[Outward Shows]

The manuscript is in the Georgetown University Library and consists of a sheet of paper 228 by 182 mm, folded once to make a pair of geminate leaves each 114 by 182 mm, of which all sides except 2 verso are written. Japp has added a conclusion and various other interventions which are ignored here. A version was published in PW, I, pp. 190–2. Japp expands the abbreviated third word of the text as ‘eradications’ but the sense demands ‘eradiations’. OED defines ‘eradiation’ as ‘The action or process of eradiating or shining forth’, citing Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), a plausible De Quincey source: ‘…what manner of making or production the world had – to wit, by way of effulgence or eradiation from the Deity’. It is possible that some such theory is the ‘doctrine’ referred to by De Quincey.