ABSTRACT
It is notoriously difficult to define the subjective implications of what each individual experiences either of the outer world or of their inner world of dreams and waking fantasies. In these pages, I want to take another look at one of the most important changes that occurred in the way in which individuals respond to the images that come from the inner world, a seismic shift so great that we are still wrestling with its implications three hundred years later. A great many scholars agree that in the course of the eighteenth century the aspect of the personality that philosophers call the ‘self’ began to assume new characteristics. For example, Charles Taylor identifies three major new developments: inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and a belief in nature as a moral source (Taylor 1989). And Roy Porter insists that the second half of the century witnesses ‘the creation of modern mentalities’ (Porter 2000: 475). But in spite of the range and variety of evidence that they as well as many other scholars have supplied, there is no consensus about how best to define the specific change in identity brought about by this shift.
