ABSTRACT
Objects speak to us and we delight in the ideas they “call up”. Joseph Addison’s eighteenth-century audience was familiar enough with the notion for him to leave it unexplained. For us too - perpetually surrounded by a galaxy of things playing upon the pleasures of our imaginations - the proposal still stands as a self-evident truth. A century earlier than Addison’s time, however, Elizabethan intellectuals would have been baffled by the contention. It is the evolution of this basic idea from the beginning of the seventeenth through to the early eighteenth century, as well as its contemporary legacy, which provides the subject of this book.
