Mind Of Man Research Articles

Dispensing Bounty in Africa

HE STORY I have to tell in response to your kind invitation is not a fiery drama. It is a quiet story. An account of modest endeavour for the most part distantly removed from the current political struggles which are straining men's minds and consciences. It relates to life behind the lines of these political battles and deals with activities and developments which, understandably, are not 'news' in present circumstances, but which one hopes, in time, will contribute something to human happiness and well-being. The dispensing of bounty in Africa. Before proceeding to the African part may I define my view of bounty. I adopt the distinction made by a Lord Justice of Appeal in a legal judgement between payments made as a matter of bounty and payments made as a matter of business. Both business and bounty are means whereby men can contrive to meet their needs and fulfil their aspirations. In many fields, both business and bounty are operating side by side-in research, in medicine, in the provision for old age, in education, in recreation. And businesses are the main providers, directly and indirectly, of the wherewithal for bounty. But whereas business is being conducted for monetary profit and can use profit as the guide to decisions, bounty has no such guide. Its distribution is aimed at the public good ; the results can sometimes be assessed in money terms, but usually not. And the need for bounty arises when things which it is thought ought to be done cannot or will not be done as a matter of business. So that the paying out of money as bounty constitutes an act of faith in the worthwhileness to mankind of the purposes for which the money is given. In Africa today the conditions and standards of living of the people are being changed rapidly by the activities of business and presumably the process will continue even more speedily and on a widening scale. Concurrently, the dispensers of bounty, both public and private, are supporting developments on a bigger and more varied scale than ever before. When I first visited Africa some years ago as the agent of a charitable foundation, I felt that I was looked upon as something of a rare oddity. On my last visit, made not so long ago, I had a different impression. In the years between the number of organisations-public and private, international and national-trying to give money away in Africa had so increased that I felt like the last man in a queue of commercial travellers. A body, such as the Nuffield Foundation, wishing to give some of its bounty in Africa, has to view what it can do in the light of what many other bodies with basically like intentions

To Win the Minds of Men

To Win the Minds of Men

Ants and Men — A Spending Spree — Royal College of Physicians

IN his presidential address to the hundred and twenty-first annual meeting of the British Association Sir James Gray, F.R.S., said that until individual nations were prepared to think in terms of the welfare of humanity as a whole there would be continued potential danger and waste of human effort. He said that frightened or angry men, like frightened or angry animals, cannot be trusted to act wisely and scientists would not make much impression on public opinion so long as men's minds were based on fear and suspicion. In presenting science to the public scientists should have the primary objective . . .

Book Review: To Win the Minds of Men

Book Review: To Win the Minds of Men

Concepts of Force

By Max Jammer London : Oxford University Press. Pp. ix + 269. Price 45s. In this book Professor Jammer has performed a greater service to scholarship than providing a mere chronological description of the growth of the concept of force. He has demonstrated how men's minds have worked on this problem, and wrestled with its subtleties.

Why I am not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects.

Dedicated as few men have been to the life of reason, Russell has always been concerned with the basic questions to which religion also addresses itself -- questions about man's place in the universe and the nature of the good life, questions that involve life after death, morality, freedom, education, and sexual ethics. He brings to his treatment of these questions the same courage, scrupulous logic, and lofty wisdom for which his other work as philosopher, writer, and teacher has been famous. These qualities make the essays included in this book perhaps the most graceful and moving presentation of the freethinker's position since the days of Hume and Voltaire.I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue, Russell declares in his Preface, and his reasoned opposition to any system or dogma which he feels may shackle man's mind runs through all the essays in this book, whether they were written as early as 1899 or as late as 1954.The book has been edited, with Lord Russell's full approval and cooperation, by Professor Paul Edwards of the Philosophy Department of New York University. In an Appendix, Professor Edwards contributes a full account of the highly controversial Bertrand Russell Case of 1940, in which Russell was judicially declared unfit to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York.Whether the reader shares or rejects Russell's views, he will find this book an invigorating challenge to set notions, a masterly statement of a philosophical position, and a pure joy to read.

