Laura E. Richards - "The Green Satin Gown"

Josiah Quincy - "Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams."

St. George Stock - "Deductive Logic"

Theodor Fontane - "Effi Briest"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4)

J >> J. Arthur Thomson >> The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4)





Quick to Learn

Quite fundamental to any understanding of animal behaviour is the
distinction so clearly drawn by Sir Ray Lankester between the
"little-brain" type, rich in inborn or instinctive capacities, but
relatively slow to learn, and the "big-brain" type, with a relatively
poor endowment of specialised instincts, but with great educability. The
"little-brain" type finds its climax in ants and bees; the "big-brain"
type in horses and dogs, elephants and monkeys. And of all animals
monkeys are the quickest to learn, if we use the word "learn" to mean
the formation of useful associations between this and that, between a
given sense-presentation and a particular piece of behaviour.


The Case of Sally

Some of us remember Sally, the chimpanzee at the "Zoo" with which Dr.
Romanes used to experiment. She was taught to give her teacher the
number of straws he asked for, and she soon learned to do so up to five.
If she handed a number not asked for, her offer was refused; if she gave
the proper number, she got a piece of fruit. If she was asked for five
straws, she picked them up individually and placed them in her mouth,
and when she had gathered five she presented them together in her hand.
Attempts to teach her to give six to ten straws were not very
successful. For Sally "above six" meant "many," and besides, her limits
of patience were probably less than her range of computation. This was
hinted at by the highly interesting circumstance that when dealing with
numbers above five she very frequently doubled over a straw so as to
make it present two ends and thus appear as two straws. The doubling of
the straw looked like an intelligent device to save time, and it was
persistently resorted to in spite of the fact that her teacher always
refused to accept a doubled straw as equivalent to two straws. Here we
get a glimpse of something beyond the mere association of a
sound--"Five"--and that number of straws.


The Case of Lizzie

The front of the cage in which Professor Holmes kept Lizzie was made of
vertical bars which allowed her to reach out with her arm. On a board
with an upright nail as handle, there was placed an apple--out of
Lizzie's reach. She reached immediately for the nail, pulled the board
in and got the apple. "There was no employment of the method of trial
and error; there was direct appropriate action following the perception
of her relation to board, nail, and apple." Of course her ancestors may
have been adepts at drawing a fruit-laden branch within their reach, but
the simple experiment was very instructive. All the more instructive
because in many other cases the experiments indicate a gradual sifting
out of useless movements and an eventful retention of the one that pays.
When Lizzie was given a vaseline bottle containing a peanut and closed
with a cork, she at once pulled the cork out with her teeth, obeying the
instinct to bite at new objects, but she never learned to turn the
bottle upside down and let the nut drop out. She often got the nut, and
after some education she got it more quickly than she did at first, but
there was no indication that she ever perceived the fit and proper way
of getting what she wanted. "In the course of her intent efforts her
mind seemed so absorbed with the object of desire that it was never
focussed on the means of attaining that object. There was no
deliberation, and no discrimination between the important and the
unimportant elements in her behaviour. The gradually increasing facility
of her performances depended on the apparently unconscious elimination
of useless movements." This may be called learning, but it is learning
at a very low level; it is far from learning by ideas; it is hardly even
learning by experiment; it is not more than learning by experience, it
is not more than fumbling at learning!


Trial and Error

A higher note is struck in the behaviour of some more highly endowed
monkeys. In many experiments, chiefly in the way of getting into boxes
difficult to open, there is evidence (1) of attentive persistent
experiment (2) of the rapid elimination of ineffective movements, and
(3) of remembering the solution when it was discovered. Kinnaman taught
two macaques the Hampton Court Maze, a feat which probably means a
memory of movements, and we get an interesting glimpse in his
observation that they began to smack their lips audibly when they
reached the latter part of their course, and began to feel, dare one
say, "We are right this time."

In getting into "puzzle-boxes" and into "combination-boxes" (where the
barriers must be overcome in a definite order), monkeys learn by the
trial and error method much more quickly than cats and dogs do, and a
very suggestive fact emphasized by Professor Thorndike is "a process of
sudden acquisition by a rapid, often apparently instantaneous
abandonment of the unsuccessful movements and selection of the
appropriate one, which rivals in suddenness the selections made by human
beings in similar performances." A higher note still was sounded by one
of Thorndike's monkeys which opened a puzzle-box at once, eight months
after his previous experience with it. For here was some sort of
registration of a solution.


