Maurice LeBlanc, The Hollow Needle

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Raymonde listened. The noise was repeated twice over, clearly enough to be distinguished from the medley of vague sounds that formed the great silence of the night and yet too faintly to enable her to tell whether it was near or far, within the walls of the big country-house, or outside, among the  murky recesses of the park. (p. 1)

Summary: An accidentally foiled burglary and a murder! And seventeen-year-old Isidore Beautrelet finds himself in the neighborhood and cannot help but poke around to see if he can discover something the gendarmes cannot. The trail becomes even more exciting when Beautrelet discovers the involvement of Arsene Lupin, the greatest thief in France and perhaps the world. But from that point, he is in a chess match with a far more experienced foe, and clever and dogged as he may be, it will take turns he cannot possibly expect. 

In a sense, just as the previous book opposed Lupin with a loose version of the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and tried to follow the logic of that, this book does the same, but with an even looser version of Joseph Rouletabille. Rouletabille is the detective in Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room and its sequels, who, when we first meet him, is eighteen years old. If you rearrange the word 'Rouletabille' (which means in English something like 'globetrotter'), you get pretty close to 'Beautrelet', although not exactly, and Beautrelet has a few features that are like Rouletabille. There are important differences -- Beautrelet knows, and has a good a relationship with his father, rather than being an orphan like Rouletabille, and I think it's fair to say that Beautrelet is the more charming character. Nonetheless, Beautrelet is dealing with a similar kind of case in a similar kind of way, involving the same sorts of secret identities.

An obvious problem with this sort of set-up is that you have a school boy, still in high school, going up against Arsene Lupin, and his success needs to be explained. LeBlanc handles this by handicapping Lupin in several ways. First, Lupin is constrained in terms of where and when he can be places by his primary interest, which in this case is romantic. Second, Lupin's own ego tends to lead him to make comments and leave clues that show how clever he is, with the result that, no matter how much Lupin outmatches him, a clever person who is as resolute and curious as Beautrelet is again and again never starting very far behind. And third, Lupin's situation is complicated in that Beautrelet is not his only worry; he is being chased from the one side by his old French foe, Ganimard, and from the other by an immensely more dangerous opponent, Herlock Sholmes, who has less information to work upon but is extremely motivated to hunt Lupin down. The three together will eventually prove too much for Lupin; he will win, and in winning he will lose. Some problems cannot be solved even by the greatest thief who has ever lived.

The Hollow Needle of the title is a reference to a lost treasure associated with the Kings of France, which Lupin and Beautrelet are both seeking. This is a kind of story with which we are very familiar -- things like the Nicholas Cage movie, National Treasure -- in which we have a treasure hunt with a bit of patriotic romance to it. It was, of course, a much less common story in the first decade of the twentieth century. This is, I think, a little weaker than the rest of the story, but it provides the puzzles that move it forward, many of which are themselves quite interesting. (It also, however, makes the story somewhat difficult to summarize without spoiling all the twists and turns.) But part of this is that, interesting as the treasure might be to Beautrelet, Lupin's own interest is in an entirely more precious kind of treasure.

Favorite Passage:

"What fine copies!" said Beautrelet, approvingly.

Lupin looked at him with an air of stupefaction:

"What! Copies! You must be mad! The copies are in Madrid, my dear fellow, in Florence, Venice, Munich, Amsterdam."

"Then these --"

"Are the original pictures, my lad, patiently collected in all the museums of Europe, where I have replaced them, like an honest man, with first-rate copies." (p. 210)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

***

Maurice LeBlanc, The Hollow Needle, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)

 Alasdair MacIntyre died on Wednesday.  He was one of the most important moral philosophers of our day, and a major figure in the revival of virtue ethics. In the fifties and sixties, he was a significant voice in Marxist theory, and while he eventually stopped being Marxist, Marxism set him on a course to think through matters of social ideology and the role of institutions in changes in ideas. In the eighties he became Catholic, and it was in the eighties and nineties that he began publishing the works for which he is best known: After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), his Gifford lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, Tradition (1990), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999).

