Subtle Mind Research Articles

Affective Interaction: Attentive Representation Learning for Multi-Modal Sentiment Classification

The recent booming of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, e.g., affective robots, human-machine interfaces, autonomous vehicles, and so on, has produced a great number of multi-modal records of human communication. Such data often carry latent subjective users’ attitudes and opinions, which provides a practical and feasible path to realize the connection between human emotion and intelligence services. Sentiment and emotion analysis of multi-modal records is of great value to improve the intelligence level of affective services. However, how to find an optimal manner to learn people’s sentiments and emotional representations has been a difficult problem, since both of them involve subtle mind activity. To solve this problem, a lot of approaches have been published, but most of them are insufficient to mine sentiment and emotion, since they have treated sentiment analysis and emotion recognition as two separate tasks. The interaction between them has been neglected, which limits the efficiency of sentiment and emotion representation learning. In this work, emotion is seen as the external expression of sentiment, while sentiment is the essential nature of emotion. We thus argue that they are strongly related to each other where one’s judgment helps the decision of the other. The key challenges are multi-modal fused representation and the interaction between sentiment and emotion. To solve such issues, we design an external knowledge enhanced multi-task representation learning network, termed KAMT. The major elements contain two attention mechanisms, which are inter-modal and inter-task attentions and an external knowledge augmentation layer. The external knowledge augmentation layer is used to extract the vector of the participant’s gender, age, occupation, and of overall color or shape. The main use of inter-modal attention is to capture effective multi-modal fused features. Inter-task attention is designed to model the correlation between sentiment analysis and emotion classification. We perform experiments on three widely used datasets, and the experimental performance proves the effectiveness of the KAMT model.

Was Pierre Duhem an Esprit de finesse?

Although Pierre Duhem is well known for his conventionalist outlook and, in particular, for his critique of crucial experiments outlined in his thesis on the empirical indeterminacy of theory, he also contributed to the scholarship on the psychological profiles of scientists by revising Pascal’s famous distinction between the subtle mind and the geometric mind (esprits fins and esprits géométriques). For Duhem, the ideal scientist is the one who combines the defining qualities of both types of intellect. As a physicist, Duhem made important theoretical contributions to the field of thermodynamics as well as to the then-nascent physical chemistry. Due to his rejection of atomism and his unrelenting critique of Maxwell’s electrodynamics, however, in his later years, Duhem’s work was surpassed and abandoned by the dominant tendencies of physics of the time. In this essay, I will discuss whether Duhem himself can be understood through the lens of his own account of the scientist’s psychological profile. More specifically, I examine whether the subtle mind – to which he seems to assign greater cognitive value – in fact plays a key role in Duhem’s critique of the English School (école anglaise), or if his preference for the axiomatic structure of theoretical physics shows a greater affinity with the geometric mind.

Criptomarxismo e Dialéctica

In his seminal work of 1939 about the idea of progress, published and awarded in the University of Coimbra intellectual milieu, the young Vasco Magalhães-Vilhena wrote what is probably the first major philosophical essay in the Portuguese language, deeply connected with a Marxist world vision. The essay is a well-established academic master-piece, where the philosophical esotericism, underlined by Leo Strauss, is intensively at work, disguising, with some areas of deliberately ambiguity, almost completely the traces of Marx and his larger constellation involving authors like Engels and Feuerbach. What is entirely visible to the attentive reader is the subtle mind of the writer, and his capacity to address important topics of social and political philosophy, like those linked to the dialectical understanding of contemporary capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions, both as an economic model and a civilization paradigm.

In Memoriam: Joël Thoraval (1950-2016)

