Music on My Mind

Clamavi De Profundis, "When the Hammer Falls"

Evening Note for Sunday, June 2

Thought for the Evening: Titles of Opinion

We live in an opinion nation. But as I tell my students, your opinion on its own is useless; since any idiot can come up with an opinion on anything, if you have an opinion, all that means is that you are not more stupid than the most stupid person. Ideally, of course, we would all have good reasons for all of our opinions -- reasons, as I tell them, unlike opinions, are valuable to other people -- but in practice, this is unattainable. Practical necessity, if nothing else, will lead us to have opinions for only limited reasons, or for nothing that can serve as a reason for the content of the opinion at all, as when people pick up opinions under the force of peer pressure. It's worth asking, then, what the legitimate answers are to the question, "Why do you hold that opinion?" What answers can be given and still be reasonable answers to this question?

There are probably many different ways to approach this, but if we take as an analogy, even if only a loose one, possession of other things (physical objects, incorporeal hereditaments), four kinds of answers, loosely resembling four titles of possession, stand out as providing you reasonable answers.

(1) possessive title: I hold this opinion for such-and-such reasons that lead to it as a rational (even if defeasible) conclusion. Obviously, specific relevant reasons are the primary titles by which one can say that you have some kind of right to have a particular opinion. If reasons do not give title to opinions, nothing does.

(2) successive title: I hold this opinion because I have received it from someone who, at least as far as my reasons suggest, had some kind of possessive title to it. We cannot practically get by without depending on the testimony of others; that means some of the opinions we have, we have only because other people have them, not because we ourselves have any direct reasons for them.

(3) accessive title: I hold this opinion because it is accommodated well by my other opinions, for at least some of which I have some kind of non-accessive title. As I've noted before, there is a kind of doxastic synousia, a hanging-together of things like beliefs, suppositions, and opinions, that does not seem to be strictly reducible to reason-relations; one belief can accommodate another without necessarily being any genuine reason for it. For instance, peoples' opinions about the universe are sometimes clearly influenced by their politics; people with very democratic views of politics are often uncomfortable with very hierarchical views of the universe. It's not that your political views provide any reason for thinking the universe itself works a certain way; it's just that your habits of political thought make some other kinds of structural thinking about the world easier. There are many subtler kinds of cases. One of the reasons we have opinions is that they fit the way we already think.

(4) prescriptive title: I hold this opinion because, however I got it to begin with, I have held it a long time without finding reason to reject it. People sometimes don't want to admit something like this title, but in fact many of our strongest opinions are likely to be opinions that are too fundamental for relatively weak titles like (2) and (3), but for which we can't pin down any definite possessive title, because we've held it so long, and though we might be able to make up an argument for it on the spot, that's precisely what we'd be doing -- not giving our reason for why we hold it but making up a reason out of thin air for why someone could hold it.

Perhaps there are others, but as they get progressively weaker as we move from (1) to (4), if you have an opinion without one of these titles, the chances that you are unreasonable in holding it seem very high. And we could probably say, in some sense, that you have no right to hold it, that you have no right to have that opinion. From the other side, it's important to grasp that all of this is about reasonableness -- the point is that all of these are reasonable answers to the question, "Why do you have that opinion?" None of these titles mean that your opinion is right, nor do any of them even imply that your opinion is one that can be rationally defended as superior to other opinions. They just are the kinds of answers a reasonable person might honestly give to the question; they are answers that rule out the possibility that you just made up the opinion just to have one, or that you are really trolling, or anything else like that.

This approach to opinions is opposed to a number of other approaches you could find.

(i) The above approach assumes you have to have a 'right' (in some sense) to a particular opinion. You could deny this, and simply say that you can have whatever opinion you have, whatever the explanation for your having it might be. You do find people saying things like this, but I think nobody consistently holds it when you press them.

(ii) You could have an approach that restricts the number of titles. For instance, there is certainly a view, we can call it evidentialism (although perhaps not all forms of evidentialism in epistemology strictly require it), that the only legitimate titles for an opinion are (1) and (2), or even (1) and a restricted form of (2). You do find people stating this view. What you don't find, I think, are people actually living in a manner consistent with it. It doesn't really give us an account of being reasonable about opinion-holding, because it holds a standard people cannot live up to, and therefore is making an unreasonable demand.

