Questions

[The Truth]

What is this section of the site for?

Can we talk shit here?

Why doesn't a duck's quack echo?

Why does Marlin want me?


:confused:

[Marlin]

What is this section of the site for?

Hiding threads that would be immediately closed elsewhere.

Can we talk shit here?

Yes, but we have to open a new thread every day because mean ol' Stret dun come close 'em up at night.

Why doesn't a duck's quack echo?

Why should it?

Why does Marlin want me?

Because you lift us up where we belong...

[The Truth]

I feel all warm and fuzzy now.

[Marlin]

That'd be the Iron Bru...

[The Truth]

Irn Bru is a man's drink. Dr Pepper is for Yank wannabes.

[Marlin]

I see the time in Bar L has warped your mind, tastebuds and appreciation of culture.

Scotland, and everything in it, is worse than Wales.

[The Truth]

Nothing is worse than Wales. Scotland is Wales Lite.

[Marlin]

Scotland is Wales on steroids. Full of dirty unwashed junkies with worse dental hygiene than the scouse.

[Kop]

I'll take that as a compliment then.

[The Truth]

In Wales they don't even HAVE teeth - they use those shitty plastic knives to cut their food up into really small pieces. Be honest, if you were in an accident and needed a blood transfusion would you accept Welsh blood?

[Marlin]

No I wouldn't, but thats because I'm part of the master race. We only mix and mingle with people South East of the Watford gap. (and North of Tooting).

Welsh blood tastes better than Scottish blood though. Less chemicals.

[The Truth]

Welsh blood is black as they eat coal.

Scottish blood is 50% proof and therefore sterile.

I know which I'd rather have.

[Marlin]

I'm sure black blood won't be a problem for you. I've always suspected there was a hint of the tarbrush in your lineage.

And you're sterile enough already aren't you?

[The Truth]

I'll have you know that my lineage has been verified by the Mosleyian Institute for Caucasian Studies. I have a certificate to that effect and a signed photograph of David Ike.

Rumour on the street is that you have some pikey blood in you. Nothing is lower than a pikey. Well, maybe a Welsh pikey.



P.S. some of my best friends are pikeys.

[Marlin]

That's racialist.

[The Truth]

I'm going to start charging you a tariff for using that line. And it couldn't possibly be racialist - my best friend is a disabled black lesbian with extreme dyslexia. So there.

[Marlin]

Actually, I've copyrighted it.

Hope you voted for the Black One Legged Lesbian Party. Who would have though they'd go to war...

[The Truth]

I voted for Plaid Cymru actually.

[Marlin]

Don't they support the IRA?

[Precinct 13]

I've got a top secret mission for you two ;)

[Marlin]

Sounds good. What is it?

[Precinct 13]

Top secret old bean ;) I would send you a PM but I can't from this name. Ah, what the heck, may as well change to another name ;)

[Marlin]

All very secret squirrel...

Can Cottee play too?

[FtangFtang]

"What happened Muskie , what happened ?"

[Loose Cannon]

We all have to sit in a circle, hold hands and sing praise to the Lord Insite! :laugh:

[_00_deathscar]

'AVE YOU GONE NUTS?

[Marlin]

Stop picking on Insite.

Cottee, La Resistance has a mission for you, but I'll only reveal it once I get back from the pub...

See ya in an hour or so...

:drink:

[The Truth]

Marlin has done a few things in a circle but holding hands isn't one of them. Filthy beast.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
Stop picking on Insite.

Cottee, La Resistance has a mission for you, but I'll only reveal it once I get back from the pub...

See ya in an hour or so...

:drink:

Oh-oh.

[ourkid]

Team forums, its a football discussion area where threads that turned into arguments are put, not somewhere for a chit chat.. closed.

[Joe]

Originally posted by ourkid
Team forums, its a football discussion area where threads that turned into arguments are put, not somewhere for a chit chat.. closed.

I thought we agreed that this would be a virtually non-moderated area? I dont see any harm in this being somewhere for "chit chat"... opened.

[Pach]

:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

Innkeeper!!! A yard of your finest ale for the noble young fellow here!!

Good call mate.

[Marlin]

Woo Hoo!

Insite just bitchslapped Ourkid! Fight in the car park coming up...

[FtangFtang]

BUNDLE !!!

[The Truth]

Lieutenant Steve! Lieutenant Steve!

[Loose Cannon]

Free OMG!

:Mexican:

[sosh]

Originally posted by Loose Cannon
Free OMG!

:Mexican:

Ehh, dont overdo now... :no:

InSite... Good call.. ;) :clap:

[The Truth]

Welcome to our thread Sosh.

:)

[sosh]

Thanks! :D Felt a bit left out from your threesome! ;)
:laugh:

[The Truth]

Always up for a foursome. Very accommodating that way.

[FtangFtang]

Fine but you boys will need to let the most senior member have first go.

[The Truth]

Won't have long to wait then Cottee.

[FtangFtang]

At least I haven't come already like Marlin.

[The Truth]

:laugh: :laugh:

[Marlin]

I was just warming up. I hear it's cold in Swedes...

[The Truth]

For those of you who are wondering, yes, it is real.

[StretfordEnd]

Originally posted by The Truth
For those of you who are wondering, yes, it is real.

Miniscule, but real . . . :p

[Pach]

I don't even want to know how you came accross that information

[The Truth]

Stret comes across quite a lot of things. Apparently.

[Marlin]

Pach, you misspelt across.

Nob.

[The Truth]

We have high standards here Pach.

[Pach]

And you mispelt "misspelt".
Teet

[_00_deathscar]

Originally posted by pachicin
And you mispelt "misspelt".
Teet

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

[Marlin]

Good to see that one didn't go over your head...

Troof, our standards can't be that high. We let Sosh join in...

[The Truth]

Leave Sosh out of this you bounder or I'll be forced to thrash you.

[sosh]

:clap: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
dont let me interupt you boyz.. i quite enjoy watching you... you can have the first go cotteeboy...;) if you let me have him after! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :p

[The Truth]

Saucy.

[Loose Cannon]

Is this an Arsenal orgy or can anyone join in? :p

[sosh]

you can.. its just the lads, who tries to get in touch with their feminine side.. or each others male ones? dunno.. :D

[Loose Cannon]

Come over and see me and I'll get in touch with your feminine..........

[sosh]

Why do you think i have one?

:rolleyes:

[Loose Cannon]

Originally posted by sosh
Why do you think i have one?

:rolleyes:

I'm sure we can think of a way of finding out ;)

:sex:

[sosh]

i think we lost the chit chat in here.. marlin, cooteeboy and truth... come back and get us back in track again! :D

[Loose Cannon]

I didn't have you down as the shy type Sosh ;) Leave it to me....... :D

[sosh]

shy? lol
what had you in mind then? some dirty talk? cybersex?

:salute:

















that will cost you.... :laugh:

[Hitman9945]

Jesus you are all nuts in here :laugh:

[sosh]

why thank you! :D :D :D

[Loose Cannon]

Originally posted by sosh
shy? lol
what had you in mind then? some dirty talk? cybersex?

:salute:
that will cost you.... :laugh:

Who says I don't charge? :laugh: I'm sure you're worth every penny ;) We should get together and explore the notion that the best things in life are free ;)

:sex:

[sosh]

if its free, you dont have to pay... so that theory of yours just crashed...

:rolleyes:

[Hitman9945]

He didnt mean free as in charging but free as in parts of the body being free.......

:laugh:

[The Truth]

Sosh - why have a burger when you've steak at home?

;)

[sosh]

really? youre so sharp! :laugh: :p

[sosh]

Originally posted by The Truth
Sosh - why have a burger when you've steak at home?

