Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.

Reviews

'The strength of Perception and Analogy comes in its detailed catalogue of how analogies are used to affirm religious beliefs during this period. Scholars working in disability studies will find the chapters on human limitation particularly useful, as Powell's close readings affirm the centrality of disabled bodies for linking medical and religious discourses during the eighteenth century.'
Annika Mann, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Introduction
1. Celestial speculations
2. Light, perception and revelation
3. Seeing in colour
4. Understanding the eye
5. Perception and the body
Bibliography
Notes
Index