On 7 March 2016, Joel Thoraval left us, struck down in a few weeks by a devastating cancer that was unfortunately discovered too late. In him sinology has lost an outstanding researcher whose brilliant insights, boundless intellectual curiosity, and encyclopaedic knowledge of a wide range of cultural universes sustained his profoundly original thinking. He will also be remembered by his colleagues and friends as a subtle mind with a ready wit and as a fundamentally modest man.Joel Thoraval was born in Brest in 1950. After his undergraduate days marked by the militant atmosphere of 1968, he enrolled at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he was particularly keen to attend the lectures by Maurice Godelier, to whom he always remained close, while at the same time he continued his studies in philosophy and history. His attraction to Central Asia led him to train himself in archaeology and the languages of that region (Sogdian, Pehlevi, but also Russian), and for his doctorate he left to work as an archaeologist on the Hellenistic site of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan. He was to spend several years there, as a researcher at the French Archaeological Delegation. His stay was interrupted in 1980 by the Soviet invasion, which put a brutal end to his first scientific project. A combination of circumstances then gave him the chance to leave for China, where he began by pursuing his studies in Shanghai before taking up various posts: as Cultural Attache in Beijing (1981-1984), as a research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1984-1991), and then as Cultural Councillor in Hong Kong. In this last position he played a major role in helping Michel Bonnin to set up the CEFC and Perspectives chinoises/China Perspectives. In 1994 he left Asia to join the EHESS China Centre in Paris.Joel Thoraval's research on China developed through several main stages. first of these was devoted to ethnological work in the northwest of Hainan Island, among a population officially classified as Han but offering nonetheless several striking features. This gave rise to a series of studies on the problem of nationality and on relationships of ethnicity within the Chinese world. He analysed these by approaching them through a range of diverse cultural practices, whether based on kinship (lineages), on religion, or on gender relations (with his study on the phenomenon of amorous nocturnal visits). Some of these studies have become classics for generations of students, such as 'Ethnicity' as Applied to the Chinese Cultural World, first published in Perspectives chinoises in 1999.His long stay in Hong Kong, at the Chinese University's New Asia (Xinya) College, allowed him to gain acute insights into the Chinese intellectual world, and especially into the academic communities rethinking Confucian traditions in the light of modern Western philosophy. This gave rise to his twofold interest in the modern Chinese reception of Western ideas and in the ways in which traditional Confucian teachings are currently categorised, theorised, and put into practice. A stay in Japan between 2000 and 2002 enabled him to bring a comparative perspective to bear on his reflections.In addition to his incisive articles on the intellectual debates in mainland China (such as The politics of memory, The dreamt tradition, and Historical consciousness and social imaginary), which demonstrate his gift for perceiving and closely analysing the spirit of an age, his work also focused on Confucian thought in the twentieth century with particular attention to the philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909-1995). He was the first to introduce this thinker to the French public (see especially his Ideal of the sage and strategy: An introduction to the thought of Mou Zongsan). Mou Zongsan was of special interest to him as the ideal embodiment of a type of philosophical fate of contemporary Confucianism while also being an indispensable thinker for understanding the reception of Kant in China. …

Spying with Sympathy and Love

Spying with Sympathy and Love Pat C. Hoy II (bio) Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2014. x + 370 pages. $26. I have a confession of my own to make about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s intriguing confessional, The Sympathizer. Tour de force that the novel is, its convoluted but compelling plot and my own animated desire to unravel its mysteries sent me on a spellbound chase, yearning for resolution and relief. In haste I raced past many of the book’s haunting images, failing even to absorb the full force of Nguyen’s biting critiques of American and Vietnamese cultures—images and critiques that leave us not only informed but also disturbed by his revelation of national blunders, ethnic shortsightedness, and, what seems to him, the inevitable, unchanging course of human history. I intend, here at the outset, to call attention to the novel’s narrative power rather than my own initial, hasty reading. So taken was I by the first quarter of the book that I believed myself to be reading an actual confession, not of a fictive character but of Nguyen himself. I had begun the book, as I always try to do with new books, free of the cant of commercial criticism, the hype of blurb, and my own inherent preconceptions about literature—in what Gaston Bachelard calls a state of “non-knowing.” He reminds us in The Poetics of Space that for the serious reader “knowing must … be accompanied by an equal capacity for forgetting.” Acquiring this “phenomenological attitude” allows us, during our first reading, to be caught up in the movement of a book—passively participating and being entertained as a child might be. But Bachelard also reminds us that “after the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading.” When I began the book, I did not know, had not bothered to see, that I had a novel in hand rather than a memoir. So the character himself, the unnamed narrator of a compelling spy tale, and the quality of the narration seized me, leaving me almost breathless in my pursuit of an ending—hooked as I was on verisimilitude and the thrill of the chase. Eventually my pleasure was interrupted by a labored account of the filming of a war movie the narrator had been called on to advise, and I paused for awhile to begin the “creative work of reading.” But the tale itself, despite occasional extravagances and convolutions of plot, called me back into the chase. The fictive character, distinguished from his creator, still carried the [End Page 685] day, still compelled me to care what became of him—and to care as well about what Nguyen would make of him for the novel’s sake. Across the novel Nguyen creates a dramatic sweep of human history grounded in a highly particularized tale of male camaraderie. The novel’s epic aspirations ride confidently atop the revelatory emotional currents generated by this unlikely male brotherhood. A bastard born of the union of a French priest and a Vietnamese domestic, the narrator is, as the novel’s first sentence tells us, “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” We learn quickly that he can see at least two sides to every issue, and we begin to know from his experiences that such a capacity complicates both his personal and his professional life. He lives and works among the sectarian, straddling, as he must, two cultures whose ideas have become blindingly dogmatic. But trouble and complication are the narrator’s birthright. Educated in America before the fall of Saigon, he returns to Vietnam to serve eventually in the Army of South Vietnam where his western education, his sharp but subtle mind, and his capacity to accommodate stand him in good stead with the general he serves as advisor and confidant. Those qualities also help him fashion the mask of the subversive that he must inhabit to survive. The tale proper begins in the midst of Saigon’s fall and takes the narrator, selected members of the general’s staff, and the general’s immediate family to America by way of Guam. They settle in California, into...

Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man (review)

Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Man. Edited by Christopher M. Bellito, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson. (New York/Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 480. $29.95 paperback.) Attempting to introduce Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) to twenty-first century involves almost as much complexity and nuance as typified subtle mind of Nicholas himself.The contributors to this volume, mostly members of American Cusanus Society, have achieved a formidable task. volume divides into five sections: Introduction, and Society, and Spirituality, Philosophy, Theology, and Science, and a Guide to Research. This works weE, for it allows readers to dip into whichever facet of Cusa's writings has most fascination for them or one can just read book straight through. To get a glimpse of whole picture one would do best by reading two chapters in Part I: Introduction, i.e., An Appreciation by Morimichi Watanabe and chap. 2 Life and Works by Donald F. Duclow.They place Cusa in context of fifteenth century, and they reflect breadth of Cusa's interests, profundity of his thought, but also how his life and works reveal his involvement in issues and events of his lifetime: Council of Basel, attempt at reunion with Greek Churches, and also an issue of his time and ours, attempt at dialogue between European and Christian worlds on one side and non-Christian and especially Muslim world on other. Section II presents in three chapters parts of Cusa's life that have become better known in last two generations: [Cusa and] Reform by Brian A. Pavlac, The Church by Thomas M. Izbicki, and Political and Legal Ideas by Morimichi Watanabe. One of terms in Cusa's mystical theology and metaphysical thinking could be very aptly applied here: the coincidence of opposites. Pavlac concentrates on Cusa and reform in a discussion of his deeds. Cusa was an advocate of contemplative life but was constantly on move, involved in major crises of his day. He worked for reform as a bishop and preacher but was also a coEector of benefices, a curialist at heart of what many saw as major structure in need of reform. He was open-minded and a realist in his dealings with Hussites at Basel and wrote his major treatise (De concordantia catholica) at Basel but then broke with Basel to side with Pope Eugenius IV in hope of having a better chance of reuniting churches. His personal intervention and journey to Constantinople in pursuit of union led to remarkable vision and shift in thinking while on return voyage which leads into third part in this volume: and Spirituality. Here several writers expound on Cusa and Renaissance Humanism by Pauline M. …

Lance Armstrong's war: one man's battle against fate, fame, love, death, scandal, and a few other rivals on the road to the Tour de France