;)

LOL thats right! Tony is my steak! ;)

[Hitman9945]

Watch it sosh or troof will gobble ya steak up for you ;) never mind sosh you have loose bits for company :D

[The Truth]

Well I was referring to myself actually. Tony is more of a pork chop.

:cool2:

[sosh]

you wish... ;) :laugh:

so where´s the rest of the gang?

[The Truth]

Marlin is 'entertaining' his cell mate and CotteeBoy is trying to deep fry a Pot Noodle.

[sosh]

:laugh: ohh yeah, thats why marlin never is online during the night.. he´s locked in.. lol

cotteeboy.. think i share his destiny.. lol

[Hitman9945]

So let me guess you are looking for company are you? Try sosh, shes free at the moment.......:laugh:

[sosh]

??? truth... ure still on here? or at the msn?

[Hitman9945]

Hes not online sweetheart.

[sosh]

he never is... :P

[Hitman9945]

Wonder why ;)

[Marlin]

They've let me out for an hour, but they're monitoring my posts, so no discussing the escape plan.

If Troof is a Steak and Tone is a Pork Sword, can I be Venison? A cut above the rest, and always game...

[sosh]

:eek: :laugh:

escape plan? heck.. i would never help you! i want u behind bars! :laugh: :p

[Marlin]

i like the sound of that. Do you dress up as the Warden?!

Purr...

[sosh]

well, you always said you use to pay for it.. ;):laugh:

[Marlin]

I meant financially, not in terms of incarceration.

As I grew up on an East London pig farm, you can't hold that against me. Anyway, Cottee would have done as well, only the girls wouldn't take his money. They said what he was asking for was "fundamentally sordid, deviant, against the very core of humanity".

[sosh]

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
youre all awful! :clap: :D

truth are at work btw.. he seemed very pissed off! lol can u write him a nice and cute pm? to cheer him up? :p

[The Truth]

I actually had to work this morning.

:(

[Marlin]

What?! Why didn't you palm it off to someone else?

Since I went on that Time Management course I've learnt all about delegation. It's great, you give all your work to other people, they do it, bring it back, and you get all the credit...

[sosh]

awww... we all feel with you dear... :( but try to think of the happier times, that are to come! soon it will be lunch, and then u can have your fruit, and play footie with the other children...

:dunce:

[Marlin]

They don't allow Troof fruit in Borstal. He has a bread sandwich for lunch.

[sosh]

:laugh: well, at least he gets to play.. ;)

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin

As I grew up on an East London pig farm, you can't hold that against me. Anyway, Cottee would have done as well, only the girls wouldn't take his money. They said what he was asking for was "fundamentally sordid, deviant, against the very core of humanity".

Correct . I had to find another pig farm.

[sosh]

:clap:

[The Truth]

I have come to the conclusion that 90% of the population are w@nkers.

I am reserving judgement on the other 10%.

[Marlin]

Do that many women masturbate?

[Loose Cannon]

Originally posted by Marlin
Do that many women masturbate?

I know quite a few that do (at least that will admit it)

[Marlin]

I'd like everyone to now veto this thread.

Can't let Troof's thread get to 100 posts, he'll get all egotistical...

[FtangFtang]

I must here and now confess that I have never been out with a woman who used a vibrator.....But then again why would she ?

:Worship:

[Loose Cannon]

Originally posted by Marlin
I'd like everyone to now veto this thread.

Can't let Troof's thread get to 100 posts, he'll get all egotistical...

I want to see the Sports.com survivors thread re-opened, there was a good chance it would have ended up with more posts than some team forums :laugh:

[Marlin]

Morons! He'll start thinking he's God now.

Cottee, that's just what they tell you mate. Weren't you a little suspicious that although you heard an electric toothbrush in the bathroom every evening, it was never there when you went in afterwards?

[The Truth]

The nearest Marlin gets to servicing a woman is running her sticky Black Mamba under the tap when she's finished.

[sosh]

Originally posted by Cotteeboy
I must here and now confess that I have never been out with a woman who used a vibrator.....But then again why would she ?



:no: :no: :no:
how little u know....

[The Truth]

If an Englishman catches his wife masturbating he is still legally entitled to burn her at the stake. True dat.

[sosh]

:laugh: thats the thing dear... you never seem to catch us, do you? :D

[Marlin]

Which is why Troof is on wife number 46.

[sosh]

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

[The Truth]

Beats inmate #57.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by The Truth
Beats inmate #57.

I guess he thinks that "variety" is the spice of life.

[The Truth]

Talking of spices, I hear his number twos now resemble Thousand Island dressing.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by sosh
:no: :no: :no:
how little u know....

I know ...I'm just an innocent child...:cry:

[Marlin]

No, you'd like an innocent child.

[The Truth]

Keep the forums free of this filth Marlin or I'll be forced to report you to London's Finest.

[Marlin]

Super Mario Bros.

[The Truth]

It's a crazy world.

[sosh]

well, you sure dont know much about women! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

[Marlin]

We do.

They have two feet, four breasts and like chicken sandwiches.

[The Truth]

I know you pretty well Sosh.

[Marlin]

Not as well as I do.

[sosh]

:no: four? in your dreams...

yeah, course you know me... :rolleyes:

[The Truth]

Has she asked you for naked pictures of yourself yet? Thought not.

:smokin:

[Marlin]

No, but I sent them anyway. Best to stay one step ahead of the game. I'm expecting her underwear in the mail any day now...

[sosh]

:rolleyes: its just a question of time... :salute:

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by The Truth
Has she asked you for naked pictures of yourself yet? Thought not.

:smokin:

Damn . And I thought that mine were special to her. :no:

[The Truth]

I'm wearing it.

:)

[Marlin]

What, Cottee's?

[sosh]

i wonder.. is it really possible for you to make a joke, in a non sexual aspect? :rolleyes:

or am i only allowed in your "group" cause im a girl? :(

[sosh]

Originally posted by Marlin
What, Cottee's?

:clap: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

[Karaja]

The only sexual experience The Tit ever had was with his own hand, real ladies 'man'... :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

[Marlin]

Of course we can.

Cottee, Why did the chicken cross the road?

[The Truth]

Well OMG it's a lot safer than the mountain chimps that pass for women where you come from. Don't have to worry about baboon rash for a start.

[Karaja]

Originally posted by The Truth
Well OMG it's a lot safer than the mountain chimps that pass for women where you come from. Don't have to worry about baboon rash for a start.

get your hand out of your pants you horny c'nt.

[The Truth]

I see the quality of your comebacks matches that of your personal hygiene.

[Karaja]

Originally posted by The Tit
I see the quality of your comebacks matches that of your personal hygiene.

the quality of your pick up lines matches your brainpower. doesnt count for much eh? :laugh:

[sosh]

:D :laugh: :laugh: okay, youre approved!

[The Truth]

Since when have you needed pick-up lines in Venezuela? A flash of the Yankee dollar and hey presto - instant gargling.

[sosh]

:laugh: no need for a fight....

[Karaja]

Originally posted by The Truth
Since when have you needed pick-up lines in Venezuela. A flash of the Yankee dollar and hey presto - instant gargling.

and all you do son is flash your 'sexy' face and they just come running........



.........away from you...

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

[The Truth]

:yawn:

You're too boring and unspeakably stupid to converse with OMG. Forgive me if I ignore you.

[Karaja]

Originally posted by The Tit
:yawn:

You're too boring and unspeakably stupid to converse with OMG. Forgive me if I ignore you.

ouch...that hurt. :cry:

[Marlin]

They have good shooting and bass fishing in Venezuela...

