THE REVEREND DOCTOR RALPH CUDWORTH
“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet.” — Ouisa, in John Guare’s “SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION”
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ralph Cudworth HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1617
July 13, Sunday (Old Style): Ralph Cudworth was christened at Aller, near Wells in Somersetshire, a son of the rector of Aller, the Reverend Doctor Ralph Cudworth, formerly fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
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1624
August 30, Monday (Old Style): While Ralph Cudworth was about seven years of age, his father the Reverend Doctor Ralph Cudworth, rector of Aller, had made his will and died. On this day the body was buried at Aller. His mother Mary Machell Cudworth would remarry with the Reverend Doctor John Stoughton, who would provide the boy with a good home education and then send him off to his father’s college, Emmanuel College at Cambridge.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
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1632
Ralph Cudworth entered Emanuel College at Cambridge University.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
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1635
Ralph Cudworth took his BA degree at Emanuel College at Cambridge University.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
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1639
Ralph Cudworth took his MA degree and became fellow and tutor of Emmanuel College of Cambridge University.
John Birkenhead became a Fellow of All Souls’ at Oriel College of Oxford University.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
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1642
Ralph Cudworth took on the Catholics of England with A DISCOURSE CONCERNING THE TRUE NOTION OF THE LORD’S SUPPER. He considered this sacrament to be that of a “feast upon a sacrifice,” analogous to the feasts which followed the legal sacrifices among the Jews; not itself sacrificium, but, in Tertullian’s language, participatio sacrificii. Soon he would add to this THE UNION OF CHRIST AND THE CHURCH; IN A SHADOW, in which he would attempt to depict marriage as more than a mere family contract.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
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1644
The Reverend Thomas Shepard proposed to the Confederation of New England that each family give to Harvard College annually a quarter-bushel of wheat, or the equivalent in money. The result was an income to the new college of almost £270. Why was this new ministerial “Colledg in Newtowne,” which would eventually be named in honor of its early benefactor, the deceased Reverend John Harvard, situated in this new town, and that town redesignated Cambridge in honor of the seat of learning in England? The reason, largely, was that this was where the Reverend Shepard was situated, he being, until his early death at the age of 43, this college’s unofficial chaplain.
For refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant, most of the Masters and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge were ejected, among them Abraham Cowley (who was such a royalist that two years earlier he had even committed the unforgivable sin of writing a play to be performed for the King’s entertainment). He went to live at Oxford, a stronghold of the royalists, and then fled in the suite of Lord Jermyn, Queen Henrietta Maria’s chief officer, to join the group of exiles that was accumulating in Paris. He would remain in exile with the royal family for a dozen years.
The Parliamentary visitors appointed Ralph Cudworth as Master of Clare Hall, as their replacement for a Royalist whom they were ejecting. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1645
In a house called “Whitehall,” in Cheam, Surrey, the Reverend George Aldrich began the Cheam School.
Ralph Cudworth was appointed as master of Clare Hall and elected as Regius Professor of Hebrew. From this point he would be recognized as a leader among the “Cambridge Platonists,” a group that was more or less in sympathy with the Parliament and more or less at odds with the faction of the royals. He would be consulted in regard to university and government appointments by John Thurloe, Oliver Cromwell’s secretary to the council of state.
Parliamentary soldiers were reorganizing the English army. Each regiment of the “New Model Army” was to have 10 companies, and be commanded by a colonel. Line companies were authorized to contain about 100 enlisted men, at the rate of two musketeers (shoulder firearm with matchlock) for each pikeman. Each company had a captain, a lieutenant, and an ensign to carry the flag. Sergeants lead the troops on the march, and corporals drilled them in pike and musket coordination. Their drummers controlled the company movement by the use of eight basic calls. Headquarters companies, which included the lieutenant colonel and the sergeant major, were somewhat larger. The dragoons, the cavalry, and the artillery were in other units, and then of course there were the sutlers, following along behind. Cavalrymen, and soldiers assigned to artillery units, carried shoulder firearms that used the wheel-lock or flint-lock mechanisms, in order to avoid accidents with slow matches that could cause powder wagons to explode. The New Model Army would turn out to need only five chaplains, and their sole duty would be to pray for victory in battle and then –if God gave them the victory– offer thanksgiving.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
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1647
March 31, Wednesday (Old Style): Professor Ralph Cudworth had been called from Cambridge to preach to the House of Commons. On this day, before that body, he advocated principles of religious toleration and charity. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1650
The Reverend Ralph Cudworth was presented to the college living of North Cadbury, Somerset. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1651
The Reverend Professor Ralph Cudworth thought of leaving Cambridge, but reconsidered. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1654
In the diary of John Worthington we learn that the Reverend Professor Ralph Cudworth had nearly been compelled, through poverty, to leave Cambridge University. However, in this year, after it became clear that Henry More did not want to become the master of Christ’s College at Cambridge, Cudworth was elected to that mastership and became financially able to marry. (Although at the Restoration he would have trouble retaining this post as the 14th Master of the college, presumably because he had been advising John Thurloe, Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, about young men in Cambridge suitable for government service, he would be able to retain this post for the length of his life.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1659
January 18, Tuesday (1658, Old Style): Birth of Ralph Cudworth’s daughter Damaris Cudworth Masham, who would also become a philosopher. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1662
The Bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon, who would soon become the Archbishop of Canterbury, presented Ralph Cudworth to the rectory of Ashwell in Herefordshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1665
Ralph Cudworth and his fellow-Platonist, Henry More, came close to quarreling with one another, because More had written on an ethical topic which Cudworth feared would interfere with a treatise he himself was contemplating on such a topic. As a courtesy, to avoid stealing any of Cudworth’s thunder so to speak, More would have his treatise, the ENCHIRIDION ETHICUM, published only in Latin (Cudworth’s long-contemplated treatise, nevertheless, would not ever materialize). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1671
With a few deft twists of his wrist, the Reverend Professor Ralph Cudworth, longtime opponent of Thomas Hobbes, finished his fantasy, THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE. Of the three great refutations of false ideas which for him summed up all religious and moral truth, in this work he had gone to the mattresses on behalf of the first: • the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus was quite mistaken, because reality consisted of a supreme divine intelligence and a spiritual world • all pantheistic naturalism was quite mistaken, and all stoicism had been quite mistaken, because humans have complete moral freedom and responsibility (he would beat this to death in his TREATISE ON FREE WILL) • the medieval Nominalists and their successors were quite mistaken, because moral ideas possessed an eternal reality (he would flog this in his TREATISE ON ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1678
Publication of the initial portion of Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE saw the light of day, dedicated to Lord Chancellor Heneage Lord Finch, and (presumably at the doing of the Bishop of Gloucester) the author became a prebendary of Gloucester.
