Early Thinkers Research Articles

Some Factors Influencing Protein Synthetic Activity in a Cell-Free Mammalian System

It has become increasingly apparent that specific protein synthesis in bacteria is subject to control by repression, derepression, and induction. Contrary to our earlier thinking, a new hypothesis suggests that ribosomal RNA may not intrinsically be the bearer of specific coded information for amino acid sequence. Instead, this information may be supplied to the ribosome by a particular structural locus on the DNA in the form of a messenger RNA, in whose base sequence is encoded the information for ordering amino acids. This messenger RNA is thought to be made and destroyed relatively rapidly and to be able to express its template role only in association with a ribosome. Thus the availability of this structural message would determine whether or not a given protein was synthesized. The control of the production of the messenger appears to reside in certain regulator genes that produce repressor molecules. There is a considerable body...

J. Allen Smith: Jeffersonian Critic of the Federalist State

It is a commonplace that every period rewrites history in the light of its own problems, and with the aid of wisdom after the event. Changes in the climate of opinion and shifts in the winds of doctrine naturally bring the contributions of earlier thinkers under new scrutiny. Today the mood of critical reassessment is strong, for a significant shift has taken place in English and American political opinion during the past decade; the temper of the times is not visionary, but revisionist, and the pull is not toward revolution, but toward revaluation. The spate of books and articles on the “new conservatism,” the “new right,” and the “conservative tradition,” however, and if ever, defined; the reconsiderations of liberal and reformist thought; the succession of Michael Oakeshott to the chair of Harold J. Laski; the recantations of repentant liberals, and the curious spectacle of revolutionaries triumphantly in reverse; the vogue of Burke and De Tocqueville; and even the difference between D. W. Brogan's earlier acid etching of the American political scene and his recent essay in contentment, all make clear in their varying ways that times have changed.

The Prescriptions of the Classical Economists

One of the responsibilities of those living in an age of dissolving beliefs is to see that the good parts of earlier thinking are not lost. Even those who regard economic liberalism as a dead cause would do well to consider the nature and significance of Professor Robbins's new inquiry into the classical policy prescriptions. No policy system, once politically potent, will be allowed simply to fade away; its break-up will be hastened by those seeking to appropriate certain fragments of it, and those who wish to destroy others. Today, those who draw their theory of policy in the main from the English and Scottish classical writers find themselves embattled upon two fronts. There are appropriators who would present one of the two principal ornaments of that school, Ricardo, as chiefly significant as contributing to the preliminaries of Marxism; and there are patronisers who treat the classics as devoid of virtue, the dubious apologists of the impotent state. Professor Robbins, though not unaware of the first category, addresses himself in the main to the second. He enters upon the task of rehabilitating the English classical economists as a source of policy, It is high time, he believes, that their real positions should be plainly stated. Ostensibly he has undertaken a purely historical and descriptive exercise in exposition. But the book is a good deal more than this; it is provocative at three different levels, each with its peculiar interest. He gives us his attitude as an eminent contemporary economist toward present-day treatment of the study of earlier systems in general, and of the classical case in particular. Secondly, he deals vigorously with the mis-statements he believes to be current about Adam Smith, Bentham, Malthus, Ricardo, the Mills and the rest. Finally, he discusses what the classical system, in its positive aspect, really stood for.

Kingdom and Polity in Eusebius of Caesarea

Eusebius of Caesarea occupies a unique position in ancient Christian thought. His central problem is to explain and justify a Christian society which is to transform the Roman Empire and which will become the new world civilization supplanting Hellenism and Judaism. Earlier thinkers do not face this problem. The Roman Empire is for them one of the powers ordained of God, but it is pagan and they expect it to remain so. Consequently the question of human government is only peripheral to their thought. Nor do later thinkers see the problem quite as Eusebius does. In the East, for example in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, the question of human government again becomes peripheral to Christian thought, and Eusebius has no successor as a “political theologian.” In the West, Augustine gives a general answer to the problem of a Christian society in a Christianized Empire, but his solution contradicts that of Eusebius. To Augustine, the structure of the Christian Roman Empire is still that of Babylon, and human society is still a mixture of two opposed cities, the earthly city and the city of God.

