the rev. wm paley, archdeacon carlisle -

THE REV. WM. PALEY, ARCHDEACON OF CARLISLE

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The Rev. Wm. Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle

“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: Paley, a common authority with manyon moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission toCivil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency;and he proceeds to say that “so long as the interest of the wholesociety requires it, that is, so long as the establishedgovernment cannot be resisted or changed without publicinconveniency, it is the will of God ... that the establishedgovernment be obeyed, and no longer.... This principle beingadmitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance isreduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger andgrievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense ofredressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shalljudge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplatedthose cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, inwhich a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, costwhat it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowningman, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This,according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would savehis life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must ceaseto hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost themtheir existence as a people.

WILLIAM PALEY

mailto:[email protected]?subject=Contribution to Kouroo Contexture

mailto:[email protected] subject=Contribution to Kouroo Contexture

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf


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July: William Paley was born in Peterborough, just northeast of Northampton in England.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1743


http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdf





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William Paley entered, as sizar, Christ College at Cambridge University.

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

1758








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William Paley took his college degree and became usher at an academy in Greenwich.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1763








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William Paley was elected a fellow and tutor of Christ College at Cambridge University, where he would become an intimate friend of John Law and would lecture on metaphysics, morals, the Greek Testament, John Locke, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Clarke’s A DISCOURSE CONCERNING THE BEING AND ATTRIBUTES OF GOD, THE OBLIGATIONS OF NATURAL RELIGION, AND THE TRUTH AND CERTAINLY OF THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION, IN OPPOSITION TO THOMAS HOBBES, SPINOZA, THE AUTHOR OF THE ORACLES OF REASON, AND OTHER DENIERS OF NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION, and Bishop Joseph Butler’s ANALOGY OF RELIGION, NATURAL AND REVEALED. In his lectures on divinity he would take the position he would maintain later in his MORAL PHILOSOPHY, that the 39 Articles of English history was nothing more than a politicolegal document inasmuch as by parsing these 39 thingies one might obtain some 240 distinct propositions some of which were mutually inconsistent.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1766








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William Paley was ordained, and would be appointed as the rector of Musgrave in Cumberland.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1767








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The Reverend William Paley resigned from his position as rector of Musgrave in Cumberland to become the vicar of the parishes of Appleby and Dalston.

The Reverend Joseph Priestley’s EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON AIR detailed his discoveries on the effects of various gases such as oxygen, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide on mice and other animals.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1776








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The Reverend William Paley was installed as the prebend of Carlisle.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

1780








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The Reverend William Paley became an archdeacon of the Anglican Church.

1782





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The Reverend William Paley, D.D.’s THE PRINCIPLES OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. Toward the end of this year he became the chancellor of his diocese.

1785

PALEY’S PRINCIPLES





http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/17/80DECADE/85/1785_WilliamPaley_I.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/17/80DECADE/85/1785_WilliamPaley_II.pdf


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Upon being urged by Professor John Law to expand his lectures, the Reverend William Paley published THE PRINCIPLES OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (London). 1

College student David Henry Thoreau was making reference above to the Reverend Paley’s “There are habits, not only of drinking, swearing, and lying, ... but of every modification of action, speech, and thought: Man is a bundle of habits....”

Anticipating Bentham, his “moral system,” such as it was, merely summarized the utilitarianism of the 18th Century. Thoreau would disparage this work in “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”:

1786

1. Bishop William Paley on “Virtue,” in THE PRINCIPLES OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1785:

“Show how it is that a Writer’s Nationalityand Individual Genius may be fully manifestedin a Play or other Literary Work, upon aForeign or Ancient Subject — and yet fullJustice be done to the Subject.”

Thoreau’s essay of December 16, 1836 for Professor Channing’sassignment above would begin with: “Man has been called a bundleof habits. This truth, I imagine, was the discovery of aphilosopher — one who spoke as he thought and thought before hespoke — who realized it, and felt it to be, as it were, literallytrue. It has a deeper meaning, and admits of a wider applicationthan is generally allowed. The various bundles which we labelFrench, English and Scotchmen, differ only in this, that whilethe first is made up of gay, showy and fashionable habits, –thesecond is crowded with those of a more sombre hue, bearing thestamp of utility and comfort; –and the contents of the third, itmay be, are as rugged and unyielding as their very envelope. Thecolor and texture of these contents vary with different bundles;but the material is uniformly the same.”





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WILLIAM PALEY





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In WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Thoreau would write that “The maker of this earth but patented a leaf,”

WALDEN: Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated theprinciple of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earthbut patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher thishieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last?This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxurianceand fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitiousin its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lightsand bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; butthis suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and thereagain is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of theground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring,as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing morepurgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me thatEarth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth babyfingers on every side. Fresh curls springs from the baldest brow.There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along thebank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in fullblast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history,stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied bygeologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like theleaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, –not a fossilearth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central lifeall animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes willheave our exuviæ from their graves. You may melt your metals andcast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will neverexcite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic likeclay in the hands of the potter.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

GEOLOGY




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/WALDEN/PeopleOfWALDEN.pdf


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commenting upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Urpflanze” in his VERSUCH DIE METAMORPHOSE DER PFLANZEN ZU ERKLÄREN (AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PLANTS) that would be published in 1790. You can visit the European fan palm (Chamaerops humilis var. arborescens) which Goethe used for his illustration of his idea about the Ur-shape of leaves, which Goethe sighted during this year. This palm tree still survives. It had been planted in 1585. It is in the glass house inside the circular garden in the botanical garden of Padua, Italy.

Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein:

What pleases me most at present is plant-life. Everything isforcing itself upon me, I no longer have to think about it,everything comes to meet me, and the whole gigantic kingdombecomes so simple that I can see at once the answer to the mostdifficult problems. If only I could communicate the insight andjoy to someone, but it is not possible. And it is no dream orfancy: I am beginning to grow aware of the essential form withwhich, as it were, Nature always plays, and from which sheproduces her great variety. Had I the time in this brief spanof life I am confident I could extend it to all the realms ofNature – the whole realm.

Thoreau would be informing himself of Goethe’s Italian journey during Spring 1838. Although today this thinking about the Ur-shapes of leaves falls under the category of obsolete science, in that period before the creation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, while Thoreau would be studying it, this would still be cutting edge science. Read about it in James McIntosh’s THOREAU AS ROMANTIC NATURALIST (Cornell UP, 1974). (Of course, when Darwin would publish in 1859, taking the science of biology beyond this Goethe stage, Thoreau would be one of his very first American readers, and would be open to Darwin’s heretical new ideas.)

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MINDYOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

PLANTS








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From this point into 1792, the Reverend William Paley would be actively opposing the international slave trade.

1789





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“EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”: It is a creditable incident inthe history, that when, in 1789, the first privy-council reportof evidence on the trade, a bulky folio, (embodying all the factswhich the London Committee had been engaged for years incollecting, and all the examinations before the council,) waspresented to the House of Commons, a late day being named for thediscussion, in order to give members time, — Mr. Wilberforce, Mr.Pitt, the prime minister, and other gentlemen, took advantage ofthe postponement, to retire into the country, to read the report.For months and years the bill was debated, with some consciousnessof the extent of its relations by the first citizens of England,the foremost men of the earth; every argument was weighed, everyparticle of evidence was sifted, and laid in the scale; and, atlast, the right triumphed, the poor man was vindicated, and theoppressor was flung out. I know that England has the advantage oftrying the question at a wide distance from the spot where thenuisance exists: the planters are not, excepting in rareexamples, members of the legislature. The extent of the empire,and the magnitude and number of other questions crowding intocourt, keep this one in balance, and prevent it from obtainingthat ascendency, and being urged with that intemperance, which aquestion of property tends to acquire. There are causes in thecomposition of the British legislature, and the relation of itsleaders to the country and to Europe, which exclude much that ispitiful and injurious in other legislative assemblies. From thesereasons, the question was discussed with a rare independence andmagnanimity. It was not narrowed down to a paltry electioneeringtrap, and, I must say, a delight in justice, an honest tendernessfor the poor negro, for man suffering these wrongs, combined withthe national pride, which refused to give the support of Englishsoil, or the protection of the English flag, to these disgustingviolations of nature.





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It has often been pointed out that the Reverend William Paley’s depiction of the universe as a giant watch mechanism was an uncited appropriation, but perhaps he should be excused from such charges of plagiarism, since he construed that his task was merely the compilation of textbooks. His most original work, published in this year, was HORCE PAULINCE; OR THE TRUTH OF THE SCRIPTURE HISTORY OF ST. PAUL EVINCED, BY A COMPARISON OF THE EPISTLES WHICH BEAR HIS NAME WITH THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES AND WITH ONE ANOTHER (London; republished by J. Tate in 1840 and by T.R. Birks in 1850).