This initial portion, intended to dispense with the “fatal necessity” of deterministic atheism by demonstrating that such an attitude was impossible, would generate such a clamor among the theologians, that much of the rest of it would never see publication (some of it would appear in 1731 as A TREATISE CONCERNING ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY, and some more of it would appear in 1838, edited by John Allen, as A TREATISE OF FREEWILL). The author critiqued the two main forms of materialistic atheism, the atomic materialism of Democritus, Epicurus, and Thomas Hobbes and the hylozoic materialism of Strato of Lampsacus which had attempted to explain everything on the basis of a supposed inward self-organizing life-energy inherent in matter. The author insisted that although atomism –originated according to his theory by a Sidonian thinker named Moschus or Mochus who supposedly had lived prior to the Trojan War and was supposedly identical with the Moses figure of the Book of Exodus– had been taught by Pythagoras, by Empedocles, and by nearly all the other ancients, it had been perverted into an attitude of atheism only by Democritus.
The author proposed to provide three demonstrations: • he would demonstrate the existence of God • he would demonstrate the naturalness of moral distinctions • he would demonstrate the reality of human freedom
By way of contrast, these three true principles were opposed in philosophy by those who held with three false principles: an atheism which denied the existence of God, a religious fatalism which attributed moral distinctions not to nature but to the will of God, and a Stoic fatalism that by identifying God with nature, denied the reality of human freedom. These demonstrations went together to explain to Cudworth’s satisfaction the entire intellectual system of the universe.1
1. Initially published in part in London as a single volume, this would be printed in London in 1743 as two volumes and in 1820 as four volumes. It would then appear in America, printed at Andover in 1837/1838, as two volumes, and again in London, in 1845, as three volumes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1679
December 4, Thursday (Old Style): Sir John Birkenhead died. His remains would be interred at Saint Martin’s-in-the- Fields.
Thomas Hobbes, longtime opponent of Ralph Cudworth, died at Hardwick, England. Here are some love verses he had written not long before: Tho’ I am past ninety, and too old T’expect preferment in the court of Cupid, And many winters made me ev’n so cold I am become almost all over stupid, Yet I can love and have a mistress too, As fair as can be and as wise as fair; And yet not proud, nor anything will do To make me of her favour to despair. To tell you who she is were very bold; But if i’ th’ character your self you find Think not the man a fool tho’ he be old Who loves in body fair a fairer mind.
He must have been doing something right, for his life had not been solitary though he had never married or had children, and it had never been poor — or nasty or brutish — and it certainly had not been short. What was the secret, enlightened self-interest?
John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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dined (together with my L[ord] Ossorie & E[arl] of Chesterfild) at the Portugal Ambassadors now newly come, at Cleaveland house: a noble Palace, too good for that infamous _____: The Staire Case is sumptuous & Gallerie: with the Garden: but above all the costly furniture belonging to the Ambassador, especialy the rich [Japan] Cabinets of which I think there were a dosen; & a Billiard table with as many more hazards as ours commonly have: the game being onely to prosecute the ball til hazarded, without passing the port or touching the pin: If one misse hitting the balle every time, the game is lost, or if hazarded: & ’tis more difficult to hazard a ball though so many, than in our Tables, by reason the board is made so exactly Even, & the Edges not stuff’d: The balls also bigger, & they for the most part use the sharp & small end of the billiard-stick, which is shod with brasse or silver: The Entertainement was exceeding Civile, but besids a good olio, the dishes were trifling, hash’d & Condited after their way, not at all fit for an English stomac, which is for solid meate: There was yet good fowle, but roasted to Coale; nor were the sweetemeates good: I had much discourse with the Secretary, who seem’d an understanding person. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1688
June 26, Tuesday (16 Old Style): Ralph Cudworth died at the age of 71 in Cambridge, England, and the body would be interred in the chapel of Christ’s College. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1703
Le Clerc published extracts from Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1704
Lady Masham sent G.W. von Leibnitz a copy of her father’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE.
RALPH CUDWORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1706
The Reverend Thomas Wise published extracts from Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1731
Ralph Cudworth’s TREATISE ON ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY was posthumously published by Bishop Chandler. Of the three great refutations of false ideas which for him summed up all religious and moral truth, in this work he had gone to the mattresses on behalf of the first: • the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus was quite mistaken, because reality consisted of a supreme divine intelligence and a spiritual world • all pantheistic naturalism was quite mistaken, and all stoicism had been quite mistaken, because humans have complete moral freedom and responsibility (he would beat this to death in his TREATISE ON FREE WILL) • the medieval Nominalists and their successors were quite mistaken, because moral ideas possessed an eternal reality (he would flog this in his TREATISE ON ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1733
Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE appeared in Latin with his notes.