Imitation

Two chimpanzees in the Dublin Zoo were often to be seen washing the two
shelves of their cupboard and "wringing" the wet cloth in the approved
fashion. It was like a caricature of a washerwoman, and someone said,
"What mimics they are!" Now we do not know whether that was or was not
the case with the chimpanzees, but the majority of the experiments that
have been made do not lead us to attach to imitation so much importance
as is usually given to it by the popular interpreter. There are
instances where a monkey that had given up a puzzle in despair returned
to it when it had seen its neighbour succeed, but most of the
experiments suggested that the creature has to find out for itself. Even
with such a simple problem as drawing food near with a stick, it often
seems of little use to show the monkey how it is done. Placing a bit of
food outside his monkey's cage, Professor Holmes "poked it about with
the stick so as to give her a suggestion of how the stick might be
employed to move the food within reach, but although the act was
repeated many times Lizzie never showed the least inclination to use the
stick to her advantage." Perhaps the idea of a "tool" is beyond the
Bonnet Monkey, yet here again we must be cautious, for Professor L. T.
Hobhouse had a monkey of the same macaque genus which learned in the
course of time to use a crooked stick with great effect.


The Case of Peter

Perhaps the cleverest monkey as yet studied was a performing chimpanzee
called Peter, which has been generally described by Dr. Lightner Witmer.
Peter could skate and cycle, thread needles and untie knots, smoke a
cigarette and string beads, screw in nails and unlock locks. But what
Peter was thinking about all the time it was hard to guess, and there is
very little evidence to suggest that his rapid power of putting two and
two together ever rose above a sort of concrete mental experimenting,
which Dr. Romanes used to call perceptual inference. Without supposing
that there are hard-and-fast boundary lines, we cannot avoid the general
conclusion that, while monkeys are often intelligent, they seldom, if
ever, show even hints of reason, i.e. of working or playing with general
ideas. That remains Man's prerogative.


The Bustle of the Mind

In mammals like otters, foxes, stoats, hares, and elephants, what a
complex of tides and currents there must be in the brain-mind! We may
think of a stream with currents at different levels. Lowest there are
the _basal appetites_ of hunger and sex, often with eddies rising to the
surface. Then there are the _primary emotions_, such as fear of
hereditary enemies and maternal affection for offspring. Above these are
_instinctive aptitudes_, inborn powers of doing clever things without
having to learn how. But in mammals these are often expressed along
with, or as it were through, the controlled life of _intelligent
activity_, where there is more clear-cut perceptual influence.

[Illustration: _Photo: W. P. Dando._

CHIMPANZEE

An African ape, at home in the equatorial forests, a lively and playful
creature, eminently educable.]

[Illustration: _Photo: W. S. Berridge._

YOUNG CHEETAHS, OR HUNTING LEOPARDS

Trained to hunt from time immemorial and quite easily tamed. Cheetahs
occur in India, Persia, Turkestan, and Africa.]

[Illustration: _Photo: C. Reid._

COMMON OTTER

One of the most resourceful of animals and the "most playsomest crittur
on God's earth." It neither stores nor hibernates, but survives in
virtue of its wits and because of the careful education of the young.
The otter is a roving animal, often with more than one resting-place; it
has been known to travel fifteen miles in a night.]

Higher still are the records or memories of individual experience and
the registration of individual habits, while on the surface is the
instreaming multitude of messages from the outside world, like raindrops
and hailstones on the stream, some of them penetrating deeply, being, as
we say, full of meaning. The mind of the higher animal is in some
respects like a child's mind, in having little in the way of clear-cut
ideas, in showing no reason in the strict sense, and in its
extraordinary educability, but it differs from the child's mind entirely
in the sure effectiveness of a certain repertory of responses. It is
efficient to a degree.


"Until at last arose the Man."

