Boole's The Laws of Thought as a Text on Natural Theology

George Boole's The Laws of Thought (the longer title being An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities) is one of the classic works in logic. Published in 1854 and showing that you could do a very large amount of logic using an algebra in which x²=x was treated as a fundamental principle, it made a significant splash, but some of the choices made by Boole -- in particular, his use of exclusive disjunction (which was deliberate, and which Boole would insist was necessary to the end of his life) and his allowance of uninterpretable terms struck most of his contemporaries as odd, and eventually led them to develop what we today call Boolean algebra, which works on Boole's ideas but throws out such oddities. This has led people, I think, not to fully understand what Boole was doing; what we call Boolean algebra is simply not appropriate to what Boole was trying to do to begin with.

What Boole was doing was in the title itself: The Laws of Thought is not a discussion of a pure abstract system, but a mathematical investigation of an empirical phenomenon, thought, on analogy with mathematical physics. Boole recognizes that there are differences between the mental and the physical, and that these can sometimes be relevant to the course of the investigation, but the analogy on its own makes obvious that we should not worry about uninterpretable terms. In the mathematical derivations used in physics, nothing requires that the mathematical steps be describing physical steps. As long as your starting point describes something physical and your ending point describes something physical, you are fine; the rest may be physically interpretable or it may just be mathematical bookkeeping. And a number of features of Boole's argument can only be properly understood in light of this approach. For instance, in one passage that is often skipped over by people who are only interested in the logical methods, Boole makes appeals to how poetry works. If you're only interested in the mathematical method, you might treat this as a quaint example. But a close examination of the brief discussion makes clear that it is actually a major pillar of Boole's argument. Poetic language is expression of thought that is not encumbered by ordinary practical constraints; it is intelligible but free. Showing that poets regularly make use of commutativity (e.g., treating adjectives as switchable) gives us reason to think that it's reasonable to treat commutativity as part of the underlying structure of thought; if we find commutativity-violating cases, we can look for the additional factors (practical limitations, for instance) that make those cases different from the most unrestricted case. The Laws of Thought is about the laws of thought.

If you read the whole work, however, it becomes obvious that there is a lot of natural theology in it. Theology was one of Boole's major interests; he read extensively in it. Many of the examples given in The Laws of Thought are theological in character, and there is no doubt that one of the purposes of this is to show the value of Boole's methods in analyzing arguments even in quite difficult fields of thought. But here again, focusing on the structure of the method alone overlooks certain important structural features of the argument itself. One of the chapters devoted to showing the power of the method -- Chapter XIII -- uses algebra to discuss arguments in Clarke's Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and Spinoza's Ethics. You could very well treat this as a matter of happenstance, due to Boole's interests, or as just a handy set of examples, but you would be wrong. Boole does not confine himself to simply showing that you can characterize the arguments using his algebraic methods, but instead takes the trouble to use that as a platform for deeper considerations. Boole, remember, is not barely interested in the use of algebra to do something relevant to logic; he is trying to make progress in understanding the constitution of the mind, the laws of thought, analogous to the way the physicist seeks to make progress in understanding the constitution of the world and the laws of nature. And this is precisely what he tries to do. Boole has an obviously high opinion of Clarke and a low opinion of Spinoza, but his overall thrust is to argue that the a priori approach they both favor is not really tenable. In Spinoza's case, Boole thinks the algebraic method shows that there is not much happening beyond some rather trivial manipulation of terms. Clarke, he thinks, is generally doing things that are more subtle. But in both cases, the overall conclusion that can be derived is that the argumentative part of the arguments is not doing the actual work. While Boole has a high opinion of Clarke's logical acumen, the discovery of truth does not primarily consist in the logical transformations that are traced by the algebra.

When Joseph Butler was a student, he wrote a number of letters to Samuel Clarke with objections to certain points in Clarke's Demonstration; the correspondence has been preserved, and serves an important role in Boole's analysis. The correspondence established that some of Clarke's argumentation depended on the principle that whatever is absolutely necessary is necessary at all places and times. Butler objected that necessary existence seems to require only that the necessarily existent exist somewhere and at some time, assuming, of course, that all existing is existing somewhere and at some time. Commenting on the correspondence, Boole says,

The objections of Butler are precisely those which would occur to an acute mind impressed with the conviction, that upon the sifting of first principles, rather than upon any mechanical dexterity of reasoning, the successful investigation of truth mainly depends. (p. 200)

This conviction attributed to Butler is also Boole's. (It's notable, incidentally, that every one of the several mentions of and allusions to Butler in the work are favorable and express Boole's agreement with Butler's approach.) Boole takes a priori approaches in theological matters to put the cart before the horse. Discussions of these difficult metaphysical topics must begin with analogy and probable induction, because an inquiry into the laws of thought makes clear how limited our pure thinking-capacity is:

To infer the existence of an intelligent cause from the teeming evidences of surrounding design, to rise to the conception of a moral Governor of the world, from the study of the constitution and the moral provisions of our own nature;--these, though but the feeble steps of an understanding limited in its faculties and its materials of knowledge, are of more avail than the ambitious attempt to arrive at a certainty unattainable on the ground of natural religion. And as these were the most ancient, so are they still the most solid foundations, Revelation being set apart, of the belief that the course of this world is not abandoned to chance and inexorable fate. (pp. 217-218).