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right I: The Essence of Right

 Bl. Antonio Francesco Davide Ambrogio Rosmini-Serbati, IC, was born in Rovereto in 1797 and died in Stresa in 1855. He is most famous for founding the Institute of Charity, more commonly known as the Rosminians. He also spent a considerable amount of time as a political advisor to the Kingdom of Piedmont, and was considered for the position of Minister of the Interior of the States of the Church (essentially, the Papal State equivalent of Prime Minister) by Bl. Pius IX, although that didn't work out due to political troubles. In 1845, he published Filosofia del diritto, that is, The Philosophy of Right. I've wanted for a while to put up a series on this long and fascinating work, and there is no time like the present. (When I say the work is large, I mean very large -- I believe the first edition is something like 1700 pages. He opens the work with an epigraph from Plato's Laws that says that we should not seek brevity when writing laws, but seek the best.)

A key concern of Rosmini's in writing this work is to restore justice to its important role in discussions of law; this requires insisting on the foundational importance of the philosophy of Right, which is concerned with precisely this, being "the doctrine of first reason applied to jural justice", where jural justice is "justice rooted in rights" (p. 16). The philosophy of Right covers both natural rights and positive rights, and involves three elements: the theory of rational right (which establishes what rights are), the theory of positive laws (which is concerned with positive laws and their relations to rights), and the critique of positive laws (which is concerned with the relation between the theory of positive laws and actual positive laws). Because rights and laws organize society, the philosophy of Right has ties to political philosophy, providing it its ends, and when considered in precisely this aspect, can be called the philosophy of social justice. It also has ties to eudaimonology (concerned with happiness/fulfillment) and ethics, although it is distinct from each and links the two together. In his own work, Rosmini wants to avoid two extremes that he thinks most philosophers of Right have not managed to avoid: trying to stuff too many things into it, thus threatening its systematic unity, and trying to restrict it too far, thus threatening is universal applicability.

A right, according to Rosmini, is "a faculty which human beings have for doing or experiencing anything useful" that is "protected by the moral law which obliges others to respect this faculty" (p. 23); that is, it consists "in a eudaimonological faculty protected by the moral law" (p. 39). Rights in the philosophy of Right are therefore connected to duties in ethics or moral philosophy. A 'faculty' in this context means "a permission or authority proceeding from the jural law", that is, "action carried out under the safeguard of the law which forbids others to interfere with that action" (p. 41). 'Faculty' is the usual word used, but Rosmini suggests that 'governance' might be a better term for it, because it captures the notion of authority. Every right therefore involves a law that protects a kind of action, and a title, which is a fact that tells us that the law applies to a given case, through which we are entitled to the protection of the law. These titles can admit of different modes or modalities or modifications, and thus our rights can change over time to the extent that the titles anchoring them do. (This will be quite important later because Rosmini thinks that the function of civil society is to regulate these modalities to solve problems of justice that come from many different people coming together and potentially exercising their rights in ways that complicate the exercise of the rights of others.)

Rights in general are founded on the human person. This is inevitable because any acocunt of rights must trace back to an account of obligations, which is itself going to be concerned with what is in some sense necessary for the free action of persons. This kind of necessity arises when persons must act a certain way in order to preserve or increase their personal perfection, that is, their fulfillment specifically as a person. "If they do not follow this course of action, they lose something of their dignity, their integrity and their being. And their evil consists precisely in this loss." (p. 81) Thus obligation is the necessity of an action to avoid the loss of personal dignity, or the good appropriate to a person, where a person is "an intelligent subject, that is, a subject of such a nature that its good consists in adhering to objective entity taken in its fullness, and therefore in its order" (p. 81). That is to say, a person is an intelligent, volitional being whose completion consists in having the right kinds of objects for intellect and will, and obligations are the requirements for reaching this completion. Rights are based, then, not on the will of the legislator but on a sort of natural law inherent in persons, although Rosmini himself usually prefers to call it rational law. The first precept of this rational law is "'acknowledge beings according to their exigency' or in equivalent words, 'to acknowledge truth practically'" (p. 114). Duty and right are thus contrasted by the fact that duty arises from the objects of intellect and will, while right arises from the subject (cf. p. 148); this is why all rights have corresponding duties, but not all duties involve rights.