Man's brain is more complicated than that of the higher apes--gorilla,
orang, and chimpanzee--and it is relatively larger. But the improvements
in structure do not seem in themselves sufficient to account for man's
great advance in intelligence. The rill of inner life has become a swift
stream, sometimes a rushing torrent. Besides perceptual inference or
_Intelligence_--a sort of picture-logic, which some animals likewise
have--there is conceptual inference--or _Reason_--an internal
experimenting with general ideas. Even the cleverest animals, it would
seem, do not get much beyond playing with "particulars"; man plays an
internal game of chess with "universals." Intelligent behaviour may go a
long way with mental images; rational conduct demands general ideas. It
may be, however, that "percepts" and "concepts" differ rather in degree
than in kind, and that the passage from one to the other meant a higher
power of forming associations. A clever dog has probably a generalised
percept of man, as distinguished from a memory-image of the particular
men it has known, but man alone has the concept Man, or Mankind, or
Humanity. Experimenting with concepts or general ideas is what we call
Reason.

Here, of course, we get into deep waters, and perhaps it is wisest not
to attempt too much. So we shall content ourselves here with pointing
out that Man's advance in intelligence and from intelligence to reason
is closely wrapped up with his power of speech. What animals began--a
small vocabulary--he has carried to high perfection. But what is
distinctive is not the vocabulary so much as the habit of making
sentences, of expressing judgments in a way which admitted of
communication between mind and mind. The multiplication of words meant
much, the use of words as symbols of general ideas meant even more, for
it meant the possibility of playing the internal game of thinking; but
perhaps the most important advance of all was the means of comparing
notes with neighbours, of corroborating individual experience by social
intercourse. With words, also, it became easier to enregister outside
himself the gains of the past. It is not without significance that the
Greek Logos, which may be translated "the word," may also be translated
Mind.


Sec. 9

Looking Backwards

When we take a survey of animal behaviour we see a long inclined plane.
The outer world provokes simple creatures to answer back; simple
creatures act experimentally on their surroundings. From the beginning
this twofold process has been going on, receiving stimuli from the
environment and acting upon the environment, and according to the
efficiency of the reactions and actions living creatures have been
sifted for millions of years. One main line of advance has been opening
new gateways of knowledge--the senses, which are far more than five in
number. The other main line of advance has been in most general terms,
experimenting or testing, probing and proving, trying one key after
another till a door is unlocked. There is progress in multiplying the
gateways of knowledge and making them more discriminating, and there is
progress in making the modes of experimenting more wide-awake, more
controlled, and more resolute. But behind both of these is the
characteristically vital power of enregistering within the organism the
lessons of the past. In the life of the individual these enregistrations
are illustrated by memories and habituations and habits; in the life of
the race they are illustrated by reflex actions and instinctive
capacities.


Body and Mind

We must not shirk the very difficult question of the relation between
the bodily and the mental side of behaviour.

(_a_) Some great thinkers have taught that the mind is a reality by
itself which plays upon the instrument of the brain and body. As the
instrument gets worn and dusty the playing is not so good as it once
was, but the player is still himself. This theory of the essential
independence of the mind is a very beautiful one, but those who like it
when applied to themselves are not always so fond of it when it is
applied to other intelligent creatures like rooks and elephants. It may
be, however, that there is a gradual emancipation of the mind which has
gone furthest in Man and is still progressing.

(_b_) Some other thinkers have taught that the inner life of thought and
feeling is only, as it were, an echo of the really important
activity--that of the body and brain. Ideas are just foam-bells on the
hurrying streams and circling eddies of matter and energy that make up
our physiological life. To most of us this theory is impossible, because
we are quite sure that ideas and feelings and purposes, which cannot be
translated into matter and motion, are the clearest realities in our
experience, and that they count for good and ill all through our life.
They are more than the tickings of the clock; they make the wheels go
round.

(_c_) There are others who think that the most scientific position is
simply to recognise both the bodily and the mental activities as equally
important, and so closely interwoven that they cannot be separated.
Perhaps they are just the outer and the inner aspects of one
reality--the life of the creature. Perhaps they are like the concave and
convex curves of a dome, like the two sides of a shield. Perhaps the
life of the organism is always a unity, at one time appearing more
conspicuously as Mind-body, at another time as Body-mind. The most
important fact is that neither aspect can be left out. By no jugglery
with words can we get Mind out of Matter and Motion. And since we are in
ourselves quite sure of our Mind, we are probably safe in saying that in
the beginning was Mind. This is in accordance with Aristotle's saying
that there is nothing in the end which was not also in kind present in
the beginning--whatever we mean by beginning.


