Turns out, the best way to read a 900-page summary of eighteenth-century English theology and moral philosophy is to put it on an iPod (in distressingly robotic Mac synthesizer voice) and go walking in the woods. Finished the first volume that way this afternoon.
So far I'm interested in reading more of Hume and Paine, but the rest of that volume bores the hell out of me. I suspected it bored Stephen too—he starts including unnecessary extra sentences where he calls certain writers immature, insults their prose, notes they were only writing for advancement in the church or would rather have been doing chemical experiments instead or had fun evicting gypsies from around St. Paul's in such-and-such-a-year.
I took pictures of spores, molds and fungi, too.
"Great forces may work slowly; and it is only after many disturbances and long continued oscillations that the world is moved from one position of equilibrium to another. Progress is the rare exception: races may remain in the lowest barbarism, or their development be arrested at some more advanced stage during periods far surpassing that of recorded history; actual decay may alternate with progress, and even true progress implies some admixture of decay." (Leslie Stephen, The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, v.1, ch.1 "Introductory," sec. 17 "summary," page 17)
