Concord Days

1

Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence Concerning New England," describes the company of settlers on their way from Cambridge, under the lead of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the principal founder of Concord.

2

Verstegan, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, in Antiquities concerning the most Noble and Renowned English Nation, 1634, treating of the origin of names, says: —

"For a general rule, the reader may please to note, that our surnames of families, be they of one or more syllables, that have either a k or a w, are all of them of the ancient English race, so that neither the k or w are used in Latin, nor in any of the three languages thereon depending, which sometimes causes confusion in the writing our names (originally coming from the Teutonic) in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish languages. Neither the k nor w being in the Latin nor in the French, they could not be with the Normans in use, whose language was French, as also their surnames. As for the surnames in our Norman catalogue which have in them the letters k and w, which the French do not use, these are not to be thought to have been Norman, but of those gentlemen of Flanders which Baldwin, the Earl of that country and father-in-law unto the Conquerer, did send to aid him. Besides these, sundry other surnames do appear to have been in the Netherlands and not in Normandy; albeit they are without doubt set in the list of the Normans. And whereas in searching for such as may remain in England of the race of the Danes, they are not such as, according to the vulgar opinion, have their surnames ending in son. In the Netherlands, it is often found that very many surnames end in son, as Johnson, Williamson, Phillipson, and the like; i. e. sons of that name of John, etc.

"Then some have their surnames according to the color of hair or complexion, as white, black, brown, gray, and reddish; and those in whom these names from such causes begin, do thereby lose their former denomination. Some again for their surnames have the names of beasts; and it should seem for one thing or another wherein they represented some property of theirs; as lion, wolf, fox, bull, buck, hare, hart, lamb, and the like. Others of birds; as cock, peacock, swan, crane, heron, partridge, dove, sparrow, and the like. Others of fish; as salmon, herring, rock, pilchard, and the like. And albeit the ancestors of the bearers of these had in other times other surnames, yet because almost all these and other like names do belong to our English tongue, I do think him to be of the ancient English, and if not all, yet the most part. And here by occasion of these names, I must note, and that as it were for a general rule, that what family soever has their first and chief coat of arms correspondent unto their surname, it is evident sign that it had that surname before it had those arms."

3

To the list of ancient authors, as Cato, Columella, Varro, Palladius, Virgil, Theocritus, Tibullus, selections might be added from Cowley, Marlowe, Browne, Spenser, Tusser, Dyer, Phillips, Shenstone, Cowper, Thomson, and others less known. Evelyn's works are of great value, his Kalendarium Hortense particularly. And for showing the state of agriculture and of the language in his time, Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Husbandry is full of information, while his quaint humor adds to his rugged rhymes a primitive charm. Then of the old herbals, Gerard's is best known. He was the father of English herbalists, and had a garden attached to his house in Holbern. Coles published his Adam in Eden, the Paradise of Plants, in 1659; Austin his Treatise on Fruit Trees ten years earlier. Dr. Holland's translation of the School of Salerne, or the Regiment of Health, appeared in 1649. Thos. Tryon wrote on the virtues of plants, and on health, about the same time, and his works are very suggestive and valuable. Miller, gardener to the Chelsea Gardens, gave the first edition of his Gardener's Dictionary to the press in 1731. Sir William Temple also wrote sensibly on herbs. Cowley's Six Books of Plants was published in English in 1708. Phillips' History of Cultivated Plants, etc., published in 1822, is a book of great merit. So is Culpepper's Herbal.

4

"Dialectics treat of pure thought and of the method of arriving at it. A current misapprehension on the subject of dialectics here presents itself. Most people understand it to mean argument, and they believe that truths may be arrived at and held by such argument placed in due logical form. They demand the proof of an assertion, and imply something of weakness in the reasoning power in those who fail to give this. It is well to understand what proof means. Kant has shown us in his Critique of Pure Reason, that the course of all such ratiocination is a movement in a circle. One assumes in his premises what he wishes to prove, and then unfolds it as the result. The assumptions are in all cases mere sides of antinomies or opposite theses, each of which has validity and may be demonstrated against the other. Thus the debater moves round and round and presupposes one-sided premises which must be annulled before he can be in a state to perceive the truth. Argument of this kind the accomplished dialectician never engages in; it is simply egotism when reduced to its lowest terms. The question assumed premises that were utterly inadmissible

"The process of true proof does not proceed in the manner of argumentation; it does not assume its whole result in its premises, which are propositions of reflection, and then draw them out syllogistically. Speculative truth is never contained analytically in any one or in all of such propositions of reflection. It is rather the negative of them, and hence is transcendent in its entire procedure. It rises step by step, synthetically, through the negation of the principle assumed at the beginning, until, finally, the presupposition of all is reached. It is essentially a going from the part to the whole. Whatever is seized by the dialectic is turned on its varied sides, and careful note is made of its defects, i. e. what it lacks within itself to make it possible. That which it implies is added to it, as belonging to its totality, and thus onward progress is made until the entire comprehension of its various phases is attained. The ordinary analytic proof is seen to be shallow after more or less experience in it. The man of insight sees that it is a 'child's play, – a mere placing of the inevitable dogmatism a step or two back – that is all. Real speculation proceeds synthetically beyond what it finds inadequate, until it reaches the adequate.'"

