Category Archives: Uncategorized

Review of Hartley’s Observations on Man

Review of David Hartley, M.D., Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (1749). Page numbers refer to the Sixth Edition (1834).

We open with Hartley, awake and alert, in womb-like darkness and silence. A large drop of water plops noisily into a body of water, perhaps a cistern, quite close to us. Hartley’s explanatory voice breaks forth, “Sounds are caused by pulses or vibrations excited in the air” (p. 29) — and “when external objects are impressed on [our] sensory nerves, they excite vibrations in the aether residing in the pores of these nerves” (p. 26). Sounds reaching us “raise vibrations in the membrana tympani; and the small bones of the ear seem peculiarly adapted, by their situation and muscles, to communicate these vibrations to the cavities of the vestibulum, semicircular canals, and cochlea, in which the auditory nerve is expanded;. i.e. to the nerve itself” (p.29). And the nerve immediately “transmits” vibrations to the brain (p. 23).

Dr. Hartley dissected cadavers to observe the bones, muscles, canals, cochlea and nerves that conduct the vibrations of sounds to our brains. We can now picture the sound traveling that path; the words tell a little story. We have taken a step forward into the unknown. And the year is 1749.

The word aether lacks clear definition. It’s some kind of heavy air with a gelatinous quality that enables it to transmit vibrations. Hartley uses it because it was the accepted, the customary term. But he knows too that “Electricity is also connected . . . with the doctrine of vibrations” (p. 29), and we know from our end that the vibrations he’s talking about are indeed electrical impulses. That discovery is about a hundred years in Hartley’s future. For yet a while longer the terms aether, humours and animal spirits will have to serve.

* * * * * *

We look for analogies: our eyes work the same way our ears do — “light affects both the optic nerve and the aether” (p. 26). “The rays of light excite vibrations in the small particles of the optic nerve, by a direct and immediate action.” He calls these “vibrations analogous to those which are excited in the air by the discharge of guns, by thunderclaps, or by any other method.”

And “touch” works similarly (p. 96), with the difference that it is “the fundamental source of information in respect of the essential properties of matter. . . , our first and principal key to the knowledge of the external world.” On the up side the pleasures of touch can lift us out of ourselves, and on the down side “the pains of feeling are far more numerous and violent than those of all the other senses put together” (p. 102).

Odors and tastes have their own neural paths to travel and our brains are always astir with the vibrations flooding in. Hartley says that the vibrations are “corporeal” in nature, while the brain’s responses, “sensations and ideas,” are “of a mental nature” (p. 33). The brain stores packets of vibrations as images, sounds, touches, smells or tastes. Then he admits that it is probably “impossible” for us “to discover in what way vibrations cause, or are connected with, sensations, or ideas.” I should think that vibrations happen to us, stimulate us; sensation begins with our response to the stimulus — then with our ability to play back these strips of experience we reflect upon them, we construct pictures, ideas, attitudes, feelings and beliefs, we find or make words and then the words add up to stories about our experience. Things happen to us and we make what sense we can of them. At birth we were unable to perform all these functions, but by age two most of us were getting pretty good at it.

* * * * * *

Our first response to that plop of water in the cistern might be for our heads to jerk around in that direction as we gasp “What’s that?” We turn our attention to events like this because events “do not appear as objects of consciousness and memory, till we begin to attend to them” (p. 160). If we were already concentrating on some urgent business, or were “deep in thought,” a parade band could have marched by playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and we wouldn’t have heard a thing. But once we have turned or paid attention we label this a water drop, we associate it to others we have heard before, we acknowledge the distinct difference here of the echo that tells us it happened in a closed space of some size. So we solve this little mystery of “What’s that?” with a set of words and sense of a little story about this drop of water that fell in such and such a place at such and such a time. We might have occasion to remember this moment years from now.

There’s also a feeling component we process at the same time, maybe that eerie feeling movies chasing evil-doers through sewer systems always give, or the consoling feeling that our drinking water supply is plentiful. We can shiver and shake or we can smile and relax, depending. For response terms Hartley, following “Sir Isaac Newton,” uses attraction and repulsion, indicating our tendency to move towards a pleasant impression and away from an unpleasant or painful one. If the “plop” gave us that eerie feeling we might pause, on the alert, looking for evidence to confirm or relieve our suspicion. Then we might calculate risk, which Hartley labels “a mere mathematical tendency to approach and recede,” following Newton, and then adds, out of the blue, “be the cause what it will, impulse, pressure, an unknown one, or no physical cause at all, but the immediate agency of the Deity” (p.25). This last option, the metaphysical, I take to be his way to account for what we might well call a hunch, a strong feeling out of nowhere that the right response here and now is ______________ (fill in the blank).

