ABSTRACT
The following reflections on the eighteenth-century conception of the self are grounded in the view that we are shaped by the spirit of the age in which we live. Whatever its status today, such a view was deemed neither embarrassingly trite, nor highly controversial in the eighteenth century. The reasons for this are complex and rather surprising not least because much was said and written by eighteenth-century men, as well as women, both about the precise nature of the period they inhabited and the true extent to which they could be said to be moulded by it. Pronouncements on what even the small coterie of intellectuals and literate men and women thought of the nature of the human personae are as hazardous to make for this as any other period. Indeed, they are arguably more so, since it is not difficult to find examples of nearly every logical position which can and had been taken on this subject in the history of Western thought. What can be said with some confidence, however, is that the self was not a happy topic in the eighteenth century: it was fraught with anxieties at the theoretical and existential levels. Whatever qualified optimism there might have been about any other consideration, there seemed nothing to be jubilant about in the modern individual.
