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December 22 - December 29, 2021
It is a principle of historical criticism of the sort we have traced in Grote’s History. Both denied the legitimacy of the text.
“Grote’s History of Greece is a product of the same intellectual movement as Lyell’s Principles.”
there is no water to be seen from Rye today; the town is landlocked.
Erratics are simply markers of former coastlines. They flag where icebergs had beached.
The fact is, Lyell’s empiricism rested on a denial of the facts—as they had been taken.
The key to sound geology was finding some way to dispel deception and establish a connection between the evidence and pointable reality.
The gradual changes in their large, amorphous populations were more likely to reflect the true tempo of geological change.
He simply sought a relative measure of the degree to which deposits approached the modern epoch.
Lyell’s distrust of the fossil evidence led him to a far different point from topographical geology, where the criticism was that Cuvier had not fully enough evoked ancient landscapes and their flora and fauna.
Both shifted historical analysis from reconstructing a sequence of events to processes of change and they sought the measure of these processes in “present facts.”
Whatever the past might have been like, the most rational approach was to assume a basic continuity over time in the processes of change.
“The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life” (177).
Instead, rights have being in the primary experience of the way things present themselves to individuals.
We are only as free and have rights only so far as our experience in society warrants.
To deceive and by deception govern.
The real purpose for expanding the number of capital crimes, Hay argues, was to root deference into the everyday behavior of the people.
Their one way of survival was to make clear to the lord of the manor how very good they were, so that on that day he would speak in their behalf.
Once we discard the significance of the traditions of the court out of time immemorial, we are left with an individual appointed by and answering to the ruling elite.
Bentham proposed a rational system, a code of law, assigning a range of punishments which would fit the crime.
That Bentham’s sweeping new conception of the law was put into place reminds us how many claims there were on change at this time, and how many needs there were to be met.
“In every political community the holders of the supreme power will, on every occasion in which competition arises, sacrifice the interest of the many to their own particular interest.”
Stephen volunteered. I had drawn the appropriate triangle. As he walked to the front of the room, Stephen picked up a meter stick. He then proceeded to measure the two line segments of the base on either side of the angle bisector. One was longer than the other. The theorem was false! It was a lovely moment. Stephen was right, and he was also dead wrong.
The truths of geometry rest upon triangles of the imagination. That is, reality lies in the world of ideas.
“I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there—wherever ‘there’ may be.”
“By convention color, by convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality nothing but atoms and the void.”
For Plato and for Coleridge, the way through the thicket is to look through or beyond experience, as geometry teaches us, and find the true form of things with the mind’s eye. Don’t look for the idea of church or state in the various forms they have taken across the ages. Instead consider their aim, their purpose; what people have been addressing as they worked to create more perfect expressions. These are the postulates of political geometry, the foundational ideas for subsequent theorems.
Where Bentham denied fictions in favor of pointable reality, Coleridge denied pointable experience in favor of an underlying reality.
History is the coming to be of the prevailing idea. Coleridge’s nonfiction is not Romantic because he is the lamp, the source of light and motion, rather the ideas are the lamp. What is compelling in both of these faces of Romanticism is the push from within: the sensibilities that inform the motion of the individual who wanders lonely as a cloud has its analogue in the unfolding idea which transforms the kingdom of Alfred the Great into the parliamentary monarchy of Coleridge’s day.
Here is history as lamp, rather than mirror.
In the same way, Sedgwick has written of the systems of life according to the archetype which had guided their development over the vast spans of geological time.
Plant a carrot, get a carrot—not a Brussel sprout, That’s why I like vegetables, you know what they’re about.
His discussions of them in On the Origin of Species are essentially to deny that they are sound evidence for understanding life’s history.
Darwin writes of the past by examining the way things change in the present.
It is with short-legged sheep that Darwin begins his argument for evolution.
In this way, Darwin shifted the problem, moving the analysis of life’s history from the fossil record to heredity and processes of change, those evolutionary bits happening now all around us.
There is a pliability to life; a little of this, a little of that. Despite the intricacy of the coordination of its parts so brilliantly explored by Cuvier, there was some “slack,” some “play,” sufficient for careful husbandry to “make” short-legged sheep, draft horses as well as thoroughbreds, and even carrots.
Like Grote and Lyell, Darwin anchored his account of the distant past in a careful analysis of “present facts” and “causes now in operation.” There is no reason to link his approach directly to Grote or the Benthamian circle. We have already noted Huxley’s observation about the unity in method in Grote’s History and Lyell’s Principles. And we know Darwin carefully studied Lyell’s Principles aboard the Beagle.
Suppose you begin with an island, a volcanic peak in the proverbial middle of the sea. At a certain distance out from the shore, coral begins to grow. If the island begins to subside, the steady growth of the reef would keep the living coral near the surface. In time, the center could disappear altogether, leaving the reef as an islet or atoll. In this way, coral reefs become a lovely demonstration of long-term change due to indiscernible processes.
It was Lyell and not Sedgwick that resonated.
Don’t we carry the scars of chance encounters like that deaf woman (my mother in fact), who stopped meeting people’s eyes as she walked down the street?
What are we at heart? It is a commonplace to see two basic alternatives. Either people are selfish and only prevented from being wicked by the teachings of religion, supplemented by the threat of social sanction—the policeman’s truncheon; or they are innately good, and given the chance to go on about their business without fearing for their very survival they are other-directed, caring for those around them.
Experience is but a prompt for the reality seen by the mind’s eye. That’s why clarity is gained on reflection.
Gould points out that the three varieties of mockingbirds Darwin had collected were actually distinct species. Further, here geographical information had been included, and each was unique to its particular island.
“Indeed, as long as it is believed that Darwin’s eyes were opened by an unbiased reading of the book of nature, the most interesting source of his conversion is effectively obscured. That source is none other than Darwin himself;
“He and not the evidence per se.” An intriguing way to frame what was going on. The conversations with Gould were crucial. Darwin’s “unorthodox interpretations” were clear to him; but no one else could see them. The sharp divide between Darwin and Gould seriously undermines the standard account. It was not the fact of geographical distribution or other related sets of observations which called for evolution. It was something in Darwin.
supposing life has evolved, what processes might carry the promise of accumulated changes sufficient to separate plants or animals into distinct species from a given stock?
We see here the push behind a whole lifetime of work. This is the problem which had demanded a solution.
Fuegian manners and mores were unimaginable and he couldn’t put them down. They stayed with him for forty years.
Their savagery was accident, not essence.
That last recapitulating passage tells us squarely that such were our ancestors. But with evolution we are also descended from primates who are capable of virtuous behavior, and that was the key.