That this is all not just a digression becomes clear given the remaining course of the book. Boole immediately goes on to discuss probability, with the ultimate conclusion that Algebra, Logic, and Theory of Probability all have extensive analogies with each other, and the subordinate conclusion that when we think probabilistically about causal order, the algebra inevitably involves terms to which we cannot definitely assign a numerical value. Probable reasoning about causes is only possible by assuming hypotheses; but this does not mean that the causal order is itself merely hypothetical. Rather, there are steps that are not measurable but real. And this is precisely the point that Boole draws in the final chapter of the work, when he reiterates that he is interested in understanding the constitution of the mind. Boole takes it, as it is a question of the Order of things, that we can only draw probable inferences involving hypotheses, but it is an error to treat this as making the inferences insignificant. (This is as true when we are talking about laws of thought as when we are talking about laws of nature.) In every kind of causal reasoning, the make-up of our minds is playing a key role. How do we move from particular data to general conceptions? "It is the ability inherent in our nature to appreciate Order, and the concurrent presumption, however founded, that the phaenomena of Nature are connected by a principle of Order" (p. 403). This means that necessary truths should probably be seen more as limiting suppositions than as things we know distinctly in themselves; our approach should be generally a posteriori.

Further, Boole returns to the question of a priori method in metaphysical and theological questions, and the argument again shows that he is interested in the constitution of the mind and not just the algebraic method. Building on his algebraic methods, he tries to explain why the a priori approach always recurs in the history of thought. In Boole's algebra, the number 1 is found all over the place. It represents what he calls the 'universe of discourse', the ultimate subject of discussion. Thus, if I say, "There is nothing in the refrigerator", this can actually mean many different things, depending on whether we assume that the overall discussion is about milk, food in general, or matter. If the universe of discourse represents material objects, there is a material void in the refrigerator; if it represents food, there may be things like air but not things like pickles; if it represents milk, there may be pickles, but there won't be milk. The universe of discourse shows up as 1 in Boole's algebra, and Boole takes this not to be an accident: logical universe is closely analogous to numerical unity, and human thought is so constituted as to trace everything it considers to some kind of primal unity (p. 411). Thus we get various mysticisms of The One, and so forth. And the fact that we do tend to think this way suggests the probable hypothesis of there being some sort of Primal Unity such as natural theology indicates. But it also shows that what is occurring in a priori approaches to natural theology is the assumption that the natural world has the unity-based structure we are inclined by the constitution of our thought to assume for it, combined with the assumption that we have direct insight into how the primary unity is to be interpreted. But as we ascend from particulars to general conceptions, this interpretation is really something we could only get by analogy and probable induction. And similar considerations can be traced with other foundational elements in the laws of thought as Boole has traced them out algebraically.

Boole concedes that some people might regard all of these theological and metaphysical discussions as a digression, but they are not; this in fact how he ends the book:

To some they will appear foreign to the professed design of this work. But the consideration of them has arisen naturally, either out of the speculations which that design involved, or in the course of reading and reflection which seemed necessary to its accomplishment. (p. 424)

And this is confirmed by Mary Everett Boole, George Boole's wife, who in a published letter usually titled "Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth Century" explicitly lays out precisely this interpretation of The Laws of Thought. First, the originary idea:

My husband told me that when he was a lad of seventeen a thought struck himsuddenly, which became the foundation of all his future discoveries. It was a flash of psychological insight into the conditions under which a mind most readily accumulatesknowledge. Many young people have similar flashes of revelation as to the nature of their own mental powers; those to whom they occur often become distinguished in some branch of learning; but to no one individual does the revelation come with sufficient clearness to enablehim to explain to others the true secret of his success....But by the help of a learned Jew in Lincoln he found out the true nature of the discovery which had dawned onhim. This was that man's mind works by means of some mechanism which "functions normally towards Monism."

This, she says, was the point in the writing of The Laws of Thought:

If he had stated it in words, he would have been entangled in an unseemly theological skirmish. He presented the truth to the learned, clothed in a veil so transparent that it is difficult to conceive how any human being could have been blinded by it; he proved that by the mere device of always writing the symbol 1 for whatever is the "Universe of Thought" for the time being, the whole cumbersome mechanism then known as 'Logic' could be dispensed with.... He said in the book that this law was a law, not of facts or of essential reason, but of the human mind (Laws of Thought, p. 4).

Mary Boole, I think, has a tendency to oversimplify a bit when talking about her husband's work in matters involving her own interests, but her interpretation here is borne out by the facts of the case. The Laws of Thought discuss the application of algebraic methods to logic and probability theory; it does this explicitly to investigate the laws of thought that constitute the mind. Obviously a lot of different issues are discussed in doing this -- thus we get the 'veil' -- but the structure of the work is quite clearly a twofold argument: that the constitution of the mind "functions normally towards Monism", i.e., has a tendency to trace everything back to primal unity, and that this is a law "not of facts or of essential reason, but of the human mind", and thus the significance of it really requires an a posteriori rather than an a priori approach.