1790





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The Reverend William Paley was presented to the vicarage of Aldingham.

1792





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The Reverend William Paley’s REASONS FOR CONTENTMENT; ADDRESSED TO THE LABORING PART OF THE BRITISH PUBLIC.

1793





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The Reverend William Paley’s A VIEW OF THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY (London), an apologetic compendium of various arguments against 18th-Century deism. The author provided an a posteriori argument based upon alleged historical facts of early Christianity. He proceeds along historical lines to affirm the truth of Christianity by two propositions; namely, that “there is clear proof that the apostles and their successors underwent the greatest hardships rather than give up the Gospel and cease to obey its precepts” and that “other miracles than those of the Gospel are not satisfactorily attested.” To these he appends “auxiliary” arguments drawn from the “morality of the Gospel,” “originality of Christ's character,” and others. The argument is one-sided on account of its disregard of the field of Christian consciousness.

1794





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In recognition of his apologetic writings, The Reverend William Paley was awarded the prebend of St. Pancras at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the subdeanery of Lincoln, and the rectory of Bishop Warmouth. During this year the reverend preached a sermon on the topic “Dangers Incidental to the Clerical Character” and delivered an “Assize Sermon” at Durham.

1795





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The Reverend William Paley, archdeacon of Carlisle, published his NATURAL THEOLOGY: OR, EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY, COLLECTED FROM THE APPEARANCES OF NATURE. The Reverend used the analogy of a watch requiring a watchmaker to argue that the universe implies an intelligent designer. After being for many years a text-book classic, this would be superseded due to a shift from mechanical objectivism to immanent subjectivism. Paley advanced the teleological argument from design founded on the unity and adaptability of created things. His argument was basically rationalistic yet failed to convince the rationalists themselves. The rebound from his idea of a complex, perfected organism dropping suddenly amidst foreign surroundings, as illustrated by the finding of a watch, would be the subsequent hypotheses of natural selection and adaptation to environment and the theory of descent with modification.

(Henry Thoreau would be studying this in his senior year at college.)

1802

NATURAL THEOLOGY, INATURAL THEOLOGY, II




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/36/1836_PaleysNaturalTheology_I.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/36/1836_PaleysNaturalTheology_II.pdf


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PROSPECTION AND SOLACE VS HECATOMBS2 AND HOLOCAUST3

Let us evaluate this term PROSPECTION used by the Reverend William Paley, archdeacon of Carlisle, in his NATURAL THEOLOGY: OR, EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY, COLLECTED FROM THE APPEARANCES OF NATURE of 1802.

Stephen Jay Gould scoped the term as signifying a “knowledge of ultimate benefit.”4

The Reverend Paley elsewhere speaks of this divine prospection as “an invisible hand, detaining the contented prisoner [a bird sitting upon its eggs] from her fields and groves for a purpose, as the event proves, the most worthy of the sacrifice, the most important, the most beneficial.” He was able to think this way because he was thoroughly entangled in the notion that nature must be not only benevolent but also efficient — God wouldn’t create something merely to destroy it, for God does not do pointless things, or allow some good to come into existence by way of long and horrifying aeons of cruelty, for God is not only all-powerful but also does not practice unnecessary cruelty.

2. A hecatomb was the slaughter of 100 oxen, and thus by extension any large slaughter perpetrated in the expectation of a consequent divine benefit, or, rather, in order to reduce current levels of anxiety with regard to what would be to come.3. An offering in which the entire offering is to be consumed by the flames, leaving nothing to be shared among the priests of the temple.4. Page 139 of the essay collection from the pages of Natural History magazine: EIGHT LITTLE PIGGIES: REFLECTIONS IN NATURAL HISTORY (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1994).


Those actions of animals which we refer to instinct, are not gone aboutwith any view to their consequences … but are pursued for the sake ofgratification alone; what does all this prove, but that the prospection,which must be somewhere, is not in the animal, but in the Creator?







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The problem with the concept of fitness is that theoretical population ecologists have been applying this concept arbitrarily both to individual organisms and to species. They have been supposing that there is a definitional identity between the concept of fitness as applied to an individual specimen, in regard to its fitness to survive and to reproduce its kind, and the concept of fitness as applied to a species as a whole, in regard to its fitness to continue in existence by not becoming extinct, its numbers never ever falling to zero. They have assumed there to be a straight-line positive correlation between general individual fitness and species fitness:

GENERAL

INDIVIDUAL

FITNESS

SPECIES FITNESS





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Whereas it is entirely likely that at unexplored points high on such a chart, such a correlation would alter radically, and continue only as an inverse correlation:

Hecatomb upon hecatomb leading only to holocaust without any conceivable solace of hopefulness.

GENERAL

INDIVIDUAL

FITNESS

SPECIES FITNESS





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May 25, Saturday: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 2d birthday.

William Paley died in Lincoln, England. From this year into 1808 the first collected edition of his works would be being printed.

1805





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The Reverend William Paley, D.D.’s THE PRINCIPLES OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (London: R. Faulder). (This may or may not be the edition that was in the personal library of Henry Thoreau, to which he would refer in “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE”.)

PHILIP CAFARO ON WILLIAM PALEY IN “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE”5

PAGE 68: Slavery and imperialism are such egregious injustices,Thoreau asserts in “Resistance,” that we have an absolute,unavoidable duty to oppose our own government if it supportsthem. This is not a matter of expediency, but of justice. Arguingagainst theologian William Paley, a prominent advocate ofsubmission to civil government, he writes:

Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases towhich the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a

1806




WILLIAM PALEY




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/17/80DECADE/85/1785_WilliamPaley_I.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/17/80DECADE/85/1785_WilliamPaley_II.pdf


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people, as well as an individual, must do justice costwhat it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from adrowning man, I must restore it to him though I drownmyself. This, according to Paley, would beinconvenient. But he that would save his life, in sucha case, shall lose it. This people must cease to holdslaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost themtheir existence as a people.

In a sense, moral duty overrides expediency and all conflictinginterests by its very definition. This is true whether or notduty ever calls for the absolute sacrifice of one’s life,regardless of how often duty and expediency do, in fact,conflict, and regardless of whether Thoreau is right in thisparticular instance. Of course, we should not assert such dutieslightly. However, “when a sixth of the population of a nationwhich has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, anda whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreignarmy, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not toosoon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes thisduty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrunis not our own, but ours is the invading army.” Because theseinjustices are being sustained or perpetrated by our government,in our name, we have a direct responsibility to oppose them.

5. Philip Cafaro. THOREAU’S LIVING ETHICS: WALDEN AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004





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Henry David Thoreau quotes this in his essay on Civil Disobedience, "Resistance to Civil Government," pointing out that it is merely a rule of expediency and that the Reverend Paley evidently never contemplated a situation such as human slavery, in which "a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may." Thoreau justifies this by an oblique reference to scripture -- to the fool who in attempting to save himself, loses his own soul.


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The Reverend William Paley’s SERMONS ON SEVERAL SUBJECTS and SERMONS AND TRACTS were issued posthumously.

1808





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An edition of THE PRINCIPLES OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY of the Reverend William Paley was prepared in two volumes in London (although we know that Henry Thoreau had a 2-volume edition of this work that had been printed in London in his personal library, it is conjectural that his edition was this particular year’s).

1811

PALEY’S PRINCIPLES, IPALEY’S PRINCIPLES, II




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/11/1811_PaleysPrinciples_I.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/11/1811_PaleysPrinciples_II.pdf


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Another edition of the works of the Reverend William Paley was prepared, by Alexander Chalmers, with a biography, in five volumes (London).

1819





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Friend Jonathan Dymond’s AN INQUIRY INTO THE ACCORDANCY OF WAR WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY: AND AN EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING BY WHICH IT IS DEFENDED: WITH OBSERVATIONS ON SOME OF THE CAUSES OF WAR AND ON SOME OF ITS EFFECTS (Philadelphia: Tract Association of Friends, between 1823 and 1825). [Bound in with this volume, eventually, as it now exists as a book on the shelf of a research library, would be A LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES TOUCHING THE MATTER OF SLAVERY / BY THEODORE PARKER, a tract which would be issued in Boston in 1848 by J. Munroe.] Thomas Hancock remarked that this volume “completed succeeded in overthrowing the delusive and pernicious doctrines of Paley, with regard to ‘expediency’ as a rule of conduct either for states or individuals.”

1823

WILLIAM PALEY

THEODORE PARKER

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY





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AN INQUIRY INTOTHE ACCORDANCY OF WAR

WITH THEPRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY,

ANDAN EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING BY WHICH IT IS DEFENDED.

WITH OBSERVATIONS ON SOME OF THE CAUSES OF WAR AND ON SOME OF ITS EFFECTS.BY JONATHAN DYMOND.