Solar Energy—Its Domestic and Foreign Implications

FOR NEARLY A DECADE after the victorious conclusion of World War II, we in the United States assumed that, since we possessed the world's greatest productive capacity, we were also the world's leaders in all aspects of science. On October 4, 1957, our complacency was rudely shattered by the appearance in our skies of a sphere, a cone, and a cylinder. The sphere was the Russian satellite, 1957 Alpha, and the cone and cylinder were debris from the vehicle which hoisted this ingenious petard into its orbit. Far from being a mere iron ball tossed casually into outer space by an over-enthusiastic skyrocket, Sputnik was a Fourth of October announcement that the future has crowded in upon the present, and far sooner than most of us expected. Today we find ourselves engaged in a race for scientific supremacy, a race in which we and the Soviets will seek astounding accomplishments as much for the purpose of influencing men's minds as for gaining military predominance. We must without fail overcome the lead which Russia's rocket experts gained in the field of penetrating outer space, but we must pay even more attention to the vastly more important problem of raising the standard of living of the billions of people on this planet who have never read a book, known a doctor, or seen an electric light bulb.' The United States is the only nation which, at the beginning of its history, possessed large and readily accessible supplies of the three fossil fuels-coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Liberal use of those fuels has enabled us to achieve the world's highest standard of living, but in so doing we also developed the world's greatest appetite for energy. Today, with only 7 per cent of the world's population, and 8 per cent of its land area, we are using 40 per cent of the earth's total annual energy production. Even more important is the fact that two-thirds of our annual demand is for the fluid fuels, which constitute less than 2 per cent of our total fossil fuel reserves.

Sense Consciousness According to St. Thomas

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDIToRs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PRoVINCE OF ST. JoSEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XXI OCTOBER, 1958 SENSE CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO ST. THOl\fAS No.4 A concept of consciousness would seem to be an Integral part of a theory of knowledge as well as a crucial element in any theory of human nature. Our capacity to know ourselves is necessarily bound up inextricably with the question of our capacity to know in general, and in turn underlies many such problems as those of self-realization and the validity of self-criticism, the nature of psychological personality, the foundation of ethics and morality, and other related points. Traditionally accepted as an evident object of psychological study, both by philosophers and early empirical psychologists, the notion of consciousness began to suffer a certain diminution in the latter half of the nineteenth century, until in some schools of thought its reality came to be wholly denied. At the same time, through the influence of psychoanalysis, the 415 416 MICHAEL STOCK important role of the unconscious mind was made strikingly manifest, and the question of the respective influence of conscious and unconscious motivation became a central issue in psychology and ethics. At the present time, with the reality of consciousness generally accepted again, and some of the early over-statements of the force of the unconscious somewhat modified, the time seems ripe for an extensive investigation of the relationships obtaining between the conscious and unconscious spheres of men's minds. In this context, it seems useful to state more fully the ideas on consciousness held by St. Thomas, not only because his insights are hound to be of value in discussing current problems, but also because such doctrine should be explicitly understood if many of the implications of Thomistic psychology and moral theology are to be fully appreciated. Certainly many aspects of the doctrine of consciousness have been treated in one form or another, but, so far as I know, there is no complete and exhaustive statement. In working towards such a statement, it seems useful to sketch first, as in general outline, a broader conspectus of the points which will have to be raised and solved before an integral statement can be offered. For the sake of analysis, the matter may be divided under three main headings; the questions of strictly sense consciousness, the questions of purely intellectual consciousness, and the questions of intellectual reflection on the senses. Our immediate purpose here is to raise and discuss some of the problems involved in sense consciousness. By way of preliminary notes, some of the ambiguity which attaches itself to the notion of consciousness should be removed. In common usage, consciousness often means nothing more than knowledge, for instance, when we ask someone whether or not he was conscious of some noise or sight. For St. Thomas, however, consciousness always had a note of cognitive complexity about it; it was knowJedge as applied to something.1 1 " Nomen enim conscientiae significat applicationem scientiae ad aliquid; unde conscire dicitur quasi simul scire." De Ve:rit., q. 17, a. l; cf. Summa Theol., I, q. 79, a. 18; ll Sent., d. ~4, q. ~. a. 4. SENSE CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO ST. THOMAS 417 In the moral order, it was knowledge applied to deliberate actions as they measured up to or failed to measure up to rules of reason and Faith; what is today called conscience. This moral consciousness was necessarily founded on psychological consciousness, which, in its strictest sense, was knowledge of knowledge, or the awareness of an act of knowledge. It thus involved two elements-an apprehension of some knowable object and a separate cognitive realization that that object was apprehended. By extension, however, the word " consciousness " could be used to signify the things of which one has consciousness, that is, the things known which are known to be known.2 By extension, again, in another direction, consciou~ ness may signify the·act of being aware of other psychological states or operations besides those which are cognitive, that is, the actual awareness of emotions, feelings, performances and the like. Under this...

Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic

Shakespeare couples lunatic, lover, and poet as ‘of imagination all compact’ (Dream v.i.7-8); Spenser finds that Phantastes’ chamber is filled with ‘leasings, tales, and lies’ (F.Q. II.ix.51.9) and that his eyes seem ‘mad or foolish’ (F.Q. II.ix.52.7); Drayton speaks of the ‘doting trumperie’ of imagination; when men's minds become ‘inflamed', says Bacon, ‘it is all done by stimulating the imagination till it becomes ungovernable, and not only sets reason at nought, but offers violence to it’. These views of imagination and its activity, echoed in other important literature of the age of Elizabeth, hardly suggest a favorable view of the faculty assigned to the poet. The explanation of such derogatory views lies in the popular psychology of the period.

THE EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF OBERLIN—THE FOUNDER OF THE FIRST NURSERY SCHOOL

Education, since the earliest times, has been concerned with the mental, moral and physical well-being of the individual yet it has rarely, in practice, been able fully to adjust itself to man's threefold nature. To divide the attention equally between a training of man's mind, body, and morals, and to realise, in the words of the Athanasian creed, that is afore or after other - none is greater or less than another, would seem to present an ideal of educational theory and practice that is wholly unattainable. In consequence, as we become only too painfully aware when studying the evolution of educational consciousness, different countries in different centuries have tended to exalt those aspects of man's development that have particularly interested them, and often to stress them unduly.

An Exploratory Psychology Course for Teenagers

I am interested in taking psychology because I believe it would help me understand other people better and would help improve myself in the eyes of them. I think a course in psychology would be helpful to me because I plan to major in that line in college. This would be like a preparatory course for me. As for others, psychology would be helpful in the understanding of man's mind and his everyday problems and how to cope with them. I would like to take psychology in high school as I plan to major in mental hygiene when I attend college.

David Macbeth Moir as Morgan Odoherty

Efforts to establish the identity of Morgan Odoherty, the Irish adjutant whose coruscating wit shone so brightly from the early pages of William Blackwood's Maga, have for years proved fascinating but frustrating scholarly exercises. Some years ago, in PMLA (lviii, Sept. 1943, 716–727), Ralph Wardle posed the question “Who Was Morgan Odoherty?” and then supplied an accurate but incomplete answer. After meticulously sifting a mass of contradictory evidence, Wardle came to the conclusion that Odoherty was not William Maginn, as generally assumed, but was rather “the embodiment of the Irishness in several men's minds—and most of them were dyed-in-the-wool Scots.” On the strength of a statement by David Macbeth Moir's biographer that Moir's contributions to Blackwood's Magazine included “familiar letters and rhyming epistles from Odoherty; mockheroic specimens of translations from Horace; Christmas carols by the fancy contributors, Mullion and the rest; ironical imitations of living poets; Cockney love-songs; puns and parodies,” Wardle knew that Moir “took his turn as Odoherty.” Exactly which contributions were Moir's, though, he could only conjecture.

Joachim of Flora: A Critical Survey of his Canon, Teachings, Sources, Biography and Influence

One of the most significant and influential figures of the ‘renaissance of the twelfth century,’ though not mentioned by Charles Haskins in his monumental work of that title (Cambridge 1927), was the Calabrian Joachim of Flora, a man who contributed nothing directly to the revival of science, to a knowledge of Greek or Latin antiquity, or to the rise of a secular attitude. Long before the date of the appearance of Haskins' work, however, since Michelet in fact, Joachim's name was associated with the Renaissance, and in the early years of this century this link was emphasized by Burdach and his followers. He is supposed to have done more to orient men's minds towards, and to have aroused expectations of, a coming new age in the later Middle Ages than anyone else. Whether one wishes to go as far as Burdach went (and I myself certainly do not wish to do so), it is at least true that his works and the works associated with his name helped to create the ferment that was eventually, in a few centuries, to make men feel that they were in a new era of rebirth and that a period of darkness lay behind them.

The Impact of the Cold War Upon Civil Liberties

AT A TIME when the fears of some have reached a stage where a school board member in a reputedly enlightened community finds Robin Hood communistic; when a respected organization in its efforts to become the sole custodian of patriotism finds the Girl Scouts subversive; and when the public scene is characterized by the spectacles of perjury trials, the probing of men's minds by legislative inquisitions, and charges and findings of disloyalty with such accompaniments as guilt by association, perpetual jeopardy of those so unfortunate.as to be accused, and expurgation by oath, it is an understatement to say that basic liberties are endangered. In such a state of affairs regardless of whether fears for the national security are rational or irrational or whether suspicions are justified or not,, it is inevitable that legislatures, executives, and courts will reflect popular distempers and respond to them either because they share the public fears or desire to exploit them for political preferment. Legislative response has taken the form of the accusatorial inquisition and statutes designed to outlaw the Communist Party, control subversion, and to revive a form of the test oath for public employees. Executive response has assumed the form of loyalty and security programs, vigorous enforcement of anti-subversive legislation, and the use or misuse on occasion of the files of the secret police and the Civil Service Commission for partisan political purposes. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the explosion of the atomic bomb, the mounting tensions of the Cold War, and the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb have produced a crisis in the ancient conflict between liberty and authority, or as currently called, national security. The crisis places in full focus the dilemma which Lincoln faced in 1861 and stated so well when he asked, Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?L