Armstrong's War is the extraordinary story of greatness pushed to its limits, a vivid, behind-the-scenes portrait of Armstrong--perhaps the most accomplished athlete of our time--as he faces his biggest test: a historic sixth straight victory in the Tour de France, the toughest sporting event on the planet. Made newly vulnerable by age, fate, fame, doping allegations, and an unprecedented army of challengers, Armstrong fights on all fronts to do what he does like no one else: exert his will to win. That will, which has famously lifted him beyond his humble Texas roots, beyond cancer, and to unparalleled heights of success, is revealed by acclaimed journalist Daniel Coyle in new and startling dimensions. We see how Armstrong rebuilds after his near-loss in the 2003 Tour, discovering new strategies to cope with his aging body. How he fills the holes in his life after his painful divorce from his wife, Kristin, and the ensuing time apart from his three young children. How he manages the exceedingly difficult trick of being Lance Armstrong--a combination of world-class athlete, celebrity, regular guy, and, for many Americans, secular saint. But a saint's life it's not. To function at his peak, Armstrong requires what his friends artfully call stimulus--and if it's lacking, he won't hesitate to create some. We see Armstrong operating at the turbulent center of a fast-orbiting cast of swaggering Belgian tough guys, controversial Italian sports doctors, piranha-toothed lawyers, and jittery corporations, not to mention a certain female rock star. We see the subtle mind games he plays with himself and with rivals Tyler Hamilton, Jan Ullrich, and Iban Mayo. We see himthrough the eyes of his teammates, competitors, and friends, and explore his powerful relationship with his mother, Linda. We see what happens three weeks before the Tour, when he's faced with a double challenge: a blowout defeat in an important race and the release of a controversial book seeking to link him to performance-enhancing drugs. And finally we see it all culminate in the Tour de France, where Armstrong will rise to new and unexpected levels of domination. Along the way, Armstrong's War journeys through the little-known landscape of professional bike racing, a Darwinian world of unsurpassed beauty and brutality, a world teeming with underdogs, gurus, groupies, and wholly original characters, where athletes do not so much choose the sport as the sport chooses them. Over the season, Armstrong and these characters collide in raw and sometimes violent theater. From the first training camps to the triumphal ride into Paris, Armstrong's War provides a hugely insightful look into the often-inspiring, always surprising core of this remarkable man and the world that shapes him.

Depression and ReasonA Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise.Annette C. BaierA Treatise of Human Nature.L. A. Selby-Bigge

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssaysDepression and Reason Annette C. Baier A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise. Annette C. Baier A Treatise of Human Nature. L. A. Selby-Bigge Pall S. ArdalPall S. Ardal Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 103, Number 3Apr., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/293525 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Imaginary Ancestors by Madeline DeFrees, and: Inconstant History: Poems and Translations by Gregory McNamee

378 WesternAmerican Literature Nielsen explores the physical universe in search of a lost Platonic world. While she never quite reaches this world (or the elusive “blue rose”), the search itself seems of value. The poems themselves abound with word-play: alliteration, punning, and classical/romantic allusions. The author frequently fractures syntax while pre­ serving sense, in a style reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As in Hopkins, a religious dimension pervades many of the poems, for example “On the Christ Who Lives Within.”The poem “Tortoise”recalls Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and his vision of the things of this world, down to a line that reads, “inscape of mustard seed instead.” The tortoise is . . beautiful/ in being all and just the thing he is,”a verse echoing Hopkins’s “selves goes ourself.” These poems must be read slowly (and read several times) to be compre­ hended. This poet adopts manyvoices, some occasionally too erudite or too coy. Phrases like “to our needing wagon house” (from “Plains Cradle Song”) and “Some suddenlys we near” (from “The Hoverer”) fall below the level of the rest of the text. The density ofcertain lines sometimes interrupts the poems’flow, as do abrupt shifts in the poet’s mercurial voice. Endings seem flat or sentimental in several poems, most notably in “Swift to the Window” and “The May Re­ union.” The personal poems, some elegiac in tone, are the most moving. In a sequence of poems on blindness in the section titled “Their Magic Light” the poet’svoice is memorable. Searing emotions are stated in a clear voice: “They’ll lift the deepest topaz out of morning’s/mourning socket when they take your eyes away.” In Looking for the Blue Rose students of poetry will find a subtle mind employing elegant rhythms and diction to probe beneath the surface of reality in search of greater truths. SUSAN ELIZABETH GUNTER Westminster College ofSalt Lake City Imaginary Ancestors. By Madeline DeFrees. (Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1990. 96 pages, $10.00.) Inconstant History: Poems and Translations. By Gregory McNamee. (Seattle: Bro­ ken Moon Press, 1990. 96 pages. $12.95.) Two 1990 releases by Broken Moon Press, Seattle, represent high quality in paperback poetry books. Imaginary Ancestors, by Madeline DeFrees, and Incon­ stant History, by Gregory McNamee, are companion volumes whose extra-glossy covers sparkle with contemporary appeal. The superficial gleam is balanced by Reviews 379 enduring elements in design, printing, production (sewn bindings) and paper (acid-free). Both books are 96 pages, more or less, depending on what you count. But why is the DeFrees volume half-an-inch wider than McNamee’s and $2.95 cheaper, at $10.00? It seems the Broken Moon library would be more compat­ ible if perfectly matched. In some ways, the contents of these two books are also similar. Both are collections of relatively short, well-written, literate, witty, playful and readable free verse. However, DeFrees pursues a more intimate course than McNamee. She describes much of her work in an “Author’sNote”as a search for her “lineage,” which has been clouded by an “orphan mother” who provided contra­ dictory accounts of her own biography. From there, DeFrees attempts to re­ cover (or uncover) the “self’ obscured by 38 years in a convent. Finally, she alludes to several bookish influences on her literary life. Cathedral bells resonate in “Clare of Assisi”as DeFrees edits her name: ... I saved myself. Chopped off the Mary, axed out the Clare, forgot about burlap and beggars, let go of the altar. Assisi was a lot like Camelot, as hard to forget. With ocean and lake everywhere, I still hear those bells underwater. Among the cerebrations are celebration and pain. The tone is revealing but not cloying. Much of the language is colloquial. There are allusions—Emily, Horatio, Galileo and Garbo—but many are explainable in context. The DeFrees genealogy included is pertinent. If there is a confession within the autobiography, no further penance is required. From “Horatio Alger:” . . . Like Author Unknown, like Anonymous, I had arrived, was secretly famous. Gregory McNamee’s Inconstant History: Poems and Translations is a puzzle, a gazetteer and a “Word Power” exercise, all without the answers I needed on...

The Law of the Subtle Mind: The Traditional Japanese Conception of Law

They don't like law in Japan. 1 This is one scholar's summary of the traditional Japanese attitude to law. Though oversimplified, it is substantially true. Japan's growing economic, political and cultural importance is prompting Western lawyers and legal educators to study Japanese traditional 2 and contemporary law.3 They are likely to be startled. Westerners are accustomed to the idea of justice under a system of rational and impersonal laws. Western society is litigation-oriented; social problems become legal problems, thrashed out in open court, and lawyers are everywhere. Japanese traditionally abhor lawsuits. Why do they ? Ten thousand Japanese lawyers serve a major industrial nation with a population of 100 million.4 How can they ? 5 The answers are not to be found in the law books alone; owing partly to the traditional Japanese aversion to law, book law in Japan does not accurately reflect the social mechanisms which adjust tensions and resolve disputes,6 and may not adequately reflect the state of the living law itself.' To answer these questions we must put aside our Western conception of law and try to understand the traditional Japanese conception of law.8

The essential tension : selected studies in scientific tradition and change

The Essential Tension is a collection of previously published essays by Thomas Kuhn to which the author has added two hitherto unpublished articles and a splendid, partly autobiographical preface. These assembled studies shed much light on the early evolution and subsequent reformulations of Kuhn's provocative The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; revised edition 1970). Read as a group, they reveal a profound and subtle mind struggling to articulate and to resolve tensions between different modes of knowing and experiencing

