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Looking at Philosophy
The Unbearable Heaviness of
Philosophy Made Lighter

SEVENTH EDITION

Donald Palmer
Professor Emeritus at College of Marin
(Formerly Visiting Assistant Professor,
North Carolina State University)
LOOKING AT PHILOSOPHY
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 Preface

Wittgenstein once said that a whole philosophy book could be written

consisting of nothing but jokes. This is not that book, nor does this book
treat the history of philosophy as a joke. This book takes philosophy
seriously but not gravely. As the subtitle indicates, the goal of the book is
to lighten the load a bit. How to do this without simply throwing the
cargo overboard? First, by presenting an overview of Western philosophy
from the sixth century b.c.e. into the early twenty-first century in a way
that introduces the central philosophical ideas of the West and their
evolution in a concise, readable format without trivializing them, but at
the same time, without pretending to have exhausted them or to have
plumbed their depths. Second, following a time-honored medieval
tradition, by illuminating the margins of the text. Some of these
illuminations, namely those that attempt to schematize difficult ideas,
I hope will be literally illuminating. Most of them, however, are simply
attempts in a lighter vein to interrupt the natural propensity of the
philosophers to succumb to the pull of gravity. (Nietzsche said that only
the grave lay in that direction.) But even these philosophical jokes, I hope,
have a pedagogical function. They should serve to help the reader retain
the ideas that are thereby gently mocked. Thirty years of teaching the
subject, which I love—and which has provoked more than a few laughs on
the part of my students—convinces me that this technique should work.
I do not claim to have achieved Nietzsche’s “joyful wisdom,” but I agree
with him that there is such a thing and that we should strive for it.

iii
 Before turning you over to Thales and his metaphysical water
(the first truly heavy water), I want to say a word about the women
and their absence. Why are there so few women in a book of this
nature? There are a number of possible explanations, including
these:

1. Women really are deficient in the capacity for sublimation

and hence are incapable of participating in higher culture
(as Schopenhauer and Freud suggested).
2. Women have in fact contributed greatly to the history of
philosophy, but their contributions have been denied or
suppressed by the chauvinistic male writers of the histories
of philosophy.
3. Women have been (intentionally or unintentionally)
systematically eliminated from the history of philosophy by
political, social, religious, and psychological manipulations
of power by a deeply entrenched, jealous, and fearful
patriarchy.

I am certain that the first thesis does not merit our serious
attention. I think there is some truth to the second thesis, and I
may be partially guilty of suppressing that truth. For example, the
names of at least seventy women philosophers in the late classical
period alone have been recorded, foremost of which are Aspasia,
Diotima, Aretê, and Hypatia. (Hypatia has been belatedly honored
by having a journal of feminist philosophy named after her.)
Jumping over centuries to our own age, we find a number of well-
known women contributing to the history of philosophy in the first
half of the twentieth century, including Simone de Beauvoir,
Susanne Langer, and L. Susan Stebbing.
However, no matter how original, deep, and thought-provoking
were the ideas of these philosophers, I believe that, for a number of
reasons (those reasons given in the second and third theses are
probably most pertinent here), few of them have been treated by
historians of thought with as much attention as have their male
counterparts. Fortunately, things have begun to change in the past few
years. An adequate account of contemporary philosophy could not in

iv Preface
good faith ignore the major contributions to the analytic tradition of
philosophers Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, G. E. M. Anscombe, and
Judith Jarvis Thompson, nor those contributions to the Continental
tradition made by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Monique Wittig, Luce
Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Furthermore, a new wave of women
philosophers is already beginning to have considerable impact on the
content of contemporary philosophy and not merely on its style.
So, despite the risks, I defend the third thesis. I truly believe that
if women had not been systematically excluded from major
participation in the history of philosophy,1 that history would be even
richer, deeper, more compassionate, and more interesting (not to
mention more joyful) than it already is. It is not for nothing that the
book ends with a discussion of the work of a contemporary woman
philosopher and with a question posed to philosophy herself, “Quo
vadis?”—Whither goest thou?
In this, the seventh edition, I have made a number of changes
from the former editions. Where readers have pointed out ambiguity
or lack of clarity, I have changed the wording or rewritten whole
paragraphs. In Chapter 5, I have added a section on John Locke’s
theory of personhood, which has become a topic of philosophical
interest in recent years. I have updated some illustrations, deleted
a few that no longer seem timely, and I have added some new ones. I
have had some help with all seven editions of this book. I’d like to
thank the reviewers who made suggestions for the seventh edition.
They include

Daniel Korman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Nathaniel Nicol, Washington State University
Jonathan Weinberg, University of Arizona
Paul Wilson, Texas State University
Jim Bull, my editor at Mayfield Publishing Company for the first
two editions, had faith in this project from its inception. For the new
edition, my development editor, Katy Gabel, and the project manager,
Maria McGreal, at McGraw-Hill have been exceptionally helpful. My
wife, Leila May, has been my most acute critic and my greatest source

Preface v
of inspiration. She kept me laughing during the dreariest stages of the
production of the manuscript, often finding on its pages jokes that
weren’t meant to be there. I hope she managed to catch most of them.
There probably are still a few pages that are funnier than I intended
them to be.