The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man

IT is a pity that Hume, who carried the Cartesian system of philosophy to its logical conclusion, lived too early to contemplate the discoveries of the past century in Egypt and Babylonia, for he would readily have understood and assimilated the ancient processes of thought which arose at the dawn of history in Western Asia--‘ And no truth appears to me more evident ’, he said, ‘ than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as man ’. The arguments are developed in section XVI of ‘ The Understanding ’, where there are many delightful passages of special relevance to the ancient concepts about life. Again, he said that a bird, that ‘chooses with such care and nicety the place and materials of the nest, and sits upon her eggs for a due time, and in a suitable season, with all the precaution that a chymist is capable of in the most delicate projection, furnishes us with a lively instance of animal sagacity’. Locke, on the other hand, in his discussion of animal rationale, had refused to be drawn so far. ‘ And if Balaam’s ass had, all his life, discussed as rationally as he did once with his master, I doubt yet whether any one would have thought him worthy the name ‘man’, or allowed him to be of the same species with himself ’. Of these two statements Hume’s approximates more closely to the earliest Asiatic view of life, and it is on these lines that Messrs. Frankfort, Wilson, and Jacobsen have approached their problem, which, briefly put is-how did the early thinkers of the Near East come to say what they did about creation, the state, and man ? Professor and Mrs Frankfort define the earliest mode of thought as an ‘ I-thou ’ relation-ship, by which they mean that the primitive Asiatic conceived of all creation in a reciprocal nexus wherein the material world was percipient as well as perceived, and Professor Wilson elaborates the same theme by saying that for the Egyptians the world was consubstantial, and that their view of life might be defined as monophysite. Pro-fessor Jacobsen’s contribution illustrates to what extent the Mesopotamian view of life conformed with this outlook, for example how salt and grain were conceived of as animate beings in a close relationship with man, responsible and responsive to him. Other ideas peculiar to the Mesopotamian mind are no less clearly stressed, and herein lies the fascination of the book, that we have a comparative examination of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Israelite approach to life, for Hebrew theology was cast out of a similar matrix. In a concluding chapter by the Frankforts, we see the dawn of a new intellectual era. The Greek physical philosophers, regardless of the data of experience, carried the old basic concepts of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians from a concrete to an abstract frame and worked them to a reductio ad absurdurn, much as Hume did for the concepts of Cartesian philosophy. Their prescience gave birth to science. Nor should we forget that Thales of Miletus prophesied an eclipse, thereby following in the wake of the Babylonian astronomers, who had made similar observations and recorded them centuries earlier.

Philosophy and Science

Many centuries ago, at the very beginning of the systematic development of philosophy, Plato declared that the thinker's domain comprises “the wholeness of things;” and indeed, the earlier thinkers took all knowledge for their province and did not hesitate to discuss problems now referred to art, psychology, economics, mathematics, or physics. Since then the meaning of philosophy has appreciably changed, however, and the intellectual descendants of the great founder of the Academy no longer claim the monopoly of all fields of study. For there appeared in the meantime a mighty competitor—or should we say a partner?—in the pursuit of truth, namely, science.

The Gods in Plato, Plotinus, Epicurus

The two tractates forming the treatise of Plotinus, called rather misleadingly, to the modern mind, ‘On Providence’, have attracted attention mainly because of the remarkable stress laid in them on the doctrine of the Logos, which marks an interesting development of Plotinus' latest thought and brings the treatise into an apparently close relation to other systems with which the philosophy of Plotinus has little in common. I do not, however, in this article wish to discuss the Logos doctrine of these tractates, but rather to compare certain other aspects of the thought of the treatise with their probable sources in the work of earlier thinkers, and in particular to draw attention to a curious and unexpected parallelism of thought in one passage. I think that conclusions of some interest for the history of Greek thought in general can be drawn from such a comparison.

Immanence and Transcendence

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless."