Shuddering Through the Paradox of Prayer

 The Lord’s Prayer
by Alice Meynell

“Audemus dicere ‘Pater Noster.’” -- Canon of the Mass 

There is a bolder way,
There is a wilder enterprise than this
All-human iteration day by day.
Courage, mankind! Restore Him what is His. 

 Out of His mouth were given
These phrases. O replace them whence they came.
He, only, knows our inconceivable “Heaven,”
Our hidden “Father,” and the unspoken “Name”;

 Our “trespasses,” our “bread,”
The “will” inexorable yet implored;
The miracle-words that are and are not said,
Charged with the unknown purpose of their Lord. 

 “Forgive,” “give,” “lead us not” --
Speak them by Him, O man the unaware,
Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what,
Shuddering through the paradox of prayer.

Jottings on the Philosophical Analysis of Stage Props

 Having recently helped out a bit on stage crew for a community theater production of Singin' in the Rain, I have been thinking quite a bit about what it is to be a stage prop. A few thoughts toward an account.

(1) In Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, he identifies a number of ways in which real objects may play a role in fictions and imaginations. He highlights three in particular:

(a) Prompters. Given a real object, we may be provoked by it to imagine something. Walton's example is that you might, on seeing a bear-shaped stump, imagine a bear. Prompters "induce us to imagine what otherwise we might not be imaginative enough to think of" (p. 22). One of the important uses of prompters, which is certainly relevant to stage props is that they coordinate imaginings, in such a way that the imaginings can converge spontaneously rather than by negotiation and stipulation. "The prompter coordinates the imaginings of the participants and also gives them grounds to expect such coordination---both without disruptive discussion" (p. 23). The particular definition given to prompters here, that they induce imaginations by provoking us to imagine particular things, means that they are somewhat limited in function. If you set out to carve a bear-shaped wooden statue, the statue might be a prompter for someone else, but it is not at any point a prompter for you while making it -- you are not imagining the bear because you see the bear-statue already in the wood, but you are instead imagining a bear and re-shaping the wood to conform to the imagination you independently have. (Of course, later, you might set it aside and then come across it and imagine a bear because of it, in which case it would be a prompter.) Thus prompters are important but have a limited role in our overall imaginative activities. They are associated with a very limited range of our imaginative experiences.

(b) Objects of Imaginings. One of the trickiest aspects of imagination is that we do not merely imagine in response to things (prompters), but we imagine things to be other things. We might imagine a stick to be a sword, a rag doll to be a baby, a table to be a fort, an arrangement on a stage to be London. "Things that a person imagines about are objects of his imagining" (p. 25). Prompters may be objects of imagining for what they prompt us to imagine, but they are not necessarily so, and likewise, the objects of imagining may prompt us to imagine those things that they are imagined to be, but not necessarily so. Walton suggests that one of the functions of an object of imagining is to substantialize what you are imagining. If you imagine a stump to be a bear, there is now physical thing, what could be called the "imaginary bear", that can be touched, avoided, looked at, and so forth.

(c) Props. We sometimes talk about truth in a fiction or fictional truth. Thus it is true in The Hound of the Baskervilles that Sherlock Holmes is a detective; it is true in a performance of The Tempest that Prospero has magical powers; it is true in Raphael's Il Parnaso that the god Apollo plays a lira-da-braccio; it is true with respect to Santa Claus that he can come down a chimney. (Walton wants to deny that fictional truth is actually a kind of truth; this denial is a point, I think, on which Walton's overall account goes very wrong, since my own view is that fictional truth importantly is a kind of secondary or derivative truth that has reference to truth in a more primary sense, but it matters less than it might because Walton can treat the use of 'truth' here as a useful fiction for those propositions that in context are 'to be imagined'.) Suppose you have two boys who have agreed for a game that a stump 'counts as' a bear; they sneak up on what they take to count as a bear, but in fact it turns out not to be one -- perhaps it is a boulder rather than a stump, and so doesn't count as a bear. Meanwhile, however, they later, to their surprise, stumble into a stump they hadn't known was there -- there was something counting as a bear there, all along, even though they did not know it. Stumps in this game are working as what Walton calls props. "Props are generators of fictional truths, things which, by virtue of their nature or existence, make propositions fictional" (p. 37); they "generate fictional truths independently of what anyone does or does not imagine" (p. 38). The stump, given a principle of generation (e.g., the agreement that stumps count as bears), makes it a fictional truth that there is a bear there.