Contempt prior to examination, however comfortable tothe mind which entertains it, or how ever natural togreat parts, is extremely dangerous; and more apt thanalmost any other disposition, to produce erroneousjudgments both of persons and opinions.-PALEY.

PHILADELPHIA:URIAH HUNT & SON, No. 62 NORTH FOURTH STREETJACOB SMEDLEY, JR., 304 ARCH STREET.

COLLINS & BROTHER, NEW YORK.EPHRAIM MORGAN & SON CINCINNATI.

CUSHING & BROTHER, BALTIMORE.1

1. Another source alleges that the 1st edition of AN ENQUIRY, ETC. was printed in London in 1823 without the author’s name. The 3rd edition “corrected and enlarged” was published in 1824. It was republished in Philadelphia in 1834 with notes by Thomas S. Grimké, and again in 1835, that being referred to as the 4th edition.

READ THIS BOOK




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/34/1834_JonathanDymondWAR.pdf


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Two more editions of the works of the Reverend William Paley were prepared, one by E. Lynam and the other by his son E. Paley.

1825





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By this point the influence of the “Common Sense” school of Scottish philosophy, supremely universal and scientific and therefore beyond reproach as a tool for the generation of the requisite nonsectarian citizenry, was overwhelming in the PCness of American universities. By common-sensical was meant universally self-evident, which left the previous Humean skepticism out in the cold.6

The President of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, Esq., the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London, implementing the last will and testament of the Right Honourable and Reverend Francis Henry, Earl of Bridgewater, who had died during February 1828, invited the Reverend William Kirby to craft one of the offerings in a series that would become known as the “Bridgewater Treatises.”7

1830

6. The revealed texts at the time were such as Bishop Joseph Butler’s THE ANALOGY OF RELIGION, NATURAL AND REVEALED (1736) and the Reverend William Paley’s NATURAL THEOLOGY: OR, EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY, COLLECTED FROM THE APPEARANCES OF NATURE (1802). For a late and clear statement of this position, see the work of Thomas Reid (1710-1796). For a last gasp, refer to Mark Hopkins’s EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY (1846).

THOMAS REID





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Professor Cornelius Conway Felton prepared an edition of HOMER, using the illustrations prepared by John

7. The Earl of Bridgewater had directed his trustees to invest £8,000 in the public funds, and use the accruing dividends to subsidize the publication of 1,000 copies of a work “On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation,” illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as, for instance, the variety and formation of God’s creatures in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion; the construction of the hand of man, and an infinite variety of other arguments: as also by discoveries, ancient and modern, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature. The immediate inspiration for this project had been the Reverend William Paley, archdeacon of Carlisle’s 1802 crowdpleaser, NATURAL THEOLOGY: OR, EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY, COLLECTED FROM THE APPEARANCES OF NATURE.

With the advice of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, and with the concurrence of a nobleman immediately connected with the deceased, the Royal Society settled upon eight authors they could trust to write with appropriate piety and tendentiousness on different aspects of the assigned topic:

The Reverend Thomas Chalmers: THE ADAPTATION OF EXTERNAL NATURE TO THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONSTITUTION OF MAN.

Professor John Kidd: ON THE ADAPTATION OF EXTERNAL NATURE TO THE PHYSICAL CONDITION OF MAN.Professor William Whewell: ON ASTRONOMY AND GENERAL PHYSICS.Sir Charles Bell KH FRS FRSE FRCSE MWS: THE HAND: ITS MECHANISM AND VITAL ENDOWMENTS AS

EVINCING DESIGN.Dr. Peter Mark Roget, FRS: ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO NATURAL

THEOLOGY.The Reverend Professor William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S., Dean of Westminster: GEOLOGY AND

MINERALOGY CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO NATURAL THEOLOGY.The Reverend William Kirby: ON THE HISTORY HABITS AND INSTINCTS OF ANIMALS.Dr. William Prout, FRS: CHEMISTRY, METEOROLOGY, AND THE FUNCTION OF DIGESTION.

1833







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kidd_(chemist)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mark_Roget

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Prout


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Flaxman (1755-1826).





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According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):

On a following screen is a list of textbooks that were to be used at Harvard for the school year 1833/1834, together with their list prices at the Brown, Shattuck, and Company bookstore, “Booksellers to the University.”

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 3 (1833-1837) -David Henry Thoreau enters Harvard College (president JosiahQuincy), having barely squeezed by his entrance exams and rooming with Charles S.Wheeler

Thoreau’s Harvard curriculum: Greek (8 terms under Felton and Dunkin)-composition,grammar, “Greek Antiquities,” Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Sophocles,Euripides, Homer. Latin Grammar (8 terms under Beck and McKean)-composition, “LatinAntiquities,” Livy, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Juvenal. Mathematics (7 terms underPierce and [Joseph] Lovering) English (8 terms under ET Channing, Giles, W&GSimmons)-grammar, rhetoric, logic, forensics, criticism, elocution, declamations,themes. Mental Philosophy (under Giles) William Paley, Stewart. Natural Philosophy(under [Joseph] Lovering)-astronomy. Intellectual Philosophy (under Bowen) Locke,Say, Story. Theology (2 terms under H Ware)-Paley, Charles Butler, New Testament.Modern Languages (voluntary) Italian (5 terms under Bachi) French (4 terms underSurault) German (4 terms under Bokum) Spanish (2 terms under [Francis] Sales)Attended voluntary lectures on German and Northern literature (Longfellow),mineralogy (Webster), anatomy (Warren), natural history (Harris).

Thoreau was an above average student who made mixed impressions upon hisclassmates.

In the spring of ‘36 Thoreau withdrew due to illness -later taught for a briefperiod in Canton under the Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, a leading New Englandintellectual who Harding suggests profoundly influenced Thoreau.

(Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)





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A new edition of THE WORKS OF WILLIAM PALEY... was prepared in Philadelphia by the firm of J.J. Woodward. This was the edition that would be on the bookshelf of Henry Thoreau, and would evidently be the edition he would consult for his reading of the A VIEW OF THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY.

1836

WM. PALEY’S WORKS




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/36/1836_PaleysWORKS.pdf


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According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):

May 5, Friday: In Providence Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

6th day Attended the School Committee, the Meeting of OB Trustees & also a committee of the Meeting for Sufferings in the evening to prepare an address on Slavery to be circulated among our Members & people at large lodged at the School House —

David Henry Thoreau’s essay on his Harvard College assignment “Paley in his NATURAL THEOLOGY, Chap. 23 — speaks of minds utterly averse to ‘the flatness of being content with common reasons’ —

and considers the highest minds ‘most liable to this repugnancy.’ See the passage, and explain the moral or intellectual defect.”

Turgot has said, “He that has never doubted the existence ofmatter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysicalinquiries.” It would seem as if doubt and uncertainty grew withthe growth of the intellect, and strengthened with its strength.The giant intellect, it is true, is for a season borne along

1837

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHYChapter 4 (1837-1838) -After graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau taughtschool in Concord but quit after two weeks as a result of a dispute over corporalpunishment. He searched in vain elsewhere for a teaching position. He then turnedto his father’s pencil business and through Harvard library research developed asuperior pencil.

Thoreau was developing his friendship with Waldo Emerson, who introduced him tomembers of the “Hedge Club” (begun in 1836) who became known as theTranscendentalists. Some members of the Hedge Club were: FH Hedge, Rev GeorgeRipley, Rev Orestes Brownson, Rev Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody,Bronson Alcott, Rev Theodore Parker, C.P. Cranch, Rev John Sullivan Dwight and Thoreau(in fall of 1837.)

The Emerson/Thoreau friendship flourished. Many like Lowell saw him as an inferiorcopy of Emerson, but Emerson defended Thoreau’s originality. Bronson Alcott movedto Concord to be near Emerson and became a friend of and influence upon Thoreau.Thoreau delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 11, 1838.

(Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

WILLIAM PALEY





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with the tide, the opinions and prejudices of the mass aresilently acquiesced in, the senses are, for awhile, the supremearbiters from whose decisions there is no appeal — mystery isyet afar off, it is but a cloud in the distance, whose shadow,as it flits across the landscape, gives a pleasing varietyto the scene. But as the perfect day approaches, its morninglight discovers the dark and straggling clouds, which at firstskirted the horizon, assembling as at a signal, and, as theyexpand and multiply, rolling slowly onward to the zenith,till at last the whole heavens, if we except a faint glimmeringin the east, are overshadowed. The earth was once firm beneaththe feet, but it now affords but a frail support, — its solidsurface is as yielding and elastic as air. The grass grew andthe water ran, and who is so blind as to question their reality?A feeling of loneliness comes over the soul, for these thingsare of the past.This is the season of probation, but the time approaches,and is now at hand, when the glorious bow shall “rise onthe lurid rear of the tempest, the sun laugh jocundly abroad,and

Every bathed leaf and blossom fairPour out its soul to the delicious air.”