Arguably, Boole's attempt to avoid being "entangled in an unseemly theological skirmish" resulted in a veil less transparent for the learned than Mary Boole suggests. Certainly most people fail to grasp the structure of the work at all, and most of the theological side of the work is treated as either merely an example for the logical apparatus or a digression. Nor can they be entirely blamed, because when Boole brings these things up, he always ends up talking about suggestion and analogy, and saying he can't fully pursue the question here, which makes it easy to overlook that these things may in fact have been among the things he primarily had in view. It also, I think, leads to a number of inadequately filled gaps in Boole's argument. Much of his diagnosis of a priori approaches, for instance, really depends on hypotheses for which he has provided only very brief argument, or even only gestures at arguments. As Boole notes with respect to natural theology itself, that an inference depends on hypotheses is not in itself a flaw, but the avoidance of "skirmish" has the result that some important parts of the argument are not thoroughly examined. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt, I think, that a major goal of The Laws of Thought is the critical investigation of methods of reasoning in matters such as the existence of God; it comes up not just as a set of examples but as essential to the structure of the work.

****

George Boole, The Laws of Thought, Prometheus Books (Amerst, NY: 2003).

I Ease You

Jesu
by George Herbert

Jesu is in my heart, his sacred name
Is deeply carved there: but th’other week
A great affliction broke the little frame,
Ev’n all to pieces: which I went to seek:
And first I found the corner, where was J,
After, where ES, and next where U was graved,
When I had got these parcels, instantly
I sat me down to spell them, and perceived
That to my broken heart he was I ease you,
And to the whole is J E S U.

Capreolus on the Unity of the Virtues

One of the standard positions of traditional virtue ethics is what is often called the unity of virtues thesis, which is that virtues are interconnected so that to have one you have to have all of them. In practice, the position has usually been understood not to apply literally to everything that can be called a virtue but only to the cardinal virtues. To have prudence, the intellectual cardinal virtue, you must have the three moral cardinal virtues of justice, fortitude, and temperance; to have justice, you must have prudence, fortitude, and temperance, and so forth. It has also tended to be recognized that we often use virtue-terms to indicate acquired dispositions that are not strictly virtuous but virtue-ish, incomplete virtues, we might say, and that this incompleteness is due to imperfections in the integrity of one's character, so that there is a perfectly reasonable sense in which one can say that (for instance) someone is temperate but not just.

So the basic position really amounts to saying that to have any cardinal virtue (at least in a complete and proper form), you must have all the cardinal virtues (in a complete and proper form). This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, given that you can think of ways in which one cardinal virtue might be necessary to the completeness of another -- for instance, someone who (we suppose) has justice but not fortitude is not going to be appropriately disposed for cases in which justice requires endurance in the face of death or grave danger, and someone who has (again, we suppose) temperance but no justice would presumably have difficulty finding the right point of moderation in matters in which justice was intimately involved. In addition, of course, there are good Aristotelian reasons for thinking that all virtues whatsoever depend on prudence in one way or another. However, even so, people tend to be quite shy about accepting the unity of the virtues thesis today, so it's worth looking a bit more closely at a more developed defense. Capreolus's defense of the Thomistic version of the unity of virtues thesis, from his Defensiones Theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis.

Capreolus analyzes the position into basic claims that could be disputed, with each given its own basic argument.

(1) No one can possess prudence without moral virtues. You can't have, by a sort of second nature, the disposition to judge rightly in a matter to which a virtue is relevant unless you can judge rightly with respect to the particular presuppositions of particular virtues, which vary according to the virtue. We see this in cases where someone desires badly; people who desire badly have a tendency to make false assumptions in their moral reasoning about those things they desire. People who have a vice are prejudiced in the direction of the vice whenever they reason, for instance. So it follows that prudence has to grow up with the other moral virtues, so that we will be reasoning rightly in the regions of human life with which those virtues are concerned.

(2) No one can possess moral virtues without prudence. This follows in the standard Aristotelian way:

No habit that chooses according to right reason can exist without a right reason that deliberates, judges, and prescribes. But this is the way in which moral virtue is related to prudence. Therefore it cannot exist without prudence. (p. 327)

(3) The four cardinal virtues are interconnected so that whoever possesses one possesses the others. This follows, of course, from the previous two claims.

These arguments suffice for the conclusion, but as Capreolus is a scholastic commentator, he does not consider a question to have been properly understood until one can see how objections may be handled, and despite the near-universal acceptance of the unity of virtues thesis up to Capreolus's day, he is able to find some fairly formidable objections in the work of John Duns Scotus. As with many disputes between Thomists and Scotists, the dispute is not so much about the central point but about load-bearing features in the rational account of that point. Scotus, like Aquinas, does accept the unity of virtues thesis in some form, even if qualified. However, if you think about the above two arguments, it's clear that the load-bearing element in these arguments is the virtue of prudence, so that the ground for the interconnection of the cardinal virtues is prudence itself. Scotus thinks that this is more complicated than it seems, and that because of this (1) is not strictly necessarily true, and that (3) is only going to be the case if we are talking about the character of someone who is moral, simply speaking. Obviously you need all the virtues to be moral, simply speaking, and obviously to have virtue you need prudence. But Scotus has the view that there is not a single species of prudence, and you need different kinds of prudence for different virtues, so even (2) is not accepted by him in an unqualified form.