[Karaja]

Originally posted by Marlin
They have good shooting and bass fishing in Venezuela...

yes, thats quite true, but MOOSE hunting is more popular...try it sometime.

[sosh]

off to bed.. catch u later girls! :wave:

[Marlin]

Moose hunting is too easy. The really stupid ones just line up and wait to be shot down.

[Karaja]

Originally posted by Marlin
Moose hunting is too easy. The really stupid ones just line up and wait to be shot down.

no thats buffalo...moose need lot more shots to be killed, tough b'stards.

[Marlin]

I've heard rumours that moose come back even after they've been killed off. As do Venuzuelans funnily enough...

;)

[Karaja]

Originally posted by Marlin
I've heard rumours that moose come back even after they've been killed off. As do Venuzuelans funnily enough...

;)

very witty, mate...i am impressed. :D

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
Of course we can.

Cottee, Why did the chicken cross the road?

To have his photo taken wearing sosh's underwear.

[Marlin]

You calling Sosh a chicken?

karaja - I aim to please.

;)

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
You calling Sosh a chicken?



;)

Well , her breasts sure taste nice.


BTW closure is imminent.:D

[Marlin]

You ghastly fiend. You've been told not to bite before...

Out of interest, are they Southern Fried or battered?

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
You ghastly fiend. You've been told not to bite before...

Out of interest, are they Southern Fried or battered?

Hard to say , but they're served in king size baps with plenty of mayonaisse.

[Marlin]

You're trying to get this closed now, and you misssspelt mayonaise.

I hope they weren't crusty baps...

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
You're trying to get this closed now, and you misssspelt mayonaise.

I hope they weren't crusty baps...

What....you mean the mayonese ??.....andythomson....oh my god !!!

[Marlin]

If Tomson's been there then we'd all better get down the clap clinic...

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
If Tomson's been there then we'd all better get down the clap clinic...

:clap:

[Karaja]

Originally posted by Marlin
karaja - I aim to please.

;)

yeah, you are one of those expensive pleasure toys used by sosh arent you...:eek:

[Marlin]

I prefer the term Gigolo actually.

[Karaja]

Originally posted by Marlin
I prefer the term Gigolo actually.

thats a sinonym?

[Marlin]

Non.

It's a career goal...

[The Truth]

You know I'm a radical.

[Hitman9945]

You lads ought to restard Monty Python. Your wit is just what the world sorely needs :laugh: :clap:

[Karaja]

Originally posted by Marlin
Non.

It's a career goal...

good, because i neveer knew how to spell the word 'jiggolo'

[Marlin]

What the world needs is more anteaters.

[Karaja]

we need more ants too. :cute:

[TiggerUS]

We need super-ants who can kick in the anteaters ;)

[The Truth]

When you look back it's just a flicker of time.

[Marlin]

Been on the whiskey and Kerouac again Troof?

[The Truth]

Hate whiskey and Kerouac was an overrated tosser. Irn Bru and Starbars me old china. Sorted.

[TiggerUS]

A couple of JD's before a night and the night's long......

[TiggerUS]

........mind you any night with my pooh bear is a long night :D

[StretfordEnd]

Originally posted by Karaja
good, because i neveer knew how to spell the word 'jiggolo'

Then perhaps you should invest in a dictionary, COLLINS do a rather good one :rolleyes:

[Marlin]

So does Roget's. Called the Pornosaurus or sumfing...

[The Truth]

Always bringing the tone of the conversation into the gutter.

[Marlin]

I can't help having a voice like Barry White.

And before you say it, no, I don't look like Barry White...

[The Truth]

You've upset Ourkid now you ******.

[Marlin]

Twas you.

Do you think he comes in here?

No rude jokes please.

[The Truth]

It wasn't me - I merely commented upon the quality of the Daniels/Ash knee-trembler and you had to go all silly.

I suspect he may well come in here on daring midnight raids, finger poised over the 'Close Thread' function...

[Marlin]

He wouldn't dare...

[The Truth]

I know.

:)

[Marlin]

He really wouldn't you know.

He's scared.

[The Truth]

Bricking it.

I bet he looks like this:

:eek:

[Marlin]

:cry:

More like this.

Although he'll pretend he's doing this:

:rolleyes: :no: :rolleyes:

[The Truth]

Someone needs to make a stand against the forces of cretindom.

[Marlin]

How could I ever stand against you? Twouldn't be right...

[FtangFtang]

How disgusting.

[Marlin]

Pre vert.

[The Truth]

Ignore him Cottee, he's looking for attention again. He's like a drunken child at times.

[Marlin]

Looks like the toys are out of the pram again. Your just jealous because Cottee's been eating what you thought were your Chicken baps.

[The Truth]

I told her to throw him a scrap or two in order to keep him sweet. Cottee knows the score.

[Marlin]

Sounds like you're trying to take over my old pimping racket.

Kerouac was fecking crap. Never liked it. Hunter S Thompson on the other hand...

"We were somewhere around Barstow, when the drugs began to take hold..."

[The Truth]

'Trying' to take over? Fur coats and ivory-tipped canes are go mate.

P.S. Quit trying to go all literary on me in an attempt to appear learned.

[Marlin]

Ah, but no white limo yet.

It's not learned, it's learnted you stupid ****.

[The Truth]

Listen, I'm on a half-day today - heading down to Skank Central to check out the latest stock - you have 45 minutes in which to say something interesting. Hope you work well under pressure.

[Marlin]

Will this do?

In the middle of the 19th century, Herbert Spencer provided the first fully systematic articulation of the doctrine of mental evolution. In Spencer's view, processes of mind were fundamentally continuous with processes of life, each consisting of the adaptation of the organism to relations in the environment. As life evolved, so too did mind: from simple irritability to reflex activity, instinct, acquired adaptation, and, ultimately, to reasoning. In its essential processes and functions, therefore, human mind was continuous with animal mind.

The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 and even more his Descent of Man in 1871 gave added impetus to this claim. As Darwin wrote in The Descent: 'My object...is solely to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.'

Darwin's argument tended, as his co-evolutionist, Alfred Russel Wallace, pointed out, 'to the conclusion that man's entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action of the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived.'

Darwin's conclusion and its corollary-that human mind differed from animal mind only in level of development and not in kind-amounted to a denial of human primacy and uniqueness. Not surprisingly, this provoked a storm of controversy, even among those who otherwise supported the case for evolution by natural selection; and, in response to this controversy, proponents of human menal evolutionism began to look around for evidence consistent with the continuity position. This led to a sharp increase in interest in the nature and development of human and animal mind.

Of all those addressing themselves to this issue, none was as thorough, systematic, or influential as George John Romanes. Romanes' overarching goal was to do for mind, and most especially for human mind, what Darwin had done for body, to trace the path of its gradual and continuous development from the lowest to the highest forms. By illustrating the way in which intelligent ideation emerged from reflexes and instincts and providing an analysis of continuity in graded levels of ideation, Romanes hoped to provide evidence for the 'probable genesis of mind from non-mental antecedents.'

The argument for mental evolution was presented in three books, published between 1882 and 1888: Animal Intelligence, Mental Evolution in Animals, and Mental Evolution in Man.2 Animal Intelligence provided much of the empirical data on which the argument for mental evolution in animals was based. Gathering data from every conceivable source, Romanes compiled a nearly encyclopedic catalogue of the 'facts of Comparative Psychology.' Evidence for memory, emotion, and general intelligence in animal way-finding, construction, social interaction, communication, and problem solving was systematically presented for each of the major zoological categories arranged in phylogenetic order.