Note
1. See Mary Warnock, ed., Women Philosophers (London: J. M. Dent, 1996).

vi Preface
 Contents

Preface iii

Introduction 1

1. The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Sixth and Fifth Centuries b.c.e. 10
Thales 11
Anaximander 15
Anaximenes 19
Pythagoras 21
Xenophanes 25
Heraclitus 28
Parmenides 31
Zeno 34
Empedocles 36
Anaxagoras 38
Leucippus and Democritus 41

2. The Athenian Period

Fifth and Fourth Centuries b.c.e. 50
The Sophists 50
Protagoras 51
Gorgias 52
Thrasymachus 53
Callicles and Critias 53
Socrates 55
Plato 60
Aristotle 72

vii
3. The Hellenistic and Roman Periods
Fourth Century b.c.e. through Fourth
Century c.e. 95
Epicureanism 95
Stoicism 99
Skepticism 104
Neoplatonism 105

4. Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

Fifth through Fifteenth Centuries 111
Saint Augustine 115
The Encyclopediasts 119
John Scotus Eriugena 120
Saint Anselm 123
Muslim and Jewish Philosophies 127
Averroës 129
Maimonides 130
The Problem of Faith and Reason 132
The Problem of the Universals 133
Saint Thomas Aquinas 135
William of Ockham 146
Renaissance Philosophers 151

5. Continental Rationalism and British

Empiricism
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 162
Descartes 162
Spinoza 179
Leibniz 183
Hobbes 188
Locke 193
Berkeley 202
Hume 208
Kant 216

6. Post-Kantian British and Continental Philosophy

The Nineteenth Century 236
Hegel 236
Schopenhauer 244

viii Contents
 Kierkegaard 254
Marx 264
Nietzsche 276
Utilitarianism 284
Bentham 285
Mill 288

7. The Phenomenological Tradition and Its

Aftermath
The Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
into the Twenty-First 298
Husserl 298
Heidegger 302
Sartre 310
Structuralism and Poststructuralism 317
Saussure 318
Lévi-Strauss 320
Lacan 325
Derrida 329

8. Pragmatism and the Analytic Tradition

The Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
into the Twenty-First 339
Pragmatism 339
James 340
Dewey 346
The Analytic Tradition 351
Frege 352
Moore 357
Russell 362
Logical Positivism 369
Wittgenstein 375
Quine 386
Farewell to the Twentieth Century 396
Nussbaum 396

Glossary of Philosophical Terms 414

Selected Bibliography 433
Index 442

Contents ix
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 Introduction

The story of Western philosophy begins in Greece—or, more

specifically, in the Greek settlements on the coast of the
Persian Empire, in present-day Turkey.

1
The Greek word “Logos” is the source of the English word “logic”
as well as all the “logies” in terms like “biology,” “sociology,” and
“psychology,” where “logos” means the theory, or study, or rationalization
of something. “Logos” also means “word” in Greek, so it involves the act
of speaking, or setting forth an idea in a clear manner. “Logos,”
therefore, designates a certain kind of thinking about the world, a kind
of logical analysis that places things in the context of reason and
explains them with the pure force of thought. Such an intellectual
exercise was supposed to lead to wisdom (Sophia), and those who
dedicated themselves to Logos were thought of as lovers of wisdom
(love = philo), hence as philosophers.
What was there before philosophy, before Logos? There was
Mythos—a certain way of thinking that placed the world in the context
of its supernatural origins. Mythos explained worldly things by tracing
them to exceptional, sometimes sacred, events that caused the world
to be as it is now. In the case of the Greeks, Mythos meant tracing
worldly things to the dramatic acts of the gods of Mount Olympus.
The narratives describing these origins—myths—are not only
explanatory but also morally
exemplary and ritualistically You will wear your
instructive; that is, they baseball cap backward
provide the rules that, if because the gods wore
followed by all, would
theirs backward!
create the foundation of
a genuine community of What’s baseball?
togetherness—a “we” and
an “us” instead of a mere
conglomeration of individuals who
could only say “I” and “me.” Hence,
myths are often conservative in
nature. They seek to maintain
the status quo by replicating
origins: “So behaved the sacred
ancestors, so must we behave.”
Myths had the advantage of
creating a whole social world Explaining Ancient Greek Customs