I find this particular vocabulary to have some oddities. For instance, it seems to follow from Walton's account of prompters that there are things that prompt us to imagine things but are not prompters, because they are not provoking us to imagine anything in particular, but merely providing a sort of guiding line or exhortation for our imagining. It's important not to forget these other things, but perhaps there's not too much lost by using 'prompter' specifically in Walton's sense. However, if I have a stick that I am imagining to be a sword, and you start talking about the object of imagining, my own natural inclination is to assume that you are talking about the sword that you are imagining the stick to be; but in Walton's sense of 'object of imagining', the object of imagining is the stick. I can see the sense in this sense, but I also find this confusing and immensely discordant with our usual practice in talking about objects of imagining. So I would suggest that we distinguish these by calling that which is imagined to be something the material object of imagining and that which we imagine it to be the formal object of imagining. In this case, the stick is the material object of imagining and the sword is the formal object of imagining.

It's also the case that Walton's use of 'prop' is rather different from our ordinary use of the word 'prop'. For instance, in a stage play, what 'generates fictional truths' about a lamppost on the stage is first and foremost the play itself -- the references of the characters to it, their actions with respect to it, and so forth. You could have a purely imaginary lamppost, in the sense that there is no physical prop on the stage but everyone acts as if there were a lamppost in a particular spot. The principle of generation (the script, or perhaps the directorial instructions about how to implement the script, or perhaps the agreement of the actors about how to perform a scene in the absence of a prop) provides all that's needed to generate most of the fictional truths that are relevant to the lamppost; it's the actions of the actors, not the prop, that constitute the primary generators of fictional truths on a stage. If we add in the lamppost, this (a) facilitates the actors' work in generating the relevant fictional truths and relatedly (b) facilitates the audience's recognition of the fictional truths that are intended to be communicated. None of this has to do with generation per se of fictional truths. Any fictional truths that the lamppost would generate would have to be specifically concerned with its being a physical object (and, therefore, presumably, with its being a material object of imagining) -- for instance, that there is a lamppost visible in that location. Thus, props cannot be the only generators of fictional truths, and, indeed, it seems that they would always presuppose non-prop generators of fictional truths. On the other side, however, Walton's account of props means that 'prop' in his sense is astoundingly wide. Not only are stage props 'props', but the actors are props, and the stage is a prop, and the curtain is a prop, and in many contexts, the audience is a prop. And beyond that, the script on the page is a prop and the handbill that explain the play is a prop and the poster that advertises the play is a prop, and if someone records the play, the video is a prop, and if someone uses the video to paint a scene based on the play, the painting is a prop, and so forth. 

Stage props can be prompters, and objects of imagining, and props in Walton's sense; but there is no straightforward way to use Walton's account of props to give much of an account of stage props. An interesting question is whether we can take Waltonian props to be a genus of stage props. Are all stage props always Waltonian props? And I think the answer is No. A reason to think not is that stage props are stage props offstage as well as onstage. If you have a cane waiting offstage to be used onstage, it is a stage prop, but it is not generating any fictional truths; it only does so when it becomes salient onstage, e.g., by an actor using it to walk. In scholastic terms, to be a prop in the Waltonian sense is a relation secundum dici, but to be a stage prop is a relation secundum esse -- the stage prop is the thing itself as capable of being related in certain ways, not its being able to be said to be proppish in function -- being a stage prop is a 'relative habitude' of the thing itself, not a relation to which the thing is further directed.