Mental Evolution in Animals related the data on animal intelligence to evolutionary theory. Distinguishing intelligence (involving individually acquired adaptations and conscious choice) from reflex and instinctive actions (fixed by heredity), Romanes traced the development of mind from its first beginnings in protoplasmic life to its successive manifestations in organisms at progressively higher levels of the phylogenetic scale. Thus, for example, evidence for the first appearance of memory was found in echinoderms, for association by contiguity in mollusks, and for association by similarity in fish and batrachia. Reasoning was first identified in higher crustacea, communication in hymenoptera, and the understanding of words in birds. To rodents and carnivores, Romanes attributed the first understanding of mechanisms; to monkeys and elephants, the first tool use; and to anthropoid apes and dogs, a vague sense of conscience.

It was only in Mental Evolution in Man, however, that Romanes finally arrived at the vexed question of 'whether the mind of man is essentially the same as the mind of the lower animals, or, having had, either wholly or in part, some other mode of origin, is essentially distinct-differing not only in degree but in kind from all other types of psychical being.' Citing the improbability that organic and mental evolution would be everywhere continuous except with regard to the mind of man and evidence for recapitulative continuity between human ontogenesis and phylogenesis, Romanes argued for a 'very strong primâ facie case in favour of the view that there has been no interruption of the developmental process in the course of psychological history; but that the mind of man, like the mind of animals...has been evolved.'

Romanes then devoted the remainder of Mental Evolution in Man to an examination of the probable course of evolution with regard to the nature and emergence of distinctively human ideation. Beginning from the traditional distinction between concrete particular ideas (simple ideas that derive immediately from individual percepts) and abstract general ideas (ideas that derive from 'an assemblage of particular ideas' ), he identified two different levels of general ideation, each dependent for its development on the power of abstraction but varying in complexity as a function of relationship to language. At the lower level were general ideas derived as abstractions from concrete particulars without the aid of language. For these lower level abstractions Romanes coined the term 'recepts.' At the higher level were general ideas 'rendered possible only by the aid of language, or by the process of naming abstractions as abstractions.' For these Romanes reserved the term 'concepts.'

Recepts were, in effect, 'intuitive' or 'practical' (rather than 'reflective') ideas derived by abstraction from similar percepts. Unnamed, they remained in themselves 'unperceived abstractions.' Infants might know that all nipples could be sucked; but they did not know that they knew.

Concepts, on the other hand, were named abstractions, general ideas formed with language. Through their names, concepts could be held up before the mind as objects as well as products of abstraction. As Romanes described it: 'the human mind is enabled to think about abstractions of its own making, which are more and more remote from the sensuous perception of concrete objects; it can unite these abstractions into an endless variety of ideal combinations; these, in turn, may become elaborated into ideal constructions of a more and more complex character; and so on...'

Since Romanes believed that all warm-blooded animals and some invertebrates formed and employed recepts in making intuitive judgments and reasoning about the environment, but that humans were alone in operating at the reflective conceptual level, his analysis of mental evolution and his argument for the continuity of human and animal mind derived directly from this distinction. As he put it: 'The question, then, which we have to consider is whether there is a difference of kind, or only a difference of degree, between a recept and a concept. This is really the question with which the whole of the present volume will be concerned...'.

In attempting to answer this question, Romanes examined the nature and function of recepts in animals and infants and of concepts in self-reflective, verbal humans, and the evolution of language and communication in both children and the race, particularly in relationship to the development of reflective self-consciousness. In the course of this examination, he distinguished five levels of graded ideation: percepts, lower recepts (shared by animals and very young children just learning to use gestures and vocal signs for simple associative denotation of the sort found, for example, in parrots), higher recepts (typical of the young child who can use words connotatively to assign referents to categories but not yet 'bestow...names consciously recognized as such), lower concepts (involving 'the self-conscious naming of recepts' ), and higher concepts (involving 'the self-conscious classification of other concepts...and the self-conscious naming of such ideal integrations...').

Pointing out that these grades of ideation form a continuous developmental series from child to adult and animal to human, Romanes thought that he had demonstrated not only the 'possibility of a natural transition' from receptive to conceptual ideation but the 'probability of such a transition having previously occurred in the race.' He believed, in other words, that he had established the principle of human mental evolution.

Whether or not he was successful in this regard, the significance of Romanes' work is undoubted. The depth and breadth of his evidence gathering and his clear articulation of the problem of comparative mentality inaugurated the field of comparative psychology and served as an immediate stimulus to those such as C. Lloyd Morgan who were to develop the field into a science. His developmental analyses, especially those concerning ideation and language use, were among the first achievements of an emerging developmental psychology and exerted a considerable influence on those, like James Mark Baldwin, who were interested in the implications of human evolution for an understanding of development in the child.

Now pogo on that, ya twat...

[The Truth]

Originally posted by Marlin
Will this do?

In the middle of the 19th century, Herbert Spencer provided the first fully systematic articulation of the doctrine of mental evolution. In Spencer's view, processes of mind were fundamentally continuous with processes of life, each consisting of the adaptation of the organism to relations in the environment. As life evolved, so too did mind: from simple irritability to reflex activity, instinct, acquired adaptation, and, ultimately, to reasoning. In its essential processes and functions, therefore, human mind was continuous with animal mind.

The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 and even more his Descent of Man in 1871 gave added impetus to this claim. As Darwin wrote in The Descent: 'My object...is solely to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.'

Darwin's argument tended, as his co-evolutionist, Alfred Russel Wallace, pointed out, 'to the conclusion that man's entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action of the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived.'

Darwin's conclusion and its corollary-that human mind differed from animal mind only in level of development and not in kind-amounted to a denial of human primacy and uniqueness. Not surprisingly, this provoked a storm of controversy, even among those who otherwise supported the case for evolution by natural selection; and, in response to this controversy, proponents of human menal evolutionism began to look around for evidence consistent with the continuity position. This led to a sharp increase in interest in the nature and development of human and animal mind.

Of all those addressing themselves to this issue, none was as thorough, systematic, or influential as George John Romanes. Romanes' overarching goal was to do for mind, and most especially for human mind, what Darwin had done for body, to trace the path of its gradual and continuous development from the lowest to the highest forms. By illustrating the way in which intelligent ideation emerged from reflexes and instincts and providing an analysis of continuity in graded levels of ideation, Romanes hoped to provide evidence for the 'probable genesis of mind from non-mental antecedents.'

The argument for mental evolution was presented in three books, published between 1882 and 1888: Animal Intelligence, Mental Evolution in Animals, and Mental Evolution in Man.2 Animal Intelligence provided much of the empirical data on which the argument for mental evolution in animals was based. Gathering data from every conceivable source, Romanes compiled a nearly encyclopedic catalogue of the 'facts of Comparative Psychology.' Evidence for memory, emotion, and general intelligence in animal way-finding, construction, social interaction, communication, and problem solving was systematically presented for each of the major zoological categories arranged in phylogenetic order.

Mental Evolution in Animals related the data on animal intelligence to evolutionary theory. Distinguishing intelligence (involving individually acquired adaptations and conscious choice) from reflex and instinctive actions (fixed by heredity), Romanes traced the development of mind from its first beginnings in protoplasmic life to its successive manifestations in organisms at progressively higher levels of the phylogenetic scale. Thus, for example, evidence for the first appearance of memory was found in echinoderms, for association by contiguity in mollusks, and for association by similarity in fish and batrachia. Reasoning was first identified in higher crustacea, communication in hymenoptera, and the understanding of words in birds. To rodents and carnivores, Romanes attributed the first understanding of mechanisms; to monkeys and elephants, the first tool use; and to anthropoid apes and dogs, a vague sense of conscience.