(iii) Perhaps you could deny that possessive title is the fundamental title. I don't know any widely respected view that doesn't take theoretical or practical reasons to be the most basic kind of justification for having an opinion, but people do sometimes do strange things that minimize the value of possessive title. Take Bulverism, for instance: this is when people deny that an opinion with possessive title, i.e., backed by at least some o kind of reasons, can be reasonably held because some feature of the person nullifies that title. So, for instance, in the famous sexist remark: 'You only say that because you are a woman'. This is generally considered an illegitimate line of reasoning because (a) it is always or virtually always question-begging and (b) it attempts to bypass all reasons whatsoever, or else to sort out reasons that will be accepted and reasons that won't according to something that has nothing to do with the reasons themselves.

Various Links of Interest

* Gregory Stackpole looks at Isidore of Seville on Secular Rule and Rulers

* Deborah Savage, Adam's Gift: Man in the Order of Creation

* Alexander Zubatov, The Case for Confucianism in America: How an Ancient Chinese Philosophical Tradition Could Save Our Fraying Democracy

* Sabine Hossenfelder summarizes the basics of black holes

* Astrid Lindgren, Pomperipossa in Monismania, a fairy tale about the evil of excessive taxation. Lindgren is most famous for the Pippi Longstocking books; she wrote this little story as a protest over the fact that, under Swedish law at the time, she was being taxed at a marginal tax rate of 102%, because the law required self-employed individuals to pay taxes both as individuals and as employers. The story struck a chord, and started a huge debate about the goals of taxation; it is often credited with being one reason why the Swedish Social Democrats lost the 1976 election.

* Geri Walton, Voltaire's Coffee Obessions in the 18th Century

* The Optimizer's Curse and Wrong-Way Reductions notes some problems for common forms of Effective Altruism.

* John McCoy and Tomer Ullman, Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics. If you give people a list of fantastic things (conjure something out of thin air, make it cease to exist, make it levitate, make it invisible), which do they think would be hardest to accomplish?

* I don't generally like Cass Sunstein's work, but I do like his suggestion for a word that means "what happens when a group of people, outraged by some real or imagined transgression, responds in a way that is disproportionate to the occasion, thus ruining the transgressor’s day, month, year or life": lapidation.

* St. Ambrose and Baptism of Desire

* Singing Homer's Odyssey

* Lisa Song on the problems with carbon credits

Currently Reading

Fanny Burney, Evelina
David Papineau, Philosophical Devices
E. M. Dadlez, ed., Jane Austen's Emma: Philosophical Perspectives
Michael Pakaluk, The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark

How a Two-Year-Old Solves the Trolley Problem

Newman on Opinion Journalism

Most men in this country like opinions to be brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for them. They like to be waited on, they like to be consulted, for they like to be their own centre. As great men have their slaves or their body-servants for every need of the day, so, in an age like this, when every one reads and has a voice in public matters, it is indispensable that they should have persons to provide them with their ideas, the clothing of their mind, and that of the best fashion. Hence the extreme influence of periodical publications at this day, quarterly, monthly, or daily; these teach the multitude of men what to think and what to say. And thus is it that, in this age, every one is, intellectually, a sort of absolute king, though his realm is confined to himself or to his family; for at least he can think and say, though he cannot do, what he will, and that with no trouble at all, because he has plenty of intellectual servants to wait on him. Is it to be supposed that a man is to take the trouble of finding out truth himself, when he can pay for it? So his only object is to have cheap knowledge; that he may have his views of revelation, and dogma, and policy, and conduct,—in short, of right and wrong,—ready to hand, as he has his table-cloth laid for his breakfast, and the materials provided for the meal.

Bl. John Henry Newman, "Christ Upon the Waters--Part 2", Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.

Iustinus Martyr

Today is the feast of St. Justin Martyr, who is in a sense the patron saint of this weblog, which I first decided to get on St. Justin's Day, years ago. A re-post from 2010, lightly revised:

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Around about 90 BC Antiochus of Ascalon reacted against the skepticisms of the New Academy by founding what came to be called the Old Academy. The name 'Old Academy' and the peculiarity of its being newer than we call the New Academy is quite deliberate; Antiochus regarded it as intolerable that the School of Plato was so very un-Platonic, and thus advocated a return to Plato. Such reform movements are never merely reactionary; rediscovery in response to opposition to one's project is inevitably innovative. The new movement drew from Peripatetic and Stoic sources in order to defend itself, attack Academic skepticism, and form connections to the philosophical positions of other schools. Like any reform movement, it simultaneously identified itself with a past purity -- the original Academy of Plato and his first three successors -- and used this as a framework for developing new solutions to more contemporary problems. The resulting project was Platonic and Peripatetic and Stoic, which while eclectic is less eclectic than it is usually made to sound, because returning to the root made it possible to find genuine commonalities. The Peripatetics were an early offshoot of the Academy, through Aristotle; and many of the ideas we associate with Stoicism first found their basic form in the successors of Plato.