The embryo philosopher seeks the sunny side of the hill, or thegrateful coolness of the grove — he instinctively bares hisbosom to the zephyr, that he may with the least inconveniencediscuss the reality of outward existences. No proposition is soself-evident as to escape his suspicion, nor yet so obscure asto withstand his scrutiny. He acknowledges but two distinctexistences, Nature and Spirit; all things else which hisobstinate and self-willed senses present to him, are plainly,though unaccountably, absurd. He laughs through his tears at thevery mention of a mathematical demonstration. There is aflatness about what is common that at once excites his ridiculeor disgust. He goes abroad into the world, and hears men assertand deny in positive terms, and he is astounded — he is shocked— he perceives no meaning in their words or their actions.He recognizes no axioms, he smiles at reason and common sense,and sees truth only in the dreams and superstitions of mankind.And yet he but carries out principles which men practicallyadmit every day of their lives. Most, nay all, acknowledge a fewmysteries; some things, they admit, are hard to understand;but these are comparatively few, and could they but refer themback one link in the chain of causes and effects, the difficultywould at once be removed.Our philosopher has a reasonable respect for the opinionsof men, but this respect has not power to blind his judgment;taking as he does an original view of things, he innocentlyconfounds the manifest with the mysterious.That such is the common reason, was properly enough, in the firstplace, no recommendation with him, and is now a positive





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objection. What is more common than error? Some seeming truthshe has clung to as the strongholds of certainty, till a closerinvestigation induced mistrust. His confidence in theinfallibility of reason is shaken, — his very existence becomesproblematical. He has been sadly deceived, and experience hastaught him to doubt, to question even the most palpable truths.He feels that he is not secure till he has gone back to theirprimitive elements, and taken a fresh and unprejudiced viewof things. He builds for himself, in fact, a new world.The opinions of the few, the persecuted, the dreamers of thisworld, he has a peculiar respect for — he is prepossessedin their favor. Man does not wantonly rend the meanest tie thatbinds him to his fellow; he would not stand aloof, even in hisprejudices, did not the stern demands of truth, backed byconviction, require it. He is ready enough to float with thetide, and when he does stem the current of popular opinion,sincerity, at least, must nerve his arm. He has not only theburden of proof, but that of reproof, to support. We may callhim a fanatic — an enthusiast — but these are titles of honor,they signify the devotion and entire surrendering of himselfto his cause. Where there is sincerity there is truth also.So far as my experience goes, man never seriously maintainedan objectionable principle, doctrine, or theory. Error never hada sincere defender; her disciples were never enthusiasts.This is strong language, I confess, but I do not rashly make useof it. We are told that “to err is human,” but I would rathercall it inhuman, if I may use the word in this sense. I speaknot of those errors that have to do with facts and occurrences,but rather errors of judgment. Words, too, I would regardas mere signs of ideas.

That passage in the Vicar of Wakefield which Johnson pronouncedfine, but which Goldsmith was wise enough to strike out,previous to publication, must be taken in a very limited sense.“When I was a young man,” he writes, “I was perpetually startingnew propositions; but I soon gave this over; for I found thatgenerally what was new was false.”At best, we can but say of a common reason, that men do notdispute it. True, they defend it when attacked, for if they didnot, Reason never would. This is well explained by Gray, when heundertakes to account for the popularity of Shaftesbury.“Men are very prone,” says he, “to believe what they do notunderstand; — they will believe anything at all, provided theyare under no obligation to believe it; — they love to take a newroad even when that road leads nowhere.”





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August 30, Wednesday: At the Harvard College graduation ceremonies, William James Hubard was busy cutting memento silhouettes of the various seniors of the graduating Class of 1837, and so of course he one of the silhouettes he cut, presumably attired in a mortar-board graduation hat, was a full-figure one of graduating senior David H. Thoreau. (I do not have an illustration of this, but on the following screen is a silhouette, done of Stansfield Rawson of Wastdale Hall, Cumberland, that is generally representative of Hubard’s skill in the genre.)

http://www.baumanrarebooks.com/browse-books.aspx

AN EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY: THE EARLIEST KNOWN PORTRAIT OF HENRYDAVID THOREAU, AN EXTRAORDINARY SILHOUETTE BY HUBARD DONE FORTHOREAU’S 1837 HARVARD GRADUATION THOREAU, Henry David. Original silhouette portrait. Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1837. Image measures 6-3/8 by 9-1/4 inches,mounted in original bird’s-eye maple frame; overall measurements10-3/8 by 13-1/4 inches. $90,000.A splendid, hitherto unknown and unrecorded silhouette portraitof Henry David Thoreau, this silhouette was done by theprominent silhouette artist and painter William J. Hubard on theoccasion of Thoreau’s graduation from Harvard University in 1837and is signed by Hubbard. In fine original bird’s-eye frame. Thoreau allowed only a few portraits to be done in his lifetime,and until now, only a handful of images, all dated after 1854,were known to exist: two daguerreotypes, several roughcaricatures done by friends, and a sketch, the original of whichis nearly completely disintegrated. This silhouette portraitpre-dates the other portraits by some 17 years. It depictsThoreau’s full figure and profile and shows him dressed ingraduation cap and gown. It is identified on the front, in theartist’s hand, “Henry David Thoreau, Harvard 183, Wm. J. Hubard,profilist.” Hubard was an English-born artist who attained fameat an early age as a silhouettist. Upon his arrival in Americain the mid-1800’s, he was widely praised and his silhouetteswere displayed at exhibitions; within a few years, however, hehad retired from silhouette-cutting and devoted himself topainting, exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in 1834.he continued throughout his life to occasionally cut profiles,doing a silhouette of Franklin Pierce as late as 1852. Hubardwas on the east coast in 1837, eventually marrying in Octoberin Virginia and traveling to Europe at the beginning of 1838.Hubard is considered to be a major silhouette artist of the 19thcentury, and examples of his work signed are rare.On the reverse of the silhouette is a small piece of paper whichreads in a contemporary hand “David Henry Thoreau, Harvard 1837,given Dr. Joseph Green Cogswell Cambridge, Mass.” Cogswell, atone point librarian of Harvard University, was the firstsuperintendent of the Astor Library in New York. The switch inThoreau’s name –it reads “David Henry,” not “Henry David”– is infact appropriate, as Thoreau’s name was indeed officially “DavidHenry.” Called by his middle name by his family from birth, aftergraduating from college he changed his name to “Henry David” toreflect this practice (though characteristically he neverbothered to make it official, just as he never officiallygraduated from Harvard because he refused to pay a five dollar




http://www.baumanrarebooks.com/browse-books.aspx


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fee for the diploma).With the help of curators and experts, we have ascertained thatno mention of this portrait exists in Thoreau’s archives or inmodern bibliographies. In our experience, we have encounteredfew pieces of such immediate historical, literary and artisticinterest as this silhouette. Because so few images of Thoreauexist, this will be regarded as an important discovery byliterary scholars and Thoreau enthusiasts. An unusually largesilhouette, the portrait faithfully depicts Thoreau’s profileand characteristic stance, as described by his contemporaries.As an unrecorded signed work by William Hubard, the silhouetteis also of great importance to Hubard experts and collectors ofearly American silhouettes. A truly extraordinary piece.





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The Harvard commencement contributions made by graduating senior Charles Wyatt Rice of Brookfield and by graduating senior Henry Vose of Dorchester in regard to “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times Considered in its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary Character of a Nation” offer interesting points of comparison and contrast with the contribution made on this day by the 3d member of their panel, graduating senior Henry David Thoreau of Concord:

This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it isuseful –it is more to be admired and enjoyed then, than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed,–the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other sixhis sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the softinfluences and sublime revelations of Nature.

1st, the contribution which would have been made by Young Charles Wyatt Rice (had he bothered to show up for this commencement exercise):

Well, first of all, there is the matter of young Charles Wyatt Rice’s spelling. He has been attending a college of some repute for something like four years. Has nobody taken the trouble to teach this student how to spell?

Despite the fact that he has been supplied with the word “commercial,” properly spelled, Rice comes up with “comercial.” He also creates the word “nought,” phonetically spelled, for “naught.”

There is a problem with young Charles Wyatt Rice’s classical allusion:

He should have referred to the worship of Mammon, rather than to the worship of Plutus. Presumably he is attempting to refer to the plutocrat, and to plutocracy?

There is the matter of young Charles Wyatt Rice’s metaphors:

Paragraph the first: The distinguishing trait of modern times is, the comercial [sic]spirit. The love of gain seems to have taken an universal hold on the hearts of men. Plutus is nowworshipped with a zeal that consumes itself, and the flame at His altar is lit up with an intensity,that brings the very temple crackling and clashing upon the head of the zealous votary, andburies him in its ruins. In looking around upon the faces of our fellow men for sympathy with thepurer emotions that sometimes spring up in our own bosoms, we find nought [sic] there butgain. Until the question is forced with thrilling energy upon every lover of his country, whatmust be the effect of this universal love of gain, this commercial spirit of modern times on thepolitical character of his nation.