When freedom has the appropriate characteristics -- it involves the exercise of personal activity involving morally lawful good for the person who has it in such a way that others morally must not interfere with it -- it is a right, and can be called jural freedom. The moral duty that requires us not to interfere with it is called the jural duty (dovere giuridico). We can define jural duty more exactly as "that moral duty which obliges one person to leave intact and free some activity proper to another person" (p. 155), and this notion of 'what is proper to a person' is a fundamental key for understanding rights; having a right to things is intrinsically linked to their being proper to us as persons. An implication of this is that rights are always between persons, and heavily depend on the persons and their possible relationships with each other.

So much for rights in general. Given all of this it is possible to begin deriving specific rights. In doing so, Rosmini proposes four rules to keep us from confusing things that need to be kept clear:

(1) "To be certain that a right which has been made known to us exists in reality, we must first see whether it is complex. If it is, we must break it down and reduce it to simple rights. We must then demonstrated the existence of each of these" (p. 169).

(2) "The existence of a right is not rigorously demonstrated without the demonstration of the existence of each of its five constituents" (p. 170). These five constituents arise from the account of rights given above and are: (a) activity of a subject, (b) personhood, (c) goodness for the person, (d) lawfulness or moral licitness, (e) jural duty. On the basis of this rule we have to distinguish between rights and merely lawful activities.

(3) "If I have demonstrated that a moral duty to avoid impeding a given action does not exist in some human beings, I have not at the same time demonstrated that the action is not a true right relative to other human beign who have the moral duty to respect the action; I have simply demonstrated that the action is not a right reltive to those individuals alone in whom the duty does not exist" (p. 171). Some rights are indeed complete rights -- every other human being has a jural duty to respect them -- but others are more limited. That some rights are only rights relative to various groups of human beings does not make them any less rights.

(4) Rosmini recognizes that there are some kinds of things that are not rights but nonetheless sometimes must be treated as if they were for various practical reasons; he calls these presumed rights, and distinguishes them from true rights. Of these presumed rights he says, "Although I must consider certain things in others as if they were true rights, I could never consider the same things as rights in myself" (p. 172).

For instance, let's take the right to self-preservation, a widely recognized right. By rule (1), this is quite clearly going to have to be a complex right, and therefore will need to be broken down into simple rights, each of which needs its own account. By rule (2) we recognize that, whatever may be relevant to self-preservation as a good, the right has to be concerned with activities. These activities also, by the same rule, need to be morally licit -- there are many things you could do to preserve yourself that would violate all sorts of moral duties. Further, by the same rule again, it has to involve self-preservation in a way that is a good for the person whose life is preserved; this sense of 'good' is very broad, but it is not unlimited. Depending on the particular activities considered, we find by rule (3), that some of our simple rights involved in self-preservation may be rights relative to everyone, but others only relative to particular people for particular moral reasons. And by rule (4), we have to recognize that there are things that might be lumped in with self-preservation that, because of their close ties to the right, should generally be treated as if they were rights when dealing with others, but, as they are not rights, do not actually have any associated claim or entitlement to them -- we could not demand them for ourselves, for instance.

