The Saunterer

William Jennings Bryan on science and religion

    At first glance, William Jennings Bryan has it right in saying:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of the storm tossed human vessel. (Quoted from The World’s Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case, by John Thomas Scopes. The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. 1999. p. 338.)

    On second glance, religions are harmful moral rudders, by pressing on humanity the course of overrunning Earth with twenty times the number of people it should be holding at one time, forever killing Nature.

    For a brief biography of William Jennings Bryan, click here.

George Henry Lewes on the role of imagination in science

    “It is because we see little that we have to imagine much” - G. H. Lewes reached this pregnant remark by starting here:

From known facts . . . [the scientist] infers the facts that are unapparent. He does so by an effort of imagination (hypothesis) which has to be subjected to verification; he makes a mental picture of the unapparent fact, and then sets about to prove that his picture does in some way correspond with the reality. . . . Were all the qualities of things apparent to sense, there would no longer be any mystery. A glance would be science. But only some of the facts are visible; and it is because we see little that we have to imagine much. (Quoted from The Principles of Success in Literature, by George Henry Lewes. Edited by Wm. Dallam Armes. 1901. Berkeley: University of California Students’ Co-operative. p. 69.)

    For a brief biography of George Henry Lewes, click here.

Jacques Cousteau on the need for desperadoes

Jacques Cousteau, writing of our backs to the wall, the urgency brought by the relentless destruction of nature, said:

Today the time is right because time is running out. Desperadoes have been known to triumph in the face of a desperate cause. (Quoted from The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, by Jacques Cousteau and Susan Schiefelbein, New York: Bloomsbury USA. 2007. p. 204.)

    For a brief biography of Jacques Cousteau, click here; and for Susan Schiefelbein, click here.    

Anthony Grafton on the stretch of footnotes

    The Saunterer has discovered that a considerable minority of those who have cited his research articles and books have gotten it wrong. They cited something he wrote as supporting something they wrote, but it didn’t. This is by way of noting that scholarship in general often rests on stretched citations, a claim that Anthony Grafton illustrates in his book, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press.1997). From page 235:

Footnotes guarantee nothing, in themselves. The enemies of truth - and truth has enemies - can use them to deny the same facts that honest historians use them to assert. The enemies of ideas - and they have enemies as well - can use them to amass citations and quotations of no interest to any reader, or to attack anything that resembles a new thesis. Yet footnotes form an indispensable if messy part of that indispensable, messy mixture of art and science: modern history.

    For a brief biography of Anthony Grafton, click here.

Frank Sinatra on friendship and the insignificance of race

    Here is the key passage of an essay Frank Sinatra wrote:

A friend to me has no race, no class, and belongs to no minority. My friendships were formed out of affection, mutual respect, and a feeling of having something strong in common. These are eternal values that cannot be racially classified. This is the way I look at race. (Quoted from “The Way I Look at Race,” in the July 1958 issue of Ebony magazine, pgs. 34 - 44.)

    For a brief biography of Frank Sinatra, click here.

The reason for protesting timber sales

    Decades ago, a forest defender named Gedden Cascadia climbed to the top of a 140 foot Douglas fir. Reflecting back on the climb, he wrote:

That first tree that I climbed is still standing. After all these years, I can still go back and sit under it and remember the blisters and how scared I was. I can be reminded of the moment I fell in love. That love is what has sustained me, along with the anger that is invoked by the sound of every chain saw being wielded by greed. I want to be remembered as a person who stood up and pushed aside the apathy inherent in the comfort we enjoy as a society. (Quoted from Forest Defenders: The Confrontational American Landscape, by Christopher LaMarca. powerHouse Books. 2008.)

    For more on Gedden Cascadia and his beliefs, click here.

Sidney Hook on what makes a great teacher

    One of Sidney Hook’s great teachers was Morris R. Cohen, professor of philosophy from 1912 to 1938 at CCNY. In an essay on Cohen, Hook gave the measure of influential teaching:

What makes a great teacher? I believe it is the ability to inspire in students a dedication to the subject of instruction. The dedication may be expressed either in active pursuit of the discipline or in an appreciation of its results. When we look back on our schooling, we remember teachers rather than courses - we remember their manner and method, their enthusiasm and intellectual excitement, and their capacity to arouse delight in, or curiosity about, the subject taught. Different teachers affect different students in different ways. But when students have been reached by their teacher, the response is the same - respect, admiration, and a desire to win approval. Sometimes a teacher’s influence is strong enough to override that of parents and peers. (Quoted from “Morris R. Cohen – Fifty Years Later,” by Sidney Hook. The American Scholar, Summer 1976, Vol. 45, Num. 3.)

    For a brief biography of Morris R. Cohen, click here. For a brief biography of Sidney Hook, click here.

Mark Kac on the two kinds of geniuses

    As Mark Kac tells:   

In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius,”. . . . (Quoted from Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, by Mark Kac. Harper and Row. 1985. p. xxv.)

    For a brief biography of Mark Kac, click here.

Albert Camus on living for money

    Modern America would have sickened Albert Camus:    

Any life directed toward money is a death. Renascence lies in disinterestedness. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. 2001. p. 203.)

    For a brief biography of Albert Camus, click here.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on truth

    Mathematical logic deals in absolute truth; culture deals in relative truth. Saint-Exupéry put it this way:

Truth is not that which can be demonstrated by the aid of logic. If orange-trees are hardy and rich in fruit in this bit of soil and not that, then this bit of soil is what is truth for orange-trees. If a particular religion, or culture, or scale of values, if one form of activity rather than another, brings self-fulfilment to a man, releases the prince asleep within him unknown to himself, then that scale of values, that culture, that form of activity, constitute his truth. Logic, you say? Let logic wangle its own explanation of life. (Quoted from Wind, Sand and Stars, the edition republished in Airman’s Odyssey, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. 1939. Reynal & Hitchcock. p. 158.)

    For a brief biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, click here.