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A flame does not light itself up with an intensity, it lights other things with an intensity. A temple may, one is willing to suppose, crackle rather than crack, but when it did so it would crash, rather than clash, upon the head of the zealous votary inside it. Gain is hardly the sort of thing that one finds upon the faces of our fellow men, as what one finds upon the faces of our fellow men are expressions and although greed may involve an expression, gain does not.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice uses curious modifiers:

What might be the function, in this piece, of magnifying mere energy into “thrilling” energy?

Young Charles Wyatt Rice’s sentence construction leaves something to be desired:

The last long sentence of this would apparently be a question, if it made sense at all, but it apparently here was intended to function in some other manner.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice presumably would be saying, above, that speculation has brought about a business crash, and that people are in distress. He certainly is not saying this very well. One might have expected better from a young gentleman who has just spent approximately four years in a liberal arts college — or even two years in a junior college.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice presumably is saying, above, that any legislative measures which would be responses to the nation’s economic predicament would be of necessity temporary

Paragraph 2: The answer is every where around us. We read in the crises to which nationshave come. Well do the members of all commercial states exclaim, the country is in bankruptcy;the people are in distress; in every quarter the cry is help. And with this exclamation is utteredthe confession that very much of this calamity has been brought about by the universal love ofgain, the commercial spirit of modern times. Were this questioned, it might be read in the fate ofthe merchant whom once the morn beheld constant at his counting room, content to get richslowly but surely, until the passion became inordinate and in a moment of temptation, he plungedinto speculation and ruin. It might be read in the fate of the mechanick, who saved hishardearned wages, but only to sink them in speculation, and his family in distress. It might beread, indeed, in the conduct and fate of every class of the community.

Paragraph 3: And now the cry for aid has gone up from the people. This cry has arisen toour legislatures. Another week beholds the congress of the nation assembled at its Capitol.The course of our own nation will find its parallel in that of other countries. Let us for a momentplay the prophet, and, reasoning from the nature of things, anticipate the effect of measures.Influenced, then, by the desire of affording some present relief, the national counsellors enactlaws for the present - laws to operate but for a time - laws to which men look for aid, but underwhich they know not how to act. In a word, they bring upon the people all the evils of temporarylegislation. And what a tyranny is this! Under it men stand in suspense, looking eagerly to theground before them, but too fearful to advance to it. They dare not take new steps for they fearthat the laws which urged them to it will cease, and then they may wish, but wish in vain for theirformer station. The country presents a singular but a fearful spectacle, the business of a nationfettered by suspense, and men looking, but looking in vain to the countenances of their fellowsfor hope and assurance. A new reign is brought upon the land, not indeed the reign of Terrour,but one more fearful still, the reign of Doubt. We behold a nation, whose countenance bears butone impress, anxiety, and whose limbs are fettered but by one manacle, uncertainty.





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measures, and would therefore be unreassuring. We note that he does not say why the legislative response would of necessity be in the form of temporary measures. We note also that after having identified the cause of the nation’s economic slump as overextension due to overconfidence, he identifies the solution as a return of confidence without explaining how it might be, that the antidote to a poison is to consist of a great deal more of that very same poison.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice has perhaps in the course of his college education read Homer’s Odyssey, or more likely hear of it, but Charybdis was not a rock upon which one’s bark might dash — it was, instead, a humongous whirlpool in which one might be swallowed up. Rice’s metaphor of the chain does not work, for one cannot by riveting (or even by rivetting) tighten a chain. Also, what is this “pressure of the night-mare,” is it maybe like a horse that comes and lies upon one as one sleeps, pressing one down upon one’s bed? Rice’s proffered solution, which is for each businessman to rely on himself rather than waiting upon collective or governmental action, appears to be a standard proposal out of standard polemical party politics. –Rice is a regular Harvard Man, your standard product.

In brief, had Henry David Thoreau delivered such a piece we might have serious doubts at this point that he would ever become competent as a thinker, let alone as a writer! Is it any wonder that, discretion being the better part of valor, Young Charles Wyatt Rice didn’t show up to recite such a commencement exercise as this one, and had to be officially recorded as “sick”?

Paragraph the last: Or if the bark, whose progress we are watching, escape this Scyllaof the Political Sea, it may still dash upon the Charybdis. In times of deep distress, it is thoughtthat any state must be better than the present, any laws better than those now in force. The peoplerise, but too often only to sink into deeper subjection. Witness the popular tumults of the OldWorld, where the mass rule today, only that the morrow may behold them suffering under sternertyranny. The tumult is calmed. But it is the calmness of despair. The attempt to sunder the chains,has been but the occasion of rivetting [sic] them the tighter. The depression of trade, too, isever a strong motive in the people to grant new powers to government. They feel but too deeplythat their trade is depressed, and they fancy that the remedy is not in themselves but in theirlegislators. They come with the humble prayer that the power may be taken from them. For theyfancy they cannot govern themselves. Let them not wonder then, that they feel the power theyhave conferred on others. Let them not be surprised, that the laws which appear to give relief tothe many, give nothing but power to the few. Let them not be disappointed, when they find that aweight, like the pressure of the night-mare, is on them. But let them awake to the consciousness,that their best dependence is upon themselves, and that power is safest, where it is easiestrecalled to those who delegated it.





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Now here is the contribution made by Henry Vose, who at the very least in his approximately four years of study has learned how to spell, if he is not yet entirely clear as to the distinction between “farther” and “further”:

Young Henry Vose has done better than Young Charles Wyatt Rice, in that he has created a 1st paragraph without an egregious spelling error. He posits a world in which a newer commercial spirit, of production and distribution of goods and service, is overwhelming an earlier preoccupation with the appropriation and reappropriation of existing goods.

Young Henry Vose supposes, plausibly, that people who are not in want can be expected to be more productive in science, philosophy, and fiction than people who live in want. Where is this observation going to lead him?

Young Henry Vose demonstrates that commerce influences literature by pointing to financial bequests bestowed. The more “munificent” the male merchants of Boston (by which he evidently means, the richer they get) the larger their financial bequests become, and the more lasting these monuments to their memory become, the nobler the recipient institutions become, and the nobler they become, the more able they become to “ameliorate” mankind (by which he evidently means, to reduce the original ignorance of all of us male citizens, as his ignorance has evidently been reduced). It is therefore our duty as the sons of this maternal institution, Harvard College, our Alma Mater, to respect her, remember her, and be grateful. Wow — what a

Paragraph the first: It has been said to be one of the principal signs of the times thatthe commercial spirit is superseding the warlike spirit in Christendom. If this be true it is indeeda triumph, and we may discover in it some of the causes of that superiority we fondly believe in,of modern times over past ages. That commerce in its innumerable relations influences almostevery department of human affairs no one can doubt. Morals and Politics acknowledge its power,and Letters, which might be supposed to be exempt from its sway, are immediately affected by it.This growing commercial spirit of modern days, this love of enterprise cannot but engender aboldness of thought and action, which the whole community must feel. Its power is almostwithout limit. As long as there are lands to be explored, or seas to be navigated, its votaries areimperceptibly carried farther and farther into its meshes. It deals with every nation, and everyclass, and comes in contact with human character of every stamp.

Paragraph 2: And can it be that commerce, in these numberless connections, does not touchthe literary character of a nation? Must not its influence be widely felt, even if indirect and silent,where letters and science are concerned? Philosophy and fiction find in it elements congenial totheir growth. The novelist finds a romance on the sea and in traffic, matter-of-fact as it may seem,and seizes upon it with the boldness and zeal, which characterize the seaman and the merchant;and the philosopher, as he surveys the ordinary courses of business, finds ample materials forthe imagination, or for reflection, wherewith to verify hypotheses, or erect theories. And hisprospect is boundless: he may look onward and onward as far as the mind’s vision can extend,and still there is something beyond; something to exercise curiosity and excite investigation.

Paragraph 3: But commerce exerts a more direct influence on literature. It is from themunificence of its devotees that the noblest institutions for the amelioration and education ofmankind have grown up. If the public in modern times is indebted to any one class of men morethan another for the aid they have given the sciences and arts, it is to our merchants. They haveerected lasting monuments to their memory in the public institutions they have founded: theyhave endeared themselves to a grateful community by their never failing zeal to aid, either bytheir wealth or their talents in the great cause of education and reform; And among other objectsof their liberality they have not forgotten our Alma Mater. They have ever extended to her afostering hand, encouraging her in the day of her adversity, and aiding her to extend herinfluence, when in the full tide of her glory. It is for us, her sons, to regard them with the liveliestfeelings of respect, and to cherish their memory with the warmest gratitude.





