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Defra IS the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting the UK’s world-leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Defra’s very broad remit means it plays a major role in all our day-to-day lives, from the food we eat and the air we breathe, to the water we drink. - Water Abstraction ReformRisk Solutions helped Defra design and test changes to the regime that govern how users can abstract water from rivers and ground water aquifers, in response to increasing pressures from demographic and climate change. We managed a multi-disciplinary team that engaged water users, environmental groups and regulators in the construction of an integrated water ...Read more - Foot and MouthFollowing the 2001 outbreak of FMD, Defra imposed a 20-day standstill period prohibiting any livestock movements off-farm following the arrival of an animal. The 20-day rule caused significant difficulties for farmers. The Lessons Learned Inquiry, which reported in July 2002, recommended that the 20-day standstill remain in place pending a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the ...Read more
The concept of peacemaking or hózh̨óji naat’aah goes back to the beginning of time and is embedded in the journey narrative. In fact, according to the journey narrative, the Holy People journeyed through four worlds. In the course of their journey, they came upon many problems, which were either caused naturally or caused by the Holy People. The problems had to be addressed and resolved before the journey continued. The problems could be addressed by the use of prayers, songs and offerings. These remedies were incorporated into the Diné Traditional Ceremonies. Another way to address the problems was to talk about them in a controlled way. This talking out became the Diné peacemaking process. The Diné traditional dispute resolution process is the Diné traditional court of law and equity. This process is known as hózh̨óji naat’aah which can be loosely translated as reparation or mending of controversies through harmony. Diné Peacemaking is an adaptation of the traditional process... Navajo Nation. Navajo Peacemaking Guide. Navajo Nation. July 2012. Guide. (https://courts.navajo-nsn.gov/Peacemaking/Plan/PPPO2013-2-25.pdf, accessed May 30, 2024)
Perigo’s Perspective: On The Two Meanings Of Tenor “Tenor” has two meanings. One is, the character or usual pattern of something: Google gives as an example, “Suddenly the tenor of the meeting changed, and people started insulting each other.” We may talk about the tenor of our times where attention spans have shortened to the point of non-existence, speech has become a feral nasal emission, news has become propaganda, rights have been trampled, millions have succumbed to hysteria, and so on. One should discuss that tenor only in the presence of gallons of gin, oceans of wine. The other type of tenor – the highest male voice in music – is far more edifying and gratifying to contemplate, and remains invaluable in countering the tenor of our times. It's not that long ago that three of the best such tenors got together in Rome and gave a concert to celebrate the coming back to life of one of them from leukaemia. The whole world watched, and was enthralled and enraptured. The event became iconic, and was repeated every four years thereafter. The tenor of my friendship with soprano Lillian Young was defined in part by her reaction to one phrase sung by one tenor. Every time Mario Lanza got to the phrase Talor dal Mio Forziere in the aria Che Gelida Manina from La Boheme, Lillian would burst into tears. Tears of joy and rapture. Every time. Convulsive tears. We played the aria often, and it happened every time. The phrase means At times from my strongbox, so in and of itself means little, but Mario as usual made it sound like the Creation scene in the Book of Genesis. “I sing each word as though it were my last on earth,” he used to say. The tenor of our times might be gleaned from the fact that someone once altered this, in a script I was to read from, to “I sing each word like it was my last on earth.” “No, no,” I protested. “As though it were, not like it was. We have it on tape. We're going to be playing the tape. I sing each word as though it were my last on earth.” But I digress. Mario's explosive Talor dal mio forziere was also singled out by his conductor and accompanist, Constantine Callinicos, in an interview I recorded with him in New York in the early eighties. Lillian was edified and gratified that Costa too was partial to that phrase. Something else helped set the tenor of our friendship: her husband Dave's unfailing reaction to her singing of a particular song, Scenes that Are Brightest. Lillian and I were part of a concert given by pupils of tenor Robin Dumbell at the Mana Arts Festival in 1970-something. Robin himself was New Zealand's best-kept musical secret. Dave attended every rehearsal for the Mana Arts programme. One of Lillians's solos was Scenes that are Brightest. Every time she sang it, Dave bawled his eyes out just as Lillian did to Talor dal mio. The rest of us loved the spectacle of Dave's big beautiful tears as much as we did the beauty of Lillian's singing. Dave was a handsome fellow of military bearing, an airline pilot with a handle-bar moustache and magnificent speaking voice. He had once been an announcer on the YC network. Not given to displays of emotion, but this always undid him! On New Year's Day, 2019, Lillian's number flashed on my phone. I answered, hoping she had rung to finalise a date for a visit, as we had discussed at Christmas. I greeted her with a bawdy hilarious obscenity, as was our wont when phoning each other. Alas, it was not she but her daughter Gay, ringing to tell me that her mum had passed away that morning, at the age of 96. We both said, trust Lillian to shuffle off on a day we couldn't possibly forget; how truly operatic! She had written to me months earlier; you know, an old-fashioned letter that one folds into an envelope which one stamps and posts. In the letter she marvelled, “Isn't it fabulous that our relationship spans over 40 years, and no cross words?” And that was the tenor of our friendship. As well as the word “Trumpy” she emblazoned across the letter, which remains affixed to my fridge. Yes, she loved Orange Man Bad. I'm glad she was spared the worst of the unspeakable evil of Woke-Fascism. Repulsive Deep State globalist politicians are rampaging right now; it's their season. What better time to ignore these vermin, and celebrate humans? That's the tenor of my question today. We played Mario's Che Gelida Manina at Lillian's funeral, as she had asked. I could swear that when he got to Talor dal mio forziere, there was a loud, edified and gratified knock on the lid of the coffin.
Irish Reflections in Poland “All historical parallels are to some degree inaccurate. But they are none the less necessary for every cultivated intelligence.” - Josef Pilsudski Year 1920 Neither Irish people nor Poles are short of opinions, with the result that it sometimes seems there are as many perspectives on parallels between the two countries as there are observers. It goes without saying that the reflections which follow, by an Irish citizen who has lived in Poland for the past five years, are purely personal, and are intended as a contribution to the debate rather than the last word. Among Irish readers, since its publication in 1936, The Farm by Lough Gur has obtained the status of minor classic. This work of reminiscences provides a richly detailed portrait of the life of a prosperous farmer’s family by the shores of Lough Gur in late nineteenth century Limerick. A feature of this now vanished world was the determination of post-famine farmers not to divide their farms and that only one son should inherit the land. One result of this sociological shift, when compared with behaviour earlier in the century, was that younger members of farmers’ families, both young men and young women, were expected to make their own way in the world. For many well-to-do farmers daughters the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of increased educational opportunity as new orders of nuns, frequently with French links, established their presence in many parts of provincial Ireland. The education provided undoubtly had its quaint aspects, as country girls were introduced to French manners and the French language (its mockers described the genteel style fostered by such an education resulted as “convent parlour”). One result was to equip young Irishwomen with the skills necessary to become governesses in continental Europe. Poland was among the countries in which early twentieth century Irish girls sought employment. As the travellers J.M. Hone and Page Dickinson noted in 1910, “Warsaw is one of the few European capitals that the tourist has not yet wooed. A few governesses in high Polish families are practically the only resident British subjects, and these ladies are mostly Irish, because they must be Catholics. The Polish aristocracy cultivate the English language, like their fellow-subjects, the Georgian princes in Transcaucasia, though not perhaps to the same extent…. In both towns quite a number of Irish governesses will be found.” Among those who found work in early twentieth century Poland was Bessie O’Brien from County Limerick. The chapter in The Farm by Lough Gur entitled “Bessie Goes to Poland” tells of the astonishment of the O’Brien family when a letter arrives from “reverend Mother in France” to announce that “Bessie has the chance of a good position as a governess with a Madame Swinarski in Poland”. This news immediately provokes the question, “ ‘Where exactly is Poland?’ We all spoke at once. Michael went for the Atlas and mother found the place with trembling hands. In the hubbub no one heard me say that Poland is on the way to the isles of Greece!” The uncertainty of the O’Brien’s family as to the location of Bessie’s new home serves as a reminder of how far, before the age of mass travel, Ireland and Poland were from each other. Such indeed was the distance that Irish and Polish people almost certainly met in significant numbers for the first time not in Europe but as emigrants in the great cities of North America. Although, in as far we can judge, contacts on this side of the Atlantic over the centuries between Ireland and Poland have been miscellaneous and accidental, the two countries are linked by parallel histories in which themes and motifs repeat. As a result, for Irish people the experience of living in Poland can at times be slightly uncanny, as aspects Ireland’s past seem to find Polish echoes at every turns. These echoes can be quite recent. For anyone who grew up in Ireland of the 1960s, many aspects of contemporary Poland, from the everyday (the succession of seasonal fruits and vegetables in the market sellers’ stalls) to the typical (the warmth of Polish hospitality), and from the ceremonial (the Polish commemorative urge and determination that the past’s lessons will not be forgotten) to the profound (the devout crowds of all age groups at mass), recall Ireland as it was before the great transformation of the last quarter century. The faults which accompany these virtues also repeat, with elements of contemporary Polish discourse recalling the introspective Ireland of earlier decades. These parallels become even more striking when one turns to the history of the two countries. Ireland and Poland lost their independence to predatory neighbours, who had better organised and more centralised states machines. Following the late eighteenth century partitions and the abolition of the Irish parliament in 1801, leaders in both countries were faced with the struggle to maintain the existence of the nation in circumstances when the range of institutions which go with statehood no longer existed. Eventually both availed of the opening caused by the First World War to advance the national agenda. Polish leaders exploited the need of the rival partioning powers to obtain the support of their Polish subjects, while in Ireland radical nationalists attempted to secure independence by forming an alliance with the Central Powers (“our gallant allies in Europe” in the 1916 proclamation of the Irish republic). Both re-gained sovereignty only with considerable difficulty, in the confused period which followed the ending of the great war. As a result, for an Irish person the experience of reading a history of Poland can be unsettling, as one encounters a history that is at once exotic and yet strangely familiar; at times it almost seems that if only dates and names were changed the history of Poland could be that of Ireland. These similarities were noted by Bessie O’Brien, when she took up duty in the Swinarski household in the German partition. Her first letter home, which was included as an appendix in The Farm by Lough Gur provides a high-spirited, amusing and informative description of her new family. Her account, which takes up eight pages of text, is insightful and nuanced in its depiction of the family members, their relatives and retainers, and amounts to a miniature portrait of the culture, prejudices and idiosyncrasies of an early twentieth century szlachta family. In Bessie’s letter pride of place is given to the real head of the household (“Number two who is really number one”) Madame Swinarski. She writes of her, “I seldom felt so attracted towards anyone; she is intelligent, well-informed and noble-hearted, above all so patriotic; you cannot imagine the extent to which she carries the love of her country, and so we are well met. She cries sometimes in speaking of the wrongs they all suffer: we compare our stories and what a resemblance we find between the two nations!” A few “homely examples” of similarities between Poland and Ireland concludes, “I could go on for hours proving to you that oppression is the cause of their and our faults, otherwise how could there be such a striking resemblance between the two nations, so far apart, having no communication and of different race? One topic, which is at once fascinating and little explored, is the role of mothers, aunts and other female relatives in the transmission of religious values, including the religion of patriotism, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland. Where Poland was concerned Bessie’s letter suggests that women played an important role as guardians of the national flame. In a particularly striking passage she wrote of Madame Swinarski: You should see her when she talks of her country! She always finishes in tears. Her mother died saying, ‘My God, I never did anything wrong; I always gave to the poor; I practiced faithfully my duties as a Christian and a good Catholic. I never so much as harmed a fly, but I cannot forgive the enemies of my country! No, never! And I pray in this solemn moment when I go to appear before the great Judge, that the most terrible misfortune may fall on the head of whoever of my children forgets the misfortunes of Poland! To you, my sons, I leave it to avenge her! You, my daughters, never dare to rejoice in your family or in solitude; never be happy – I forbid it to you – till Poland is free!’ Her sons, both before and after her death, were in every insurrection of the country. Once, after a battle in the depths of winter, she went over the battlefield with a lantern in her hand looking for the corpses of her husband and two sons; she was accompanied by Madame Swinarski (then only 15 years old). Every body lying there she lifted, peering into the dead face. ‘Is it Casimir? Is it Stanislaus? Is that Thaddeus?’ What courage, and what a scene for a young girl, especially when she found her brother, 16 years old, dead not from wounds so much as from the cold which penetrated and congealed them. They carried him home between them, and had a rejoicing for the neighbourhood in his honour. ‘This is the dearest of my children’, cried his mother, ‘he has given me more happiness to-day than all the rest of you put together. I can only say that I hope to see each of you share the same glorious fate! For what is a Polish noble born if not to die when the enemies conquer?’ Madame Swinarski is the counterpart of her admirable mother, yet her brothers and sisters say, ‘Our Valerie has not a grain of patriotism!’ when I heard this I cried out, ‘Oh, then, if that is the way, may God defend us from the others!’ She assures me that with them it is shame and disgrace to a family that has not lost some member fighting against the Germans or the Russians. The contempt they have for a young man who has never been imprisoned, or lost an eye or an arm, or cannot show that he has taken an active part in the rebellions, is unbearably cutting. Bessie O’Brien’s letter reveals her to have been an amusing and clear sighted observer. It seems clear that if she had not married a young Serb, who was serving as an officer in a Russian cavalry regiment, and departed with him for Serbia, she had the makings of a gifted journalist or novelist of manners. She might thus be seen as a precursor of better known writers such as Kate O’Brien or Maura Laverty who found in the experience of working in continental Europe (both worked as governesses in Spain) an imaginative enlargement and, at a personal level, an opportunity for self-definition and a release from the constraints of a provincial society. With its succession of character sketches, which amounts to a group portrait of a Polish household and brief outline of the essential social background, Bessie’s letter might be seen as a first chapter in a generic Irish women’s novel of exile. Irish–Polish affinities are at their most marked during the nineteenth century. The Polish dialectic of insurrection and organic work has its Irish equivalent in the alternation between the rival strategies of armed separatism and constitutional nationalism. Defeat had a comparable impact within both body politics, with the Polish retreat from revolutionary romanticism to a more sober approach to the national question following the crushing of the January rising echoed in Ireland during the same period as, following a comparable defeat, domination of the political scene by the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood gave way to the more pragmatic activity of the Land League. This shift towards a more realistic assessment of what was achievable did not take place without strain, as the more sober-minded among the Polish and Irish elite grew increasingly exasperated with the verbal maximalism, and attendant lack of realism, of their revolutionary brethren. It was in this spirit that, following the failure of the uprising of 1863, Julian Lukaszewski admonished his countrymen, “The latest uprising has taught us a great lesson; we have had a difficult education. The noose, conflagration, Siberia, the general repression at home and exile abroad ought to sober us completely and bring it home to us that it is not in poetry and clairvoyance or in higher missions that political calculation lies, but in the awareness of the actual conditions of our country, in its wealth and resources, which await future great deeds”. Lukaszewski’s comments could be compared to the advice to caution, and a prudent awareness of the sheer weight of British power, which A.M. Sullivan of The Nation tendered to the young Fenians in the 1850s, or the even more astringent verbal medicine administered some years later by Thomas D’Arcy McGee to his (as he believed) deluded fellow countrymen. McGee, who himself had taken part in the failed insurrection of 1848, following which he departed for exile in north America, had come to despise the combination of ineffectualness and high rhetoric which characterised “these Punch-and Judy Jacobins”. McGee’s views were deeply resented. His portrait of what he took to be a typical Irish nationalist demagogue among the exiled Irish in the United States may suggest why he was so disliked: “He is not seldom a dealer, by wholesale or retail, in spirituous liquors; sometimes a lawyer sometimes an editor... He is always ready with his money subscription to the church, but seldom goes to church. He lies up on Sunday, after the toils of the week, reading a sporting journal or a police gazette. He has a ready rowdy sort of rhetoric, and is never at a loss, when called on, to propose or second a resolution. He is particularly savage on England, and grows quite pathetic, unprepared as he is, at the mere mention of ‘the old land’. A fair share of mother wit - a sufficient stock of spending-money, and a vast deal of brass- complete the equipment of this very active, very important, and much courted individual”. One of the most striking features of early twentieth century Europe was the retreat from the broadly democratic nationalism which swept the continent in 1848 to a narrower and less tolerant conception of the nation. This shift from the language of Lamertaine and Mazzini to that of Maurice Barres and D’Ununzio can be observed in both the case of Ireland and Poland. Thomas D’Arcy McGee belonged to the Young Ireland group of the 1840s which, under the leadership of Thomas Davis and through the medium of The Nation newspaper, promoted a generous definition of Irish nationality. Davis included in his vision all the population groups living on the island, both the descendents of the indigenous Gaels and those who had arrived over recent centuries. His approach to religion was equally ecumenical, being based on respect for both the majority Catholic faith and the reformed churches, including his own Church of Ireland. He was explicit, and at times pugnacious, in his defence of minority rights. By the end of the century, decades after Davis’ death, although he remained a revered figure in the nationalist pantheon, his vision of an Ireland made up of various strands was coming under challenge from the tougher, more narrowly focused nationalism which went by the name “Irish Ireland”. The most influential and verbally adroit ideologist of this mutation within Irish nationalism was D.P. Moran whose newspaper The Leader, launched in September 1900, provided a widely read vehicle for his ideas. It is an indicator of Moran’s combination of intellectual rigour and alarming honesty that, instead of treating Davis as a respected but ignorable ancestor, he should have overtly rejected his heritage arguing, in a sinister mantra, “The Gael must be the element that absorbs”. In many of his key ideas Moran resembled such contemporaries as Charles Mauras in France and Roman Dmowski in Poland. The resemblance with Dmowski is particularly striking, as Poland also possessed an alternative concept of the nation embodied in the memory of the multi-ethnic rzeczpospolita and the civic liberalism of the constitution of 1791. Although Moran could be acute he had little of Dmowski’s analytic powers, resembling the Pole chiefly in his aggression, intolerance and ethnic narrowness. Significantly both men were influenced by the social Darwinism which was such a widespread current in the Europe of their youth and it may be that, like others during the same period, the peculiar timbre of their thought had its origin in a neo-scientific misapprehension of what it means to be human. Writing in The Worker’s Republic of December 1899, the Irish socialist leader James Connolly commented on “the close analogy existing in many respects between the positions of Poland and Ireland”. Connolly’s subsequent career, which was politically and intellectually adventurous and culminated in his execution, following his participation in the insurrection of Easter 1916, was marked by a continued interest in developments in Poland. In a study published in 1985, arguing against prevailing attempts on the Irish left to accommodate Connolly within a Leninist mould, Brendan Clifford argued that the Polish dimension to his thought provided an important clue to the nature of his politics. Clifford’s understanding of Connolly is best suggested by the unabridged title of his work. This is Connolly: The Polish Aspect. A Review of James Connolly’s Political and Spiritual Affinity with Joseph Pilsudski, Leader of the Polish Socialist Party, Organiser of the Polish Legions and Founder of the Polish State. In Clifford’s view, “Connolly’s interest in the Polish Socialist Party was not an eccentricity. The Polish Socialist Party pioneered the combination of socialism and nationalism which Connolly attempted to develop in Ireland. The PSP was founded in 1892. Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1898. Connolly’s vision of Socialism being established as the vital principle in the revival of an ancient nation was also Pilsudski’s vision. Connolly and Pilsudski were both of an adventurous and romantic revolutionary disposition which was underpinned by a firm grasp on material realities. Both were Marxists up to a point, but subordinated Marxism to romantic ideals…. Though revolutionaries by inclination, Connolly and Pilsudski were not Leninists by inclination. They were revolutionaries in national affairs. Lenin knew nothing of Connolly. But he knew Pilsudski only too well and detested his politics”. Brendan Clifford’s exploration of Connolly’s Polish aspect provided the starting point for an extended meditation on the differing courses of Irish and Polish history. His most striking claim, amounting to a leitmotif in his work, is that the apparent similarities between the two countries are merely apparent and mask a more profound difference. Clifford argues that this difference had its origins in the process whereby the Gaelic Irish began the transition to modernity by becoming English speakers and embracing ultramontane Catholicism. As no comparable rupture marked Polish history, and as Ireland had remade itself, the paths of the two nations diverged sharply. In Clifford’s formulation, “Polish Catholicism was Polish, but Irish Catholicism was Roman.” Similarities at the level of political history can be paralleled in the religious experience of the two peoples. The nineteenth century Irish, like the Poles, gathered around their church and, in the absence of alternative institutions, made it an instrument of national self-assertion. As a result the bishops in both countries had to manoeuvre between the demands of their flocks and the need to deal with the occupying power. The Vatican’s well documented inclination to side with Vienna and St. Petersburg rather than with the oppressed Polish faithful had its echo in Papal willingness to exert a calming influence in Ireland in the hope of securing diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the Holy See in return. (Both initiatives came to nothing, as neither St Petersburg nor London was willing to deal). Rome’s perceived indifference to the suffering of Polish and Irish Catholics inevitably aroused resentment. Although it is difficult to think of an Irish writer who might have expressed himself in such extravagantly subversive terms, many Irish readers would have seen the point of Slowacki’s famous satire involving the Polish patriot Kordian, the Pope and a demented parrot. In a striking formulation a former Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) once expressed the view that “analogies are disgusting”. One does not have to endorse this in its entirety to realize the limitations of comparison; one thing is not another and, similarities notwithstanding, the history of Ireland is not that of Poland. Nowhere are differences more striking than in relation to the core elements of identity, particularly language. In his essay of 1982 “Conversations in the Citadel” Adam Michnik commented on the challenge faced by his nineteenth century fellow-countrymen, “National resistance meant defence of the faith, the language and customs of fathers and grandfathers; it meant blocking through passive resistance, the persistent attacks on the national identity”. It is at this point that Ireland and Poland part company, as the nineteenth century Irish decoupled defence of the faith from that of the language and customs of fathers and grandfathers. Ireland entered its fatal union with Great Britain in 1801, six years after the final partition of Poland. Throughout the long nineteenth century, in spite of their many disputes regarding political tactics, there was a consensus among Polish intellectuals that language and traditions must be maintained. This remained the case even in the most depressing of circumstances when, faced with the overwhelming power of the occupiers, re-establishment of statehood appeared remote and illusory. There was no equivalent to this obstinate Polish point of honour on the Irish side. It was thus that Ireland, which entered the union as an Irish speaking nation with an English speaking minority, recovered its independence one hundred and twenty years later as an English speaking nation with an Irish speaking minority. Although at the time of the Act of Union a majority of Ireland’s inhabitants spoke Irish, it was already a language under threat and in terms of power structures of no consequence. The intensified pressure made possible by the Union, the Great Famine of the 1840s in which the Irish speaking poor were overwhelmingly the victims, and the accompanying changes in Irish mentalities, sealed the fate of the language. In the view of later cultural nationalists the nineteenth century, which witnessed the great retreat of the Irish language, constituted an unparalleled disaster As Austin Clarke wrote, contemplating the great change which came over the Irish countryside: Famine has made great clearances And our language comes to an end. Beggars wheedle in English at our fairs. How much coffinship will bring Emigrants to God’s own country? In contrast with the high spirited Polish defence of the national substance there was on the Irish side, throughout most of the nineteenth century, effectively nothing. Instead, as politics displaced culture, those intent on protecting what they saw as the essence of the nation were isolated voices who never acquired sufficient weight to matter. The difference between Polish and Irish attitudes was noted by the perceptive Betty O’Brien who commented, “Polish is the language of the people and all speak it, but French is used in good society. It is a good thing that the Poles keep alive their old tongue…. After all what were they to do? – speak the conqueror’s tongue as we unfortunate Irish have done? Perish the thought! Neither German nor Russian will ever be the tongue of Poland”. It was only towards the end of the century, with the emergence of Gaelic revivalism, that voices equivalent to those which were so widespread in Poland began to make them heard. By this point, as is clear in retrospect, it was too late. Both Poland and Ireland shared the common situation of what Adam Michnik has described as “a menaced national existence”. Each reacted differently. In reflecting on why matters which were so diligently attended to in another, a number of reflections come to mind. The most obvious of these is that, in comparison with Ireland, Poland had much greater resources. In addition to the peasant masses, it possessed a land owning gentry, an emerging middle-class, an intelligentsia, an elite diaspora and a national church. Ireland had nothing equivalent to the social thickness of nineteenth century Poland, just poor peasants, farmers and a small and scattered middle-class. Although Ireland had a church, its leadership tended towards pragmatism and had its own agenda (mostly relating to control of education). Moreover in the second half of the century the Irish church increasingly emerged as the mother church of the Irish diaspora throughout the English speaking world. In these circumstances it was, to say the least, unlikely to share the linguistic concerns of the Poles and indeed the practice of preaching in English to Irish speaking congregations features among the reasons advanced by contemporary observers for the decline of Irish. As Oliver Mc Donagh has argued, as a result of the union with Great Britain, Ireland found itself linked in an unequal partnership with what was then the most advanced state in the world. One result was that Britain had the means to penetrate Ireland, through public administration, law and education, with thoroughness, indeed intimacy that in the Polish case was quite beyond the powers of the ramshackle Czarist state. Even in the most difficult of times Poland always had at its disposal an institute of higher education, either in Vilno, Lwow or Krakow. Once again Ireland had nothing equivalent. Lacking thus Poland’s resources, and under pressure of a state intent on language change through the means of mass education in English, for many of the Irish rural poor English represented the only available bridge to modernity and economic advance. The failure of Irish to embrace modernity could be seen as implicit in W.B.Yeats’ claim that Gaelic was incapable of abstraction; this was a dimension which Polish intellectuals ensured that their language retained. Both countries were deeply influenced by the impact of literary romanticism. The result in both cases was an exalted insurrectionary language, as romanticism provided a new, and at times startlingly original, vehicle for the articulation of national passions. Yeats’s self-interrogation in old age, as he reflected on the impact of his play Kathleen Ni Houlahin on a generation of young nationalists, Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? would have had a resonance in Poland as in few other parts of Europe. With the growth of literacy in nineteenth century Ireland, patriotic verse becomes one of the staples of local newspapers and magazines catering for a new readership. There was obviously an immense demand for verse of this kind, which is impressive in its sheer quantity. Over many decades patriotic verse provided an eloquent restatement of familiar themes, commented on issues of the day, and strove to keep up Irish spirits in difficult times. Such verse could range between nostalgia for past glories and rousing prophecies of better things to come, and in terms of quality between the pedestrian and the superb. Local writers were quick to recognize the affinities between Ireland’s situation and that of Poland; comment on Polish affairs in nationalist newspapers throughout the century was almost invariably sympathetic, while the great insurrections of 1830 and 1863 were followed by floods of pro-Polish verse. “A Ballad of Freedom” by Thomas Davis, a key figure in the emergence of Irish cultural nationalism, provides a representative instance of this declamatory public poetry. The first three verses, which appeared in the famous mid-century anthology The Spirit of the Nation, denounce French oppression in Algeria, English oppression in India and Russian oppression of the people in Caucasus. The poem reaches its climax in the fourth verse, with an invocation of Poland and a postulated brotherhood of the oppressed, which will extend from Sind in British India to the River Shannon in Ireland. But Russia preys on Poland’s fields, where Sobieski reigned; And Austria on Italy – the Roman eagle chained – Bohemia, Servia, Hungary, within her clutches gasp; And Ireland struggles gallantly in England’s loosening grasp. Oh! Would all these their strength unite, or battle on alone, Like Moor, Pushtani, and Cherkess, they soon would have their own. Hurrah! Hurrah! It can’t be far, when from the Scindh to Sionainn Shall gleam a line of freemen’s flags begirt with freemen’s cannon! The coming day of Freedom – the flashing flags of Freedom” As Davis comes close to acknowledging, in productions of this kind Poland like other victims of the nineteenth century empires acts as a surrogate for Ireland, so that denunciation of Czarist oppression is, by extension, denunciation of Ireland’s oppressors. The tactic of indirect expression attained a rare and chilling eloquence in James Clarence Mangan’s “Siberia” which was published in The Nation of 18 April 1846. Mangan’s editors comment that he had, no doubt, “been reading in The Nation, specifically the issue of 11 April, about captured revolutionary leaders in Russian Poland. Several were executed, but some lives were spared and these men were ‘degraded from the ranks and condemned to hard labour in Siberia’ ”. In the poem, the desolate physic and human landscape of Siberia acts as an emblem both for Mangan's own hopelessness and for the misery and despair of Ireland in the years of the Great Famine: In Siberia’s wastes Are sands and rocks Nothing blooms of green or soft, But the snow-peaks rise aloft And the gaunt ice-blocks. And the exile there Is one with those; They are part, and he is part, For the sands are in his heart, And the killing snows. Therefore, in those wastes None curse the Czar. Each man’s tongue is cloven by The North Blast, that heweth nigh With sharp scimitar. And such doom each drees, And cold-slain, he at length sinks there, Yet scarce more a corpse than ere His last breath was drawn. Although the relationship of “Siberia” to Ireland is implied rather that explicit, the emotional sources upon which Mangan drew are unmistakably suggested in the companion piece which accompanied “Siberia” in The Nation of 18 April 1846. This is entitled “To the Ingeezee Khafir calling Himself Djaun Bool Djenkinzum” or, in standard English, “To the English unbeliever calling Himself John Bull Jenkinson”. The sacralising of the national struggle, encapsulated in the image of Poland as Christ on the cross between two thieves, which is so prominent in nineteenth century Polish writing, found eloquent echoes in the language of Irish nationalism. In the vision of the seventeenth century poets, Ireland was Israel among the nations while the, otherwise inexplicable, disasters which befell the Gaelic Irish were to be understood by analogy with the wanderings of the Israelites in the wilderness before their final admission to the promised land. This identification survived the transition to English, becoming one of the great eloquent commonplaces of nationalist declamation. Together with so much other Irish bric-a-brac, it found in the early twentieth century a final resting place in the pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses In Ireland, as in other parts of Europe, the years before the First World War witnessed a heightening of the political and rhetorical temperature. The resort to a messianic language of national redemption, which was such a widespread feature of discourse of the age, found a particularly eloquent practitioner in the poet, educationalist, language revivalist and president of the republic proclaimed in Dublin in Easter 1916, Patrick Pearse. Although a Catholic, Pearse’s visionary imaginings bordered on the blasphemous as he conceived of the main proponents of separatism (Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel and James Fintan Lawlor) in canonical terms as the four evangelists of Irish nationalism. In an extension of this vision, the degraded nation was seen as undergoing a process of death and resurrection, in which his own role would be analogous to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. It was against this background that, four years after Pearse’s execution, as the Irish struggle for independence reached its climax, Aodh de Blacam and Liam Rinn turned to Polish literature, finding in Adam Mickiewicz’s national messianism language appropriate to Ireland’s situation. In 1920, in what was clearly intended to be a strong symbolic statements, Mickiewicz’s Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (The Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage) were translated into Irish as Leabhar Na Pólainne and published in Dublin. As the following brief extract may suggest, the hypnotic cadences of Mickewicz’s fifth gospel passed easily into Irish: Agus do lean na Pólannaih ag adhrad Dé, mar bhí’s acu, an té adhran Dia, go dtugan sé omós don mhaith. Is mar sin d’fhan an náisiún Pólannach dílis do Dhia a sinsear ó thūis deire. Agus dubhairt a Phólann fé dheire: A mhuintir a thocfaidh chugam beidh said saor agus có-ionann, óir is mise a tSaoirse. One of the recurrent motifs in modern Irish history has been the search for an external ally, which could balance England’s growing military and demographic preponderance. This was a search which extended over the centuries, with potential partners extending from Spain of Philip II, via ancien regime, revolutionary and Napoleonic France, to imperial Germany in the early twentieth century. Following the partitions, Polish leaders found themselves engaged in a similar quest. Although this took place over a shorter time-scale, it was equally intense, embracing the efforts of Dambrowski and Poniatowski to serve Poland by serving Napoleon, the activities of the Hotel Lambert group, Mickiewicz’s attempt to raise a Polish legion in Turkey and the early twentieth century manoeuvrings of Dmowski and Pilsudski between Berlin Vienna, Paris, St. Petersburg and at one stage Tokyo. For the Poles the well known Irish slogan “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” would have been perfectly comprehensible, requiring only a change of proper nouns. Where Ireland was concerned the eighteenth century French alliance was the most intensely felt, with the lush eloquence of countless Irish language aislingi (vision poems) prophesying the return from France of the exiled Stuarts who would once again reign as rightful kings. In the early nineteenth century the feelings which attached to the Stuarts seem to have transferred to Napoleon, with English language ballad makers replacing the visionary Gaelic poets of a few decades earlier. Napoleon goes through the snow And his ballad goes on and on But the balladmaker is happy at darkfall. The words are ready in mouth. The detonating impact of Napoleon on the European imagination is perhaps most acutely registered in Stendhal’s Le Chartreuse de Parme and in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz.As is evident from his novels, for the French writer the Napoleonic era was experienced chiefly in terms of increased social and erotic energy, the glamour of bearing arms and the myriad opportunities which the empire’s enlarged horizons brought with them. While Mickiewicz was responsive to the energy of the Napoleonic era, for him as for his fellow countrymen, it possessed the additional dimension of national liberation. The hope that French arms would restore former liberties by driving the Muscovites from the Polish lands finds its most exultant expression in the swelling verse of book eleven of Pan Tadeusz. This bears the simple but eloquent title “Rok 1812” (Year 1812). The cry of Mickiewicz’s Lithuanians, “Bog jest z Napoleonem, z Napoleon z nami” was echo in Ireland of the same period, where similar hopes were entertained of deliverance at French hands. As William Carleton noted in his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, “Scarcely had the public mind subsided after the rebellion of Ninety-Eight, when the success of Buonaparte directed the eyes and hopes of the Irish people him as the person designed to be their deliverer”. As a result of the intense, semi-apocalyptic hopes which both peoples reposed in Napoleon, much in Pan Tadeusz finds an unexpected gloss in the imaginings of the early nineteenth century Irish. In the Polish poem, news of Napoleon is at first a distant rumour, belonging more to the domain of legend than of history. He is first heard of in book one, when Captain Rykow tells the company a legend of the magical transformations of Bonaparte and Suwarow during the course of battle into the shapes of a fox, a hound, a cat and a pony. In Ireland comparable stories clustered around the figure of Napoleon. In his Autobiography William Carleton recalled how before mass crowds of people gathered at the cross-roads, “engaged in chat upon the usual topic of the day: the most important, and that in which they felt the deepest interest, was the progress of the Peninsular War. Bonaparte was their favourite, and their hopes were not only that he would subdue England but ultimately become monarch of Ireland….One of the most remarkable (anecdotes concerning him), and which was narrated and heard with the most sincere belief in its truth was the fact of his being invulnerable. It mattered nothing whether he went into the thickest part of battle or not, the bullets hopped harmlessly off him like hailstones from a window”. In Ireland as in Poland, the arrival of the Napoleonic deliverer was understood as the fulfilment of prophecy. As Carleton noted, “many prophecies too were related, in which the glory of this country under his reign was touched off in the happiest colours”. For this reason the prophetic signs which precede the advent of the French armies in Lithuania – the comet of the year 1811 and the strange behaviour of cattle and birds in spring of 1812 – had their equivalents in early nineteenth century Ireland where believers in the prophecies of Colmcille and Pastorini were on the look out for portends that the millennial year of Ireland’s deliverance was at hand. Once more our best witness is William Carleton, who reported that the wandering poor, of whom Ireland had many, were one of the principle channels through which prophetic speculations were diffused. This took place at the fireside in the evening when the beggars, who were given lodgings overnight in the cottages of the settled community, entertained their hosts with legendary recital. InCarleton’s account, “‘The miller with two thumbs was then living’; said the mendicants, for they were the principal propagators of these opinions, and the great expounders of their own prophecies. Several of them had seemed him, a red haired man with broad shoulders, stout legs, exactly such as a miller ought to have and two thumbs on his right hand; all precisely as the prophecy had stated”. One of most striking aspects of Pan Tadeusz is the mounting drumbeat of war; from rumours of distant battles in book one to the flood tide of French armies sweeping across Poland and Lithuania in book eleven. Because of Ireland’s island situation, the long dreamed for French help could only arrive by sea. In 1794 the Directory sent a substantial fleet to Bantry Bay in the south-west of Ireland, which was unable to land because of unusually severe weather conditions. In 1798, known subsequently as Blian Na bhFrancach or the Year of the French, a much smaller force landed at Killalla in the west of Ireland and, having been joined by large numbers of Irish, marched eastwards before being defeated by the English at Ballinamuck. While the French taken after the battle were treated as prisoners of war, their Irish allies were put to death. In the popular Irish imagination the arrival of the French belonged more to the realm of prophecy fulfilled than that of sober history. In countless nineteenth century ballads the motif of “the French upon the sea” served to keep spirits up, as in the following encounter between Napoleon and the traditional female figure of a personified Ireland: As Granu was walking along the sea shore For seventy weary long years and more, She saw Bonaparte coming far off at sea, Saying rowl away my boys, we’ll clear the way Similar imaginings were articulated in the Irish language, as in the following verse from Kerry: Tá prionsa Ag teacht go hÉireann, Bona Parte is ainm dó, Tá Emperor SA Spáinn Ag cur garda leis go hAlbain, Seinnfear adharc is fliúit dó, Beidh trumpa agus beidh gal is blast is púdar Ag cur Na Majors dubha ar ballchrit (A prince is coming to Ireland, Bonaparte is his name. There is an emperor in Spain sending a guard with him to Scotland. Horn and flute will be played for him. There will be a trumpet and there will be smoke and blast and gunpowder to terrify the black majors.) Although it might appear absurd to compare this anonymous folk poem with the exquisite art of Pan Tadeusz, there are affinities between the Irish handling of the Napoleonic advent and that in “Rok 1812”. For both the essential thematic elements are: (1) The arrival of Napoleon in Lithuania/Ireland, (2) The excitement caused by this event, (3) The rout of Poland’s/Ireland’s enemies by the French armies. (In the Kerry poem Ireland’s enemies are the “Majors dubha” of the final line, dubh/black being a standard disparagement epithet). It is reported that, in exile in St.Helena, Napoleon regretted that he had not sent his forces to Ireland rather than to Egypt. Both the Irish and the Poles were in the end disappointed in the hopes they reposed in their French saviour. Perhaps some measure of disappointment was inevitable, as Napoleon’s primary concern had to be the interests of the French state rather than the well-being of Poland or Ireland. In spite of this, in Ireland at least, the Napoleonic glamour lingered long into the century. Historical memory received powerful visual reinforcement through the mass diffusion of lithographs of nineteenth century Ireland’s favourite hero, the brave and eloquent Robert Emmet, who had been hanged in Dublin in 1803 ( “Bold Robert Emmet the darling of Erin”). In the many images of Emmet which were found on the walls of farmhouses and peasant cottages, the youthful hero was presented in period costume and in an unmistakable Napoleonic pose. The result was to provide later insurrectionaries with an iconography upon which they could draw, allowing them to frame their actions in terms of the style of a previous era. The appeal of the French mode for the romantic young of the 1860s is suggested in Padriac Fallon’s “The Young Fenians”: They looked so good; They were the coloured lithographs Of Murat, Bernadotte and Ney And the little Corsican. Mars had raised them from our dead And given to each his martial head. Flags flew from our every word; The new names sang from litanies, Saviours each one; They were the eagles in the morning sun; A country rising from its knees To upset all the histories. It would be fascinating to know whether Poland’s rich insurrectionary tradition and associated repertoire of romantic gestures, contains any comparable echoes. The impact of Sir Walter Scott on the nineteenth century European imagination is one of the commonplaces of literary history. From Russia and Turkey in the east to United States in the west, readers were stirred by the magnificent historical tapestry which Scott wove into the fabric of his novels. In Poland, as Donald Davie argued in The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott, Scott’s example was one of the elements which went into the making of Pan Tadeusz. Whereas in other parts of Europe the Waverly novels were experiences as energising and acted as an incitement to imitation, in Ireland, where their author was much admired, the impact was curiously sterile and self-defeating. For Scott’s many Irish readers, the example of what had been achieved in a neighbouring country prompted the desire that their own country’s dramatic history should receive a similarly impressive fictional embodiment. But, although the attempt was occasionally made, by general consent the results were unimpressive and the desired Irish historical novel never really emerged. For a people who outsiders regularly described as keenly interested in native history, and for whom their understanding of that history was arguably central to their self-definition, the absence of an Irish historical novel was felt to be a particular grievance. Although comparatively early in the century writers such as Gerald Griffin, the Banims and William Carleton produced an impressive, if uneven, body of fiction, which in terms of content, style and form was quite unlike anything being produced elsewhere in the English speaking world, as their subjects were drawn from contemporary Irish life, each in turn failed to fill the role of the Irish Scott. Arguably the desire for a fiction of this kind was misplaced; while the Scott model was crafted to portray internal conflicts, whose dramatic antagonisms and ultimate reconciliation could be seen as part of the organic growth of the nation, it was less suited to dealing with national conflicts, such as those between Ireland and England or Poland and Russia. (Mickiewicz circumvented this difficulty by basing Pan Tadeusz upon a conflict within the Polish-Lithuanian community). In spite of the failure of Irish writers to produce the goods, the demand for a body of Irish historical fiction continued to be reiterated throughout the nineteenth century by almost everyone who addressed themselves to the subject. Perhaps inevitably, the terms in which this was articulated grew increasingly plaintive, clichéd and monotonous. For reasons that are not completely clear, but might include boredom with a thoroughly exhausted topic, the reordering of fictional priorities resulting from the advent of modernism and Joyce’s achievement, and the securing of Irish independence, the demand died out in the early twentieth century. In the mid 1980s the question of the missing novel reappeared in the writings of Brendan Clifford, in terms which were both thought provoking and more cogent than when last formulated in the nineteenth century. In his Connolly: the Polish Aspect Clifford raised the question of why there was no equivalent of Pan Tadeusz in the Irish language, in other words why late Gaelic Ireland never came to terms with modernity and made its own the emerging major form of the novel. In his view the obvious candidate to become an Irish Mickiewicz was Eoghan Ruadh Ó Suilleabháin, the most dearly loved of the poets of late eighteenth century Munster. Clifford argues that Ó Suilleabháin was particularly suited to the role, being a man of varied social experience, a master of Irish, English and Latin, and in touch with all the layers of late eighteenth century Irish society . In a striking passage Clifford comments, “Owen Roe…lived at a moment when an Irish Pan Tadeusz might have been produced to good effect, making Cromwellian/Williamite society comprehensible to the Gael, making an end of their crippling, stylised dismissal of that society as Séan Buí, involving them in the national politics of the period (which originated from Séan Buí), representing Gaelic society to the other societies on the island (Anglo-Irish and Ulster Scots), and laying the basis for a Gaelic renaissance in the modern. And the finger of destiny points unwaveringly at Owen Roe O’Sullivan – the poet who lived in both worlds, the classical scholar, the labourer, the disputer with priests, the schoolmaster, the voyager around the world, the seducer of virgins – as the only possible Gaelic Mickiewicz. As one investigates the period one sees destiny pointing at Owen Roe …. How then could Owen Roe – the brilliant innovating traditionalist, the supreme poet of a society which lived through its poetry – have failed to be the Irish Mickiewicz? Did Gaelic Ireland, near the end of its tether, not renew itself through him to become the cultural medium of modern Irish social development?” (“Séan Buí or Yellow John was a standard disparaging epithet for the English population who were settled in Ireland after the confiscations of the seventeenth century). Having raised the question Brendan Clifford concluded, rather sadly, that the finger of destiny pointing at Eoghan Ruadh was an illusion and that temptation to write a Gaelic Pan Tadeusz was easily resisted because it was not experienced. Moreover, as Clifford acknowledges, Eoghan Ruadh was a more traditional figure than his account implies. In order to have embraced his postulated destiny he would have had to have been familiar with the novel as a genre (Mickiewicz knew Scott) and accustomed to doing his literary business though print. Until the very end the Gaelic literary tradition remained overwhelmingly manuscript based. As nineteenth century Polish literature provided a forum in which the displaced national struggle could be conducted, its fate was to become intensely politicised. If Irish literature of the same period was marginally less so, the difference was one of degree rather than of kind, as the Irish too conducted their disputes through the medium of fiction, poetry, the writing of history and literary criticism. The equivalence of warfare and belles lettres is unmistakably signalled in Samuel Ferguson’s comment in the Dublin University Magazine of November 1833 when, having taken account of the depleted resources available to the Ascendancy, he concluded, “We must fight our battles now with a handful of types and a composing stick, pages like this our field, and the reading public our arbiter of war.” Inevitably a literature conducted in such a spirit had its limitations, most notably an over privileging of the public and the accessible at the expense of the private and the interior. Where poetry was concerned, as WB Yeats argued in his essays of the 1890s, the result was that patriotism became the criterion of excellence and that a rhetorical and declamatory use of language left little room for the more subtle music of inwardness. The dominance of popular taste by the school of verse which derived from Thomas Davis led Yeats to call, in a provocative phrase, for the de-Davisisation of Irish literature. Two decades later Stephen Dedalus commented in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. In common with Yeats, Stephen’s remark might equally be seen as registering the writer’s recoil from the weight of the public and the inherited from the aesthetic duties and categories which acceptance of that heritage was presumed to impose. The present writer’s knowledge of Polish literature is sadly incomplete and I do not know whether it contains similar moments of protest, when attempts are made to reject the tribe and to vindicate the singularity of the artist’s vision. While I cannot be certain, in the nature of the case it seems inconceivable that Yeats and Joyce did not have their Polish counterparts. Some Polish-Irish comparisons are less than flattering. It may be that both peoples, obsessed with their own suffering, were inattentive to the rights of minorities living within their borders. Thus Irish nationalists, accustomed to thinking of their country as an indivisible entity, were slow to recognize the emergence and consolidation in the north-east of the island of a population group which differed from them in its sense of its own identity, religion, political allegiance and, until the nineteenth century, language. The relationship within the old Polish commonwealth between the ruling elites and their Ruthenian subjects is a much debated theme; whatever the judgment made, one suspects that the concerns and ambitions of Mizkiewicz’s Polish speaking sczlachta would have appeared very differently if seen through the eyes of a Lithuanian or Bialorussian peasant. The fact that those who have been quickest to draw attention to this uncomfortable fact have been Poland’s Czarist and Stalinist enemies, does not diminish the validity of the point. Even the devil can occasionally tell the truth, if only for his own purposes. This essay has suggested that, to the degree that Ireland’s situation resembled that of Poland, the two peoples shared analyses and strategies and found themselves faced with comparable choices and dilemmas. It may therefore be useful to recall that most Irish-Polish encounters, far from being linked to the deep structures of history, were casual and accidental, belonging to the domain of chance and sometimes of comedy. The best known of these, at least for Irish people, was that which took place in the Congo in June 1890 between Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad. At the time Casement was a British consular official. His task in the Congo, which was the personal property of King Leopold II, was to investigate the unbelievably inhumane conditions to which the population had been reduced by their Belgian master. In a letter of 1903 Conrad recalled the impression Casement had made upon him, when they met in Leopold’s heart of darkness. Conrad wrote, “I can assure you that he is a limpid personality. There is a touch of the conquistador in him too; for I have seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crookhandled stick for all weapon, with two bulldogs, Paddy (white) and Biddy (Brindle) at his heels and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle for all company. A few months afterwards it so happened that I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his sticks, dogs, and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in the park .... I always thought some particle of La Casas’ soul had found refuge in his indomitable body …. He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know.” Casement, who later became an advanced nationalist and was closely involved in attempts during World War I to forge links between revolutionary forces in Ireland and Britain’s German enemies, was captured when he landed from the Irish coast from a German submarine in Holy Week 1916. Although, in trying to secure the freedom of his country with outside help Casement’s tactics were no different from those of Pilsudski or the Czech Masaryk, he was convicted of high treason and hanged in London in August 1916. As his humanitarian work in Africa and South America had gained for Casement an international reputation, in the weeks before his execution there were moves by a number of prominent figures to secure a reprieve. Conrad, whose son was serving in the British army, was not among those who petitioned for mercy. In a letter of 1916, to the Irish-American John Quinn, with the assistance of hindsight he qualified his earlier judgment; “But already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force …. He made his way, and sheer emotionalism has undone him. A creature of sheer temperament – a truly tragic personality; all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet.” By any reckoning Casement was indeed a tragic figure, whose fate can only attract pity. In the same decade as he met Joseph Conrad, an encounter of a more piquant kind took place in Switzerland between an Irish–American and another Polish novelist. The Pole was the renowned Henryk Sienkiewicz while his visitor, who wished to discuss the translation of his novels into English, was the scholar, folklorist and linguist (he was reputed to have mastered seventy languages, including several north American Indian tongues) Jeremiah Curtin. Curtin, who was born of Irish emigrant parents in Detroit in 1835, was one of the pioneers of Irish folklore studies. He acquired some knowledge of Gaelic in the United States and, by reading printed Irish folktales and quizzing Irish emigrants, came to an appreciation of the wealth of oral narrative that was still to be found in the Irish speaking districts of the West of Ireland. He visited the land of his parents for the first time in 1871, and a further four times over the next twenty-two years. With the aid of interpreters, for he never acquired complete mastery of the Irish dialects, he collected the lore which was published as Myths and Folklore of Ireland, Hero Tales of Ireland, Irish Folk Tales and Tales of the Fairies and the Ghost World. Curtin’s activities as a collector were undertaken a generation before the scientific collection of Irish folklore began, with the result that he provided an invaluable, and otherwise unobtainable, sampling of the late nineteenth century oral tradition. His initiative was a heroic one and he been described by an admirer as “calling on Irish speakers and writing down their long tales inside miserable huts choked by a peat fire and roosting hens.” Given the value of his contribution, Curtin continues to be an esteemed figure in Irish studies. He is hardly likely to be regarded in a similar light by students of Polish literature. The impression he made on his Polish host, when they first met in 1897, is recorded in a letter of Sienkiewicz’s after their meeting. This is surely sufficiently amusing to deserve quoting at some length. Sienkiewicz wrote, “Jeremiah Curtin arrived, naturally. He is the most awful and colossal bore that the imagination of nine poets could conceive. He clutches at your sleeve while talking, and he repeats one and the same thing ten, twenty or twenty-five times. He talks about nothing except WithFire and Sword, the Deluge, Pan Michael, and Quo Vadis. He has no other topic. It seems as if the world were only partially created until the advent of his mission as translator and all that exists today is only two crucial subjects and two major questions: my novels and his translations. I can’t even begin to suggest to you the horror of all his compliments. He sits at my table and goes on and on without interruption from breakfast to dinner. He even talks while eating and drinking and then grabs me by the knees for forty minutes or more. And when I escape to write a letter I can still hear his voice at my back: ‘You must go to America.’ The monster doesn’t want to tell me how long he is staying. His wife is neither ugly enough not pretty enough to make up for it all, and they are driving me to utter desperation because, I’m telling you, even if I could contain one thousandth part of the incense he blows in my ear I’d burst like a bomb filled with dynamite.” In spite of his antipathy, Sienkiewicz was prepared to co-operate with Curtin, apparently for financial reasons. As a result the Irish-American folklorist became the principle channel by which Sienkiewicz’s works became known to the English-speaking world. Polish scholars are agreed that he was a less than adequate interpreter. Curtin, who as a Russophile was out of sympathy with the Polish cause, had an imperfect knowledge of Polish and was obliged to rely on Russian translations of the novels as the basis for his own renderings into English. In the judgment of Albert Jusczak, Curtin, “being able to read and understand only the words he sees on the printed page, but linguistically quite unable to grasp the feelings behind them, he robs the reader of a powerful emotional experience and impoverishes the novel.” It was inability to tolerate the thought that English speaking readers could only come to know Sienkiewicz via “Curtin’s barely animated puppets, so stiff and wooden that they creak whenever a mouth flies open”, that prompted W.S. Kuniczak to publish his own acclaimed translation of the Trilogy in 1991-1992. As the twentieth century advanced, possibly because both countries had secured their independence and were of less interest to each other, affinities between Ireland and Poland lessened as, to all appearances, did the level of comment. In 1917 T.W.H. Rollenson published Ireland and Poland: a Comparison, as a contribution to the debate on whether Ireland’s future was best secured by independence or some continued link with Britain. More than two decades later, writing to a correspondent in New York, the poet Joseph Campbell expressed his sense of disappointment at what independence had brought. The New Ireland, which he saw as narrow in sympathies and an economic failure, had fallen far short of the dreams of his youth. Additionally the poet, who was a Belfast man, belonged to the generation of nationalists who found the partition of the country an unbearable wrong. Accordingly Campbell wrote, “Ireland at the moment is tranced in a dead apathy … Don’t believe any reporters who tell you the country has progressed since 1921 …There are about 200,000 unemployed in Northern and Southern Ireland – it used to be Ireland, but now we are partitioned more cruelly than Poland”. In June 1946 the Catholic intellectual monthly Studies carried an article by John Murray S.J. entitled “The Tragedy of Poland”. Murray, who had no illusions about what was taking place, wrote: “We see Poland garrisoned with Russian and Russian–controlled troops and administered by a Provisional ‘Government’, consisting almost wholly of Communists with scarcely any support from the Polish people. We see a land through which walk the spectres of famine and distress; where every voice is stilled save that which blares and blusters from the East; where no man’s liberty is secure, and where the prisons and concentration camps have changed nothing but their label and are used for the same purpose of political oppression”. (Coincidentally, in the same year the young Brian Moore had taken up duty in Poland as a UN relief worker and was gathering impressions which would go into the making of his later fiction. For foreigners faced with the complexity of Polish grammar and the unfriendliness of Polish consonant clusters, the writings of Norman Davis provide an indispensable introduction to the history of the culture of our host country. It is striking that Davies, who has interpreted Poland with such insight, should also have written of Irish history with an unusual degree of sympathy. Davies is unique among British historians in rejecting a half-perceived conceptual framework which views the histories of the other nations inhabiting the islands of Britain and Ireland as appendages to the history of England. His Heart of Europe was published in 1984 during the period of repression which followed the suppression of Solidarity and the introduction of martial law. In the concluding section, having chronicled the dismal history of the Polish People’s Republic, Davies was led to protest against the influence of a then modish revisionism regarding the nature of communist power on Western perceptions of Poland. Davies wrote, “Specialists, one often suspects, exist for the purpose of making simple things complicated, and on an issue such as the present crisis in Poland, anyone who tries to take the broader view, and reduce the multiplicity of events to simple intelligible propositions, is in danger of being charged with the mortal offences of ‘over-simplification’, ‘unwarranted generalisations’, or worst of all ‘schematisation’…Anything which smacks of a clear opinion, or which enters the uncertain world of predictions and probabilities, is generally thought in academic circles to lack the necessary degree of equivocation…The simple fact of political oppression, for example, which millions of Polish people can recognize instinctively for what it is, proves far too elusive for many academic commentators.” Although Davies’ strictures are severe, for Polish readers they are unlikely to appear excessively so. Over recent decades the received version of Irish history, with its unilinear narrative, its binary contrasts and focus upon the experience of conquest, defeat and confiscation, has come to appear unduly simplified and has been subject to increasing academic challenge. One suspects that the impulse towards revisionism has its origin in recoil from the sheer murderousness of what took place and embarrassment with the view of history as martyrology which sometimes results. Moreover historians, like other interpreters, are attracted by complexity and may feel obscurely dissatisfied with narratives which, as is the case for extended stretches of Irish and Polish history, possess an exemplary moral clarity. In Ireland, if not yet in Poland, received popular accounts of national history have, for some, come to be seen as naïve and self-serving and as inviting deconstruction. Whatever the interpretive gains from the resultant muddying of the waters, these surely fade when contemplating events such as the massacres of Mullaghamast or Katyn. (Although separated by over three centuries, these are marked by striking similarities. Both involved deception and the killing of unarmed opponents. In each case the victims were local elites, from the Irish midlands and eastern Poland respectively, whose extirpation was part of a larger strategy of conquest). Faced with the irreducibility of what took place, the reflections of the poet-diplomat Denis Devlin in “To Me: A Greek Country Schoolteacher” come to mind: Our enemies said so much we talked too much That we talked no more, ashamed. Shamefaced like the Irish about the memory of Cromwell. But this is wrong, wrong to hide what happened. It is true; simply true my friend was butchered. It is true; simply true the town was razed. In the writing of history, as in the conduct of one’s personal life, it is no doubt commendable to avoid self-pity and polemic. Moreover revisionism is arguably intrinsic to the practice of history as an intellectual discipline, as existing interpretations are refined, emphasises shifted and new hypotheses tested. To think to any purpose is inevitably to revise. When, however, all of the revisions on offer tend in a single direction, at times monotonously so, we may begin to suspect that the enterprise is being driven by an ideological imperative rather than by a disinterested search for understanding Thus for many Irish readers, faced with a questionable relativisation of our history, Davies’ insistence on the primacy of narrative, his willingness to call things by their right names, and to take account the perception of history by those who are its subject are likely to be experienced as a recall to essential criteria. In recent years post-colonial theory has gained an impressive presence in Irish studies. Arguably the Third World focus of such writing is of limited value and closer and more fruitful similarities are to be found among the suppressed nations of east-central Europe. Irish analogies and illuminating divergences abound in the historical experiences of the people of this area, from Lonrot’s redefinition of the nation through the medium of folklore and epic song in the Kalevla, to the Slovak struggle to maintain their language in the face of Hungarian state pressure. As these pages have attempted to suggest, in both its affinities and differences, the example of Poland is particularly rich in material for reflection. Selected Bibliography Carbery Mary, the Farm by Lough Gur. The Story of Mary Fogerty (Sissy O’Brien), Cork and Dublin 1973, (First published 1937). Carleton, William, the Autobiography of William Carleton, London, 1968, pp. 54-55. (First published 1895). Carleton, William, the Works of William Carleton, (New York, 1881), Vol. 1, p. 960. Clifford, Brendan, Connolly the Polish Aspect, Belfast 1985, pp.123-124, 57. Devlin, Denis, “Uncollected Early Poems” in the Lace Curtin, 1971. Fallon, Padraic, a Look in the Mirror and Other Poems, Manchester 2003, p. 51. Krzyzanowski, Jerzy, the Trilogy Companion. A Reader’s Guide to the Trilogy of Henryk Sienkiewicz, New York, 1991, p. 20, 30. Mangan, James Clarence, the Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, Poems 1845- 1847. p.157, 449 Mickiewicz, Adam, Leabhar Na Pólainne, Dublin 1920 Murray, John, “The Tragedy of Poland”, Studies, June 1946, p.175. Ó Ruairc, Míchéal, Dán is Cead Ón Leitriúch, p. 80. O’Sullivan, Sean ed., Folktales of Ireland, London 1966, xi Saunders, Norah and Kelly A. A. Joseph Campbell Poet and Nationalist, Dublin 1988, p. 137.
The word “grammar” has a negative connotation for many people. It’s often seen as boring or tedious work. As we discussed in many posts, when you don’t enjoy doing something, it’s really hard to keep doing it consistently. However, it’s important to realize that grammar is only the structure of the language. We do need grammar in all languages, but it doesn’t need to be a burden. If grammar is a big challenge for you, you simply need to change your state of mind towards it. In this post, we will explain how to make grammar and sentence structure much easier to understand. If you ask the greatest language learners in the world if grammar is necessary, you will likely get a variety of responses. Some language learners simply love grammar. They feel that it makes the language unique. They want to study grammar in depth, because they want to learn exactly how the language works. Their passion for language learning stems from learning these rules. However, many others will say that grammar is not really important to them. These people are more interested in other aspects of the language. The truth is that both types of people are learning grammar, but the way they learn it is very different. There are basically two main ways of learning grammar. The first is learning from rules and explanations; this is the way most adults learn in a classroom. The second is through lots of exposure to the language; this is the way most of us learn our first language. Children are unaware of why they say things in a certain way. They don’t think about object pronouns or linking ideas with conjunctions and prepositions. They simply copy their parents and learn from hearing phrases in a certain way thousands of times over the course of many years. The problem with learning this way as adults is that we don’t listen to the language for 10 hours a day and we want to learn the language much faster than a baby does. That’s where grammar rules come in. We believe that it’s best to use a combination of these two methods to learn the most efficiently. The right balance will depend on each person. The only thing you need to keep in mind, is that you should never hate grammar, you should always find it useful. The problem is that grammar rules were invented after languages already existed. Grammar is used to explain how a language works, but sometimes it can get way more complicated than it needs to be. We believe that it’s best to learn the general idea of a grammar rule, but to quickly move on and learn from context with lots of exposure. You can always come back to it when you are more advanced and if you are still having trouble. Knowing the general idea of a grammar rule will save you a lot of time and confusion when you read or hear something that is different from your own language. Once you know the rule, learning from context will be much easier. But there’s really no point in spending all your energy on pages and pages of a single grammar rule and manually learning all the exceptions (unless you love doing so). Everything will eventually make sense to you, even if it sounds confusing at first. Many beginners make the mistake of trying too hard to understand complex grammar rules. This can prove disastrous, because they are slowly draining their passion and enjoyment for learning the language. Do learn those rules, but don’t spend too much time on them. Get out there in the world, watch movies, listen to music, read books and speak as much as you can. You shouldn’t worry about making mistakes. If you are still having trouble with a certain grammar rule when you are at a much higher level, simply go back to the rule and learn it more in depth. But in most cases, things will sort themselves out as you learn the language. Things will likely make a lot more sense when you have some experience under your belt. The next time you are confused with a grammar rule, just move on. Ask yourself if learning this rule in depth is the most important thing you can do to get closer to your goal. Unless you are quite advanced, or if your goal is passing an exam on this rule, it probably isn’t. We believe that grammar is essential when learning a language, but that sometimes traditional grammar books and classes can make it more complicated than it needs to be. On the other hand, a lot of programs and apps out there do not teach any grammar and expect you to learn absolutely everything from context. It is best to create a nice balance between these two learning methods. Learn the general idea, then let repetition work its magic. We have combined everything we know from years of language acquisition and research to create an awesome language-learning method. Visit OUINO.com to learn more. Subscribe on YouTube Follow us on Facebook
Researchers have found that some asteroids that are largely made from small pieces of rubble could be very difficult to deflect if one were to ever hurtle towards Earth, a terrifying finding that could force us to reconsider our asteroid defense strategies. It's an especially pertinent topic considering NASA's recent successful deflection of asteroid Didymos by smashing its Double Asteroid Reduction Test (DART) spacecraft into it last year, a proof of concept mission meant to investigate ways for humanity to protect itself from asteroid threats. By analyzing asteroid particles collected by Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa 1 probe, which visited the 1,600-foot "rubble pile" asteroid Itokawa back in 2005, the researchers suggest the remote asteroid is far older than previously thought. In fact, Itokawa, which scientists have long believed is a giant collection of space rocks and not one large lump, could be as old as the solar system itself. Itokawa's considerable age shocked the scientists. "Unlike monolithic asteroids, Itokawa is not a single lump of rock, but belongs to the rubble pile family which means it's entirely made of loose boulders and rocks, with almost half of it being empty space," said Fred Jourdan, planetary sciences professor at Curtin University in Australia and lead author of a new paper titled "Rubble pile asteroids are forever," published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a statement. Yet the mysterious pile of space rubble remained cohesive. "The survival time of monolithic asteroids the size of Itokawa is predicted to be only several hundreds of thousands of years in the asteroid belt," Jourdan said, adding that its formation dates back to "at least 4.2 billion years ago," which is "an astonishingly long survival time for an asteroid the size of Itokawa." According to Jourdan and his colleagues, the fact that it's a rubble pile and not a solid lump makes it inherently shock-absorbent, which could explain its extremely long lifespan and inherent resilience. If an object like it were ever headed toward Earth, though, it could be very bad news. "In short, we found that Itokawa is like a giant space cushion, and very hard to destroy," he said. The research suggests that rubble piles like Itokawa may be far "more abundant in the asteroid belt than previously thought," according to coauthor Nick Timms, also a professor of planetary sciences at Curtin, which means "there is more chance that if a big asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, it will be a rubble pile." But that doesn't mean we're doomed. Armed with the knowledge that it may be a loose collection of rocks threatening our existence — and not a giant billiard ball in the sky — we could change our defense tactics ahead of time, and, for instance, use a "shockwave of a close-by nuclear blast to push a rubble-pile asteroid off course without destroying it," as Timms suggested in the statement. In other words, we might have to rethink our defense strategies. READ MORE: 'Rubble pile' asteroids nearly impossible to destroy, study suggests [Curtin University] Share This Article
Consciousness Studies/Seventeenth And Eighteenth Century Philosophy Rene Descartes (1596-1650)[edit \| edit source] Descartes was also known as Cartesius. He had an empirical approach to consciousness and the mind, describing in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) what it is like to be human. His idea of perception is summarised in the diagram below. Dubitability[edit \| edit source] Descartes is probably most famous for his statement: "But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search." Descartes is clear that what he means by thought is all the things that occur in experience, whether dreams, sensations, symbols etc.: "5. Of my thoughts some are, as it were, images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name IDEA; as when I think [ represent to my mind ] a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel or God. Others, again, have certain other forms; as when I will, fear, affirm, or deny, I always, indeed, apprehend something as the object of my thought, but I also embrace in thought something more than the representation of the object; and of this class of thoughts some are called volitions or affections, and others judgments." (Meditation III). He repeats this general description of thought in many places in the Meditations and elsewhere. What Descartes is saying is that his meditator has thoughts; that there are thoughts and this cannot be doubted when and where they occur (Russell (1945) makes this clear). Needless to say the basic cogito put forward by Descartes has provoked endless debate, much of it based on the false premise that Descartes was presenting an inference or argument rather than just saying that thought certainly exists. However, the extent to which the philosopher can go beyond this certainty to concepts such as God, science or the soul is highly problematical. The description of thoughts and mind[edit \| edit source] Descartes uses the words "ideas" and "imagination" in a rather unusual fashion. The word "idea" he defines as follows: "5. Of my thoughts some are, as it were, images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name IDEA; as when I think [ represent to my mind ] a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel or God." (Meditation III). As will be seen later, Descartes regards his mind as an unextended thing (a point) so "images of things" or "IDEAS" require some way of being extended. In the Treatise on Man (see below) he is explicit that ideas are extended things in the brain, on the surface of the "common sense". In Rules for the Direction of the Mind he notes that we "receive ideas from the common sensibility", an extended part of the brain. This usage of the term "ideas" is very strange to the modern reader and the source of many mistaken interpretations. It should be noted that occasionally Descartes uses the term 'idea' according to its usual meaning where it is almost interchangeable with 'thought' in general but usually he means a representation laid out in the brain. Descartes considers the imagination to be the way that the mind "turns towards the body" (by which Descartes means the part of the brain in the body called the senses communis): "3. I remark, besides, that this power of imagination which I possess, in as far as it differs from the power of conceiving, is in no way necessary to my [nature or] essence, that is, to the essence of my mind; for although I did not possess it, I should still remain the same that I now am, from which it seems we may conclude that it depends on something different from the mind. And I easily understand that, if some body exists, with which my mind is so conjoined and united as to be able, as it were, to consider it when it chooses, it may thus imagine corporeal objects; so that this mode of thinking differs from pure intellection only in this respect, that the mind in conceiving turns in some way upon itself, and considers some one of the ideas it possesses within itself; but in imagining it turns toward the body, and contemplates in it some object conformed to the idea which it either of itself conceived or apprehended by sense." Meditations VI So ideas, where they become imagined images of things were thought by Descartes to involve a phase of creating a form in the brain. Descartes gives a clear description of his experience as a container that allows length, breadth, depth, continuity and time with contents arranged within it: "2. But before considering whether such objects as I conceive exist without me, I must examine their ideas in so far as these are to be found in my consciousness, and discover which of them are distinct and which confused. 3. In the first place, I distinctly imagine that quantity which the philosophers commonly call continuous, or the extension in length, breadth, and depth that is in this quantity, or rather in the object to which it is attributed. Further, I can enumerate in it many diverse parts, and attribute to each of these all sorts of sizes, figures, situations, and local motions; and, in fine, I can assign to each of these motions all degrees of duration."(Meditation V). He points out that sensation occurs by way of the brain, conceptualising the brain as the place in the body where the extended experiences are found : Meditations VI: "20. I remark, in the next place, that the mind does not immediately receive the impression from all the parts of the body, but only from the brain, or perhaps even from one small part of it, viz., that in which the common sense (senses communis) is said to be, which as often as it is affected in the same way gives rise to the same perception in the mind, although meanwhile the other parts of the body may be diversely disposed, as is proved by innumerable experiments, which it is unnecessary here to enumerate." He finds that both imaginings and perceptions are extended things and hence in the (brain part) of the body. The area of extended things is called the res extensa, it includes the brain, body and world beyond. He also considers the origin of intuitions, suggesting that they can enter the mind without being consciously created: Meditations VI, 10 : "10. Moreover, I find in myself diverse faculties of thinking that have each their special mode: for example, I find I possess the faculties of imagining and perceiving, without which I can indeed clearly and distinctly conceive myself as entire, but I cannot reciprocally conceive them without conceiving myself, that is to say, without an intelligent substance in which they reside, for [in the notion we have of them, or to use the terms of the schools] in their formal concept, they comprise some sort of intellection; whence I perceive that they are distinct from myself as modes are from things. I remark likewise certain other faculties, as the power of changing place, of assuming diverse figures, and the like, that cannot be conceived and cannot therefore exist, any more than the preceding, apart from a substance in which they inhere. It is very evident, however, that these faculties, if they really exist, must belong to some corporeal or extended substance, since in their clear and distinct concept there is contained some sort of extension, but no intellection at all. Further, I cannot doubt but that there is in me a certain passive faculty of perception, that is, of receiving and taking knowledge of the ideas of sensible things; but this would be useless to me, if there did not also exist in me, or in some other thing, another active faculty capable of forming and producing those ideas. But this active faculty cannot be in me [in as far as I am but a thinking thing], seeing that it does not presuppose thought, and also that those ideas are frequently produced in my mind without my contributing to it in any way, and even frequently contrary to my will. This faculty must therefore exist in some substance different from me, in which all the objective reality of the ideas that are produced by this faculty is contained formally or eminently, as I before remarked; and this substance is either a body, that is to say, a corporeal nature in which is contained formally [and in effect] all that is objectively [and by representation] in those ideas; or it is God himself, or some other creature, of a rank superior to body, in which the same is contained eminently. But as God is no deceiver, it is manifest that he does not of himself and immediately communicate those ideas to me, nor even by the intervention of any creature in which their objective reality is not formally, but only eminently, contained. For as he has given me no faculty whereby I can discover this to be the case, but, on the contrary, a very strong inclination to believe that those ideas arise from corporeal objects, I do not see how he could be vindicated from the charge of deceit, if in truth they proceeded from any other source, or were produced by other causes than corporeal things: and accordingly it must be concluded, that corporeal objects exist. Nevertheless, they are not perhaps exactly such as we perceive by the senses, for their comprehension by the senses is, in many instances, very obscure and confused; but it is at least necessary to admit that all which I clearly and distinctly conceive as in them, that is, generally speaking all that is comprehended in the object of speculative geometry, really exists external to me. " He considers that the mind itself is the thing that generates thoughts and is not extended (occupies no space). This 'mind' is known as the res cogitans. The mind works on the imaginings and perceptions that exist in that part of the body called the brain. This is Descartes' dualism: it is the proposition that there is an unextended place called the mind that acts upon the extended things in the brain. Meditations VI, 9: "... And although I may, or rather, as I will shortly say, although I certainly do possess a body with which I am very closely conjoined; nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I, [that is, my mind, by which I am what I am], is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it." Notice that the intellection associated with ideas is part of an "active faculty capable of forming and producing those ideas" that has a "corporeal nature" (it is in the brain). This suggests that the "thinking" in the passage above applies only to those thoughts that are unextended, however, it is difficult to find a definition of these particular thoughts. "Rules for the Direction of the Mind" demonstrates Descartes' dualism. He describes the brain as the part of the body that contains images or phantasies of the world but believes that there is a further, spiritual mind that processes the images in the brain: "My fourth supposition is that the power of movement, in fact the nerves, originate in the brain, where the phantasy is seated; and that the phantasy moves them in various ways, as the external sense <organ> moves the <organ of> common sensibility, or as the whole pen is moved by its tip. This illustration also shows how it is that the phantasy can cause various movements in the nerves, although it has not images of these formed in itself, but certain other images, of which these movements are possible effects. For the pen as a whole does not move in the same way as its tip; indeed, the greater part of the pen seems to go along with an altogether different, contrary motion. This enables us to understand how the movements of all other animals are accomplished, although we suppose them to have no consciousness (rerum cognitio) but only a bodily <organ of> phantasy; and furthermore, how it is that in ourselves those operations are performed which occur without any aid of reason. My fifth and last supposition is that the power of cognition properly so called is purely spiritual, and is just as distinct from the body as a whole as blood is from bone or a hand from an eye; and that it is a single power. Sometimes it receives images from the common sensibility at the same time as the phantasy does; sometimes it applies itself to the images preserved in memory; sometimes it forms new images, and these so occupy the imagination that often it is not able at the same time to receive ideas from the common sensibility, or to pass them on to the locomotive power in the way that the body left to itself -would. " Descartes sums up his concept of a point soul seeing forms in the world via forms in the sensus communis in Passions of the Soul, 35: "By this means the two images which are in the brain form but one upon the gland, which, acting immediately upon the soul, causes it to see the form in the mind". Anatomical and physiological ideas[edit \| edit source] In his Treatise on Man Descartes summarises his ideas on how we perceive and react to things as well as how consciousness is achieved anatomically and physiologically. The 'Treatise' was written at a time when even galvanic electricity was unknown. The excerpt given below covers Descartes' analysis of perception and stimulus-response processing. "Thus for example [in Fig 1], if fire A is close to foot B, the tiny parts of this fire (which, as you know, move about very rapidly) have the power also to move the area of skin which they touch. In this way they pull the tiny fibre cc which you see attached to it, and simultaneously open the entrance to the pore de, located opposite the point where this fiber terminates - just as when you pull one end of a string, you cause a bell hanging at the other end to ring at the same time. When the entrance to the pore or small tube de is opened in this way, the animal spirits from cavity F enter and are carried through it - some to muscles which serve to pull the foot away from the fire, some to muscles which turn the eyes and head to look at it, and some to muscles which make the hands move and the whole body turn in order to protect it. Now I maintain that when God unites a rational soul to this machine (in a way that I intend to explain later) he will place its principle seat in the brain, and will make its nature such that the soul will have different sensations corresponding to the different ways in which the entrances to the pores in the internal surface of the brain are opened by means of nerves. In order to see clearly how ideas are formed of the objects which strike the senses, observe in this diagram [fig 2] the tiny fibres 12, 34, 56, and the like, which make up the optic nerve and stretch from the back of the eye at 1, 3, 5 to the internal surface of the brain at 2, 4, 6. Now assume that these fibres are so arranged that if the rays coming, for example, from point A of the object happen to press upon the back of the eye at point 1, they pull the whole of fibre 12 and enlarge the opening of the tiny tube marked 2. In the same way, the rays which come from point B enlarge the opening of the tiny tube 4, and likewise for the others. We have already described how, depending on the different ways in which the points 1, 3, 5 are pressed by these rays, a figure is traced on the back of the eye corresponding to that of the object ABC. Similarly it is obvious that, depending on the different ways in which the tiny tubes 2, 4, 6 are opened by the fibres 12, 34, 56 etc., a corresponding figure must also be traced on the internal surface of the brain. And note that by 'figures' I mean not only things which somehow represent the position of the edges and surfaces of objects, but also anything which, as I said above, can give the soul occasion to perceive movement, size, distance, colours, sounds, smells and other such qualities. And I also include anything that can make the soul feel pleasure, pain, hunger, thirst, joy, sadness and other such passions. Now among these figures, it is not those imprinted on the external sense organs, or on the internal surface of the brain, which should be taken to be ideas - but only those which are traced in the spirits on the surface of gland H (where the seat of the imagination and the 'common sense' is located). That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses. And note that I say 'imagines or perceives by the senses'. For I wish to apply the term 'idea' generally to all impressions which the spirits can receive as they leave gland H. These are to be attributed to the 'common' sense when they depend on the presence of objects; but they may also proceed from many other causes (as I shall explain later), and they should then be attributed to the imagination. " The common sense is referred to by philosophers as the senses communis. Descartes considered this to be the place where all the sensations were bound together and proposed the pineal gland for this role. This was in the days before the concept of 'dominance' of parts of the brain had been developed so Descartes reasoned that only a single organ could host a bound representation. Notice how Descartes is explicit about ideas being traced in the spirits on the surface of the gland. Notice also how the rational soul will consider forms on the common sense directly. Descartes believed that animals are not conscious because, although he thought they possessed the stimulus-response loop in the same way as humans he believed that they do not possess a soul. John Locke (1632-1704)[edit \| edit source] Locke's most important philosophical work on the human mind was "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" written in 1689. His idea of perception is summarised in the diagram below: Locke is an Indirect Realist, admitting of external objects but describing these as represented within the mind. The objects themselves are thought to have a form and properties that are the archetype of the object and these give rise in the brain and mind to derived copies called ektypa. Like Descartes, he believes that people have souls that produce thoughts. Locke considers that sensations make their way from the senses to the brain where they are laid out for understanding as a 'view': "And if these organs, or the nerves which are the conduits to convey them from without to their audience in the brain,- the mind's presence-room (as I may so call it)- are any of them so disordered as not to perform their functions, they have no postern to be admitted by; no other way to bring themselves into view, and be perceived by the understanding." (Chapter III, 1). He considers that what is sensed becomes a mental thing: Chapter IX: Of Perception paragraph 1: "This is certain, that whatever alterations are made in the body, if they reach not the mind; whatever impressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception. Fire may burn our bodies with no other effect than it does a billet, unless the motion be continued to the brain, and there the sense of heat, or idea of pain, be produced in the mind; wherein consists actual perception. " Locke calls the contents of consciousness "ideas" (cf: Descartes, Malebranche) and regards sensation, imagination etc. as being similar or even alike. Chapter I: Of Ideas in general, and their Original: "1. Idea is the object of thinking. Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas,- such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose what I have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind;- for which I shall appeal to every one's own observation and experience. 2. All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring. 3. The objects of sensation one source of ideas. First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION. 4. The operations of our minds, the other source of them. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is,- the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got;- which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds;- which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other SENSATION, so I Call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By reflection then, in the following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say, viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations here I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought. 5. All our ideas are of the one or the other of these. The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations. " He calls ideas that come directly from the senses primary qualities and those that come from reflection upon these he calls secondary qualities: "9. Primary qualities of bodies. Qualities thus considered in bodies are, First, such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what state soever it be; and such as in all the alterations and changes it suffers, all the force can be used upon it, it constantly keeps; and such as sense constantly finds in every particle of matter which has bulk enough to be perceived; and the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter, though less than to make itself singly be perceived by our senses: .......... These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. 10. Secondary qualities of bodies. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but power to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities....." (Chapter VIII). He gives examples of secondary qualities: "13. How secondary qualities produce their ideas. After the same manner, that the ideas of these original qualities are produced in us, we may conceive that the ideas of secondary qualities are also produced, viz. by the operation of insensible particles on our senses. .....v.g. that a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter, of peculiar figures and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes the ideas of the blue colour, and sweet scent of that flower to be produced in our minds. It being no more impossible to conceive that God should annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, than that he should annex the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance." (Chapter VIII). He argues against all conscious experience being in mental space (does not consider that taste might be on the tongue or a smell come from a cheese): Chapter XIII: Complex Ideas of Simple Modes:- and First, of the Simple Modes of the Idea of Space - paragraph 25: "I shall not now argue with those men, who take the measure and possibility of all being only from their narrow and gross imaginations: but having here to do only with those who conclude the essence of body to be extension, because they say they cannot imagine any sensible quality of any body without extension,- I shall desire them to consider, that, had they reflected on their ideas of tastes and smells as much as on those of sight and touch; nay, had they examined their ideas of hunger and thirst, and several other pains, they would have found that they included in them no idea of extension at all, which is but an affection of body, as well as the rest, discoverable by our senses, which are scarce acute enough to look into the pure essences of things." Locke understood the "specious" or extended present but conflates this with longer periods of time: Chapter XIV. Idea of Duration and its Simple Modes - paragraph 1: "Duration is fleeting extension. There is another sort of distance, or length, the idea whereof we get not from the permanent parts of space, but from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession. This we call duration; the simple modes whereof are any different lengths of it whereof we have distinct ideas, as hours, days, years, &c., time and eternity." Locke is uncertain about whether extended ideas are viewed from an unextended soul. "He that considers how hardly sensation is, in our thoughts, reconcilable to extended matter; or existence to anything that has no extension at all, will confess that he is very far from certainly knowing what his soul is. It is a point which seems to me to be put out of the reach of our knowledge: and he who will give himself leave to consider freely, and look into the dark and intricate part of each hypothesis, will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly for or against the soul's materiality. Since, on which side soever he views it, either as an unextended substance, or as a thinking extended matter, the difficulty to conceive either will, whilst either alone is in his thoughts, still drive him to the contrary side."(Chapter III, 6). David Hume (1711-1776)[edit \| edit source] Hume (1739–40). A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects. Hume represents a type of pure empiricism where certainty is only assigned to present experience. As we can only directly know the mind he works within this constraint. He admits that there can be consistent bodies of knowledge within experience and would probably regard himself as an Indirect Realist but with the caveat that the things that are inferred to be outside the mind, in the physical world, could be no more than inferences within the mind. Hume has a clear concept of mental space and time that is informed by the senses: "The idea of space is convey'd to the mind by two senses, the sight and touch; nor does anything ever appear extended, that is not either visible or tangible. That compound impression, which represents extension, consists of several lesser impressions, that are indivisible to the eye or feeling, and may be call'd impressions of atoms or corpuscles endow'd with colour and solidity. But this is not all. 'Tis not only requisite, that these atoms shou'd be colour'd or tangible, in order to discover themselves to our senses; 'tis also necessary we shou'd preserve the idea of their colour or tangibility in order to comprehend them by our imagination. There is nothing but the idea of their colour or tangibility, which can render them conceivable by the mind. Upon the removal of the ideas of these sensible qualities, they are utterly annihilated to the thought or imagination.' Now such as the parts are, such is the whole. If a point be not consider'd as colour'd or tangible, it can convey to us no idea; and consequently the idea of extension, which is compos'd of the ideas of these points, can never possibly exist. But if the idea of extension really can exist, as we are conscious it does, its parts must also exist; and in order to that, must be consider'd as colour'd or tangible. We have therefore no idea of space or extension, but when we regard it as an object either of our sight or feeling. The same reasoning will prove, that the indivisible moments of time must be fill'd with some real object or existence, whose succession forms the duration, and makes it be conceivable by the mind." In common with Locke and Eastern Philosophy, Hume considers reflection and sensation to be similar, perhaps identical: "Thus it appears, that the belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present; and that this alone distinguishes them from the imagination. To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. 'Tis merely the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment, and lays the foundation of that reasoning, which we build upon it, when we trace the relation of cause and effect." Hume considers that the origin of sensation can never be known, believing that the canvass of the mind contains our view of the world whatever the ultimate source of the images within the view and that we can construct consistent bodies of knowledge within these constraints: "As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and 'twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc'd by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv'd from the author of our being. Nor is such a question any way material to our present purpose. We may draw inferences from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or false; whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the senses." It may be possible to trace the origins of Jackson's Knowledge Argument in Hume's work: " Suppose therefore a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac'd before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; 'tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, said will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether 'tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho' it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe i here are few but will be of opinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions; tho' the instance is so particular and singular, that 'tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim." David Hume (1748) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume's view of Locke and Malebranche: "The fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed. La Bruyere passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten." He is clear about relational knowledge in space and time: "13. .. But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted." 19. Though it be too obvious to escape observation, that different ideas are connected together; I do not find that any philosopher has attempted to enumerate or class all the principles of association; a subject, however, that seems worthy of curiosity. To me, there appear to be only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely, Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect." He is also clear that, although we experience the output of processes, we do not experience the processes themselves: "29. It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends. Our senses inform us of the colour, weight, and consistence of bread; but neither sense nor reason can ever inform us of those qualities which fit it for the nourishment and support of a human body. Sight or feeling conveys an idea of the actual motion of bodies; but as to that wonderful force or power, which would carry on a moving body for ever in a continued change of place, and which bodies never lose but by communicating it to others; of this we cannot form the most distant conception. .. 58. ... All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life. " Our idea of process is not a direct experience but seems to originate from remembering the repetition of events: "59 ..It appears, then, that this idea of a necessary connexion among events arises from a number of similar instances which occur of the constant conjunction of these events; nor can that idea ever be suggested by any one of these instances, surveyed in all possible lights and positions. But there is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar; except only, that after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist." Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804)[edit \| edit source] Kant's greatest work on the subject of consciousness and the mind is Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant describes his objective in this work as discovering the axioms ("a priori concepts") and then the processes of 'understanding'. P12 "This enquiry, which is somewhat deeply grounded, has two sides. The one refers to the objects of pure understanding, and is intended to expound and render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts. It is therefore essential to my purposes. The other seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests; and so deals with it in its subjective aspect. Although this latter exposition is of great importance for my chief purpose, it does not form an essential part of it. For the chief question is always simply this: - what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart from all experience?" Kant's idea of perception and mind is summarised in the illustration below: 'Experience' is simply accepted. Kant believes that the physical world exists but is not known directly: P 24 "For we are brought to the conclusion that we can never transcend the limits of possible experience, though that is precisely what this science is concerned, above all else, to achieve. This situation yields, however, just the very experiment by which, indirectly, we are enabled to prove the truth of this first estimate of our a priori knowledge of reason, namely, that such knowledge has to do only with appearances, and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but as not known by us. " Kant is clear about the form and content of conscious experience. He notes that we can only experience things that have appearance and 'form' - content and geometrical arrangement. P65-66 "IN whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us. The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance. That in the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter; but that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance. That in which alone the sensations can be posited and ordered in a certain form, cannot itself be sensation; and therefore, while the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only, its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must allow of being considered apart from all sensation. " Furthermore he realises that experience exists without much content. That consciousness depends on form: P66 "The pure form of sensible intuitions in general, in which all the manifold of intuition is intuited in certain relations, must be found in the mind a priori. This pure form of sensibility may also itself be called pure intuition. Thus, if I take away from the representation of a body that which the understanding thinks in regard to it, substance, force, divisibility, etc. , and likewise what belongs to sensation, impenetrability, hardness, colour, etc. , something still remains over from this empirical intuition, namely, extension and figure. These belong to pure intuition, which, even without any actual object of the senses or of sensation, exists in the mind a priori as a mere form of sensibility. The science of all principles of a priori sensibility I call transcendental aesthetic." Kant proposes that space exists in our experience and that experience could not exist without it (apodeictic means 'incontrovertible): P 68 "1. Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. The representation of space cannot, therefore, be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation. 2. Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determina- tion dependent upon them. It is an a priori representation, which necessarily underlies outer appearances. * 3. The apodeictic certainty of all geometrical propositions and the possibility of their a priori construction is grounded in this a priori necessity of space. ........." He is equally clear about the necessity of time as part of experience but he has no clear exposition of the (specious present) extended present: P 74 "1. Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come within our perception, if the representation of time were not presupposed as underlying them a priori. Only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (successively). They are connected with the appearances only as effects accidentally added by the particular constitution of the sense organs. Accordingly, they are not a priori representations, but are grounded in sensation, and, indeed, in the case of taste, even upon feeling (pleasure and pain), as an effect of sensation. Further, no one can have a priori a representation of a colour or of any taste; whereas, since space concerns only the pure form of intuition, and therefore involves no sensation whatsoever, and nothing empirical, all kinds and determinations of space can and must be represented a priori, if concepts of figures and of their relations are to arise. Through space alone is it possible that things should be outer objects to us. ..2. 3.. 4.. 5..." Kant has a model of experience as a succession of 3D instants, based on conventional 18th century thinking, allowing his reason to overcome his observation. He says of time that: P 79 " It is nothing but the form of our inner intuition. If we take away from our inner intuition the peculiar condition of our sensibility, the concept of time likewise vanishes; it does not inhere in the objects, but merely in the subject which intuits them. I can indeed say that my representations follow one another; but this is only to say that we are conscious of them as in a time sequence, that is, in conformity with the form of inner sense. Time is not, therefore, something in itself, nor is it an objective determination inherent in things." This analysis is strange because if uses the geometric term "form" but then uses the processing term "succession". Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)[edit \| edit source] Leibniz is one of the first to notice that there is a problem with the proposition that computational machines could be conscious: "One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception." Monadology, 17. Leibniz considered that the world was composed of "monads": "1. The Monad, of which we shall here speak, is nothing but a simple substance, which enters into compounds. By 'simple' is meant 'without parts.' (Theod. 10.) 2. And there must be simple substances, since there are compounds; for a compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simple things. 3. Now where there are no parts, there can be neither extension nor form [figure] nor divisibility. These Monads are the real atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things. " (Monadology 1714). These monads are considered to be capable of perception through the meeting of things at a point: "They cannot have shapes, because then they would have parts; and therefore one monad in itself, and at a moment, cannot be distinguished from another except by its internal qualities and actions; which can only be its perceptions (that is, the representations of the composite, or of what is external, in the simple), or its appetitions (its tending to move from one perception to another, that is), which are the principles of change. For the simplicity of a substance does not in any way rule out a multiplicity in the modifications which must exist together in one simple substance; and those modifications must consist in the variety of its relationships to things outside it - like the way in which in a centre, or a point, although it is completely simple, there are an infinity of angles formed which meet in it." (Principles of Nature and Grace 1714). Leibniz also describes this in his "New System": "It is only atoms of substance, that is to say real unities absolutely devoid of parts, that can be the sources of actions, and the absolute first principles of the composition of things, and as it were the ultimate elements in the analysis of substances <substantial things>. They might be called metaphysical points; they have something of the nature of life and a kind of perception, and mathematical points are their point of view for expressing the universe."(New System (11) 1695). Having identified perception with metaphysical points Leibniz realises that there is a problem connecting the points with the world (cf: epiphenomenalism): "Having decided these things, I thought I had reached port, but when I set myself to think about the union of the soul with the body I was as it were carried back into the open sea. For I could find no way of explaining how the body can make something pass over into the soul or vice versa, or how one created substance can communicate with another."(New System (12) 1695). Leibniz devises a theory of "pre-established harmony" to overcome this epiphenomenalism. He discusses how two separate clocks could come to tell the same time and proposes that this could be due to mutual influence of one clock on the other ("the way of influence"), continual adjustment by a workman ("the way of assistance") or by making the clocks so well that they are always in agreement ("the way of pre-established agreement" or harmony). He considers each of these alternatives for harmonising the perceptions with the world and concludes that only the third is viable: "Thus there remains only my theory, the way of pre-established harmony, set up by a contrivance of divine foreknowledge, which formed each of these substances from the outset in so perfect, so regular, and so exact a manner, that merely by following out its own laws, which were given to it when it was brought into being, each substance is nevertheless in harmony with the other, just as if there were a mutual influence between them, or as if in addition to his general concurrence God were continually operating upon them. (Third Explanation of the New System (5), 1696)." This means that he must explain how perceptions involving the world take place: "Because of the plenitude of the world everything is linked, and every body acts to a greater or lesser extent on every other body in proportion to distance, and is affected by it in return. It therefore follows that every monad is a living mirror, or a mirror endowed with internal activity, representing the universe in accordance with its own point of view, and as orderly as the universe itself. The perceptions of monads arise one out of another by the laws of appetite, or of the final causes of good and evil (which are prominent perceptions, orderly or disorderly), just as changes in bodies or in external phenomena arise one from another by the laws of efficient causes, of motion that is. Thus there is perfect harmony between the perceptions of the monad and the motions of bodies, pre-established from the outset, between the system of efficient causes and that of final causes. And it is that harmony that the agreement or physical union between the soul and body consists, without either of them being able to change the laws of the other." (Principles of Nature and Grace (3) 1714). The "laws of appetite" are defined as: "The action of the internal principle which brings about change, or the passage from one perception to another, can be called appetition. In fact appetite cannot always attain in its entirety the whole of the perception towards which it tends, but it always obtains some part of it, and attains new perceptions. Monadology 15. Leibniz thought animals had souls but not minds: "But true reasoning depends on necessary or eternal truths like those of logic, numbers, and geometry, which make indubitable connections between ideas, and conclusions which are inevitable. Animals in which such conclusions are never perceived are called brutes; but those which recognise such necessary truths are what are rightly called rational animals and their souls are called minds. (Principles of Nature and Grace (5) 1714). Minds allow reflection and awareness: "And it is by the knowledge of necessary truths, and by the abstractions they involve, that we are raised to acts of reflection, which make us aware of what we call myself, and make us think of this or that thing as in ourselves. And in this way, by thinking of ourselves, we think of being, of substance, of simples and composites, of the immaterial - and, by realising that what is limited in us is limitless in him, of God himself. And so these acts of reflection provide the principle objects of our reasonings." Monadology, 30. George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)[edit \| edit source] A Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge. 1710 Berkeley introduces the Principles of Human Knowledge with a diatribe against abstract ideas. He uses the abstract ideas of animals as an example: "Introduction. 9........The constituent parts of the abstract idea of animal are body, life, sense, and spontaneous motion. By body is meant body without any particular shape or figure, there being no one shape or figure common to all animals, without covering, either of hair, or feathers, or scales, &c., nor yet naked: hair, feathers, scales, and nakedness being the distinguishing properties of particular animals, and for that reason left out of the abstract idea. Upon the same account the spontaneous motion must be neither walking, nor flying, nor creeping; it is nevertheless a motion, but what that motion is it is not easy to conceive. He then declares that such abstractions cannot be imagined. He emphasises that ideas are "represented to myself" and have shape and colour: "Introduction. 10. Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever." This concept of ideas as extended things, or representations, is typical of the usage amongst philosophers in the 17th and 18th century and can cause confusion in modern readers. Berkeley considers that words that are used to describe classes of things in the abstract can only be conceived as particular cases: "Introduction. 15... Thus, when I demonstrate any proposition concerning triangles, it is to be supposed that I have in view the universal idea of a triangle; which ought not to be understood as if I could frame an idea of a triangle which was neither equilateral, nor scalenon, nor equicrural; but only that the particular triangle I consider, whether of this or that sort it matters not, doth equally stand for and represent all rectilinear triangles whatsoever, and is in that sense universal. All which seems very plain and not to include any difficulty in it. Intriguingly, he considers that language is used to directly excite emotions as well as to communicate ideas: "Introduction. 20. ... I entreat the reader to reflect with himself, and see if it doth not often happen, either in hearing or reading a discourse, that the passions of fear, love, hatred, admiration, disdain, and the like, arise immediately in his mind upon the perception of certain words, without any ideas coming between. Berkeley considers that extension is a quality of mind: "11. Again, great and small, swift and slow, are allowed to exist nowhere without the mind, being entirely relative, and changing as the frame or position of the organs of sense varies. The extension therefore which exists without the mind is neither great nor small, the motion neither swift nor slow, that is, they are nothing at all. But, say you, they are extension in general, and motion in general: thus we see how much the tenet of extended movable substances existing without the mind depends on the strange doctrine of abstract ideas." He notes that the rate at which things pass may be related to the mind: "14..... Is it not as reasonable to say that motion is not without the mind, since if the succession of ideas in the mind become swifter, the motion, it is acknowledged, shall appear slower without any alteration in any external object? Berkeley raises the issue of whether objects exist without being perceived. He bases his argument on the concept of perception being the perceiving of "our own ideas or sensations": "4. It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?" He further explains this concept in terms of some Eternal Spirit allowing continued existence. Berkeley is clear that the contents of the mind have "colour, figure, motion, smell, taste etc.": "7. From what has been said it follows there is not any other Substance than Spirit, or that which perceives. But, for the fuller proof of this point, let it be considered the sensible qualities are colour, figure, motion, smell, taste, etc., i.e. the ideas perceived by sense. Now, for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing is a manifest contradiction, for to have an idea is all one as to perceive; that therefore wherein colour, figure, and the like qualities exist must perceive them; hence it is clear there can be no unthinking substance or substratum of those ideas." He elaborates the concept that there is no unthinking substance or substratum for ideas and all is mind: "18. But, though it were possible that solid, figured, movable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible for us to know this? Either we must know it by sense or by reason. As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense, call them what you will: but they do not inform us that things exist without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which are perceived. This the materialists themselves acknowledge. It remains therefore that if we have any knowledge at all of external things, it must be by reason, inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of Matter themselves do not pretend there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas? I say it is granted on all hands (and what happens in dreams, phrensies, and the like, puts it beyond dispute) that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though there were no bodies existing without resembling them. Hence, it is evident the supposition of external bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas; since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always in the same order, we see them in at present, without their concurrence. " and stresses that there is no apparent connection between mind and the proposed material substrate of ideas: "19. But, though we might possibly have all our sensations without them, yet perhaps it may be thought easier to conceive and explain the manner of their production, by supposing external bodies in their likeness rather than otherwise; and so it might be at least probable there are such things as bodies that excite their ideas in our minds. But neither can this be said; for, though we give the materialists their external bodies, they by their own confession are never the nearer knowing how our ideas are produced; since they own themselves unable to comprehend in what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it should imprint any idea in the mind. ..... Berkeley makes a crucial observation, that had also been noticed by Descartes, that ideas are passive: "25. All our ideas, sensations, notions, or the things which we perceive, by whatsoever names they may be distinguished, are visibly inactive- there is nothing of power or agency included in them. So that one idea or object of thought cannot produce or make any alteration in another. To be satisfied of the truth of this, there is nothing else requisite but a bare observation of our ideas. For, since they and every part of them exist only in the mind, it follows that there is nothing in them but what is perceived: but whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflexion, will not perceive in them any power or activity; there is, therefore, no such thing contained in them. A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do anything, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of anything: neither can it be the resemblance or pattern of any active being, as is evident from sect. 8. Whence it plainly follows that extension, figure, and motion cannot be the cause of our sensations. To say, therefore, that these are the effects of powers resulting from the configuration, number, motion, and size of corpuscles, must certainly be false. He considers that "the cause of ideas is an incorporeal active substance or Spirit (26)". He summarises the concept of an Eternal Spirit that governs real things and a representational mind that copies the form of the world as follows: "33. The ideas imprinted on the Senses by the Author of nature are called real things; and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they copy and represent. But then our sensations, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless ideas, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas of Sense are allowed to have more reality in them, that is, to be more strong, orderly, and coherent than the creatures of the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the mind. They are also less dependent on the spirit, or thinking substance which perceives them, in that they are excited by the will of another and more powerful spirit; yet still they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it. Berkeley considers that the concept of distance is a concept in the mind and also that dreams can be compared directly with sensations: "42. Thirdly, it will be objected that we see things actually without or at distance from us, and which consequently do not exist in the mind; it being absurd that those things which are seen at the distance of several miles should be as near to us as our own thoughts. In answer to this, I desire it may be considered that in a dream we do oft perceive things as existing at a great distance off, and yet for all that, those things are acknowledged to have their existence only in the mind." He considers that ideas can be extended without the mind being extended: "49. Fifthly, it may perhaps be objected that if extension and figure exist only in the mind, it follows that the mind is extended and figured; since extension is a mode or attribute which (to speak with the schools) is predicated of the subject in which it exists. I answer, those qualities are in the mind only as they are perceived by it- that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but only by way of idea; and it no more follows the soul or mind is extended, because extension exists in it alone, than it does that it is red or blue, because those colours are on all hands acknowledged to exist in it, and nowhere else. As to what philosophers say of subject and mode, that seems very groundless and unintelligible. For instance, in this proposition "a die is hard, extended, and square," they will have it that the word die denotes a subject or substance, distinct from the hardness, extension, and figure which are predicated of it, and in which they exist. This I cannot comprehend: to me a die seems to be nothing distinct from those things which are termed its modes or accidents. And, to say a die is hard, extended, and square is not to attribute those qualities to a subject distinct from and supporting them, but only an explication of the meaning of the word die. Berkeley proposes that time is related to the succession of ideas: "98. For my own part, whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties. I have no notion of it at all, only I hear others say it is infinitely divisible, and speak of it in such a manner as leads me to entertain odd thoughts of my existence; since that doctrine lays one under an absolute necessity of thinking, either that he passes away innumerable ages without a thought, or else that he is annihilated every moment of his life, both which seem equally absurd. Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task. "99. So likewise when we attempt to abstract extension and motion from all other qualities, and consider them by themselves, we presently lose sight of them, and run into great extravagances. All which depend on a twofold abstraction; first, it is supposed that extension, for example, may be abstracted from all other sensible qualities; and secondly, that the entity of extension may be abstracted from its being perceived. But, whoever shall reflect, and take care to understand what he says, will, if I mistake not, acknowledge that all sensible qualities are alike sensations and alike real; that where the extension is, there is the colour, too, i.e., in his mind, and that their archetypes can exist only in some other mind; and that the objects of sense are nothing but those sensations combined, blended, or (if one may so speak) concreted together; none of all which can be supposed to exist unperceived." He regards "spirit" as something separate from ideas and attempts to answer the charge that as spirit is not an idea it cannot be known: "139. But it will be objected that, if there is no idea signified by the terms soul, spirit, and substance, they are wholly insignificant, or have no meaning in them. I answer, those words do mean or signify a real thing, which is neither an idea nor like an idea, but that which perceives ideas, and wills, and reasons about them. .... Thomas Reid (1710-1796)[edit \| edit source] Thomas Reid is generally regarded as the founder of Direct Realism. Reid was a Presbyterian minister for the living of Newmachar near Aberdeen from 1737. He is explicit about the 'directness' of his realism: "It is therefore acknowledged by this philosopher to be a natural instinct or prepossession, a universal and primary opinion of all men, a primary instinct of nature, that the objects which we immediately perceive by our senses are not images in our minds, but external objects, and that their existence is independent of us and our perception. (Thomas Reid Essays, 14)" In common with Descartes and Malebranche, Reid considers that the mind itself is an unextended thing: ".. I take it for granted, upon the testimony of common sense, that my mind is a substance-that is, a permanent subject of thought; and my reason convinces me that it is an unextended and invisible substance; and hence I infer that there cannot be in it anything that resembles extension (Inquiry)". Reid is also anxious to equate the unextended mind with the soul: "The soul, without being present to the images of the things perceived, could not possibly perceive them. A living substance can only there perceive, where it is present, either to the things themselves, (as the omnipresent God is to the whole universe,) or to the images of things, as the soul is in its proper sensorium." Reid's Direct Realism is therefore the idea that the physical objects in the world are in some way presented directly to a soul. This approach is known as "Natural Dualism". Reid's views show his knowledge of Aristotle's ideas: "When we perceive an object by our senses, there is, first, some impression made by the object upon the organ of sense, either immediately, or by means of some medium. By this, an impression is made upon the brain, in consequence of which we feel some sensation. " (Reid 1785) He differs from Aristotle because he believes that the content of phenomenal consciousness is things in themselves, not signals derived from things in the brain. However, he has no idea how such a phenomenon could occur: "How a sensation should instantly make us conceive and believe the existence of an external thing altogether unlike it, I do not pretend to know; and when I say that the one suggests the other, I mean not to explain the manner of their connection, but to express a fact, which everyone may be conscious of namely, that, by a law of our nature, such a conception and belief constantly and immediately follow the sensation." (Reid 1764). Reid's idea of mind is almost impossible to illustrate because it lacks sufficient physical definition. It is like naive realism but without any communication by light between object and observer. Reid was largely ignored until the rise of modern Direct Realism. Reading between the lines, it seems that Reid is voicing the ancient intuition that the observer and the content of an observation are directly connected in some way. As will be seen later, this intuition cannot distinguish between a direct connection with the world itself and a direct connection with signals from the world beyond the body that are formed into a virtual reality in the brain. References[edit \| edit source] - Descartes, R. (1628). Rules For The Direction of The Mind. - Descartes, R. (1637). DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD OF RIGHTLY CONDUCTING THE REASON, AND SEEKING TRUTH IN THE SCIENCES. - Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy. - Descartes, R. (1664) "Treatise on Man". Translated by John Cottingham, et al. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 99-108. - Kant, I. (1781) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith with preface by Howard Caygill. Pub: Palgrave Macmillan. - Locke, J. (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - Reid, T. (1785). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Edited by Brookes, Derek. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. - Reid, T. (1764). An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Edited by Brookes, Derek. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. - Russell, B. (1945). A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster. See: "Thomas Reid" at Wikisource - Cartesian Conscientia by Robert Hennig
“The old adage ‘Birds of a Feather Flock Together’ seems to apply to birds of different species too. Was at Singapore Botanical Gardens’ Evolution Garden in Dec 2010 and noticed a pair of birds of different species that seem to look alike but hanging around almost together. “I spotted the Drongo Cuckoo (Surniculus lugubris) at the open air car park (above left). It was busy flying around and flew to a branch near a male Greater Racket-tailed Drongo (Dicrurus paradisus) (above right), thinking that the first bird was the female. Both birds were of similar size, had red eyes and almost black throughout body and tail. But when I got home to view the images via the laptop, I noticed the earlier bird had a different tail design and had white markings. “I was wondering if this sticking around together was just a mere coincidence or something that happens in nature where different species of birds flock together for special purposes? “…to add to the above, other similar looking birds also seem to flock together. I have seen pictures of Milky Storks (Mycteria cinerea) mingling with Painted Storks (Mycteria leucocephala) at Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. Also, the Black-tailed Godwits (Limosa limosa) and the Whimbrels (Numenius phaeopus) are often together.” Thong Chow Ngian 4th February 2011 Leave a Reply
The right tape to wrap electrical wiring connections is electrical tape because they are insulators. But then, what happens when you don’t have electrical tape at home, and you need to protect exposed wires? Can you substitute with duct tape? Is it conductive? Alright, back to the question. Can you use duct tape instead of electrical tape? It would be best if you do not use duct tape instead of electrical tape because it doesn’t have the specific requirements for the safe flow of electricity. Duct tape doesn’t wrap snugly enough around wires. Duct tape also has cloth fibers in its backing. This feature can potentially cause a fire accident. This guide will explain when you can replace the electrical tape with duct tape, the difference between duct tape and electrical tape, their uses, why you shouldn’t use duct tape instead of electrical tape, and more information you need to know. Why Shouldn’t I Use Duct Tape As Electrical Tape? Even though duct tape has numerous functions, you would be surprised to find out that it cannot fix everything. Among other things, this kind of tape cannot fix insulating wires. In its backing, duct tape uses cloth fibers. When cloth fibers are placed up against electrically charged wires, they can dry out and even conflagrate, particularly when they carry high voltages of electricity, which is why electrical tape is best for electrically charged wires. The cloth backing of duct tape also lacks the flexibility to wrap around wire the way electrical tape does. Experts refer to this characteristic as elongation. The ability of an electrical tape to stretch lets it conform to the wire it’s being used for. For this reason, electrical tape is the preferred method when it comes to wire insulation. Electrical tape has the thermal capacity to handle high volts of electricity, while duct tape cannot. Duct Tape Vs Electrical Tape Duct tape and electrical tapes are very different and are used for different purposes. Here’s a simple list showing the differences between the two tapes; Features of Duct Tape - It is durable - Adhesive and general strength - It is water-resistant but not waterproof - Usable on all types of surface - Duct tape can fix a leaking pipe or hose. Features of electrical tape - The material of electrical wire is stretchy PVC vinyl - It comes mostly in black, but can also be found in other green, white, red, and yellow, which can be used to indicate the wires’ voltage level and phase When Should I Use Duct Tape Instead Of Electrical Tape? Though you shouldn’t use duct tape to substitute electric tape, in case of an emergency, you can use duct tape to insulate a wire if you don’t have an electric tape. However, once you have it, you have to replace the duct tape. The issue here is the dielectric breakdown of duct tapes. Although it is non-conducive, it won’t protect you from electrocution when you touch the ground and the hot wire at the same time. The duct tape won’t block the voltage from the live wire so that you can get zapped. Are There Good Alternatives To Electrical Tape? Yes. There are tapes you can use when you don’t have an electrical tape. They include wire nuts and heat shrink connector tubes. Wire nuts are plastic insulated caps that have threading inside. They cover the naked wires and can connect two wires when crimped together. Wire nuts can be used when you don’t have electrical tape. Heat shrink connector tubes surround two wires before they are heated to “solder” and hold the wires together. Should I Do My Electrical Work By Myself Or Call An Expert? If you’re a homeowner who is not an expert with insulation, you should only use electrical tape for small home projects. Use black electrical tape if you want to repair small cables. You can even attach two separate cables. When it comes to extensive electrical repairs, you shouldn’t try to do it yourself. Cables or wires that have many damages shouldn’t be handled by someone who isn’t an expert. You should also avoid using electrical tape for long-term connections in light switches and junction boxes. Hire trained professionals for this kind of job. Is Electrical Tape Waterproof? No. Electrical tapes are not waterproof. Even though this type of tape is stretchy and elastic, which means it can easily wrap tightly, it is not waterproof. Electrical tape can’t be made waterproof because the adhesive can lose its properties when it’s wet, and the seal will not be able to hold its shape under pressure. However, most electrical tapes are made with some weather and water resistance that allows the tape to work with small quantities of moisture, but they won’t perform where there are larger amounts of liquid. Always remember to keep the wiring and electrical devices far away from liquids. Water and liquids act as a conductor for electricity, which makes them dangerous. Ensure that you take the appropriate safety precautions at all times. Can Electrical Tape Catch Fire? Most electrical tape manufacturers ensure that the tapes they produce have strong thermal properties; most insulation tapes can be used with temperatures up to 80° Celsius. Nevertheless, electrical tapes are explosive when they become too hot. There is a minimal chance of combustion if the electrical tape is used correctly in a suitable environment, although this depends on the situation and the type of electric tape. Some types of insulating tape are designed to withstand heat better than others. So when you are buying electrical tape for your task, make sure you choose the tape that will serve you better. Can I Use Masking Tape When I Don’t Have Electrical Tape? No! You cannot use masking tape to replace electrical tape because it is not designed to do the kind of job electrical tape is designed to do. Masking tape is flammable. It also won’t protect you from getting electrocuted. The only tapes that can be used to connect anything that conducts electricity are UL-listed electrical tape. Can Electrical Tape Stop Electricity? Yes, it can. Electrical tape is pressure-sensitive. This type of tape is designed for the insulation of materials that conduct electricity, generally electrical wires. Electrical tapes stop the electrical current from passing to other wires by accident. When an electrical current accidentally passes from one wire to another, a fire accident caused by electricity can occur, causing damages to the home, office, or workshop. Can Electrical Tape Be Used To Insulate Wire? The main purposes of producing electrical tape are to insulate and protect wires and connections alike. You should know that just twisting wires together and sealing them with insulation tape is not the right splicing technique for following strict safety standards. Wire connectors are often required to achieve a fully code-compliant setup, so ensure that you double-check any relevant guidelines or procedures. Furthermore, you have to be mindful that under the right combination of circumstances, only a few materials are consistently 100% non-conductive, despite the extraordinary dielectric performance of a lot of insulating tapes. When there is sufficient current and voltage, when the path to the ground is short enough, and when in suitable or unsuitable environmental conditions, you will be surprised to find that even the most specific electrical tape can potentially conduct enough current to cause damage. Be careful when it comes to the limitations of insulating tapes that are used unsafely or incorrectly, and make sure you shut down all circuits before you start any repair or maintenance work in the home or office. Can I Use Teflon Tape In The Absence of Electrical Tape? People looking to use electrical tape for insulation purposes should go for the standard black electrical tape. You can also use Teflon electrical tape if you are working on mechanical and automotive applications that require a high level of heat resistance. Can I Put My Electrical Tape On Live Wire? Using electrical tape is the simplest method of making wires safe. It is also used on capped live electric wires for safety. You can use electrical tape on loose live wires that are unable to fit the cap. Ensure that you terminate the wire in a junction box and do not bury the wire in the wall. Can Electrical Tape Melt? Manufacturers have designed electrical tape to be non-flammable and self-extinguishing, so it cannot burn. However, electrical tape can melt and deform when heated to temperatures over 176℉ (80℃). Duct tape is designed to be used for packaging. It also has countless creative household uses. On the other hand, electrical tape is designed for electricians. Duct tape does not come with the fire-resistant feature electrical tape has. We will not recommend the use of duct tape as a substitute when you are doing electrical work. Both duct tape and electrical tape have their specific applications. However, you can use duct tape in case of emergency, but you have to replace it as soon as you can. The general rule is to use electrical tape for electrical work and duct tape for household work and other works it is designed to do.
Episode 574: Venus Could Have Supported Life For Billions Of Years. First Habitable Planet In The Solar System? After decades of research, including multiple landers and orbiters, science can definitively say: Venus sucks. Seriously, that place is the worst, with its boiling temperature, intense pressure, sulfuric acid rain, and more. But was it always this bad? According to new research from NASA and various universities in Sweden and the US, Venus might have actually been the first habitable world in the Solar System. And it might have maintained a reasonable climate for billions of years, finally rolling over into a runaway greenhouse effect just a few hundred million years ago. Audio Podcast version: What Fraser's Watching Playlist: Weekly email newsletter: Weekly Space Hangout: Support us at https://www.patreon.com/universetoday More stories at https://www.universetoday.com/ Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universetoday Instagram - https://instagram.com/universetoday Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / [email protected] Karla Thompson - @karlaii / https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEItkORQYd4Wf0TpgYI_1fw Chad Weber - [email protected]
Why is media important to you as a student? Social media plays an important role in every student’s life. It is often easier and more convenient to access information, provide information and communicate via social media. Tutors and students can be connected to each other and can make good use of these platforms for the benefit of their learning and teaching. How does media influence your lifestyle choices? Social media and other media can influence the decisions that teenagers make about their health and lifestyle. For example, media messages and content can make it look ‘normal’, cool or grown-up to eat junk food, smoke, drink alcohol and take other drugs. How does media affect the way we communicate? The internet and social media has drastically changed the way people all over the world interact and communicate. Social media networks allow us the opportunity to share opinions with a far wider audience. Another big change that has occurred is that there is now no filter on the way we speak. What is the importance of media and information literacy? Put simply, MIL aims to enable individuals to think critically about the media and the information they consume by engaging in a process of inquiry. The aim, according to UNESCO’s definition of media and information literacy, is to allow individuals to become engaged citizens and responsible decision-makers. How does social media help students? With the right strategy, social media can make studying more collaborative and efficient. Social media can help centralize the collective knowledge of an entire class to make studying and communicating more efficient for everyone. Designate a course or study group hashtag, such as #Bio101Finals How do you define media and information literacy? Media and Information Literacy (MIL), defined as the ability to access, analyze, and create media, is a prerequisite for citizens to realize their rights to freedom of information and expression. Media development supports MIL projects because they help people make their own choices and realize their human rights. Does the media influence body image? Self-Image Media, social media and peer pressures influence the way teens see themselves. Media’s effect on body image can cause self-image issues which can lead to eating disorders, drug and alcohol use, cutting, bullying and sexual risk behaviors How you understand media and information literacy? Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is a “combination of knowledge, attitudes, skills, and practices required to access, analyse, evaluate, use, produce, and communicate information and knowledge in creative, legal and ethical ways that respect human rights” (Moscow Declaration on Media and Information Literacy, 2012) … How does social media affect people’s body image? The study “found that brief exposure to body-positive Instagram posts resulted in improved body image and mood in young women, compared to idealized and appearance-neutral posts.” At the same time, though, Daley also discovered the surveyed women thought about their bodies more in general Can you explain the use of media and information? Answer: Media and information literacy (MIL) is linked to access to information, free expression and education. Media and Information Literacy (MIL), defined as the ability to access, analyze, and create media, is a prerequisite for citizens to realize their rights to freedom of information and expression.
Cold storage refers to a way of storing and interacting with cryptocurrency keys offline. Cold storage is used by cryptocurrency exchanges and individual holders to prevent hackers from being able to access their digital assets. In contrast to a hot wallet, a cold storage device is not connected to the internet, which protects it from unauthorized access and cyber attacks, as well as other vulnerabilities that come with being connected to the internet. Due to the irreversible nature of blockchain technology, when digital assets are accessed and stolen, they are irretrievable. This is why it is imperative to keep the private key to your cryptocurrency wallet in a cold storage device like a hardware wallet. When it is stored in cold storage, when making a transaction, the transaction is signed in an offline environment that never comes into contact with a server, making it inaccessible to hackers. There are countless stories of people forgetting or losing their private key or their private key being stolen and losing access to millions of dollars worth of bitcoin.
