The Saunterer

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on the religion of science

There are those - and I am one of them - who rebel at having to deal with an intermediary. They want to go to the fountain-head. Someone who knows me well says that science, to me, has been a religious experience. He is probably right. If my religious passion had been turned toward the Catholic Church I should have wanted to be a priest. . . . I have always been in direct touch with the fountain-head . . . [and] my source of inspiration has always been direct. (Quoted from The Mind of God & Other Musings, by S. A. Jones, p. 45.)

    There are two main forms of pantheism. One has God in every rock, tree, animal, cloud, thing in the universe. The other has God behind the scene, once creating the laws of nature and letting them loose with the Big Bang. Although neither form has God caring about people, it’s possible to make a satisfying creed of pantheism, unselfish and a source of energy for creating goodness.

    The sciences that put scientists most nearly in direct touch with the fountain-head are those with smooth, beautiful, simple laws: physics, mathematics, astronomy and suchlike. Is the percentage of pantheists greater there than in sciences in less direct touch, as research into firefighting, financial planning, public administration, library matters and sewer systems? Is the percentage of pantheists believing God doesn’t care about humans greater among physicists than sociologists, say? It is simple enough to research for the answers, and has anyone?
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    For a brief biography of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, click here.

When did science as we know it begin?

    Practically yesterday!:

Eight hundred life spans can bridge more than 50,000 years. But of these 800 people, 650 spent their lives in caves or worse; only the last 70 had any truly effective means of communicating with one another, only the last 6 ever saw a printed word or had any real means of measuring heat or cold, only the last 4 could measure time with any precision; only the last 2 used an electric motor; and the vast majority of the items that make up our material world were developed within the lifespan of the eight-hundredth person. (Quoted from pages 9 - 10 of Assessing Technology Transfer, 1966 NASA Report SP-5067, by R. L. Lesher and G. J. Howick.)

    The first scientific journal was published in your great-great-great-great grandparents’ time, 1665. Its title? Journal des Scavans. (Source: The Harvest of a Quiet Eye, A. L. Mackay, Bristol and London: The Institute of Physics, p. 133)

    William Whewell coined the word “scientist” in 1840, writing: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist.” The first known published use of the word “researcher”came in 1883, when E. R. Lankester wrote: “Teaching here appears to be producing an income which may support a researcher.” (Sources of both: the Oxford English Dictionary)

G. K. Chesterton on the meaning of growth

     Of the meaning of growth, G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. (Quoted from Building the Nineteenth Century, T.F. Peters, The MIT Press, p. 369)
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    For a brief biography of G. K. Chesterton, click here.

Mean L. L. Bean and its non sequitur

    We wrote L. L. Bean:
As a longtime L.L. Bean customer, I just received your winter catalog. I and my family are disgusted by the fur trimmed items. Until you go fur free, we will order nothing from you. You fail to understand that fur items rape our sensibilities. It hurts us and people like us.

    L. L. Bean replied:
Dear Mr. Romesburg,
Thank you for sharing your comments with us. We appreciate hearing from you. We have been selling fur items for 94 years and our customers continue to request it. We do not have plans to discontinue and will continue to sell both faux and real fur.
Regards,
Laurie Brooks,
Public Affairs, L.L.Bean, Inc.

    The non sequitur (logical fallacy) is of the form: “We have always done it. Therefore it is right.”

    A logically correct and honest form of argument is available to L. L. Bean and its private owners. We suggest they adopt it: “Yes we’re mean. The fur we sell comes from rabbits and cats and dogs and other domesticated animals, put to horrible deaths. As long as there is profit in hurting animals and people sympathetic to them, we’ll go after it.”

    For details on L. L. Bean’s credo of meanness, click here.