Ernst Mach: His Work, Life, and Influence (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 273 skill, his subtle mind, his bold constructions and reconstructions, and his sometimes unexpected but persuasive conclusions. E. H. VOLKART University o! Hawaii Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. By Frank Miller Turner. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Pp. 273. $12.50) It is a well-known story that Sidgwick gave up his fellowship because he could no longer subscribe to the Apostle's Creed. The episode tells us something about a typical Victorian phenomenon, the loss of orthodox faith. But it also shows an aspect of at least some Victorian minds very unlike the standard Huxleian scientific rationalist. For Sidgwick as for James Ward, Frederic Myers, Samuel Butler, Alfred Wallace and George Romares (the other men of letters or science discussed in this essay) the loss of religion left an intellectual and emotional gap to be filled. The story of attempts by these men to find some alternative basis for a spiritual realm in parapsychology, parapsychism and creative evolution is told here with a wealth of documentation, and similarities between these late Victorians and their continental counterparts are suggested. Claremont Graduate School A. R. Louca Ernst Mach: His Work, Li]e, and Influence. By John T. Blackmore. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1972. Pp. 414. $16.95) John T. Blackmore's biography of Ernst Mach is a distressing book. On the one hand, the book has significantly enriched the public store of biographical information about Mach. On the other hand, Blackmore does not understand the nature of Mach's major contributions to the development of either modern physics or philosophy, and so portrays it in a misleading way. This is a lamentable state of affairs, since his is the only full length biography of Mach. According to Einstein, it was Mach who shook the dogmatic faith in classical mechanics held by the physicists of the last century. For Mach as for Newton, concepts and principles were inferred from phenomena and then rendered general by induction. The sum of Mach's critique of Newton's absolutes was that they could not be inferred from experience. According to Einstein, despite Mach's help in clearing up past confusions, he was not a reliable guide to the future since he did not understand "the constructive-speculative nature of thought, more especially scientific thought..." ("Autobiographical Notes," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. by P. A. Schilpp [Evanston, 192I], p. 21). "All concepts, even those which are closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic, freely chosen conventions..." (ibid., p. 13). But Blackmore does not locate Mach's error in a mistaken view of method; rather for Blackmore, Mach's great error was to be a phenomenalist. In his preface, Blackmore writes: "To clarify and occasionally criticize Mach's philosophical ideas especially those of a phenomenalistic or Buddhistic drift, I have often contrasted his point of view with what I call 'common sense'. I mean the representationalistic view of Galileo, Boyle, Locke, and Newton----ideas widely accepted and 274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY used by practical people today and the only epistemology compatible with a reasonable understanding of the process of perception as accepted by most scientists in the field" (pp. x-xi). Thus, in his account of Mach's critique of Newton, Blackmore assesses the matter as involving merely a decision between phenomenalism and dualism. For Blackmore , when "Newton talked about physical reality he meant what lay entirely beyond experience (i.e., consciously noticeable experience). When Mach talked about physical reality, he meant what lay entirely within experience (consciously noticeable experience)" (p. 91). These claims are based on Blackmore's explication of Newton as a dualist, who believed that ideas were in the mind while objects were outside of the mind, and of Mach, on the other hand, as denying the existence of objects apart from sensations. On the basis of this analysis of the philosophical differences between Newton and Mach, Blackmore makes short work of Mach's famous critique of Newton's account of absolute space as set out in The Science o/Mechanics (LaSalle, 1960): Math objected to "absolute space" on the grounds: first, that...

The Turn of the Screw and Alice James

The tenderest of men, Henry James could hardly have used the illness of his sister Alice as the basis of a story while she lived, or later, without elaborately disguising it—particularly since that illness, though not concealed, was only guardedly revealed as mental. But the heroism of Alice, fully as much as his experience and special knowledge of hysteria, must have strongly tempted him to exploit the extraordinary dramatic possibilities of her disease long before he composed The Turn of the Screw Delicacy, propriety, affection instantly inhibited the development of so rich a “germ,” but it remained planted in James's ingenious and subtle mind until he could bring the derivative narrative forth so altered that his closest intimates would not suspect its source or connections. The product is one of the greatest horror stories of all time.

Huizinga as Accuser of His Age

Huizinga I was a notable figure in the Dutch, and even in the wider Western, life of his time. None of our Dutch historians has been so much read and so much admired. At the same time he irritated many and was sharply attacked. His fascination is by no means spent. Even now one can surrender with delight to the pictures he creates, one can both learn from and enjoy the sparkling of his intellect; then again one feels repelled by his prejudice or wonders how it could dominate this subtle mind to that extent. An uncommon and an important personality he remains. I say this at the outset so emphatically because I am going to approach him from the side that rouses me to opposition. Those charges against our time in which he indulged especially in the years of crisis before and during the Second World War, and which procured him an entirely novel reputation with the public at large, seemed to me at the time already to be missing their mark, inspired as they were by personal feelings of unease, historically and politically unwarranted. A thorough reo reading has confirmed me in this opinion, and it will be the starting point of this paper. Next I shall ask myself how these prejudices and these personal sentiments are to be explained. In looking back on his earlier work we shall find that they were present in his mind from the beginning; in which peculiarities, in which general attitude towards life and society did they have their roots? A further analysis of his general outlook at first more particularly in connection with the severe criticisms levelled against him from three sides in 1930 will then occupy the two concluding sections.

Prof. L. I. Mandelstam

PROF. L. I. MANDELSTAM, an outstanding Russian physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., died in Moscow on November 27, 1944, when at the height of his powers. Mandelstam was endowed with an unusually profound and subtle mind. He was at once a brilliant experimenter, an outstanding theoretical worker, a profound thinker, especially interested in the problems of epistemology and of the philosophy of science, and an outstanding expert in radio-engineering.