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Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN -13: 978- 0- 226- 55080- 0 (cloth)
ISBN -13: 978- 0- 226- 55094- 7 (e- book)
DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226550947.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data
Names: Goldsmith, John A., 1951– author. | Laks, Bernard, author.
Title: Battle in the mind fields / John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037456 | ISBN 9780226550800 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226550947 (ebook)
Classification: LCC P 33 .G65 2018 | DDC 410.9—dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn loc gov/2018037456
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface ix
Chapter 1. Battle in the Mind Fields 1
In the Beginning 1
Soft Mentalism, Hard Mentalism 4
Liberation Moments 6
Our Kind of Science 8
The World of Ideas and the World of Social Relations 16
Generations 24
Authority 31
Group Identity 33
Ideology 36
Jehovah’s Problem and Noah’s Solution 39
Credit Problem and Heroes 42
Mind and Materialism 46
Conclusions 51
Chapter 2. The Nineteenth Century and Language 53
Introduction: History, Typology, Structuralism 53
Deep Time 61
Linguistics 76
Chapter 3. Philosophy and Logic in the Nineteenth Century 147
Philosophy 147
Logic: Boole, Frege, Russell 176
Chapter 4. The Mind Has a Body: Psychology and Intelligent Machines in the Nineteenth Century 191 Germany, the Homeland of Psychology in the Nineteenth Century 192
Psychology Comes to the New World 202
Psychology in France 218
The Unity of Mankind—and the Differentiation of Types of Humans 228
The Era of Machines 231
Moving On 237
Chapter 5. Psychology, 1900–1940 239
Structuralism and Functionalism 240
John B. Watson and Behaviorism 241
The Second Generation of Behaviorists 259
Gestalt Psychology 278
The Period Comes to a Close 307
Chapter 6. American Linguistics, 1900–1940 311
Early American Anthropology 312
Edward Sapir 320
The Phoneme 323
Leonard Bloomfield 332
Sapir and Bloomfield 362
The Creation of Linguistics as a Profession 366
Chapter 7. Philosophy, 1900–1940 373
Edmund Husserl 376
Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein 387
Logical Positivism, Logical Empiricism 390
Conclusions 432
Chapter 8. Logic, 1900–1940 435
Three Approaches to the Philosophy of Mathematics 438
The Chrome Machine of Logic 461
The Logicians’ Grammar 477
Conclusions 485
Chapter 9. European Structuralism, 1920–1940 489
Nikolai Trubetzkoy 491
Roman Jakobson 517
Structuralism and the Prague Linguistic Circle 542
Phonology 558
Death, War, and Pestilence 570
Chapter 10. Conclusions and Prospects 573
Midnight in the Century 573
Guideposts 574
Prospects 592
Conclusions 597
Notes 599
References 677
Index 715
Preface
First of all, a word about what this book is, and what it is not. It is a historical account of some central ideas in modern linguistics—an account of the ideas and some of the events surrounding their development, debate, and disposition. The book is not , appearances to the contrary, the history of modern linguistics or of any other period. It is far too selective in its choice of topics to be thought of as the history of anything. If it is historical, it is because we feel that this is the only way to narrate the story and the best way to hear it as well.
It is a study of rupture and continuity in linguistics. The primary lesson that we draw from the work we have studied here is that in the realm of ideas, continuity is overwhelmingly the way things work, while in the realm of personal interactions, acknowledgments, and jealousies, the degree of rupture that our scholars have described is great. We might even say that it is astonishing, but there is nothing to be surprised at, really, if we listen to what historians of ideas and historians of science have been telling us. Our goal in this book is to make clear how this pattern of continuity and of rupture has come to be and to shed a bit of light on why it is. In the end, we think that this situation has some regrettable sides to it, and we have not shied away from drawing some normative conclusions as well. But by and large we have subscribed to the eternally optimistic philosophy that the truth will set us free and so have tried to keep the moralizing to a minimum. Not to avoid it completely, but to keep it to a minimum.
We will have occasions in this book to remind ourselves, as well as the readers, what intellectual continuity means and what it does not mean. When we find intellectual continuity in the development of a new idea, we do not mean that the new idea was easy to come by, or that it was not
novel, or that it was not a work of first- class originality. It is easy to misread a history such as ours in which the connections between new perspectives and older developments are emphasized. Continuity means that the new ideas were based on the present; it does not mean that this basis was trivial, or obvious, or less astonishing than anyone may have thought.
What does it mean, then? In our view, it is based on the notion (hardly controversial, in our day and age) that at any given moment, there are a range of ideas, opinions, and beliefs that comprise the current state of affairs. These ideas, these common beliefs, will vary with their degree of adhesion: some will be held by many, some by few. Some will have arisen recently, others will have been around for a long time. These ideas will not all be consistent with one another. (If they were, there would be no notion of controversy in a discipline.) These ideas form, in some respects, a large organic garden, or perhaps a zoo, in which change and variety is the principal constant. It is always the case that new creatures are descendants of other living organisms: new creatures do not come on the scene with no living, direct ancestors, or arise as the descendant of a long- extinct breed or race.
To put it slightly differently, when we look at the origin of new ideas, they are always the creative modification of several ideas that have been developed recently that no one has yet connected. There are three crucial elements in that: there is a connection that is made of several ideas; those ideas are current ideas of some recency; and this novel connection, once made, is developed and elaborated in a genuinely creative new way. That is the pattern that we find, over and over. And that is the pattern we will show our readers over the course of the growth and development of the mind sciences. Our view of intellectual history is thus both historical and variationist. It is historical in that we believe that there is no way to understand the ideas of a discipline at a particular moment in time without understanding the historical path which led the field from there to where it is today. It is variationist in that it explicitly denies the Kuhnian notion that a scientific discipline will subscribe to a core set of ideas which define a paradigm, a climate of opinion; a living discipline is a quiltwork of disagreements.
The discovery and the acknowledgment of continuity in the study of the mind in these fields is not an exercise in showing that for each idea traditionally attributed to one scholar, there was an earlier scholar who had pretty much said the same thing. That game is rarely of interest if it goes no further than that. The real lesson to be learned from studying the con-
tinuity of thought in this area is that all of these thinkers are engaging in a greater conversation, and that no single scholar is large enough to hold any single important idea: all of the ideas have developed over the course of generations of controversies in which people with different perspectives and prejudices have served and returned ideas in a great game.
We noted just above that at the level of personal interaction among scholars, the continuity of ideas seems to vanish, and instead we find all sorts of conflicts, of alliances, and of branding. The people whose work we study are, when all is said and done, just people, with all the baggage that they bring with them.1
It is both helpful and healthy to redouble our efforts to focus on the real intellectual substance in this story, but we have found that we are interested in both sides—both the idea side and the personal and institutional side of the story. Perhaps the most interesting part of the second side of the story is a phenomenon that we find ourselves up against throughout the story: a moment when a leading thinker decides that essentially all the work that has preceded him is no longer worth reading or taking seriously. This stratagem (for what else can we call it?) comes up on quite a few occasions, and there are quite a few more who adopt what the Voegelins once called an eclipsing stance. We are fascinated by the double fact that so many feel called to adopt that stance, and that it seems to work so often, for so long. In some instances, this stance is adopted explicitly, with a statement that what has preceded can be safely jettisoned, while in other cases, the message is passed on implicitly, by failing to state the obvious.
The reader is likely to have noticed already that in the pages that follow, there are many dates, places, and events. But do not be fooled by this: that is not what the book is really about. The dates and the events are there to allow us to reflect on questions with real intellectual depth, on hypotheses and the arguments developed for them, on the ways in which questions and positions may remain or return despite differences in their formulation. We care deeply about the ways in which we find conceptual continuity across the work of thinkers who were themselves not aware of the continuity. We care equally about the flip side of this coin: the ways in which change and rupture can emerge from underneath the cover of loyalty and common community.
What this means, in practical terms, is that we undertake a synchronic dialogue with the great writers of the past, and so we discuss their hypotheses and their arguments not as if they were archeological ruins but as if
their hypotheses were alive, and as if they were colleagues whose offices were next door. It might take a bit of effort to see how their perspectives bear on our own questions, but that is a challenge that we always face in the real world. The point is that to unearth the continuities and the ruptures and to construct an internal history, what we must do is to engage in a dialogue which allows us to actually feel the agreements and disagreements as if they were ours today.
Our interest in rupture and continuity has led us to take more seriously certain aspects of external history as well. There are three kinds of external forces that play a major role in this story. The first is political, and in this book, the most striking case is the rise of Nazism in Central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, a world historical fact that led to a major exodus of intellectuals out of Europe at critical moments of our story. From a larger perspective, that movement of scholars from Europe to the United States is part of a bigger picture which began when the United States was younger and not so rich, a time when the natural place for would-be American scholars to go for higher education was Western Europe. The present book is the first of two volumes telling a single story, and we will focus in this book on the events that brought the mind sciences up to World War II. It will be followed by a second volume that treats the three decades that followed the outbreak of the war.
