James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer

Introduction

Opening Passage:

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we account for the venerable air that is already gathering around American annals. When the mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial history, the period seems remote and obscure, the thousand changes that thicken along the links of recollections, throwing back the origin of the nation to a day so distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of ordinary duration would suffice to transmit, from mouth to mouth, in the form of tradition, all that civilized man has achieved within the limits of the republic. Although New York alone possesses a population materially exceeding that of either of the four smallest kingdoms of Europe, or materially exceeding that of the entire Swiss Confederation, it is little more than two centuries since the Dutch commenced their settlement, rescuing the region from the savage state. Thus, what seems venerable by an accumulation of changes is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it solely in connection with time.

Summary: The shadow cast by the past looms over practically the whole of The Deerslayer, despite the fact that much of the story is told in a vivid and present detail. We ourselves are made by the narrator to look back at the story as a distant thing, half-obscured by forgetfulness and legend; this is the very first thing the narrator does in the book, and the very last, and repeatedly through the story we are reminded that the narrator is conveying a story that has long since happened. All of the major characters in the story have a past, too, and are bound by that past, which is their gift and their limitation; except possibly for Hetty, whose simplicity intimates eternity, no character breaks free of the boundaries set by a past established long before. This is an interesting feature of the book, given that the plot itself requires none of this entanglement of past and present. The plot is all about the immediacy of friendship and youthful adventure, and the mix of the two gives the book a somewhat melancholy and nostalgic tone, perpetually suggesting might-have-beens that in reality could never be.

The story opens in the early 1740s on Otsego Lake in New York. Natty Bumppo, a.k.a. Deerslayer, is travelling with Harry March, a.k.a. Hurry Harry, who is serving as a sort of guide. Deerslayer is bound to meet his Indian friend Chingachgook, the Great Serpent of the Mohicans; the two young men will be on their first warpath together. The mission is quite important: Chingachgook's bride-to-be, Wah-ta-Wah, a.k.a. Hist, has been kidnapped by a group of Hurons who have come out of French Canada to collect white scalps. As it happens Hurry Harry is himself bound to meet up with Thomas Hutter, a man with a mysterious past, precisely to take Huron scalps. We are not quite to the French and Indian War, but things are beginning to heat up as the British and the French each pay for blood. Thomas Hutter turns out to live in a castle of logs in the middle of the lake, and to travel around in a sort of houseboat called the 'ark'; a very striking setting. He also has two daughters, Judith and Hetty. Beyond that the story ends up being somewhat less than straightforward as each side tries to outmaneuver the other. The chase scenes in particular are quite good, and, interestingly, I think Cooper's leisurely style contributes to this. Cooper's books are notorious for being slow-moving when nothing is happening; but precisely this makes it possible for him to pack every adventure and chase scene with an extraordinary amount of action and detail, without any shift of style. It is not the solution to the problem of action that most people would take today, but it deserves a bit more respect than it usually gets. Cooper can do things with chase scenes that almost no one else ever manages, precisely because of his quirks.

Cooper also often takes a lot of flak for his women, and one can hardly get through a chapter here without some comment about feminine sentiment or the feelings of the more gentle sex, but the female characters themselves are done very well. Almost half of the major characters are women; they each are noticeably different personalities but are each in their own way unflinching in the face of danger. Wah-ta-Wah, the Delaware girl, is quite impressive. She is the original damsel in distress, and is quiet and reserved, but she easily has the most astute mind in the book; her quick thinking saves people several times. Judith and Hetty are as brave as their Biblical namesakes. For a brief moment they all shine. Every character, in fact, is interesting in his or her own right, and, despite their many faults, one ends up sympathizing with most of them, even the Hurons, who, however cruel, have their own kind of honor. They all shine.

And then they are gone. We know something of the fate of some of the characters -- Hetty here and Chingachgook, Natty Bumppo, and Wah-ta-Wah from the other books in the series. Much of it is harsh. Of Judith's final fate we never learn, and as the narrator coolly reminds us, no matter how curious we are, in the end it is none of our business nor anyone else's. All that remains is the story.

Favorite Passage: In this passage, Judith and Hetty are trying to escape from the Hurons by canoe.