It was only in Mental Evolution in Man, however, that Romanes finally arrived at the vexed question of 'whether the mind of man is essentially the same as the mind of the lower animals, or, having had, either wholly or in part, some other mode of origin, is essentially distinct-differing not only in degree but in kind from all other types of psychical being.' Citing the improbability that organic and mental evolution would be everywhere continuous except with regard to the mind of man and evidence for recapitulative continuity between human ontogenesis and phylogenesis, Romanes argued for a 'very strong primâ facie case in favour of the view that there has been no interruption of the developmental process in the course of psychological history; but that the mind of man, like the mind of animals...has been evolved.'

Romanes then devoted the remainder of Mental Evolution in Man to an examination of the probable course of evolution with regard to the nature and emergence of distinctively human ideation. Beginning from the traditional distinction between concrete particular ideas (simple ideas that derive immediately from individual percepts) and abstract general ideas (ideas that derive from 'an assemblage of particular ideas' ), he identified two different levels of general ideation, each dependent for its development on the power of abstraction but varying in complexity as a function of relationship to language. At the lower level were general ideas derived as abstractions from concrete particulars without the aid of language. For these lower level abstractions Romanes coined the term 'recepts.' At the higher level were general ideas 'rendered possible only by the aid of language, or by the process of naming abstractions as abstractions.' For these Romanes reserved the term 'concepts.'

Recepts were, in effect, 'intuitive' or 'practical' (rather than 'reflective') ideas derived by abstraction from similar percepts. Unnamed, they remained in themselves 'unperceived abstractions.' Infants might know that all nipples could be sucked; but they did not know that they knew.

Concepts, on the other hand, were named abstractions, general ideas formed with language. Through their names, concepts could be held up before the mind as objects as well as products of abstraction. As Romanes described it: 'the human mind is enabled to think about abstractions of its own making, which are more and more remote from the sensuous perception of concrete objects; it can unite these abstractions into an endless variety of ideal combinations; these, in turn, may become elaborated into ideal constructions of a more and more complex character; and so on...'

Since Romanes believed that all warm-blooded animals and some invertebrates formed and employed recepts in making intuitive judgments and reasoning about the environment, but that humans were alone in operating at the reflective conceptual level, his analysis of mental evolution and his argument for the continuity of human and animal mind derived directly from this distinction. As he put it: 'The question, then, which we have to consider is whether there is a difference of kind, or only a difference of degree, between a recept and a concept. This is really the question with which the whole of the present volume will be concerned...'.

In attempting to answer this question, Romanes examined the nature and function of recepts in animals and infants and of concepts in self-reflective, verbal humans, and the evolution of language and communication in both children and the race, particularly in relationship to the development of reflective self-consciousness. In the course of this examination, he distinguished five levels of graded ideation: percepts, lower recepts (shared by animals and very young children just learning to use gestures and vocal signs for simple associative denotation of the sort found, for example, in parrots), higher recepts (typical of the young child who can use words connotatively to assign referents to categories but not yet 'bestow...names consciously recognized as such), lower concepts (involving 'the self-conscious naming of recepts' ), and higher concepts (involving 'the self-conscious classification of other concepts...and the self-conscious naming of such ideal integrations...').

Pointing out that these grades of ideation form a continuous developmental series from child to adult and animal to human, Romanes thought that he had demonstrated not only the 'possibility of a natural transition' from receptive to conceptual ideation but the 'probability of such a transition having previously occurred in the race.' He believed, in other words, that he had established the principle of human mental evolution.

Whether or not he was successful in this regard, the significance of Romanes' work is undoubted. The depth and breadth of his evidence gathering and his clear articulation of the problem of comparative mentality inaugurated the field of comparative psychology and served as an immediate stimulus to those such as C. Lloyd Morgan who were to develop the field into a science. His developmental analyses, especially those concerning ideation and language use, were among the first achievements of an emerging developmental psychology and exerted a considerable influence on those, like James Mark Baldwin, who were interested in the implications of human evolution for an understanding of development in the child.

Now pogo on that, ya twat...

No.

[Marlin]

Ok, perhaps this is more to your taste.

M. PAUL VALÉRY, a writer for whom I have considerable respect, has placed in his most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which seems to me of very doubtful validity. I have not seen the complete essay, and know the quotation only as it appears in a critical notice in the Athenæum, July 23, 1920:

La philosophie, et même la morale tendirent à fuir les oeuvres pour se placer dans les réflexions qui les précèdent.... Parler aujourd'hui de poésie philosophique (fût-ce en invoquant Alfred de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c'est naivement confondre des conditions et des applications de l'esprit incompatibles entre elles. N'est-ce pas oublier que le but de celui qui spécule est de fixer ou de créer une notion—c'est-à-dire un pouvoir et un instrument de pouvoir, cependant que le poète moderne essaie de produire en nous un état et de porter cet état exceptionnel au point d'une jouissance parfaite....

It may be that I do M. Valéry an injustice which I must endeavour to repair when I have the pleasure of reading his article entire. But the paragraph gives the impression of more than one error of analysis. In the first place, it suggests that conditions have changed, that "philosophical" poetry may once have been permissible, but that (perhaps owing to the greater specialization of the modern world) it is now intolerable. We are forced to assume that what we do not like in our time was never good art, and that what appears to us good was always so. If any ancient "philosophical" poetry retains its value, a value which we fail to find in modern poetry of the same type, we investigate on the assumption that we shall find some difference to which the mere difference of date is irrelevant. But if it be maintained that the older poetry has a "philosophic" element and a "poetic" element which can be isolated, we have two tasks to perform. We must show first in a particular case—our case is Dante—that the philosophy is essential to the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic beauty of the parts; and we must show that the philosophy is employed in a different form from that which it takes in admittedly unsuccessful philosophical poems. And if M. Valéry is in error in his complete exorcism of "philosophy," perhaps the basis of the error is his apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet, namely, that the latter endeavours "to produce in us a state." 1
The early philosophical poets, Parmenides and Empedocles, were apparently persons of an impure philosophical inspiration. Neither their predecessors nor their successors expressed themselves in verse; Parmenides and Empedocles were persons who mingled with genuine philosophical ability a good deal of the emotion of the founder of a second-rate religious system. They were not interested exclusively in philosophy, or religion, or poetry, but in something which was a mixture of all three; hence their reputation as poets is low and as philosophers should be considerably below Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, or Democritus. The poem of Lucretius is quite a different matter. For Lucretius was undoubtedly a poet. He endeavours to expound a philosophical system, but with a different motive from Parmenides or Empedocles, for this system is already in existence; he is really endeavouring to find the concrete poetic equivalent for this system—to find its complete equivalent in vision. Only, as he is an innovator in this art, he wavers between philosophical poetry and philosophy. So we find passages such as:

But the velocity of thunderbolts is great and their stroke powerful, and they run through their course with a rapid descent, because the force when aroused first in all cases collects itself in the clouds and ... Let us now sing what causes the motion of the stars.... Of all these different smells then which strike the nostrils one may reach to a much greater distance than another.... 1 2
But Lucretius' true tendency is to express an ordered vision of the life of man, with great vigour of real poetic image and often acute observation.

quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum
quodcumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt...

medio de fonte leoprum
surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat...

