The mastery of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken

This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter

"Studies the path of natural philosophy (i.e., physics) from Isaac Newton through Scotland into the nineteenth-century background to the modern revolution in ph

"This volume is both a formal study of the anecdote's properties and possibilities and an inquiry into the anecdote's intellectual function in Enlightenment cul