ABSTRACT
The emotional and developmental emphases the distinctly Wordsworthian but the balance of the underlying philosophy may be derived directly from Cudworth. Most critically lacking at this stage of development is Wordsworth's concept of the "One Life", which does not emerge with any clarity of philosophical point or purpose until it crops up, suddenly but now centrally, in Wordsworth's efforts of early 1798 to explain the natural foundations of the Pedlar's philosophical mind. As Jonathan Wordsworth has argued with respect to the 1794 sequence concerning "A heart that vibrates evermore, awake / To feeling for all forms that Life can take", though "it should, one feels, be easy enough to trace a line of development from this passage to The Pedlar", any apparent "resemblance" it bears "to Wordsworth's later positions can easily be overstressed". As philosophical categories, action and passion describe, respectively, what the mind actively does by its own powers and what it passively suffers from external or internal stimulation.
