Cogito Ergo Sum XIV

Rene Descartes, Search for Truth (CSM II, 411-412):

Eudoxus. You cannot deny that you have such doubts; rather it is certain that you have them, so certain in fact that you cannot doubt your doubting. Therefore it is also true that you who are doubting exist; this is so true that you can no longer have any doubts about it.

Polyander. I quite agree with you on that point, because if I did not exist, I would not be able to doubt.

Eudoxus. You exist, therefore, and you know that you exist, and you know this just because you are doubting.

Polyander. All of this is quite true.

Eudoxus. But, so that you are not deflected from the course I suggested, let us proceed gradually, and as I said, you will find that you are making greater progress than you think. Let us go through the argument again. You exist, and you know that you exist, and you know this because you know that you are doubting....

Beam on Our Bewilder'd Mind

Today is the Feast of St. Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose was what we might call a Renaissance man except that he lived in the late Roman Imperial period rather than the Renaissance; this was actually why the still-seeking Augustine was so thoroughly impressed by him. He was, among other things, a poet who invented a new poetic genre that became very popular, the Ambrosian hymn. So it seems fitting to put up a poem by Ambrose today. The following is John Henry Newman's Englishing of one of the Ambrosian hymns that we know was actually written by Ambrose (because Augustine quotes it and attributes it to him), Aeterne rerum conditor. It is the best known of Ambrose's hymns because of its role in the Roman Breviary (where it was assigned to Lauds on Sundays from Epiphany to Lent and from early October to the beginning of Advent).

Lauds—Sunday
by John Henry Newman

Æterne rerum conditor.

Framer of the earth and sky,
Ruler of the day and night,
With a glad variety,
Tempering all, and making light;

Gleams upon our dark path flinging,
Cutting short each night begun,
Hark! for chanticleer is singing,
Hark! he chides the lingering sun.

And the morning star replies,
And lets loose the imprison'd day;
And the godless bandit flies
From his haunt and from his prey.

Shrill it sounds, the storm relenting
Soothes the weary seaman's ears;
Once it wrought a great repenting,
In that flood of Peter's tears.

Rouse we; let the blithesome cry
Of that bird our hearts awaken;
Chide the slumberers as they lie,
And arrest the sin-o'ertaken.

Hope and health are in his strain,
To the fearful and the ailing;
Murder sheathes his blade profane,
Faith revives when faith was failing.

Jesu, Master! when we sin,
Turn on us Thy healing face;
It will melt the offence within
Into penitential grace:

Beam on our bewilder'd mind,
Till its dreamy shadows flee;
Stones cry out where Thou hast shined,
Jesu! musical with Thee.

To the Father and the Son,
And the Spirit, who in Heaven
Ever witness, Three and One,
Praise on Earth be ever given.

One interesting fact about Ambrose is that he read silently, even when other people were present. We know this, again, because Augustine mentions it as a remarkable fact (Confessions Book VI, Chapter III):

Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room--for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him--we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence--for who would dare interrupt one so intent?--we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men’s business. Perhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. And even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one.

Pardon II

Well, President Obama on Friday finally pardoned some people, 682 days after his inauguration, thus managing by 17 days not to be the slowest President ever to pardon anyone (George W. Bush still holds that dubious title). P. S. Ruckman, Jr. has some of the details: there are nine pardons total; six of the nine are for extremely minor offenses (so minor that the people in question weren't even given jail time, and were just trying to clear their record) and aren't the sort of things that seriously required a huge amount of deliberation; the most recent crime was eleven years ago; and this compares with 1,288 denied clemency requests and a backlog of requests currently numbering over 4000. But I suppose it's something, and at least Obama didn't pass the 699-day mark, which would have been extraordinarily depressing. I suppose now we get to see if this slow pace keeps up, or if this is now the cracking of the ice and at least a steady trickle will come out of the White House for now; one hopes the latter.