We don't have much on Antiochus, although what we do have suggests that he was better at articulating a vision than developing it. But the challenge was taken up by many others over the next several centuries, the most important of whom were Eudorus of Alexandria, Plutarch of Chaeronea (the best known of the three), and Philo of Alexandria. The third of these is especially intriguing and important, for Philo was a Jew (hence the other name he is known by, Philo Judaeus). Philo's integration of Jewish belief and Middle Platonism would set the stage for centuries to come. For Christianity partly grew up in the crucible of Middle Platonism, of the Philonic type, although in many cases it would not have been Philo himself so much as his general context and perhaps other Middle Platonists about whom we know less.

There are parts of Paul's letters and the Epistle to the Hebrews in which one might see such influence, but the influence is most marked in the Gospel of John (and it is notable that Hellenistic Jews come up explicitly a couple of times in the book, e.g., 7:35, 12:20ff). One of the most important means Philo had used to integrate Jewish and Greek thought was his developed account of the Logos. Logos, reason or word, was a common term in Greek philosophy, and was associated with the divine; it also occurs quite often in the Septuagint to refer to God's word. On Philo's account the Logos is a power in God; it is the divine Mind containing the Platonic Ideas and is active and effective as God's Word:

[I]n the one living and true God there were two supreme and primary powers, Goodness [or Creative Power] and Authority [or Regent Power]; and that by his Goodness he had created every thing; and that by his Authority he governed all that he had created; and that the third thing which was between the two, and had the effect of bringing them together was the Logos, for it was owing to the Logos that God was both a ruler and good.(Cher 1.27-28, qtd here)

It's the general Philonic idea of divine Logos that is in the background of the opening words of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Logos
and the Logos was with God
and the Logos was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
Through him all things were made;
without him nothing was made that has been made.
In him was life,
and that life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness,
but the darkness does not comprehend it.

And, he continues, the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. Thus Christianity from its early days built on the vocabulary, or, rather, vocabularies, of Middle Platonism.

It is then unsurprising that many Middle Platonists found Christianity to have its attractions, and this brings us to the saint whose feast-day it is, Justin the Martyr. Justin was born to a pagan Greek family in Samaria (as he calls himself, he was "Justin, the son of Priscos, son of Baccheios, of Flavia Neapolis, in Palestinian Syria") in the early second century. He became a philosopher of Middle Platonist stamp, drawing now from Stoicism, now from Pythagoreanism, now from Aristotelianism, eventually making his way to Ephesus. He converted at some point to Christianity, in part, it seems, because he found them to be less morally objectionable than people in other schools of philosophy (particularly in terms of their courage and charity to others); and much of the argument in his works is that philosophy, especially as conceived by Socrates and Plato, finds its natural culmination in Christianity. Both philosophy and Christianity share in their love of Logos, but Christians hold that Logos so reciprocated as to become man. Justin explicitly mentions Socrates as a proto-Christian in his argument that it is unjust for the Empire to persecute Christians:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Logos of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without Logos, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived according to Logos.

We don't know the full details of how it is that Justin became a martyr; certainly he was never hesitant to insist in public that Christians were right, although he is largely quite irenic when it came to pagans. There is some indication that in his wandering about first Ephesus and then Rome engaging in philosophical arguments he may have made enemies; he explicitly says at one point that he expected it to happen, and even named one Crescens, a Cynic philosopher, as a likely person to cause problems for him. Thus Crescens perhaps did get to him, or someone like Crescens, although we don't really know for sure. We do know that he was tried with six others in a standard trial under the prefect Rusticus during the persecutions under Marcus Aurelius and was put to death. It is perhaps an irony that the parataxis, the obstinacy, that the philosopher Marcus Aurelius loathed in Christians, the philosopher Justin exalted as showing the paradoxical summit of a good life, a life that put truth before life. The emperor probably never knew the teacher, but for different reasons they would both have considered Justin's death appropriate to his views.

