"The Old Empire consisted for the most part of contiguous territory in North America , which had been settled and peopled from the British Isles .... The new Empire, as it took shape by 1815, was made up of many different communities--real English colonies in Canada and the West Indies ; penal settlements, growing into colonies, in the Southern Pacific [ Australia ]; conquered European colonies in Canada , South Africa and the West Indies; kingdoms annexed in India , Ceylon and the Malay Archipelago; some footholds in tropical Africa , and strategic posts guarding the routes of trade in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean Sea, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean --a vast diversity of race and region.

"The object of this expansion of power was not, as Adam Smith had said of the First Empire, to raise up a people of customers, but to secure to Great Britain the freedom to sell all over the world the products of her growing industries. The stimulus of the industrial revolution created the motive of imperial policy. Little conscious of the manifold problems in which their activity entangled us, our merchants and statesmen, seeking new markets, were binding up our fortunes with a quarter of the human race.

"As English colonists had been left to govern themselves, a commercial policy had sufficed for an imperial policy in the Old Empire, but English statesmen were now setting themselves a larger task, and had to learn the art of government in a great variety of climes and circumstances and over a great variety of peoples. And this not in a stationary world, but in a world awakened to a new energy with the discoveries and stimulus of industrial and political evolution."

“In its most general sense, Empiricism is the name applied to the attitude that beliefs are to be accepted and acted upon only if they first have been confirmed by actual experience—a definition that accords with the derivation of the name from the Greek word emperia , “experience”” (6: 766).

“As stressing experience, Empiricism is thus opposed to the claims of authority, intuition, imaginative conjecture, and abstract, theoretical, or systematic reasoning as sources of reliable belief. Its most fundamental antithesis is with…Rationalism….A Rationalist theory of meaning asserts that there are concepts not derived from…experienceable features of the world, such as “cause,” “identity,” or “perfect circle,” and that these concepts are…part of the mind's innate or natural equipment” (6:767).

“In both everyday attitudes and philosophical theories, the experiences referred to are principally those arising from stimulation of the sense organs, in particular those of sight and touch. Most philosophical Empiricists, however, have maintained that sensation is not the only provider of experience, admitting as empirical the awareness of mental states in introspection or reflection, such as feelings of pain or of fear, often metaphorically described as present to the “inner sense”” (6:767) .

“The most elaborate and influential presentation of Empiricism was made by John Locke (1632-1704), an early Enlightenment philosopher, in the first two books of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). All knowledge, he held, comes from sensation or from reflection, by which he meant the introspective awareness of the workings of [one's] own mind” (6:769).

“The basic strength of Empiricism consists in its recognition that man's concepts and beliefs apply to a world outside himself, and that it is by way of his senses that this world acts upon him. The question, however, of just how much the mind itself contributes to the task of processing its sensory input is one that no simple argument can answer” (6:770).

"Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind of Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it" (Jonathan Swift).

"Two things...are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack....For effective attack we must reach some kind of impersonal level...that commits the attacker, if only by implication, to a moral standard" (Northrop Frye).

"The satirist claims, with much justification, to be a true conservative. Usually (but not always--there are significant exceptions) he operates within the established framework of society, accepting its norms, appealing to reason (or to what his society accepts as rational) as the standard against which to judge the folly he sees" (Robert C. Elliot).

"The satirist's characteristic purpose is to cleanse society of its impurities, to heal its sicknesses; and his tools are crude ones: the surgeon's knife, the whip, the purge, the rack, the flood, and the holocaust, all typical metaphors of satire. He employs irony, sarcasm, caricature, and even plain vituperation with great vigor, determined to beat the sots into reason or cut away the infected parts of society; but the job is always too much for him. The massive weight of stupidity, bestiality, greed, and cunning, which is his scene, resists his uttermost efforts, and so he suffers frustration and the agonized sense that evil multiplies faster than it can be corrected or even catalogued. But suffering brings no change in him; his methods, his sense of his own righteousness, and his understanding of evil remain the same....This constant movement without change forms the basis of satire, and while we may be only half aware of the pattern as we read, it more than any other element creates the tone of pessimism inherent in the genre" (Alvin B. Kernan).

"This is precisely the satirist's task: to appeal to men's responsibility by projecting the consequences of their actions."

"What primarily distinguishes Blake as a satirist from the Augustans is the shift from moral judgment to a standard of energy. It is not the evil man man so much as the soulless or dead man that Blake disdains" (Martin Price).