C. S. Lewis on how Christians justify their attitude of supporting war

    According to C. S. Lewis, Christian love is wishing for the loved one’s ultimate good, and Christians should not confuse love with affectionate feeling. So love everyone, even those you detest. If they become an unbearable threat to your beliefs or body, kill them. But love them as you do so, and forevermore. Hear C. S. Lewis:

You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself? When I look into my own mind, I find that I do not love myself by thinking myself a dear old chap or having affectionate feelings. I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself and quite apart from my character. I might detest something which I have done. Nevertheless, I do not cease to love myself. In other words, that definite distinction that Christians make between hating sin and loving the sinner is one that you have been making in your own case since you were born. You dislike what you have done, but you don’t cease to love yourself. You may even think that you ought to be hanged. You may even think that you ought to go to the Police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained. It seems to me, therefore, that when the worst comes to the worst, if you cannot restrain a man by any method except by trying to kill him, then a Christian must do that. That is my answer. But I may be wrong. It is very difficult to answer, of course. (Quoted from C. S. Lewis’ God in the Dock, p. 49.)
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    For a brief biography of C. S. Lewis, click here.

Irwin Edman on making your own religion

    You can make your own religion. You can enter into its heaven. Irwin Edman tells how:

For imaginative and sensitive minds, the passion called religious may find another object than the traditional image of God. Any intense allegiance or adventurous devotion is a faith. The artist in his creation, the worker in his work, the teacher in his teaching, if they are sincere and reflective of what they are doing, are performing acts of piety to the commands of an inner god. Permanent and stirring dreams constitute a heaven; a compelling and engrossing ideal is a god. To live governed by these invariables, to make no compromise where they are concerned is to lead something like what the theologians would call the spiritual life. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 319.)
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    For a brief biography of Irwin Edman, click here.

Marie Bashkirtseff on what animals have to teach us

    “Know thyself first” insisted Socrates. “Be thyself first” insists this Saunterer. I am thinking of one of the many admirable qualities of dogs, cats, pigs, beavers, horses, all of them: they are as they sincerely are, and we can learn from that. Hear Marie Konstantinovna Bashkirtseff:

Ah, when one thinks what a miserable creature man is! Every other animal can, at his will, wear on his face the expression he pleases. He is not obligated to smile if he has a mind to weep. When he does not wish to see his fellows he does not see them. While man is the slave of everything and everybody! (Quoted from p. 10 of Marie Bashkirtseff: The Journal of a Young Artist, Rahway, N. J.: W. L. Mershon & Co., 1889. )
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    For a brief biography of Marie Konstantinovna Bashkirtseff, click here.

John Muir on butterflies

    Of one of nature’s wonderful inventions - butterflies - John Muir wrote:

Butterflies colored like the flowers waver above them in wonderful profusion, and many other beautiful winged people, numbered and known and loved only by the Lord, are waltzing together high over head, seemingly in pure play and hilarious enjoyment of their little sparks of life. How wonderful they are! How do they get a living, and endure the weather? How are their little bodies, with muscles, nerves, organs, kept warm and jolly in such admirable exuberant health? Regarded only as mechanical inventions, how wonderful they are! Compared with these, Godlike man’s greatest machines are as nothing. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 342.)
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    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here.

John Galsworthy on what we lose when we live in cities

    When we live in cities we live apart from nature, and the loss is irreplaceable. John Galsworthy puts it better:

I think too much of town life has done us in; when we don’t live (to some extent at all events) with Nature, we forget how to live at all. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 274.)
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    For a brief biography of John Galsworthy, click here.

Cyril Connolly on “What makes for lasting friendship?”

    Cyril Connolly is about to define friendships that last. Well, many have. But he is about to go a step further and apply his definition, which will tell us who among us cannot have lasting friendships, and why more women have lasting friendships than men:

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other’s dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him. Therefore a man with a will to power can have no friends. He is like a boy with a chopper. He tries it on flowers, he tries it on sticks, he tries it on furniture, and at last he breaks it on a stone. (Quoted from Cyril Connolly’s commonplace book, The Unquiet Grave, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1945, p.17. Connolly wrote it under his pen name, Palinurus.)
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    For a brief biography of Cyril Connolly, click here.