The second kind of external force is quite simply death: a scholar’s work stops abruptly at the time of his death, and if death does not stop his or her influence, it changes the character of that influence mightily. While ideas can survive the death of the people who championed them, people have no such longevity; their direct and personal influence vanishes with their death.
The third kind of force is the way in which economic resources are allotted in the creation of jobs, which in turn lead academics to leave some institutions and go to some others. We will see occasions when money that came from the Rockefeller Foundation (to take only one example) made it possible for European academics to leave their homes and avoid almost certain death, and also made it possible for academics to be invited to leave one university and come with all their students to another one. There are—not always, but often—stories that are of interest to us about why an academic institution decides it wants to hire significantly in an area, such as linguistics, psychology, or philosophy, and when that has a significant impact on the story here, we have every reason to look further into what those reasons were.
As we explore these questions, we are aware that we remain linguists, and we are deeply interested in the ideas themselves; we are not dependent on secondary sources to help us understand what is at stake. It is our strong belief, made more certain throughout the process of writing this book, that a deep account of a discipline cannot be neutral, cannot be so external that it rests on nothing but objective facts. If it is to deal both with ideas and with people, if it is to examine both the ideas that formed the people and the people who brought the ideas to life, then the histories of our disciplines must be internal histories which are capable of understanding the nature of the debates, the arguments, and the stakes. An internal history is not always a history as it was lived by the actors, each with his or her own particular point of view; in fact, it rarely is, and it may be the history that is constructed by partisans who attempt to put down their particular positions in order to reconstruct the underlying dynamics that are at play in the world of a given scientific domain at a particular time. It is less a history of events and more a history of ideas, a history whose primary aim is to bring to light the forces that act upon the growth and development of a discipline. These can include the strengths and the weaknesses of the actors themselves, the arguments and ideas both within the discipline and outside of it, as well as prestige, legitimacy, the strength of the orthodox, and the enthusiasm of the Young Turks—in short, everything that is at play in a disciplinary field and that makes it what it is.
We have naturally chosen particular incidents, schools, scholars, and coalitions in our discussions, and the fact that we have left a movement or a scholar out of our discussion does not mean that we think they are less worthy, important, or influential than those we have discussed. We have little discussion of Sigmund Freud in psychology, or of J. R. Firth in linguistics, and nothing to say about Kierkegaard or Bergson in philosophy. We talk more about Bloomfield than we do about Sapir, a fact that in no way reflects a view on their relative importance. We do not discuss Reichenbach’s ideas of time and tense, which have had a great impact on current semantics. We barely mention sociology, anthropology, and economics. In all these cases, we were sorely tempted to include discussions. But we have done our best to maintain a tight coherence of the discussion that is to follow, and to do that, we have had to embrace the fact that an omission from our account should never be interpreted as a tacit message that whatever is left out is of less importance.
The particular story that we focus on in this book involves one part of the field of linguistics as we saw it when we embarked on our careers
in linguistics some 40 years ago. Our own experiences begin roughly where the story leaves off, although we know (or knew) personally many of the principals whose careers extended into the 1970s and beyond. We have great admiration for all of the linguists we describe in this book (for some a bit more than for others, but that is only natural). Some of them are our teachers, and some our friends or professional colleagues, although of course many died before we were born, and those we only know through their writings. A large number of the people we discuss have set to paper their views about where their work comes from, or where the work of others comes from, and in quite a few cases, we aim to show that they are mistaken—sadly mistaken, if you will.
Our intention in this book is to help the reader better understand where our current beliefs in linguistics come from, and how they have been justified. We do not mean by this to criticize or dismiss any particular theory or framework, except insofar as a theory may have been offered to the public with an inaccurate pedigree. But each theory offers an answer to a set of questions which are more often implicit than explicit, and a historical perspective is sometimes the best, if not the only, way to come to understand what those questions are.
Both of us began our studies in linguistics in graduate school around the same time. We were drawn into the field because of the appeal of the questions and methods being explored and developed in generative grammar. If Chomsky had not come onto the scene when he did, it is highly unlikely that we would be here writing about linguistics. We, like so many of our generation, were inspired by the nature of the questions that generative grammar allowed us to explore. So just in case it is not clear, let us say it up front: we consider all of the thinkers and scholars that we write about in this book to be heroes. They are humans, but heroes nonetheless, and there are none of whom it cannot be said that they left the field better for having been there.
One reader of this book, a friend and participant from time to time in this book’s story, was not happy by the occasional observation on our part that seemed to be suggesting that we were taking sides in a particular confrontation: at one point, we used the word “strident” to characterize a particular linguist’s prose. We’ve left the word in; we have done our very best to remain sympathetic to all sides in these disagreements, which does not mean that we cannot call a sentence “strident” in tone when it is. As for our position, we are reminded of a statement almost certainly apocryphally attributed to John Lennon: we gave up being fans when we became professionals.
Needless to say, we have our own views on a number of subjects that we will discuss in this book, and we would not be unhappy if, as the result of reading it, some of our readers become convinced of our views. Still, that is not our primary aim, which is rather to show that among the great questions and ideas that have been central to the mind sciences over the last several centuries, there is more than one way to look at things. No matter how convinced you are of whatever you are convinced of, there is a good case to be made for other points of view. Progress generally comes from finding a new synthesis that brings together older ideas that seemed—but only seemed to be in conflict.
This book is itself also the product of a debate, or a dialectic in the etymological sense of the term. It grew out of the pleasure that we found in discussion, in agreement and in disagreement, in the enjoyment of confronting ideas and arguments. Writing this book has been a project that began a decade ago, and the decision to write this book came only after years of extended discussions between us. It is the result of the agreements and disagreements shared by two linguists from two different continents, who grew up in two intellectual traditions and different material cultures, but who both share a great pleasure in debate, in arguing, and in encouraging controversy as a form of dialogue. We know full well that this is something that we learned from our teachers. Morris Halle, who advised one of us and greatly influenced the other, expressed what we feel: “Convince me,” he would say. “Argue with me!” 2
We have been sensitive to the extreme gender bias that leaps out at us as we tell this story. There are women who play important roles in the developments that we discuss, but there are not enough. In the early work on the mathematics of computation, there is Ada Lovelace, and in the story of the exodus of the psychologists from Central Europe to the United States, there is Charlotte Bühler, and there are a few more, such as Margaret Mead. But the academic world has not had a long history of encouraging and supporting women who sought a career at a research university. In our professional lifetime, we have seen the gender balance in linguistics come to parity or near it, but the same cannot be said for some of the other academic disciplines that we explore.
Our friends have warned us that this will not be an easy book to read. There are parts that are a bit dramatic, and there might even be some humor, but there are more parts that are difficult. Despite the tone, we do not offer a simplification of the issues. The reader who does not already have at least a smattering of knowledge of linguistics, philosophy, and
psychology is going to be introduced to quite a number of unfamiliar characters and ideas. The reader who does have some knowledge of these fields is likely to have his assumptions challenged. We think, on the whole, that these issues have not been treated very well in the literature, and it has taken us decades to get to the point where we have been able to see some of these things.
It is often said that there are two ways to read the older literature in one’s discipline: one either tries to force the earlier vocabulary into today’s categories, translating as best one can into today’s terminology, or else one tries to put oneself in the earlier mind- set, and read yesterday’s articles from the point of view of a contemporary who was reading it for the first time. Over the course of writing this book, we have come to realize that for our purposes, both of these perspectives are necessary, and we do our best to help the reader come to grips with an older literature in both of these ways.
For that reason, we have made a special effort to include more snippets from writers than are typically found in studies of this sort, for the simple reason that the readers deserve to get a bit of a feel for themselves of how an earlier thinker chose to frame his thoughts and make his case.
Notes and Comments
Unless otherwise indicated, all the translations from French and German are our own. Russian names that occur have required a transliteration in English, and in some cases we have simply adopted the common transliterations that have been used, and when there is no common usage to fall back on, we have used a transliteration that makes the most sense, given familiar English orthography. We write Shpet, therefore, rather than Chpet or Špet, and Karchevsky rather than Karcevskij.
We have many people to thank for their help in the course of writing this book. There have been moments when we realized that just about anyone we have ever had a conversation with about linguistics has likely influenced this book in one way or another. Among those whose observations came at particularly important moments, we think of Farrell Ackerman, Daniel Andler, Robert Barsky, Hans Basbøll, Gabriel Bergounioux, Jackson Bierfeldt, Diane Brentari, Noam Chomsky, Katya Chvany, Jacques Durand, Pierre Encrevé, Lila Gleitman, Morris Halle, Chas Hockett, Fred Householder, Geoff Huck, Simon Jacobs, Bill Labov,
Chantal Lyche, Geoff Pullum, Robert Richards, Jason Riggle, Haj Ross, Jerry Sadock, Gillian Sankoff, Patrick Sériot, David Stampe, Guri Bordal Steien, and Atanas Tchobanov.
