Revolutionary thinking at the end of the Eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from ‘Being’ in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John Beer traces this question in writings by Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the impact of their ideas on successors such as Keats, De Quincey, Byron and the Shelleys. Relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles and Tennyson is also discussed.