What really gets me about the paucity of pardons in recent Presidential terms is that the number of requests that would be reasonable to grant must be massive in comparison with what they would have been a hundred or two hundred years ago, just from the size of the U.S. population and the inevitability of the sort of mistakes, misfortunes, and instances of excessive zeal that pardons are supposed to correct. We should expect that over time the number of pardons would (more or less, allowing for variations from term to term and President to President) have increased. And for a good portion of our history they did, in fact, do this: not all Presidents were equally generous with the pardon power, of course, but the trend is noticeable. But for the past forty years at least, things have looked increasingly dismal.

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

Just about every time that I think I'm finally getting on top of things this term, the term retaliates by slapping me hard a few times; late November to mid-December is always, quite literally, my busiest time of year, and this year it's worse than usual. So I Stargate-marathon while grading papers and quizzes, and commenting on papers, and double-checking quiz grades, and double-checking that course requirements were met, and putting it all together, and taking note of things that I need to change for next term, and answer student e-mails frantically asking me questions about things that are in the syllabus or that were mentioned in the review class they attended, or were emailed to the entire class a week and a half ago, and doing paperwork, and reflecting on the fact that while Socrates is write that no one should be paid for teaching I should nonetheless be paid ten times what I am paid in order to put up with the craziness that goes with grading. It's good fun. And sometimes I take a break reading, which is harder to do than it sounds given that I start feeling guilty about the fact that I am not grading Every Single Waking Moment of the Day.

One of the books I am reading is Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and it's an interesting experience (besides being a fitting metaphor for my end of term grading); I've read it before, but I always find when I re-read Verne that I've forgotten how lush his descriptions are. One always remembers the stories -- the action sequences. But Verne is interesting in that the action-sequences are in a sense just auxiliary: they are there to keep you interested in the descriptions by breaking them up a bit and putting them into a story. And many of his novels -- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is very much a case in point -- consist mostly of continual, enthusiastic descripton of natural phenomena (and even those that don't often make it up in part by enthusiastic description of technology or engineering). And it's part of what makes Verne work: what you'll remember when you close the book is the story (giant squid wrestling with the Nautilus), but what you get caught up in when actually reading the book is the extraordinary landscape, whether it's of sea life or of marvellous machines, or of nations seen while racing onward to some destination. What really shows the quality of Verne's skill as a writer is that the descriptions are not easy (they are full of things that most people could not be expected to know) but they are beautifully written.

In a great many English translations these long passages are cut out. And that's very much a shame. We need more science fiction with passages like this:

What charming hours I passed thus at the saloon windows! What new specimens of submarine flora and fauna I admitted to the brilliant light of our electric lantern! Agariciform fungi, slate-coloured actinies, amongst others the thalassianthus aster, rubipores like flutes, only waiting for the breath of the god Pan, shells peculiar to that sea, which establish themselves in madreporic excavations, the base of which is turned in a short spiral, and lastly, a thousand specimens of a polypier that I had not observed before, the common sponge.

The class of spongiaires, the first group of polypiers, is precisely created by this curious product, the utility of which is incontestable. Sponge is not a vegetable, as some naturalists still say, but an animal fo the last order: a polypier inferior to coral. Its animality is not doubtful, and we may admit the opinion of the ancients, who looked upon it as an intermediary between plants and animals. I ought to say, however, that naturalists have not agreed about the organisation of the sponge. According to some it is a polypier, and to others, such as Milne Edwards, it is a solitary and unique individual.

[This is the Collins Classics version, copyright 2010, p. 174. The French of which this is a translation is below. (Speaking of which, whatever possessed the translator to translate 'salon' as 'saloon' when 'salon' would have done better?)]

After which M. Aronnax continues his discussion of the sponge for several paragraphs, broken up only by his calling Conseil, and why? In order that Conseil might learn about sponges and polypiers, of course. And that's what makes Verne almost uniquely great as a science fiction writer: while he does write about how cool a submarine would be, what he spends most of his time writing about is how cool scientific investigation would be if you had a submarine. He is really and truly enthusiastic about the sponges; he's not afraid to give a little lesson on sponge taxonomy, because he actually has the writing skills to pull it off; and he doesn't dumb it down at all, because his astounding adventures are intellectual adventures as well as adventures in the more ordinary sense. We really do need more writers like him.