2 Introduction
in which all acts had meaning. They had the disadvantage of creating
static societies, of resisting innovation, and, many would say, of being
false. Then, suddenly, philosophy happened—Logos broke upon the
scene, at least according to the traditional account. (There are other
accounts, however, accounts that suggest that Western Logos—
philosophy and science—is just our version of myth.) But let us suppose
that something different did take place in Greece about 700 b.c.e.1
Let’s suppose that the “first” philosopher’s explanation of the flooding
of the Nile River during the summer (most rivers tend to dry up in the
summer) as being caused by desert winds (desert winds, not battles or
love affairs among gods) really does constitute novelty. Natural
phenomena are explained by other natural phenomena, not by
supernatural events in “dream time”—the time of the ancient gods. In
that case, Greece truly is the cradle of Western philosophy.
Why Greece, and not, for example, Egypt or Judea? Well, let’s be
honest here. Nobody knows. Still, a number of historical facts are
relevant to the explanation we seek. For one, there was a very
productive contact between ancient Greece and the cultures of the
eastern Mediterranean region—Persia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus,
southern Italy, and
Once, many many years ago, there was a big Egypt, among
bang. But great fathers Galileo and Newton others. The
were not dismayed. They conferred Greeks were a
and said, “It is good.” well-traveled
group and were
extremely adept at
borrowing ideas, conventions,
and artistic forms from the
cultures they encountered
and applying these
elements creatively to
their own needs. There is
also a controversial theory
that Greek culture derives
greatly from African sources.2
A Modern Myth?
A Modern Myth? It is at least certain, as one

Introduction 3
historian of Greek ideas has recently said, that “the cultural
achievements of archaic and classical Greece are unthinkable without
Near Eastern resources to draw upon,”3 and eastern North Africa fits
into this map.
Also, unlike the case in some of the surrounding societies, there
was no priestly class of censors in Greece. This observation does not
mean that Greek thinkers had no restrictions on what they could say—
we will see that several charges of impiety were brought against some
of them in the period under study—but that they were able
nevertheless to get away with quite a bit that went against prevailing
religious opinion.
Another historical fact is that the Greek imagination had always
been fertile in its concern with intimate detail. For example, Homer’s
description of Achilles’ shield takes up four pages of the Iliad. In
addition, the many generations of Greek children who grew up on
the poems of Homer and Hesiod4—two of the main vehicles that
transmitted Greek religion—recognized in them their argumentative,

4 Introduction
 Dreaming in Detail
Dreaming in Detail

intellectually combative, and questioning nature. The polemical nature of

Greek drama and poetry would find a new home in Greek philosophy.
A final component of the world into which philosophy was born is
the socioeconomic structure that produced a whole leisured class of
people—mostly male people—with time on their hands that they could
spend meditating on philosophical issues. It is always jolting to
remember that during much of Greece’s history, a major part of the
economic foundation of its society was slave labor and booty from
military conquests. This fact takes some of the luster from “the Glory
that was Greece.”
Still, for whatever reasons, the poetry and drama of the Greeks
demonstrate an intense awareness of change, of the war of the
opposites—summer to winter, hot to cold, light to dark, and that most
dramatic change of all, life to death.

Introduction 5
 Indeed, this sensitivity to the transitory nature of all things
sometimes led the Greeks to pessimism. The poets Homer,
Mimnermus, and Simonides all expressed the idea, “Generations
of men fall like the leaves of the forest.”5
But this sensitivity also led the Greeks to demand an
explanation—one that would be obtained and justified not by the
authority of religious tradition but by the sheer power of human
reason. Here we find an optimism behind the pessimism—the human
mind operating on its own devices is able to discover ultimate truths
about reality.

Generations of Men Fall like the Leaves of the Forest

6 Introduction
 But let us not overemphasize the radicalness of the break made
by the Greek philosophers with the earlier, mythical ways of thinking.
It’s not as if suddenly a bold new atheism emerged, rejecting all
religious explanations or constraints. In fact, atheism as we understand
it today was virtually unknown in the ancient world.6 Rather, these
early Greek philosophers reframed the perennial puzzles about reality
in such a way as to emphasize the workings of nature rather than the
work of the gods. For instance, they tended to demote cosmogony
(theories about the origins of the world) and promote cosmology
(theories about the nature of the world).
This new direction represents the beginnings of a way of thinking
that the Greeks would soon call “philosophy”—the love of wisdom. We
can discern in these early efforts what we now take to be the main
fields of the discipline that we too call philosophy: ontology (theory of
being); epistemology (theory of knowledge); axiology (theory of value),
which includes ethics, or moral philosophy (theory of right behavior),
and aesthetics (theory of beauty, or theory of art); and logic (theory of
correct inference).
In fact, the theories put forth in ancient Greece could be called
the origins of Western science with as much justification as they can
be called the origins of Western philosophy, even though at that early
period no such distinctions could be made. Roughly, I would say that
science deals with problems that can be addressed experimentally by
subsuming the observable events that puzzle us under the dominion of
natural laws and by showing how these laws are related causally to
those events. Philosophy, on the other hand, deals with problems that
require a speculative rather than an experimental approach. Such
problems often require conceptual analysis (the logical scrutiny of
general ideas) rather than observation or data gathering. Consider
these questions, paying special attention to the underlined words:

Can we know why on rare occasions the sun darkens at midday?

Is it true that the moon’s passing between the earth and the sun
causes such events?
Can there be successful experiments that explain this
phenomenon?