Part of the reason for the additional complications is Scotus's desire to preserve freedom of will against all possible intrusion: on his account, you can judge rightly and not will at all in accordance with it. So it is in principle possible to have the habit of judging rightly (prudence) but have no moral virtues because you simply don't make the relevant choices that your right judgments indicate. Obviously its being in principle possible does not imply that this is at all the norm; I'm not sure how common Scotus thinks it actually is, in fact. But if it's in principle possible, then (1) certainly has to be weakened and (3) qualified.

A second reason is that Scotus thinks virtues could be complete in their own field even if they are not complete with regard to what they would have to be for a completely moral character. He uses the analogy of the senses. You could have perfect sight without perfect hearing; the two kinds of sensation are different. Obviously if you lack perfect hearing, you have imperfect sensory ability, simply from that very fact, but it doesn't directly affect the act of sight. In the same way, he thinks, if you lack (say) the virtue of temperance, you lack virtue in the sense of full moral character, but this would not affect acts of (say) fortitude, for which you still could have the right disposition of second nature.

Thomists have always regarded the Scotist account as effectively breaking the account of virtues, so that virtues are barely more than habits that happen to conform to some kind of right judgment; the relationship between virtues on Scotus's account, while real, is quite limited. The acquired dispositions for the virtues aren't interconnected on their own but only in the sense that they happen to be the acquired dispositions that are consistent with right reason. The unity is posterior to the habits, one might say, rather than integral to them in the way Thomists want to argue.

The Thomistic position on free choice, of course, differs from the Scotistic position in that Scotus treats the intellect as a purely natural faculty and puts all of the freedom in the will itself, whereas Aquinas divides human freedom in matters of choice between the intellect and the will, so that both are free faculties in a limited sense and freedom of choice in the full sense arises from their interaction. Because of this, Capreolus takes the position of the Scotists to over-assimilate prudence to universal practical knowledge; prudence is in fact concerned with deliberating, judging, and prescribing in these particular circumstances here and now, and it is impossible treat the actual choice as completely separate from this judgment -- it is of the nature of the thing that how the will chooses incorporates, so to speak, the intellectual contribution. This is not to say that prudence always issues in doing the right thing, which everyone agrees is not the case with any of the virtues, but when prudence fully prescribes something as the right course, it's impossible for the will to be in a state as if this had not happened or as if this were irrelevant, and since a virtue is a habit and not a single act, it's impossible for the intellect to have the habit of prudence, and the consistent right judgment that comes with that, without the will acquiring an appropriate disposition in response.

Capreolus, of course, simply denies the analogy with the senses; the two cases are not similar. It is true that there is no strict interconnection among the senses, but this is because the sense are straightforwardly independent: sight does not subserve hearing, nor vice versa, they just contribute different things. Sensory life does not, as such, depend on any particular ordering. This is not true of moral life: moral matters are structured such that (for instance) if you are intemperate, you are going to commit injustices, and we see this all the time in people failing to do justice to each other because of lust. Moral decision-making is not, for the Thomist, a matter of doing the right thing in relatively isolated domains; rather, doing the morally right thing in one domain will often overlap with doing the morally right thing in another domain. So prudence is in fact all one and the virtues have to grow up together, so to speak, into one integral moral character. Consistently good moral decision-making is holistic, and can't be broken into lesser parts. This doesn't change the fact, noted previously, that as the virtues are being developed, the interconnections might not be fully formed; but these failures will be precisely ways in which we have failed fully to develop the virtue in question.

Now, obviously I have somewhat simplified the points in question, and equally obviously Scotists will have responses to Capreolus. But as is generally the case with scholastic dispute, as one works through the dispute one gets a clearer picture of the conclusions that are being drawn.

****

John Capreolus, On the Virtues, White and Cessario, trs. Catholic University Press (Washington, DC: 2001).

Basil and Gregory

Today is the feast of Ss. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzen, Doctors of the Church.

From On the Holy Spirit (1.2) by St. Basil the Great:

To count the terms used in theology as of primary importance, and to endeavour to trace out the hidden meaning in every phrase and in every syllable, is a characteristic wanting in those who are idle in the pursuit of true religion, but distinguishing all who get knowledge of "the mark" "of our calling;" for what is set before us is, so far as is possible with human nature, to be made like God. Now without knowledge there can be no making like; and knowledge is not got without lessons. The beginning of teaching is speech, and syllables and words are parts of speech. It follows then that to investigate syllables is not to shoot wide of the mark, nor, because the questions raised are what might seem to some insignificant, are they on that account to be held unworthy of heed. Truth is always a quarry hard to hunt, and therefore we must look everywhere for its tracks. The acquisition of true religion is just like that of crafts; both grow bit by bit; apprentices must despise nothing. If a man despise the first elements as small and insignificant, he will never reach the perfection of wisdom.

From The First Theological Oration (section 3) of St. Gregory of Nazianzen:

Not to every one, my friends, does it belong to philosophize about God; not to every one; the Subject is not so cheap and low; and I will add, not before every audience, nor at all times, nor on all points; but on certain occasions, and before certain persons, and within certain limits.