John Kay patented the fly-shuttle, which quickened the weaving of cloth, thus mechanizing weaving — while the generation of thread through spinning remained a cottage industry. In 1764, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny made the thread generating process more efficient. Further improvements in bleaching and dyeing as well as the steam-powering of looms would change the British textile industry — with production soaring from 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to 22 million pounds in the 1780s. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1820
Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE: WHEREIN ALL THE REASON AND PHILOSOPHY OF ATHEISM IS CONFUTED, AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY DEMONSTRATED ... AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE AUTHOR: BY THOMAS BIRCH (London: R. Priestly). This edition would be available to Henry Thoreau in the personal library of Ralph Waldo Emerson. CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, I CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, II CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, III HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1825
The Fellows’ Garden of Christ’s College, the site for which had been purchased in 1554, achieved the form it would preserve. One of the highlights of this garden is a still-producing mulberry tree that had been planted in 1608 to boost the English silk industry. Busts along the north side of the pool commemorate three Collegians: the blind professor of Mathematics Nicholas Sanderson; the poet John Milton, and the philosopher Ralph Cudworth, 14th Master of the College. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1838
Ralph Cudworth’s TREATISE ON FREE WILL, ed. John Allen. Of the three great refutations of false ideas which for him summed up all religious and moral truth, in this work he had gone to the mattresses on behalf of the first: • the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus was quite mistaken, because reality consisted of a supreme divine intelligence and a spiritual world • all pantheistic naturalism was quite mistaken, and all stoicism had been quite mistaken, because humans have complete moral freedom and responsibility (he would beat this to death in his TREATISE ON FREE WILL) • the medieval Nominalists and their successors were quite mistaken, because moral ideas possessed an eternal reality (he would flog this in his TREATISE ON ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY)
July 24th, Tuesday, or 25th, Wednesday: The Reverend Waldo Emerson lectured in Hanover on “LITERARY ETHICS” before the literary societies of Dartmouth College.2 The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self- trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us the story of men or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing me, that what high dogmas I had supposed were the rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only now possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, — were the prompt improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the soul seems to whisper, “There is a better way than this indolent learning of another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.” IMMANUEL KANT JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE THE LIST OF LECTURES
2. Lawrence Buell’s comment on this talk is that it represented the 1st time any major literary figure had ever attempted to define an ethics of the literary, and that it wasn’t much of a start. He says he’s personally underwhelmed, and considers “LITERARY ETHICS” as merely a watered-down repetition of the talk the reverend had given in the previous summer at Harvard College, “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” — with some gratuitous wilderness stuff thrown in to remind his audience that compared to his alma mater, their Dartmouth College was an intellectual backwater. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In his “autobiography,” John Shepard Keyes would later reminisce about how he and his father John Keyes had accompanied Emerson on this lecture expedition: I can remember best my trip to Dartmouth College Hanover NH It was Fathers alma mater, and he perhaps thought it would be a better place for me than Cambridge. So as Mr Emerson was to make the address there before the literary societies we took him in charge and starting Saturday morning journeyed around Monadnock as it seemed to me all day and reached Keene N.H. at dark. Here we staid at the Cheshire House then a famous hostelry and as I had never been out of the state before I enjoyed myself greatly Father had friends there Gen Perry & others Mr Emerson was known and cordially welcomed by them And I saw that pleasant town over Sunday under favorable auspices. At dark that night we took the stage again for Walpole and after a striking drive by lamplight safely were housed at the tavern at Bellows Falls for a sleep, broken by the roaring waters, which I was out very early to see in all their romantic wildness. With Mr. Emerson my father who was quite familiar with them, showed us their huge worn pits and rocky ledges and points of interest until breakfast and the stage called us to resume the journey. All that day we rode up the Connecticut River admiring much its beautiful valley meadows hills and waters reaching Hanover late in the evening to find it bustling with commencement festivities. Mr E was carried off by the societies, and we found rooms and friends at the hotel. The next day Father renewed his youthful memories of people and places, he knew thirty years before finding less change than I had thought possible, while I left to my own devices strolled about the college campus and buildings making vastly unfavorable comparisons of it to my Cambridge. It was in holiday garb but even that was tame and poor beside the rich and dashing Harvard. At the hotel was a bride the wife of a friend of Fathers a Mr. Spaulding of Nashua, a very young and lovely lady, and I paid her very assiduous attention which her old husband smiled on complacently and she accepted graciously in his absence at the college meetings he attended— Of the commencement I remember but little only in my sophomoric conceit I thought the speakers green, and I fear was more impressed with the brides looks than with all orations &c. The address of Mr Emerson was a revelation to all who heard it, and reading it lately since its publication in the new edition of his works I was reminded of the stir to the life and spirit of those who heard it and his power and eloquence then for the first time. It made a great sensation partly because it shocked the orthodoxy and old-fashioned notions of the college and mainly because it voiced the new aspirations then just beginning to be felt all over New England. He received much admiration and attention from every one there, and we came in as his friends for a share of it though I confess that even the bride overlooked her soph for the sages conversation to my mortification. At the ball which closed the festivities I got even however as the lady danced finely dressed splendidly and shone so fairly as the belle in her wedding dress and cameo necklace, that I as her escort for her husband was too HDT WHAT? INDEX
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old to dance was in high feather again— We parted after supper with arrangements all made by me, to have a special stage for our drive home with a select party, and I dreamed of her I feel sure, for I thought I had never seen anyone so lovely — and some of the seniors treated me to a parting bumper in return for their introductions to the bride and Mr Emerson. We started early next morning in an extra stage, in which Mr Emerson Father Mr. Spaulding and several friends of theirs of the college or old graduates, and on the outside Mrs Spaulding and myself with the driver, and we climbed very deliberately over the long hills that make the back lane of New Hampshire The days ride was long hot and dusty Mrs S. sought the shade and comfort of the inside and I helped the driver & at last after dark, and with the incident of losing our way & the driver’s getting off to climb a guide post and see what it said an experience I never knew repeated in all my staging, we reached Concord N.H. quite late in the evening. We were all too tired to do much but sleep except Mr. Emerson who had preached there years before and knew many of the people, and saw some of them late as it was. The next morning we looked over the town which I remember seemed smaller than our Concord, although it was the state capital and had some good buildings. It was always called then ‘New’ Concord by Massachusetts people to distinguish it from ours, and was new looking. We took the Mammoth road line of stages because the driver promised me to drive 6 horses a feat I had never tried before, and I forget whether that parted us from the Spauldings or whether we left them at Nashua. Anyhow we reached Lowell in season to get brought in a carry all home Saturday night after an exciting and eventful week. My first journey from home of any length. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1840
April 9, Thursday: Jones Very appeared in Concord on this bright spring day, and he and Waldo Emerson found they were able to resume their relationship as if nothing had occurred. They walked in the afternoon to Edmund Hosmer’s (Gleason G9) and then to Walden Pond, and later Emerson recorded in his journal that Very had been a “treasure of a companion.”