In order actually to derive specific rights, we need a general feature of activity that marks the kinds of activity that involve rights.  This general feature Rosmini calls proprietà. This is the feature that relates to 'what is proper to a person'. There is no easy English word for this. We could render into English as 'property', but in English that tends to have the implication of physical possession, which is awkward when we talk about, e.g., rights spouses have with respect to each other because each spouse is proper to the other. Denis Cleary and Terence Watson translate it as 'ownership'; that is also somewhat awkward, but it is more acceptable. We recognize that the wife has rights with respect to her own husband, precisely because he is her own husband. 'Belonging' might sometimes work, but is probably too broad. In any case, I will keep using proprietà. In the sense that is relevant here, it is inherently concerned with something that is individual and not merely common, although we will see that societies that have sufficient unity can be relevantly 'individual'. In the specific sense required for the right, the individual and what is proper to the individual cannot be equal; they could, of course, be equal for some other purpose, but to say you have a right with respect to something is to say that it is adjoined to you as a person, and therefore is adjunct to your own independent personhood. It is, in a sense, a jural part of you. 

Given the account so far, rights, and thus proprietà, always involve persons in some way. The jural freedom mentioned above, the governance people have with respect to what is their own, is therefore an attribute of proprietà, which "constitutes a sphere around the person in which the person is the centre" (p. 180), within which the person can do any lawful thing he pleases. This sphere of proprietà is where we find the title that is essential to rights. The law, in its most general form, is "Do no harm to persons by separating any part of themselves from themselves, that is, any part contained within the sphere of their [proprietà]" (p. 180), or perhaps more simply, "Respect that which belongs to others" (p. 193). Rosmini argues that this is a superior account of rights when compared with its major rival, the Kantian kind of theory that bases rights on the possibility of coexistence, which he thinks impoverished, in not covering enough, and only covering what it does in an abstract way.

With the principle for the derivation of rights in hand, proprietà, we can proceed actually to derive specific rights.

to be continued

****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume I: The Essence of Right, Denis Cleary and Terence Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1993).

Reading Well Is Reading and Reading

 Kitten has a Substack essay, College English majors can't read, discussing a study (from 2015) of reading comprehension among college-age English majors. One of the passages that was used was the opening of Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Students were to paraphrase it into more colloquial English, and often fumbled it very badly, despite being allowed to use reference materials like dictionaries. A common failure in paraphrasing passages like this was an inability to distinguish between literal and figurative language even when literal paraphrase made no logical sense; they also clearly interpret not by actually reading the passage as a passage but by picking out things they understand (or think they understand) and trying to string them together. But what I find more enlightening than the student responses are the occasional comments (both at Substack and at other places in social media discussing the article) trying to defend the students, because when I read them, I say, "Ah, this is why they have difficulty reading; too many people don't really understand reading itself."

You have the people who say that the language is archaic. This is a common refrain -- I have students who say similar things. It is obviously false in this case -- the passage does not use any words that are not still used today, although chimney-pots and blinkers for horses are more niche than they used to be. (Trying to pretend that words less common than they used to be have ceased to exist is also a common refrain. I once had a class try to argue that 'providence' and 'providential' were not words in modern English -- I was discussing the relation between the words 'prudence' and 'providence', which are variants of the same word.) There are specifically British terms, of course, but there is still a Lord Chancellor, and Lincoln's Inn still exists, and Holborn Hill has not vanished. Moreover, this is all irrelevant; the students had access to reference materials in which they could look up what these were. Megalosaurus is not as popular a dinosaur as it used to be, but is obviously a dinosaur. (And in fairness, most of the students in the study clearly recognized that it was a dinosaur; you can tell because at this point their paraphrases begin to break down as they struggle to make sense of this story about, as they think, a dinosaur waddling around London.)

Others argue that it's 'not grammatical in a modern sense'. In a sense this is true -- Bleak House opens with a scene-setting like you would find in a play, and thus the sentences are functioning like 'captions'. In the sense that these people mean, it was not 'grammatical' in Dickens's day, either. It is in fact simpler, more vivid, and more journalistic than a more rigidly grammatical opening would have been; it is easier to read, not more difficult. But in any case, the defense is also irrelevant. Fluent readers do not generally consult the grammar when they read. The reverse is the case -- 'grammar' is just our word for using language to describe the functional roles of words in interpretations by fluent readers and listeners when they read or hear the passages in which they are embedded.

