Month: October 2016

Tolstoy: “In Todhunter’s ‘Theory of the Beautiful’ (1872), beauty is infinite loveliness…”

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In Todhunter’s Theory of the Beautiful (1872), beauty is infinite loveliness, which we apprehend both by reason and by the enthusiasm of love. The recognition of beauty as being such depends on taste; there can be no criterion for it. The only approach to a definition is found in culture. (What culture is, is not defined.) Intrinsically, art that which affects us through lines, colours, sounds, or words is not the product of blind forces, but of reasonable ones, working, with mutual helpfulness, towards a reasonable aim. Beauty is the reconciliation of contradictions.

From What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Aylmer Maude, New York : Funk & Wagnalls (1904), p. 35. (archive.org).

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Richard Whatley: Defending Logic

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Monument in the west aisle of the south transept dedicated to Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin.

Those who have spoken of Induction or of Example, as a distinct kind of Argument in a Logical point of view, have fallen into the common error of confounding Logical with Rhetorical distinctions, and have wandered from their subject as much as a writer on the orders of Architecture would do who should introduce the distinction between buildings of brick and of marble

In 1826 Richard Whately, future Archbishop of Dublin, published his Elements of Logic. Soon after its publication, the great wave of 19th century logical works began, from writers such as George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, Charles Sanders Peirce and Bernard Bolzano. While Whately’s work contained none of the innovations of these later works, it paved the way for them1

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His Native Potatoes

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NPG D12313; Edmund Burke ('Cincinnatus in retirement') by James Gillray, published by Elizabeth d'Achery
by James Gillray, published by Elizabeth d’Achery, hand-coloured etching, published 23 August 1782
© National Portrait Gallery, London

For National Potato Day, a satirical portrait of Edmund Burke eating potatoes. The caption reads “Cincinnatus in retirement falsely supposed to represent Jesuit Padre driven back to his native potatoes. See Romanish Commonwealth.”

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