[Faraday gave this lecture at the CPS in the month that the essay-circle began work. Several themes in the lecture have a bearing on the work of the group and Faraday's contributions to it in particular. One is Faraday's belief in human improveability, and his view that it is to be achieved through the individual conscience and will. Only once in the lecture does he acknowledge the possible effects of wider society on an individual's progress. Even more than in the previous year's Observations on the Means of Obtaining Knowledge, Faraday's purpose here is to shame his audience into further and greater efforts towards self-improvement, and though he comments several times on the potential of the City Philosophical Society to help in such efforts, his chief emphasis is on the duty of the individual to fulfil his nature by drawing himself out of idleness and dissipation and into an industrious, moral and energetic life.

A related theme which runs through this lecture as well as some of Faraday's contributions to the Mental Exercises is that of habit: Faraday seems to be fascinated at this period by its power to confirm the individual in virtue or vice. He introduced the idea of ‘inertia of the mind’ in his 1817 CPS lecture; here he develops it very considerably to create an analogy between mechanical systems and mental processes: a kind of mechanics of psychology. He describes the analogy as founded in ‘playfulness’, but the tone of the lecture is very earnest. Geoffrey Cantor, in his very important study of Faraday in the context of his religious life, points out that the call to ‘perfection’ made in the second paragraph of this lecture should be understood as an affirmation of the injunction ‘Be perfect: keep the commandments, and thou shalt live,’ made by the founder of the Sandemanian sect. This comparison reminds us that Faraday's passionate impulse towards self-improvement for himself and others, though it frequently adopted aspects of the ‘polite’, secular and even worldly goals of early nineteenth-century education, was primarily driven by ideas about divine judgement and the salvation of the individual. Faraday's impossibly high standards (for example, in seeking—Democritus-like—a person ‘who has never relaxed but when fatigue required it’) reflect the urgency of the attempt to meet divine demands.