Not to all men, because it is permitted only to those who have been examined, and are passed masters in meditation, and who have been previously purified in soul and body, or at the very least are being purified. For the impure to touch the pure is, we may safely say, not safe, just as it is unsafe to fix weak eyes upon the sun's rays. And what is the permitted occasion? It is when we are free from all external defilement or disturbance, and when that which rules within us is not confused with vexatious or erring images; like persons mixing up good writing with bad, or filth with the sweet odours of ointments. For it is necessary to be truly at leisure to know God; and when we can get a convenient season, to discern the straight road of the things divine. And who are the permitted persons? They to whom the subject is of real concern, and not they who make it a matter of pleasant gossip, like any other thing, after the races, or the theatre, or a concert, or a dinner, or still lower employments. To such men as these, idle jests and pretty contradictions about these subjects are a part of their amusement.

Of Easy Wind and Downy Flake

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Fortnightly Books Index 2018

Obviously there was a lot of Jules Verne this year, as I was trying to read through as many of his Voyages Extraordinaires as possible; but the non-Verne novels were quite a diverse group.


November 25: Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century; (with Michel Verne) The Lighthouse at the End of the World
Introduction, Review

November 11: Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
Introduction, Review

October 28: Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea(s)
Introduction, Review

October 14: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Introduction, Review

September 30: Jules Verne, Family Without a Name
Introduction, Review

September 16: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Introduction, Review

September 2: Umberto Eco, Baudolino
Introduction, Review

August 19: Jules Verne, The Mighty Orinoco; Invasion of the Sea
Introduction, Review

August 5: Frances Mossiker, Napoleon and Josephine: Biography of a Marriage
Introduction, Review

July 22: Jules Verne, The Begum's Millions [with Paschal Grousset]; Robur the Conqueror; Master of the World
Introduction, Review

July 8: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
Introduction, Review

June 24: Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
Introduction, Review

June 3: George MacKay Brown, Magnus
Introduction, Review

May 20: Jules Verne, The Self-Propelled Island; A Castle in Transylvania
Introduction, Review

May 6: Isaac Asimov, The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr
Introduction, Review

April 22: Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
Introduction, Review

April 8: The Poetic Edda; The Saga of the Volsungs and The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok
Introduction, Review

March 25: Jules Verne, The Kip Brothers; Travel Scholarships
Introduction, Review

March 11: Sigrid Undset, Ida Elisabeth
Introduction, Review

February 25: Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Introduction, Review, Timeline

February 11: Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon & Around the Moon
Introduction, Review

January 28: Elias Lönnrot, The Kanteletar
Introduction, Review

January 14: Jules Verne, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
Introduction, Review


*************

Fortnightly Books Index for 2017

Fortnightly Books Index for 2016

Fortnightly Books Index for 2015

Fortnightly Books Index for 2014

Fortnightly Books Index for 2012-2013

Music on My Mind

Connor Engstrom (ft. Joey Elrose), "Final Countdown".

Evening Notes Index 2018

December 5: The Tacit Mechanics of Hume

November 15: Deception and Clifford's Ethics of Belief

October 31: Prima Facie Duties and Humanitarian Traditions

October 20: Probability as a Measure

October 11: Saturated Phenomena

October 2: Cockburn on Space

September 25: 'Classical Theism'

September 20: Kinds of Failing in Teaching

September 5: The Pseudo-Scotus Validity Paradox

August 16: Modal Operators with Multiple Arguments

August 8: Catholic Social Teaching and the Notes of the Church

July 23: Quasi-Property

July 14: Humanitarian Traditions

July 6: Parental Rights and the Right to Parental Protection

June 14: The Notion of Militia in Scottish Enlightenment Thought

May 24: Rosmini on the Definition 'Rational Animal'

April 25: Medical Ethics and the Rights of Infants and Toddlers

January 15: Mythology as a Guide to Morals


Evening Notes Index 2017b
Evening Notes INdex 2017a

Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires

This past year I spent some time reading as many of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires as I could find and fit into the year. I had already done two as fortnightly books, and the rest I added this year, either as fortnightly books (F) or as brief notes (N), and got through about three quarters of the series that was published in Verne's lifetime:

1. Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863): N
2. Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, 1866): F
3. Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864, revised 1867): F
4. De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865): F
5. Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways, 1867–8): N
6. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, 1869–70): F
7. Autour de la lune (Around The Moon, 1870): F
8. Une ville flottante (A Floating City, 1871): N
9. Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais (The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa, 1872): N
10. Le Pays des fourrures (The Fur Country, 1873): N
11. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873): F
12. L'Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874–5): F
13. Le Chancellor (The Survivors of the Chancellor, 1875): N
14. Michel Strogoff (Michael Strogoff, 1876): N
15. Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet, 1877): N
16. Les Indes noires (The Child of the Cavern, 1877): N
17. Un capitaine de quinze ans (Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen, 1878): N
18. Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum (The Begum's Millions, 1879): F
19. Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine (Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, 1879): N
20. La Maison à vapeur (The Steam House, 1880)
21. La Jangada (Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon, 1881): N
22. L'École des Robinsons (Godfrey Morgan, 1882): N
23. Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1882): N
24. Kéraban-le-têtu (Kéraban the Inflexible, 1883)
25. L'Étoile du sud (The Vanished Diamond, 1884): N
26. L'Archipel en feu (The Archipelago on Fire, 1884)
27. Mathias Sandorf (Mathias Sandorf, 1885): N
28. Un billet de loterie (The Lottery Ticket, 1886): N
29. Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conqueror, 1886): F
30. Nord contre Sud (North Against South, 1887): N
31. Le Chemin de France (The Flight to France, 1887)
32. Deux Ans de vacances (Two Years' Vacation, 1888): N
33. Famille-sans-nom (Family Without a Name, 1889): F
34. Sans dessus dessous (The Purchase of the North Pole, 1889): N
35. César Cascabel (César Cascabel, 1890): N
36. Mistress Branican (Mistress Branican, 1891)
37. Le Château des Carpathes (Carpathian Castle, 1892): F
38. Claudius Bombarnac (Claudius Bombarnac, 1892): N
39. P’tit-Bonhomme (Foundling Mick, 1893)
40. Mirifiques Aventures de Maître Antifer (Captain Antifer, 1894): N
41. L'Île à hélice (Propeller Island, 1895): F
42. Face au drapeau (Facing the Flag, 1896): N
43. Clovis Dardentor (Clovis Dardentor, 1896)
44. Le Sphinx des glaces (An Antarctic Mystery, 1897): N
45. Le Superbe Orénoque (The Mighty Orinoco, 1898): F
46. Le Testament d'un excentrique (The Will of an Eccentric, 1899)
47. Seconde Patrie (The Castaways of the Flag, 1900)
48. Le Village aérien (The Village in the Treetops, 1901)
49. Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (The Sea Serpent, 1901)
50. Les Frères Kip (The Kip Brothers, 1902): F
51. Bourses de voyage (Traveling Scholarships, 1903): F
52. Un drame en Livonie (A Drama in Livonia, 1904)
53. Maître du monde (Master of the World, 1904): F
54. L'Invasion de la mer (Invasion of the Sea, 1905): F

In addition, I did a fortnightly book on two works that, while not part of the series published in Verne's lifetime, are closely related to it: Paris in the Twentieth Century, which is an early work that Verne proposed for the series, but which was turned down by Hetzel, and The Lighthouse at the End of the World, which was largely written by Verne by the end of his life and was published shortly after his death with revisions by his son, Michel Verne. You can find that here.

Most of the works in the series are stand-alone, but some of the works are explicitly set up as sequels. By 'explicitly' I mean that there is direct reference in the course of a story to another story as giving events leading up to that story. There are a number of other works that could possibly take place in 'the same universe', as we say; for instance, there are three works that explicitly mention the same real-world ship, the Pereire of the French Transatlantic Company, as playing some kind of important minor role: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Le Superbe Orénoque. Perhaps you could take that as a reason to group them together. And there is one case (Claudius Bombarnac) that both refers to something written by Verne as a literary work and alludes to a number of other works by Verne without actually treating those works as prequels (usually just by presenting characters that are similar to those in other works). But in some cases, there is an explicit connection to another of the Voyages, and, in two cases, to works by other authors that were a major influence on Verne's own themes. I do not claim to have done any exhaustive search, but these are the cases that I found in the course of this project:

Voyage	is explicitly a sequel to
7. Autour de la lune	4. De la terre à la lune
10. Le Pays des fourrures	2. Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras
12. L'Île mystérieuse	5. Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, 6. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
15. Hector Servadac	7. Autour de la lune
29. Robur-le-Conquérant	18. Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum
34. Sans dessus dessous	4. De la terre à la lune, 7. Autour de la lune, 15. Hector Servadac, 22. L'École des Robinsons
44. Le Sphinx des glaces	Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
47. Seconde Patrie	Johann David Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson
49. Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin	2. Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras
53. Maître du monde	29. Robur-le-Conquérant

While the most famous ones are quite deserving of their fame, some of the lesser known works are nice in their own right -- probably not what most readers expect from a Verne book, although fun if given a chance to be their own story rather than having to meet prior expectations. I'd mentioned that Un billet de lotterie was already one of my favorites. Other lesser-known works that I found fun were Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine, Les Indes noires, and Le Rayon vert. But all of the works were at least interesting in one way or another.

Reading so much Verne all together really brings home a number of things.

(1) Verne's fiction is fundamentally (as one could perhaps expect from the title of the series) geographical fiction. It's a commonplace of Verne scholarship that Verne was interested in geography, but it becomes almost overwhelming when reading a lot of it. Verne is interested in new technology, but while he has an eye to other uses, his primary interest is almost always the new geographical adventures that the technology opens up; he is interested in scientific discovery, but the primary kind of scientific discovery that interests him is the kind that involves a scientific expedition or journey of some kind or another.

(2) Verne doesn't put a lot of effort into the openings of most of his books. In doing the notes, I quoted the openings of the books, but these are often not very representative of the work as a whole. He does like putting us immediately into the middle of the story, but his philosophy seems to have been to do that in any way that he could, rather than put much emphasis on the opening itself. Perhaps this is due to the particular way in which his books were originally serialized -- we should perhaps think of 'the beginning' as a much larger chunk of the story than just the opening paragraphs. And Verne over the course of the series breaks just about every 'rule' that people give to beginning writers about how to open their stories: he'll introduce characters that we never meet again and who have no actual importance to the story, he'll dump a lot of exposition, he'll build very slowly up to the actual story, he'll leave us completely unclear about what is going on for several paragraphs, etc. But for all that, it always works in the overall context.

