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December 22 - December 29, 2021
Grote traced the emergence of the modern mind. As he announced in his preface, his task was “to set forth the history of a people by whom the first spark was set to the dormant intellectual capacities of our nature.”33
the fifth century B.C., evidently, we have moved from the age of the rhetor to that of the author, from a wandering bard singing the tales of the ancients and changing them as he went along, to the critic offering commentary.
Grote observes that this marvelous tale was subsequently rationalized to far more prosaic proportions: Plutarch, in the first century A.D., simply refers to Hercules’s medical skills, as illustrated by his cure of the deathly ill Alkestis.
their jaundiced eye. Their skepticism led them to question particular items, despite a general regard for the mythical past. This might lead to a certain discomfort as is
Reasoned purification is precisely the tale Grote sought to trace.
Writing allowed the legends to stand “apart from the imagination and the emotions wherein the old legends had their exclusive root.”
“the habit of attending to, recording and combining, positive and present facts, both domestic and foreign.”41 Such facts isolated the outrageous proportions of myth, and guided its rationalization.
Such “present facts” lie at the heart of the emergent rational criticism of the historian. One of the most distinctive aspects of Grote’s approach was his use of extensive comparative materials on the mythologies of various peoples. Grote’s notebooks, in fact, include an array of materials on the mythology of the American Indian, of India, and of Europe. They illustrate the extent to which Greek mythology was but an instance of the universal condition of the precritical mind.
Somewhere in the writings of Bertrand Russell is a proof that the intricacies of the individual exceed an infinite intersection of universals. There is always a further touch of particularity.
It is a shift from event to perception. Story becomes a window to an interior landscape.
For Grote it was about the critic and the issues that led him to modify the ancient tale and make it more authentic or reliable as history.
was the growth of criticism.
Plato and Aristotle took the place of Achilles and Odysseus as guides to the perplexed.
The Discovery of the Mind, Bruno Snell argues that Homeric figures had no internal dialogue, no “self” as it were, and further, that we can follow in subsequent Greek storytelling the gradual development of modern sensibilities about the mind.
There was no inside. With Thirlwall and Grote that is both affirmed and turned on its head.
suggested this period be seen as a second scientific revolution, one where the style of argumentation became more sophisticated mathematically, richer in data and statistical analysis.
that reason has its imaginings that imagination knows not.
John Playfair, writing in 1807, put it this way: “We became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.”
This, for Herschel, was the very wonder of science: not a wonder at things, not a wonder at the colors and contours of Sugar Loaf Rock, but a wonder at how, across those three months and the relentless wash of the sea day after day, with bitter winds and violent currents and no land sightings to mark their place, the captain had always known where they were. It was a wonder at the reasoning that could yield so masterful a command of nature.
what is it?
“We must never forget that it is principles, not phenomena,—the interpretation, not the mere knowledge of facts,—which are the objects of inquiry to the natural philosopher.”
The rather contemplative state of eighteenth-century matter was giving way to something far more chaotic.
thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered abode of reason, but we find ourselves in a factory.
If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of relief or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holydays, or to remember them but as prerogatives of childhood . . . Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours’ a-day attendance at the counting
...more
The Chemical History of a Candle,
The ancient regime maintained itself as long as thoughtful people feared the complexities of change.
Yet reason was shackled by its own success. We knew enough of life’s complexities to doubt any significant improvement was possible, a sensibility not far removed from that of a much earlier day.
“The desire of knowledge spreads with each effort to satisfy it. The sacred thirst of science is becoming epidemic; and we look forward to the day when the laws of matter and of mind shall be known to all men.”
“the minds of the working orders are now arriving at such a degree of strength and maturity that they will no longer be satisfied with the simple food which contented their forefathers.”30 The sciences offer a more substantive fare, a fare that is empowering.
“He said he had a strong desire to assist the institution, but he had also some apprehension that the education the people were getting would make them discontented with the government. I said the whole mass of the people were discontented with the government, and that although teaching them would not remove their discontent, it would make them less disposed to turbulence.”
as our god-given capacity of reason transforms the spent life of ancient ferns into the fuel that drives our industry and our society. In an age of transition, Sedgwick spoke from a rock.
“habits of practical kindness, and self-control” and cultivate “all those qualities which give elevation to the moral and intellectual character.”34 A message equally apt for 1832, for 1969, and for our own day.
“The thread of operation is here broken, the march of nature is changed, and none of the agents she now employs were sufficient for the production of her ancient works.”36 For Cuvier, as for Pindar, the past is only half-brother to the present.
was a context, we may add, coherent with Mitford’s approach to history.
“And in the narrations of a great fatal catastrophe, handed down to us, not in our sacred books only, but in the traditions of all nations, there is not a word to justify us in looking to any mere physical monuments as the intelligible records of that event.”40 Noah’s deluge was a moral, not a physical event.
It is no wonder that issues surrounding design can sometimes be full of sound and fury, and signify far too little. Lines have been drawn that have put science and design in opposition, where opposition is hardly the case.
That is, in the act of turning to experience we witness the hand of God in the very fact that we can witness phenomena. The
seeming discontinuity, a jarring break in the series of life forms suggestive of a revolution, is translated into a series of intervening steps and a vast span of time.
The broader continuities of nature had been sacrificed at the altar of a too-narrow precision.
We have been too taken with “the measure, the garb, and fashion of ancient song, without looking to its living soul or feeling its inspiration.”56 That is precisely what Sedgwick had now done with the fossil record. He had sought its living soul, the many ecosystems of the distant past.
Susan Cannon talks about this same shift in one of her essays in Science and Culture. She notes a distinctive concern for massive amounts of factual material, adding that “an interest in the detailed complexity of the actual may seem to suggest the influence of Romanticism.”
This is the “force” of an analytical framework.
Sedgwick’s new geology led Phillips to drop his original introductory chapter because things had changed at the most fundamental level of how historical inferences work and the proper ends of analysis. Sedgwick changed what geologists looked for, what they saw, and what it meant.
To this end it was necessary to examine in close detail the character of a region, a particular place—topos. Authenticity became essential, a regard for the local face of things. Systems and topographical geology sought the ancient surface. Thirlwall sought the landscape which was the mythological mind. They both shared that same regard for authenticity, along with brilliant effects of light, atmosphere, and occasional splashes of red that was the genius of Turner.
We may add here a link to art and fiction via Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, where he writes: “What can replace a clichéd explanation of our functioning is not an image of perversity but a broader conception of what is normal” (99). He then suggests this rejection of stock characters and phrases by Proust may explain why he liked impressionist paintings, where an effort was made to render scenes with a distinct authenticity.
History becomes a single story, a story beginning at a remotely distant point when the earth was first formed and carrying on through a succession of eons and eras, of floras and faunas, leading to the first humans, to Noah’s flood and on to the rise and fall of languages, cultures, and civilizations.
Thirlwall and Grote deny this project.
Perhaps there is not a genuinely historical face to the historical sciences, sciences like geology and evolutionary biology.
pseudo-history, which merely arranges events and relics along a time line. Pseudo-history is an external kind of knowing, characteristic of the natural sciences.
It is not a carefully kept archive of the succession of events, the raising of mountains, the coursings of rivers, the ebb and flow of a vast diversity of plants and animals. It is only a random sampling of relics and scar tissue, itself subject to the wear and tear of physical and organic forces.