Justin lived in the evening of Middle Platonism. In the very next century people like Plotinus would begin to push for major systemization, and the Neoplatonic phase of philosophy would begin. Much of Middle Platonism would survive, but the doctrines became less eclectic, more systematically integrated, at times reinterpreted; philosophical criticism of other positions became more developed and thorough; and the questions about the relation between philosophy and religion became more complicated than they were in the days of Justin and Clement of Alexandria and others of their kind who took Christianity to be divine philosophy. But the role of Middle Platonism in early Christian life, as witnessed by people like Justin, would have significant consequences for centuries to come.

Dashed Off XI

the political principles 'no punitive procedure without fair evidentiary procedure' & 'no punitive procedure without procedure for recourse/appeal' & 'no punitive procedure without procedure for self-defense (broadly construed)'

In politics as in chemistry, the dose makes the poison.

As a principle is increasingly seen as necessary, it is increasingly seen as normative, for both theoretical and practical reason.

Sometimes factional politics seems an endless story of people not learning that he who digs a pit falls into it.

"He who reads much and also understands is filled; he who has been filled sheds water upon others." Ambrose, Ep. 15 to Constantius

Scientific inquiry must deal with idealizations because it materially draws principles form particular circumstances of observation and experiment, but teleologically seeks for these principles to be illuminating outside those circumstances. Thus one draws from the motion of a body in the gravitational field of earth an account of how it moves that one wishes to apply to all the motions of heaven and earth, if possible, and as widely as possible if it is not universal; it must be stripped of its local conditions and made into an ideal type, the point particle with mass-information without any particular obstruction or impediment; all situations may then be related to this type, taking the precautions of use required by the local circumstances. (The latter is actually important -- physicists do not generally deal with idealizations as such but with idealizations used with qualifications derived from the evidence of the situation's particular quirks.)

All mediate action must be explained in terms of immediate action.

The one thing we seem to know to give us excellent educational results, in every context, is the student's sense of the value of initiative in learning, active docilitas. We know things that stifle or impede it, we know things that work better once it is had; but we have no method for cultivating it if it is lost or if it is never developed.

People often conflate 'sense of humor' with 'good humor'.

Specific freedoms are traditional privileges.

NB Euler's argument for divine revelation, Letter XVIII to a German Princess
Euler's mechanical definition of a miracle Letter XXXVII

"The words of a language express general notions; and you will rarely find one which marks only a single individual." Euler, Letter CI

"Virtue is the only means of rendering a spirit happy; to bestow felicity on a vicious spirit is beyond the power of God himself." Euler, CXI
"Real happiness is to be found only in God himself; all other delights are but an empty shade, and are capable of yielding only a momentary satisfaction." CXIII
"The holy life of the apostles, and of the other primitive Christians, appears to me an irresistible proof of the truth of the Christian religion." CXIV

"If thou reachest after and seekest nothing but the will of God and the benefit of thy neighbour, thou wilt entirely enjoy inward liberty." Imitatio Christi 2.4

sharp (focused) wonder vs. muddled (vague) wonder

When we attend a ritual, the ritual is the primary thing, and the feelings it evokes a coloring of it.

Note Newman's analogy between Church and Army in the English constitution. This seems confirmed by the parallel vestigiation of both.

"A scientific concept is the more fruitful the more it can be brought into connection with other concepts on the basis of observed facts; in other words, the more it can be used for the formulation of laws." Carnap

Part of the charm of Much Ado About Nothing is that it does well in showing the clever outsmarting themselves -- Benedick and Beatrice talk themselves into love, and John's scheme turns on itself through its own cunning. The foolish things of the world confound the wise.

Translations are not bare translations but always for a purpose.

The Church has the right to:
(1) evangelize (divine commission)
(2) constitute itself through the sacraments (divine commission)
(3) worship the Lord and regulate such worship (priestly authority)
(4) own property, exercise political presence, and exercise patronage consistent with its mission (royal authority)
(5) speak freely as the people of God (prophetic authority)
(6) be in itself independent of the state and have the cooperation of the state in this where it is appropriate (social end)

"Gracefulness consists especially in the excellence of the sensible, as the sublime lies in the excellence of the intelligible." Louis of Poissy (adapted by the Christian Brothers)

the union of the graceful and the sublime as a symbol of the Incarnation

matrimony as pre-eminently the graceful-sublime sacrament

If the Church is to build churches, it must be a patron of crafts; if it is to print Bibles, it must be a patron of printers; if it is to translate the Bible, it must be a patron of translators; if it is to study the Bible, it must be a patron of scholarship; if it is to aid the poor in an organized way, it must be a patron of charities.