We walked this P.M. to Edmund Hosmer’s & Walden Pond — The south wind blew & filled with bland & warm light the dry sunny woods. The last year’s leaves flew like birds through the air. As I sat on the bank of the Drop or God’s Pond & saw the amplitude of the little water, what space what verge the little scudding fleets of ripples found to scatter & spread from side to side & take so much time to cross the pond, & saw how the water seemed made for the wind, & the wind for the water, dear playfellows for each other — I said to my companion, I declare this world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists. At Walden Pond, the waves were larger and the whole lake in pretty uproar. Jones Very said, “See how each wave rises from the midst with an original force, at the same time that it partakes the general movement!”
Very informed Emerson of the event at the home of the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr. during his September 1839 visit to Cambridge. Emerson enjoyed his story of Christian’s return to the realm of the Romans. Later, he mused in his journal about the manner in which he had behaved toward Very. Edwin Gittleman’s reading of this is that Emerson “placed his former antipathy in perspective, and attributed most of the blame to his own HDT WHAT? INDEX
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narrow, cold, distrustful nature.” By June this self-critique had been moved into the essay “Friendship”:
We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting –as indeed he could not help doing– for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain- dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?
Gittleman parses this paragraph as indicating that
The impersonal “we” employed by the essayist concealed something more than belated regret at having failed to respect a friend’s integrity. It was an admission of his own hypocrisy and restlessness of spirit, and a condemnation of his earlier reluctance to abandon an uncharitably moralistic attitude toward Very. His radical manifestation of a religious individualism at least should have been tolerated, even if it were directed toward Lidian Emerson.
April 9: I read in Cudworth how “Origen determines that the stars do not make but signify; and that the heavens are a kind of divine volume, in whose characters they that are skilled may read or spell out human events.” Nothing can be truer, and yet astrology is possible. Men seem to be just on the point of discerning a truth when the imposition is greatest. RALPH CUDWORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX
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During the spring, summer, and fall of this year Henry Thoreau would be studying the history of philosophy: • Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE: WHEREIN ALL THE REASON AND PHILOSOPHY OF ATHEISM IS CONFUTED, AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY DEMONSTRATED ... A NEW EDITION; WITH REFERENCES TO THE SEVERAL QUOTATIONS IN THE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM; AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE AUTHOR, BY THOMAS BIRCH of 1678, in which Thales of Miletus and other presocratics had been condemned as mere atheistic materialists. (Waldo Emerson had the four volumes of the London publisher J.F. Dove, for Richard Priestley, edition of 1820 in his personal library.) CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, I CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, II CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, III • Francois Fénelon’s ABRÉGÉ DE LA VIE PLUS ILLUSTRES PHILOSOPHIQUES DE L’ANTIQUITIE (circa 1700), which reported to him the things that Aristotle had placed on record in his METAPHYSICS (“The earth rests upon water” and the “first principle” is “water”) and in his DE ANIMA (“the magnetic stone has soul in it” and “sets a piece of iron in motion” because “All things are full of gods”) and in his POLITICS about the almost-lost work of Thales of Miletos, and in addition retold the story that Thales had explained the summer rising and winter falling of the Nile River as being caused by the Estesian winds. • Baron Joseph de Gerando’s HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE, CONSIDERES RELATIVEMENT AUX PRINCIPES DES CONAISSANCES HUMAINES (1822-1823), which by way of contrast provided a sympathetic reading of Thales, characterizing him as the first natural philosopher (in our current idiom, “scientist”). Thoreau recorded in his journal that Thales of Miletus had been “the first of the Greeks who taught that souls are immortal,” recording also Gerando’s point that this ancient Greek philosopher had considered that “virtue consists in leading a life conformable to nature.”
