A fascinating survey of Victorian literature from one of England's greatest minds Dishing out his signature brand of harsh wit, G. K. Chesterton casts a critical eye on the poets and novelists that defined the Victorian age in English literature. "Her imagination was sometimes superhuman - always inhuman," he writes of Emily Brontë. "Wuthering Heights might have been written by an eagle." Ranging from sharp denunciation to genuine admiration, Chesterton...

"The object of the following chapters is not to teach mathematics, but to enable students from the very beginning of their course to know what the science is about, and why it is necessarily the foundation of exact thought as applied to natural phenomena." Thus begins this volume by the prominent English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, a concise statement on the nature and meaning of mathematics for the general student. Expertly...

"The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of the Revolution: that can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books. Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it before the English reader; so that he may understand both what it was and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar to Englishmen have risen out of it." "If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the...

Ethics is a subject about which there has been and still is an immense amount of difference of opinion, in spite of all the time and labour which have been devoted to the study of it. There are indeed certain matters about which there is not much disagreement. Almost everybody is agreed that certain kinds of actions ought, as a general rule, to be avoided and that under certain circumstances, which constantly recur, it is, as a general rule, better...