Virtuous Man Research Articles

Religion and Radicalism

L N HIS REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE, Burke lamented the great transformation which he sensed taking place in European civilization. age of chivalry is gone, he wrote, of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.' Throughout most of his career, even in the Reflections, Burke was convinced that England was the principal evidence of this most unfortunate transition. He singled out one group as the major modernizing agent in his Englandthe sectarian protestant dissenters. He was right. While many strands of English life contributed to the modernity that undermined the ancien regime, even parts of the aristocracy itself, for example, the cutting edge of change came from these dissenters. They were the boldest voices attacking the traditional order; they were the secular prophets, the vanguard, of a new social order. These talented and industrious protestant dissenters played the decisive role in transforming England into the first bourgeois civilization. This paper is an effort to reconstruct the ideology of this radical community. It looks at its notions of government, of society, and of the virtuous man. One finds here the articulation of inherited ideas of Lockean liberalism with a progressive and revolutionary fervor that sought to topple all aspects of the aristocratic world-of Burke's beloved age of chivalry. The major force behind this radicalization of Lockean liberalism was its capture in the early stages of the industrial revolution by these protestant dissenters, the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit. The spirit of 1776 was the spirit of bourgeois radicalism.

Justice in Adam Smith: The Right and the Good

We are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness. This is by no means the weak side of human nature, or the failing of which we are apt to be suspicious. [Smith, M.S., VII, II, iii, p. 39]1 The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public inter? est of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the greater interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty of which it is only a subordinate part: he should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the uni? verse. . . . [M.S., VI, II, iii, p. 249]

A Few Virtuous Men (Li Cornuti) A Novel of Sicily. By Ben Morreale. (Plattsburgh, New York: Tundra Books, 1973)

A Few Virtuous Men (Li Cornuti) A Novel of Sicily. By Ben Morreale. (Plattsburgh, New York: Tundra Books, 1973)

A Few Virtuous Men (Li Cornuti) A Novel of Sicily

A Few Virtuous Men (Li Cornuti) A Novel of Sicily

Napoleon's Surgeon.

This is best source in English on life and writings of Baron Larrey. Devoted to his soldiers and respected by Napoleon, who called him the most virtuous man I have known, Larrey was a courageous innovator. Dible's book documents well his contributions to battlefield surgery: light ambulance wagons to aid wounded and to move them from danger; better techniques of amputation, of stopping hemorrhage, and of setting fractures; improved care of wounds, a more accurate understanding of causes and treatment of gangrene. A good teacher, Larrey admonished, It is not enough to have carried out an operation skillfully; it is just as important to foresee and to prevent complications which may follow it. For pleasure and perspective, surgeon of today should read this excellent book.

“Nor Man It Is”: The Knight of Justice in Book v of Spenser's Faerie Queene

Artegall's limitations and those of his Legend are largely inherent in the nature of justice. The subject of justice leads to the dream of a Golden Age in Book v, but it leads also to the presence of historical allegory, often a painful reminder of Elizabethan shortcomings. Artegall's experiences in Book v reflect both the historic and the symbolic poles in the poem; hence they mirror a strain and a more general duality in the techniques and concerns of the Book. From the beginning of Book v, Artegall is divided against himself. With two exceptions, brief moments of unified identity found in his meetings with Arthur and Britomart, Artegall has always a choice between being Justice, a virtue and an abstraction, and being a Knight, a virtuous man and a human being. (JHA)