(2) One of the interesting things about stage props that needs to be considered is that all stage props represent something, but they themselves can be what they represent. If we put a piano on stage for the actors to work with in some way or other, that makes it a stage prop. But its purpose as a stage prop is to be what it is, a piano. In one sense, it's obviously not like the stick imagined to be a sword. It may not even be like a dull sword imagined to be a sharp sword; it could be like that (a defective piano standing in for a properly functioning piano), but depending on the context, it might be, and might need to be, a perfectly functioning piano that will be used as a functioning piano. On the other hand, it's not actually all that different. The piano is put on the stage to be a material object of imagining; it's just that the piano is a material object of imagining whose formal object of imagining is a piano. When you put a piano on a stage, it is not merely there; it is being put there to be imagined to be a piano.  It's not as if you have all this host of things on stage that are imagined to be various things, and then you have the piano that is not imagined to be anything at all; on the contrary, its use in the play almost certainly requires us to imagine it to be a piano. The actual piano is also a fictional piano; it is true that the piano is related in various ways to things (e.g., an actor), and it is also fictionally true that the piano is related in those various ways to things (e.g., to the character we are imagining the actor to be). One thing that makes stage props interesting is that they are an obvious case in which the actual and the fictional overlap. I can pull out an actual, physical, really functioning pen, which is then fictionally, imaginatively, attributively a pen in the context of the play. To say that something is a pen in the fiction of the play does not imply that it is not an actual pen; to say that something is an actual umbrella is consistent with its also being a fictional umbrella. Obviously, we are not using the word 'fictional' here in an exclusionary sense that implies falsehood (that's the whole point), but the way the piano, or the pen, or the umbrella is related to other things means that it has a role in the ficiotn and therefore a status in the fiction that is constituted by what is true in the fiction. In the sense in which 'fictional' characterizes what is going on in the play, we cannot deny that the piano is also fictional. I mean, the fictional characters might play the piano, which can only be made sense of if the piano is fictional, even if we have a real piano being the fictional piano. 

In this sense it is a bit like an actor playing himself in a cameo. In the movie Last Action Hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Jack Slater, a fictional character, who in the movie meets Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as a fictional character in the movie plays Jack Slater, a fictional character in the movie within the movie. When Jack Slater, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, interacts with Arnold Schwarzenegger, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, they are both fictional characters; it's just that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actual person, is playing both a fictional character different from himself and also himself as a fictional character. So too the actual piano, which is playing itself as a fictional piano.

This is related to Walton's point about (material) objects of imagining substantializing our imaginations; stage props make fictions 'more real' by introducing what is non-fictional to serve fictionally. This could be by pure stipulation (like designating a section of the stage as a street), or it could be by symbolic representation (like using a stick to symbolize a sword), or it could be fictionally representing itself.

(All of this has some relevance, I think, to various philosophical positions that get grouped under the label 'fictionalism'. For instance, mathematical fictionalism is the position that mathematical objects are fictions. Well, okay, but as we see in the case of stage props, actors, self-referring fictions, and so forth, something being a fiction does not guarantee its being only a fiction, and you could very well be a mathematical realist and hold that mathematical objects are also fictions in some way -- e.g., you might analogize the role a mathematical object plays in a Euclidean proof to an actor's role in a play and take it that the real mathematical object is playing itself as a fictional role in the proof. The point is not whether this is an immediately attractive position in philosophy of mathematics; rather, the point is that when you've said that something is fictional, that does tell you something about how it works, but it rules out very little about what it could be. Fictional Troy turned out to be archeologically locatable.)

(3) In a play. we normally think of the play as actors doing things on the stage. But you can also think of it in terms of the under-play, in which the stage props (including things like most costumes, which are often wearable stage props) are moved on and off and around the stage. The under-play actually works a lot like the play; things have to go on and off stage on various cues, at various times, at various locations. The stage props are themselves the 'actors' of the under-play, although they differ from the actors in that they are not active but patient. They are the patients of the play, the things that do not themselves do but instead undergo. In this sense, there is a clear similarity between a stage prop and a puppet in a puppet show. The difference is that puppets symbolically represent actors, whereas stage props don't unless the stage prop is itself a puppet or something similar. A puppet show is in a sense all under-play, one representing a possible actual play, whereas in an ordinary play, the under-play is a fragmentary thing in which (for instance) chairs are brought off and on in a way that only gets its full meaning within the play itself. You could have postmodern play that was all under-play -- it would consist of a stage set with people doing nothing put moving chairs and things on and off the stage on various cues. It would be quite mysterious without the actual play, and probably would have difficulty keeping people's interest for the same lenght of time as an actual play which had the very same under-play.