John Goldsmith wishes to express his gratitude to the University of Chicago, which has always been an ideal place for the kind of discussions that have gone into the writing of this book and whose deans have been generous over the last few years with helping him to find the time needed to work on this book. Bernard Laks expresses his gratitude to the Institut universitaire de France and the Université de Paris Nanterre for their support. The University of Vienna and the University of Chicago kindly provided funds to support a seminar organized by Elissa Pustka at the University of Vienna on April 6, 2017, which provided valuable feedback for us.
We both want to thank our wives, Jessie Pinkham and Claudie Laks, for their indulgence and support in this project, and we’re especially delighted that Claudie’s work could serve as the basis for the cover of this book.
Diagrams/Figures
The multicolored schemas we have included should be used with care. Each presents a number of actors in our story, in boxes that are color coded to roughly indicate what discipline the actors were involved in. Their placement in the schema is determined in part objectively: their height in the schema is a direct reflection of the year of their birth (we have shifted a few people up or down in interests of visual clarity). We have greatly simplified things by indicating relationships between various pairs of these people with colored lines, indicating roughly four relationships. One relationship is between colleagues, people who knew each other and influenced each other’s work. The second relationship is one of important intellectual influence without personal influence or contact. The third is the most important, in a sense, represented in blue; it is the relationship between a mentor or dissertation advisor and the young scholar being advised. In the cases we look at here, there are a good number of secondary relations of just this sort, where a senior scholar plays a mentoring relationship of someone who was not officially his student (such as Sapir and Whorf), and we have indicated this with a dashed blue line. Finally, in a few cases, we wish to emphasize the hostile relationship between two
scholars, and we have chosen to indicate these relationships in red. Bear in mind that restricting relationships to just these four kinds has led to some strange designations: for example, the relationship between Edward Sapir and Margaret Mead is represented with the color that indicates “colleagues,” which is not a very good description, but it is better than any of the other choices. In some cases, we describe in the text a group of people who all influenced each other a good deal, but we have not made our figures more cluttered to include all of those pairwise connections. We have included a few mixed categories, notably “philosopher-psychologist,” but that did not really help, because it is hardly a meaningful question to ask whether Brentano should be classified as a philosopher or as a philosopher- psychologist. Therefore, the reader should use the colors provided as a roadmap, but they cannot be relied upon in cases where the boundaries are blurred.
Philosopher/psychologist 1838–1917
Mathematician 1859–1938
Linguist 1859–1938
Logician 1859–1938
Philosopher 1859–1938
colleagues
Psychologist 1859–1938
Anthropologist 1859–1938
Figure 0.1. Sample schema. There are some guidelines needed to understand our figures. The information contained here is intended to serve as a visual reminder of who is who, and what they did. In all cases, a simplification is needed to do this, and the reader must bear in mind that the categorization here is in every instance a simplification of what we describe in the text. The decisions we have made here are simply what seems to us the most helpful and the least inaccurate. The vertical position is determined by date of birth—strictly, in most cases, with a very small amount of adjustment made for clarity. The colors of the individual boxes reflects the disciplines of the actors, but in most cases, some real simplification was needed. Quite a number of people are assigned to two categories, with two colors. The colors of the arrows connecting the boxes correspond to four kinds of relations: mentor (or teacher), colleague, influence, hostility. In many cases, it is hard to determine the relative importance of various teachers, and (as elsewhere) our choices represent an interpretation on our parts.
In order to help the reader organize the characters visually, we have included a number of ovals or rectangles of various sizes, usually with a label, such as “Prague Linguistic Circle.” We caution the reader not to take these indications as claims about membership in the organizations or as some sort of Venn diagram that includes or excludes members. They are there purely to help the reader remember who is who, and should be thought of as pointers to the text, where more information is noted. In particular, the reader should not interpret our depictions as signifying something about the relationship between a school, a circle, or anything else. To repeat: the information presented in the diagrams is in most regards highly subjective, and on different days, we ourselves would make different choices in a few cases as to which color to use or whom to place inside a colored box.
Battle in the Mind Fields
In the Beginning
Battle in the mind fields: the characters in this story are, for the most part, a feisty and pugnacious cast. They come prepared for battle, they rarely take prisoners, and they enter the fray defending the faith. These are philosophers, psychologists, linguists, cognitive researchers of all stripes, the inheritors of the great classical questions that may live forever: What is thought? How is it that we are conscious of ourselves? How is it that humans are endowed with the gift of language? Is the multiplicity of languages in the world an indication that there are many ways of viewing the world, or are all the languages of mankind cut from a common cloth?
This book describes the evolution of some of these ideas and provides a rough snapshot of some of these people, with the goal of understanding the present, and with the certainty that the only way to understand the present is to understand where it has come from. A glance at what is to come may give the impression that we have wandered a bit through the pages of the past, but we promise that what we have included has reverberated in some fashion right down to the present day.
One of the best reasons to study the history of our disciplines is that everything we think we have learned was once an answer to a living, breathing question, and it was an answer provided at a time when alternative answers were also being taken every bit as seriously. But once an answer is certified as true and placed among our certainties, we forget the question to which it was the answer, and the consequence is that we forget what were the alternatives that once enjoyed some traction. In short, we become trapped by our beliefs—not always a bad thing, as long as
it leads to no problems. But this phenomenon leads in a natural way to a sclerosis of the mind, a hardening of the mental arteries, and in the end a less adequate understanding of what the disciplines have learned the hard way.
Although much of our perspective in this book derives from personal experience, we have also gained a great deal from the sociologists and philosophers who have studied the evolution of thought in various disciplines. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, made the case for what he called “anamnesis,” with a slight nod towards Plato, though using the term in his own way. He argued that a necessary condition for scientific progress was understanding explicitly the conditions (not to mention the context and the constraints) under which dominant scientific ideas had emerged. He was referring not just to science, but also to the vast range of social endeavors that constitute human society. Whether we call it change, or development, or evolution, the fact is that the moment that we live in is always one of confrontation and contestation, for all the reasons discussed in this book. Once that moment has passed, powerful forces enter into play to pretty up the past, to make it docile and submissive. Understanding and wisdom demand just the opposite, though; they demand that we know where we came from and how we got here.
Why? Because the sine qua non of scientific progress is what we might call the disenchantment of the scientific world. The student discovers a scientific world, ready-made and already endowed with simplified stories of the past. But the scholar who wants to understand must free herself of that thrall and be on a first-name basis with that world; the scientist must eventually become the master of those stories, and in most cases, that means knowing how we got to where we are. Know where you came from, and you will know where you are going.1 And so we will have to begin in the past: not as far back as we might—in ancient Greece, say—but with a rapid introduction to the most relevant themes of the nineteenth century, when it seems that we can find the odd character here and there who is already contemporary and many others who are almost there.
People respond and react to what they read, what they hear, and what they are told. That’s only human nature. No one locks himself in a closet and refuses to be influenced by other people. Yet it is not at all rare to encounter brilliant thinkers who try to wipe the historical slate clean— tabula rasa!—and start over, afresh. Of course they themselves never do start over afresh, themselves unaffected by all the ideas and scholarship of the past—that would be impossible—but they send forth the message
that the work of the past is unimportant. This seems very odd, and so it is. There is some willful forgetting going on, and we would like to know why and to figure out what ought to be done to overcome it.
All thinking is a continuation of conversations that we have overheard or participated in. If we want to understand a book, we might need to have read perhaps not everything its author has ever read, but a quite a bit, and often what we find obscure in a difficult writer is obscure simply because we have to roll back some thought process that the writer had engaged in when presented with other questions, other possibilities, and other ideas. 2 Sometimes we engage in fast reading, just as we sometimes eat fast food, but just as there is for slow food, there is also a great need for slow reading, and we will engage the reader in such an activity in this book. We are tempted to say that a bibliography which goes back no more than five years is either unscientific or dishonest. That is too simple, and of course we could imagine papers where a slender bibliography was all that was needed. But as a generalization, it has lot going for it. When it comes to the central questions of the mind, the giants of human thought have preceded us, and we must remember that if we often disagree with them, we never leave them behind. It is critical that we remind ourselves that part of the essence of scientific work consists of confronting a vast library of ideas. When we know a field thoroughly, we find that nine times out of ten, we can summarize and on occasion even evaluate a book by doing nothing more than reading the bibliography carefully. 3
The second half of the twentieth century saw the development of an overarching new view of mind which, despite its importance, has no simple name and which will be a major concern of both volumes of this book. This new view is tightly bound to the machine that has changed our lives: the computer. But the connection is not a simple one. Computers, the real thing, first appeared during World War II, largely as part of the war effort, in the United States, in England, and in Germany. Computers were needed at first to solve differential equations rapidly so that artillery could be more accurately aimed, then to break enemy codes and encryption systems, and eventually to help in the development of the atomic bomb. But computers were not the simple source of the new ideas about the mind. If anything, it was the other way around. People were able to invent and create computers because these new ideas about logic and computation were already being developed. Technology, philosophy, logic, mathematics: all these fields were tied together in a complex unity that is no less real today than it was in the beginning of the twentieth century.