Some people argue that in order to understand the passage you need familiarity with the British judiciary, or pre-evolutionary accounts of dinosaurs, or some such. No; these can enrich your reading of the passage, particularly in the context of the larger novel -- the combination of primeval swamps, muddy London in November, and the Court of Chancery is a true masterpiece of juxtaposition that ties into the themes and events of the novel in a way that no reader would see immediately. But this is how novel-reading works -- in reading the novel, you have to start the novel, and then you find that the rest of the novel sheds light on the start of the novel, and learning about broader contextual matters sheds even more. If you had to know all the things that can be known about a passage before you could understand, you would never be able to read novels at all. To read a novel, you read it, and you understand what it says, and as you proceed you understand more about the things you have already read, and if you actually study the novel, you get an even deeper understanding of the things you have read (often many times). Just to paraphrase the opening, you don't actually need anywhere near that much.

It's also worth noting that Dickens structures the passage so that we get most of the essential information more than once. If you don't know when end of Michaelmas term is (and not all of his original readers would have, at least for legal contexts), he tells us that it's November weather; if you don't know what November weather in London is like, he tells us that it is muddy, that it's as if recently flooded, that there are mires, that the horses are splashed, that the people are carrying umbrellas, that people are slipping and sliding as they walk, that it is muddy again. If you didn't catch that the sun is not shining in the chimney-pot sentence, or guess it from all the evidence of rain, he implies it again when he puts into question whether the day ever broke. Someone reading the passage for the first time might not realize just from this passage that the Lord Chancellor is actually going to be (albeit rather indirectly) important to the novel, but they should be able to figure out easily that it is around November in London, and it is rainy and muddy. The reader should be able to think -- perhaps even, if they have a visual imagination, to imagine clearly -- the scene through the words. That is what it is actually to read: to think of what is beyond the words on the page, through the words on the page. Just as you see from the menu that the restaurant serves chicken, you see from the passage that London is muddy, and everything else tells us how and when and in what way it is muddy: it's London-in-November muddy, dinosaur-swamp muddy, snowing-soot-from-blackly-smoky-chimneys muddy, dogs-can't-be-told-apart muddy, horses-splattered-up-to-their-eyes muddy, pedestrians-slipping-and-sliding muddy, growing-muddier-at-a-compound-rate muddy. The students in question, as noted above, are clearly trying to guess and infer a meaning for the passage based on fragmented parts; they are not thinking through and beyond the words themselves. They are trying to decipher a puzzle from a few selected clues; they are not dwelling in muddy London while the Lord Chancellor holds court.

One of the attempted defenses of the students that gets close to right is the argument that it's just a kind of language that they aren't used to. This is in some sense true; but what the defense fails to grasp is that this is just what it is not to read well, particularly given that we are not dealing with euphuistic poetry but with a passage, originally published in popular periodicals, from an influential novel by one of the most influential novelists of all time. But the problem is rendered more acute in that, to have difficulty grasping the point of the passage, you would have to not only be unfamiliar with Dickens in particular, but many, many other works. Fluent readers can pick up books in style and even dialect with which they are unfamiliar and begin to make sense of it, because they have read many things of many kinds. That's what makes you a fluent reader. They won't necessarily catch everything or get everything exactly right, but they will be already beginning to adapt. If you have difficulty reading anything, that is sometimes because it is badly written, but it is also quite often just because there is a large region of texts you don't read much. There is no shame in it, of course -- no one has read a lot of every sort of thing -- but if you've read enough, of enough different kinds, you can generally read difficult texts, particularly texts that are network-central like the novels of Dickens, just by reading them a few times.