What this highlights is that stage props have roles just as actors do. Roles are deontic structures. The piano ought to be out on the stage for such-and-such scene. The coatrack ought to have been removed by such-and-such scene. The table ought to be placed on the such-and-such side of the stage. To be a stage prop is to be something capable of participating in a deontic structure for a show, a role. This role may include any of Walton's functional statuses (prompter, material object of imagining, or Waltonian prop). This deontic structure in a play is established by the play itself -- the script and various decisions made for implementing it. In a magic show it would no doubt be established by the requirements of the magic tricks and the plan for their order. But it is only because there are such deontic structures that there are stage props.

(4) One thing that is very important about a stage prop is that, as a stage prop, it is purely instrumental -- it is usually a separated instrument, although sometimes it could be a conjoined instrument. A stage prop is something that is for use on the stage for a show. Even if we have a rock, in using it as a stage prop, we in a sense 'artifactualize' it; it is no longer just a rock, but a rock to serve a purpose in a play or some other kind of show. You can take a rabbit and make it a stage prop in a magic show. Thus whether something is a stage prop is about whether it can be classified as an instrumental patient available for a role in a show. 'Availability for a show' is not a particularly precise thing; obviously the things in a prop lock-up for a theatre company are available for a show, and thus can be classified as instruments available for a show. An umbrella at a store is not a stage prop, but if someone buys it to be an umbrella in a show, then it is a stage prop. To be classified as available for a show requires there being some idea of the kind of show for which it could be available; the kinds of things that could be stage props for a magic show may overlap but are not necessarily the kinds of things that could be stage props for a tragedy. Tragedies in ancient Greece had props, but they were quite limited, in part because they were religious ceremonies, in part because there were expectations about how they could be done, and in part because the venues required that you only use things that would be easily visible to more or less everyone in what was effectively a stadium. They would likely have been puzzled as to how a rabbit, a top hat, and stick would function as stage props, having no conception of our magic show conventions, or how a pocket-watch would work as a stage prop in a modern drama, not being used to our relatively intimate stage-theater setting. Thus what can be a stage prop depends on what can be an actual show. There's no point trying to claim that Mount Rushmore is a stage prop unless you have the kind of show in which it could be a stage prop. Nonetheless, if you had such a show, absolutely nothing forbids Mount Rushmore from being a stage prop, i.e., classified as an instrumental patient available for a role in a show.

(5) One complication with the considerations in (4) is that a stage prop has different modes. A stage prop 'in storage', i.e., as available in a broad sense, is different from a stage prop 'in waiting', i.e., as available in the more immediate sense of 'ready to go'; and a stage prop 'in waiting' is different from a stage prop 'in use', i.e., actually being used specifically as a stage prop.  Thus 'classified as an instrument available for a show' is not quite a complete account of a stage prop; you can have a stage prop that just stays in storage, available but never used, but what makes it a stage prop is that it is for being 'in use'. The old, technical way of making this distinction would be by saying that stage props can be potential and actual; thus stage props 'in storage' are potential stage props and stage props 'in use' are actual stage props. Unfortunately, this has also become a confusing way of talking, because there are two different things you can mean if you say that something is a potential X. You could mean that it is an X, but as being potential. You could also mean that it is not an X, but has the potential to become X. Potential being and actual being are both being; potential being is not nothingness. Likewise, a potential infinite and an actual infinite are both infinite; it's actually quite essential that a potential infinite not be finite. But we see in both cases that people get confused. In philosophy of mathematics, people repeatedly get Aristotle wrong by confusing his potential infinite (which is infinite) with an indefinite finite (which is not infinite); in metaphysics, a large number of mistakes get made by assuming that if something is potential it is not anything at all. Obviously, if we use this terminology here, both potential stage props and actual stage props are stage props.

While the terminology has the disadvantage of being confusing, it has the advantage of giving us roughly the right structure for reasoning. The stage prop 'in storage' (the potential stage prop) has to be partly activated as a stage prop to be a stage prop 'in waiting' (what the scholastics might have called the virtual stage prop), and the stage prop 'in waiting' has to be fully activated as a stage prop in order to be a stage prop 'in use'. These modes are related analogically; the potential stage prop and virtual stage prop exist to be an actual stage prop, to be not merely available for use, but available as actually being used.

***

Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA: 1990).