"The aesthetic experience of love is expressed in that 'gaze' which contemplates other persons as ends in themselves." Francis, Amoris Laetitia

iconodoulia & the aesthetic experience of love

An ethical system is inadequate unless it is coherent, rooted in personal nature, ennobling, and vast of scope.

"Granted the presence of an all-beneficient providence over things, we can trust in it for assurance that the material error in which we necessarily fall without our intervention is one of the many accidents directed by the all-wise and all-powerful goodness governing all things." Rosmini
"Persons who do not admit a supreme guide cannot reasonably believe they will avoid errors, nor that someone will free them from the harm arising from errors."

the problem of doctrinal positivists who do not recognize customary doctrine

The tendency of civil terror is to bloody revolution or to government terror.

A possibility with regard to the kinds of union: the Church patient lays in the passive/'material' aspect of beatitude, the dispositive aspect, and the Church Triumphant adds the active/'formal' aspect, the perfective. Thus Purgatory is a sort of dispositive beatitude, a beatitude in preparation, and the Beatific Vision perfective beatitude or beatitude proper.

Hume tends to talk as if what was external, continuing, and independent were primarily the sensible content; but Shepherd is surely right that it is primarily efficacy. And Hume's agnosticism about the causes of impression eliminates sensible content as well as efficacy from any certainty on this matter.
-- Does this cause a problem for Hume's account of constancy, which is certainly content-focused?

the combinatorics of possible philosophical positions + causal-epistemic account of development of philosophical positions (constraints & contributions) + analysis of structural and functional analogies = abstract history of philosophy

Toulmin's model as the model of a philosophical position

abstract HoP as higher-order metaphysics
concrete HoP: historical -> classificatory -> nomological/counterfactual
HoP = abstract + concrete + metaHoP

etiological, nomological, and teleological aspects of HoP

"All evidence may be referred to four titles, Consciousness, Perception, Testimony, and Inference." Ferguson

Ferguson's response to the problem of evil is interesting: perceiving physical evil is just part of being active in the physical world, and perceiving moral evil is just part of being progressive in the moral world.

We tend to think of moral progress as linear, but it is expansive and multidimensional.

"The means of acquiring any right may be referred to four principal heads: Occupancy, Labor, Convention, and Forfeiture." Ferguson
"The safety of the people consists in the secure employment of their rights."

The apostles are unique not merely in the sense of being most proximate to the original revelation, but in the sense of being commissioned by Christ as part of the original revelation.

the three primary magisterial acts of the Church: definition, organic transmission, counsel

Note that violation of the original contract was explicitly the theoretical justification for the Glorious Revolution.

sources of normal divergences between stories with shared root
(1) attribution shift
(2) narrative extrapolation
(3) teleological reordering
(4) simplifying paraphrase
(5) simplifying reduction
(6) narrative melding
(7) divergence of understanding

a very crude taxonomy of science funding
(1) open
---- (a) for prestige of discovery: patronage
---- (b) for interest of solution: subscription
(2) centralized
---- (a) for social/political end: subsidy
---- (b) for directed profit: investment

'felt value' as presential awareness of inclination to something as good

Ages of fraud follow ages of violence, and violence fraud; throughout history, humankind wars against the Truth and the Life by which we are in the image of God.

Animals live; but to be human is to have a life that in some way proceeds from understanding.

artistry vs artisticism
science vs scientisticism
romanticism vs romanticisticism
poetry vs poeticism
religion vs religionism

"people are shy of granting what an opponent's case really requires." Aristotle Top VIII.1
"do not be insistent, even though you really require the point, for insistence always arouses the more opposition"
"a learner should always state what he thinks"
"some people bring objections of a kind which would take longer to answer than the length of the discussion at hand."

four kinds of objection (Aristotle)
A. solution finding
---- 1. demolishing premise
B. obstacle creating
---- 2. objecting to the questioner
---- 3. objecting to the question
---- 4. protesting time

Interpretation of a major thinker begins with details and coalesces them into a unity only by gradual steps, which is why interpretations by competent interpreters can differ in significant ways.

Note that Simplicius indicates that Aristotle's Categories were sometimes titled, 'Introduction to the Topics', among other titles used for the work.

The aporetic method works precisely because perplexity is due to lack of resources.

Agriculture is the conversion of otherwise wasted energy into food.