---

Que d’heures charmantes je passai ainsi à la vitre du salon ! Que d’échantillons nouveaux de la flore et de la faune sous-marine j’admirai sous l’éclat de notre fanal électrique ! Des fongies agariciformes, des actinies de couleur ardoisée, entre autres le thalassianthus aster des tubipores disposés comme des flûtes et n’attendant que le souffle du dieu Pan, des coquilles particulières à cette mer, qui s’établissent dans les excavations madréporiques et dont la base est contournée en courte spirale, et enfin mille spécimens d’un polypier que je n’avais pas observé encore, la vulgaire éponge.

La classe des spongiaires, première du groupe des polypes, a été précisément créée par ce curieux produit dont l’utilité est incontestable. L’éponge n’est point un végétal comme l’admettent encore quelques naturalistes, mais un animal du dernier ordre, un polypier inférieur à celui du corail. Son animalité n’est pas douteuse, et on ne peut même adopter l’opinion des anciens qui la regardaient comme un être intermédiaire entre la plante et l’animal. Je dois dire cependant, que les naturalistes ne sont pas d’accord sur le mode d’organisation de l’éponge. Pour les uns, c’est un polypier, et pour d’autres tels que M. Milne Edwards, c’est un individu isolé et unique.

Cogito Ergo Sum XIII

Descartes, Principles of Philosophy I, 7:

So, if we reject everything we can doubt in any way, and even imagine it all to be false, we can readily suppose that there is no God, no sky, and no bodies — and even that we ourselves have no hands, no feet, and indeed no body at all. However, this does not allow us to suppose that we who are thinking such things are nothing, since it is a contradiction to believe that something which thinks does not exist at the very time when it is thinking. So the knowledge that I think therefore I am is the first and most certain of all items of knowledge which anyone will arrive at if they philosophise in the right order.

Farrell on ID and Catholic Thought

I was a bit surprised to find that my visitor logs had links from the Huffington Post; but it turns out that John Farrell has an article on why Catholics are skeptical, and increasingly skeptical, of the Intelligent Design movement, which is something I've discussed for a while now. It's a pretty good summary of some of the reasons, although, of course, given the medium it's pretty concise. Those who are interested in the big debate that John mentions can follow it in Tom Gilson's useful collection of some of the major links.

Absence of Evidence

In the comments thread to a post on another blog, a commenter gave the following quotation:

'The simplest explanation for the total absence of evidence for gods is a total absence of gods'.

I've increasingly over the past couple of years come across claims of this sort (the commenter seems to be quoting someone, but I don't know who), and I find it interesting because the underlying idea seems to be pretty clearly wrong, for all its superficial plausibility, even when we ignore the obvious hyperbole of 'total absence of evidence'. (Obviously there's evidence -- religious experiences, etc.; the question is just whether it's adequate to establish the conclusion. It is very rare to find cases of actual disputes where one side literally has no evidence at all, inconvenient as that fact may be. Even believers in house elves have strange occurrences to call to witness. What we usually mean is that the evidence is weak, which is very different from being nonexistent. The rhetorical advantages of conflating weak evidence with no evidence are, of course, obvious; but we should not treat a rhetorical figure as literal speech.) What we mean by "total absence of evidence" is at most a total absence of evidence available to be used in reasoning (otherwise the only way to establish total absence of evidence for X is to prove that X can't possibly exist -- if we aren't talking about evidence available to us, we'd have to take into consideration all evidence available to everyone at every time, including the future, and therefore we would need to establish a guarantee that no real evidence could possibly turn up in the future). And because of this, if all other things are equal, the simplest explanation for absence of evidence is that you've probably just overlooked it or not come across it. It is simplest in at least three different ways:

(1) It involves the weakest supposition about the world. If I commit to the claim that some evidence of X probably exists, I'm not by that committed to any claim for or against the existence of X, just to the existence of something that someone could reasonably classify as evidence for the existence of X, whatever that evidence might be. This is clearly a weaker supposition, with fewer commitments, than the supposition that there is no X.

