Two parallel trends prepared scholars for the investigation of the mind–body relationship so that a model of psychological inquiry could evolve. The first trend was methodological, characterized by the triumph of empiricism. Scientific innovations by Francis Bacon and Newton were firmly based on careful observations and quantification of observables. Using inductive methods, moving from observed particulars to cautious generalization, empiricism stood in contrast to the deductive methods of the Scholastic philosophers. The second trend occurred in the attempt to develop conceptions on the nature of humanity and was more a philosophical enterprise. Spinoza taught that mind and body are manifestations of the same unity of the person. Human activity, although unique because of humanity’s higher intellectual powers, is determined by the laws of nature. Descartes stated that the first principle of life is self-awareness of the idea, and all else that we know proceeds from self-reflection. His dualism of the interaction between mind and body distinguishes psychology from physiology. Descartes’ views were developed in the French and British philosophical traditions; Spinoza influenced the German efforts to develop a model of psychology.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists, philosophers, writers, artists, and composers were interested in questions of order and structure – of the universe, human society, and the individual. So were the people who read, saw, heard, and discussed their works in clubs, coffeehouses, salons, newspapers, and journals. Many people developed new ways to contemplate the universe and the place of humans in it: physicians, chemists, and alchemists observed and experimented on the natural world; astronomers searched the skies with the newly invented telescope; mathematicians posited laws to explain how basic forces worked. Philosophers increasingly argued that reason was the best tool for understanding the world, though most thought that the capacity for rational thought varied widely between different types of people. Concern with order and the limits of human understanding emerged in literature as well, while art and music saw giant works on a huge scale but also smaller, more reflective pieces. The eighteenth century saw a broadening of culture and learning, but also a growing split between professional and amateur – both trends that created a larger market for many types of cultural products.

This chapter examines the motivations for and practices of library formation, development and management exercised by the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), Britain’s oldest provincial learned society and second oldest museum. It contends that civic philanthropy in the form of library formation served as a core activity for SGS members throughout the first fifty years of the Society’s history, and as a key component of the society’s raison d’être. The SGS’s extensive archival and bibliographical holdings provide a means of examining the modes of acquisition, cataloguing and circulation of the three libraries under the SGS’s management in the period 1710–1755: the parish library of St Mary and St Nicolas, the library of Spalding Grammar School, and the library housed in the SGS museum. Spalding’s libraries provide a composite case study that reveals the interconnection of individual and institutional forms of philanthropy at work in eighteenth-century libraries. At the same time, the SGS emerges as a precursor of the later eighteenth-century subscription libraries and literary and philosophical societies that engaged in library formation as a means of fostering sociability, education, improvement and intellectual exchange in local communities throughout Britain.

The Introduction offers a contextual framework for exploring aspects of eighteenth-century thought. In the first section, ‘Ideas and their history’, the question of how to approach the ways of thinking that animated English-speaking peoples some three centuries ago is briefly considered. This is followed by an outline of how knowledge was structured in the eighteenth century, particularly as this is reflected in the pioneering encyclopedias of the period, such as Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopédia and the French Encyclopédie. The limitations of attempts to label the prevailing intellectual ethos of the period (Age of Reason, of Revolutions, of Enlightenment, of secularization, of progress) or to define its temporal limits (the ‘long’ eighteenth century) are next considered. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the institutional framework and social habits—elements of the sociology of knowledge—that structured intellectual inquiry in the eighteenth century. A short appendix of terms highlights differences between the meanings of key words in the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries: how they were understood and used then, in contrast with their meaning for us now.