Links of Note

* Vanessa Seifert, Reframing the Reduction-Emergence Debate around Chemistry (PDF) 

* Patrick Flynn, Is All Truth-Seeking Philosophy?, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* James Como, Le style c'est l'homme meme, at "The New Criterion", on C. S. Lewis

* João Pinheiro da Silva, The Problems of Essentialist Natural Necessity, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Jack Davey,  Chateaubriand's England, at "Stac Davey"

* John Hawks, How evolution became a uniquely American controversy

* Christian List, A quadrilemma for theories of consciousness

* Eric Falden, What Did Kings Actually Do All Day?, at "Falden's Forge"

* Anthony Madrid, What Goes Wrong When We Write Ghazal's in English, at "The Paris Review"

* Edward Feser, Preventive war and the U.S. attack on Iran, at "Catholic World Report"

The Riotous Wet Leaves with Music Ring

The World Was Waiting for the Thunder's Birth
by Maurice Baring 

The world was waiting for the thunder’s birth,
To-day, and cloud was piled on sullen cloud:
Then strong, and straight, and clean, and cool, and loud
The rain came down, and drenched the stifling earth.
The heavy clouds have lifted and rolled by;
The riotous wet leaves with music ring,
And now the nightingale begins to sing,
And tender as a rose-leaf is the sky. 

I wonder if some day this stifling care
That weighs upon my heart will fall in showers?
I wonder if the hot and heavy hours
Will roll away and leave such limpid air,
And if my soul will riot in the rain,
And sing as gladly as that bird again?

Fortnightly Book, June 29

 I'm running a little behind on this, due to travel.

813 was Maurice Leblanc's attempt to put Arsene Lupin to rest. It failed, and the next Lupin book, which is also the next fortnightly book, is The Crystal Stopper, which was serialized in Le Journal in 1912. Two of Lupin's associates are arrested and in danger of being executed; one of them is innocent, and Lupin puts his wits to plumbing the depths of the mystery in order to find the evidence to save him, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems.

Pretty much every source that talks about this book also talks about how the book was inspired by the Panama Canal Scandals. The Panama Canal Company was a French company that, as its name suggests, was hired to construct a canal in Panama. The company found that, despite the project being for a shorter canal than the Suez Canal, the tropical climate was a massive impediment. Something like 22000 workers died trying to build the canal, largely due to malaria and yellow fever. The tropical rainy season also created severe engineering problems for which there was not always an obvious solution, and in fact, established clearly that the original design would need to be modified. In 1889, the company went bankrupt, and a court ordered it to be liquidated, a process that ended up being slow and complicated, and a financial disaster for a large number of people. In 1892, while this process was still going on, accusations were made that the company had been bribing politicians in an attempt to cover up the company's difficulties. Literally hundreds of legislators were accused, and a parliamentary inquiry discovered that over a hundred may have been involved, although the evidence in many of the cases was not sufficient for conviction. The scandal contributed to the downfall of the Clemenceau government, and, because some of the few people who were actually convicted were Jewish, greatly intensified the rising surge of French antisemitism. It also convinced many that the Third Republic was too corrupt to be viable. As to the Panama Canal Company itself, a New Panama Canal Company was formed in order to find a buyer for the assets; the United States government bought them, and, based on what the Panama Canal Company had learned, was able actually to complete the Panama Canal. I don't know what relevance any of this will have to the story, but we will see.

Maurice Leblanc, 813

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Mr. Kesselbach stopped short on the threshold of the sitting-room, took his secretary's arm and, in an anxious voice, whispered:

"Chapman, someone has been here again." (p. 1)

Summary: Arsene Lupin, the greatest thief in France and perhaps the world, does not kill -- clever in a thousand ways, he does not need to do so in order to steal. But when he robs the diamond magnate Rudolf Kesselbach, Kesselbach turns up dead, with all the evidence pointing to Lupin. This sends Lupin on a hunt to uncover who has framed him, but he soon finds himself in a fight for his life as his opponent turns out to be an extraordinarily clever serial killer who has an uncanny knack for being a step ahead. At the same time, Lupin strives to maintain his current plan -- to steal much of Europe -- and prevent it from collapsing into ruin due to the machinations of his unknown and unusually dangerous foe, and to save Dolores Kesselbach, the wife of the late Rudolf Kesselbach, from sharing the same fate as her husband. Unfortunately for him, even Lupin cannot successful juggle all three aims at once. Something will give.