5

"Infants," says Olympiodorus, "are not seen to laugh for some time after birth, but pass the greater part of their time in sleep; however, in their sleep they appear both to smile and cry. But can this any otherwise happen than through the soul agitating the circulations of their animal nature in conformity with the passions it has experienced before birth into the body? Besides, our looking into ourselves when we seek to discover any truth, shows that we inwardly contain truth, though concealed in the darkness of oblivion." Does atom animate and revive thought, or thought animate and illuminate atom? And which the elder?

6

This improvisation is preserved in its words. Josiah, it may be named, was under seven years of age, and the other children were chiefly between the ages of six and twelve years.

7

Here I was obliged to pause, as I was altogether fatigued with keeping my pen in long and uncommonly constant requisition. I was enabled to preserve the words better than usual, because Josiah had so much of the conversation, whose enunciation is slow, and whose fine choice of language and steadiness of mind, makes him easy to follow and remember. —Recorder.

8

"Nothing is more interesting in the history of the human mind than the tendency of enlightened souls in all ages to gather in clusters, as in the material world crystallization goes on by the gathering of individual atoms about one axis of formation. Thus the schools of Greek Philosophy, the Pythagorean, the Eleatic, the Peripatetic, the Alexandrian, were human crystallizations about a central idea, and generally in a given locality, – as Samos, Athens, or the Lucanian city of Elea, where Zeno learned lessons of Parmenides, and whence they both journeyed to Athens in the youth of Socrates, and held their "Radical Club" at the house of Pythodorus in the Ceramicus. The Schoolmen and the Mystics of the middle ages clustered together in the same way about Abelard. Thomas Aquinas, Occam, Gerson, Giardano Bruno, the early Italian poets, rally in groups in the same way; so do the Elizabethan Dramatists, the Puritan Politicians, the English Platonists. Coming nearer our own time, there are the Lake Poets of England, the Weimar circle of genius, in Germany, the Transcendental Idealists in Concord and Boston, and finally, the German American Philosophers of St. Louis, concerning whom we now speak. In all these Schools and Fellowships of the human soul, a common impulse, aided by accident of locality and other circumstances, trivial only in appearance, has led to the formation of that strictest bond, the friendship of united aspirations. New England has so long been considered the special home of ideas, that it may surprise one to learn that St. Louis, on the Mississippi, has become the focus of a metaphysical renaissance; yet such it has become. A few Germans, New Englanders, and Western men gathered there, having found each other out, began to meet, expatiate, and confer about Kant and Hegel, Fichte, and Sir William Hamilton. Soon they formed a Philosophical Society, and by and by, having accumulated many manuscripts, they began to publish a Magazine of "Speculative Philosophy." At first, this publication came out semi-occasionally, but finally settled down into a regular Quarterly, with contributors on both sides of the Atlantic, and from various schools of metaphysical thought. The January number is, indeed, a remarkable production. Every article is good, and most of them profound; no such collection of striking varieties of philosophic thought has been made public for a long time as this. The Journal is edited by William T. Harris, ll.d., Superintendent of the Public Schools of St. Louis."

9

His works are comprised in fifty-four books, which his disciple Porphyry divided into six Enneads, assigning, agreeably to the meaning of the word, nine books to every Ennead. Thomas Taylor translated parts of these only.

10

"It would make a most delightful and instructive essay," says Coleridge, "to draw up a critical, and, where possible, biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at Cambridge, from the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II. The greater number were Platonists, so called, at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson (chaplain of Charles I and Vicar of Newcastle upon Tyne), Henry More, John Smith, and some others (Norris, Glanvil). Jeremy Taylor was a Gassendist, and, as far as I know, he is the only exception. They were alike admirers of Grotius, which, in Taylor, was consistent with the tone of all his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and the skeleton half truths of the systematic divines of the synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's Song preachers on the other. What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge, – an examination of the scales and weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine; but he turned abruptly back, and the honor of establishing a complete προπαιδεία (Organon) of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards." —Lit. Remains, iii. 416.