By Mark Feldman Almost 300 hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, wrote a satirical essay entitled "A Modest Proposal (For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick)." Appalled by the poverty he had encountered daily, he offered an ironic solution - that the poorer members of society offer up their young as food to the wealthier citizens for small sums, thus bettering their wretched state.

One of the virtues of the internet - for a news organisation, at least - is that it tells the provider which stories have aroused the greatest interest among readers. Over the past few days, users of The Independent's online edition have "hit" one story above all others.

The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment. By Julia V. Douthwaite. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xiii + 314 pages. Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century. By Richard Nash.

I PHILOSOPHERS MAY BE ARMED with valid and logically faultless arguments and yet remain entirely blind to meaningful possibilities whose philosophical significance is immense. Philosophical blindness may also concern physical or psychical phenomena as well as their meanings and significance.