NOTES Introduction NOTES TO PP. 1–4 1. “The Source of Labour,” Chambers’s Journal, 4th series, 3 (1866): 555–56. John Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion (New York:D.Appleton, 1864), 446–47. 2. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 3, 69–83, 179–237. Karl Marx, Capital:A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York:Vintage, 1977), 283. For the late-nineteenth-century literary ramifications of produc- tivism, see Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992); also Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 3. Rabinbach, The Human Motor,3. 4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York:W.W.Norton, 1975), 94 (4:618–22). 5. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 218–19. 6. Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York:Dover, 1952), 401. See also P.M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 233–306. 7. Stephen Wallech,“ ‘Class Versus Rank’:The Transformation of Eighteenth- Century English Social Terms and Theories of Production,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986):409–31.Isaac Kramnick,Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca:Cornell University Press,1990),60.The phrase “republican tradition” is appropriate in this context, although the assumptions under discussion could in principle be adapted to non-republican forms of government. See John Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition,” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 138. 8. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), 5:3, 5:1. 194 NOTES TO PP. 5–16 9. Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 10. David Simpson, from whom I draw the phrase “agrarian idealism,” has described a very similar tension. See Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination:The Poetry of Displacement (New York:Methuen, 1987), 56–78. 11. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W.B.Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1:364–65. 12. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York:Oxford University Press, 1975), 127, 130–31. 13. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 227–42, 271n, 268–319. 14. Tyndall, Heat, 447. 15. PW 2:142–44. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,Works and Correspondence, ed. Pierro Sraffa and M. H. Dobb, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 1:69. 16. Antoine Lavoisier and Armand Seguin,“Premier mémoire sur la respiration des animaux,” in Antoine Lavoisier, Œuvres, 7 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1862), 2:688–703. 17. G.W.F.Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 103. 18. Annabel Patterson, “Wordsworth’s Georgic: Genre and Structure in The Excursion,” The Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 145–54. 19. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, 56–78. 20. John F.W.Herschel, A Treatise of Astronomy (London: Longman, 1833), 211. Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (New York:Scribner’s, 1896), 1:56. Chapter 1 Light as Fluid Agency 1. Kepler thought the sun sustained the motion of surrounding worlds through its own rotation. See Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy, trans. William H. Donahue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 379–81. Writers in the first half of the eighteenth century drew a different analogy to the human heart by suggesting that the sun’s emission of light and absorption of air produced a circulatory current. See, for instance, Richard Lovett, Philosophical Essays (Worcester: R. Lewis, 1766), 233–39. 2. Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York:Dover, 1952), 401. 3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:Random House, 1970). 4. Stephen Wallech,“ ‘Class Versus Rank’:The Transformation of Eighteenth- Century English Social Terms and Theories of Production,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 409–31. NOTES TO PP. 17–19 195 5. Versions of this phrase are scattered widely in eighteenth-century literature. This one happens to come from James Thomson,“Liberty,” The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 409 (5:604). 6. This list is not exclusive.Approaching the question from the perspective of natural history, one could just as reasonably emphasize the disappearance of an informing vegetative principle that was distinct from common matter on the one hand and from the soul on the other. Mid-eighteenth-century debates over living form dispense with this hypothesis, preferring to com- bine something preexisting (whether a germ or an “internal mold”) with attractive forces that set it in motion. See James L. Larson, Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 132–69. 7. See e.g., Jean Baptiste van Helmont, “Spiritus vitae,” Ortus Medicinae (Amsterdam, 1648), 195–201. The role of solar symbolism in alchemy is discussed in B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius:The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 38–45. 8. Hermann Boerhaave, Elements of Chemistry, Being the Annual Lectures of Herman Boerhaave, M. D. (London: J. & J. Pemberton, 1735), 1:47; see also 1:37.Boerhaave taught medicine and chemistry at the University of Leyden; his students went on to teach at Scottish and English universities, often using Boerhaave’s lectures as a text. 9. Isaac Newton, “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation,” The Janus Faces of Genius:The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought, by B. J.T.Dobbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 265. 10. Newton,“Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation,”267. 11. Newton, Opticks, 374. Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (1727; rpt. London: Oldbourne, 1961), 186–87. 12. Newton, Opticks, 401. 13. Newton, Opticks, 374. 14. For a fuller discussion of the changing meaning of “active principles” in Newton’s career see J. E. McGuire,“Force,Active Principles, and Newton’s Invisible Realm,” Ambix 15 (1968): 154–208. 15. Newton, Opticks, 348–54. 16. P. M. Heimann, “ ‘Nature is a Perpetual Worker’: Newton’s Æther and Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” Ambix 20 (1973): 4–7. 17. Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) formed a theory of fire that was indebted to Newton’s Opticks, and J.T. Desaguliers’s Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734–1744) represented Newton’s queries from the Opticks as if they were confirmed truth. See I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 43 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,1956), 232, 254. 18. J. T. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: J. Senex, 1734), 2:36. 19. Hales, Vegetable Staticks, 178. 196 NOTES TO PP. 19–22 20. Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu (Paris: Prault, 1744), 39. 21. Robert Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 157–90. 22. Du Châtelet, 39. 23. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans.Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 24. Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 40. 25. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser, 2 vols. (New York:Dover, 1959), 1:166–82 (book. 2, chap. 8). 26. The history of this argument is explored in P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire,“Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 233–306. 27. Cadwallader Colden, The Principles of Action in Matter (London: R. Dodsley, 1751), 16, 2. 28. One particularly influential example was Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (London: J. Johnson, 1777). Priestley’s matter theory,drawn from Roger Joseph Boscovich,is very different from Colden’s. But he likewise deploys empirical epistemology to show that observers never encounter a strictly passive substance. Knowledge of matter or sub- stance must therefore be knowledge of active power. 29. James Hutton, Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy (Edinburgh: Strahan, 1792), 280. 30. Hutton, Dissertations, 412. 31. I use “skeptical empiricism” here and elsewhere as shorthand for “a skeptical application of empiricist epistemology.”These arguments are “skeptical” not in the sense that they finally deny the possibility of knowledge, but because their operative strategy is to ask whether an observer can really “form any conception” of something (say, solidity); if not, it is discarded as a superflu- ous hypothesis. They are “empiricist” because their criteria of knowledge always begin (and often end) in sense experience. 32. Both of the chemists discussed here—Priestley and Senebier—were in fact skeptical empiricists in matters of epistemology.I have no evidence that their epistemology determined their program of pneumatic research, though it certainly governed Priestley’s presentation of that research. 33. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1774–1777), 1:277–78. 34. Jan Ingenhousz, Experiments Upon Vegetables (London: P. Elmsley, 1779), 28–30. 35.