Thoreau first laid plans to write an account of his and his brother’s 1839 boat/stagecoach trip from Concord MA to Concord NH and into the White Mountains to climb Agiocochook (Mount Washington). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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HISTORY OF CONCORD NH
June 14, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was reading in a set of four volumes from Waldo Emerson’s library, the Reverend Doctor Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE: WHEREIN ALL THE REASON AND PHILOSOPHY OF ATHEISM IS CONFUTED, AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY DEMONSTRATED ... A NEW EDITION; WITH REFERENCES TO THE SEVERAL QUOTATIONS IN THE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM; AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE AUTHOR, BY THOMAS BIRCH (4 volumes, London: J.F. Dove, for Richard Priestley, 1820):
June 14th 1840
— . — Aristotle’s definition of art.3
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. — Chaldaic Oracles.4
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— Inscription upon the temple at Sais.5
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Plotinus aimed at6
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— Euripides in Orestes v. 420.7
——
“The right Reason is in part divine, in part human; the second can be expressed, but no language can translate the first.” Empedocles.8
3. Aristotle, DE PARTIB. ANIMAL., Book I, in Cudworth’s TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM, Volume I, page 336:
4. Cudworth’s TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM, Volume II, page 71: HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
—————
June 14th 1840
— “In glory and in joy, Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side”!9
I seemed to see the woods wave on a hundred mountains, as I read these lines, and the distant rustling of their leaves reached my ear.
June 24, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau commented on his reading of Cambridge Platonists such as the Reverend Doctor Ralph Cudworth:
June 24: When I read Cudworth I find I can tolerate all, — atomists, pneumatologists, atheists, and theists, — Plato, Aristotle, Leucippus, Democritus, and Pythagoras. It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication, which charms me. It is so rare to find a man musing. But between them and their commentators there is an endless dispute. But if it come to that, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. As it is, each takes me up into the serene heavens, and paints earth and sky. Any sincere thought is irresistible; it lifts us to the zenith, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest. Dr. Cudworth does not consider that the belief in a deity is as great a heresy as exists. Epicurus held that the gods were “of human form, yet were so thin and subtile, as that, comparatively with our terrestrial bodies, they might be called incorporeal; they having not so much carnem as quasi-carnem, nor sanguinem as quasi- sanguinem, a certain kind of aerial or ethereal flesh and blood.” This, which Cudworth pronounces 5. Plutarch, ISIS AND OSIRIS, in Cudworth’s TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM, Volume II, page 170:
6. Plotinus, ENNEAD VI, in Cudworth’s TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM, Volume III, page 39: HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
“romantical,” is plainly as good doctrine as his own. As if any sincere thought were not the best sort of truth!
There is no doubt but the highest morality in the books is rhymed or measured, — is, in form as well as substance, poetry. Such is the scripture of all nations. If I were to compile a volume to contain the condensed wisdom of mankind, I should quote no rhythmless line.
Not all the wit of a college can avail to make one harmonious line. It never happens. It may get so as to jingle, but a jingle is akin to a jar, — jars regularly recurring.
So delicious is plain speech to my ears, as if I were to be more delighted by the whistling of the shot than frightened by the flying of the splinters, I am content, I fear, to be quite battered down and made a ruin of. I outgeneral myself when I direct the enemy to my vulnerable points. The loftiest utterance of Love is, perhaps, sublimely satirical. Sympathy with what is sound makes sport of what is unsound.
Cliffs. Evening. — Though the sun set a quarter of an hour ago, his rays are still visible, darting half-way to the zenith. That glowing morrow in the west flashes on me like a faint presentiment of morning when I am falling asleep. A dull mist comes rolling from the west –as if it were the dust which day has raised– A column of smoke is rising from the woods yonder, to uphold heaven’s roof till the light comes again. The landscape, by its patient resting there, teaches me that all good remains with him that waiteth, and that I shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here, than by hurrying over the hills of the west. Morning and evening are as like as brother and sister. The sparrow and thrush sing and the frogs peep for both. The woods breathe louder and louder behind me. With what hurry-skurry night takes place! The wagon rattling over yonder bridge is the messenger which clay sends back to night; but the dispatches are scaled. In its rattle the village seems to say, This one sound, and I have done. Red, then, is Day’s color; at least it is the color of his heel. He is ‘stepping westward.’ We only notice him when he comes and when he goes. With noble perseverance the dog bays the stars yonder — — I too like thee walk alone in this strange familiar 7. Euripides, ORESTEIA, in Cudworth’s TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM, Volume IV, page 172:
The manner in which Thoreau punctuates this line obscures the fact that the subject of the verb is Loxias. Lox- ias is like the divine in being dilatory in providing protection. Thoreau would use this snippet in his essay “PARADISE (TO BE) REGAINED”
8. Cudworth’s TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM, Volume I, page 112: HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
DOG night — My voice like thine beating against its friendly concave, and barking I hear only my own voice. 10 o’clock.
Although the above journal entry was placed by Thoreau within quotation marks, scholars believe it to have been original. William M. White’s version of this journal entry is:
Though the sun set a quarter of an hour ago, His rays are still visible, Darting half-way to the zenith.
That glowing morrow in the west flashes on me Like a faint presentiment of morning When I am falling asleep.
A dull mist comes rolling from the west, As if it were the dust which day has raised. A column of smoke is rising from the woods yonder, To uphold heaven’s roof Till the light comes again.
The landscape, By its patient resting there, Teaches me that all good remains with him that waiteth, And that I shall sooner overtake the dawn By remaining here, Than by hurrying over the hills of the west.
9. Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS (Philadelphia: Kay, 1837), Volume II, pages 45-46, reads “Following his plough, along the mountain-side.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1845
Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE was translated into Latin by Johann Lorenz von Mosheim and furnished with notes and dissertations which were translated into English in a London edition by John J. Harrison.