On Questions

In the course of his life a man surrounds himself with questions, much as he surrounds himself with furniture, books or pictures. Personality is expressed not only by the selection of a Chippendale chair, the amassing of early colour-plate books, or the purchase of a Renoir, but also by the kind of questions which a man “collects”-raises, without necessarily solving. Some questions, like some books, are to be brooded over and studied; some are introduced only to be contemplated from time to time, like fine bindings; and some occur so casually as hardly to rouse any attention at all. There is an obvious difference between a man who bids carefully at a book auction or forces himself on to his knees to identify a dust-covered quarto in a slum bookshop, and a man whose library is inherited from parents or grandparents; acceptances and not choices will distinguish the casual possessor from the bookman. Similarly, there are many questions which sit lightly on a man's mind, which are as little the object of sustained wondering or bafflement as his ancestors” well bound volumes of theology or game-shooting are the reflection of his own tastes or interests. These may be questions of any sort: they may be factual questions, important or trivial, or they may be theoretical questions, philosophical perhaps, or religious or scientific. A student of literature, for instance, has been known to congratulate himself on his ignorance of modern science, ignorance so deliberate that any scientific question raised in his presence fails even to make him wonder. For any person, however, there are ranges of questions which barely touch his mind: he may be aware that he does not know how to derive answers to them for himself, but his inability will not cause him concern. The memory, the practical or the reasoning skill of the kind that would be required are perhaps so much out of proportion to what he possesses that to bemoan the lack of them is unrealistic -as it is often idle and merely conventional for one who is tone-deaf to say how much he wishes he could sing an aria. Other questions altogether, important or trivial, he takes seriously and troubles to answer, because they touch his own special interests directly: he may pride himself on never neglecting a newspaper problem in bridge or chess, or he may never fail to answer correctly a question about the construction of some instrument or machine. The same person, however, will also get the length of raising many questions which remain mere questions. He may be troubled and puzzled about certain political or social question which circumstances do not compel him to answer: but he will not be hypocritical in professing an interest in them. Some of these questions, of course, may become solved after a fashion, if he listens to the voice of politician, statistician, priest or psychologist and is lucky enough to get an answer which satisfies him. But many will survive with just enough recurrences of wondering about them to make them, as you might say, chronic. This is the intermediate class of questions.

Berkeley and Molyneux on Retinal Images

As a philosopher, Berkeley had many purposes. The central ones were refute the scepticism inherent in the Newtonian world, criticize the innovations of the philosophers, natural philosophers and mathematicians, and demonstrate, in opposition the deistic view of a distant Deity, the immediate presence of God. Berkeley saw that the chief source of the scepticism, errors and perplexities besetting men's minds was the prevailing belief, shared by the common man and the philosophers, that there are material entities or external objects which are capable of existing whilst unperceived by any minds. This belief was an essential part of the doctrine which Berkeley called materialism. It is likely that Berkeley was a convinced immaterialist before he wrote the Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,1 and even before he began fill his two private notebooks, now called the Philosophical Commentaries,2 but it seems that when he began the Commentaries, he had found neither arguments support his conviction, nor answers possible objections. By the time he began write the Principles of Human Knowledge,3 he had found his arguments, and knew how answer all the objections immaterialism that he could think of. One important objection constitutes the Third Objection in the Principles. This is based on the facts of vision: . . . we see things actually without or at a distance from us, and which consequently do not exist in the mind. 4 Consideration of this difficulty gave birth to the Essay.5 The above objection was the view of the common man. He thought that external objects can be directly seen. The philosophers, e.g., Locke, Malebranche and Descartes, corrected this mistake of the vulgar, and asserted that external objects can be seen only mediately or indirectly by means of certain immediate objects of sight which do not exist outside the mind and which are images or resemblances of external things.6 Berkeley felt that if the views either of the common man or of the philosophers were correct, then immaterialism was impossible. In the Principles, Berkeley indicates what the Essay had accomplished. It had shown that:

Book Review: In the Minds of Men: The Study of Human Behavior and Social Tensions in India

