"[T]he thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)


Place of Publication
London
Publisher
B. Crosby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate Street
Date
1794
Metaphor
"[T]he thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses."
Metaphor in Context
I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. but I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.
(p. 448)
Provenance
Reading
Citation
5 entries in ESTC (1794, 1795, 1796, 1797).

William Godwin, Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols. (London: B. Crosby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate Street, 1794). <Link to ESTC>

Reading Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).
Date of Entry
09/14/2009
Date of Review
10/12/2007

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.