Soft Mentalism, Hard Mentalism
A principal focus of our account is this transitional period and the change in the way the mind was understood. To give a name to this transition (though one that will need a good deal of spelling out over the course of the book), we will look at this shift from a soft mentalism to a hard mentalism. Soft mentalism focused on consciousness and self-awareness, while hard mentalism focused on representation, intension, and belief. Hard mentalism began as a fantasy: machines that could talk, play chess, and do sums. Pascal and Leibniz had some success with machines that could calculate. These fantasies began to take on form, if not life, and Charles Babbage came as near as anyone in the nineteenth century with his analytical engine. Hard mentalism sees Leibniz as its patron saint, while soft mentalism looks to Descartes.4 And as logic is the science of what makes thought possible, there are two concepts of logic that correspond to these mentalisms: hard logic and soft logic.
The physical sciences over the past four centuries have been extraordinarily successful, as no thinking person could fail to see. Like a sharp investor looking for a place to put his money, many thoughtful people have looked to the physical sciences to try to figure out what they are doing so right and to see whether there are lessons to be learned that could be applied elsewhere. The crass might call this “physics envy”; others will see it as prudence and good common sense. We will see how the fascination with science and with measurement came to center stage in the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, as more kinds of objects came to be placed under the scientific microscope: the sound changes in language studied in depth and detail by philologists and linguists, especially by German philologists and linguists, in the nineteenth century, for example. Taxonomic structures of cultural and social systems, of biological species, and of chemical elements all developed quickly during this period. Some of these systems were shaken up again at midcentury by the Darwinian revolution, the revolution that gave a new account, without recourse to divine intervention, of how change over long periods could be scientifically explained.
One of the messages that we expect our readers to take away is the idea that it is simply impossible to understand any of the mind fields— linguistics, philosophy, psychology, logic—over the past 100 years in isolation. Each field influenced, and was in turn influenced by, the others.
This interaction, on the rare occasions it is discussed, is usually presented as a quaint corner of dusty history. We will try to show how wrong this view is, and how much these disciplines have suffered from being unaware of the origins of many of the most important ideas and values that have shaped them. An important part of this intimate relation between the fields derives directly from the fact that these disciplines share deep historical roots, and in many ways these fields were once one. There is much to be learned, for example, from watching how psychology fought for its independence from philosophy after the middle of the nineteenth century and how linguistics continues to view its independence from psychology and to reflect on that independence.
We will frequently see an idea appear in one discipline as if it were new, when it actually migrated from another discipline, like a mole that dug under a fence and popped up on the other side. Disciplines may at times emphasize their limits; under most conditions this is a bad thing, but these limits help clarify for a wide range of workers what the questions are that they should be addressing. Still, there are always individuals who are passionately interested in issues that transcend a single discipline and whose work therefore becomes multidisciplinary. It may be possible to write a history of a single discipline, but it is not possible to research a history of a discipline and restrict oneself to that discipline: the reality, the boots on the ground, has always seen thinkers read and write across the disciplinary boundaries. 5
We have found it useful to adopt some of Bourdieu’s perspectives, as we noted just above.6 Bourdieu generalizes the notion of capital from the economic domain to a wide range of social arenas, all the while recognizing that this capital can grow, diminish, accumulate, or even in some cases be wiped out in a crash. It is a banality to say that money is both a reality and a social construction. No one needs any explanation that money has its reality: it can be transformed into a sweater, a dinner, a car. And it is a social construction; without the force of a government behind it, a 10- dollar bill is just a slip of custom-made paper, not good for much at all. And while there is an arbitrariness to the units with which we measure monetary value, all capital has the possibility of accumulating, of being added to by its owner.
In various social arenas, which Bourdieu calls fields, individuals enter into different relations with one another; most of the relations discussed in in this book involve academic and scientific roles. In different fields, actors may work to accumulate capital, even though the capital is generally
specific to each field. In the academic realm, the notion of capital corresponds to authority and influence, and under certain conditions it can transfer across fields; although the economic metaphor breaks down in such cases, since a transfer from one field to another need not involve a decrease in accumulated capital in the first. But transfer across fields, as Bourdieu underscores, is far from obvious and far from automatic: it is indeed a complex alchemy, which can involve far more than an explicit or pre- established set of rules; it may depend on a larger context, including ideas circulating on more extensive fields, or a sensitivity to the widest field of all, the zeitgeist.7
In the rest of this chapter, we will survey the principal themes that return frequently in the story that will capture our attention. We have cast a wide net, from a chronological point of view, so that we can see recurrences—and see them we will.
Liberation Moments
Here is the first noteworthy observation: new ideas that catch on are always perceived by the catchers- on to be liberating them not just from a set of ideas but from a dogma of an earlier generation. Each successful new way of looking at mind, language, and reasoning is viewed as a notional liberation moment. This way of putting it captures both the heady revolutionary fervor that comes along with a new scientific perspective and the sensation that a new perspective brings out explicitly what was wrong with the old conventional wisdom. Now, with the problem out in the open, we can get rid of it, put it behind us, and move forward with new vigor. We see the dogma of our elders and wonder how they could have failed to see it for what it was, as we see it now.
One of the ideas we will try to spell out is that we never completely drop old ideas: they remain with us, often getting harder and harder to see consciously, which is generally not a good thing. But one of the constants we will hear in the stories that are recounted by participants is this: each person, individually and in concert, felt that a great weight had been lifted from his or her shoulders, and that weight was the weight of a heavy past tradition. The behaviorists felt that way, as did the logical positivists, the early generative grammarians, and then the later generative semanticists. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel told of his similar conversion experience upon first encountering Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s work.
It follows from this that if you do not understand how a once dominant idea could have captured the imagination of smart, young people, then you simply do not understand it. All new ideas that grab the imagination of new people in a field do so because they are perceived as liberations from some kind of orthodoxy of the past.
Noam Chomsky expressed the heady emotion that we are talking about very well:
The whole history of grammar, for thousands of years, had been a history of rules and constructions, and transformational grammar in the early days, generative grammar, just took that over. So the early generative grammar had a very traditional flair. There is a section on the Passive in German, and another section on the VP in Japanese, and so on: it essentially took over the traditional framework, tried to make it precise, asked new questions and so on. What happened in the Pisa discussions was that the whole framework was turned upside down.
So, from that point of view, there is nothing left of the whole traditional approach to the structure of language, other than taxonomic artifacts, and that’s a radical change, and it was a very liberating one. The principles that were suggested were of course wrong, parametric choices were unclear, and so on, but the way of looking at things was totally different from anything that had come before, and it opened the way to an enormous explosion of research in all sorts of areas, typologically very varied. It initiated a period of great excitement in the field. In fact I think it is fair to say that more has been learned about language in the last 20 years than in the preceding 2000 years. 8
The last sentence is certainly a showstopper: either you believe it or you are stunned by its scientific immodesty. But immodesty (if that is what it is) aside, it illustrates the giddy feeling of liberation that so often comes along with being part of a movement that takes itself to be revolutionary. Martin Joos, an ornery member of the post-Bloomfieldian generation, must have had this in mind when he wrote that “linguistics has been preeminently a young man’s pursuit ever since the 1920’s.” 9
Sociology also reminds us that it is not always best to focus too much on the individual: as Bourdieu put it, it is not so much the heir that inherits the inheritance, in the world of ideas, as it is the inheritance that inherits the heir!10 We should not be too shocked to discover that systems of positions and dispositions are reborn in each individual in each new generation of scholars.
Here’s another way to think of it. There is a force that we can feel when we read the work of giants who have preceded us, an energy that comes with it, an ability to make us think today. At the same time, the most profound contributions have always been the result of a thorough knowledge of orthodoxy and its dogma mixed with a passion for heterodoxy. There is no deep mystery why this should be so. It is the simple result of the fact that no one thinks alone or starts over from scratch.
Here is something else to keep in mind, something that we will state more than once, because it bears repetition: if the constant reminders of the sources of our ideas make the dead weight of the past seem inescapable, don’t worry. Escaping the dead weight of the past is usually very simple: all that is necessary is to become aware, to become knowledgeable. The liberation is virtually instantaneous. There are grounds for hope and optimism.
Our Kind of Science
Any observer of the linguistic scene would notice that every generation has wanted its field to be scientific, and what’s more, each generation thinks that it will be the very first generation to have succeeded in the quest to become a science. Within the mind sciences (linguistics, psychology, philosophy, logic), each generation rebukes the previous one for having wrongly thought that it had its hands on a legitimate scientific method and framework, and then it immediately goes on to offer what it takes to be a truly scientific vision.