(3) It is notorious that English translations of Verne are often bad. I knew that going into the project, but I was taken aback by the sheer scale of the badness. Many of the translations are just plain awful as translations; they often descend to mere paraphrase (trying to punch up his beginnings or cut down his expositions or make the story more relatable to some imaginary audience in the translator's head); they are sometimes sloppy about scientific and geographical details in ways that Verne himself certainly is not; they sometimes change the very tenor of the story itself. It is truly an awful situation.

There are twelve Voyages I did not manage to fit in, mostly later works where English translations are hard to find. Without worrying too much about it, I think I'll try to get those done in the next two years; that shouldn't be too grand a task to complete.

Notes and Links

* I just yesterday got back from a brief trip to see family for the holidays, during which I had a chance to read a few things, among which were:

Tom Holland's Dynasty, about the House of Caesar. It's very uneven in style, and at times unnecessarily vulgar, but the latter is not so out of place dealing with the likes of Caligula and Nero, and the whole is quite a readable account of how a bunch of autocrats managed to become indispensable and imperial despite, in principle, having no formal office, and managed to strip Roman citizens of their liberty while nonetheless remaining quite popular. I found the parts about Augustus to be particularly good. The whole has the refreshing tendency to avoid the false tone of just-the-facts objectivity that has come to infect works by historians; it's quite clear that the bulk of what we have about the August Household is gossip, and it salvages what it can of objectivity by recognizing various points of view in the gossip. You can ignore almost all of the reviews for the work, I think; none that I have seen are very good or even very accurate, probably because reviewers for history are addicted to trying to assess history texts in terms of arbitrary standards of relevance 'for our times'.

Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, the founding novel of the popular nineteenth century genre of Ruritanian Romance, is a short, quick, and rollicking read. I don't think I've ever read it before, but it was excellent. It doesn't have any pretensions as great literature, and yet it has the distinctive characteristic of great literature, that it never ceases to delight. Hope apparently wrote a more tragic sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, as well some other, more loosely related, Ruritania works, which I will eventually have to look up.

Jean Paul Sartre's The Words is a writer's autobiography, although perhaps one should say it's an elaborate fakery of an autobiography. Everyone I have seen discuss it reads it as a straight autobiography of Sartre's early life, but there are too many signs that this can't be the whole story: his repeated tying of literature to imposture and illusion, the careful tuning of his memories to meet psychoanalytic expectations, the endless (but indirect and subtle!) flattering of the reader as a reader. In reality, I think it should be seen as a literary exploration of Sartre's own experience of reading and writing, draped loosely and somewhat artificially over a chronological frame of Sartre's childhood.

* I saw Aquaman in 3D. It lacks some of the charm of Wonder Woman, but is more consistent story-wise. Despite being a DC offering, it's OK as a movie. As a 3D movie, however, it is splendid; they obviously put a lot of thought into the visual aspect of the movie, and unlike a lot of movies where they mostly just use the 3D to spruce up some fight scenes, practically every scene of this movie is enriched in some way by it. If you like 3D, this is one to see. Even if you aren't interested in 3D, this is a great movie for visual spectacle -- wide, sweeping ocean scenes and the like -- and so probably worth a splurge for theater viewing.

* Thony Christie discusses internalism vs. externalism in historical writing and The Seven Learned Sisters.

* Kenny Pearce compares Ibn Sina and Descartes on the nature of body.

* David Evans discusses how the gospel of Mark draws on the Old Testament to construct a Christology.

* C. S. Lewis, Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus

* Nathaniel McCallum, Inherited Guilt in Ss. Augustine and Cyril. I've noted before that reatus is often broader than 'guilt', being something more like 'liability'; so we always have to be careful, as McCallum notes, to take the context into account.

* Timothy Larsen on John Stuart Mill's religious views.

* Roger Scruton, The Fury of the Modernists.

* A journalist from Der Spiegel by the name of Claas Relotius was tasked with reporting on rural America in the age of Trump, and wrote a piece on the little town of Fergus Falls. He was caught manufacturing lies to spice up the story with rural American stereotypes for his German readers by a couple of local reporters -- fictional persons, fictional stories, events that could not possibly have happened. He eventually was fired, and a number of other articles written by him have been shown to have fabricated information. Given that some of the manufactured stories won awards, it would be worthwhile for Der Spiegel and the journalistic community in Germany to contemplate why they were taken in so completely by stories that read like crazy caricatures; Relotius got away with what he did because he was giving people what they wanted to read. That reflection will, of course, not happen. But it's a good example of how absolutely crucial local journalists on local beats are to the journalistic ecosystem.

* The PNC Christmas Price Index jumps up a bit due to a surge in the price of geese and in wages for entertainers.