Of the three great refutations of false ideas which for him summed up all religious and moral truth, in this work he had gone to the mattresses on behalf of the first: • the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus was quite mistaken, because reality consisted of a supreme divine intelligence and a spiritual world • all pantheistic naturalism was quite mistaken, and all stoicism had been quite mistaken, because humans have complete moral freedom and responsibility (he would beat this to death in his TREATISE ON FREE WILL) • the medieval Nominalists and their successors were quite mistaken, because moral ideas possessed an eternal reality (he would flog this in his TREATISE ON ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY) HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1851
February 9, Sunday: Henry Thoreau wrote something in his journal on this day that Dr. Alfred I. Tauber would consider relevant to an understanding of his attitude toward time and eternity: “My desire for knowledge is intermittent but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe –to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar –to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet –is perennial & constant.”
February 9, Sunday: The last half of January was warm & thawy. The swift streams were open & the muskrats were seen swimming & diving & bringing up clams leaving their shells on the ice. We had now forgotten summer & autumn, but had already begun to anticipate spring. Fishermen improved the warmer weather to fish for pickerel through the ice– Before it was only the Autumn landscape with a thin layer of snow upon it we saw the withered flowers through it –but now we do not think of autumn when we look on this snow That earth is effectually buried– It is mid winter. Within a few days the cold has set in stronger than ever though the days are much longer now. Now I travel across the fields on the crust which has frozen since the Jan. thaw –& I can cross the river in most places. It is easier to get about the country than at any other season– Easier than in summer because the rivers & meadows are frozen –& there is no high grass or other crops to be avoided –easier than in Dec. before the crust was frozen Sir John Mandeville says –“In fro what partie of the earth that men dwell, outher aboven or benethen, it seemeth always to hem that dwellen there, that they gon more right than any other folk.” Again –“And yee shulle undirstonde, that of all theise contrees, and of all theise yles, and of all the dyverse folk, that I have spoken of before, and of dyverse laws and of dyverse beleeves that thei have, yit is there non of hem alle, but that thei have sum resoun within hem and understondinge, but gif it be the fewere.” I have heard that there is a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge– It is said that Knowledge is power and the like– Methinks there is equal need of a society for the diffusion of useful Ignorance –for what is most of our boasted so called knowledge but a conceit that we know something which robs us of the advantages of our actual ignorance– In What consists the superiority of that {One leaf missing} auctoritatis. Habemus enim hujusmodi senatûs-consultum, veruntamen inclusum in tabulis, tanquam gladium in vaginâ reconditum; quo ex senatûs-consulto, confestim interfectum te esse, O Business, convenit. Vivis; et vivis, non ad deponendam, sed ad confirmandam, audaciam. Cupio, Patres Conscripti, me esse clementem: cupio in tantis rei-privatae periculis, me non dissolutum videri: sed jam me ipse inertiae nequitiaeque condemno. Castra sunt in Italiâ, contra rem-privatam, in Etruriae faucibus collocata: crescit in dies singulos hostium numerus: eorum autem imperatorem castrorum, ducemque hostium, intra moenia, atque adeò in senatu, videmus, intestinam aliquam quotidie perniciem rei-privatae molientem.” For a man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful but beautiful while his knowledge is oftentimes worse than useless beside being ugly. In reference to important things whose knowledge amounts to more than a consciousness of his ignorance Yet what more refreshing & inspiring knowledge than this? How often are we wise as serpents without being harmless as doves. Donne says “Who are a little wise the best fools be RALPH CUDWORTH Cudworth says “we have all of us by nature (as both Plato & Aristotle call it) a certain divination, presage and parturient vaticination in our minds, of some higher good & perfection than either power or knowledge.” – – Aristotle himself declares, that there is , which is , something better than reason & knowledge, which is the principle and original of all.” Lavater says “Who finds the clearest not clear, thinks the darkest not obscure” My desire for knowledge is intermittent but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe –to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar –to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet –is perennial & constant. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our minds’ histories– How little exercised we have been in our mind –how few experiences we have had I would fain be assured that I am growing apace & rankly – though {Two leaves missing} society –to that culture –that interaction of man on man which is a sort of breeding in & in and produces a merely English nobility a puny & effoete nobility, a civilization which has a speedy limit. The story of Romulus & Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a mere fable; the founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar source. It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. America is the she wolf to day and the children of exhausted Europe exposed on her uninhabited & savage shores are the Romulus & Remus who having derived new life & vigor from her breast have founded a new Rome in the west. It is remarkable how few passages comparatively speaking there are in the best literature of the day which betray any intimacy with nature. It is apparent enough to me that only one or two of my townsmen or acquaintances (not more than one in many thousand men in deed –) feel or at least obey any strong attraction drawing them toward the forest or to nature, but all almost without exception gravitate exclusively toward men or society. The young men of Concord and in other towns do not walk in the woods but congregate in shops & offices– They suck one another– Their strongest attraction is toward the mill dam. A thousand assemble about the fountain in the public square –the town pump –be it full or dry clear or turbid, every morning but not –one in a thousand is in the meanwhile drinking at that fountain’s head. It is hard for the young aye & the old man in the outeskirts to keep away from the Mill dam a whole day –but he will find some excuse as an ounce of cloves that might be wanted or a new England Farmer still in the office –to tackle up the horse –or even go afoot but he will go at some rate– This is not bad comparatively this is because he cannot do better. In spite of his hoeing & chopping he is unexpressed & undeveloped. I do not know where to find in any literature whether ancient or modern –any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any. The actual life of men is not without a dramatic interest at least to the thinker. It is not altogether prosaic. 70,000 pilgrims proceed annually to Mecca from the various nations of Islám. But this is not so significant as the far simpler & more unpretending pilgrimage to the shrines of some obscure individual which yet makes no bustle in the world I believe that adam in paradise was not so favorably situated on the whole as is the backwoodsman in America– You all know how miserably the former turned out –or was turned out –but there is some consolation at least in the fact that it yet remains to be seen how the western Adam Adam in the wilderness will turn out –
In Adams fall We sinned all. In the new Adam’s rise We shall all reach the skies. Infusion of hemlock in our tea, if we must drink tea –not the poison hemlock –but the hemlock spruce I mean –or perchance the Arbor Vitae –the tree of life is what we want. ARISTOTLE
DIFFERENT DRUMMER HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
Pilgrim Costumes HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1910
John S. Harrison detected, in THE TEACHERS OF EMERSON (New York), that there was a continuity between Ralph Cudworth’s “plastic nature” and Waldo Emerson’s definition of art. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1941
At this point Professor F.O. Matthiessen, in his AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: ART AND EXPRESSION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND WHITMAN, uncritically bought into the category “American Renaissance” formed in 1876 by Samuel Osgood. He chose to focus on the first half of the decade of the 1850s during which were being presented to the American public Melville’s MOBY-DICK, multiple editions of Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS, Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER and THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, and Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR. LIFE IN THE WOODS. He arbitrarily included Waldo Emerson with said group of productive authors despite the fact that Emerson had not been producing anything of significance during the timeframe in question — Waldo, he averred, had been “the cow from which the rest drew their milk.”