It is much more interesting for the reader to see this directly. Here is a modest sample of moments when linguists observe that finally linguistics has become a science. We will begin here with a typographical convention that we employ in the rest of the book: within a quotation, added emphasis appears in boldface, and original emphasis appears in italics. Feel free to skim.11
Since the commencement of the present century, and especially within the last fifteen years, the philosophy of language has been pursued with great ardor, and the learned on the continent of Europe, by following the grand Baconian principle of induction, have placed this science on a solid basis , and are in the way of most important discoveries. These discoveries are modifying the grammars and lexicons of every language. . . . The new method of
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intoxications. On his return found him drinking. He annoyed and became too angry. He said it was not right Thereupon they quarrelled and he insulted him with his foot This watchman prays you to peep through this matter.”
A native who had had words with one of our employees attempted to revenge himself by writing to me to accuse his enemy of taking bribes.
“I have the honour to inform your kindness,” says the letter, “that Ahmed Hassan the Chief Porter under your noble direction is taking bibes (sic) like hens, eggs, veg., and some other things, and he takes also one pound from every porter. So I beg from your kindness to examine him in this manufacture and to accept my request and highly oblige.”
Revenge is also the motive of another complaint, reading as follows:
“I lay this matter before you, as I know you are very fond to know all what your men do The Inspector at ... became so proud of himself thinking he was the only chief one there who can do as he likes. He is always willing to mischief the poor in order that he can do what he likes Also he is a gallant and tries to lead the good women a fast life That is because he is not willing to be watched by the faithful men of occupation. He is always interfering with some other man’s affairs, and he is hard trying to gather money so much for himself.”
Here is another effort:
“Sir, with heart full of deep sympathy and eyes full of hot tears, I am Ahmed Hassan who was dismissed last week, have the honour to inform you: I am a poor man have crowded children and a wife without state cannot find any way by which I live, that is case deserving kindness upon justice. What shall I do? Kindly I beg you sir for the sake of by God to remain me in my job ”
A request for employment was worded in the following confident manner:
“Petitioner, Mohammed Ahmed, your slave, begs to state that he has served the Government in Cairo twenty years, and thanks God his has done his duties most energetically. Born in a tropical country and having spent thirty years in Egypt my body has become damp and now I am very anxious to return to my own place. As you have done me so many kindnesses in the past I shall be obliged if you will recommend me for employment there, as I am poor and am well convinced that the most beloved thing to you is my welfare.”
The correct address on the envelope often puzzles the native greatly. Lord Cromer once received a letter addressed simply to “The Lord, Cairo.” Sir Eldon Gorst was on one occasion addressed as “His Majesty Gorst.” Lord Edward Cecil was once the recipient of a letter addressed to “Sessel the
Substitute,” he being then an Under-Secretary of State, an office which is called in Arabic “El Wakil”—i.e. “Deputy.”
The native stable-boy in charge of our hospital for sick animals desired a rise in his wages, and wrote me the following petition:
“We respectfully beg to lay before your kind notice. I am Abdullah Ahmed of the animals. I beg to acquainted your Excellency I had been appointed to that place according to your noble order I beg to inform you Sir from the time in which I worked I got a great tired because I feed buffaloes, camels, she goats, cows, he horses, asses, all these animals with out sickness neither wounds. Although I say to the police officer increase my wages he say No, fool I beg you to increase my wages and I implore God to grant you a happy life ”
The above letters have been written either by the professional scribes who are generally to be found seated outside the government offices in any provincial town, or by friends of the petitioners who had learnt to write while employed as dragomans or servants in European households. Sometimes, too, a minor clerk in a Government office will not be above writing such a letter in return for a basket of vegetables, let us say, or a couple of pigeons. Such people pride themselves on their knowledge of English, and often display a keen desire to converse or correspond with one another in our language however slight their acquaintance with its intricacies may be.
An example of the ludicrous results of this affectation is shown upon a sheet of paper which I have before me. At the head of the paper is my Egyptian secretary’s note to a certain station-master, reading, “Kindly reserve three sleeping baths (berths) on the train to-night.” The stationmaster sent the note on to the wagon-lit inspector with the words, “Please make the needful and write and obliged.” The inspector forwarded the note to the superintendent with the endorsement, “Please command”; and that official returned it after adding the words, “Yours truly, are reserved.” The station-master then received the note and forwarded it to my secretary, with the message: “Dear. You find your require and oblige”; and my secretary sent it on to me with the final endorsement: “Sir, the baths are ready.”
There is another class of correspondence of which a few specimens lie before me. These are letters, petitions, and reports of minor native officials, who, although belonging to the lower classes by birth, have received a good education and speak English with some fluency. Writers of this class generally use language which is somewhat Biblical in character, as will be seen in the following petition:
“Sir, one, only one Kind word from you will go a great way off and do a great deal of good, therefore, I write these lines in the hope of getting that good word I have already been tried in the furnace. Poverty, mortification, and disappointment have done their work upon me, and my soul and body are now sufficiently sick. Will you therefore, have compassion upon me and approve my reinstatement in the office from which I was dismissed as a last chance?”
Here are two short letters of a different type. The first was written by a sporting Egyptian employed in my department, whose pony I had ridden with enjoyment on two occasions. It reads:
“As I believe you will be pleased to hear that my horse whom you have loved has gained the first prize in the first course of our Sporting Club races yesterday, therefore I have written these words to you for pleasure.”
The second letter was left at my house on Christmas Day by another employee, and reads:
“With the greatest pleasure and most gaiety I have come to say Happy Christmas to you.”
Both these are typical specimens of a naïve and child-like, but quite charming, class of letter which an English official in Egypt constantly receives.
The following official note was received by me from an Egyptian of a somewhat nervous temperament:
“The Inspector of ... begs to inform you that he is quite sure that the robbers will be found in their hiding. When he received your word saying that you would attack them at this midnight his hand shivered with gladness and his heart was full of joy. He will be at the place of meeting with the horses at the time you say, but owing to his mother is about to die he hopes you will not need him to accompany you.”
I must now be permitted to relate a few anecdotes concerning the children of Egypt, which will further display that quality of youthful simplicity which is usually so very engaging, and which leads more often to an internal convulsion than to an outburst of wrath.
A curious fact in regard to the Egyptian peasant is that, in a manner of the little child, he seldom knows his own age. A lad with a budding moustache will tell you in all seriousness that he is forty, and a wizened old man will, with many gestures indicating his uncertainty, declare himself to be “perhaps about thirty.” A true story is told of an old native who was taken before the
magistrate on a charge of stealing six buns from a pastrycook’s shop. Asked what his age was, he replied that he thought he was about 112. The magistrate turned to the clerk and inquired whether any previous offence was recorded against the prisoner. The clerk replied that there seemed to be nothing against him—at any rate not for the last hundred years. The magistrate then addressed the old man once more, and asked him whether he had no grandchildren or other descendants with whom he could live and who could keep him out of mischief. “Oh,” replied the prisoner, “I am well enough looked after, thank you. I live with mother.”
A somewhat similar tale comes from the upper reaches of the Nile. In the Sudân there are always a large number of camp-followers who do odd jobs for the troops stationed in outlying places, and these men receive daily rations from the War Office, the amount varying according to the age of the individual. A short time ago a grey-haired native sergeant of many years’ service asked his commanding officer whether the rations of one of these hangers-on might be increased from those of a boy to those of an adult. “Why?” asked the officer. “Is the man more than eighteen years old?” “Oh yes, I think he must be,” said the sergeant, after some hesitation. “He is my father.”
The Egyptian is generally inclined to be very literal in the interpretation of his instructions, and several amusing anecdotes are told in this regard. An English official died suddenly at a lonely outpost in the Sudân, and the Egyptian officer on whom the charge of affairs had devolved wired acquainting the authorities with the sad news. Very wisely the Englishman at headquarters, who had heard stories of persons being buried alive, telegraphed back saying: “Make certain that he is really dead before burial.”
The reply of the Egyptian official was received a few hours later. It reads: “Have made certain with revolver.”
Another story is told of an Egyptian clerk at a railway station in the far south who was much disinclined to act on any occasion without precise instructions. One day the officer at the depot received a telegram from him which read: “Station-master is being devoured by lion on platform. Please wire instructions.” On another occasion this same clerk telegraphed down the line to the nearest English official the following startling message. “Station attacked by lions, tigers, bears, and wolves.” The Englishman replied: “Your message ridiculous. Wire precisely what you mean.” To this the clerk, after some hesitation, humbly answered, “Delete tigers and bears.”
When the great dam at Aswân was being built, the Egyptian government gave notice to all Nile boatmen that the river would be closed to traffic at this point for the period of one year. In spite of ample warning, however, several vessels arrived from Lower Nubia after the date fixed for the closing of the waterway, and were therefore held up on the south side of the works. After waiting a month or two one of the skippers came to the engineer in charge and asked him how long he would have to wait before he could continue his journey down stream, as he was somewhat in a hurry.
“Well,” said the official, “I expect you will have to stay where you are for about ten months more.”
“Thank you, sir,” the boatman answered, quite unmoved. “Would you be so kind as to lend me a bit of rope? I suppose I shall have to tie up.”
There are times when the simplicity of the Egyptian becomes annoying. Indeed there are occasions when these irresponsible ways lead to terrible crimes, for which the hangman’s rope is none too severe a punishment. A tragic story of this kind was told me a year or two ago in Upper Egypt. Three young peasants wished to play a practical joke on an unpopular villager, who was for the moment believed to be absent from home; and they decided that the most amusing plan would be to enter his house and make hay with his goods and chattels. They therefore went at dead of night to the place, and made an examination to ascertain the easiest manner of forcing an entrance. In the back wall they discovered that several bricks were loose, and by removing these a hole was made of a size sufficient to permit of a child crawling through. With many suppressed giggles they returned to their own dwelling place and secured the services of a little girl about nine years old who was related to one of their number. They then hurried back to their victim’s house, and telling the girl that she must open one of the doors or windows from the inside, they pushed her through the hole. Now it so happened that the unpopular gentleman had returned from his travels and was asleep within the front chamber; and very soon the little girl appeared at the hole in the wall, calling to her companions to pull her back again as quickly as possible. At that moment the owner of the house awoke, and, hearing the noise, rushed into the back room. There he saw in the semidarkness the figure of the girl struggling to escape through the hole, and promptly he seized her by the legs and began to pull. The practical jokers on the other side of the wall, realising what was happening, grabbed the girl’s head and also began to pull.
“Allah!” said one of them. “He’ll drag her in and recognise who she is, and then he’ll have us up for burglary.”
“Pull!” gasped another; “he’ll get her!”
“You’ll pull her head off if you’re not careful,” said the third.
“O well, she’s only a girl,” answered his companion. They now each had a hand upon the unfortunate child’s head and throat, and with a mighty tug they pulled her through the hole. They then picked up the limp body and raced back to their own home.
“Well, well,” panted one, as they sat once more in safety, “that was a narrow squeak!”
“Poor little girl!” said the second. “She was a comely lass!”
“Ah me!” sighed the third. “But we’ll give her a good funeral tomorrow.”
Their alternate laughter and tears presently attracted the attention of other members of the family, and soon their crime was out.
During an epidemic of cholera some years ago orders were sent to the native authorities in the villages to “isolate” any cases of the illness which might be detected. An English official, happening to visit one of these villages a short time after this order had been issued, asked the head man whether any cases of cholera had occurred among his people.
“Only one,” replied the old Egyptian—“a girl. We ‘isolated’ her.”
“Good!” said the Englishman. “How did you do it?”
The native smiled and drew his finger across his throat. “With a knife,” he said.
The Egyptian’s idea of justice is peculiar; and although the better class native judges are usually excellent exponents of the law, instances are often to be noticed of an absurdly childish reasoning. A short time ago two natives were had up before the courts on the charge of having carried firearms without licenses. In passing sentence the native judge fined one of the offenders one hundred piastres and the other fifty piastres. An English official asked the Judge why he had not given the same punishment to both men.
“Well, you see,” said the Egyptian, “one of the guns was longer than the other.”
So much has been written in regard to native superstitions that little need here be said upon the subject. I cannot refrain, however, from recording one story dealing with this phase of Egyptian life. A native effendi, a man of the educated classes, found himself in trouble one morning at the Zoological Gardens at Cairo owing to the fact that he had been observed by one of the keepers to climb the railings surrounding the giraffes’ compound and to open and shut an umbrella several times, apparently for the purpose of frightening one of the animals. When he was closely questioned as to his actions he stated that he had wished to shade the giraffe’s neck from the sun, in order that he might have the pleasure of watching the creature shrink to the size of a mouse, a phenomenon which he had been told would be observed if a shadow were cast upon that part of its anatomy at noon.
Another native, who had been watching a chimpanzee with awful interest for some time, asked the keeper what manner of diet was provided for animals of that kind. The keeper having told him, the visitor smiled, and, taking his arm, drew him aside. “Now that nobody can hear what we are saying,” he whispered, “tell me truly: do you not feed them on the flesh of criminals who die in the city prisons?” As a deterrent to crime it might have been as well had the keeper admitted that such was the case.
Egyptians will believe stories of the wildest kind, which in Europe only a child would accept. For example, when the Aswân Dam was built, many natives declared that the English had only undertaken the work in order to convey the water of the Nile in pipes to England for the benefit of the British farmer. Many of the peasants believe that England is inhabited solely by men who spend one half of the year in digging through perpetual ice and snow for the gold which lies below, and the other half of the year in spending the proceeds in Egypt, which is obviously the hub of the universe.
This credulity is so general that the native peasant, believing the English official to be similarly minded, often invents, and even acts out, the most absurd story by which to conceal the actual facts of a case. It recently happened that two brothers were followed home one night through the streets of their village by a watchman who regarded them as suspicious characters. Entering their house and shutting the door, the two men observed through the crack that the watchman took up his stand outside. One therefore suggested to the other that they should get him into trouble by accusing him of some unjustified act of violence against themselves; and it was finally agreed that the elder brother should shoot the younger in the leg, and that
they should then declare that the officious watchman was the aggressor. The family gun was procured, the younger brother held out his leg, and the elder fired at him. Unfortunately, however, he was not a good shot, and the wretched victim, receiving the whole charge in his stomach, promptly died. The watchman was at once accused of the crime, and was sent to prison on a charge of manslaughter. He also had a brother; and this man, thirsting for revenge, went to the enemy’s house, and there shot himself in the leg, declaring to the people who rushed in that he had been the victim of a murderous assault. His story, however, was not believed, and at length the whole tale came out.
A year or two ago some natives who were harvesting in their fields sent one of their women down to the river for water. As she was returning with the water-jar upon her head, a boy of about fifteen years of age belonging to another family asked her to let him drink from the jar. This she refused to do, there was a quarrel, and the woman received a knife-wound from which she died. The boy’s family at once handed him over to the relatives of the victim, and made no attempt to shield him from the consequences of his act. The aggrieved party, however, were by no means satisfied. “This is all very well,” they said, “but you have killed one of our finest women, and you offer us a miserable little boy as the murderer. That will not do at all.” They therefore accused the headman of the offending family, and concocted their story so well that he was found guilty and sent to penal servitude.
In conclusion I must relate one more story in order to illustrate the peculiar manner in which tragedy and comedy go hand in hand amongst the children of Egypt. A well-known robber was arrested at a small station in the Sudân during the time when martial law was still in force; and he was promptly sentenced to death. The solitary English officer in charge of the post refrained from attending the execution, the arrangements for which were left to the discretion of his Egyptian colleagues. A gibbet was erected, and about nine o’clock on the next morning the condemned man was driven up to it in a mule-cart. The rope was passed round his neck, the mule was whipped up, and the cart passed from under the feet of the victim, who was left swinging in mid-air. The officer, however, had forgotten to tie the man’s hands; and he promptly swarmed up the rope to the crossbeam, there seating himself comfortably in the piping hot sunshine, while the troops stood gaping around him, the officer mopping his forehead in an ecstasy of heat and vexation. Nobody knew what to do. They could not shoot the man, for
their orders were to hang him; and, on the barren sandy ground, no stones could be found to throw at him in order to dislodge him. The Egyptian officer therefore entered into friendly conversation with him, begging him to come down and be hanged like a man, instead of sitting up there swinging his legs like a monkey. This the robber totally refused to do, and he declared that nothing short of a free pardon would induce him to descend. The officer therefore endeavoured to appeal to the man’s better feelings. “Look here,” he said, “it is all very nice for you, sitting up there in the breeze, but down here it is dreadfully hot; and, you know, none of us have yet had our breakfasts, and we are feeling extraordinarily faint and uncomfortable. Please do come down and be hanged properly, or I, for my part, will most certainly be sick.”
The robber, however, refused to move; and at last the English officer was sent for, who, acting in accordance with an unwritten law, pardoned him there and then, thereby enlisting the faithful services of a scout who has since done very valuable work.
CHAPTER XV
AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN POEM
A ago, when the hieroglyphical script of the Ancient Egyptians first began to be deciphered, it would hardly have been believed possible that scholars would one day find themselves possessed of such a vast literature as is now at the disposal of Egyptologists; nor would it have been dreamed that the subtilties of the language, the idioms, or even the grammatical structure, would ever be so fully understood as they are at the present day. Thanks mainly to the diligent work of a group of painstaking German Jews, and to the brilliant labours of a handful of European and American scholars, we can now translate the many hieroglyphic or hieratic texts which have come down to us, with a degree of accuracy almost equal to that obtained in our renderings of Greek and Latin. Poems, prayers, tales serious and comic, historical narratives, satires, and letters, are now able to be put into modern language with the full certainty that the meaning has been grasped; and the wealth and variety of the material thus presented to us is astonishing.
One of the most remarkable documents of all those which have come down from Pharaonic times is that which records the dialogue between a man about to commit suicide and his own soul, composed somewhere about the year B.C. 2000. The papyrus upon which it is written is now preserved in Berlin; and the text has been translated by Professor Erman and Professor Breasted, whose renderings I have, in the main, here followed. The man is supposed to be weary of his mortal life, owing, it would seem, to the fact that his body has been disfigured by some dreadful mutilation, perhaps inflicted by his enemies; and the burden of the flesh has become intolerable to him. His soul, however, enjoys its sojourn upon earth, and has no desire to be launched into another sphere. The distinction between soul and body is somewhat difficult for us to understand, but actually it may be supposed that the dialogue represents the battle in the unfortunate man’s mind between the desire for freedom from bodily pain on the one hand, and the dread of death on the other.
“Recollect,” says the life-loving soul, “that burial is lamentation and a bringer of tears, causing a man to be full of sorrow. It is taking a man from
his home and casting him out upon the heights (of the desert). But you will not be going up there that you may see the sun. There are those who build (their tombs) in red granite, who construct their sepulchres within a pyramid; there are those who (lie) splendidly in splendid structures.... But their memorial altars are as forsaken as are (the bodies of) those weary-ones who, without a surviving relative, die on the pathway across the inundation, the flood taking hold of them on the one side, the heat (of the sun) on the other, and to whom (alone) the fish along the brink of the water speak. Hearken to me!—pursue the gladness of the day and forget sorrow.”
But the man does not fear death so greatly as he dreads life now that his body has become hideous and an object to be shunned by others. “My name,” he cries in the bitterness of his distress, “is more horrible than the stench of a (dead) bird on a summer day when the sun is hot.... Yea, my name is more abhorrent than a woman against whom gossip is told to her husband.” He then burst into a tirade against humanity in general. “The quiet man perishes,” he declares; “the bold-faced walk abroad. Hearts are full of thieving; the (only) man in whom one can trust is he of no understanding.... I am burdened with misery, and have no faithful friend....”
Then, in the anguish of his mind, he utters a welcome to Death which will stand for all time amongst the greatest poems in existence. The brevity of his metaphors, which are yet amply descriptive, are reminiscent of the best Japanese poetry, and show the same masterly handling of the structure of imagination, the same ability in the selection of the essential materials for the formation of a mindpicture.
“Death is before me to-day
Like the recovery of a sick man;
Like going out into the garden after an illness.
Death is before me to-day
Like the fragrance of myrrh;
Like sitting under a (ship’s) sail on a windy day
Death is before me to-day
Like the scent of lotus flowers;
Like resting on the roadside to drink deep
Death is before me to-day
Like the course of the overflowing water-channel,
Like the return of a man from a ship of war to his house.
Death is before me to-day
Like the clearing of (mist from) the sky;
Like a man fowling therein toward that of which he was not aware.
Death is before me to-day
As a man craves to see his home
When he has spent years in captivity.”
I doubt whether, in the whole world’s literature, Death has ever been portrayed in more alluring fashion or so sweetly sung. Could one but think of the experience of life’s termination as being like that of going out from the monotony of the sick-room into the vivid freshness of the garden, when one’s senses are all quickened by long absence from growing things, truly Death would be a sensation which would make all the distress of life worth while. Or does the reader know the enchantment of sitting upon the deck of a Nile-vessel when the steady North wind fills out the great sail above him, white against the deep blue of the sky, and drives the prow through the waters with the insistency of nature itself? Does he know that indefinable sense of reliability which is conveyed to a sailor by the straining sail spread above him in the sunlight? Has he felt the confident exultation of that passage through the waters, when the mind, aware of the destination, is absorbed by the majesty of the journey? Even so, says our poet, is Death; the triumphant rush forward to a sure harbour. The picture of the over-flowing water-channel is one that will best be appreciated by those who have lived amongst the fields of Egypt. The farmer digs a rough channel through the soil with his hoe, and into this he suddenly releases the water which has been held back awhile by a little bank of earth, so that it rushes forward on to the rich ground, travelling along its appointed way in the sunlight. And to the
joyful overflow of the cool water upon the prepared earth the poet tells us that Death is to be likened.
The metaphor in regard to the clearing of the mist requires to be explained before its extreme beauty can be appreciated by those unfamiliar with Egypt. Upon a reed-covered lake of the Delta a hunter’s canoe is silently propelled through the dense, white mist of early morning, as yet undissolved by the risen sun. Presently the little craft comes to rest amidst the tall stems of the papyrus-plants; and in the stillness of the morning the clearing of the air is awaited, in order that the hunter may learn in which direction to move towards his quarry. Then, of a sudden, the sun breaks through the vapour, the white volume of the mist rolls aside, and he finds himself already in full, close view of the flock of duck and wild-fowl which he is seeking but of whose presence he was not aware. Even so is Death: the rending of the mist, and the sudden, proximate vision of that which stirs a hunter’s heart.
As the lines of this poem are read and their sense is received by the brain, the series of pictures spring into life in the imagination with a clarity which is evidence of the author’s mastery in the selection of words. Each sentence is expressed with such lucidity, such poignancy, and such convincing brevity, that the brain responds almost automatically. The meaning of the words leaps to the mind, the curtain swings up, the picture is seen in its perfection; and so clear is the vision that one is almost loath to read on and thus to change the scene. But not only is a series of pictures called before the imagination: there is also their application to the poet’s imagery of Death; and, line by line, the reader is introduced to mankind’s ultimate tragedy in a new and wondrous aspect.
In spite of this laudation of Death, the soul still protests against the destruction of its earthly home; and thereupon the man describes the great privileges enjoyed by “those who are yonder,” that is to say, the dead. They shall sit, he declares, in the barque of the sun and shall traverse the sky like the stars; they shall converse face to face with the solar gods and shall not be repelled by them; and they shall at last be able to inflict punishment for evildoing where punishment is due, and shall seize hold of the wicked in the manner of the living gods. The idea of an ultimate Justice, and of the ability of the dead to sit in judgment upon those who had wronged them in life, at length overcome the scruples of the soul; and the embittered man is thus left free to put an end to his existence.
CHAPTER XVI
THE STORY OF THE SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
W the early Spanish explorers led their expeditions to Florida, it was their intention to find the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, tales of its potent waters having reached Peter Martyr as early as 1511. This desire to discover the things pertaining to Fairyland has been, throughout history, one of the most fertile sources of adventure. From the days when the archaic Egyptians penetrated into the regions south of the Cataracts, where they believed that the inhabitants were other than human, and into Pount, the “land of the Gods,” the hope of Fairyland has led men to search the face of the earth and to penetrate into its unknown places. It has been the theme of countless stories: it has supplied material for innumerable songs.
And in spite of the circumambulations of science about us, in spite of the hardening of all the tissues of our imagination, in spite of the phenomenal development of the commonplace, this desire for a glimpse of the miraculous is still set deeply in our hearts. The old quest of Fairyland is as active now as ever it was. We still presume, in our unworthiness, to pass the barriers, and to walk upon those paths which lead to the enchanted forests and through them to the city of the Moon. At any moment we are ready to set forth, like Arthur’s knights, in search of the Holy Grail.
The explorer who penetrates into Central Africa in quest of King Solomon’s mines is impelled by a hope closely akin to that of the Spaniards. The excavator who digs for the buried treasures of the Incas or of the Egyptians is often led by a desire for the fabulous. Search was recently made in the western desert of Egypt for a lost city of burnished copper; and the Anglo-Egyptian official is constantly urged by credulous natives to take camels across the wilderness in quest of a town whose houses and temples are of pure gold. What archæologist has not at some time given ear to the whispers that tell of long-lost treasures, of forgotten cities, of Atlantis swallowed by the sea? It is not only the children who love the tales of Fairyland. How happily we have read Kipling’s “Puck of Pook’s Hill,” De la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine,” Kenneth Graham’s “Wind in the Willows,” or F. W. Bain’s Indian Stories. Fairy plays, such as Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” and Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird” have been enormously successful. Say what we
will, fairy tales still hold their old power over us, and still we turn to them as a relief from the commonplace.
Some of us, failing to find Fairyland upon earth, have transferred it to the kingdom of Death; and it has become the hope for the future. Each Sunday in church the congregation of business men and hard-worked women set aside the things of their monotonous life, and sing the songs of the endless search. To the rolling notes of the organ they tell the tale of the Elysian Fields: they take their unfulfilled desire for Fairyland and adjust it to their deathless hope of Heaven. They sing of crystal fountains, of streets paved with gold, of meadows dressed with living green where they shall dwell as children who now as exiles mourn. There everlasting spring abides and never-withering flowers; there ten thousand times ten thousand clad in sparkling raiment throng up the steeps of light. Here in the church the most unimaginative people cry aloud upon their God for Fairyland.