- Data is any information used to inform your business decisions. - Data must be accurate to ensure appropriate decision making. - Companies can use the four ideas below to help ensure data integrity. - Numerous resources and programs are available to assist with the appropriate management of data. Everyone is bombarded by data daily. But data is also crucial to the effective operation of any business. What is data? Data can refer to the following: - Information gathered for referrals or analysis. - Information that informs thinking and decision-making processes. For instance, business data could include the number of products a company sold in its northern region in the first business quarter. These numbers can help leaders in your organization make future business decisions. Why is data (and its integrity) so important? Data integrity refers to the quality and reliability of data, including the preservation, precision and consistency of data. When the information at hand is reliable, business owners and executives can make suitable choices, which contributes to the overall success of the business. In fact, the best everyday decisions are made using real-time data. This lets you have a pulse on your business’s efficiency in the marketplace and on the performance of your competition. But many business managers are concerned about the quality of their organizations’ data. According to a study from KPMG, only about 35% of executives reported a high level of trust in their business data. When asked why they don’t trust the data, more than 60% of C-suite executives blamed technology or automated processes. And more than 90% of the executives surveyed said bad data could negatively impact branding and reputation. How to ensure data integrity Now that you understand why data integrity is so valuable for companies, it’s time to learn how to achieve it. When stakeholders and
Splendor Solis (‘Splendour of the Sun’) was considered one of the most beautiful alchemical treatises ever produced. This very popular book was attributed to a somewhat mysterious figure named Salomin Trismosin (supposedly the teacher of Paracelsus), which first appeared some time in the 1530’s. It included artwork by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Lucas Cranach. The Splendor Solis contains mostly allegorical text and a series of 22 images, but was considered sufficiently useful for alchemists that it was recreated dozens of times and has never gone out of print. It was considered the most important alchemical source besides the Emerald Tablet. As with so many books of science or magic, multiple copies and hacks of the Splendor Solis are to be found. The purported author, Salomin Trismosin, is believed by many scholars to be the invention of disciples of the radical Swiss physician and practitioner Paracelsus. This work is a classical text of late medieval alchemy in that it was equally popular as a practical guide for aspiring chemists, with details needed for many key alchemical processes clearly and accurately laid out (albeit in allegorical format) in the book, while also being treasured by the devotees of so-called philosophical alchemy and other closely related brands of mysticism. The flowing are images from the Splendor Solis, with a couple of excerpts from the text: THE THIRD PARABLE AVINCENA says in the Chapter on the MOISTURES:— “When Heat operates upon a moist body, then is blackness the first result.” For that reason have the old Philosophers declared they saw a Fog rise, and pass over the whole face of the earth, they also saw the impetuosity of the Sea, and the streams over the face of the earth, and how the latter became foul and stinking in the darkness. They further saw the King of the Earth sink, and heard him cry out with eager voice: “Whoever saves me shall live and reign with me for ever in my brightness on my royal throne,” and Night enveloped all things. The day after they saw over the King an apparent Morning Star, and the Light of Day clear up the darkness, the bright Sunlight pierce through the clouds, with manifold coloured rays, of brilliant brightness, and a sweet perfume from the earth, and the Sun shining clear. Herewith was completed the Time when the King of the Earth was released and renewed, well apparelled, and quite handsome, surprising with his beauty Sun and Moon. He was crowned with three costly crowns, the one of Iron, the other of Silver, and the third of pure Gold. They saw in his right hand a Sceptre with Seven Stars, all of which gave a Golden Splendor, and in his left hand a golden Apple, and seated upon it a white Dove, with Wings partly silvered and partly of a golden hue, which ARISTOTLE so well spoke of when he said: “The Destruction of one thing is the birth of another.” Meaning in this Masterly Art: “Deprive the thing of its Destructive Moisture, and renew it with its own Essential one which will become its perfection and life.” “AND THIS IS THE FIRST PARABLE: GOD created the Earth plain and coarse, and very productive of Gravel, Sand, Stones, Mountains and Valleys, but through the influence of the planets, and the working of Nature, the Earth has been changed into many forms. Outside there are hard stones, high mountains and deep valleys, and strange things and colours are inside the Earth, as, for instance, Ores and their beginnings, and with such things earth has come from the original form, in the following manner: Where the Earth first began to grow large, or to expand and multiply, the constant operation of the Sun-Heat also formed in the interior of the Earth a sulphury vapourous and damp heat, penetrating her through and through. This penetrating work of the Sun’s heat caused in the cold and damp of the Earth, the formation of large quantities of vapour fumes, fog and gas, all of which grow with the length of time strong enough to follow their tendency to rise, thus causing on the Earth’s surface eruptions, forming hill and dale, &c. Where there are such hills and dales, there the Earth has been matured and most perfectly mixed with heat and cold, moisture and dryness, and there the best ores may be found. But where the earth is flat there has been no accumulation of such fumes and vapours, and there no ores will be found, while the uplifted part of the soil, especially, such as has been slimy, loamy, and fat, and has been saturated with a moisture from on high; got soft again, forming dough-like layers one on top of the other, which in the course, of time, under the influence of the Sun’s heat, become more and more firm, hard and baked; and other ground as gravel and sand, brittle and yet soft, hanging together like grapes, is too meagre and dry, and has not received enough moisture, consequently it could not form itself into layers, but remained full of holes, like badly prepared pap, or like a mealy dough, which has not been watered enough; for no earth can become stone, unless it be rich and slimy and well mixed with moisture.”
A variety of structural and functional defects have been described in animals. These birth defects are usually classified by the body system primarily affected, and many are discussed in this book under the appropriate body system section. Defective newborns have survived a disruptive event during embryonic or fetal development. Defective development may also cause embryonic loss, fetal death, mummification, abortion, stillbirth, a newborn not capable of living, or birth defects. When an abnormality is present at birth, it is called a congenital condition. Susceptibility to environmental agents or genetic abnormalities varies with the stage of development and species, and decreases with fetal age. The fertilized egg is resistant to agents or factors that cause or increase the chances of a congenital defect (teratogens), but it is susceptible to genetic mutations and changes in the chromosomes. The embryo is highly susceptible to teratogens, but this susceptibility decreases with age as the critical developmental periods of various organs or organ systems are passed. The fetus becomes increasingly resistant to teratogens except for structures that develop late such as the cerebellum, palate, urinary system, and genitals. The frequency of individual defects varies with the species, breed, geographic location, season, and other environmental factors. It is estimated to occur at a rate of 0.2 to 3.5% of all canine births. Commonly reported congenital and inherited defects in dogs include neurologic defects, eye defects, heart defects, skeletal muscle defects, failure of one or both testicles to descend into the scrotum (known as cryptorchidism), and hip and elbow abnormalities. Most congenital defects have no clearly established cause; others are caused by genetic or environmental factors or interaction between these factors. Inherited defects resulting from mutant genes or chromosome abnormalities tend to occur in patterns of inheritance. Such patterns include dominant (in which the defect will occur if either parent supplies an abnormal gene to its offspring), recessive (in which both parents must supply an abnormal gene) or others, such as sex-linked (in which the gene is associated with the X chromosome and not the Y chromosome). Some common diseases or disorders caused by genetic defects include deficiencies of particular enzymes that lead to the body’s inability to perform normal metabolic functions, and chromosome abnormalities that can result in sterility, abnormal growth, increased embryonic mortality, or reduced litter size. Viruses, certain drugs, and radiation are common causes of chromosomal damage. The complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors is being studied and is slowly becoming better understood. Factors tending to produce abnormalities of formation include toxic plants, viral infections that occur during pregnancy, drugs, trace elements, nutritional deficiencies, and physical agents such as radiation, abnormally high body temperature, and uterine positioning. These factors may be difficult to identify, often follow seasonal patterns and stress, and may be linked to maternal disease. They do not follow the pattern of family inheritance that is shown by genetic changes. Also see professional content regarding congenital and inherited disorders.
The Rising Tide of Ransomware On November 3, 2015, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) issued a joint statement notifying banks and financial institutions of the increasing frequency and severity of cyber attacks involving extortion. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) notes that cyber-extortion malware, sometimes also referred to as ransomware, "is a type of malware that infects a computer and restricts a user’s access to the infected computer." The malware is used to extort money from victims by indicating that the victim's computer has been locked or that access to files have been denied, and demand that a ransom is paid to restore access. Ransom demands typically range between $100–$300 dollars, and are sometimes demanded in virtual currency, such as Bitcoin. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has identified certain ransomware that attempts to extort as much as $5,000. Some industry analysts estimate that malicious actors can profit almost $33,600 per day, or $394,400 per month, using ransomware. The increasing profitability of ransomware has contributed to its proliferation, especially to the banking and financial sector. The FFIEC's statement is "intended to alert financial institutions to specific risk mitigation related to the threats associated with cyber attacks involving extortion." The statement identifies a variety of risks that victim institutions may face, including "liquidity, capital, operational, compliance and reputation risks, resulting from fraud, data loss, and disruption of customer service." In order to mitigate the risks presented by ransomware, the FFIEC has advised institutions to conduct ongoing security risk assessments. Ideally, such assessments should include ongoing evaluations of an institution's IT systems, performing security monitoring, prevention, and risk mitigation activities, providing adequate training and awareness to personnel about cyber attacks involving extortion, and implementing and regularly testing controls around critical systems and services. Institutions are also encouraged to review their incident response and business continuity procedures to help improve an organization's response in the event of an attack. The FFIEC is also promoting information sharing with the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) to improve their ability to identify attack tactics and to mitigate ransomware attacks on their systems successfully. Institutions that are victims of cyber extortion schemes are encouraged to inform law enforcement authorities and notify their primary regulator(s). Institutions should also be aware of their responsibility to notify their federal and state regulators if the attack results in unauthorized access to sensitive customer information. Notification must be in accordance with the Interagency Guidelines Establishing Information Security Standards implementing the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and applicable state laws. With the increasing scope and severity of cyber extortion attacks, institutions should be prepared to handle such threats. Ice Miller’s Data Security and Privacy Practice advises clients on issues of risk management, data breach response, cyber security planning, and business continuity. Nick Merker, a former IT systems, network, and security engineer, is also a co-chair of Ice Miller’s Data Security and Privacy Practice and speaks frequently on data security issues. Sid Bose is a former IT systems engineer. Nick Merker can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or (312) 726-2504. Sid Bose can be reached at email@example.com or (317)236-2243. This publication is intended for general information purposes only and does not and is not intended to constitute legal advice. The reader should consult with legal counsel to determine how laws or decisions discussed herein apply to the reader’s specific circumstances.
WORLD WAR II Sept. 1, 1939 - Sept. 2, 1945 NEWINGTON -- Like many World War II Marines returning from the Pacific, George G. Gentile quickly put memories of an island nightmare behind him. Upon his discharge in 1946, Gentile focused on the next segment of his life. He finished college, went to dental school at Georgetown University, then returned to New Britain to practice dentistry. He raised a family, made a career for himself, paid off a mortgage and lived the American dream. "For most of my life, up until my retirement, I very rarely thought about Iwo Jima," he said. "Things went so fast I completely forgot the war." Forgetting wasn't such a bad thing. Gentile fought on the barren mass of lava and ashes that came to symbolize the horror of the Pacific island-hopping campaign. The Marines landed at Iwo on Feb. 19, 1945, and for the next month fought to take it from 21,000 Japanese. His first experience on the front line was to replace four Marines who had been killed in a foxhole. "That was a real traumatic experience, especially in the morning when it got light, to see them there." Nearly 7,000 Marines, including 100 from Connecticut, were killed at Iwo Jima. Another 20,000 were wounded. Nearly all of the Japanese defenders died. Gentile was one of the lucky ones. When the battle was over he walked off the island. "These are the things that were hard to get out of your mind when you got back on ship," he explained. "How come you made it and they didn't?" Today, those who fought at Iwo Jima and lived to tell about it call themselves survivors. Forty-two years after he left the island, Gentile began to think about the place again. In 1987, a patient told him about a meeting of Iwo Jima survivors on Long Island. Gentile decided to go, and while there he met some of the men he'd served with. The memories began to return. With the 50th anniversary of the war approaching, many vets found themselves thinking about the war. Gentile grew concerned that people would forget about what happened at Iwo Jima. In 1987, he began working to organize the Iwo Jima Survivors Association. Today it is a national organization with about 500 members. Among other accomplishments, the organization raised $300,000 to erect a memorial along Route 9 in Newington dedicated to the men killed on Iwo Jima.
On a sunny stretch of the Bear River near Colfax, the cool water carries a nasty surprise for swimmers and fishermen. Look closely at the water flowing by. It carries clots of a feathery substance that looks like shredded toilet paper. Step into the gravelly shallows. Your feet will scream at you to get out of the sewage spill. But this isn't sewage. About 10 miles of the Bear River below Rollins Reservoir is infested with a strange algae called "didymo," short for its scientific name, Didymosphenia geminata. The algae's slang name describes the species better: "rock snot." Though it looks slippery, it feels more like a wet shag carpet. "No doubt, it is pretty yucky, and that's the complaint from a lot of recreationists," said Leah Elwell, program director at the Center for Aquatic Nuisance Species in Livingston, Mont., which monitors the problem nationwide. "If you're kayaking, you don't want to get a mouthful of that. It does kind of foul up your day." Didymo is considered native to North America. It has been reported in a handful of other California locations, including portions of the American River's south fork and the Feather River. But scientists know very little about the algae, and they've grown alarmed by a mysterious change in its behavior in recent years. So-called "nuisance blooms" of didymo, like that in the Bear River, are being reported with increasing frequency around the world. Experts don't know why, but suspect everything from climate change to a genetic mutation in the algae itself. To read the complete article, visit www.sacbee.com.
Cessation of Labor Force Growth since 2008 The United States has a long history of population growth and concomitant labor force growth. As the chart below shows, the number of men in the civilian labor force (men either working in paid employment or actively seeking work) increased fairly steadily over the past half-century—at least, until the onset of the current recession. For the past five years, however, the number of men in the labor force has fluctuated around a fairly level trend line at approximately 82 million. This cessation of growth came on the heels of a 6-million-man increase during the previous seven years. In the post-World War II era, the number of women in labor force grew even faster than the number of men, and also tended to grow fairly steadily. When the current recession began, the female labor force continued to grow, increasing by about a million women between the officially designated beginning and end of the recession (December 2007 – June 2009). In the second half of 2009, however, this growth stopped, and a slight reversal occurred, putting the total on a lower, fairly level trend line throughout 2010 and 2011, albeit still at a higher level than the female labor force had reached before the recession began. Labor economists and others have been puzzling over what has happened. Although labor force growth tended to slow or even to halt momentarily during past recessions of the postwar era, the current cessation of growth has no precedent in that era, and hence analysts have found its explanation to be a challenge. Whatever the answer(s), one thing is clear: unless the labor force resumes something like its historically normal growth, we cannot expect a resumption of historically normal economic growth. Labor inputs are major contributors to the production of goods and services. Increases in labor productivity are only a partial substitute unless the rate of productivity growth can be made much greater than observed historically over long periods. One also wonders: how are the millions of people who normally would have been in the labor force occupying themselves? Who is supporting them? What are their expectations and plans? Their extended stay outside the labor force joins a number of other puzzling features of the present recession, during which the patterns of economic changes and policy responses have differed significantly from those observed during previous macroeconomic busts. We are living, as the cliche has it, in interesting times. Unfortunately, many of the developments that make these times interesting also make them worrisome.
Background: Poor menstrual hygiene practices can lead to gynecological problems, psychosocial stress, and reduced access to school. Menstrual hygiene has not received adequate attention in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, there were fragmented and inconsistent findings. Therefore, this systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to estimate the pooled prevalence of menstrual hygiene practice and identify its associated factors among adolescent girls in Sub-Saharan Africa. Methods: The protocol for this review had registered at PROSPERO with registration number: CRD42020165628. In this study, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guideline will be used. Online electronic databases PubMed, Google Scholar, CINAHL and grey literature will be searched to retrieve available studies. Joanna Briggs Institute checklist will be used to assess the quality of the studies. Heterogeneity among studies will be examined using a chi-squared test and I-squared statistic. To investigate sources of heterogeneity, subgroup analyses and meta-regression will be performed. Sensitivity analysis will be conducted to identify influential studies. Publication bias will be examined by funnel plots and Egger’s test. The statistical analysis will be conducted using STATA version-16 software. A random-effect model will be used to estimate the pooled prevalence, and statistical significance will be determined at a p-value of <0.05. Discussion: Poor menstrual hygiene practice affects the health of millions of adolescent girls in developing countries. Currently, there are no synthesis research findings on the overall pooled prevalence of menstrual hygiene practice and its associated factor in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, this systematic review and meta-analysis will be used to inform policy-makers, programmers, planners, clinicians, and researchers to design appropriate strategies.

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