Revolution and Romanticism

DAVID HARTLEY

Observations on Man 1791

First published in 1749, Hartley's great work was abridged by Priestley in 1775 and reissued by Joseph Johnson in 1791. To Priestley, who founded his Unitarianism on the Observations, it seemed that Hartley was the greatest of human beings with the single exception of Jesus. Coleridge adopted his associationist theology in the mid 1790s, naming his eldest son David Hartley Coleridge, and passing on to Wordsworth the theory of mind that underlies ‘Tintern Abbey’, the early Prelude and the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. An indispensable book.

£105 $165

The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be
Against, or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

(Wordsworth, from ‘Expostulation and Reply’)

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Poetry of the 1890s