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concept! This has presumably never been said before, or never so well. Vose might as well stop here, but he does not, for he senses that there may be lingering doubts on the parts of those of us who can perceive only the surface appearances of things:

Perhaps we are lucky that Young Henry Vose names no names here. Who would want to be exposed, as biting the hand that feeds?

Young Henry Vose is democratically inclined, one perceives; there may be a mingling of the classes, a circulation of places and roles. The clerk may quit his job and enroll in college, the literary scholar go to work in a downtown firm. This is all OK.

Young Henry Vose posits at the end what he has posited at the beginning, a world in which the production and distribution of goods and service gives people of different areas an excuse to rub elbows with one another. The circularity of this reasoning process seems not to have perplexed him. Now let us compare and contrast this with the contribution made by the third member of the student panel:

Paragraph 4: It is an opinion entertained by many that the operations of traffic must inducea narrowness of mind and soul directly averse to the interests of literature and science. There aresome whose vision is so limited that they only see the merchant through the medium of his day-book and ledger, and who, in the simplicity of their heart believe his whole life consists in buyingand selling merchandize [sic]. They are of that class, who form their judgments from palpableand outward circumstances, and who are either too indifferent or too thoughtless to carry theirobservation farther [sic]. They merely see the ripple on the surface and know nothing of theundercurrent.

Paragraph 5: We need entertain no fears that this growing love of traffic of modern timeswill engross public attention and absorb our best minds to the prejudice of literary pursuits. Thedifferent occupations of life will never suffer for want of numbers. Every man will follow the bentof his feelings and talents, and from the present state of society we have little to apprehend thatany one profession will extend itself to the exclusion of the rest. It is indeed desirable that thepursuits of literature and commerce should have a common feeling and end. It were to be wishedthat their votaries would seek to aid each other; the merchant by imparting his zeal and boldness,and something more solid than either; the scholar by exercising that influence, which letters andscience never fail to give. And we know of no readier means, by which this community of feelingmay be effected than that the scholar and the merchant should oftentimes change places. Shouldone of us descend from the temple of learning to mingle in the walks of business, let us bid himGod-speed, and pray him to remember the interests of science and education, and employ hisextended means in their behalf. And when one, who has begun life in the counting room, entersthe race with us, let us extend to him the hand of welcome, hoping that he may bring with him aportion of that zeal and enterprise, that are the characteristics of his former profession.

Paragraph the last: This growing commercial spirit is of a nature to unite the nationsof the earth. It nurtures a community of interests among people of different tongues and climes.It brings them nearer to each other, and the advance of one nation in education and refinementis made to bear upon the character of its neighbor. And so it is of that internal commerce, whichbinds together the different parts of the same country: giving impetus and nutriment to all theenergies of mankind, and spreading activity, enterprize [sic] and wealth through all classesof society; awakening the moral and intellectual powers of a people as necessary to its ownsuccess, and stamping upon their literary character its own indelible characteristics.





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THE COMMERCIAL SPIRIT OF MODERN TIMES,

CONSIDERED IN ITS INFLUENCE ON THE POLITICAL, MORAL,

AND LITERARY CHARACTER OF A NATION.

The history of the world, it has been justly observed, is the history of the progress of humanity; each epoch is characterized by some peculiar development; some element or principle is continually being evolved by the simultaneous, though unconscious and involuntary, workings and struggles of the human mind.8 Profound study and observation have discovered, that the characteristic of our epoch is perfect freedom — freedom of thought and action.9 The indignant Greek, the oppressed Pole, the zealous American, assert it. The skeptic no less than the believer, the heretic no less than the faithful child of the church, have begun to enjoy it. It has generated an unusual degree of energy and activity — it has generated the commercial spirit. Man thinks faster and freer than ever before. He moreover [inserted above line: ̂ moves] moves faster and freer. He is more restless, for the reason that he is more independent, than ever. The winds and the waves10 are not enough for him; he must needs ransack the bowels of the earth that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its surface.

Indeed, could one examine this beehive of ours from an observatory among the stars, he would perceive an unwonted degree of bustle in these later ages. There would be hammering and chipping, baking and brewing, in one quarter;11 buying and selling, money-changing and

8. Presumably at the suggestion of the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, who had written on Victor Cousin in 1836, Thoreau had checked out from the Gore Hall library in June 1837, and then renewed in July, the English translation published in Boston in 1832 of Professor Cousin’s 1828 lectures, FRAGMENTS PHILOSOPHIQUES, titled INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (tr. Henning Gottfried Linberg). Here we can see the influence of this reading. Refer to pages 146-7, 157, and 272-4.9. In NEW VIEWS OF CHRISTIANITY, SOCIETY, AND THE CHURCH, published in Boston in 1836 while Thoreau was staying at his home, Orestes Augustus Brownson had written as if perfect freedom were something to be expected in humankind’s future. Here, ironically, Thoreau, who himself owned a copy of this treatise, situates it instead in our magnificent present.10. If this indicates anything, Waldo Emerson had written, in NATURE in 1836, that:

11. Emerson had written, in NATURE in 1836, that:

NATURE: “The winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on theside of the ablest navigators.”

NATURE: [Humankind’s] operations taken together are soinsignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing,that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the humanmind, they do not vary the result.





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speech-making, in another. What impression would he receive from so general and impartial a survey? Would it appear to him that mankind used this world as not abusing it?12 Doubtles[s] he would first be struck with the profuse beauty of our orb; he would never tire of admiring its varied zones and seasons, with their changes of livery. He could not but notice that restless animal for whose sake it was contrived,13 but where he found one to admire with him his fair dwelling place, the ninety and nine14 would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface.

In considering the influence of the commercial spirit on the moral character of a nation, we have only to look at its ruling principle. We are to look chiefly for its origin, and the power that still cherishes and sustains [this may have been: sustains and cherishes] it, in a blind and unmanly love of wealth. And it is seriously asked, whether the prevalence of such a spirit can be prejudicial to a community? Wherever it exists it is too sure to become the ruling spirit, and as a natural consequence, it infuses into all our thoughts and affections a degree of its own selfishness; we become selfish in our patriotism, selfish in our domestic relations, selfish in our religion.

Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives; let them make riches the means and not the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit. The sea will not stagnate, the earth will be as green as ever, and the air as pure. This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful—15 it is more to be admired and enjoyed then, than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed, —the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow,16 and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.

But the veriest slave of avarice, the most devoted and selfish worshipper of Mammon, is toiling and calculating to some other purpose than the mere acquisition of the good things of this world; he is preparing, gradually and unconsciously it may be, to lead a more intellectual and spiritual life. Man cannot if he will, however degraded or sensual his existence, escape truth. She makes herself to be heard above the din and bustle of commerce, by the

12. Emerson had written, in NATURE in 1836, that:

NATURE: The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when weexplore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made forhis support and delight on this green ball which floats himthrough the heavens. What angels invented these splendidornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, thisocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? thiszodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coatof climates, this fourfold year?





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merchant at his desk, or the miser counting his gains, as well as in the retirement of the study, by her humble and patient follower.

Our subject has its bright as well as its dark side.17 The spirit we are considering is not altogether and without exception bad. We rejoice in it as one more indication of the entire and universal freedom which characterizes the age in which we live — as an indication that the human race is making one more advance in that infinite series of progressions which awaits it. We rejoice that the history of our epoch will not be a barren chapter in the annals of the world, — that the progress which it shall record bids fair to be general and decided. We glory in those very excesses which are a source of anxiety to the wise and good, as an evidence that man will not always be the slave of matter, but erelong, casting off those earth-born desires which identify him with the brute, shall pass the days of his sojourn in this his nether paradise as becomes the Lord of Creation.18

Young Henry David Thoreau had been reading, during the preceding June and July, in a book published in Boston in 1832 which he twice checked out from the collection of his student club, the “Institute of 1770,” the Henning Gottfried Linberg translation of Professor Victor Cousin’s INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. He had also perused Mrs. William Minot’s review of that book, “Cousin’s Philosophy” in the North American Review (XXXV, December 1936) and may have seen the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson’s review of it in The Christian Examiner (XXI, 1836-1837:33-64). From this introduction to the

history of philosophy, on pages 186-7, he would have learned that any truth or interest considered exclusively inevitably invites displacement or change; that “all the points of view from which truth has been regarded, all the systems and the epochs which history describes, (though excellent in themselves,) are incomplete, and therefore, reciprocally destroy each other; yet there still remains something which preceded and which survives them, namely, humanity itself. Humanity embraces all things, it profits by all; and it advances always,

13. The earth was of course per GENESIS 1:3 contrived for our use. Emerson, in NATURE, quoted a similar conceit as found in a poem by George Herbert:

14. MATTHEW 18:12/13, LUKE 15:4,7.15. NATURE.

The stars have us to bed: Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.Music and light attend our head. All things unto our flesh are kind,In their descent and being; to our mind, In their ascent and cause.