In conclusion

What has led to the truly wonderful result which we admire in a creature
like a dog or an otter, a horse or a hare? In general, we may say, just
two main processes--(1) testing all things, and (2) holding fast that
which is good. New departures occur and these are tested for what they
are worth. Idiosyncrasies crop up and they are sifted. New cards come
mysteriously from within into the creature's hand, and they are
played--for better or for worse. So by new variations and their sifting,
by experimenting and enregistering the results, the mind has gradually
evolved and will continue to evolve.




VIII

FOUNDATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE




THE WORLD OF ATOMS


Most people have heard of the oriental race which puzzled over the
foundations of the universe, and decided that it must be supported on
the back of a giant elephant. But the elephant? They put it on the back
of a monstrous tortoise, and there they let the matter end. If every
animal in nature had been called upon, they would have been no nearer a
foundation. Most ancient peoples, indeed, made no effort to find a
foundation. The universe was a very compact little structure, mainly
composed of the earth and the great canopy over the earth which they
called the sky. They left it, as a whole, floating in nothing. And in
this the ancients were wiser than they knew. Things do not fall down
unless they are pulled down by that mysterious force which we call
gravitation. The earth, it is true, is pulled by the sun, and would fall
into it; but the earth escapes this fiery fate by circulating at great
speed round the sun. The stars pull each other; but it has already been
explained that they meet this by travelling rapidly in gigantic orbits.
Yet we do, in a new sense of the word, need foundations of the universe.
Our mind craves for some explanation of the matter out of which the
universe is made. For this explanation we turn to modern Physics and
Chemistry. Both these sciences study, under different aspects, matter
and energy; and between them they have put together a conception of the
fundamental nature of things which marks an epoch in the history of
human thought.


Sec. 1

The Bricks of the Cosmos

More than two thousand years ago the first men of science, the Greeks of
the cities of Asia Minor, speculated on the nature of matter. You can
grind a piece of stone into dust. You can divide a spoonful of water
into as many drops as you like. Apparently you can go on dividing as
long as you have got apparatus fine enough for the work. But there must
be a limit, these Greeks said, and so they supposed that all matter was
ultimately composed of minute particles which were indivisible. That is
the meaning of the Greek word "atom."

Like so many other ideas of these brilliant early Greek thinkers, the
atom was a sound conception. We know to-day that matter is composed of
atoms. But science was then so young that the way in which the Greeks
applied the idea was not very profound. A liquid or a gas, they said,
consisted of round, smooth atoms, which would not cling together. Then
there were atoms with rough surfaces, "hooky" surfaces, and these stuck
together and formed solids. The atoms of iron or marble, for instance,
were so very hooky that, once they got together, a strong man could not
tear them apart. The Greeks thought that the explanation of the universe
was that an infinite number of these atoms had been moving and mixing in
an infinite space during an infinite time, and had at last hit by chance
on the particular combination which is our universe.

This was too simple and superficial. The idea of atoms was cast aside,
only to be advanced again in various ways. It was the famous Manchester
chemist, John Dalton, who restored it in the early years of the
nineteenth century. He first definitely formulated the atomic theory as
a scientific hypothesis. The whole physical and chemical science of that
century was now based upon the atom, and it is quite a mistake to
suppose that recent discoveries have discredited "atomism." An atom is
the smallest particle of a chemical element. No one has ever seen an
atom. Even the wonderful new microscope which has just been invented
cannot possibly show us particles of matter which are a million times
smaller than the breadth of a hair; for that is the size of atoms. We
can weigh them and measure them, though they are invisible, and we know
that all matter is composed of them. It is a new discovery that atoms
are not indivisible. They consist themselves of still smaller particles,
as we shall see. But the atoms exist all the same, and we may still say
that they are the bricks of which the material universe is built.

[Illustration: _Photo: Elliott & Fry._

SIR ERNEST RUTHERFORD

One of our most eminent physicists who has succeeded Sir J. J. Thomson
as Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge. The
modern theory of the structure of the atom is largely due to him.]