The most annoying defenses are from those people who say that they don't think it matters whether the students can read and interpret a paragraph from Dickens or any other nineteenth-century author. One commenter I saw somewhere said that he bet the students could read and interpret what was written in the past hundred years. This is implausible in the extreme -- a student who cannot read the vividly journalistic Bleak House is not likely to be able to read James Joyce's very experimental Ulysses (published beginning in 1918, within the hundred-years limit from when the study took place), and for that matter cannot necessarily be assumed easily to follow the finer points of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The only way they would be able to read these books well is either reading a lot of that kind of work or reading a whole lot of things in general. That is, again, how you read well. If they read a lot of things in general, they would have no real difficulty with Bleak House, although they might have to read the passage a few times to get it. If they read a lot of difficult novels in English at all, from any time period, they are also not going to have all that much difficulty with Bleak House.  If they read a lot of different kinds of easier novels, they shouldn't have too much trouble, either, although, again, they might have to read it a few times and look up some words and phrases first. But, of course, the defense is again irrelevant; it doesn't matter what someone's arbitrary opinion is, because what's relevant here is what in fact college English majors need to be able to do, and being able to read influential novels in English is one of them. If a plumber without college education can't read Bleak House closely and well, that is perhaps a matter of 'no harm, no foul'. (Although it's not all that difficult to find plumbers without college educations who can.) If a college English major can't, that is an obvious problem. 

Reading well, again, is just a matter of familiarity with reading. There have been, and still are, people with only a minimum of education who can pick up a King James Bible, first published in 1611, and read it without any difficulty at all. How do they do that? They read it, and keep reading it. That's it. There are other things that you can do to tighten things up -- consult reference works, ask experts, listen to lectures, read with others, and the like. But these supplement actually reading. Some people do take to it more easily than others; I could read at what the Substack essay calls literacy level 4 in middle school, and one would not expect something like that in general. But in every case, someone who reads well, reads massively, although their reading may be narrower or broader. In my own case, reading was from early on my primary pasttime, and I would often read library books or books I particularly liked multiple times; I read lots of animal stories and science fiction and mythology and theology, from the adult as well as the children's sections of the library. If I found I liked an author, like Albert Payson Terhune in second grade, or a few years later Isaac Asimov or C. S. Lewis, I read whatever I could find by them, which is, why for instance, I had the original Foundation trilogy and Mere Christianity on my bookshelves in elementary school, having put them on my birthday wishlist -- although living in a small town, what could be found was not always extensive. I also read a lot of Boy's Life and Reader's Digest. And so it went in an expanding circle. This sort of thing, with different preferences and tastes and available materials, and at different ages, is just the sort of thing readers do. Reading is a habitus of thinking beyond the words on a page, through the words on a page; it is an acquired disposition you gain by doing, and only gain by doing, and the acquisition of it is ever-expanding and never-ending.

Reading well, then, is just reading and reading. The struggles of the college English majors in the study are signs that they have not actually read much, and have read less, in fact, than can be wished for people entering college and trying to get a degree in English. Some of them, no doubt, turned out to be late bloomers, catching up after a childhood of not reading extensively and becoming exceptional readers; this certainly does happen. Others almost certainly never finished their degree, and never read much afterward. Yet others perhaps struggled through and then never did much with it. Some may have become English teachers and yet are still unable to read English all that well, surviving by sticking to a limited treadmill and developing a knack for glibness of speech; this also certainly does happen, unfortunately. More of them likely discovered what they found most interesting and then stuck mostly with that, which is what most people do when it comes to reading, and is usually fine. From a snapshot of students at a time, you can never tell how things will end for them. But it is true that students are increasingly coming into college without much skill in reading, and, while this is sometimes because reading has been outcompeted by other things, and sometimes due to various minor disabilities, and sometimes because they haven't tried and perhaps will never be interested in trying, it is also sometimes because they have been shortchanged. The thing of it is, college is not well designed for people who don't have much skill in reading, whatever the reason for it.

The Mind and the World

 Recalling for the moment our generic distinction of acts and potencies in the understanding, sense appetite, and will, we see that in our understanding we have an external engagement with the world, in our sense appetite a give-and-take with the world, and an outreach into the world in our will. These three are intrinsically connected, for the inner give-and-take presupposes some engagement with the outside, and the deliberate intervention in the world presupposes a certain inner give-and-take.