More servants wait on man Than he’ll take notice of. In every path, He treads down that which doth befriend himWhen sickness makes him pale and wan.Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him.

Man is all symmetry, Full of proportions, one limb to another, And to all the world besides. Each part may call the farthest, brother; For head with foot hath private amity, And both with moons and tides.

Nothing hath got so farBut man hath caught and kept it as his prey; His eyes dismount the highest star; He is in little all the sphere.Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Find their acquaintance there.

For us, the winds do blow,The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;Nothing we see, but means our good, As our delight, or as our treasure;The whole is either our cupboard of food, Or cabinet of pleasure.

CHRISTIAN EXAMINER




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/38/1838_ChristianExaminerXXIII.pdf


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and athwart of every thing. And when I speak of humanity, I speak of all the powers which represent it in history; of industry, the state, religion, art, and philosophy.... In fact, humanity is superior to all its epochs. Every epoch aspires to make itself equivalent to humanity; it endeavors to measure its duration, to fill it, and to give a complete idea of humanity; ... therefore, each of these is good, in its time and its place; and it is also good that each of them should, in its turn, succeed and displace its predecessor.” Might it be from this that young Thoreau derived the sentiment he expressed at the conclusion of his piece, as to the “goodness” of the commercial spirit, and the optimism he expresses in regard to human nature?

Christian P. Gruber has, in THE EDUCATION OF HENRY THOREAU, HARVARD 1833-1837 (Ann Arbor MI: University Microfilms Publication 8077 of 1954, pages 193-5, 273-6), suggested that Henry David Thoreau may have been influenced by the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson’s NEW VIEWS OF CHRISTIANITY, SOCIETY, AND THE CHURCH, which had been published in the previous year in Boston and of which Thoreau owned a copy, as well as by the teaching skills of Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing.

16. GENESIS 3:19

WALDEN: For more than five years I maintained myself thus solelyby the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about sixweeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had freeand clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping,and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out ofproportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train,not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time intothe bargain. As I did not teach for the good part of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have triedtrade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under wayin that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil.I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what iscalled a good business.

WALDEN: In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experiencethat to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship buta pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits ofthe simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweatof his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.





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Joseph J. Kwiat has, in “Thoreau’s Philosophical Apprenticeship” (New England Quarterly XVIII,1945:61-69), written of the manner in which Henry David Thoreau in this piece preferred the NATURE of Waldo Emerson over the NATURAL THEOLOGY: OR, EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY, COLLECTED FROM THE APPEARANCES OF NATURE of the Reverend William Paley.

At graduation from Harvard College, in addition to his commencement lecture, Henry David Thoreau prepared a page for his class’s yearbook in which he referred to Stoughton Hall and Hollis Hall as having

“dank but classic walls” which had shut “his old, and almost forgotten friend, Nature” out.

[next screen]

Since he ranked 4th among the 47 graduating seniors in Thoreau’s Harvard College graduating class who were receiving Bachelor of Arts Degrees, and since the parts of the graduation ceremony had been assigned on the basis of class standing, it was Charles Theodore Russell of Princeton, Massachusetts who stood up first, and delivered the salutatory oration in Latin. (As 19th in class standing, Thoreau had to wait through this, a conference, and an essay, before being able to participate in the conference to which he had been assigned.) One of the auditors, the Reverend John Pierce, thought that Russell’s piece “was well written and delivered, but spoken, as if he were disappointed in not having one of the English Orations.”19

17. By 1854 he no longer shared Cousin’s view of inevitable progress:

18. This reflects Cousin’s principal thesis in ECLECTICISM. “Lord of Creation” reflects GENESIS 3:19 as well as Emerson’s NATURE.19. The Reverend John Pierce, MS journal, entry of 30 August 1837.

WALDEN: When formerly I was looking about to see what I could dofor a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes offriends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thoughtoften and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I coulddo, and its small profits might suffice, –for my greatest skillhas been to want but little,– so little capital it required, solittle distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought.While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or theprofessions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs;ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in myway, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep theflocks of Admetus, I also dreamed that I might gather the wildherbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to bereminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads.But I have since learned that trade curses every thingit handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, thewhole curse of trade attaches to the business.





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David Henry Thoreau

I am of French extract, my ancestors having taken refuge in the isle ofJersey, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, by Lewis 14th, in theyear 1685. My grandfather came to this country about the year —73, “sanssouci sans sous,” in season to take an active part in the Revolution,as a sailor before the mast.I first saw the light in the quiet village of Concord, of Revolutionarymemory, July 12th 1817.I shall ever pride myself upon the place of my birth ———May she neverhave cause to be ashamed of her sons. If I forget thee, O Concord, letmy right hand forget her cunning. Thy name shall be my passport inforeign lands. To whatever quarter of the world I may wander, I shalldeem it my good fortune that I hail from Concord North Bridge.At the age of sixteen I turned my steps toward these venerable halls,bearing in mind, as I have ever since done, that I had two ears and butone tongue. I came —— I saw —— I conquered —— but at the hardest, anothersuch a victory and I had been undone; “One branch more,” to use Mr.Quincy’s own words, “and you had been turned by entirely. You have barelygot in.” However, “A man’s a man for a’ that,” I was in, and didn’t stopto ask how I got there.I see but two alternatives, a page or a volume. Spare me, and be thouspared, the latter.Suffice it to say, that though bodily I have been a member of HarvardUniversity, heart and soul I have been far away among the scenes of myboyhood. Those hours that should have been devoted to study, have beenspent in scouring the woods, and exploring the lakes and streams of mynative village. Oft could I sing with the poet,

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;My heart’s in the Higlands [sic] a-chasing the deer;Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe,My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.

The occasional day-dream is a bright spot in the student’s history, acloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, shedding a grateful lustre overlong years of toil, and cheering him onward to the end of his pilgrimage.Immured within the dank but classic walls of a Stoughton or Hollis, hiswearied and care-worn spirit yearns for the sympathy of his old, andalmost forgotten friend, Nature, but failing of this is fain to haverecourse to Memory’s perennial fount, lest her features, her teachings,and spirit-stirring revelations, be forever lost.Think not that my Classmates have no place in my heart —— but this istoo sacred a matter even for a Class Book.

“Friends! that parting tear reserve it,Tho’ ’tis doubly dear to me!Could I think I did deserve it,How much happier would I be.”

As to my intentions ——————— enough for the day is the evil thereof.




Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by King Louis XIV in 1685...

John Thoreau embarking from St. Hélier, Isle of Jersey on May 3, 1773...

French Huguenot service on the revolutionary side during the Revolutionary War...

Birth of David Henry Thoreau...

Psalm 137:5...

As a graduating senior Thoreau had been studying John Milton’s L’Allegro, and had noted his use of the word "cunning" meaning "skill."

Thoreau also quoted Zeno the Stoic early on in his JOURNAL: "On this account have we two ears but one mouth, that we may hear more, and speak less."

Julius Caesar’s "Letter to Amantius" announcing his victory over Pharnaces at Zela in Pontus in 47 BC: "Veni, vidi, vici."

The remark of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, "Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone," was reported in Plutarch’s LIVES, Chapter 21, Section 9.

Thoreau is quoting what Harvard President Josiah Quincy had to say in regard to his college entrance exam results in 1833.

Robert Burns’s poem "For A’ That And A’ That."

Robert Burns again, "My Heart’s In The Highlands."

(Exodus 13:21-22; 14:19; 33:9-10; Numbers 14:14): Go to Exodus 13:21-22...

Samuel Rogers’s PLEASURES OF MEMORY.

Robert Burns again, "Scenes of Woe."

Matthew 6:34: Go to the Sermon on the Mount...


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June 15, Monday: Treaty between the United States of America and Great Britain, in Regard to Limits Westward of the Rocky Mountains.

An anti-Mexican-War statement about the higher law by Henry Thoreau appeared in a Whig newspaper that generally supported that war, the Boston Courier:

Conflict of LawsIn the conflict of laws, one law must be supreme. If ourstate laws conflict with our national, the state lawyields. The higher law always renders the conflictinglower law null and void. Is it not so in all cases? Ifthe national law bids me do what my conscience forbids,must not my conscience be supreme? Shall the law ofconscience or the law of Christ be repealed by theCongress of the United States?

In regard to this 1846 public appeal to conscience by Thoreau, we should consider that according to Professor Daniel Walker Howe’s MAKING THE AMERICAN SELF: JONATHAN EDWARDS TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN (Studies in Cultural History. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1997, page 236), the real subject of Thoreau’s January 1848 lecture “‘The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government’ would be the construction of a moral self, to which the act of breaking the law is a means.... Thoreau refused to accept the conventional wisdom that conscience was a weak faculty, and undertook to illustrate, through precept and example, the potential power of conscience in everyday life ... his essay is in its way a religious document, part of the literature of spiritual perfectionism.” Although the title which Thoreau assigned for his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” highlights his repudiation of Garrisonian nonresistance, Howe points out on page 240 that “Thoreau had attempted to preserve some of the conventional nonresistant attitude toward government. ‘I submit to loss, inconvenience, suffering, in obedience to law even if I conceive the law unjust,’ he declared, ‘but I cannot do wrong,’ even to obey the law.”