(2) It is the simplest in that, unlike a categorical rejection or affirmation of something's existence, it allows for the subsumption of the case under an already well-established generalization, that is, the straight psychological fact that people often overlook or fail to come across evidence for things.

(3) It is the simplest in that it provides the least impediment to future inquiry: it closes down the fewest options for further research.

Part of the problem, I think, is that phrases like 'total absence of evidence for the existence of X', despite the literal meaning, actually convey in practical, colloquial speech the idea that there is, overwhelmingly, evidence against the existence of X, and it is indeed true that the simplest explanation for overwhelming evidence against the existence of X is X's nonexistence. And perhaps a failure to recognize that we do not, in actual practice usually judge absence of evidence absolutely but relative to what is accessible to us (the distinction I mentioned above) contributes to this confusion. But what is actually happening is that an entire range of suppositions is being elided. And there's a reason why people often say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: it's precisely that actual absence of the thing/event/whatever is not the simplest explanation for absence of evidence, considered on its own.

There are actual cases where an absence of evidence would be evidence of absence, of course; the cases, that is, where all other things are not equal. In practice, all of these are cases where we actually have pre-existing preponderant reason (either through preponderance of evidence or through actual proof) that X's existence is inconsistent with the lack of evidence in question, or else made definitely unlikely by it, and that it is either impossible or unlikely that the reason the evidence is lacking is your fault. But these cases, of course, don't salvage the general principle.

Chrysorrhoas

Today is the Feast of St. John of Damascus. John was a Syrian Christian; his name at birth may have been Mansur ibn Sarjun al-Taghlibi -- our records are not wholly clear, and if I understand correctly it is possible that this was really the name of his father. The family of Mansur was a family of fair local importance in a time of great change: John's grandfather was in charge of taxes under the Byzantine Empire, and then, when the region was conquered by the Umayyad caliphate, the family continued in the civil service, working for the caliph (which was common among the civil servants of the time). Indeed, John's father, Sarjun, was put in charge of building the Arab fleet for the purpose of attacking Constantinople. John himself served in the court of the caliph for some time, before going to the Mar Saba monastery. It was there, at Mar Saba, that he took the name John as his monastic name. He wrote quite a few important works, the most important of which is the one usually known in the west as the Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Because he's primarily a synthesizer of doctrine, his creativity is often overlooked; as with most synthesizing geniuses, the creative ingenuity he constantly displays is not flashy and obvious but often very subtle. He is sometimes called Chrysorrhoas, which means, "streaming with gold."

Tolstoy's cousin, Count Alexei Tolstoy, wrote a poem about John of Damascus that became the core of a famous cantata by Taneyev, Ioann Damaskin, also sometimes called A Russian Requiem. It is Russian music at its finest, and streaming with gold itself. The following is but an excerpt (the third movement).

Make Plain My Pathway Still

O Thou Essential Word
by Catherine Winkworth

O Thou essential Word,
Who wast from the beginning
With God, for Thou wast God;
Thou hope of all the sinning,
Chosen to save our race,
Welcome indeed Thou art,
Redeemer, Fount of grace,
To this my longing heart.

Come, self-existent Word,
And speak Thou in my spirit!
The soul where Thou art heard
Doth endless peace inherit.
Thou Light that lightenest all,
Abide through faith in me,
Nor let me from Thee fall,
And seek no guide but Thee.

Ah! what hath stirred Thy heart,
What cry hath mounted thither,
And reached Thy heavenly throne,
And drawn Thee, Savior, hither?
It was Thy wondrous love,
And my most utter need,
Made Thy compassions move,
Stronger than death indeed.

Then let me give my heart
To Him who loved me, wholly;
And live, while here I dwell,
To show His praises solely;
Yes, Jesus, form anew
This stony heart of mine,
Make it till death still true
To Thee, for ever Thine.

Let nought be left within
But what Thy hand hath planted;
Root out the weeds of sin,
And quell the foe who haunted
My soul, and set the tares;
From Thee comes nothing ill,
O save me from his snares,
Make plain my pathway still.

Thou art the Life, O Lord,
And Thou its Light art only!
Let not Thy blessèd rays
Still leave me dark and lonely.
Star of the East, arise!
Drive all my clouds away,
Till earth’s dim twilight dies
Into the perfect day!

Winkworth, one of the very small handful of hymn-translators to rival John Mason Neale in importance and quality, is here translating a German hymn by Laurentius Laurenti.

Cogito Ergo Sum XII

Descartes, Second Replies (CSM II, 104):

Now some of these perceptions [of the intellect] are so transparently clear and at the same time so simple that we cannot ever think of them without believing them to be true. The fact that I exist so long as I am thinking, or that what is done cannot be undone, are examples of truths in respect of which we manifestly possess this kind of certainty. For we cannot doubt them unless we think of them; but we cannot think of them without at the same time believing they are true, as was supposed. Hence we cannot doubt them without at the same time believing they are true; that is, we can never doubt them.

Cogito Ergo Sum XI

Descartes, Second Replies (CSM II, 140):

When someone says 'I am thinking, therefore I am, or I exist', he does not deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind. This is clear from the fact that if he were deducing it by means of a syllogism, he would have to have had previous knowledge of the major premiss 'Everything which thinks is, or exists'; yet in fact he learns it from experiencing in his own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing.

Philosophical Folklore

As some long-term readers know, I have an interest in philosophical folklore; much of this folklore is found in discussions of critical thinking and informal logic, which is a pretty fruitful hunting ground for it: almost everything that goes by the name 'critical thinking', and much in the field of informal logic, is philosophical folklore, bits and pieces that have filtered down and become common legend. Some of these bits and pieces, used wisely, do good work; others are, as we might say, mere superstition -- things that were once held by only a few for very specific and very controvertible reasons, or things that have long since become too crudely simplified to do the work they are supposed to do, or things that once made good sense but are now consistently understood a completely different way due to the accidents of linguistic change.

But one finds philosophical folklore elsewhere, especially when it comes to history of philosophy. I've mentioned, for instance, the irony that what is often called Leibniz's Law is not found in Leibniz; you can find superficially similar claims, but on closer claim they turn out not to have anything to do with identity in the proper sense, or else to be obviously different in logical character from what goes by the name. For instance, Leibniz explicitly tells us that his claim in Discourse on Metaphysics, section 9, which is often said to be the source, is paradoxical, in the company of claims like "You can't divide substances in half" or "Every substance mirrors the entire world." It's also based purely on Leibniz's very peculiar account of what an individual substance is. Nothing like this is even remotely in view when people talk about "Leibniz's Law". In this case what seems to have happened is that some claims made by Leibniz were put into a very different logical form than Leibniz himself would or could have put them, and by people making assumptions Leibniz himself wouldn't or couldn't have made, with the result that things were changed significantly in the translation.

Another example is that what is usually called Pascal's Wager actually does not derive directly from Pascal, although it was influenced by him. It really derives from Arnauld and Nicole's Port-Royal Logic and you can recognize it by the fact that it gives a role in the Wager to hell -- i.e., very bad consequences play an important role in the argument. This is not the way Pascal sets up his own Wager, in any of the fragments we have. What happened there is that Port-Royal Logic was published long before anything directly from Pascal (we only have Pascal's version in fragmentary notes published posthumously), and therefore it had a chance to become very widespread, although, since it clearly is influenced by Pascal, it gets Pascal's name.