As yet the Indians had not been able to get nearer to the girls than two hundred yards, though they were what seamen would term "in their wake"; or in a direct line behind them, passing over the same track of water. This made the pursuit what is technically called a "stern chase", which is proverbially a "long chase": the meaning of which is that, in consequence of the relative positions of the parties, no change becomes apparent except that which is a direct gain in the nearest possible approach. "Long" as this species of chase is admitted to be, however, Judith was enabled to perceive that the Hurons were sensibly drawing nearer and nearer, before she had gained the centre of the lake. She was not a girl to despair, but there was an instant when she thought of yielding, with the wish of being carried to the camp where she knew the Deerslayer to be a captive; but the considerations connected with the means she hoped to be able to employ in order to procure his release immediately interposed, in order to stimulate her to renewed exertions. Had there been any one there to note the progress of the two canoes, he would have seen that of Judith flying swiftly away from its pursuers, as the girl gave it freshly impelled speed, while her mind was thus dwelling on her own ardent and generous schemes. So material, indeed, was the difference in the rate of going between the two canoes for the next five minutes, that the Hurons began to be convinced all their powers must be exerted or they would suffer the disgrace of being baffled by women. Making a furious effort under the mortification of such a conviction, one of the strongest of their party broke his paddle at the very moment when he had taken it from the hand of a comrade to relieve him. This at once decided the matter, a canoe containing three men and having but one paddle being utterly unable to overtake fugitives like the daughters of Thomas Hutter.

Recommendation: It's not a book for swift reading, and it builds slowly, but it becomes more and more interesting as it goes. Highly recommended.

Poem a Day XXIX

Crown

The golden crown upon my head I give,
or would if golden crown I had to give,
and with it all the life I have to live,
if life were something such as I could give;
for when and where you dwell true love shall live,
and there I too must wish to love and live,
and though it cost me dear, I dearly love
to love your life and give to you my love.

Some Thoughts Toward a Philosophy Video Game III

(10) Continued. Philosophical movements and schools do not exist in a void. One cannot fully understand the influence of Stoicism in the Roman Imperial period without some notion of the interaction between Stoic ideas and the ideas of governance carried forward by the senatorial families; it is this interaction that gives us Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and, later, and with much influence from elsewhere, Boethius. Likewise, Thomism in Europe and the Americas has benefitted from its association with the Catholic Church, and Sadrianism still plays a role in the thought of Iran due to the relation of Sadrianism to Persian forms of Islam. And, thirdly, philosophical movements are not all in direct opposition all the time. Hellenistic philosophy in practice occasionally divided into three schools and one, with the Epicureans being the odd school out; for all their differences, the other major philosophical schools tended to agree that the Epicureans were perversely wrong, and union against a common foe is a great, even though limited, uniter. Some philosophical movements get along relatively well with each other, because they share major things in common; some do not and cannot, because their differences are too great.

(11) In order to simulate the interaction of different philosophical movements in a toy-model environment like a video game, we already have Debates, but not all relations between different philosophical movements are antagonistic. Further, not all real philosophical debates are binary; sometimes philosophically distinguishable groups join forces. So I would suggest that philosophical movements that share traits -- an AIRT and an AIRG, for instance -- can, if they share doctrines and have no bad blood, ally, either in a sort of informal nonaggression pact -- they will only skim philosophers off each other passively, through the ordinary operation of influence, not actively by Debates and Critical Texts -- or by uniting together for Debates against philosophical movements that share fewer traits with each and lack Doctrines in common with them. This is somewhat artificial, but in the long run I think it gives a better sense of the way in which philosophical movements interact -- it's not all disagreement, but sometimes a rather complicated interaction of different agreements and disagreements.

Philosophical movements, however, are as human as anything else, and bad blood is possible -- whatever their agreements people in two philosophical movements may not like each other very much. Thus refusal to ally and even dogged attack due more to history than immediate circumstances should be part of any sandbox version of how the history of philosophy works. Habits of opposition endure; old oppositions are remembered. Opposition between Thomists and Scotists is still often on auto-pilot after all these centuries, despite the fact that the commonalities between the two, in comparison with other philosophical movements they interact with, make them natural allies in everything beyond some relatively technical details. Some things that could create bad blood between otherwise similar philosophical movements within the context of the video game: extensive use of Debates and Critical Texts against each other, above some critical threshold, in the past several centuries; disparity with regard to government power (e.g., one philosophical movement having good relations with the government during the same period that the other is an object of harrassment); religious division where the religions themselves are particularly in opposition.

