William Henry Davies was born in a pub and learnt early in life to rely on his wits and his fists - and to drink. Around the turn of the century, when he was twenty-two, his restless spirit of adventure led him to set off for America, and he worked around the country taking casual jobs where he could, thieving and begging where he couldn't. His experiences were richly coloured by the bullies, tricksters, and fellow-adventurers he encountered - New Haven Baldy, Wee Shorty, The Indian Kid, and English Harry, to name but a few. He was thrown into prison in Michigan, beaten up in New Orleans, witnessed a lynching in Tennessee, and got drunk pretty well everywhere. A harrowing accident forced him to return to England and the seedy world of doss-houses and down-and-outs like Boozy Bob and Irish Tim. When George Bernard Shaw first read the Autobiography in manuscript, he was stunned by the raw power of its unvarnished narrative. It was his enthusiasm, expressed in the Preface, that ensured the initial success of a book now regarded as a classic.

This work is an essay in Peirce's epistemology, with about an equal emphasis on the "epistemology" as on the "Peirce's." In other words our intention has not been to write exclusively a piece of Peirce scholarshiJ> hence, the reader will find no elaborate tying in of Peirce's epistemology to other portions of his thought, no great emphasis on the chronology of his thought, etc. Peirce scholarship is a painstaking business. His mind was Labyrinthine, his terminology intricate, and his writings are, as he himself confessed, "a snarl of twine." This book rather is intended perhaps even primarily as an essay in epistemology, taking Peirce's as the focal point. The book thus addresses a general philosophical audience and bears as much on the wider issue as on the man. I hope therefore that readers will give their critical attention to the problem of knowledge and the sugges tions we have developed around that problem and will not look here in the hope of finding an exhaustive piece of Peirce scholarship."

This book is the result of a discontent on my part with (r) the super ficial and offhand way many determinists set forth their arguments, without the slightest hint of the difficulties which have been raised against those arguments, and (2) the fact that the chief and best argu ments of the libertarians are scattered allover the literature and are seldom if ever brought together in one package. may be taken as an effort to gather into one place Mostly this work and to express as cogently as possible the arguments for freewill. So far as I know all of the arguments we treat have been made before. Only toward the end of this work do I attempt to elaborate a point not heretofore emphasized. That point is that freedom of the will is a concept intimately entangled with the human power to reason, so that if one of these powers goes, the other must also go. Moreover, both the will and the reason are intimately tied up with our moral sensitivities, so that no one of these phenomena is intelligible without the others. Hints of these ideas abound, of course, in the literature, and the degree of originality claimed is minimal. The interconnections, however, between these three basic concepts of the will, the reason, and the good, are of such great importance and are so usually ignored that I feel our short statement of the situation warrants the reader's sympathetic attention."

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1908 Edition.

"I hasten to protest at the outset that I have no personal knowledge of the incorrigible super-tramp who wrote this amazing book," is how George Bernard Shaw opens his preface. He was introduced to Davies's writing when he received a volume of poems through the post and was later instrumental in bringing his work to the attention of critics and publishers. At the time he wasn't aware that Davies was a tramp living in a London dosshouse. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp chronicles the years between 1893 and 1899 when Davies left his home-town, Newport, and spent time drifting, begging and taking on seasonal work in America and Canada.

William Henry Davies (1871–1940) was a Welsh poet and writer. He was also a traveller and adventurer, often living on his wits as a tramp and itinerant labourer. After a serious accident while attempting to board a train in eastern Canada while on the way to the Klondike Gold Fields he returned to London and began to write. He would become one of the most popular poets of his time with his work championed by both Edward Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. Famous for his prose memoir The Autobiography of a Super- tramp, he is best-known as a poet for ‘Leisure’, a hymn to living slow and having ‘time to stand and stare’. Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction to the wide range of Davies’s poetry which lies beyond his famous reputation. Here are hymns to the beauty of his native south Wales and to the natural world, poems in praise of lives lived on the margins and on the streets, drinking songs and songs of the sea. More than anything, as Newport poet Jonathan Edwards argues in his compelling introduction, Davies emerges as a poet of people, who never turns away from the suffering or the beauty of the saints and lodgers among whom he lives. Jonathan Edwards’s first collection of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. He lives in Crosskeys, near Newport, and is editor of Poetry Wales.