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo
spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,
sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri. 3
The philosophy which Lucretius tackled was not rich enough in variety of feeling, applied itself to life too uniformly, to supply the material for a wholly successful poem. It was incapable of complete expansion into pure vision. But I must ask M. Valéry whether the "aim" of Lucretius' poem was "to fix or create a notion" or to fashion "an instrument of power." 4
Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper, the man who is trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may be trying to realize ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time. But this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic. The poet can deal with philosophic ideas, not as matter for argument, but as matter for inspection. The original form of a philosophy cannot be poetic. But poetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can deal with this idea when it has reached the point of immediate acceptance, when it has become almost a physical modification. If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious impeachment, not only against Dante, but against most of Dante's contemporaries. 5
Dante had the benefit of a mythology and a theology which had undergone a more complete absorption into life than those of Lucretius. It is curious that not only Dante's detractors, like the Petrarch of Landor's Pentameron (if we may apply so strong a word to so amiable a character), but some of his admirers, insist on the separation of Dante's "poetry" and Dante's "teaching." Sometimes the philosophy is confused with the allegory. The philosophy is an ingredient, it is a part of Dante's world just as it is a part of life; the allegory is the scaffold on which the poem is built. An American writer of a little primer of Dante, Mr. Henry Dwight Sidgwick, who desires to improve our understanding of Dante as a "spiritual leader," says:

To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter; so it is to us. He and we are concerned with the allegory. That allegory is simple. Hell is the absence of God.... If the reader begins with the consciousness that he is reading about sin, spiritually understood, he never loses the thread, he is never at a loss, never slips back into the literal signification. 6
Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the difference between literal and spiritual sin, we may affirm that his remarks are misleading. Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and certainly the Comedy is in some way a "moral education." The question is to find a formula for the correspondence between the former and the latter, to decide whether the moral value corresponds directly to the allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance Dante assigned to allegorical method. In the Convivio we are seriously informed that

the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them;

and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. And so distinguished a scholar as M. Hauvette repeats again and again the phrase "didactique d'intention." We accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two usual ways of dealing with it. One may, with Mr. Sidgwick, dwell upon its significance for the seeker of "spiritual light," or one may, with Landor, deplore the spiritual mechanics and find the poet only in passages where he frees himself from his divine purposes. With neither of these points of view can we concur. Mr. Sidgwick magnifies the "preacher and prophet," and presents Dante as a superior Isaiah or Carlyle; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the scheme, and denounces the politics. Some of Landor's errors are more palpable than Mr. Sidgwick's. He errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the standards of classical epic. Whatever the Comedy is, an epic it is not. M. Hauvette well says:

Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poème se rapproche du genre classique de l'épopée, et dans quelle mesure il s'en écarte, est un exércice de rhétorique entièrement inutile, puisque Dante, à n'en pas douter, n'a jamais eu l'intention de composer une action épique dans les règles. 7
But we must define the framework of Dante's poem from the result as well as from the intention. The poem has not only a framework, but a form; and even if the framework be allegorical, the form may be something else. The examination of any episode in the Comedy ought to show that not merely the allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of the poem. Landor appears, for instance, to have misunderstood such a passage as the Paolo and Francesca, by failing to perceive its relations:

In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight.

This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all recollected delight would have been, for Francesca, either loss of humanity or relief from damnation. The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the remembrance of it, is a part of the torture. Francesca is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify. For in Dante's Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly are in life; they are actually in the greatest torment of which each is capable.

E il modo ancor m'offende. 8
It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation is at the opposite pole from Landor's, should have fallen into a similar error. He says:

In meeting [Ulysses], as in meeting Pier della Vigna and Brunetto Latini, the preacher and the prophet are lost in the poet.

Here, again, is a false simplification. These passages have no digressive beauty. The case of Brunetto is parallel to that of Francesca. The emotion of the passage resides in Brunetto's excellence in damnation—so admirable a soul, and so perverse.

e parve de costoro
Quegli che vince e non colui che perde. 9
And I think that if Mr. Sidgwick had pondered the strange words of Ulysses,

com' altrui piacque,

he would not have said that the preacher and prophet are lost in the poet. "Preacher" and "prophet" are odious terms; but what Mr. Sidgwick designates by them is something which is certainly not "lost in the poet," but is part of the poet. 10
A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion that no emotion is contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. The emotion of the person, or the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the person, is never lost or diminished, is always preserved entire, but is modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme, is coloured by the atmosphere of that person's residence in one of the three worlds. About none of Dante's character is there that ambiguity which affects Milton's Lucifer. The damned preserve any degree of beauty or grandeur that ever rightly pertained to them, and this intensifies and also justifies their damnation. As Jason

Guarda quel grande che viene!
E per dolor non par lagrima spanda,
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!

The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the vindictive Adamo acquires greater ferocity, and the errors of Arnaut are corrected—

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. 11
If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the Comedy is dependent upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole scheme is. The usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As the centre of gravity of emotions is more remote from a single human action, or a system of purely human actions, than in drama or epic, so the framework has to be more artificial and apparently more mechanical. It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be justified. The emotional structure within this scaffold is what must be understood—the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, all human emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also extended in significance by their place in the scheme. 12
But Dante's is the most comprehensive, and the most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made. Dante's method of dealing with any emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with that of other "epic" poets as with that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes a character apparently controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the character and the emotion itself. The emotion is split up into constituents—and perhaps destroyed in the process. The mind of Shakespeare was one of the most critical that has ever existed. Dante, on the other hand, does not analyse the emotion so much as he exhibits its relation to other emotions. You cannot, that is, understand the Inferno without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. "Dante," says Landor's Petrarch, "is the great master of the disgusting." That is true, though Sophocles at least once approaches him. But a disgust like Dante's is no hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso.

La forma universal di questo nodo,
credo ch'io vidi, perchè più di largo
dicendo questo, mi sento ch'io godo.

The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty. But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from negative to positive. The negative is the more importunate. 13
The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary scaffold, is complete from the most sensuous to the most intellectual and the most spiritual. Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most elusive:

Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse
lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse.

Per entro sè l'eterna margarita
ne recepette, com' acqua recepe
raggio di luce, permanendo unita.

or

Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fe' Glauco nel gustar dell' erba,
che il fe' consorto in mar degli altri dei. 2

Again, in the Purgatorio, for instance in Canto XVI and Canto XVIII, occur passages of pure exposition of philosophy, the philosophy of Aristotle strained through the schools.

Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
ma l' altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
o per poco o per troppo di vigore...

We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.

Onde convenne legge per fren porre...

It is one of the greatest merits of Dante's poem that the vision is so nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as "poetry," is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole. 14
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valéry's "modern poet" who attempts "to produce in us a state." A state, in itself, is nothing whatever. 15
M. Valéry's account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and with the tendencies of such a work as William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success—but to set something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader's particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words. Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something perceived. When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted.

You couldn't do any better.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by Marlin
Ok, perhaps this is more to your taste.

M. PAUL VALÉRY, a writer for whom I have considerable respect, has placed in his most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which seems to me of very doubtful validity. I have not seen the complete essay, and know the quotation only as it appears in a critical notice in the Athenæum, July 23, 1920:

La philosophie, et même la morale tendirent à fuir les oeuvres pour se placer dans les réflexions qui les précèdent.... Parler aujourd'hui de poésie philosophique (fût-ce en invoquant Alfred de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c'est naivement confondre des conditions et des applications de l'esprit incompatibles entre elles. N'est-ce pas oublier que le but de celui qui spécule est de fixer ou de créer une notion—c'est-à-dire un pouvoir et un instrument de pouvoir, cependant que le poète moderne essaie de produire en nous un état et de porter cet état exceptionnel au point d'une jouissance parfaite....