[Illustration: _Photo: Rischgitz Collection._

J. CLERK-MAXWELL

One of the greatest scientific men who have ever lived. He
revolutionised physics with his electro-magnetic theory of light, and
practically all modern researches have had their origin, direct or
indirect, in his work. Together with Faraday he constitutes one of the
main scientific glories of the nineteenth century.]

[Illustration: _Photo: Ernest H. Mills._

SIR WILLIAM CROOKES

Sir William Crookes experimented on the electric discharge in vacuum
tubes and described the phenomena as a "fourth state of matter." He was
actually observing the flight of electrons, but he did not fully
appreciate the nature of his experiments.]

[Illustration: _Photo: Photo Press_

PROFESSOR SIR W. H. BRAGG

One of the most distinguished physicists of the present day.]

But if we had some magical glass by means of which we could see into the
structure of material things, we should not see the atoms put evenly
together as bricks are in a wall. As a rule, two or more atoms first
come together to form a larger particle, which we call a "molecule."
Single atoms do not, as a rule, exist apart from other atoms; if a
molecule is broken up, the individual atoms seek to unite with other
atoms of another kind or amongst themselves. For example, three atoms of
oxygen form what we call ozone; two atoms of hydrogen uniting with one
atom of oxygen form water. It is molecules that form the mass of matter;
a molecule, as it has been expressed, is a little building of which
atoms are the bricks.

In this way we get a useful first view of the material things we handle.
In a liquid the molecules of the liquid cling together loosely. They
remain together as a body, but they roll over and away from each other.
There is "cohesion" between them, but it is less powerful than in a
solid. Put some water in a kettle over the lighted gas, and presently
the tiny molecules of water will rush through the spout in a cloud of
steam and scatter over the kitchen. The heat has broken their bond of
association and turned the water into something like a gas; though we
know that the particles will come together again, as they cool, and form
once more drops of water.

In a gas the molecules have full individual liberty. They are in a
state of violent movement, and they form no union with each other. If we
want to force them to enter into the loose sort of association which
molecules have in a liquid, we have to slow down their individual
movements by applying severe cold. That is how a modern man of science
liquefies gases. No power that we have will liquefy air at its ordinary
temperature. In _very_ severe cold, on the other hand, the air will
spontaneously become liquid. Some day, when the fires of the sun have
sunk very low, the temperature of the earth will be less than -200 deg. C.:
that is to say, more than two hundred degrees Centigrade below
freezing-point. It will sink to the temperature of the moon. Our
atmosphere will then be an ocean of liquid air, 35 feet deep, lying upon
the solidly frozen masses of our water-oceans.

In a solid the molecules cling firmly to each other. We need a force
equal to twenty-five tons to tear asunder the molecules in a bar of iron
an inch thick. Yet the structure is not "solid" in the popular sense of
the word. If you put a piece of solid gold in a little pool of mercury,
the gold will take in the mercury _between_ its molecules, as if it were
porous like a sponge. The hardest solid is more like a lattice-work than
what we usually mean by "solid"; though the molecules are not fixed,
like the bars of a lattice-work, but are in violent motion; they vibrate
about equilibrium positions. If we could see right into the heart of a
bit of the hardest steel, we should see billions of separate molecules,
at some distance from each other, all moving rapidly to and fro.

This molecular movement can, in a measure, be made visible. It was
noticed by a microscopist named Brown that, in a solution containing
very fine suspended particles, the particles were in constant movement.
Under a powerful microscope these particles are seen to be violently
agitated; they are each independently darting hither and thither
somewhat like a lot of billiard balls on a billiard table, colliding and
bounding about in all directions. Thousands of times a second these
encounters occur, and this lively commotion is always going on, this
incessant colliding of one molecule with another is the normal
condition of affairs; not one of them is at rest. The reason for this
has been worked out, and it is now known that these particles move about
because they are being incessantly bombarded by the molecules of the
liquid. The molecules cannot, of course, be seen, but the fact of their
incessant movement is revealed to the eye by the behaviour of the
visible suspended particles. This incessant movement in the world of
molecules is called the Brownian movement, and is a striking proof of
the reality of molecular motions.

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