Freedom of Choice by Yves R. Simon

710 BOOK REVIEWS Freedom of Choice. By YvES R. SIMoN. New York: Fordham University Press, 1969. Pp. 167. Index. $5.50. Peter Wolff, the editor and chief translator of this volume, while serving as Assistant Director of the Institute for Philosophical Research when that organization was preparing its volumes on freedom, was struck by the paucity of good books dealing with and solving some of the problems of human liberty. Among all the works of contemporary philosophers only one stood out, Traite du librc arbitre by Yves Simon. He wrote to the author about translating and publishing it and found that Simon was revising it himself to appear in a n:ulti-volumed Encyclopedia he was planning on important philosophical problems. Even then Simon, who was incurably ill and knew it, asked Wolff to finish the task if he were unable. This Wolff did with the assistance of Professor Simon's widow, Paule Simon, and Desmond FitzGerald. Simon introduces his subject by analysing some popular notions of freedom: unihibited expression, disorderliness, exuberance, inventiveness, creativity. He shows how the Epicurean theory of "swerve" in the atoms of Democritus, reappearing in the Hcisenburg-Bohr principle of indeterminacy , satisfied many that the basis of human freedom lay in the indeterminacy of matter. The point of the book is to show that this is precisely where the root of freedom does not lie. It is found rather in the superdeterminacy of the will towards the comprehensive good (bonum in communi). The comprehensive good is not an abstraction. A " money-minded " person is one who is interested in things only insofar as they procure money for him. Everything he wants he wants under the aspect of " being financially interesting." So the good all men seek by necessity is not an abstraction. It is embodied in the most fleeting particular objects of desire as well as long-range life projects. It is present in " rest and motion, in contemplation and action, in study ami business, in pleasure and austerity, in the gratifications of the senses as well as those of the spirit, in the ways of justice and those crime." (p. 23) All men seek this. They seek it necessarily. And from this necessary thrust towards the universal good comes dominative power in the will over every particular good. Theories of freedom are basically confused over the difference between this active indifference of the will and the will's passive indifference. Active indifference comes from strength, power, force; it is the indifference of a hard substance cutting through soft, the indifference of the virtuous man to the kinds of trials thrust upon him. Passive indifference comes from weakness, inadequacy, deficiency; it is the indifference of a soft substance receiving a thousand impressions and distortions from a hard, of a weak man trembling before every wind. Those who understand freedom through images of disorder have really confused the passive potentiality of the will with its active power, have BOOK REVIEWS 711 rooted freedom in the area of man's weakness rather than his strength. " By dominating indifference the will is an image of God, by passive indifference it rather is an image of prime matter. Aquinas mentions a philosopher who ' most foolishly ' thought God was the prime matter. Without going so far many people handle analogical intellection so clumsily that they confuse free choice with passive indifference of the will." (p. 120) This is the main argument of the book. It is presented with extraordinary profundity and clarity mixed with that very attractive homely wisdom which made Professor Simon a marvellous teacher. The translation is very fine. In future editions perhaps another word for " indifference" could be found. The paragraph on page 100 beginning" But when there is a question of human action " is confusing, since it really shows a parallel between the practical and theoretical fields rather than the contrast Simon seems to have wanted to show. The word " nonvoluntary " in the last line of page 102 would better be rendered "nonfree" in keeping with what Simon rightly says on page 27 (at the bottom) about the voluntariness of the will's adherence to the comprehensive good. Mortimer Adler in his forward says of the book...

The Making of Men by Paul Weiss

272 BOOK REVIEWS Five of the authors discuss the individual from different aspects: Bhattacharyya , the metaphysical; Murti, the religious; Desgupta, the ethical; Saksena, the social; and Chand, the institutional aspect. These present a well-rounded approach to the problem of individualism so prominent in the West today. In the limits of so brief a review, all essays could not be treated individually . All are informative and important. The book is highly recommended as a doorway to more extensive reading in Indian thought. La Salle CoUege Philadelphia, Pa. E. RussELL NAuGHTON The Making of Men. By PAUL WEISS. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Pp. 152 with index. $4.95. In this book, which is a series of reflective glances at the educative process in the twentieth century in the United States, the author, a philosopher, offers philosophical evaluations of the various ingredients which comprise the present-day system of schooling young men from early grades to college. The book is more evaluative than descriptive. Moreover, it is not argumentative nor even insistently persuasive; the style is simple didactic and the content represents the matured judgments of the long-trained philosopher and educator, expressing with a certain finality the wisdoms which years of thoughtful experience have refined. Therefore, the book's impact does not derive from the power of its syllogisms but from the character and authority of the man who is presenting in it the best results of his years of involvement. As must be expected, the man whose making interests Paul Weiss is the civilized, cultivated, perceptive, virtuous man; he is concerned with the educational process insofar as it is ordained to the formation of wise, urbane, creative, humane and sensitive human beings. Several touchstones are consistently applied to gauge the worth of all the educational ingredients at each stage of the process. To be truly educative, the materials offered to the developing skills, talents and mind of the growing person must be challenging enough to stir interest but not so difficult that they frustrate, nourishing in a way which satisfies the appetite and still whets it for more. At every stage, the growing individual must be treated as he is at that stage, the child as child, the youth as youth, the young man as young man, each with his proper needs and aspirations, which are different from those of an adult and not merely those of an adult-scaled-down-tosize , but each qualitatively appropriate. While the mind is taught, the spirit BOOK REVIEWS 273 must also be formed, in the childhood by stories, in teen-age by heroes, in youth by the records of great men and events in history. Techniques and procedures are not part of the properly educative process; they are appropriately taught in vocational institutions. True education prepares the mind to grasp and assimilate final goods, the goods which make life worth living, and men truly men. These materials are the materials which embody universal principles and values, as opposed to those which are particular and technical: philosophy, for example, as opposed to forestry, chemistry and physics as opposed to engineering, biology as opposed to medicine, art as opposed to craft. Inevitably the author is designing his criteria with an eye to his key evaluation, his ultimate evaluation of the genuine good life and the genuinely fulfilled man. This is, of course, not only the heart question of the book but one of the heart questions of the whole history of philosophy. Whoever in any compelling way answers this question, which is also a great question in theology, religion and politics, will be called greatest of the great, and therefore it cannot be expected that Paul Weiss, although he is wise, will have finally located the key to the mystery. He examines the claims of pleasure, knowledge, wealth, power, fame and security; he estimates the contributions of engineers and other producing people, politicians and other organizing people, humanitarians and other serving people, scholars and other thinking people; he beautifully balances the values of each and the limitations inherent in each and acknowledges that none of them is the answer to the ultimate good life and happy man. But then he must provide his...