Another example, about which I've been meaning to write a post (but it's a complicated issue and so I need to have a good stretch of time to do it), has to do with the phrase "Knowledge is Power". It's usually attributed to Francis Bacon. It is indeed a very Baconian sentiment, and Bacon does have the Latin phrase scientia est potentia in his writings. But there he's talking about divine simplicity, and the claim he is making is that knowledge is (the same as) power for God, as opposed to us. One occasionally also finds it attributed to Thomas Hobbes, and indeed, Thomas Hobbes also says that knowledge is power; and the meaning is much more like what we usually mean by it. But he adds sed parva, roughly, "but only a little", and that's a pretty important qualification.

The list could be extended at considerable length. Not all bits of philosophical folklore are wrong, it should be said, although explaining the ones that are wrong is often a more interesting task than explaining the ones that are right. And even those that are wrong if taken straight may nonetheless show some real insight -- "knowledge is power" is indeed a pretty good summary of Baconian philosophy, even if Bacon never thought to summarize it exactly that way, and it would be virtually impossible to come up with a three-word summary that does better -- or be based on conflations or errors that even very reasonable people may make.

What sets me in mind of all this is this discussion of a bit of philosophical folklore, by T. H. Irwin. One occasionally encounters the claim that Augustine argued that the virtues of pagans were merely 'splendid vices', splendida peccata. As with most such philosophical folklore, one can make some Augustinian sense of the claim (although, as Irwin notes in the paper, how much Augustinian sense is a tricky matter to determine, with lots of room for controversy); but Augustine himself seems never actually to say this. This is a particularly interesting case because it has been a massively influential bit of philosophical folklore. Because philosophical folklore is popular and widely accepted, it does tend to have some real influence, which is why it's very worthwhile for historians of philosophy like myself to study it (and a real shame that we don't do it more often). But the degree of influence of this particular tidbit through history has been quite extraordinary; there are probably only a relatively small handful of folkloric tidbits (like Ockham's Razor) that have been more influential.

Cogito Ergo Sum X

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation Two:

But how do I know that there is not something different altogether from the objects I have now enumerated, of which it is impossible to entertain the slightest doubt? Is there not a God, or some being, by whatever name I may designate him, who causes these thoughts to arise in my mind? But why suppose such a being, for it may be I myself am capable of producing them? Am I, then, at least not something? But I before denied that I possessed senses or a body; I hesitate, however, for what follows from that? Am I so dependent on the body and the senses that without these I cannot exist? But I had the persuasion that there was absolutely nothing in the world, that there was no sky and no earth, neither minds nor bodies; was I not, therefore, at the same time, persuaded that I did not exist? Far from it; I assuredly existed, since I was persuaded. But there is I know not what being, who is possessed at once of the highest power and the deepest cunning, who is constantly employing all his ingenuity in deceiving me. Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived; and, let him deceive me as he may, he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I shall be conscious that I am something. So that it must, in fine, be maintained, all things being maturely and carefully considered, that this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

Cogito Ergo Sum IX

Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part IV:

Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search

In the next place, I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that " I," that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.

Cogito Ergo Sum VIII

Avicenna, Al-Shifa: Soul, I.1 (Hackett Reader 178-9):

So we say that it has to be imagined as though one of us were created whole in an instant but his sight is veiled from directly observing the things of the external world. He is created as though floating in air or in a void but without the air supporting him in such a way that he would have to feel it, and the limbs of his body are stretched out and away from one another, so they do not come into contact or touch. Then he considers whether we can assert the existence of his self. He has no doubts about asserting his self as something that exists without also asserting the existence of any of his exterior or interior parts, his heart, his brain, or anything external. He will, in fact, be asserting the existence of his self without asserting that it has length, breadth, or depth, and, if it were even possible for him in such a state to imagine a hand or some other extremity, he would not imagine it as a part of his self or as a necessary condition of his self - and you know that what can be asserted as existing is not the same as what cannot be so asserted and that what is stipulated is not the same as what is not stipulated. Thus, the self whose existence he asserted is his unique characteristic, in the sense that it is he himself, not his body and its parts, which he did not so assert. Thus, what one has been alerted to is a way to be made alert to the existence of the soul as something that is not the body - nor in fact any body - to recognise it and be aware of it, if it is in fact the case that he has been disregarding it and needed to be hit over the head with it.