Our native inclination, or disposition — sunny and on the bold side or shy and retiring — goes into our decision. So does what Hartley calls vividity: “the most vivid simple ideas of sensation are those where the corresponding sensations are most vigorously impressed” (p. 48). Such sounds are impossible to ignore. But “if the sensation be faint, or uncommon, the generated idea is also faint in proportion,” even “evanescent and imperceptible.” Something soft, indistinct, muffled, barely heard, is easier to dismiss as meaningless. Then there is conditioning, the “disposition of animal bodies to accommodate themselves to . . . any state that is often impressed” (p. 49), some “new normal” where we no longer hear that faucet dripping or the trains that rumble by every hour all night long. Whether an experience was joyful or painful the first time, repetition will turn it flat, not worth noting.

We’re walking in the woods one day when we hear a sharp “chirp” sound, a sound we’ve never heard before. We compare and contrast this new experience with earlier stored experiences: it could be a bird or it could be some kind of squirrel. It’s a mystery. We consult our joyful/painful reading, drift towards a decision whether we accept or reject this new bit of information, welcome it in or slam the door against it. But it’s a mystery, how can we not be intrigued? Two words have popped up as possible labels for this new experience, and it might be the case that neither of them is the right word. If we can lay eyes on this chirping critter we can settle on a generic word, but then we’ll be looking for something more specific. The right word might be something we can look up, or this might be some new species we can name after ourselves. We have some homework to do.

Hartley draws our attention to the many similar events occurring across our language community, how such activities “extend the ideas and significations of words and phrases, by new associations; and particularly by associations with other words, as in definitions, descriptions, etc.” His response to this news is on the joyful side: “The advancement of the arts and sciences is chiefly carried on by the new significations given to words in this…way” (p. 184).

So let’s say that a week later we get clear sight of a bird making this very squirrel-like sound. We can briefly celebrate a Eureka moment — “Gotcha!” But then it can lead to a next mystery, is this bird trying to talk to squirrels about something? Do they share warnings about strangers in the woods? Are they talking about us? If the stakes were higher we could find the solution to our mystery life-changing. If some joker were playing a trick on us we’d be disgusted and angry. If we had not been intrigued, if we had never cared whether it was a bird or a squirrel, the revelation of the bird might escape our attention entirely.

The impressions with their immediate ideas Hartley calls “ideas of sensation” and describes as “simple,” “elements” as in chemical elements which combine to make compounds. All the associating, reflecting and evaluating we go through integrating new impressions makes of them “intellectual” ideas, which are “complex,” analogous to chemical compounds. So “ideas of sensation” strike us in Phase One, and “intellectual ideas” are work products from our Phase Two home work.

Hartley, it’s worth noting, sees a need for lots of such home work; he believes there is much at stake; and he gives reason to hope that completing such work will make the world a better place.

* * * * * *

The title of the book and the center of its focus is observations. Hartley’s own observations of human anatomy serve as warrants for all the claims he makes about how our senses work, how our brains work and how our minds process the sensations that come to it. What’s at stake are (1) the model of the world we construct in our minds and (2) our survival for a lengthy happy life negotiating our way through this actual world which is always bigger and more complicated than our model account for. The work we do updating our model, making it more accurate (more reliable) he calls philosophizing, and he proposes a three-stage plan of action as originally “recommended and followed by Sir Isaac Newton” (p. 16). In Stage One we amass observations of “certain select, well-defined, and well-attested phaenomena,” as for example his tracing components of our auditory system from ear to brain. We move to Stage Two as we “discover and establish the general laws of action, affecting the subject under consideration” — if the squirrels and the jays talk to each other, are other woods critters also in the conversation? Then we want to fine tune our story, check and recheck numerous times to improve our story and keep it straight. Stage Three opens when we are confident enough of our story to “explain and predict the other phaenomena by these laws” we have formulated. Stage Three is where reliability becomes important. “This is the method of analysis and synthesis,” he writes. He also says elsewhere that “philosophy is the art of decyphering the mysteries of nature” (p. 235). All these noises we hear in the woods: are they all part of a conversational buzz going on in a language we don’t understand?

For the heavy lifting part of late Stage One he says, “if the experiments or observations be many, their circumstances nearly related to each other, and in a regular series. . . , [and] if the real cause . . . produce these [observed] effects by the varieties of some simple law, the method[s] of induction and analogy will carry great probability with [them]” (p. 228). The simpler the story the more credibility it carries with it — hence his theory of vibrations occurring in all our sensations, swarming our nerves and coalescing into distinctive configurations in our brains. “And if the general conclusion or law be simple, and always the same, from whatever phaenomena it be deduced. . . , there can scarce remain any doubt, but that we are in possession of the true law inquired after.” Hence his confidence in reporting his findings here.

