Wordsworth's attack, in book 12 of the 1805 Prelude, on modern ‘Statists’ and ‘false philosophy’, has become a locus classicus for critics addressing the relationship between Wordsworth's poetry – associated with a ‘more judicious knowledge’ of man – and his late eighteenth-century inheritance of Enlightenment philosophy. Wordsworth's reference to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) is both specific and barbed, but the poet has in his sights here not just the emergent discourse of political economy which Smith founded, but the larger field of eighteenth-century human sciences and moral philosophy which Wordsworth imbibed, but against which – in the implied narrative offered here, at least – his poetry turns. That Wordsworth's alternative goal, a ‘more judicious knowledge’ of the ‘dignity of Man’, reiterates the ‘man’ who was the object or construct of the human sciences of previous decades – even whilst it attempts to transmute ‘Man’ as ‘Abstraction, shadow, image’ into ‘the man / Of whom we read, the man whom we behold / With our own eyes’ – already suggests the complexity of his relation to his philosophical forbears.