There are a number of quirks with regard to this that would have to be worked out. Randall Collins in his work The Sociology of Philosophies suggests that philosophical movements are more likely to ally where they are at some shared disadvantage -- philosophical movements in positions of power tend to be less likely to think it necessary or important, whereas philosophical movements at a disadvantage tend to make common cause. How generally true this is, is an interesting question, but it does seem to be a phenomenon we see -- Hindu philosophy before and after British dominance shows a very different set of relations among philosophical groups on each side of the divide; philosophically, at least, Hindu irenicism and eclecticism is an effect of colonization by a foreign power -- Hindu philosophical movements that previously were at each other's throats, figuratively speaking, start seeing themselves as sharing the common trait of being genuinely Indian. So that's one thing that might come about. A second, historically related, quirk that would have to be taken account is the tendency of allied philosophies to become more similar through their allied interaction, sometimes leading to the complete assimilation of one by the other, or their fusion into a new kind of philosophical movement. A third quirk is the opposite -- sometimes philosophical movements exhibit sharp breaks, splitting into two or more movements.

(12) The interaction of philosophical movements with religions gets very complicated. Religious institutions and hierarchies can have very complicated and tangled relations with both governments and populaces. But religions have an undeniable influence on philosophical history -- including how long it endures, what troubles it has, and what resources are available to it. Christian Neoplatonisms outlasted pagan Neoplatonisms in part because the latter were more dependent on the Imperial government than the former -- the Christians had their own institutions, which could operate more or less independently of the government, and, indeed, which extended outside the bounds of the Roman Empire entirely, into the northern European tribes and the Persian Empire. Thus, despite the Emperor Julian, once the government started favoring Christianity, there was very little else pagan Neoplatonism could do. So the interaction of a philosophical movement with a religious one -- alliance or opposition -- can shape its influence.

In addition, religions are not philosophically neutral -- even where they do not absolutely rule something out, they may not favor it, and even where they do not insist on something, they still may approve. Christianity, for instance, having practically been born under Middle Platonism, and having taken the Middle Platonism of its Hellenistic Jewish governments as its earliest philosophical vocabulary, has always been less favorable to materialistic views of human beings than Islam, whose early development was in a context to which Platonism of any sort was foreign, and, indeed, originally met with in Christians. One occasionally finds forms of Christianity in which human beings are viewed as being simply material compositions, with no incorruptible part, but this has tended to be rare and to be regarded suspiciously. On the other hand, different religions play out their philosophical alliances in different ways, in great measure due to the fact that they differ in institutional structure. All the major monotheistic religions are actually fairly philosophy-friendly (it is difficult to be major without association with a major civilization, and it is difficult to associate with a major civilization without at least having a fairly generous tolerance for at least certain kinds of philosophical thought), but Christianity, especially in the West, has been much more promiscuous in its philosophical alliances than is the norm. In addition, some religions tend to view themselves as quasi-philosophical already, while others make sharp distinctions between themselves and any philosophical movement that comes along. But, of course, all this varies considerably depending on details of context.

Even if one prefers to avoid the extraordinary complexities of this sort of thing, religions tend to collect resources -- institutions, money, land -- that sometimes they share with philosophical movements; this certainly is an important feature of much history of philosophy, and should be a part of this sort of toy-model.

Alliances with religions would be either implicit or explicit: religions will tend naturally to favor philosophically movements with similar doctrines or traits, regardless of what one does. On the other hand, explicit alliances are also possible, although doing so might under certain circumstances make the religious authorities in the game look on you with suspicion more than friendliness.

(13) The third major kind of interaction that would need to be involved in the dynamics of any video game trying seriously to present a decent toy model of how philosophical movements actually work, is political. Since the major victory condition of the game (there might be other kinds of victory condition added, but here we are talking about the one that counts as complete victory) is to become the dominant philosophical movement by winning over a clear majority of the populace and getting the favor of the government, this is significant. Even if it weren't, no one doing work in the history of philosophy can afford to ignore all political matters; some of them have crucial significance for the course of philosophical history. We saw this clearly in the case of religion, but there are more direct implications. Practically the entire history of Chinese philosophy arose out of complex interactions between the government and various philosophical movements. The Qin dynasty, for instance, saw the interaction between a Confucianism that had been growing increasingly popular for centuries and a government-supported Legalism. (Neither were at the time actual schools or solidified movements; rather, 'Confucianism' is the label given to little philosophical movements with one set of traits -- idealistic in particular -- and certain political Doctrines and 'Legalism' the label given to those with other sets of traits -- pragmatic in particular -- and certain political Doctrines; that is, between ru movements and fa movements.) Then Confucianism became favored -- but different Confucianisms at different times -- until the transition from Imperial to the troubled period of Republican/Nationalist China, when San-min became briefly favored; San-min fell with the Maoist Revolution, when Communism became favored, although traces of its influence remained; Confucianism in particular tended to be regarded with disfavor under the Communist regime until relatively recently, but while still in a state of subordination it has recently begun to be regarded as being, so to speak, China's philosophical ambassador to the world. This is all highly simplified, of course. The point is that philosophical movements interact with politics; they clash with pet government projects; they change governments. This inevitably has to be any part of the toy model.

