John Stuart Mill on Nature

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Natures everyday performances.

Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; & in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.

If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, Nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, & does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another.

Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, & has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve …

All this, Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy & of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best & noblest indifferently with the meanest & worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest & worthiest enterprises, & often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; & it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them.

She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence.

Such are Natures dealings with life.

Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness.

In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death.

Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; & Nature does this too on the largest scale & with the most callous indifference.

A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root, starves a million of people.

The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize & appropriate the wealth of the rich & the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding & killing as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents.

Natures explosions of fire damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague & cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias.

Even the love of 'order' which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is in fact a contradiction of them.

All which people are accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' & its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of Natures ways.

Anarchy & the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, & death, by a hurricane & a pestilence

Visitors

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But when I am but sick and I might infect they have no remedy but their absence and my isolation.It is an excuse to them that are great and pretend and yet are loath to come. It is an inhibition to those who would truly come, because they may be made carriers of the infection to others by their coming. [5]


They visit me and I attempt to keep
A social smile upon my face. Even here
Some ceremony is required

Elizabeth Jennings: Sequence in hospital V The Visitors

Euthanasia

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God has kept the power of death in his own hands lest any man should bribe death.

If man knew the gain of death, the ease of death, he would provoke death to assist him by any hand which he might use. [16]


Mr Gibson used to tell him that his motto would always be 'kill or cure,' & to this Mr Coxe once made answer that he thought it was the best motto a doctor could have; for if he could not cure the patient, it was surely best to get him out of his misery quietly, & at once.

Mr Wynne looked up in surprise, & observed that he should be afraid that such putting out of misery might be looked upon as homicide by some people. Mr Gibson said in a dry tone, that for his part he should not mind the imputation of homicide, but that it would not do to make away with profitable patients in so speedy a manner; & that he thought that as long as they were willing & able to pay 2/6 for the doctors visit, it was his duty to keep them alive; of course, when they became paupers the case was different. Mr Wynne pondered over this speech; Mr Coxe only laughed.

At last Mr Wynne said: 'But you go every morning, sir, before breakfast to see old Nancy Grant, & you've ordered her this medicine, sir, which is the most costly in Corbyns bill?'

'Have you not found out how difficult it is for men to live up to their precepts? You’ve a great deal to learn yet, Mr Wynne!' said Mr Gibson, leaving the surgery as he spoke

'I never can make the governor out,' said Mr Wynne, in a tone of utter despair. 'What are you laughing at, Coxey?'

'Oh! Im thinking how blest you are in having parents who have instilled moral principles into your youthful bosom. You'd go & be poisoning all the paupers off, if you hadn’t been told that murder was a crime by your mother; youd be thinking you were doing as you were bid, & quote old Gibsons words when you came to be tried. "Please, my lord judge, they were not able to pay for my visits, & so I followed the rules of the profession as taught me by Mr Gibson, the great surgeon at Hollingford, & poisoned the paupers"

Mrs Gaskell: Wives & Daughters

Death

When heaven had not yet come into existence,
When men had not yet come into existence,
When gods had not yet been born,
When death had not yet come into existence …

Egyptian Pyramid Texts

God, who is immortal himself, put a spark of immortality into us. We might have blown it into a flame but blew it out by our first sin [1]

But to cure the body, the root, the occasion of diseases is a work reserved for the great Physician which he does never any other way but by glorifying these bodies in the next world. [22]

Si monumenturn requiris, circumspice

John Donne in his shroud - St Pauls Cathedral


Pound St Pauls Church into atoms, & consider any single atom; it is, to be sure, good for nothing: but, put all these atoms together, & you have St Pauls Church Dr Johnson in Boswells Life 20 July 1763

You can see, Samuel Johnson was what you might call a Premature Molecular Biologist; otherwise he could have considered the possibility that reassembly may have yielded Liverpool Station

Erwin Chagaff

Respect

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There was an ancient way of celebrating the memory of men who deserved well of the state. A statue in a style which was then called Hermes, the head and shoulders of a man standing upon a square pillar. Those shoulders were without arms and hands [20]

Ancient Athenians constructed their prison in about 450BC, an edifice which they called "The Peoples Thing"

Some Athenians & foreign residents were denounced for allegedly committing gross sacrilege by profaning the aweful mysteries of Eleusis in unlicensed private celebrations or by mutilating the ithyphallic images sacred to Hermes, the god of travel & other social commerce.

History Today

The end of the world

The heavens have had their dropsy, they drowned the world. They shall have their fever and burn the world.

The world had a foreknowledge of the Flood 120 years before it came and so some made provision against it and were saved.

The fever shall break out in an instant and consume all.

The Flood did no harm to the heavens from whence it fell, it did not put out those lights, it did not quench those heats.

But the fever, the fire shall burn the furnace itself, annihilate those heavens that breathe it out . [10]

When Nemesis wreaks her vengeance
Let us pray that it will be
Not through war & conflagration
Or the fury of the sea,
Not from nuclear desolation
And extinction by degrees
From slow corroding poisons
Or untreatable disease,
But rather as a blessing
That the kindly gods bestow;
The obliterating mercy
Of interminable snow
That falls until no lineaments
Of raddled earth remain
And the innocence of Eden
Is restored to us again

Philip A Nicholson

The world goes round

I am up and I seem to stand, and I go round.

I am a new argument of the new philosophy that the earth moves round.

Why may I not believe that the whole earth moves in a round motion though that seem to me to stand when I seem to stand and yet am carried in a giddy and circular motion as I stand? [21]

Wittgenstein is alleged to have said:
"Why do people always say that it was natural for man to assume that the sun goes round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?"
The friend responded, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth."
To which Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?"

