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December 22 - December 29, 2021
clarity of judgment where I had only seen “stuff.”
“row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.”
If the education of a surgeon should become very extensive, if the fees of surgeons should consequently rise, if the supply of regular surgeons should diminish, the sufferers would be, not the rich, but the poor in our country villages, who would again be left to mountebanks, and barbers, and old women, and charms and quack medicines.
Proofs and Refutations (1976),
Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (1982). Lastly,
Raptor Red (1985)
Robert Coles’s The Moral Intelligence of Children (1997) about racism; or literary criticism, as in Gilbert
we learn from a charming collection of letters to the editor of the London Times that of the 615 MPs after the election of 1935, twelve represented universities—a trailing residue of the old ways that persisted until 1950.
the Post piece simply gave him the byline with no further explanation.
nothing more than a political pause.’
think we shall gain at least the chance of warding off the evil of confusion, growing out of accumulated discontent.
Grote links parliamentary reform to the expansion of the electorate, for that is the only reform that promises a harmony of the actions of Parliament and the needs of the people.
“the disappointments are more than can be steadily met; and men give up in despair, become reckless, and after a life of poverty, end their days prematurely in misery.” He went on to talk about the distinctive way such misfortune hits “the better sort of persons . . . who have set their hearts on bettering their condition,” reflecting on how “disappointment preys on them . . . hope leaves them . . . their hearts sink as toil becomes useless.” Place then noted the overlay of class on all this, writing “it is not the habit of men to care for others beneath them in rank.”
Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude, endangered by its own ungovernable passion. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest and fairest, and most highly civilized community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory.
Prestige by achievement replaced prestige by position.
It is worth noting that at this time it was still the case that most homes were workplaces of one sort or another. Only later with the development of factories would the home become essentially a residence; see Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, especially 116–19.
“a quiet but not indolent life, obscure but not useless,” and looking forward “to contemplating the sights and sounds of nature and the finest productions of the human intellect.”
would hardly be possible to frame a proposition more entirely contrary to all the results of my study of Ecclesiastical Theology, or to those of my personal experience.”
In theology as in life, the more we know, the more complicated things become—which was exactly what Thirlwall loved about learning.
Myths, like Socrates’s “living speech,” were oral “documents” and oral storytelling is a “be there.”
This difference is reflected in two words coined long ago. An early term for one who spoke was a “rhetor,” where rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Speaking is interactive. You engage your audience, responding to their reactions. An oral document is, in this sense, distinctly interactive. This is in contrast to the word “author,” which is associated with a set of words affirming the self, derived from the prefix “auth” and “auto,” as in the word “authentic” where something is rightly linked to a particular agent and “automotive,” a self-powered vehicle.
was the collective voice, as opposed to an individual’s take on things.
differences in the sensibilities and concerns of the audience, not the difference between poetic imagination and real events.
shifts it to the collective mind.
Their true meaning lay not in deeds, but in the forms of historical understanding they reveal and the changing sensibilities and concerns of both the storytellers and their audiences.
It was not history (events); it was history (discourse).
This is that essential fourteen-sidedness of things. The more we consider, the more complex and intriguing it all becomes.
Lists of begats were not historical records; they were explanations of how different peoples could be alike in language, social custom, or religious practice.
Genealogies did not point backward in time, but horizontally across the surface of ancient political and cultural relations.
They abbreviated the complexities of the gradual emergence of new social structures and values into a military conquest.
In this way it records the steady adaptation of the past to meet the demands of the present, an adaptation framed by the reconfiguration of conceptual devices to meet new matters of concern.
history is always about present sensibilities and present needs:
God accommodated his message to the sensibilities of his audience.
The existing stock of constructs, the might and wisdom of a hero, kinship, migrations—these were not facts, but explanatory devices.
The deepest aim of history, therefore, is not a chronology of events, but the developing sensibilities of a people witnessed in the recasting of ideas according to the genius of subsequent epochs.
For Carlyle, as for Thirlwall, mythology was so central to the ancients that to reduce it to priestly quackery, poetic exaggeration, or allegory was to take the life out of it. Myth was serious belief. It was the effort to comprehend the mysteries of existence and to find a way to plant your feet and brace yourself as you looked upon the universe.
ridding ourselves, wrote Thirlwall, “of the exaggerations with which it has been loaded, and which were not implied in the judgment of the primitive church when it fixed the canon.”
“not in any temporary, physical or even intellectual changes wrought in its subjects, but in the continual presence and action of what is most vital and essential in Christianity itself.”
inspiration as stemming from the spirit within the writers and their sense for what was truly sacred in the teachings of Jesus.
The authority of the story rested not on what was written, but on the spirit of things behind it. This is precisely the shift we have seen in Thirlwall’s alternative to Mitford.
It was not a matter of the facts you could glean from the legends of antiquity—even with the sharp reasoning that could transform the magical Golden Fleece into rivers rich in gold.
deep question it addressed, and so tease out the real “story” tha...
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myths were serious literature and we needed to push to the underlying sensibilities of the storyteller.
The sustaining truths of mythology were not facts or events, but the judgment of the storyteller; just as the sustaining truths of the New Testament were not particular matters of fact but the judgments of the gospel-writers. Understanding the past is about the mind of the ancient storyteller, whether you are reading the Old or New Testament, or the tales of Hercules and Theseus. It is the wisdom of the storyteller that is sustaining.
The remains of Thirlwall and Grote lie buried in the same grave at Westminster Abbey.
will be evil-minded toward the people, and will bring upon them by my counsel whatever mischief I can.”
it strikes you as curious that anyone would look at the Golden Age of Athens and find its democratic impulses as fundamentally flawed, that is because Grote’s defense of Athenian democracy carried the day—and the week, and the centuries. Grote’s History dramatically transformed the story of ancient Greece, forging the modern framework where Athenian democracy is the centerpiece of the Greek legacy.
monarchies and oligarchies “have a permanent and incurable interest in plundering and depressing the people in order to gratify their own appetites for wealth and power, and therefore however wise they may be, their wisdom will never be applied to the benefit, but to the injury of the people.”
The past is less a fact than an argument, an argument that serves as a guide to the perplexed.
It emerges from sensibilities deep in the world view of the scholar.
