Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Green cloth. pp (xii), (249). Index. Fine in very nearly fine jacket. "Addressing vital issues in the current revision of American literary studies, Olaf Hansen carries out an exposition of American writing as a philosophical tradition. His broad and comparative view of American culture reveals the importance of the American allegory as a genuine artistic and intellectual style and as a distinct mode of thought particularly suited to express the philosophical legacy of transcendentalism. Hansen traces intellectual and cultural continuities and disruptions from Emerson through Thoreau and Henry Adams to William James, paying special attention to the modernism of transcendental thought and to its quality as a valid philosophy in its own right. Concerned with defining ideas of self, selfhood, and subjectivity and with moral tradition as an act of creating order out of the cosmos, the American allegory provided a basic and frequently overlooked link between transcendentalism and pragmatism. Its 'suggestive incompleteness' combined in a highly dialectic manner the essence of both enlightenment and romanticism. Characterized neither by absolute objectivity nor by absolute subjectivity, it allowed speculation about the meaning of reality and about humankind's place in a realm of appearances." - jacket.

London: Longman, Green, 1865. Octavo, original brown cloth and brown endpapers. pp viii, 560. Professionally resewn and rebacked with original spine laid down, rice paper repairs to inner hinges, wear to outer corners of covers repaired. Gilt spine stamping dulled, outer corners bruised, small ink signature on half-title page, else a VG copy, text clean and unworn. "In 1861 [sic] he published his only systematic treatise in first philosophy. This was his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, a comprehensive critique of the latter's rationalism and intuitionism. So effective was Mill's critique that this work effectively dated itself and is now unfortunately neglected...Mill has no trouble in showing the logical confusion in this claim. Hamilton wants to have it both ways—all our knowledge is relative or phenomenal and within this phenomenal realm we can discover concepts which apply absolutely or non-relatively to the noumenal things-in-themselves. Mansel's views receive Mill's particular scorn: if terms are not to be used in their ordinary sense then they ought not be used at all. A being, no matter how powerful, whose acts cannot be described in terms characteristic of human morality, is not one that we can reasonably worship. Mill made his well-known proclamation that 'I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures, and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, then to hell I will go.' " - Fred Wilson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Note: 1.5 kg parcel, extra postage may be required.

No place (Rouen): No publisher, 1759. Rouen edition. 12mo, 16cm, pp (215) (including 3 page Table at rear, last page numbered 315), bound in modern marbled paper with leather spine label, red page edges. Scattered light foxing, but text is VG+, unworn. Page 195 numbered 105, last signature using smaller type. See Begesco 1441. The earliest edition was printed clandestinely (as were all the early editions) in Geneva by Cramer (299 pp, only perhaps a dozen known copies of the true first). CANDIDE was published more or less simultaneously in five countries no later than 15 Jan., 1759. Eighteen 1759 French language editions are known today. PMM 204. This famous satire on religious and philosophical (Leibnitz) optimism is Voltaire's best-known work, one of the most famous of the French Enlightenment, and a widely read classic of world literature even today.

No place (London): No publisher (Printed by John Darby), 1727. Fourth edition (first was in 1711). Three volumes. pp (6), iv, 364, including frontispiece portrait and collective title with engraved vignette by Simon Gribelin; 443; (4), 391, [1], (54, Index). Each volume has a separate title leaf. Engraved Gribelin headpieces. Old brown calf sides, period 20th century rebacking with raised bands, labels, gilt ornament. On each front pastedown is the armorial bookplate of Samuel Allen (motto "Dum vivo, spero") and small circular label of Battle Abbey (ruined abbey on the site of the Battle of Hastings); in the top margin of each front free endpaper is the 1960 ownership inscription of Robert A. Fenn, of London; Volumes 1 & 2 have the bookplate of M.P. Grace. Partial cracks to some inner hinges but all quite firm, endpaper tanning and foxing, in all a VG+ set, text clean, tight, and unworn, externally quite attractive. A nice set of one of the most influential philosophical books of the 18th century in England and elsewhere, the work uses the phrase "moral sense" for the first time and it was a foundational text for the Scottish school of ethical philosophy. 2.5 kg parcel.