Oh, OK.
Taking Thoreau’s derogation, in WALDEN, of an unnamed architect, as having been derogations of the dying Horatio Greenough (despite the fact that Greenough had not ever constructed a building), Professor Matthiessen deemed Henry’s remarks unfortunate and inappropriate. (Thoreau’s remarks about this unnamed architect would have been quite appropriate, however, had the unnamed architect been someone who actually was an architect at the time, such as Asher Benjamin. –I fail to see, therefore, any reason why we cannot consider Thoreau’s remarks to have been about the actual architect Benjamin who actually was an appropriate target, rather than about the sculptor Greenough who not being an architect at all, was not an appropriate target for Thoreau’s ire.)
Matthiessen discovered that, in WALDEN, seasonal change was, duh, a trope for spiritual metamorphosis. He opinioned of Thoreau that One strain of his thought that has not yet been given due attention was summed up by him thus:
To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions.
The context of that remark in WALDEN is where he is maintaining that the community is responsible for providing a more adequate cultural life, good libraries, distinguished lecturers at the lyceums, encouragement for the practice of all the arts. He was as opposed to the hoarding of our spiritual resources as he was to the lust for ownership in our rapacious economy. He believed that all great values should be as public as light. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
Despite his credulity, this does qualify Matthiessen as one of the significant seven scholars who have been able to swim against the stream of calumny leveled against Thoreau by the Emerson-worshipers.10
10.The other six: John C. Broderick in 1955 Leo Stoller in 1957 Sherman Paul in 1958 Wilson Carey McWilliams in 1973 Stanley Cavell in 1981 Bob Pepperman Taylor in 1996 HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
Professor F.O. Matthiessen. AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: ART AND EXPRESSION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND WHITMAN. NY: Oxford UP, 1941 HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Matthiessen devotes several chapters to Emerson’s view of art. He tells us that, “Emerson was concerned not merely with choosing his words and arranging them, but with probing to the origins of speech in order to find out the sources of its mysterious powers” (30). Emerson believed, in essence, that “in good writing, words become one with things.” In this he followed Coleridge’s desire to “reinstate the Logos as a living power, to demonstrate in poetry itself the word made flesh”(31). Emerson believed that “all knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject.” In this he followed Coleridge in his conception of the actual act of knowing: Coleridge wrote that “the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the object represented.” Matthiessen points out a similar passage in Emerson’s “The Over-Soul”: The act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one.” This is at the basis of organic unity, and is also reminiscent of Wordsworth who wrote that language “should not be the dress of thoughts, but the incarnation of thoughts, the thought made concrete”(31). When Matthiessen moves to discuss the American Renaissance and its roots in a chapter called “The Metaphysical Strain,” he defines Transcendentalism as “romanticism in a Puritan setting” (104). He goes on to point out how different romanticism would have been for Emerson from Keats or Coleridge. Unlike them, his distrust of Catholicism and the theater kept him from a sense of unity with Medieval writers or even Shakespeare, when he rejected the rationalism of the past. Matthiessen goes on to trace some of the influences on Emerson and Thoreau through Cudworth and other Cambridge Platonists. Emerson was primarily drawn through the emphasis on the individual and its increased awareness of self. He also appreciated the “complex analogy they made between man and nature through the theory of the microcosm and macrocosm” (106). Although Emerson admired Herbert’s poetry, he rejected the blatantly Christian religious element. This, as Matthiessen points out, makes a large difference, as Emerson “for whom man’s dazzling potentiality quite obscured any necessity for struggle against evil or for dependence on God as a protection against himself” (109). Another romantic strand which Matthiessen deals with is the enamorment with oriental culture and religion. Matthiessen compares Emerson and Coleridge’s conceptions of “how the artist creates his forms.” Coleridge writes: No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius can not, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.... Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, its equally inexhaustible in forms....(134) Emerson and Thoreau adopted this idea of the form flowing out of genius in their work. “Emerson rejoiced that in the strict reliance of art upon nature, the artist works not as he will but as he must...”(135). Thoreau wrote that “true art is but the expression of our love of nature” (154). They both believe in the organic style. Thoreau wrote to Emerson, that “if the man took too much pains with the expression, he was not any longer the Idea himself” (156). Matthiessen records Emerson’s reply. After agreeing with Thoreau he pointed out, “that this was the tragedy of Art that the artist was at the expense of the man”(157). HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Matthiessen’s work is very complete, not to say ponderous. As I read it I looked for evidence of Romanticism within his treatment of Emerson and Thoreau. Matthiessen recognizes transcendentalism as a prime force in this period. According to Matthiessen, it was Coleridge who was the immediate influence behind American transcendentalism. Coleridge gained a following after “the edition of AIDS TO REFLECTION that was brought out in 1829 by President Marsh of the University of Vermont. The far-reaching effects of his contribution to general critical vocabulary and thus to modes of thinking can be epitomized by a few of the terms which he coined or put into renewed currency” (6-7). Matthiessen goes on to discuss some of these terms which reek with Romanticism: subjective aesthetic, intuitive, idealize, intellectualize, organic, organization, and self conscious. Matthiessen goes on to discuss Emerson’s participation in the movement, as he battled against “the formulas of eighteenth-century rationalism in the