It may be that I do M. Valéry an injustice which I must endeavour to repair when I have the pleasure of reading his article entire. But the paragraph gives the impression of more than one error of analysis. In the first place, it suggests that conditions have changed, that "philosophical" poetry may once have been permissible, but that (perhaps owing to the greater specialization of the modern world) it is now intolerable. We are forced to assume that what we do not like in our time was never good art, and that what appears to us good was always so. If any ancient "philosophical" poetry retains its value, a value which we fail to find in modern poetry of the same type, we investigate on the assumption that we shall find some difference to which the mere difference of date is irrelevant. But if it be maintained that the older poetry has a "philosophic" element and a "poetic" element which can be isolated, we have two tasks to perform. We must show first in a particular case—our case is Dante—that the philosophy is essential to the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic beauty of the parts; and we must show that the philosophy is employed in a different form from that which it takes in admittedly unsuccessful philosophical poems. And if M. Valéry is in error in his complete exorcism of "philosophy," perhaps the basis of the error is his apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet, namely, that the latter endeavours "to produce in us a state." 1
The early philosophical poets, Parmenides and Empedocles, were apparently persons of an impure philosophical inspiration. Neither their predecessors nor their successors expressed themselves in verse; Parmenides and Empedocles were persons who mingled with genuine philosophical ability a good deal of the emotion of the founder of a second-rate religious system. They were not interested exclusively in philosophy, or religion, or poetry, but in something which was a mixture of all three; hence their reputation as poets is low and as philosophers should be considerably below Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, or Democritus. The poem of Lucretius is quite a different matter. For Lucretius was undoubtedly a poet. He endeavours to expound a philosophical system, but with a different motive from Parmenides or Empedocles, for this system is already in existence; he is really endeavouring to find the concrete poetic equivalent for this system—to find its complete equivalent in vision. Only, as he is an innovator in this art, he wavers between philosophical poetry and philosophy. So we find passages such as:

But the velocity of thunderbolts is great and their stroke powerful, and they run through their course with a rapid descent, because the force when aroused first in all cases collects itself in the clouds and ... Let us now sing what causes the motion of the stars.... Of all these different smells then which strike the nostrils one may reach to a much greater distance than another.... 1 2
But Lucretius' true tendency is to express an ordered vision of the life of man, with great vigour of real poetic image and often acute observation.

quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum
quodcumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt...

medio de fonte leoprum
surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat...

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo
spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,
sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri. 3
The philosophy which Lucretius tackled was not rich enough in variety of feeling, applied itself to life too uniformly, to supply the material for a wholly successful poem. It was incapable of complete expansion into pure vision. But I must ask M. Valéry whether the "aim" of Lucretius' poem was "to fix or create a notion" or to fashion "an instrument of power." 4
Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper, the man who is trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may be trying to realize ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time. But this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic. The poet can deal with philosophic ideas, not as matter for argument, but as matter for inspection. The original form of a philosophy cannot be poetic. But poetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can deal with this idea when it has reached the point of immediate acceptance, when it has become almost a physical modification. If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious impeachment, not only against Dante, but against most of Dante's contemporaries. 5
Dante had the benefit of a mythology and a theology which had undergone a more complete absorption into life than those of Lucretius. It is curious that not only Dante's detractors, like the Petrarch of Landor's Pentameron (if we may apply so strong a word to so amiable a character), but some of his admirers, insist on the separation of Dante's "poetry" and Dante's "teaching." Sometimes the philosophy is confused with the allegory. The philosophy is an ingredient, it is a part of Dante's world just as it is a part of life; the allegory is the scaffold on which the poem is built. An American writer of a little primer of Dante, Mr. Henry Dwight Sidgwick, who desires to improve our understanding of Dante as a "spiritual leader," says:

To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter; so it is to us. He and we are concerned with the allegory. That allegory is simple. Hell is the absence of God.... If the reader begins with the consciousness that he is reading about sin, spiritually understood, he never loses the thread, he is never at a loss, never slips back into the literal signification. 6
Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the difference between literal and spiritual sin, we may affirm that his remarks are misleading. Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and certainly the Comedy is in some way a "moral education." The question is to find a formula for the correspondence between the former and the latter, to decide whether the moral value corresponds directly to the allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance Dante assigned to allegorical method. In the Convivio we are seriously informed that

the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them;

and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. And so distinguished a scholar as M. Hauvette repeats again and again the phrase "didactique d'intention." We accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two usual ways of dealing with it. One may, with Mr. Sidgwick, dwell upon its significance for the seeker of "spiritual light," or one may, with Landor, deplore the spiritual mechanics and find the poet only in passages where he frees himself from his divine purposes. With neither of these points of view can we concur. Mr. Sidgwick magnifies the "preacher and prophet," and presents Dante as a superior Isaiah or Carlyle; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the scheme, and denounces the politics. Some of Landor's errors are more palpable than Mr. Sidgwick's. He errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the standards of classical epic. Whatever the Comedy is, an epic it is not. M. Hauvette well says:

Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poème se rapproche du genre classique de l'épopée, et dans quelle mesure il s'en écarte, est un exércice de rhétorique entièrement inutile, puisque Dante, à n'en pas douter, n'a jamais eu l'intention de composer une action épique dans les règles. 7
But we must define the framework of Dante's poem from the result as well as from the intention. The poem has not only a framework, but a form; and even if the framework be allegorical, the form may be something else. The examination of any episode in the Comedy ought to show that not merely the allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of the poem. Landor appears, for instance, to have misunderstood such a passage as the Paolo and Francesca, by failing to perceive its relations:

In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight.

This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all recollected delight would have been, for Francesca, either loss of humanity or relief from damnation. The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the remembrance of it, is a part of the torture. Francesca is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify. For in Dante's Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly are in life; they are actually in the greatest torment of which each is capable.

E il modo ancor m'offende. 8
It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation is at the opposite pole from Landor's, should have fallen into a similar error. He says:

In meeting [Ulysses], as in meeting Pier della Vigna and Brunetto Latini, the preacher and the prophet are lost in the poet.

Here, again, is a false simplification. These passages have no digressive beauty. The case of Brunetto is parallel to that of Francesca. The emotion of the passage resides in Brunetto's excellence in damnation—so admirable a soul, and so perverse.

e parve de costoro
Quegli che vince e non colui che perde. 9
And I think that if Mr. Sidgwick had pondered the strange words of Ulysses,

com' altrui piacque,

he would not have said that the preacher and prophet are lost in the poet. "Preacher" and "prophet" are odious terms; but what Mr. Sidgwick designates by them is something which is certainly not "lost in the poet," but is part of the poet. 10
A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion that no emotion is contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. The emotion of the person, or the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the person, is never lost or diminished, is always preserved entire, but is modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme, is coloured by the atmosphere of that person's residence in one of the three worlds. About none of Dante's character is there that ambiguity which affects Milton's Lucifer. The damned preserve any degree of beauty or grandeur that ever rightly pertained to them, and this intensifies and also justifies their damnation. As Jason

Guarda quel grande che viene!
E per dolor non par lagrima spanda,
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!

The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the vindictive Adamo acquires greater ferocity, and the errors of Arnaut are corrected—

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. 11
If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the Comedy is dependent upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole scheme is. The usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As the centre of gravity of emotions is more remote from a single human action, or a system of purely human actions, than in drama or epic, so the framework has to be more artificial and apparently more mechanical. It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be justified. The emotional structure within this scaffold is what must be understood—the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, all human emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also extended in significance by their place in the scheme. 12
But Dante's is the most comprehensive, and the most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made. Dante's method of dealing with any emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with that of other "epic" poets as with that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes a character apparently controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the character and the emotion itself. The emotion is split up into constituents—and perhaps destroyed in the process. The mind of Shakespeare was one of the most critical that has ever existed. Dante, on the other hand, does not analyse the emotion so much as he exhibits its relation to other emotions. You cannot, that is, understand the Inferno without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. "Dante," says Landor's Petrarch, "is the great master of the disgusting." That is true, though Sophocles at least once approaches him. But a disgust like Dante's is no hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso.

