Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense

The `only pretension, of which I am tenacious,' declares William Hazlitt in The Plain Speaker, `is that of being a metaphysician'; but his metaphysics, and particularly what this book identifies as his `power principle', has until now been neglected. Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense studies his development of the power principle as a counter to the pleasure principle of the Utilitarians, and examines the revelation of power in his philosophy of discourse, his account of imaginative structure, his theory of genius, and his moral theory.