Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yes, beds for all who come.

He was however of strong mathematical bent.  In 1868, he patented a method for lateral control of aircraft in flight, inventing what are now called ailerons.  Being a gentleman of wealth and leisure, he was able to read and write at will, and published translations of classic literature, some poetry, and pamphlets on solar energy, in addition to a work on aircraft stability.   Kinzer (2009) makes a compelling case for him also being the author of several works of philosophy published by someone calling himself “M. P. W. Bolton,” mostly in the 1860s.

Kinzer quotes the following words from Boulton’s paper,  “Has a Metaphysical Society any raison d’etre?”, read to a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, held at the Grosvenor Hotel on 9 April 1874 and chaired by William Gladstone:

There is no question, however apparently non-metaphysical, which may not be pursued till we come to the Metaphysical.  The question of whether Tarquin lived, and whether Lucretia committed suicide, is about as non-metaphysical as any question can be: yet disputants engaged in its discussion may persist till they open up the general question of the credibility of testimony; and this may open that of the credibility of memory, the nature of belief, what grounds we have for believing the existence of other persons, and an external world . . .  Whenever we try to bottom a question or subject, to use Locke’s word (the French word would be “approfondir”) then Metaphysics come in sight  . . . Every sentence involves, in some shape or other, the verb “to be”, and this, if pursued long enough, leads to the heart of Metaphysics  . . . Scientific persons often speak of Metaphysics  with scorn, calling them an Asylum Ignorantiae, useful enough to the vulgar, but in no way needed by themselves.  They imagine their science to be perfectly luminous, far above the lower regions where Metaphysical mists prevail.  But in reality they share the common lot:  the ideas of Force, Law, Cause, Substance, Causal or Active Matter, all dwell in the region of metaphysical twilight, not in the luminous ether. “

References:

For some reason, reading the quoted passage brought to mind Richard Dawkins and memes.

I am grateful to Bruce Kinzer for some information here.

There is an index here to posts about members of the Matherati.

Billie Andrew Inman [1991]:  Pater’s Letters at the Pierpont Morgan Library.  English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 34 (4):401-417.

Bruce Kinzer [1979]: In search of M.P.W. Bolton. Notes and Queries, n.s., 26 (August 1979): 310-313.

Bruce Kinzer [2009]:  Flying under the radar:  The strange case of Matthew Piers Watt Boulton. Times Literary Supplement, 1 May 2009, pp. 14-15.

Every morning, for as long as I can remember, I wake up with an urge to play the piano.   My family tell me this desire was evident from when I was only a few months old (and, so surprised they were, they took photos to prove it) and it has been strong all my life.   Apparently I returned angry from my first day of school because the kindergarten teacher, despite the presence of an upright piano at the side of the classroom, had not given any instruction on how to play it.   Certainly, my desire to play existed long before I had any lessons, or any beliefs or opinions about whether or not I could play or whether or not I was musical, and before I even knew what music was.     This desire, insistent and persistent, led to lessons and to years of practice, which in turn led to some ability, as well as a (justified, true) belief that I can indeed play.

Some people have similarly strong desires to engage in what we often refer to as religious practices – to sit quietly in solitude, to still the mind, to listen carefully, to meditate, to visit churches and temples, to commune with what may be non-material realms, to do Yoga – and they may experience these desires independently of any religious beliefs.  Arguably, such desires are the origin of the non-belief-based “religions” such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism, as well as of the mystical strains of belief-based religions.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have minority mystic strains – eg, the Kabbala in Judaism, and Sufism in Islam.    One can be a mystic Christian with very few if any actual religious beliefs, and certainly no beliefs that are particularly “Christian”, as conversations with many Quakers or Unitarians can attest.  I am expressing views here that I have before, there and there.

Not having any beliefs, but a strong urge to do something, is a very different state of mind to merely being skeptical about the matters in question, a position Andrew Sullivan expresses.    Many in the Western philosophical tradition seem unable to imagine how one can engage in a practice without first having a belief which justifies or supports doing this practice, but that inability just shows the hold that the Christian confessional tradition has over the minds of even our sharpest secular philosophers, such as Norm.   In a later post, Norm says he is contesting “the thesis of the unimportance of belief there” (his emphasis).   But, as any Zen adept will tell you:  belief (in the form of enlightenment) is what follows regular zazen practice, not what precedes or accompanies it, and may only occur after a life-time of practice.  Belief is very unimportant in many of these practices, to the point where someone can even write a book called, Buddhism Without Beliefs.