If something comes to be, there must be something that is coming to be and something from which it is coming to be.

idealism of inference (the position that one can only infer to and from propositions)

The intellectuals of a small enclave are not radically different from those of a big population, but with lots of small enclaves, one will occasionally by statistics have an extraordinary excellence, the right people connecting in the right numbers in the right ways.

The exchangeability of money is one reason why it can virtually never be on its own a reason for denying otherwise reasonable care: there are almost always less important things from which the money could be taken, so it is only when this is genuinely impossible that mere cost could be a reason. This contrasts with (e.g.) actual medical supplies tha tneed to be extended as far as possible, thus sometimes creating a rationing situation.

Sometimes we need to see a truth stated to see how obvious it is.

- the possibility of an Epicurean objection to Benthamism
- in general, Epicurus does in fact seem to be superior to Bentham on the subject of pleasure

Standing armies get their attractions from their usefulness for (1) garrison, (2) frontier work, and (3) expedition. They run the risk of (1) alienation from what is to be defended, (2) excessive expense, and (3) numbers inadequate for defense.

The force with which the people are entrusted is a measure of the actual value they have in a political system.

alienation as a problem of involuntary exchange with an other not interested in common good or mutual benefit

the worker as an end in himself

(((production + possession -> distribution) + communication of needs) -> exchange -> money) + regulation -> circulation -> market -> economy

Freedom in America is not a good intention but an interlocking set of freedom-systems, many inherited from England, some homegrown: sheriff system, jury system, militia system, electoral system, etc.

The miracle argument for scientific realism would also be an argument for axiological realism with respect to values of scientific inquiry.

"The most equitable laws on paper are consistent with the utmost despotism in administration." Ferguson

Liberal institutions tend to treat themselves as universal rather than as the subsidiary supports they are.

the epistemologically fundamental character of the familiar

catechesis as perambulation (beating the bounds)

Voyages Extraordinaires #48: Le Village aérien

"And the American Congo," asked Max Huber, "is that out of the question?"

"To what end, my dear Max?" replied John Cort. "Do we lack vast spaces in the United States? What of the new and empty regions between Alaska and Texas? Before colonizing abroad, it is better to colonize at home, I think...."

"Ah, my dear John, the European nations will eventually divide Africa, if things continue -- an area of three billion hectares! Will the Americans leave them all to the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Belgians?..."

"The Americans will have nothing to do with it, any more than the Russians," said John Cort, "and for the same reason...."

"Which is?"

"It is pointless to tire your legs when you only have to extend your arms."

[My translation.]

Le Village aérien, known in English under the title, The Village in the Treetops, is Verne's Dark Continent tale, and I was surprised at how well it held up as a story. Obviously the science in this science fiction is the kind of evolutionary anthropology you would expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the book was published in 1901), but Verne is clearly skeptical of a lot of features of it, so while he accepts the essential features for narrative purposes, he also at several points in the narrative raises questions about how it should be interpreted even if true. In the Fitzroy edition, I. O. Evans says that Verne takes the opposition between the 'Missing Link' idea that there is no sharp line between man and animal and the view, found in Verne's own Catholic background, that there is a sharp difference between the two, and he gives a "somewhat inconclusive suggestion of the manner in which the problem might be solved", and I think this is right. Verne is more interested in the questions raised, I think, than this or that particular account of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, and he's not interested in coming up with a definitive answer to them so much as he is with highlighting the significance that they can be raised.

Max Huber, a Frenchman, and John Cort, an American, are residents of Libreville, where their families own a factory. They are taking an expedition into the relatively unexplored regions of the Ubangi river in Central Africa. With them are Llanga, a native orphan whom they have essentially adopted, and Khamis, an African of Arab descent. They also have a number of native porters, but the porters abandon them after an unfortunate run-in with a herd of raging elephants, and they are forced to make some hard choices about the best way to reach the nearest missionary outpost. As they follow the river, a number of mysteries start piling up -- they occasionally hear what seems to be a voice crying out a Congolese word, Ngora, meaning 'mother' (according to Verne), and it eventually becomes clear that there are traces of a previous expedition that disappeared, that of Dr. Johausen. Dr. Johausen had had the theory that the higher simians were already capable of language, and had taken an expedition into the jungle in order to prove it, but had never returned. And they will eventually come across a tribe of creatures, not quite human but more advanced than apes, living in a treetop village.

It's nicely constructed, storywise, but not very complicated; a short adventure there and back. It's not as exciting a story as Burroughs would later write, nor as rich a story as Haggard had written earlier, but as a rough early foray into the same genre, it works fairly well.