Introduction 7
These questions are scientific questions. Now compare these questions
to the following ones, paying attention again to the underlined words:

What is knowledge?
What is truth?
What is causality?
What is value?
What is explanation?
These questions invite conceptual analysis, which is part of philosophy.
But we are moving too fast and looking too far ahead. As I said,
such distinctions had not yet been clearly drawn in the ancient world.
The thinkers there were satisfied to have asked the kinds of questions
that were foundational both to philosophy and to science.
Notice that I stress the asking of the questions that the pre-Socratics
posed rather than the answers given. Logos strives for truth and
completeness but is not always able to provide them. However, this
is not simply a problem for the ancient Greek philosophers; even
twenty-first-century scientists are loath to claim that their theories
lead to absolute certainty, rather they assert only the hope that their
theories prove to be superior to earlier theories and more approximate
to the truth. (As we will see later, conceptual analysis of the idea of
“truth” finds even it to be philosophically problematical.) I would
venture to say that philosophers should be even more wary of claims
to truth and absolute certainty than are scientists. Science is at least
somewhat constrained by observable facts (though, of course, the
concept of “fact” also needs philosophical analysis, as does the concept
of “observable”), while philosophy, often looking for “the bigger picture,”
appeals to some happy combination of reason and imagination. Reader,
beware of the results (but be philosophically aware).

Topics for Consideration

1. Pick some observable phenomenon, such as what we now call the eclipse
of the sun, and explain it from the perspective of science, and then again
from some system of myth. (You may have to visit the library for this
exercise.) Then use these two “stories” to demonstrate the difference
between Logos and Mythos.

8 Introduction
2. Think about your own patterns of belief. Are there any of them that you
would acknowledge as Mythos rather than Logos? Here are two examples:
(A) If you have religious beliefs, how would you characterize them in terms
of this distinction? (B) What do skeptics about science mean when they
assert that science itself is simply an instance of Western Mythos?

Notes
1. I have chosen to use the new dating coordinates b.c.e. (Before the Common Era)
and c.e. (Common Era) rather than the older b.c. (Before Christ) and a.d. (Anno
Domini, or The Year of Our Lord) because the attempt to gauge the whole of
human history from the perspective of a particular religious tradition no longer
seems tenable. But let’s face it: This new system is a bit artificial. Probably there is
something arbitrary about all attempts to date historical events. At least I am not
following the lead of the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who
proclaimed, “History begins with my birth.” (We’ll study Nietzsche later.)
2. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1,
The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1987).
3. Robin Osborne, The Polis and Its Culture, in Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 1,
From the Beginning to Plato, ed. C. C. W. Taylor (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997), 14.
4. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Michael Reck (New York: IconEditions, 1994); Homer,
The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998);
Hesiod, Theogony: Works and Days, trans. Dorothea Wender (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin, 1976).
5. This sentiment can be found in the poems published in Greek Lyric: An Anthology
in Translation, ed. and trans. Andrew M. Miller (Indianapolis and Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing, 1996), 27, 117, 118.
6. See Catherine Osborne, Heraclitus, in From the Beginning to Plato, 90.

Notes 9
 1
The Pre-Socratic
Philosophers
Sixth and Fifth Centuries b.c.e.

The thinkers who were active in Greece between the end of the seventh
century b.c.e. and the middle of the fourth century b.c.e. are known
today as the pre-Socratic philosophers, even though the last of the group
so designated were actually contemporaries of Socrates. (Socrates was
born in 469 and died in 399 b.c.e. We look at his thought in the next
chapter.) What all the pre-Socratic philosophers have in common is their
attempt to create general theories of the cosmos (kosmos is the Greek
term for “world”) not simply by repeating the tales of how the gods had
created everything, but by using observation and reason to construct
general theories that would explain to the unprejudiced and curious mind
the secrets behind the appearances in the world. Another commonality
was that all the pre-Socratic philosophers stemmed from the outlying
borders of the Greek world: islands in the Ionian Sea or Greek colonies
in Italy or along the coast of Persia (in today’s Turkey). Knowledge of
these thinkers is tremendously important not only for understanding the
Greek world of their time, but—as I have suggested in the Introduction—
for grasping the origins of Western philosophy and science.
The problem is that in fact very little is known about the pre-
Socratic philosophers. Most of the books that they wrote had already
disappeared by the time that the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.)
tried to catalog and criticize their views. Today’s understanding of the
pre-Socratics is based mostly on summaries of their ideas by Aristotle
and by later Greek writers who had heard of their views only by word