This was an extraordinarily good story. It was not as fun as Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes; this is deliberately darker. It was at least as well plotted as the prior book, The Hollow Needle. In the earlier works of the series, we have seen Lupin being a mischievous joker; in The Hollow Needle, we saw him both ruthless and harried. But here, for the first time, we find Lupin anxious and afraid. More people than Mr. Kesselbach will be dead by the end of it, and Lupin eventually finds himself in a situation in which, for the first time, he kills someone. Lupin himself, in fact, has more than one 'death' in this book. Many of the characters -- the cunning chief of detectives, Lenormand, or the scheming Prince Sernine, are quite interesting in their own right, and add new dimensions to our understanding of Lupin, who comes across as more of a person-in-the-round here. This story was intended to end Lupin; Leblanc is perhaps less abrupt about it than Doyle was with Holmes, but there is an air of finality and fatality hovering around everything in the tale. Of course, we know that Lupin will return, because the reading public would no more let him die than it had let Holmes die, but as an attempt to bring his story to an end, this is a very solid one.

Favorite Passage:

He lit the young man's cigarette and his own and, at once, in a few words uttered in a hard voice, explained himself:

"You, the late Gérard Baupré, were weary of life, ill, penniless, hopeless....Would you like to be well, rich, and powerful?"

"I don't follow you."

"It is quite simple. Accident has placed you on my path. You are young, good-looking, a poet; you are intelligent and -- your act of despair shows it -- you have a fine sense of conduct. These are qualities which are rarely found united in one person. I value them...and I take them for my account."

"They are not for sale."

"Idiot! Who talks of buying or selling? Keep your conscience. It is too precious a jewel for me to relieve you of it."

"Then what do you ask of me?"

"Your life!" (p. 100)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Maurice Leblanc, 813, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).

Doctor Unitatis

Today is the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Doctor of the Church. What follows is Adversus Haereses, Book II, Chapter 25; St. Irenaeus is criticizing Gnostic attempts to argue for their views on the basis of esoteric meanings of "numbers, syllables, and letters" in Scripture, which Irenaeus recognizes as linked to their false view of creation:

 If any one, however, say in reply to these things, What then? Is it a meaningless and accidental thing, that the positions of names, and the election of the apostles, and the working of the Lord, and the arrangement of created things, are what they are?— we answer them: Certainly not; but with great wisdom and diligence, all things have clearly been made by God, fitted and prepared [for their special purposes]; and His word formed both things ancient and those belonging to the latest times; and men ought not to connect those things with the number thirty, but to harmonize them with what actually exists, or with right reason. Nor should they seek to prosecute inquiries respecting God by means of numbers, syllables, and letters. For this is an uncertain mode of proceeding, on account of their varied and diverse systems, and because every sort of hypothesis may at the present day be, in like manner, devised by any one; so that they can derive arguments against the truth from these very theories, inasmuch as they may be turned in many different directions. But, on the contrary, they ought to adapt the numbers themselves, and those things which have been formed, to the true theory lying before them. For system does not spring out of numbers, but numbers from a system; nor does God derive His being from things made, but things made from God. For all things originate from one and the same God.  

But since created things are various and numerous, they are indeed well fitted and adapted to the whole creation; yet, when viewed individually, are mutually opposite and inharmonious, just as the sound of the lyre, which consists of many and opposite notes, gives rise to one unbroken melody, through means of the interval which separates each one from the others. The lover of truth therefore ought not to be deceived by the interval between each note, nor should he imagine that one was due to one artist and author, and another to another, nor that one person fitted the treble, another the bass, and yet another the tenor strings; but he should hold that one and the same person [formed the whole], so as to prove the judgment, goodness, and skill exhibited in the whole work and [specimen of] wisdom. Those, too, who listen to the melody, ought to praise and extol the artist, to admire the tension of some notes, to attend to the softness of others, to catch the sound of others between both these extremes, and to consider the special character of others, so as to inquire at what each one aims, and what is the cause of their variety, never failing to apply our rule, neither giving up the [one ] artist, nor casting off faith in the one God who formed all things, nor blaspheming our Creator.