Finally, en passant, it is a pity that Norm resorts to speculation about the motives of the people he disagrees with, as if doing so were somehow to weaken their arguments.   None of us can truly know the motives of others, so such speculation is ultimately fruitless, as well as being unbecoming.

FOOTNOTE:  I am not the only person with a daily compulsion to play the piano:

And yet playing the piano – or trying to play the piano – is now such a part of my life that a day now feels incomplete without having sat at the keyboard for even two minutes.    .  .  .   All this may one day become clear.  Until then I shall stumble on, feeling that the act of playing the piano each day does in some way settle the mind and the spirit.  Even five minutes in the morning feels as though it has altered the chemistry of the brain in some indefinable way.   Something has been nourished.   I feel ready – or readier – for the day.” (Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian)

Among the more there that is here, I believe, is a relatonship between Sufist ideas and Mendelssohn’s love of repetition, something one soon hears in his melodies with their many repeated notes.  A similar relationship exists between JS Bach’s fascination with Pietism, and his own love of repetition, as in the first movement of the D Minor Piano Concerto (BWV 1052), or the proto-minimalism of, for example, Prelude #2 in C minor, in Book 1 of the 48 (The Well-Tempered Clavier).

Those dismissing Mendelssohn for being superficial included, famously, Richard Wagner, whose criticisms were certainly motivated by anti-semitism, jealousy, and personal animosity.  But I wonder, too, if Wagner – that revolutionary of ’48 – was also dismissive of what he perceived to be the inward-focus of the Biedermeier generation, a generation forced to forego public political expression in the reimposition of conservative Imperial rule after the freedoms wrought by Napoleon’s armies.    But not speaking one’s political mind in public is not evidence of having no political mind, as any post-war Eastern European could tell you.  While in London in 1833, Mendelssohn attended the House of Commons to observe the debate and passage of the bill to allow for Jewish emancipation, writing excitedly home about this afterwards.  (Sadly, the bill took another three decades to pass the Lords.)  In July 1844, while again in London, Mendelssohn was invited to receive an Honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin, and hearing that he would be going to Dublin, Morgan O’Connell, son of Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell, asked him to take a letter to his uncle, then in a Dublin prison.  (As it happened, Mendelssohn was unable to go to Ireland on that occasion.  See: letter to his brother Paul, 19 July 1844, page 338 of Volume 2 of Collected Letters.)   One wonders how O’Connell could ask of someone such a favour, without first knowing something of the man’s political sympathies.  So perhaps those sympathies were radical, anti-colonial and republican. In an earlier letter, Mendelssohn described standing amidst British nobility with his “citizen heart” in an audience at the Court of Victoria and Albert (Letter of 6 October 1831).  As these incidents reveal, there may have been much more to this Biedermeier mister than meets the eye.

Southwell was a poet of fine sensitivity, and drew on his Jesuit spiritual training to become the first English poet to develop personation (or subjectivity), a psychologically-real description of the interior self.   His cousin Will Shakespeare was to adopt this idea in his poetry and plays, so that (for example) we learn about Hamlet’s internal mental deliberations, not only about his public actions and conversations.  The late Anne Sweeney argued that Southwell developed personation in his poetry as a direct result of completing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Lopez of Loyala, a process of meditation and self-reflection which all Jesuits undertake. In her words (p. 80):

Living underground and on the run, Southwell wrote poetry for a community unable to obtain prayer books or to easily hear preachers;  poetry was thus a substitute for sermons and for personal spiritual counselling, and a form of prayer and spiritual meditation.  His poetry is also strongly visual.