Mr. Wheatley's Virtue: a Philosophical Examination

Mr. Jon Wheatley declares himself opposed to a very popular contemporary account of the nature of moral virtue, which he describes as holding “that virtue consists in obeying a number of moral precepts all clearly within our power, the virtuous man being (presumably) he who never (or only rarely?) slips up in this obedience”. Because I concur with his rejection of this view, I am more than normally distressed, first at his confessed inability as a philosopher to offer more than a report of his own “prejudice” in opposition to the popular account, and second at the somewhat bizarre analysis of moral virtue which he presents as if it were the only alternative.

Religious Language as Symbolism

The one clear insight which can be gleaned from the discussions of religious language by both theologians and philosophers is that its reference is to the transcendent. This is almost axiomatic in Philosophy of Religion nowadays, and we feel that the remarks of Milton's archangel to the first man are most appropriate when he insists that all the conceptions we have of God or of the spiritual world are but inadequate symbols. Though this view has a long history, it does not seem to have been at all general in antiquity. It may be said to have begun with Plato and then to have continued through later generations in Neo-Platonism till it mingled with the Christian tradition. We can see how easily such traditions were fused when we look at the fusion of Platonism and Judaism in Philo of Alexandria. This is how he expounds the Exodus passage where Moses is allowed to see the back, but not the face, of God:Everything which is subsequent to God the virtuous man may apprehend: God alone is inapprehensible. That is to say, God is not apprehensible by direct frontal approach—for such approach would imply God's being disclosed such as He is: but He is apprehensible through the Powers which are consequent upon His being; for those Powers do not present His being, nature, essence but only His existence from the resultant effects.

The Limitations of George Orwell

George Orwell is well on the way to being enshrined as the patron saint of left-wing journalism. Some of the most respected English and American critics have taken up his cause. The process was begun by V. S. Pritchett, who in an obituary notice in the New Statesman and Nation praised Orwell as "a kind of saint" and as the "wintry conscience" of a whole generation. In the United States, the chief advocate has been Lionel Trilling; in an introduction to an American reprint of Homage to Catalonia, be described this book as one of the most important documents of our time and a demonstration of one of the right ways to confront life, and in fact his introduction (reprinted in The Opposing Self) might be described as a panegyric based on the text "He was a virtuous man. " With these two leading it, the work of beatification has gone on, until today there is hardly an article on the contemporary literary scene in which Orwell's name is not mentioned, and mentioned with veneration.