Such tidiness is not always achievable. Sometimes “the best hypothesis which we can form, i.e. the hypothesis which is most comformable to all the phaenomena, will amount to no more than an uncertain conjecture” (p. 229). We settle on a guess and reluctantly go with it, “and yet still it ought to be preferred to all others, as being the best that we can form” pro tem. As more data accumulate, the story gains strength and our confidence grows, we can say we’re on the path of “induction, in the proper sense of the word,” the path toward enlightenment as classically conceived, for “the great business in all branches of knowledge is thus to reduce, unite, and simplify our evidences; so as that the one resulting proof, by being of a higher order, shall be more than equal in force to all the concurrent ones of the inferior orders” (p. 230). The grand view might lead us to suspect that vibrations occur everywhere in the universe all the time.

Enlightenment is only one of multiple benefits from such work. “It is useful in inquiries of all kinds to try all such suppositions as occur with any appearance of probability, to endeavour to deduce the real phaenomena from them; and if they do not answer in some tolerable measure, to reject them at once; or if they do, to add, expunge, correct, and improve, till we have brought the hypothesis as near as we can to an agreement with nature” (p. 231). But enlightenment goes a long way because in bringing our hypotheses into “agreement with nature” we are at the same time bringing ourselves into “agreement with nature.” Such work is good for us: “In like manner, the frequent attempts to make an hypothesis that shall suit the phaenomena, must improve a man in the method of doing this; and beget in him by degrees an imperfect practical art, just as algebraists and decypherers, that are much versed in practice, are possessed of innumerable subordinate artifices, that . . . can scarce be explained or communicated to others. These artifices may properly be referred to the head of factitious sagacity, being the result of experience, and of impressions often repeated, with small variations from the general resemblance” (p. 232).

Women too can enjoy “factitious sagacity,” a special form of wisdom such as “whisperers” are believed to deploy. There’s a “holiness” to it because there is an “analogy between the word and works of God, which is a consideration of the religious kind,” and this analogy “seems to comprehend the most important truths” (p. 245). By successful philosophizing, then, and “by this amongst other means. . . , the human will is brought to a conformity with the divine; which is the only radical cure for all our evils and disappointments, and the only earnest and medium for obtaining lasting happiness” (p. 249).

The philosophizing life is thus a godly, holy and happy life. Our vibrations, our sensations, our reflections, our search for the right words and our work to get the story straight leads us inevitably into the creative, energizing force behind the universe and ourselves inside it, who is god. We can if we like call it our Higher Power, and there are other words or phrases that work equally well.

So in this work David Hartley delivers us a scientific report pretty straight from the anatomist’s lab (morgue, if you prefer), but he is also testifying, witnessing the spirit, prophetically speaking the revelations vouchsafed unto him as humble servant of the creator, bringing us the good news secret to turning our lives around and tuning in to the elevating tones of the cosmic choir perpetually singing the praises of the All Giver.

It’s not an easy read, the darkness of the historical corridor is forever throwing doubt into the construing of the text, and numerous textual errors worsen the situation. But it’s time travel, we participate in the state of mind literate people shared two hundred years ago, how they understood our equipment as creatures trying to find answers to those basic questions “Where are we?” “What are we doing here?” “Are there some things more worth doing than others?” “How shall we live?” “Are we lost? and Can we ever be found?”

Sally Field — Wise Woman

 

 

Sally“At 70, Sally Field Navigates Aging In The Spotlight” (NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, March 5, 2016) Interview with Lourdes Garcia-Navarro.

Sally Field has become a genuine wise woman. In this interview she says three great things: (1) life is process and we’re always passing from phase to phase; (2) you earn your years by living them; and (3) we carry a whole chorus of influential people with us along our way through life.

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro: What attracted you to playing this character Doris?      SF: It’s such a unique story and it looks at so many things. It looks at age, I mean, what is age? It looks at transitioning, you know, human beings; our task in life is to constantly transition from one stage into another whether it’s toddlerhood into childhood into adolescence and then young adulthood and then middle age. It’s just constant movement. . . .   I’m an old woman, 70 is old, and that’s OK. … I’ve gathered strength behind my years, I owned them, I’ve earned them, I’ve deserved them, I have a right to have them.

LGN: Are the characters you’ve played over the years like people that you take along with you?     SF: You know, they are. I’ll be walking down the street or cleaning the house or in the market and a vision, a memory will just flash through your head the way they do. You know, you’ll see the oranges or something and something will flash through your head of an experience that you had or something, and sometimes I stop myself and say, “Wait a minute, that wasn’t my experience, that was a character’s experience. It was Norma’s experience or Edna’s experience or Celeste’s experience,” and it wasn’t mine. But I portrayed it so it registered in my head as an experience that I had, so it’s an odd thing that actors do when you have the opportunity to really work on a character that you somehow have to plant inside of yourself. They stay in me and they have always changed me in some way.