Because the Jesuit mission to England during Elizabeth’s reign was forced underground it is not surprising that Jesuit priests mostly lived in the homes of rich or noble Catholics, or Catholic sympathizers, sometimes hidden in secret chambers.    It is more surprising that there were still English nobles willing to risk everything (their wealth, their titles, their freedom, their homeland, their lives) to hide these priests.   One such family was that of Philip Howard, the 20th Earl of Arundel (1557-1595), who was 10 years a prisoner of Elizabeth I, refusing to recant Catholicism, and who died in prison without ever meeting his own son.   Howard’s wife, Anne Dacre (1557-1630), was also a staunch Catholic.  The earldom of Arundel is the oldest extant earldom in the English peerage, dating from 1138.

The Howard’s London house on the Thames was one of the noble houses which sheltered Robert Southwell for several years.    The location of their home, between the present-day Australian High Commission and Temple Tube station,  is commemorated in the names of streets and buildings in the area:  Arundel Street, Surrey Street, Maltravers Street (all names associated with the Arundel family), Arundel House, Arundel Great Court Building, and the Swissotel Howard Hotel.   Of course, in Elizabethan times the Thames was wider here, the Embankment only being built in the 19th century.   One can still find steps in some of the side streets leading to the Thames descending at the edge where the previous riverbank used to be, for instance on Milford Lane.

Southwell also, it seems, spent time in the London house of his cousin Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (1573 – 1624), who was also Shakespeare’s patron and cousin.    Southampton’s house then was a short walk away, in modern-day Chancery Lane, on the east side of Lincoln’s Inn fields.   Southampton was part of the rebellion of Robert Deveraux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565-1601) against Elizabeth in February 1601. The London house of Essex was also along the Thames, downstream and adjacent to that of the Howard family.  The streetnames there also recall this history:  Essex Street, Devereaux Court.

Supporters of Essex, chiefly brothers of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), paid for a performance of Shakespeare’s play, Richard II, the evening before the rebellion.   Percy was married to Dorothy Devereaux (1564-1619), sister of Robert, and was regarded as a Catholic sympathizer.  Percy also employed Thomas Harriott (1560-1621), mathematician.

References:

The British Library has a plan of Arundel House, the London home of the Earls of Arundel, as it was in 1792, here.  The church shown in the upper right corner is St. Clement Danes, now the home church of the Royal Air Force.

Christopher Devlin [1956]: The Life of Robert Southwell: Poet and Martyr.  New York, NY, USA:  Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.

Robert Southwell [2007]:  Collected Poems. Edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney.  Manchester, UK:  Fyfield Books.

Anne R. Sweeney [2006]: Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia:  Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape 1586-1595. Manchester, UK:  Manchester University Press.

The scientific method is the only reliable method of achieving knowledge.”

Well, first, it is worth saying that the scientific method does not produce reliable knowledge.  One of the two defining features of science is that scientific claims are defeasible:  they may be contested, questioned, challenged, and even overthrown, if the evidence warrants.   There is nothing inherently reliable about any scientific claim or theory, since new evidence may be found at any time to overthrow it.  The history of science is littered with examples.   (The second key feature is that anyone may do this contesting; science is not, or rather should  not be, a priesthood.)

One could perhaps defend Atkins’ statement by saying that the abstracted method – first announcement of a claim or hypothesis about the world, then running experiments in the world aiming to falsify the claim, then objective revision or retraction of the claim – may lead to reliable knowledge over the long term.   But, as Paul Feyerabend argued from examination of historical records of scientific disputes, actual living, breathing scientists rarely follow any such method:  they merely use whatever argumentation techniques best suit their material at the time in an attempt to win support for their claims, and they typically maintain their personal support for their own claims despite any contrary evidence.  Given such diversity of actual scientific argumentation practice across disciplines, across time and across issues, I think it only a foolhardy person who would seek to demonstrate that an abstraction from these practices was guaranteed to yield reliable knowledge about the world. (I speak as someone who has tried to do just this, under some severe assumptions as to the types of knowledge and the types of argument used.  See reference below.) 