Temptation

If there had been no Woman would Man have been his own tempter? [21]

It is unnecessarily discourteous to Cleopatra's beauty to suggest that Antony's infatuation had no cause. The connection between female beauty & male infatuation is one of the most regular sequences of cause & effect observable in everyday life

EH Carr

Time

But if we consider time to be but the measure of motion, with three stations, past, present and future, yet the first and last of these are not. One is not now and the other is not yet. [14]

Past, future meant
Nothing. Only the present moment bore
This huge, vague fear, this wish for nothing more

Elizabeth Jennings: Sequence in hospital III After an operation

Complexity community

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. Any particular community life touches only part of the nature of each civilised man. If the man is wholly subordinated to the common life, he is dwarfed ... Communities lack the intricacies of human nature

Alfred North Whitehead

Concentric

God, man, angels, animals, planets, elements all had their place in a world where man & earth were at the centre & heaven beyond its circumference. This view of the world was emotionally satisfying, religiously orthodox & poetically inspiring

Hugh Kearney Science & Change 1500-1700

Vacuum

Neither God nor Nature will permit a vacuum. And so solitude is unnatural, not loved by God [5]

The chair on which I sit seems a hard fact, but I know that I sit on a nearly perfect vacuum.

The wood of the chair consists of fibres, which consist of molecules, which consist of atoms which are miniature solar systems with central nucleus & electrons for planets.

It all sounds very pretty, but it is the dimensions that matter.

The space which an electron occupies is only 1/50,000th in diameter of its distance from the nucleus; the rest of the atomic interior is empty. If the nucleus were enlarged to the size of a dried pea, the nearest electron would circle around it at a distance of about 175 yards.

A room with a few specks of dust floating in the air is overcrowded compared with the emptiness which I call a chair

Arthur Koestler

Fear of oblivion

I know not what it is that I fear now. I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease. [6]

Now, slowly,
My heart, hand, whole body yield

To fear. Bed, ward, window begin
To lose their solidity. Faces no longer
Look kind or needed; yet I still fight the stronger
Terror - oblivion - the needle thrusts in

from Sequence in hospital: I Pain. Elizabeth Jennings

Monotheism

Now there is but one God though there is a plurality of persons in God. All his external actions testify a love of society and communion.In heaven there are orders of angels and armies of martyrs and in that house many mansions.In earth there are families, cities, churches, colleges, all plural things. [5]

No great religious system ever developed into a literally pure monotheism. None has ever gone so far as to imagine a supreme God absolutely isolated, without angels & underlings, alone controlling this vast universe - Sir George Ellis

Hospital

How many are sicker than I and thrown into hospitals where (as fish left upon the sand must wait for the tide) they must wait for the physicians hour of visiting and then can be but visited? [7]

The medieval hospitium, the long nave with the door at one end, rows of beds or cubicles on either side & the altar at the far end was too like the modern hospital ward, the long room with the door at one end, the tightly packed rows of beds down either side & the steriliser at the far end, for the similarity to be accidental

C Neuman: The Hospital as Teaching Centre

Kings

This is also another misery of this king of man, the heart, which is also applicable to the kings of this world, great men. The venom and poison of every pestilential disease directs itself to the heart and the malevolence of men is also directed upon the greatest and the best. [11]


You send an image hurrying out of doors
When you depose a king & seize his throne
You exile symbols when you take by force.

And even if you say the power's your own,
That you are your own hero, your own king
You will not wear the meaning of the crown.

The power a ruler has is how men bring
Their thoughts to bear upon him, how their minds
Construct the grandeur from the simple thing.

And kings prevented from their proper ends
Make a deep lack in men's imaginings;
Heroes are nothing without worshipping.

Will not diminish into lovers, friends

Elizabeth Jennings: Kings

Prison

Even prison gives the prisoner space to take two or three steps. The Anchorites that barked themselves up in hollow trees and immured themselves in hollow walls, that perverse man who barrelled himself in a tub, all could stand or sit and enjoy some change of posture. [3]

The worst part of imprisonment is being locked up by yourself. You come face to face with time & there is nothing more terrifying than to be alone with sheer time. Then the ghosts come crowding in. They can be very sinister, very mischievous, raising a thousand doubts in your mind about the people outside, their loyalty. Was your sacrifice worth the trouble? What would your life have been like if you hadnt got involved?

Nelson Mandela

Ashes to ashes

The burning of the of the upper turf of some ground puts a new and a vigorous youth into that soils fruitfulness out of that which was barren before, and by that which is the most barren of all, ashes. [22]

The bark of a 4700-year-old pine in California

The fires [in Southern California] are a violent & highly effective way of recycling dead vegetation into ash that fertilises the soil. They purge the land of pests & diseases & open up woodlands to sunlight, giving the chance for fresh new vegetation to sprout up. Fire is so natural that many Californian plants rely on a good blaze. The famous sequoias grow their seedlings best on deep-burnt sites free of grasses & other plants; the burnt remains of scrub oak may look like charcoal but they resprout from the roots or branches; and lodgepole pine trees seal their cones with a wax that only melts when the fires come, releasing their precious seed

Paul Simons: Times of London

Remember me when I am dead

The first person who takes notice is the sexton who buries them, buries them in oblivion too.For they do but fill up the number of the dead in the statistics and we shall never hear their names till we read them in the Book of Life with our own. [7]


It is strange with how little notice, good, bad or indifferent, a man may live & die in London … he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive

Charles Dickens: Sketches By Boz