(14) Such are the basics. It's interesting to think through a project like this, regardless of whether anyone ever does anything with it, because it ends up touching on so many of the features of the history of philosophy that historians of philosophy have to deal with, even if only in a very simplified way.

Poem a Day XXVIII

Sunrise on the Sea

Fresh from his sleep, bright sun soars
up from the source of hopes and dreams,
out of the deep; with glory he pours
from endless stores the sea-wave-gleams.

Whewell on Newton's Laws I: Induction

"Science is his forte and omniscience is his foible," Sydney Smith famously said about William Whewell. And knowing a bit about everything was indeed Whewell's most obvious characteristic. Professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832, professor of moral theology and casuistical divinity from 1838 to 1855, Master of Trinity College in Cambridge thereafter, Whewell corresponded with many of the great scientific names of the day, including Faraday and Darwin. (Faraday, for instance, once wrote Whewell asking for advice in naming new scientific concepts; Faraday had thought of 'eastode' and 'westode', but Whewell suggested that he use 'anode' and 'cathode' instead, which Faraday did.) He was old college friends with John Herschel and Charles Babbage, and together with a number of other notable names of the day they had advocated reforms in mathematical education -- in particular, bringing a more continental approach to calculus to England. He wrote textbooks on mathematics and physics, advocated improvements in mineralogical classification, did extensive research on the tides, assisted other scientists (particularly George Airy) in their work, tanslated poetry from the German, got involved in major contemporary debates on political economy, contributed to the revival of Gothic architecture, and wrote his massive and influential History of the Inductive Sciences, which he followed with Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. He was a busy man, William Whewell, right up to the day he was thrown off his horse and died.

What I particularly want to look at is Whewell's assessment of Newtonian physics, because there are very few people who have ever looked in such detail at the philosophical implications of Newtonian physics. And perhaps the best way to do that is to focus in particular on how Whewell interprets Newton's famous three Laws. In order to do this, however, it's necessary to say a few things about Whewell's approach to two major preliminaries: science in general and causes. In this post I'll only look at the first.

The rough-and-ready summary people often give of the difference between deduction and induction is that in deduction we descend from general propositions to particulars and in induction we ascend from particulars to general propositions. There are any number of things wrong with this if we take it as rigorous, but it does raise the basic issue of how you can have scientific knowledge if you start with particular experiences. Whewell refers to this problem in a number of different ways; for our purposes it will be handy to have a single label for it, so I will call it the modal disparity problem. What we immediately learn from our experiences is particular, contingent, and approximate; in sciences like physics and chemistry, however, we draw conclusions that are clearly none of these things -- they are extraordinarily precise, indeed, sometimes far more precise than our prior experience could warrant, they are at least general and often universal, and at least sometimes they seem to be necessary. The modalities of our starting point and ending point are very different. The process by which we get one from the other is what Whewell generally has in mind when he talks about induction.

For most of his philosophical career, Whewell is fighting a very strong prejudgment in his contemporaries that the sciences work by accumulating facts and then through comparison ascending to general ideas; this is associated with Sir Francis Bacon, and it's a commonplace in England when Whewell comes on the scene that Bacon provided, at least more or less, the best account of scientific inquiry. Whewell will try to shake this up, and his approach is noticeably more 'German' in character. We cannot simply pull ideas from experiences, Whewell thinks, precisely because of the modal disparity. No number of particular cases will get you universal propositions; no number of contingent truths will get you necessary ones. Something else must be going on -- something must be added to the mix in order to make the process of induction possible. And Whewell's answer to what this extra element is, is in a sense straightforward: what you add is the mind itself, which formulates ideas and applies them to experience. We do not get the idea of Number from our experience; it is, so to speak, something in our minds already, that we just have to clarify and impose on the experiences so as to be able to make sense of them. Or to put it in other words, it is our way of looking at experience that imparts necessity, universality, and precision to our conclusions. This is not to say that there is no sense in which we get general propositions from particular experiences. As he often says, we superinduce the ideas on the facts we've discovered; we need both to come together for us to have knowledge. As he puts it in Of Induction, which is his critical response to Mill (who writes more in the Baconian tradition): "Induction is experience or observation consciously looked at in a general form. This consciousness and generality are necessary parts of that knowledge which is science" (p. 15). It is the particular facts we discover through experience that make our knowledge knowledge of something; and it is the mind's way of looking at it through ideas that organize these facts that make it knowledge at all. As he says (p. 13):

But the elements and materials of Science are necessary truths contemplated by the intellect. It is by consisting of such elements and such materials that Science *is* Science.