Book Review: In the Minds of Men: The Study of Human Behavior and Social Tensions in India

Cornelis Drebbel and Salomon de Caus: Two Jacobean Models for Salomon's House

ACCORDING tO Spedding's conjecture, Francis Bacon wrote fl New Atlantis in I624 as a parable to his whole philosophy, a discussion of particulars as he called them, by which all men might understand his pragmatic plan and adapt it to their future uses. As utopias go, New Atlantis offered no extraordinary contributions to political or social sciences, but it had effect upon men's minds Bacon intended-and a more practical effect than most utopian schemes: Salomon's House, academy for advancement of learning, was matrix stamped upon great scientific academies of seventeenth century, French Academie des Sciences as well as English Royal Society.' His academy was Bacon's principal instrument in Great Instauration, means by which real work of scientific revolution was to be carried out. His boast for it was brave, but no braver than his vision required: the End of our Foundation is knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and enlarging of bounds of Human Empire, to effecting of all things possible'2 Perhaps, as one critic has suggested, Bacon might never have written New Atlantis had not Tommaso Campanella published his Civitas Solis in I623 and thus inspired Chancellor to a

: In the Minds of Men: The Study of Human Behavior and Social Tensions in India . Gardner Murphy.

: In the Minds of Men: The Study of Human Behavior and Social Tensions in India . Gardner Murphy.

God and Polarity by William H. Sheldon

BOOK REVIEWS God and Polarity. By WILLIAM H. SHELDON. New Haven: Yale University Press 1954. Pp. 71~ with index. $8.00. This vast work by the emeritus Sheldon Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University is a most ambitious attempt to reconcile the chief perennial disputes among the various opposing schools of philosophy as they have developed in the history of philosophy and as they now present themselves , including the thought of both East and West. It is the author's conviction that historically these various systems may be arranged in counterpart pairs, each member of a pair providing what the other member lacks. Thu~ idealism is compared with materialism, Thomism with process philosophy, monism with pluralism and rationalism with irrationalism. In this way there is created a graded system of polar opposites ranging from inanimate matter to the Deity. In reality this graded polarity is a protest against the pure intellectualism inherited from Greek philosophers which reaches its extreme in Hegelianism. Actually reality cannot be comprehended by intellect alone but only by a union of intellect with feelings and will. Professor Sheldon is moved to write his opus magnum by the vast futility of opposing systems of philosophy, each of which avows that it alone is right and the others wrong. Yet as Aldous Huxley writes: "l\Ien live in accordance with their philosophy of life, their conception of the world. This is true even of the most thoughtless. It is impossible to live without a metaphysics. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysics and no metaphysics; it is always between a good metaphysics and a bad metaphysics." Professor Sheldon suggests that perhaps all systems of metaphysics are in the main correct except where each thinks it has refuted the other. Each may have shown its truth and all can pool their results without any one being relegated to an inferior grade, " in short that philosophy has succeeded to a high degree; that its manner, not its matter, has caused its downfall. Well, such is the case as the following pages are to set forth.... The situation of man today is unique, unique because it is critical as never before in recorded history. To meet it man must have a firm assurance of the powers that control his_ universe, powers good, bad, or indifferent, to which he must adapt his living if he would survive or perhaps progress-yes even if those powers are only his own. So does the moving finger write Philosophy in these days, giving it an opportunity, a task, a momentous choice to integrate itself or die in its seclusion, and perhaps man with it." (p. 3) 541 542 BOOK REVIEWS After one of the longest and best reviews of idealism, ci>vering nearly a third of the text, Sheldon. concludes that this philosophical approach in its three major forms has indeed done mankind great service in keeping man's mind fixed on the highest values, those of the spirit, proving as it does that law and order are to a high degree present in the universe and necessary for the best human life, that social order is no more than a means to the needs of individual persons where progress first must be rooted; " that 'there is an absolute personal spirit or God in some sense ubiquitous; that the deeper personal values are powers, real entities, upon which man may rely in guiding his life. However, the idealist experiment has not proved its clear exclusions: that matter, time, space and other categories of the physical and mental reality are to a degree unreal, that the Deity is in any way limited, etc., as detailed above. But how vague! say the modem precisians . What is person? Define mind! How much law and order do we need? Define your absolute personal spirit. All this long and dreary argument for so slim a result." (p. 860) Polar to idealism will be materialism, which the author disposes of in a -relatively short discussion. Materialism is considered as rightly insisting on the ultimate reality of physical being insofar as, we can at present aee. It is wrong in denying that consciousness, mind, spirit...