10
of mouth. Many of these accounts are surely inaccurate because of
distortions caused by repetition over several generations by numerous
individuals. (Have you ever played the game called Telephone, in which
a complicated message is whispered to a player, who then whispers it
to the next player, and so on, until the message—or what’s left of it—is
announced to the whole group by the last player in the circle?) Also,
these summaries often contained anachronistic ideas, that is, ideas
from the later time projected back into the earlier views. Only
fragments of the original works remain in most cases today, and even
those few existing passages do not always agree with one another.
Remember, these “books” were all written by hand on papyrus (a
fragile early paper made from the crushed and dried pulp of an
Egyptian water plant), and all editions of these books were copied
manually by professional scribes. Furthermore, the meaning of many of
the fragments is debatable, both because of the “fragmentary” nature
of the scraps—key words are missing or illegible—and because of the
obscure style and vocabulary in which many of these works were
written. Nevertheless, a tradition concerning the meaning of the pre-
Socratics had already developed by Aristotle’s time, and it is that
version of their story that influenced later philosophers and scientists.
Aristotle is not the only source of our information about the pre-
Socratics, but unfortunately most of the additional information comes
from post-Aristotelian commentators giving interpretations of Aristotle’s
remarks. We do not know to what extent the material provided by
these other sources is informed by extraneous sources. So Aristotle
appears to be our real source, and we have no clear idea of his
accuracy because he paraphrases the various pre-Socratics.1 Therefore,
the tradition that I report here is flawed and distorted in many ways.

Thales
Philosophy makes its first appearance in the little colony of Miletus
on the coast of Asia Minor—today’s Turkey—in the sixth century b.c.e.
The first in three consecutive generations of thinkers is Thales of
Miletus (ca. 580 b.c.e.). Apparently, he did not write a book, or if he
did, it is long lost.

Thales 11
 If we can trust Aristotle and his commentators, Thales’s argument
was something like this:
If there is change, there must be some thing that changes, yet
does not change. There must be a unity behind the apparent plurality
of things, a Oneness disguised by the superficial plurality of the world.
Otherwise the world would not be a world; rather, it would be a
disjointed grouping of unrelated fragments.
So what is the nature of this unifying, ultimately unchanging
substance that is disguised from us by the appearance of constant
change?
Like the myth makers before him, Thales was familiar with the
four elements: air, fire, water, and earth. He assumed that all things
must ultimately be reducible to one of these—but which one?
Of all the elements, water is the most obvious in its
transformations: Rivers turn into sand (in the shape of deltas), water

GRASS TO
MILK
What substance must underlie grass
to allow it to be transformed to milk?

12 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

turns into ice and then back into water, which in turn can be changed
into steam, which becomes air, and air, in the form of wind, fans fire.
Thales’s recorded words were: “The first principle and basic
nature of all things is water.”2
This obviously false conclusion is valued today not for its content
but for its form (it is not a great leap between the claim “All things are
composed of water” and the claim “All things are composed of atoms”)
and for the presupposition behind it (that there is an ultimate stuff
behind appearances that explains change while remaining itself
unchanged). Viewed this way, Thales can be seen as the first philosopher
to introduce the project of reductionism. Reductionism is a method of
explanation that takes an object that confronts us on the surface as
being one kind of thing and shows that the object can be reduced to a

Thales 13
more basic kind of thing
at a deeper but less
obvious level of analysis.
This project is usually
seen as a major function
of modern science.
(Buyer beware! A similar-
sounding word—
reductivism—usually
denotes a simplistic
exaggeration of
reductionism, such as
the assertion that all
acts of kindness are Then water it is!
actually motivated by All things are composed of water.
selfishness.)
I regret to say that I must add three other ideas that Aristotle
also attributes to Thales. My regret is due to the capacity of these
ideas to undercut what has seemed so far to be a pretty neat
foundation for future science. Aristotle says that, according to Thales,

(A) The earth floats on water the way a log floats on a pond.
(B) All things are full of gods.
(C) A magnet (loadstone) must have a soul, because it is able to
produce motion.

14 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

The first of these ideas, (A), is puzzling because it seems gratuitous.
If everything is water, then it is odd to say that some water floats on
water. (B) shows us that the cut between Mythos and Logos is not as
neat in Thales’s case as I have appeared to indicate. (C) seems
somehow related to (B), but in conflicting ways. If according to (B) all
things are full of gods, then why are the magnets mentioned in (C) any
different from everything else in nature? No surprise that over the
years scholars have spilled a lot of ink—and, because the debate still
goes on, punched a lot of computer keys—trying to make sense of
these ideas that Aristotle attributes to Thales.

Anaximander
Several generations of Thales’s followers agreed with his primary
insight—that the plurality of kinds of things in the world must be
reducible to one category—but none of them seems to have accepted
his formula that everything is water. His student Anaximander
(ca. 610–ca. 546 b.c.e.), also from the city of Miletus, said that if all
things were water, then long
ago everything would have
returned to water.
Anaximander asked how
water could become its
deadly enemy, fire—how a
quality could give rise to its
opposite. That is, if
observable objects were
really just water in various
states of agitation—as are
ice and steam—then
eventually all things
would have settled back
into their primordial
liquid state. Aristotle
paraphrases him this

Anaximander 15
way: If ultimate reality “were something specific like water, the other
elements would be annihilated by it. For the different elements have
contrariety with one another. . . . If one of them were unlimited the
others would have ceased to exist by now.”3 (Notice that if this view
can be accurately attributed
to Anaximander, then he
subscribed to an early
view of the principle
of entropy,
according to which
all things have
a tendency to
seek a state of
equilibrium.)

