Essays & Short Works
- Philosophical Travelogues
- Essays on Society and Culture
- Essays for Personal Growth
- Explorations in Science and Thought
- Explorations in Psychology
- Political Essays and Reflections
- Political Essays and Manifestos
- Philosophical Essays on Existence
Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy
This is Mill’s first work on economics. It foreshadows his Political Economy which was the standard Anglo-American Economics textbook of the…
Culture and Anarchy
Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book…
The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
Thomas H. Huxley, an English biologist and essayist, was an advocate of the theory of evolution and a self-proclaimed agnostic. A talented w…
Principles of Economics
Principles of Economics was a leading economics textbook of Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), first published in 1890. Marshall began writing the…
The Uncommercial Traveller
The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Charles Dickens. In 1859 Dickens founded a new …
Beyond Good and Evil
First published in 1886 at Nietzsche’s own expense, the book was not initially considered important. In it, Nietzsche denounced what he cons…
Book of the Damned
The Book of the Damned was the first published nonfiction work of the author Charles Fort (first edition 1919). Dealing with various types o…
Dream Psychology
Not a few serious-minded students, [...], have been discouraged from attempting a study of Freud's dream psychology. The book in which he or…
De Profundis
This short work of Wilde's was written during his two year incarceration for "gross indecency". This work is a letter which sorts …
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
Berkeley uses Hylas as his primary contemporary philosophical adversary, John Locke. A Hylas is featured in Greek mythology and the name Hyl…
The Coming of the Fairies
After a number of deaths in his close family, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned to spiritualism in hope of finding proof of the afterlife. Being…
Irish Wit and Humor
Excerpted anecdotes from the biographies of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell, relating humorous snippets of politics in 18th and 19th ce…
The Morals
The Moralia (loosely translatable as "Matters relating to customs") of the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea is an e…
Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
Before the beginning of World War II, during the time of the Modernist movement in philosophy, George Santayana wrote these five descriptive…
Write it Right
Witty, opinionated alphabetical examples of what Bierce considered poor (American) English and advice on alternatives - entertaining, though…
A Problem in Modern Ethics
“Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically misinformed.”…
The Book of Hallowe'en
This book is intended to give the reader an account of the origin and history of Hallowe'en, how it absorbed some customs belonging to other…
A Dictionary of English Synonymes
A Dictionary of English Synonymes and Synonymous or Parallel Expressions, Designed as a Practical Guide to Aptness and Variety of Phraseolog…
Butterflies Are Free To Fly
When Nicolaus Copernicus discovered the Earth wasn’t the center of the Universe, everything changed. When Isaac Newton figured out the law o…
The Silence Dogood Letters
As a teenager, Benjamin Franklin apprenticed with his brother James at the shop where The New-England Courant was printed. Since James would…