[Edith Stein, Potency and Act, Redmond, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2009) p. 189.]

Greasy Like the Pan

Today is the feast of St. Bernardino of Siena, a fiery preacher of revival in Northern Italy who played a significant role in the moral theology of finance. From his sermons:

There are certain men who say: I go not to the preaching because I can remember naught. Hearken! Listen to this example which once befell, and which perhaps will be of use and will help you to remember. There was a holy father, who living as he did in a very humble little cell in a wood had with him one of his good little hermits, who could remember naught of that which he heard for his instruction, and for this reason he never went to hear preaching or aught else. And when he was telling to the holy father the reason because of which he went not to hear the preaching he said: I remember naught. Then said this holy father: Take this little pan, for he had a little pan in which to cook fish, and he said: Boil this water, and when the water is boiling he says: Fill a glass full with it and pour it into this little pan which is all greasy. The other did so. Go, pour it out without cleansing it. And he did so, and the father said: Look now, and see if it be as greasy as it was at first. He said that it was less greasy. The father said: Put some water in it once again, and pour it out. He did so. And this time also was it cleaner. And thus the father made him to do many times, and each time was it cleaner. And he said then to him: Thou sayest that thou dost remember naught. Knowest thou the reason of this? Because thou art fat-witted, and thus greasy like the pan. Go, and pour some water into thy mind, and thou wilt see that it will be cleansed. Pour in more and again it will become cleaner and the more often thou shalt hear the word of God, the more shall thy mind be cleansed and thou wilt be able to hear the word of God, until that thy mind shall be wholly cleansed and clarified.

Links of Note

 * Antoine C. Dussault, Two Notions of Ecological Function (PDF)

* Lawrence Nolan, Descartes' Ontological Argument, at the SEP

* Kitten, The unit of matrimony is not the chore

* Shelly Yiran Shi, Are Symmetry Principles Meta-laws? (PDF)

* James Chastek, A teleology of the Cartesian project, at "Just Thomism"

* David Bannon, What is a miracle, anyway?, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Alix Cohen, Kant on Beauty and Cognition (PDF)

* J. P. Andrew, Wagering on Value Realism, from "Reflections on What Matters"

* Victoria, Richard Wilbur's "John Chrysostom", at "Horace & friends"

* Ayumu Tamura, The Role of Experience in Descartes' Metaphysics: Analyzing the Difference Between Intuitus, Intelligentia, and Experientia (PDF)

* Gilbert Plumer, Argumentative Painting (PDF)

* Fanatic Thomist, Actus Non Limitatur Nisi Potentiam: A Defense of Thomistic Doctrine

* Omne Bonum, Moral Platonism

* Dan Ackerfield, Essay Club: On Fairy-Stories by J. R. R. Tolkien, at "Mind & Mythos"

* Carlotta Pavese, The Epistemology of Skills (PDF)

* Deacon Tom, The 'Lost Sayings' of Jesus, at "Weird Catholic"

* Joel J. Miller, The Quiet Collapse of Reading -- and the Only Real Solution, at "Miller's Book Review"

* Brian Epstein, Social Ontology (PDF)

And Plants an Evergreen which Fears It Not

 To Patience
A Sonnet
by Mary Young Sewell 

Oh heav'nly patience!-- softest nurse of woe!
Whose gentle hand can smoothe the couch of pain,
Where shall we find thee in this scene below
 Where watchful science seeks thy haunts in vain?
Not on Parnassian height, where dwells the muse
And fancy bathes in heliconian dews
 Nor yet where enterprize, with quiv'ring ray,
 O'er the wild heath directs his midnight way!--
Nor yet where proud philosophy explores
 The mystic page with vain tho' fervent care
 Nor yet where bold ambition madly soars
 To grasp a crown, tho thorns are twisted there;
No, gentle patience!-- In the lowly vale
Humility has trimm'd thy peaceful cot
Where christian hope endures the wint'ry gale,
And plants an evergreen which fears it not.