name of the fuller resources of man”(7). The new emphasis was on the immediate within each human, and on the importance of the knowledge of the individual. These ideas lie behind romantic literature, “and naturally made an particular appeal to isolate, provincial America.” This romantic elevation of the individual is celebrated in Emerson’s “Self- Reliance.” Emerson writes, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” and “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” Emerson was concerned to point out the right and wrong kinds of subjectivism: “My prayer is that I may never be deprived of a fact, but be always so rich in objects of study as never to feel this impoverishment of remembering myself.” Individualism and subjectivity then may be easily confused, because of what Emerson called, “the pernicious ambiguity in the use of the term subjective.” His answer to the romantic cultivation of the ego was “the One Mind, and that all the powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all.” Because of this, “the great always introduce us to facts; small men introduce us always to themselves” (9). Another romantic idea which Emerson and Thoreau relied on is that of perception, which is “not whimsical but fatal.” There is here a “mystical acceptance of intuition as final, and demands an unswerving loyalty to its dictates”(9). Matthiessen points out a difference from much of romanticism in Emerson. Because he approaches art through his initial preoccupation with Unitarian and transcendental thought, he comes at it from a very intellectual tack. Another romantic strand besides transcendentalism was the optimism of American democracy. Emerson applauded the revolution and the democratic emphasis on the private man. Matthiessen goes on to discuss Emerson’s view of expression. He points out that “his doctrine of art is also one of religion, that it assumes the superiority of soul to matter”(25). The old forms and conventions should be thrown over for the freedom of the inner man. Art was seen as inspiration, not as craft, a natural understanding when the spirit is elevated above the letter and the “soul that lies behind all expression” is superior to “any embodiment of it.” For Emerson, the creative process bound expression and intuition together. “We need not much mind what people please to say, but what they must say” (26). HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Perhaps one of the reasons that Thoreau and Emerson regarded their art organically, as “a natural fruit” was because their topics were visible nature in such large part. Matthiessen compares Emerson and Thoreau’s handling of landscape to achieve some understanding of their organicism. He points out, from WALDEN, that Thoreau’s victory is that “he had understood that in the act of expression a man’s whole being, and his natural and social background as well, function organically together” (175). Matthiessen turns his reflections to Thoreau. He points out that Thoreau has often been regarded more as a naturalist than an artist. But he is, within his political context, a left-wing individualist, generally remembered for two things: his move to live in a hut in the woods and his act of civil disobedience. Matthiessen questions the social significance of either of these acts, given the fact that the land he lived on was borrowed and that one night in jail is not too uncomfortable. The real contribution which Thoreau makes to social thought, according to Matthiessen “lies in his thoroughgoing criticism of the narrow materialism of his day”(78). Matthiessen points out that Thoreau considers himself significant only as a writer, and yet he writes, “I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time, I should never have written” (81). Matthiessen traces Thoreau’s sense of what role language played: “Talk about learning our letters and about being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or not root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as Americanisms” (Journal 1859). Thoreau carries this romantic idea of words further when he says, “Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever” (85). The importance of the superrational is clear here: Thoreau considered poetry to be superior to philosophy, because the former expresses the whole truth, the latter a particle of it. He didn’t, however, consider language to be superior to other mediums of expression (87). According to Matthiessen, all the above would be Thoreau’s following of Emerson. What differentiates the two is Thoreau’s “interest in the varied play of all his sense, not merely of the eye, a rare enough attribute in New England and important to dwell on since it is the crucial factor in accounting for the greater density of Thoreau’s style”(87). Matthiessen points out examples of the other senses in Thoreau. Thoreau at his best, according to Matthiessen, is Thoreau pulled back from thought to surfaces: “Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me record, and it will be poetry. The sounds which I hear with the consent and coincidence of all my sense, these are significant and musical; at least, they only are heard” (91). Thoreau saw the material world as a symbol of the spiritual. He writes “What I lived for is that we are able to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” (93). [Review not attributed to a particular graduate student, and not dated] HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1945
Kenneth Walter Cameron, in his BACKGROUND OF EMERSON THE ESSAYIST (Raleigh NC), called for a more thorough analysis of the relation between Waldo Emerson and Ralph Cudworth. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1951
March: Vivian C. Hopkins, in her “Emerson and Cudworth: Plastic Nature and Transcendental Art” (American Literature 23, pages 80-98), alleged that “Ralph Cudworth’s THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE (1678) deserves to be re-examined, as a shaping influence upon Waldo Emerson’s concepts of nature and art.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
1962
Kenneth Walter Cameron’s “Ralph Cudworth and Thoreau’s Translations of an Orphic Hymn,” Emerson Society Quarterly 8, pp. 31-36.
Cameron’s A COMMENTARY ON EMERSON’S EARLY LECTURES (1833-1836) WITH AN INDEX-CONCORDANCE. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ralph Cudworth HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: September 10, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
RALPH CUDWORTH RALPH CUDWORTH
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with