Second, it is worth noting that Atkins appears to have overlooked other means of achieving knowledge. Pure mathematics, for example, produces new knowledge by means of deductive reasoning, not using anything resembling the scientific method.  Many argue that such knowledge is reliable, since once demonstrated claims cannot be overthrown (at least, not overthrown using the same assumptions and same rules of inference).  Most of theoretical physics in the modern era – from Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, through Einstein’s relativity theories, right up to contemporary string theory and brane theory – are mathematical in kind, developed by mathematicians from their intuitions and using deductive reasoning without recourse to experiment or anything approaching the scientific method. Newton, for instance, famously assumed that the physical laws which governed the motion of planets around the sun also governed the swings of pendulums here on earth, an assumption for which he had not a skerrick of evidence (and nor could he have had), and which is completely counter-intuitive.   We western moderns do not think it counter-intuitive because we have each received a decade of indoctrination at school in the objectively-weird notions of physics since Newton; without talk of mystical (and never fully explained) forces called “gravity” we too would find this assumption obviously without basis. 

In fact, most of our knowledge of physical Nature comes from these mathematical theories, even in Atkins’ own field of chemisty (where the very abstract mathematical theory of groups finds application).  Of course, we aim to test such mathematical theories by means of experiment, but a test is for the purposes of acceptance or rejection of the theory.   Once tested, the knowledge we have of Nature is from the theory, not usually from the test.   Arguably, it is mathematics, not the scientific method, which provides the knowledge we have.  In the case of string and brane theories, for example, no experiments to test these theories have yet been undertaken, and perhaps none could be undertaken even in principle (since the theories concern dimensions of space-time inaccessible to us).   In this case, not only the knowledge but even the acceptance or rejection of the theory, is from the mathematics, and not from something called a scientific method.   (And on what mathematical basis would we accept a mathematical theory of nature?  Perhaps on its elegance or mathematical beauty, or its simplicity, or its profoundness, or its tractability, or its computability.)

It is worth noting here, also, that in many cases, mathematical or computational models in science provide our only means to apprehend the Nature they are intended to model or describe.  We cannot know whether string theory, for example, describes the natural world well or not because we have no other way to apprehend or observe that part of the world it purports to describe.   It it is therefore moot to say that such theories are “reliable” or “effective”, since how could we tell? 

Atkins also ignores knowledge about actions, as distinct from knowledge of facts (know-how, rather than know-what).  For example, our knowledge about technologies and how they work – surely an important part of knowledge about the world – is typically not gained not through scientific experiment aiming to test some explicit prior hypothesis, but through building prototypes and exploring the properties of these human artefacts.  This process of creation and exploration is closer to play than to anything a philosopher of science would term the scientific method.   Similarly, an artist’s knowledge of some object (real or imagined) may be gained by drawing or painting it, using drawing as a form of thinking, again an activity very much like play.  To argue that any such knowledge gained by the artist is not knowledge, or perhaps not knowledge about Nature, would be reductionist (and, I think, perverse). 

And Atkins has also ignored, as Norm points out, the insight and knowledge  about the world provided by the humane disciplines – theology, literature, philosophy, etc.   As I have argued before, getting things done in the world requires, inter alia, a knowledge of how people and groups behave and function.   The best source of such knowledge is not science or the scientific method (despite the pretensions of academic social psychology), but literature, TV dramas, and films.

Reference:

P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2001]: Representing epistemic uncertainty by means of dialectical argumentation. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. Special Issue on Representations of Uncertainty. 32 (1-4): 125-169.

The play comprised three actors, two men and a woman, who played Newton at different ages – as a child, as a young-ish Cambridge academic, and as an old man.  As a work of drama, the conceit worked well, although it was best when one of the actors was playing another person interacting with Newton (eg, Halley, and later Leibniz, who spoke in an amusing cod-German accent).  Perhaps the real Newton was not sufficiently schizoid for three actors to play him, at least not when constrained to only use the man’s written words.    As I have remarked before, Newton’s personality was all of a piece:  it is only modern westerners who cannot imagine a religious motivation for activities such as scientific research, for example, or who find alchemy and calculus incoherent.

The performance was followed by a panel discussion by the Great and the Good – two historians and two scientists.  One of the scientists was the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, who has subsequently won this year’s Templeton Prize for Science and Religion.  The discussion was interesting, so it is a pity it was not recorded for posterity.

A review of another play about a member of the matherati, Kurt Godel, is here.