Continuing on pages 244-5, Howe argues that Thoreau cannot be described as a liberal. What he was rather than a liberal, Howe offers, was “a Romantic religious perfectionist.”

Thoreau’s orientation to political thought did notreally come primarily from the liberal tradition. Hisextensive library included none of Locke’s politicalwritings and nothing at all by Thomas Jefferson. Heconceded the applicability of liberal premises toAmerican institutions of government only in order toconsign them to the inferior realm of man-made, asopposed to the eternal moral principles of nature. Thecoordinates of Thoreau’s thinking about politics hadbeen established by his study of moral philosophy as anundergraduate. The philosophers whom Harvard Collegetook most seriously in his day were ethicalintuitionists like the Scotsman Dugald Stewart. A

1846

WAR ON MEXICO





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favorite whipping-boy of Harvard moral philosophy wasWilliam Paley, archdeacon of Carlisle and popularizerof “Christian Evidences.” ... As the title “Resistanceto Civil Government” indicates, Thoreau framed hisargument as a sarcastic commentary on Paley’s chapteron the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government” in hisMORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.... (Paley only deals with thequestion of revolution, not with selective civildisobedience.) Thoreau comments sardonically: “Paleynever seems to have contemplated those cases to whichthe rule of expediency does not apply, in which apeople, as well as an individual, must do justice, costwhat it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from adrowning man, I must restore it to him though I drownmyself. This, according to Paley, would beinconvenient. But he that would save his life, in sucha case, shall lose it.”20 Paley represented a traditionin Latitudinarian Anglicanism going all the way back toArchbishop Tillotson and John Locke, one that BenjaminFranklin had found congenial. For Thoreau, Paleytypified the shortcomings of the whole of bourgeoisutilitarian liberalism, concerned with self-interestand expediency. It was no accident that Thoreau’s essay,along with his other writings, gained a significantaudience only when nineteenth-century liberalism wascoming under widespread attack.

Continuing on pages 245-6, Howe offers that:

To understand Thoreau’s purpose in the essay“Resistance to Civil Government,” we must see it as anexample of religious perfectionism. Among the earliestand most consistently influential examples of theconstructed self in American culture were religiousidentities. The distinguishing characteristic of theevangelical tradition is its insistence that a properChristian must be born again, that is, must experience

20. MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, VI. ii

RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT





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a transformation into a new identity as follower ofChrist. The decision for Christ is generally conceivedas a response to divine grace. Henry David Thoreau’swritings are also framed to provoke in his readers aconversion experience of a sort — or at least, aspreparation for a transforming grace that will beencountered in nature. The objective is a new identityas a moral being, and this demands a consciousresolve.... Particularly relevant was Jonathan Dymond(1796-1828), an English Quaker whose ESSAYS ON THE PRINCIPLESOF MORALITY Thoreau studied in his student days. Dymondargued that the American colonists of 1776 could havemade their point successfully and without bloodshedsimply by massive noncompliance with the tax laws.

JONATHAN DYMOND





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Professor James Dwight Dana of Yale College declared that:

The whole plan of creation had evident reference to Manas the end and crown of the animal kingdom, and ...progression from the lower to the higher races.... Theearlier races were of lower types.... The developmentof the plan of creation ... was in accordance with thelaw of ... progress from the simple to the complex, fromcomprehensive unity to multiplicity through successiveindividualizations.

Dana clearly did not consider that the obvious self-serving and self-congratulatory nature of this nonscientific belief system was a reason for self-doubt. That his belief system was self-serving was obviously to him merely some sort of quaint coincidence! (Well, but he was a Yalie, and a Louis Agassiz colleague.)

Stephen Jay Gould, page 105: “James Dwight Dana viewedthe entire geological history of the earth and life asone long, coherent, and heroic story with a moral — atale of inexorable progress, expressed in both physicaland biological history, and leading, inevitably andpurposefully, to God’s final goal of a species imbuedwith sufficient consciousness to glorify His name andworks.”

During this year Charles Darwin began to write down his ideas about descent with modification. He wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker in regard to the providentialist idea that Nature exemplified God’s benevolence toward His creatures:

1856

What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy,wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!




Dana, James Dwight. _Thoughts on Species_. Philadelphia, 1857

Steel engraving made from a drawing by William Henry Bartlett in 1839 or 1840


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Darwin ... revered William Paley during his youth. In a courageous actof intellectual parricide, he then overthrew his previous mentor — notmerely by becoming an evolutionist, but by constructing a particularversion of evolutionary theory maximally disruptive of Paley’s systemand deepest beliefs.... Where did Darwin get such a radical version ofevolution? Surely not from the birds and bees, the twigs and trees.Nature helped, but intellectual revolutions must also have ideologicalbases. Scholars ... agree that two Scottish economists of thegeneration just before Darwin played a dominant role: Thomas RobertMalthus and the great Adam Smith himself. From Malthus, Darwin receivedthe key insight that growth in population, if unchecked, will outrunany increase in the food supply. A struggle for existence musttherefore arise, leading by natural selection to survival of thefittest (to cite all three conventional Darwinian aphorisms in a singlesentence). Darwin states that this insight from Malthus supplied thelast piece that enabled him to complete the theory of natural selectionin 1838 (though he did not publish his views for twenty-one years).Adam Smith’s influence was more indirect, but also more pervasive. Weknow that the Scottish economists interested Darwin greatly and that,during the crucial months of 1838, while he assembled the pieces soonto be capped by his Malthusian insight, he was studying the thought ofAdam Smith. The theory of natural selection is uncannily similar to thechief doctrine of laissez-faire economics. (In our academic jargon, wewould say that the two theories are “isomorphic” — that is,structurally similar point for point, even though the subject matterdiffers.) To achieve the goal of a maximally ordered economy in thelaissez-faire system, you do not regulate from above by passingexplicit laws for order. You do something that, at first glance, seemsutterly opposed to your goal: You simply allow individuals to strugglein an unfettered way for personal profit. In this struggle, theinefficient are weeded out and the best balance each other to form anequilibrium to everyone’s benefit. Darwin’s system works in exactly thesame manner, only more relentlessly. No regulation comes from on high;no divine watchmaker superintends the work of his creation. Individualsare struggling for reproductive success, the natural analog of profit.No other mechanism is at work, nothing “higher” or more exalted. Yetthe result is adaptation and balance — and the cost is hecatomb afterhecatomb after hecatomb.... For Malthus, Paley actually cites the keyline that inspired Darwin’s synthesis in 1838 (but in the context of apassage on civil vs. natural evils). Paley writes:

The order of generation proceeds by something like ageometrical progression. The increase of provision,under circumstances even the most advantageous, canonly assume the form of an arithmetic series. Whenceit follows, that the population will always overtakethe provision, will pass beyond the line of plenty,and will continue to increase till checked by thedifficulty of procuring subsistence.

(At this point, Paley adds a footnote: “See this subject stated in alate treatise upon population” — obviously Malthus.)





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[NOTE: Compare and contrast this with Henry Thoreau’s horror at what he found himself thinking, about nature, late at night in the train station in Worcester!!]

Hecatomb21 upon hecatomb, leading only to holocaust!22

But — by the time the ORIGIN OF SPECIES appeared in 1859, he had decided to excise its worst passages about how incompatible the natural facts of parasitism, cruelty, and waste were with any concept of a caring and all-observant deity.23

Later, Darwin would write in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY that:

In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was, also, necessaryto get up Paley’s EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY, and his MORALPHILOSOPHY.... The logic of this book and as I may add of hisNATURAL THEOLOGY gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The carefulstudy of these works, without attempting to learn any part byrote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as Ithen felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me inthe education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myselfabout Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmedand convinced of the long line of argumentation.

21. A hecatomb was the slaughter of 100 oxen, and thus by extension any large slaughter perpetrated in the expectation of a consequent divine benefit, or, rather, in order to reduce current levels of anxiety with regard to what would be to come.22. An offering in which the entire offering is to be consumed by the flames, leaving nothing to be shared among its priests.23. Stanley Edgar Hyman, THE TANGLED BANK, New York, 1962, page 38.

THE SCIENCE OF 1856




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1856_in_science


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Archbishop Richard Whately’s PALEY’S EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY, WITH ANNOTATIONS and PALEY’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY, WITH ANNOTATIONS.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

1859








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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: March 27, 2015

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST




mailto:[email protected]

Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.


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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.





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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <[email protected]>. Arrgh.




mailto:[email protected]

the rev. wm paley, archdeacon carlisle -

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