Samuel Taylor Coleridge on The Vast, The Great, and The Whole.

  For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any was as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative.  I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.

Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess.  They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little.  And the universe to them is but a mass of little things.  It is true, that the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former methods; but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour?  I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled.  They were marked by a microscopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, all become a blank and they saw nothing, and denied (very illogically) that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negations of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination and judgement and the never being moved to rapture philosophy!

(from a letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole Oct.16th. 1797)

John Locke was the man who ‘said against it’ in ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ (1695)

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man on Conditioners and Leaky Shoes Locke

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them—how Plato would have every infant ‘a bastard nursed in a bureau’, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women,[1] and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry[2]—we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They have surrendered—like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. 31 They themselves are outside, above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man’s struggle with Nature. The final victory has been won. Human nature has been conquered—and, of course, has conquered, in whatever sense those words may now bear.

Leaky Shoes Locke:

Some Thoughts concerning Education, § 7: ‘I will also advise his Feet to be wash’d every Day in cold Water, and to have his Shoes so thin that they might leak and let in Water, whenever he comes near it.’ § 174: ‘If he have a poetick vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World that the Father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the Parents should labor to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be.’ Yet Locke is one of the most sensible writers on education.

(From The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis published in 1944 retrieved from fadedpage.com
The Abolition of Man
in an impeccable epub with linkable notes)

Mr. Addison, Mr. Locke, and M. Malebranche on time

Mr. Addison reflects on the words of Mr. Locke(from no.94. Vol.1. The Spectator)
Spectator

Mr. Locke (Essay: Bk.2.Chap14) observes
'That we get the Idea of Time, or Duration, by reflecting on that Train of Ideas which succeed one another in our Minds: That for this Reason, when we sleep soundly without dreaming, we have no Perception of Time, or the Length of it whilst we sleep; and that the Moment wherein we leave off to think, till the Moment we begin to think again, seems to have no distance.'
To which the Author adds,
'And so I doubt not but it would be to a waking Man, if it were possible for him to keep only one Idea in his Mind, without Variation, and the Succession of others: And we see, that one who fixes his Thoughts very intently on one thing, so as to take but little notice of the Succession of Ideas that pass in his Mind whilst he is taken up with that earnest Contemplation, lets slip out of his Account a good Part of that Duration, and thinks that Time shorter than it is.'

The idea that you can lengthen time or feel it as longer by occupying your mind on many subjects or shorten it by focussing on just one has something to recommend it. It is the experience of many people that concentrating the mind can make time fly whilst the bored flitting from topic to topic can seem to drag.

Addison mentions Enquiry after Truth(pub.1674/5)by Mallebranche published before Locke’s Essay (1690):

“That it is possible some Creatures may think Half an Hour as long as we do a thousand Years; or look upon that Space of Duration which we call a Minute, as an Hour, a Week, a Month, or an whole Age.

”(Locke’s summary)

Henri Bergson has a similar idea of the subjectivity of the flow of time. The buzzing of the wings of a bee can be very slow to an awareness working at a higher rate or like the darting of a mouse might be slow for a cat. Duration he would define differently from Locke, Addison, and Malebranche as not an extent of time measured conventionally rather the force of all that has passed impinging on the present moment. This is preserved for use and is accessed or channelled through the brain which is an organ of action.. All that is not relevant to immediate use is filtered out. When immediate action is not required as at the point of death all that was previously ignored presents itself. Bergson takes seriously the reports of their whole life passing before them of people who thought they were about to die. I would consider this panoptic capacity as the mind of a sage and an indication of a naturalistic continuum.



Jorge Luis Borges peeps through this keyhole:
From The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges:

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand...

Sketch of a Bergson patch for Locke

In that time of the early morning when the review of your life generally drives you from your bed do you really believe that your identity survives after all those years? What was I thinking of you ask yourself. If it's not the same I, if that I is an illusion not even operative in the present then what does the hot prickling sweat of embarrassment signify? Why should I take responsibility for that faux pas? Linking the concept of identity to memory as was done by John Locke is too easily dismissed.

This being premised, to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; for which I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it; it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive.

(from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.28.9)


There are well known difficulties with this theory particularly when he adds further down:

......and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that this action was done.

Locke by the way is perfectly aware of the problems of forgetfulness and deep dreamless sleep which would create breaks in consciousness (cf. II.28.10) His proposal of serial substances with the same consciousness is an interesting one and is at least as intelligible as the claim that there is no such thing as a self.

An intuition of the connection between consciousness and identity that seems as firm as an anvil may be a very good place to start. Could memory taken in the Bergsonian way patch Locke's assumption of 'same' as in - same consciousness equals same man? Bergson maintained there is only ever a single consciousness with compresent elements that is constantly being rolled up in a single duration. It is this duration or memory working on a single moving point that establishes identity. Moreover this source of identity is most intensely felt as a contentless present moment. There is therefore no series of states as an ontological foundation. The series of states is a psychological construct that seems to underpin our identity. That part of Buddhism is right but that’s not all there is.

John locke's Style

At a time when the prevailing plain style was growing dull and insipid (John Locke is an example), it was Browne who showed the way to new possibilities of Ciceronian splendor.

(from a cliche infested review of a book on Browne in the NY Times)

Jim Holt’s view of Locke is the received, accepted and established one. I have never felt that it was fair so as a random test I did a sortilege on a lightly used copy of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding bought for the long introduction by A.D. Woozley. Out came the plum Chap.XXVII: 15

§ 15. And thus we may be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here, the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it. But yet the soul alone, in the change of bodies, would scarce to any one, but to him that makes the soul the man, be enough to [339] make the same man. For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same man? The body too goes to the making the man, and would, I guess, to every body determine the man in this case; wherein the soul, with all its princely thoughts about it, would not make another man: but he would be the same cobbler to every one besides himself. I know that, in the ordinary way of speaking, the same person, and the same man, stand for one and the same thing. And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases. But yet when we will inquire what makes the same spirit, man, or person, we must fix the ideas of spirit, man, or person in our minds; and having resolved with ourselves what we mean by them, it will not be hard to determine in either of them, or the like, when it is the same, and when not.

This a well known early thought experiment which is extensively considered in Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity by Sidney Shoemaker sticking to his last as it were. TE supplies the first two letters of ‘tendentious’. (This is Sunday, I should be resting). My point here is the clarity of the exposition. I have never found clarity to be dull. Dullness is the first stage on the way to Opacity. The dull surface of an exposition obscures its sense and whether you agree with Locke or not his meaning is clear and there is a vigour to - “And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply whatever articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases”.