For Anaximander, the

ultimate stuff behind the four
elements could not itself be
one of the elements. It would
have to be an unobservable,
unspecific, indeterminate
something-or-other, which
he called the Boundless, or
the Unlimited (apeiron in Greek). It would have to be boundless,
unlimited, and unspecific because anything specific is opposed to all
the other specific things in existence. (Water is not fire, which in turn
is not air, and air is not earth [not dirt and rock].) Yet the Boundless is
opposed to nothing, because everything is it.
Anaximander seems to have imagined the Boundless as originally
moving effortlessly in a great cosmic vortex that was interrupted by
some disaster (a Big Bang?), and that disaster caused opposites—dry
and wet, cold and hot—to separate off from the vortex and to appear

16 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

to us not only as qualities but as the four basic elements: earth, water,
air, and fire.
Anaximander wrote a book in prose, one of the first such books
ever written. But papyrus does not last forever, and only one passage
remains that we can be fairly certain comes from his book. However,
that passage is a zinger.

And from what source things arise, to that they return of necessity
when they are destroyed, for they suffer punishment and make
reparation to one another for their injustice according to the order
of time.4

There are many possible interpretations of this amazing

statement. According to the most dramatic interpretation, the whole
world as you and I know it is the result of a cosmic error. Creation is
an act of injustice. But justice will be done; the world will eventually be
destroyed, and
“things” will return
to their boundless I’ve got some good news
source and revolve
and some bad news.
The good news is that
eternally in a
the world is going
vortex. This to end . . .
interpretation,
which contains at
least as much
Mythos as Logos,
exhibits a bizarre
kind of optimism
about the triumph
of justice.
A less radical, less mythical, and more likely interpretation would
be this: Once the four elements were created, they became related to
one another in antagonistic ways, but their opposition to one another
balances out in an ecological harmony. If one element dominates at
one period (say, water in a time of flood), it will later be compensated
by the domination of another element at another period (say, fire in a

Anaximander 17
drought). So the original unity of the Boundless is preserved in the
apparent war of the opposites.
A very important part of this passage is the claim that the events
described occur “of necessity . . . according to the order of time.” This
process, then, is not due to the whims of the gods, and the
“punishment” and “reparation” for the “injustice” is not reprisal against
individual humans by angry divinities. Natural laws are governing these
processes with inevitability. If the working out of these laws is
described by Anaximander in the moral and legal language of the old
myths, his description simply shows, as the eminent pre-Socratic
scholar Malcolm Schofield says, “that Anaximander is a revolutionary
who carries some old-fashion baggage with him. That is the general
way with revolutions.”5 In any case, the cause of these processes—the
apeiron—is immortal and indestructible, qualities usually associated
with gods, as Aristotle points out.6 Again, we see that pre-Socratic
philosophy has not completely divorced itself from its religious
origins.
Other striking ideas have been attributed to Anaximander:
(1) Because the same processes that are at work here are at work
everywhere, there is a plurality of universes. (2) The earth needs no
support (remember Thales’s “floating like a log in water”). Because the
earth is right smack in the middle of the universe (well, our universe),
it is “equidistant from all things.” (3) The four elements concentrate in
certain regions—in concentric circles—of the cosmos, with earth (the
heaviest) in the center, surrounded by a circle of water, then another
of air, then one of fire. A wheel of fire circles our slower earth. What
we see as the stars are really holes in the outer ring, or “tube-like
vents,” with fire showing through.
This last cosmological picture painted by Anaximander had an
amazingly long life. Merrill Ring quotes the sixteenth-century British
poet Edmund Spenser as writing:

The earth the air the water and the fire

Then gan to range themselves in huge array,
and with contrary forces to conspire
Each against other by all means they may.7

18 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

And in the early seventeenth
century, Miguel de Cervantes
relates a heroic adventure of
Don Quixote and Sancho in
which a group of bored
aristocrats trick the knight and
his squire into blindfolding
themselves and mounting a
wooden horse, Clavileño, which
they are told is magic and will
fly them to the outer reaches of
the world. The underlings of the
Duke and Duchess blow winds Don Quixote and Sancho Pass
Don Quixote
through theand Sancho
Realm Pass
of Fire
upon our heroes with great through the Realm of Fire
billows as they reach the “realm
of the air.” Turning the wooden peg in the horse’s head that he
believes controls the horse’s speed, Don Quixote says, “If we go on
climbing at this rate we shall soon strike the region of fire, and I do
not know how to manage this peg so as not to mount so high that we
shall scorch.”8 Their tormentors then brush their faces with torches to
convince them that they have indeed reached the realm of fire at the
edge of the cosmos.
This magical episode “takes place” some two thousand years after
the death of Anaximander and sixty years after the death of
Copernicus, so people should have come to realize by then that
Anaximander was wrong.

