Textpedia

A free library of enduring ideas.

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The Idea of a University
The Four Ages of Poetry
Novum Organum
The Defence of Poesy
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
History of the Peloponnesian War
Charles Darwin1809–1882
David Hume1711–1776
Francis Bacon1561–1626
Herman Melville1819–1891
John Dryden1631–1700
Matthew Arnold1822–1888
Robert Southey1774–1843
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881
Thucydidesc.  460–c.  400 BC
W. B. Yeats1865–1939
Walt Whitman1819–1892
William Hazlitt1778–1830
William James1842–1910
American Pragmatism

Peirce and William James on belief, truth and the practical difference that ideas make.

The American Renaissance

Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville: the generation of American writers who came of age in the 1840s and 1850s.

Early Modern Philosophy

Francis Bacon and David Hume on knowledge, experience and human nature.

East and West

Sir William Jones and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, European scholars who brought Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit learning to Western readers.

The Romantic Critics

Hazlitt, Peacock and Shelley on poetry, drama and the imagination.

Victorian Sages

Carlyle and Arnold on society, culture and the spirit of the age.