Literalness and the Sensus Litteralis

Literalness and the Sensus Litteralis

The Development of Early Thought in Marketing and Promotion

W HEN we go back into early history, we find that the trader was not well regarded by society. All value was thought to come from the land, and agriculture and keeping of sheep and cattle were considered noble occupations, worthy of the virtuous man. Manufacturing, such as it was, was not ill-regarded by the philosophers, although it ranked well below agricultural pursuits. The trader, however, was considered a rather immoral person by nature and his status was low indeed, as is shown in the following quotation from Plato's The Republic:

Patterns of Imagery in Pope's Arbuthnot

N his "'Wit and Poetry and Pope': Some Observations on his Imagery" Maynard Mack speaks of Pope's wide variety of patterns "that help supply the kind of unity which he is popularly not supposed to have."' An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot offers striking illustration of this conception: analysis reveals patterns of images running throughout, each one discrete yet all so related as to give to the whole a metaphoric value which helps to tie the poem together. I do not mean to suggest that Arbuthnot has no other kind of unity apart from that given to it by these patterns of imagery, or that this imagery functions autonomously.2 Five main images emerge, all connected in a kind of evolution: animalfilth-disease-persecution-virtuous man. The animal image yields the filth, the noxious element out of which disease arises, disease turns into persecution, and persecution reveals the virtuous man. The animal image comprises all references to animals, worms, and insects in the poem, that is, to any sentient being below man. The basis of this image seems to lie in the association of the poetasters with "low Grubstreet." To Pope these men write and act without thinking, in automatic response to certain stimuli: they are like trained hawks, "May Dunce by Dunce be whistled off my hands!" (254),3 or like frogs that live on flies, wordcatchers that live on syllables (166). Furthermore, like spiders (89), they live in their own filth, so that disease flourishes in Grubstreet. From there in swarms and packs the creatures descend on Pope, carrying their infection with them. Pestered as he is by these flatterers and foes, he cannot keep from slapping in self-defense. Thus Pope justifies satire from a man of peace. It is not spiteful or inhumane to slap a mosquito or beat off a mad dog. He suffers fools with the greatest patience and restraint, but, stung beyond endurance, he is forced to cry out. And when he finally does lash out, there is something heroic in his flapping fools and whipping scoundrels regardless of their rank. However, he is far from bellicose: he keeps apart from the warfare of the wits. It is by stressing this proud aloofness ("I kept, like Asian Monarchs, from their sight," 220) that Pope can make the transition to his final picture of himself as vir bonus, full of love, nursing his aged mother and asking

Moral Instruction Through Social Intelligence

Three great questions confront educator, whether he be teacher or parent: First, what are worthy incentives in American life? Second, which of these are strong enough to stimulate best efforts of boys and girls? Third, how can they best be utilized? history of education shows us that most effective educational agencies have always utilized great national enthusiasms, or great religious forces, or both, in education of youth. education of ancient Hebrews was both national and religious. The child was to become faithful servant of Jehovah.' He learned through language and personal example of his parents religious and civic requirements of his nation. Among all nations direction impressed on education depends upon idea which is formed of perfect man.' For Hebrew perfect man was the pious, virtuous man who is capable of attaining ideal,' Ye shall be holy, for I Lord your God am holy.' Children were taught and trained to have great respect for parents and teachers, and on other hand much stress was placed upon religious and moral fitness of parents and teachers. Mildness, patience, and unselfishness were recommended as their ruling virtues. All instruction must have its immediate issue in living. Precepts were turned into conduct. Instruction was vitalized with religious and national life of people. persistence of this race through centuries is due, in part, at least, to efficiency of its education. Athenian youths of historic period were conscious of certain well-defined social enthusiasms. greatest of

Rocks and Soils

CHEMIST to the Hokkaido Cho! It is not the least striking feature of our time that there should be an Imperial College of Agriculture at Sapporo whose Professors publish researches in New York and London. This is not exactly a novel experience, for events crowd upon us thick and fast in these days; but those of us who can look back forty years must be struck when confronted with the Chemist of the Hokkaido Cho. Dr. Stockbridge is not, be it understood, the alchemist to an Eastern potentate, nor yet one of the astrologers, Chaldæans, or soothsayers of a modern Belshazzar, but an agricultural chemist and geologist discoursing upon rocks and soils, nitrates and microbes, and suggesting processes by which atmospheric nitrogen is fixed in the soil by the action of living organisms. The great Mikado, “virtuous man,” has, we know, transplanted full-grown and fully-equipped knowledge from the West to his remote dominions; and so successfully, that it has rooted, and now is become an article for exportation—as witness the volume before us. To some of our readers it may appear unnecessary to dilate upon a fact which springs naturally out of the most recent developments of civilization. We need not now despair of openings for aspiring young chemists under the protection and pay of the King of Dahomey or of Ashantee, or of an Imperial Institute at Khartoum or some other part of the Dark Continent; and truly the missionaries of science are in a fair way to rival those of religion in their ubiquity.