Anaximenes
Some of Anaximander’s followers asked, “How much better is an
‘unspecific, indeterminate something-or-other’ than nothing at all?”
They decided that it was no better, that in fact, it was the same as
nothing at all, and they also knew that ex nihilo nihil (from nothing
comes nothing), so they went on searching for the mysterious
ultimate stuff.

Anaximenes 19
 The air that
we experience
(“commonsense
air”) is a halfway
house between
all the other
forms into which
“primordial
air” can be
transformed
through
condensation and
rarefaction. The
commentator,
The next philosopher, Anaximenes (ca. 545 b.c.e.),
Theophrastus,
thought this apeiron was air.
says:

Anaximenes . . . like Anaximander, declares that the underlying nature is

one and boundless, but not indeterminate as Anaximander held, but
definite, saying that it is air. It differs in rarity and density according to
the substances [it becomes]. Becoming finer it comes to be fire; being
condensed it comes to be wind, then cloud, and when still further
condensed it becomes water, then earth, then stones, and the rest come
to be out of these.9

With the idea of condensation and rarefaction, Anaximenes

continued the project of reductionism. He introduced the important
claim that all differences in quality are really differences in quantity
( just more or less stuff packed into a specific space), an idea with
which many scientists would agree today.
These first three philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, and
Anaximenes, are known as the Milesians because they all came from
the Greek colony of Miletus on the Persian coast and because they
constitute the first school of philosophy. Despite the differences among
them, they shared a number of characteristics, some of which would
eventually become part of the Western scientific tradition: a desire for
simple explanations, a reliance on observation to support their

20 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

theories, a commitment to naturalism Rarefaction
(the view that natural phenomena
should be explained in terms of other
natural phenomena), and monism (the
view that ultimately there is only one
kind of “stuff”).
The School of Miletus ended
when the tenuous peace between
the Greek outpost and Persia
collapsed and the Persians overran
the city, leaving behind much
destruction and death. According to
the historian Herodotus, the
Athenians were so distressed at the
Condensation
fall of Miletus that they burst into
tears in the theater when the playwright Phrynichus produced his
drama “The Capture of Miletus.” The government banned his play
and fined the author one thousand drachmas for damage to public
morals.

Pythagoras
The Milesians’ successor, Pythagoras (ca. 572–ca. 500 b.c.e.), from the
island of Samos, near Miletus, did not seek ultimacy in some material
element, as his predecessors had done. Rather, he held the curious
view that all things are numbers. Literally understood, this view seems
absurd, but Pythagoras meant, among other things, that a correct
description of reality must be expressed in terms of mathematical
formulas. From our science classes, we are familiar with a great
number of laws of nature, all of which can be written out in
mathematical formulas (for example, the law of gravitation, the three
laws of motion, the three laws of thermodynamics, the law of
reflection, Bernoulli’s law, and Mendel’s three laws). Pythagoras is the
great-great-grandfather of the view that the totality of reality can be
expressed in terms of mathematical laws.

Pythagoras 21
 Very little is known about Pythagoras himself. Nothing he wrote
has survived. It is almost impossible to sort out Pythagoras’s own views
from those of his followers, who created various Pythagorean monastic
colonies throughout the Greek world during the next several hundred
years. He seems to have been not primarily a mathematician but a
numerologist; that is, he was interested in the mystical significance of
numbers. For instance, because the Pythagoreans thought that the
number 10 was divine, they concluded that what we would today call
the solar system had ten members. This theory turns out to be roughly
correct—the sun and nine planets—but not for Pythagoras’s reasons.
Well, maybe eight and a half planets; in August of 2006, the

22 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, declaring it to be a
“dwarf planet.”
Nevertheless, he anticipated the bulk of Euclid’s writings on
geometry and discovered the ratios of concord between musical
sound and number. From this discovery he deduced a mathematical
harmony throughout the universe, a view that led to the doctrine of
“the music of the spheres.” The ten celestial bodies move, and all
motion produces sound. Therefore, the motion of the ten celestial
bodies—being divine—produces divine sounds. Their music is the
eternal background sound against which all sound in the world is
contrasted. Normally, we hear only the “sound in the world” and are
unable to hear the background harmony. But a certain mystical stance
allows us to ignore the sound of the world and to hear only the divine
music of the spheres.
The influence of Pythagoras was so great that the School of
Pythagoreans lasted almost 400 years. The spell he cast on Plato alone
would be enough to guarantee Pythagoras a permanent place in the

Pythagoras 23
history of philosophy. (We shall see that Plato turns out to be the most
important philosopher of the Greek period and that he was a fine
mathematician as well.) With hindsight, we can now look at
Pythagoras’s work and see those features of it that mark him and his
followers as true philosophers. Nevertheless, it is only artificially that
we distinguish that portion of Pythagorean thought that we declare to
be philosophical. We should not ignore the less scientific aspect of
Pythagoras’s teachings, which to him were all part of a seamless whole.
He was the leader of a religious cult whose members had to obey
a strict number of esoteric rules based on asceticism, numerology,
and vegetarianism.
Despite their vegetarianism, Pythagoreans had to forswear eating
beans because eating beans is a form of cannibalism. A close look at
the inside of a bean reveals that each one contains a small, embryonic
human being (or human bean, as the case may be).