La forma universal di questo nodo,
credo ch'io vidi, perchè più di largo
dicendo questo, mi sento ch'io godo.

The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty. But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from negative to positive. The negative is the more importunate. 13
The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary scaffold, is complete from the most sensuous to the most intellectual and the most spiritual. Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most elusive:

Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse
lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse.

Per entro sè l'eterna margarita
ne recepette, com' acqua recepe
raggio di luce, permanendo unita.

or

Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fe' Glauco nel gustar dell' erba,
che il fe' consorto in mar degli altri dei. 2

Again, in the Purgatorio, for instance in Canto XVI and Canto XVIII, occur passages of pure exposition of philosophy, the philosophy of Aristotle strained through the schools.

Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
ma l' altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
o per poco o per troppo di vigore...

We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.

Onde convenne legge per fren porre...

It is one of the greatest merits of Dante's poem that the vision is so nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as "poetry," is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole. 14
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valéry's "modern poet" who attempts "to produce in us a state." A state, in itself, is nothing whatever. 15
M. Valéry's account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and with the tendencies of such a work as William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success—but to set something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader's particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words. Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something perceived. When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted.

You couldn't do any better.


Well , that's all very easy for you to say.

[Marlin]

I presume you've been indoctrinated by those new wave "Dante was just telling a good story" morons.

And I had such high hopes for you...

[The Truth]

Post a picture of a turd or something - that'd be way funnier.

[Marlin]

Enjoy... (http://www.turdtwister.com/)

[The Truth]

A vast improvement.

[Marlin]

Good to see your parents didn't cut down on their alcohol consumption to save money for your education...

[The Truth]

Sosh Marlin is posting vile links again.

:(

[Marlin]

Sosh, don't listen to him. Snot true, I swear it.

[The Truth]

Blasphemer!!!!!

[Marlin]

Jehovah, Jehovah!

Cue Cottee arriving in seconds with...

[sosh]

well, as long as you´re not able to make a joke about anything else than my bodyparts, im off..

:no: :(
im actually a bit tired of hearing jokes after jokes that only is based upon the fact im a girl.. im much more than that.. just a shame you dont realize that...

:wave:

[Marlin]

Sh1te. I knew the Dante was overdoing it.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by sosh
well, as long as you´re not able to make a joke about anything else than my bodyparts, im off..

:no: :(
im actually a bit tired of hearing jokes after jokes that only is based upon the fact im a girl.. im much more than that.. just a shame you dont realize that...

:wave:

sosh - please don't take it like that. We're all more than happy for you to make jokes about our body parts (well , Marlin and Truth are , anyway) I can only say that , for my part , I have turned over a new leaf and do not intend posting in that vein again . Its just the appalling influence of the other two.

[Marlin]

He's right, blame us. Grandad doesn't usually misbehave, at least not unless you count his incontinence...

[sosh]

okay then... yeah, its funny SOMETIMES, not every day though... theres plenty of other jokes...:rolleyes: :p

[FtangFtang]

There . You see that sosh ? Bowelist can be so much more hurtful than sexist.

[Marlin]

As can be being bowdlerised...

[sosh]

have no idea of what you mean by that...

[Marlin]

It wasn't a reference to anything unpleasant. Infact it relates to the absence of anything unpleasant, which is a rarity in this thread...

[sosh]

okay then.. :D

[Loose Cannon]

Sosh - when can we be alone again?

:love:

[sosh]

well, logg in to msn and i will give you a lesson!
:chainsaw: :angryfire

[Karaja]

Originally posted by StretfordEnd
Then perhaps you should invest in a dictionary, COLLINS do a rather good one :rolleyes:

I am sorry Mr.Leg End, I don't have the HONOR of owning a COLLINS ENGLISH DICTIONARY like your good self does :rolleyes:

[Marlin]

That is appalling grammar. Apologise at once.

[The Truth]

Christ I leave this site for 5 minutes and Marlin and Cottee drive away the only female we have. My natural charm has obviously been sorely missed.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by The Truth
Christ I leave this site for 5 minutes and Marlin and Cottee drive away the only female we have. My natural charm has obviously been sorely missed.

No Truth , not only is she not falling for the old flannel anymore , she has just slapped me down with a metaphoric wet one. Ouch ! :eek:

[The Truth]

I blame the fishy one (yeah Marlin, that's you). His constant stream of sexual innuendo is just too much. I've tried talking to him about it but he just thinks it's funny. Personally I find it deeply offensive.

[FtangFtang]

Originally posted by The Truth
I blame the fishy one (yeah Marlin, that's you). His constant stream of sexual innuendo is just too much. I've tried talking to him about it but he just thinks it's funny. Personally I find it deeply offensive.

Bit dodgy getting Marlin started on fish in this context . Oh well , too late.

[john07]

Originally posted by Cotteeboy
I must here and now confess that I have never been out with a woman who used a vibrator.....But then again why would she ?

:Worship:

She'd keep spilling her drink?????????:laugh:

[Marlin]

Fish.....

Innuendo.....

No. I promised.

I think we should get this back on firm, safe terrain. Which is better, Dangermouse or Superted?

Troof, no jokes about Spottyman having the clap.

[The Truth]

Dangermouse kicks Superted's ass.

[Marlin]

But Dangermouse never pretended to be an ordinary mouse. That was part of Superted's allure. He'd go unnoticed then strike when least expected.

Plus, Texas Pete was far harder than Baron Greenback.

[The Truth]

Ok enough of this. Marlin is a stinky pants and a smelly poo.

[Marlin]

You just can't maintain a highbrow conversation like me- always resorting to name calling, you donkey raping shit eater...

[The Truth]

I have striven to maintain a high standard of both humour and debate in this thread, a standard which you have continually lowered with your incessant references to male/female genitalia and infantile allusions to your bowel movements. I have, therefore, come to the belated conclusion that you are indeed a cumguzzling gutter slut and shall be treating you as such. Prepare to be pimped. I am going to E-Bay your ass.


:wave:

[The Truth]

I have just received a $4 bid from a resident of Burwell, Nebraska.

[Marlin]

That's not a bad idea. I'm going to start selling some other members...

[sosh]

see? u need me here, to keep order and peace...:rolleyes:

[Error]

Sosh, where have you been? :love:

[sosh]

here and there... and you? banned again? :D

[The Truth]

I'm back from footie and we won 3-2. I was brilliant.

[sosh]

arent you always? ;)

[The Truth]

Not always. Sometimes I'm AMAZING.

:cool2:

[sosh]

lol were are talking about footie here and not your work, ay? u lazy thing! lol

[Marlin]

Don't believe a word he says. He's worse than Stepanovs, and the two goals he scored were both at the wrong end.

I'm sure there's a double entendre in there somewhere...

[sosh]

youre not the one to talk about wrong ends, are you? :laugh:

[The Truth]

Marlin is just jealous because the only exercise he gets is when Tariq tells him to bend over.

[Marlin]

I work myself out every day thank you very much.

I get harder every time.

[The Truth]

Sosh - please express your disgust at the thought of an erect Marlin.

[Marlin]

What do you mean?

[sosh]

okay... :Mexican: yay! it worked.. who would have thought that?