And a little later (p. 14): "Induction for us is general propositions, contemplated as such, derived from particulars." When we put it all together we get a fairly robust and multi-faceted view of scientific discovery (pp. 29-30):

And there is the same essential element in all Inductive discoveries. In all cases, facts, before detached and lawless, are bound together by a new thought. They are reduced to law, by being seen in a new point of view. To catch this new point of view, is an act of the mind, springing from its previous preparation and habits. The facts, in other discoveries, are brought together according to other relations, or, as I have called them, Ideas;--the Ideas of Time, of Force, of Number, of Resemblance, of Elementary Composition, of Polarity, and the like. But in all cases, the mind performs the operation by the apprehension of some such relations; by singling out the one true relation; by combining the apprehension of the true relation with the facts; by applying to them the Conception of such a relation.

In a very simplified example he gives at one point, he notes that ancient astronomers discovered that the planets had recurring periods; in discovering this they applied the idea of Time to astronomical phenomena. Later they began to organize them according to the idea of Space as well, which was refined by Kepler's use of extensive data and repeated attempts to come up with a clearer and more powerful organizing idea than had previously existed. Afterward, Newton was able to add an even greater degree of organization by organizing them by the idea of Force, as well, in his theory of gravitation. Inductive sciences like physics, then, require several different strands of inquiry to come together. We need to gather new facts; we need to clarify our ideas and conceptions; we need to think through the implications of these ideas for the possible ways in which the facts can be organized; we need to test and compare; and by this joint and simultaneous progress along two fronts, that of pure concept and definition and that of observation and experimental fact, we get progress in the sciences. We do not merely observe nature; we interpret her.

There are many Ideas that organize science, but arguably there are three that Whewell thinks particularly important: Space, Number, and Cause. It is the last that is the most important for our purposes, and we will look at Whewell's account of the Idea of Cause in the next post in this series.

Poem a Day XXVII

Psalm 138

With heartfelt praise I praise you, Lord;
though before gods I will sing praise,
bow down to your holy temple,
praise your name for its steadfastness,
for you have exalted your law
beyond mere fame.

When I called, you answered my call:
you gave me boldness of spirit.

May kings among nations praise you,
for you have ordained and they hear;
may they sing of the ways of God,
for his present glory is great:
though high, he looks well on the low --
he sees them all.

I walk in the midst of trouble;
the breath of my life you preserve.

Against wrath and against hatred
your hand stretches out to preserve,
against foes your right hand is strong.
His plans will be fulfilled for me,
his mercy endures forever --
forsake us not!

Certain Fundamental Ideas

An interesting summary passage from Whewell:

All exact knowledge supposes the mind to be able to apply, steadily and clearly, not only the processes of reasoning, but also certain fundamental ideas; and it is one main office of a liberal education to fix and develope these ideas. The ideas of Space and of Number are the subject matter of Geometry, of Arithmetic, and of Algebra in its character of Universal Arithmetic: and since all our knowledge, relative to the external world, must be subject to the conditions of space and number, the elementary portions of mathematics just mentioned are, rightly and necessarily, made the basis of all intellectual education. If we advance further in mathematical study, with the view of its thus serving as an intellectual discipline, what other ideas do we thus bring to activity and use? I reply, that the main general ideas which we have next to introduce, and which consequently should be the governing principles of the second stage of a liberal education, are the following:--the mechanical ideas of Force and Body, with their various modifications; the idea of the Symmetry of symbolical expressions;--the idea of the Universal Interpretation of symbols, including as an important branch of this, the Application of Algebra to Geometry;--and the idea of a Limit.

[William Whewell, The Doctrine of Limits, page viii.]

I hope to start a series on Whewell later this week, and, of course, the final section of the series on ideas for a video game based on philosophical movement-building, and also something on natural law theory, but I am not feeling well today, so they'll have to wait.