“The roseate hues of early dawn, The brightness of the day, The crimson of the sunset sky, How fast they fade away! Oh, for the pearly gates of Heaven, Oh, for the golden floor ”
They know no way of picturing the incomprehensible state of the future, and they interpret it, therefore, in the terms of the fairy tale.
I am inclined to think that this sovereignty of the fairies is beneficial. Fairy tales fill the minds of the young with knowledge of the kindly people who will reward with many gifts those who are charitable to the old; they teach a code of chivalry that brings as its reward the love of the beautiful princess in the tower; they tell of dangers overcome by courage and perseverance; they suggest a contact with nature which otherwise might never be developed. Where angels and archangels overawe by their omnipotence, the microscopic fairies who can sit singing upon a mushroom and dangle from the swaying stem of a bluebell, carry the thoughts down the scale of life to the little and really important things. A sleepy child will rather believe that the Queen of the Fairies is acting sentry upon the knob of the bedpost than that an angel stands at the head of the cot with great wings spread in protection—wings which suggest the probability of claws and a beak to match.
The dragons which can only be slain by the noble knight, the enchantments which can only be broken by the outwitting of the evil witch, the lady who can only be won by perils bravely endured, form the material of moral lessons which no other method of teaching could so impress upon the youthful mind.
And when mature years are attained the atmosphere of Fairyland remains with us. The lost songs of the little people drift through the brain, recalling the infinite possibilities of beauty and goodness which are so slightly out of reach; the forgotten wonder of elfs and brownies suggests itself to us from the heart of flowers and amidst the leaves of trees. The clear depths of the sea take half their charm from the memory of the mermaid’s palace; the silence of forests is rich with the expectancy of the Knight of the Golden Plume; the large spaces of kitchens and corridors are hushed for the concealment of Robin Goodfellow.
It is the elusiveness, the enchantment, of Fairyland which, for the mature mind, constitutes its greatest value and charm; it is a man’s desire for the realms of Midsummer-night that makes the building of those realms in our childhood so valuable. We are constantly endeavouring to recapture the grace of that intangible kingdom, and the hope of ultimate success retains the elasticity of the mind. Held fast by the stiffened joints of reason and closeted with the gout of science, we are fettered prisoners in the world unless there be the knowledge that something eludes us to lead us on. We know quite well that the fairies do not exist, but at the same time we cannot deny that the elusive atmosphere of Fairyland is one with that of our fondest dreams.
Who has not, upon a grey morning, awakened from sleep with the knowledge that he has passed out from a kingdom of dream more dear than all the realms of real life? Vainly we endeavour to recall the lost details, but only the impression remains. That impression, however, warms the tone of our whole day, and frames our thoughts as it were with precious stones. Thus also it is with the memory of our childhood’s idea of Fairyland: the impression is recalled, the brain peers forward, the thoughts go on tiptoe, and we feel that we have caught a glimpse of Beauty. Indeed, the recollection of the atmosphere created in our youthful minds by means of fairy tales is perhaps the most abundant of the sources of our knowledge of Beauty in mature years.
I do not suppose that I am alone in declaring that some of the most tender feelings of childhood are inspired by the misfortunes of the Beast in the story of “Beauty and the Beast”; and the Sleeping Beauty is the first love of many a small boy. Man, from his youth up, craves enchantment; and though the business of life gives him no opportunity for indulging in day-dreams, there are few of us indeed who have not at some time sought the phantom isles and sought in vain. There is no stormy night, when the wind moans through the trees, and the moon-rack flies overhead, but takes something of its mystery from the recollection of the enchantments of the dark ages. The sun does not sink into the sea amidst the low-lying clouds but some vague thought is brought to mind of the uncharted isle whereon that maiden lies sleeping whose hair is dark as heaven’s wrath, and whose breast is white like alabaster in the pathway of the moon. There she lies in the charmed circle under the trees, where none may enter until that hour when some pale, lost mariner shall surprise the secret of the pathway, and, coming suddenly upon her, shall kiss her shadowed lips. Vague, elusive, undefined, as such fancies must be, they yet tinge the thoughts of almost every man at certain moments of his life, and set him searching for the enchantment of bygone days. Eagerly he looks for those
“ ... Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn”;
and it is the fact of their unreality that gives them their haunting value.
The following story preserved in a papyrus now believed to be at St. Petersburg, describes a mysterious island whereon there dwelt a monster most lovable and most forlorn: a creature so tenderly drawn, indeed, that the reader will not fail to enthrone him in the little company of the nobility of the kingdom of the fairy tale. Translations of the story by two or three savants have appeared; but the present version, which I give in its literal form, has been prepared especially for me by Dr. Alan Gardiner; and, coming from him, it may be said to be the last word of the science upon the subject of this difficult text, which, after much study, I had to confess was beyond my powers as a student of the Ancient Egyptian language.
The scene with which the story opens is clearly indicated by the introductory sentences, though actually it is not described. A large wargalley had come swinging down the Nile from the land of Wawat in the south, the oars flashing in the Nubian sunlight. On the left the granite rocks
of the island of Bigeh towered above the vessel; on the right the island of Philæ, as yet devoid of buildings, rested placidly on the blue waters. Ahead were the docks of Shallal, where the clustered boats lay darkly against the yellow of the desert, and busy groups of figures, loading and unloading cargoes, moved to and fro over the sand. Away to the left, behind Bigeh, the distant roar of the First Cataract could be heard as the waters went rushing down from Nubia across the frontier into Egypt.
The great vessel had just returned from the little-known country of Ethiopia, which bordered the Land of Ghosts, having its frontiers upon the shores of the sea that encircled the world; and the sailors were all straining their eyes towards these docks which formed the southernmost outpost of Egypt, their home. The greatest excitement prevailed on deck; but in the cabin, erected of vari-coloured cloth in the stern of the vessel, the noble leader of the expedition which was now at its conclusion lay in a troubled sleep, tossing nervously upon his bed. His dreams were all of the terrible ordeal which was before him. He could take no pleasure in his homecoming, for he was driven nigh crazy by the thought of entering the presence of the great Pharaoh himself in order to make his report.
It is almost impossible to realise nowadays the agonies of mind that a man had to suffer who was obliged to approach the incarnation of the sun upon earth, and to crave the indulgence of this god in regard to any shortcomings in the conduct of the affairs entrusted to him. Of all the kings of the earth the Pharaoh was the most terrible, the most thoroughly frightening. Not only did he hold the lives of his subjects in his hand to do with them as he chose, but he also controlled the welfare of their immortal souls; for, being a god, he had dominion over the realms of the dead. To be censured by the Pharaoh was to be excommunicated from the pleasures of this earth and outlawed from the fair estate of heaven. A well-known Egyptian noble named Sinuhe, the hero of a fine tale of adventure, describes himself as petrified with terror when he entered the audience chamber. “I stretched myself on my stomach,” he writes, “and became unconscious before him (the Pharaoh). This god addressed me kindly, but I was as a man overtaken by the twilight: my soul departed, my flesh trembled; my heart was no more in my body that I should know life from death.”[8] Similarly another personage writes: “Remember the day of bringing the tribute, when thou passest into the Presence under the window, the nobles on each side before his Majesty, the nobles and ambassadors (?) of all countries. They
stand and gaze at the tribute, while thou fearest and shrinkest back, and thy hand is weak, and thou knowest not whether it is life or death that is before thee; and thou art brave (only) in praying to thy gods: ‘Save me, prosper me this one time.’ ”[9]
Of the Pharaoh it is written—
“Thine eye is clearer than the stars of heaven; Thou seest farther than the sun If I speak afar off, thine ear hears; If I do a hidden deed, thine eye sees it.”[10]
Or again—
“The god of taste is in thy mouth, The god of knowledge is in thy heart; Thy tongue is enthroned in the temple of truth; God is seated upon thy lips ”[11]
To meet face to face this all-knowing, all-seeing, celestial creature, from whom there could be no secrets hid nor any guilt concealed, was an ordeal to which a man might well look forward with utter horror. It was this terrible dread that, in the tale with which we are now concerned, held the captain of this Nubian vessel in agony upon his couch.
As he lay there, biting his finger-nails, one of the ship’s officers, himself a former leader of expeditions, entered the cabin to announce their arrival at the Shallal docks.
“Good news, prince,” he said cheerfully to his writhing master. “Look, we have reached home. They have taken the mallet and driven in the mooring-post; the ship’s cable has been put on land. There is merrymaking and thanksgiving, and every man is embracing his fellow. Our crew has returned unscathed, without loss to our soldiers. We have reached the end of Wawat, we have passed Bigeh. Yes, indeed, we have returned safely; we have reached our own land.”
At this the prince seems to have groaned anew, much to the distress of his friend, who could but urge him to pull himself together and to play the man.
“Listen to me, prince,” he begged, “for I am one void of exaggeration. Wash yourself, pour water on your fingers.”
