Comprised of some twenty essays from the late 'seventies and early 'eighties, plus an aphoristic appendix which both sums up and enlarges upon a number of the principal themes, this is John O'Loughlin's first installment of the Collected Essays, the second of which is entitled 'A Truthful Approach to Knowledge'. They are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin, these volumes 1 & 2 of his 'Collected Essays', but this one is much less ideologically committed, being more discursive in its general approach to a variety of subjects, including art and music, which nonetheless betray a demarcation line between the Spenglerian pessimism of the earlier essays and a burgeoning interest in transcendentalism, both religious and cultural, that was to blossom more rigorously in the ensuing volume.