[The City Philosophical Society played an important part in Faraday's self-education. As well as conversation evenings and scientific lectures by its founder, John Tatum, the CPS provided a weekly lecture, delivered in rotation by its members. Faraday became a member in 1810 and gave his first lecture that year, on the topic of electricity. The lecture printed here was given in 1817, around a year and a half before Faraday founded his essay-circle. It includes of a description of the five methods of improving one's knowledge outlined by Isaac Watts (for Watts's own account of these methods, see below, pp. 216–17), and an exhortation—comparatively mild by Faraday's standards— to the members of the CPS to dedicate themselves more energetically and effectively to self-improvement. The structure of the essay may be felt to confirm Faraday's own view (expressed in the letter to Abbott above, p. 178) that his compositional methods at this time prioritized clarity over smooth flow.

The stated aims of this lecture are practical rather than philosophical; Faraday urges giving attention to techniques for acquiring knowledge instead of wasting time on questions of epistemology. But despite this emphasis on practical techniques, Faraday shows considerable interest in issues of philosophy of mind throughout his speculative and literary writings of the late 1810s, including his contributions to the essay-circle. He addresses the workings of the imagination, the reason and the memory several times and in some depth, though, as he writes here with characteristic self-deprecation, he has ‘but a slight acquaintance with authors who have considered the matter.’ Among the fruits of this interest was a recurrent concern with the formation of habits, and in this lecture Faraday introduces the idea of ‘inertia of the mind’, the habit of mental laziness, which he goes on to explore in much greater detail in the following extract.

Several CPS lectures of the 1810s were printed, but it is not clear how they were selected, or how widely they were distributed.