The photo shows the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of All Saints, at the corner of Pratt and Camden Streets in Camden, London.   Before becoming an Orthodox Chuch in 1948, the building was an Anglican Church, most recently All Saints Camden.  The building was designed by William Inwood and his son Henry Inwood in 1822-24, who had together earlier designed St. Pancras New Church in Euston, London.    Both churches borrow from ancient Greek architecture, so it is fitting that one is now filled with Greek icons and text, and used for services in (modern) Greek.   All Saints has a low-set but very deep choir balcony, extending from the entrance almost one-third the length of the church; this gives the church a quite intimate feel, despite the height of the main chapel.    The current cathedral also has three large, low-hanging white glass chandeliers over the main chapel, which enhances the intimacy.   I was reminded of the intimacy of Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Chicago, a building which is similarly deceptive from the outside about the compactness of the space within.

When built, All Saints was called Camden Town Chapel, and its founding pastor was the Rev’d Alexander Charles Louis d’Arblay (1794-1837), son of the author Fanny Burney (1752-1840) and Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D’Arblay (1754-1818), emigre French aristocrat and soldier, and adjutant-general to Lafayette.   The Reverend d’Arblay was a poet and chess-player, and had been 10th wrangler in the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge in 1818.  He was a friend of fellow-student (but non-wrangler) Charles Babbage and a member of Babbage’s Analytical Society (forerunner of the Cambridge Philosophical Society), and he may have introduced Babbage to recent French mathematics.   d’Arblay had been partly educated in France, and was aware of French trends in analysis, which in its rigour and formality was very different to the applied focus of British mathematics.  From his time as an undergraduate, Babbage ran a campaign against the troglodytic British mathematics establishment, who were then opposed to rigour, formality and theory, and he sought to introduce modern analysis into mathematics teaching at Cambridge.  British pure mathematics, as better mathematicians than I have argued, lost a century of progress as a result of its focus on certain types of applications at the expense of rigour.

Reverend d’Arblay served as minister of Camden Town Chapel from 1824-1837, and then briefly at Ely.  He died of tuberculosis, unexpectedly, and was unmarried.   Some of his poetry is on the subject of chess.  As the son of Fanny Burney, d’Arblay was the grandson of musician, composer and musicologist Charles Burney FRS (1726-1814), and thus from a remarkable family that included musicians, dancers, novelists, painters, historians, and an admiral.

Alongside d’Arblay, the founding organist at Camden Town Chapel was Samuel Wesley (1766-1837).

POSTSCRIPT [2011-12-24]: I have now seen d’Arblay’s poem, “Caissa Rediviva”, published anonymously in 1836.  This is a long poem about a chess game.  If there were any doubts about d’Arblay’s membership of the Matherati, this publication would allay them:  The frontispiece to the poem poses a non-standard chess problem, which only someone with a subtle and agile mathmind could imagine:  Given a particular chess board-configuration, find the precise sequence of 59 moves by White, each of which forces a single move by Black, and which ends with Black check-mating White with a particular move.

Reference:

An Amateur at Chess [Alexander C. L. d'Arblay] [1836]: Caissa Rediviva: Or the Muzio Gambit. London, UK:  Sampson Low.

Of course, the greatest defence against this attack on religion is that most religious believers DO indeed have evidence for their beliefs, as I have repeatedly argued before.   Of course, this evidence is usually not independently verifiable or replicable, which makes it inappropriate for use in the social activity we call science.   But that fact does not alone disqualify its use as a basis for deciding personal beliefs or personal actions.  The state of being in love is also not independently verifiable or replicable (at least not yet), but most of us do not therefore not use it as a basis for personal decision-making, and nor should we.

The ignorance Aikin and Talisse demonstrate about religion is shown also in their argument about worship:  Not all believers in or practitioners of religious ideas are engaged in the worship of divine entities.   One could make a very strong case that worship plays no part at all in Buddhism or in Taoism, or in the mystic strains of other religions, such as Sufism or the Kabbala.    These traditions seek to commune with the divine, not worship it.    Perhaps this distinction is lost on people without personal experience of non-material realms, but most pure mathematicians would get it, since they commune with, but do not worship, mathematical entities.

Aikin and Talisse reject religious worship as being demeaning to the dignity of an autonomous human person.  Why so concerned with human autonomy in this aspect, while striving  a few paragraphs earlier to prevent humans autonomously choosing what to believe?

Given such a weak case, one wonders why they make it with such stridency.