* Eduard Habsburg on how to make a Hungarian pörkölt:

Two New Poem Drafts

Aeneas

Lift up your father, Aeneas;
the wrath on the temples is burning.
Stir up your blood, Aeneas;
your road courses West unreturning.
Step by step runs the path you will travel;
seas will be crossed ere the end;
pyres will burn to bright heaven;
down shall your highway descend.
Great is your name, Aeneas,
mighty the call that you hear.
Troy shall be joined to the wolf cubs,
nations shall tremble with fear.
Lupa pepercit their motto,
eagles on high guide their way;
slaughter shall be their true genius;
God's very Son they shall slay.
Hold not your hand from the matter,
the sword of the ages to wield.
for ever by fate are you favored,
but never to fate shall you yield.
Lift up your father, Aeneas,
your destiny seize, keep it pure.
Turn yourself homeward, Aeneas:
all good comes to those who endure.

I Know Not How

I know not how the world was born,
yet born it was.
I know not how the veil is torn,
yet torn it is.
I know not how God gives His grace,
yet this He does.
I known not how worlds formed in place,
and yet they are.
I known not how planets can endure;
they travel still.
I known not how stars meet their fate,
and yet they will.

I known not how the mighty suns
that brightly shine
in burning vessels swiftly run
through space and time,

nor know I how your love has come
upon my heart,
nor how this is, nor how it ends
or even starts,
and yet it like the wind descends
to blaze like stars.

I know not how you can be,
and yet you are.

Music on My Mind

Today is the Feast of St. Stephen the Proto-Martyr, traditionally a day for doing charity to the poor. The most famous of all St. Stephen's Day carols:



Loreen McKennitt, "Good King Wenceslas".

And Shall I Silent Be?

Christmas
by George Herbert

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul's a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev'n His beams sing, and my music shine.

Due Festive Show

Christmas Without Christ
by Bl. John Henry Newman

How can I keep my Christmas feast
In its due festive show,
Reft of the sight of the High Priest
From whom its glories flow?

I hear the tuneful bells around,
The blessèd towers I see;
A stranger on a foreign ground,
They peal a fast for me.

O Britons! now so brave and high,
How will ye weep the day
When Christ in judgment passes by,
And calls the Bride away!

Your Christmas then will lose its mirth,
Your Easter lose its bloom:
Abroad, a scene of strife and dearth;
Within, a cheerless home!

Malta.
December 25, 1832.

Gaudete!

Prima Luce, "Gaudete".

Brought for Us So Low

Christmas Eve
by Christina Rossetti

Christmas hath darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Music on My Mind

Cimorelli, "Silent Night".

Let Us See Our Lamps Are Lighted

For Advent
by Christian Rossetti

Sweet sweet sound of distant waters, falling
On a parched and thirsty plain;
Sweet sweet song of soaring skylark, calling
On the sun to shine again;
Perfume of the rose, only the fresher
For past fertilizing rain;
Pearls amid the sea, a hidden treasure
For some daring hand to gain; –
Better, dearer than all these
Is the earth beneath the trees:
Of a much more priceless worth
Is the old, brown, common earth.

Little snow-white lamb, piteously bleating
For thy mother far away;
Saddest sweetest nightingale, retreating
With thy sorrow from the day;
Weary fawn whom night has overtaken,
From the herd gone quite astray;
Dove whose nest was rifled and forsaken
In the budding month of May; –
Roost upon the leafy trees;
Lie on earth and take your ease;
Death is better far than birth:
You shall turn again to earth.

Listen to the never-pausing murmur
Of the waves that fret the shore:
See the ancient pine that stands the firmer
For the storm-shock that it bore;
And the moon her silver chalice filling
With light from the great sun's store;
And the stars which deck our temple's ceiling
As the flowers deck its floor;
Look and hearken while you may,
For these things shall pass away:
All these things shall fail and cease;
Let us wait the end in peace.

Let us wait the end in peace, for truly
That shall cease which was before:
Let us see our lamps are lighted, duly
Fed with oil nor wanting more:
Let us pray while yet the Lord will hear us,
For the time is almost o'er;
Yea, the end of all is very near us;
Yea, the Judge is at the door.
Let us pray now, while we may;
It will be too late to pray
When the quick and dead shall all
Rise at the last trumpet-call.

Music on My Mind

Clamavi De Profundis, "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen".

Radio Greats: Roswell's a Guest for Christmas (The Life of Riley)

The Life of Riley is a formula sitcom whose formula has become common: a comedy centered on a well-meaning but bumbling father of a family. It was one of the most successful pioneers of this particular comedy formula, however; William Bendix's Chester A. Riley, with his endless malapropisms delivered with perfect seriousness, and his catchphrase, "What a revoltin' development this is!" became a very well known figure. The radio series ran from 1944 to 1951, and inspired a 1949 film (and, as was common, a radio adaptation of the film on Lux Radio Theater) and two television series.

"Roswell's a Guest for Christmas" is a solid Christmas episode. Roswell, the son of Riley's boss at the factory, is suddenly staying for Christmas -- although his father has not told him yet, his mother is in the hospital and it's uncertain whether she will make it. He doesn't want to be there, and he is intolerably self-important even on his best days. Nobody likes him. But Christmas is Christmas, and everybody has to find a way to get through while not sacrificing the Christmas spirit.

You can listen to "Roswell's a Guest for Christmas" at the Internet Archive (#29).