Two Poem Drafts

Unrung Change

Our churches have no bells;
the harridans of hell
have come and cut them down.
To every chapel-town
they came and took our voice.

In cheer and fear the bells
across the plains and hills
spoke words of hope and faith;
they now are merely wraiths;
they now have lost all voice.

Our churches have no bells;
their songs will never swell
with clamor born of joy;
their bronze is now destroyed
and we have lost our voice.

Casting Correspondences on the Old Man's Tortoise Shell

Patternable pattern: unstable pattern.
Nameable name: unstable name.

Nameless: therefore root of sky and land.
Named: therefore mother of ten myriad things.

Therefore:
Never yearning: seeing the profound.
Ever yearning: seeing the surface.
Both these things: the same result.
Opposing names: the same meaning.

Therefore:
One obscure: both obscure.

Much that is profound: therefore a way through.

Cogito Ergo Sum VII

Augustine, On the Trinity, Book XV, Chapter 12:

In regard to this, indeed, we are absolutely without any fear lest perchance we are being deceived by some resemblance of the truth; since it is certain, that he who is deceived, yet lives. And this again is not reckoned among those objects of sight that are presented from without, so that the eye may be deceived in it; in such way as it is when an oar in the water looks bent, and towers seem to move as you sail past them, and a thousand other things that are otherwise than they seem to be: for this is not a thing that is discerned by the eye of the flesh. The knowledge by which we know that we live is the most inward of all knowledge, of which even the Academic cannot insinuate: Perhaps you are asleep, and do not know it, and you see things in your sleep. For who does not know that what people see in dreams is precisely like what they see when awake? But he who is certain of the knowledge of his own life, does not therein say, I know I am awake, but, I know I am alive; therefore, whether he be asleep or awake, he is alive. Nor can he be deceived in that knowledge by dreams; since it belongs to a living man both to sleep and to see in sleep. Nor can the Academic again say, in confutation of this knowledge: Perhaps you are mad, and do not know it: for what madmen see is precisely like what they also see who are sane; but he who is mad is alive. Nor does he answer the Academic by saying, I know I am not mad, but, I know I am alive. Therefore he who says he knows he is alive, can neither be deceived nor lie. Let a thousand kinds, then, of deceitful objects of sight be presented to him who says, I know I am alive; yet he will fear none of them, for he who is deceived yet is alive. But if such things alone pertain to human knowledge, they are very few indeed; unless that they can be so multiplied in each kind, as not only not to be few, but to reach in the result to infinity. For he who says, I know I am alive, says that he knows one single thing. Further, if he says, I know that I know I am alive, now there are two; but that he knows these two is a third thing to know. And so he can add a fourth and a fifth, and innumerable others, if he holds out. But since he cannot either comprehend an innumerable number by additions of units, or say a thing innumerable times, he comprehends this at least, and with perfect certainty, viz. that this is both true and so innumerable that he cannot truly comprehend and say its infinite number. This same thing may be noticed also in the case of a will that is certain. For it would be an impudent answer to make to any one who should say, I will to be happy, that perhaps you are deceived. And if he should say, I know that I will this, and I know that I know it, he can add yet a third to these two, viz. that he knows these two; and a fourth, that he knows that he knows these two; and so on ad infinitum. Likewise, if any one were to say, I will not to be mistaken; will it not be true, whether he is mistaken or whether he is not, that nevertheless he does will not to be mistaken? Would it not be most impudent to say to him, Perhaps you are deceived? When beyond doubt, whereinsoever he may be deceived, he is nevertheless not deceived in thinking that he wills not to be deceived. And if he says he knows this, he adds any number he chooses of things known, and perceives that number to be infinite. For he who says, I will not to be deceived, and I know that I will not to be so, and I know that I know it, is able now to set forth an infinite number here also, however awkward may be the expression of it. And other things too are to be found capable of refuting the Academics, who contend that man can know nothing.