24 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

 Xenophanes
Xenophanes was born in Colophon on today’s Turkish coast, about fifty
miles north of Miletus, in about 570 b.c.e. He left his home in his early
twenties when it was violently overrun by a Persian army. Apparently, he
spent the rest of his long life wandering in western Greece. We do not
know the date of his death, but he tells us in one of his poems that he
is ninety-two years old as he writes. Tradition has it that he lived for
more than a hundred years. Xenophanes’s philosophical credentials
were questioned by Aristotle, who is our closest thing to an intellectual
historian of the period. Aristotle thought of him as a confused poet, and
Xenophanes has been treated as such by a number of historians of
philosophy in the modern period, but he had a number of ideas that
are worth remarking. Unfortunately, they often appear contradictory—as
Aristotle delighted in pointing out—but fortunately, there are relatively
numerous fragments extant from his writings (about 120 lines), enough
to provoke interpretive attempts to fathom Xenophanes’s thought.
Indeed, there have been many vicious battles fought by scholars against
each other’s interpretation of Xenophanes’s poems.10
We will look at only a few of the welter of ideas put forth by
Xenophanes in the fragments of his work that still exist. First, it is
fairly obvious that
he sees his main
purpose as that of
attacking the
religious and moral
views presented to
the Greek people
by their greatest
poets, Homer and
Hesiod, who,
according to
Xenophanes,
are undermining Alice Prepares Scholars to Fight over the Correct
moral values rather Interpretation of Xenophanes

Xenophanes 25
than supporting them. He writes: “Homer and Hesiod attributed to
the gods all things which are disreputable and worthy of blame
when done by men; and they told of them many lawless deeds,
stealing, adultery, and deception of each other.”11 (You will soon
discover that Plato—perhaps the most prominent philosopher of
ancient Greece—picked up Xenophanes’s moral criticism of Homer
and Hesiod and intensified it.) Concerning the theological problem,
Xenophanes says:
But mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves are),
and that they wear man’s clothing and have a human voice and
body. (frag. 5)
But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and
produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give
them bodies in form like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.
(frag. 6).

Xenophanes seems
angry at the human
propensity to
anthropomorphize
divinity. God, or the
gods, are not simply
bigger people with
more power than we,
hence with the ability
to get away with more
than we manage to
get away with. If gods
do not die, then they
are not born either,
because that would
imply that there was
a time when they did
not exist. They do not
wear clothes, nor sit
on thrones, nor have
emotional tantrums. Zeus throws a tantrum

26 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

 This is an interesting and advanced theological critique, so
what does Xenophanes himself think about divinity? “God is one,
supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in
mind” (frag. 1). Xenophanes speaks both of “God” and of “the gods.” Is
Xenophanes a monotheist or a polytheist? Most historians of Greek
philosophy ignore the plural reference to “gods” and attribute it to the
stylistic poetic requirements of the day. According to them,
Xenophanes is the first true monotheist. But those in the monotheist
camp are divided over whether he is a pantheist, believing that the
cosmos itself is god, or whether he sees god as an embodied divinity
located somewhere in the universe. The pantheist camp is aided by
fragment 8: “For all things come from earth, and all things end up by
becoming earth.” This passage can be read as claiming that earth itself
is god. Or, this passage can be read in such a way as to deny that any
god of any sort is needed to explain apparent change in the cosmos.
Some scholars have read it as placing Xenophanes’s project among the
one initiated by the
Milesians. If Thales
says that all things are
water, and
Anaximenes that all
things are air, and
Heraclitus that all
things are fire, then
Xenophanes fills the
final possibility: all
things are earth.
Others say this is a
misreading, pointing
to the next fragments,
8 and 9: “For we are
all sprung from earth
and water.” “All things
that come into being
and grow are earth
and water.”

Xenophanes 27
 Whatever else he was, this old man was not above having a good
time. In fragment 17, he says:
“The following are fit conversations for men reclining on a soft
couch by the fire in the winter season, when after a meal they are
drinking sweet wine and [crunching hazelnuts]: Who are you, and what
is your family? What is your age, my friend?”
Then, one last swipe at Homer and Hesiod: “. . . but there is
nothing praiseworthy in discussing battles of Titans or of Giants or
Centaurs, fictions of former ages, nor in plotting violent revolutions”
(frag. 21).

Heraclitus
The next philosopher to demand our attention is Heraclitus (ca. 470
b.c.e.) of Ephesus, only a few miles from Miletus. Almost 100
trustworthy passages from Heraclitus’s book remain for our perusal.
We know more about what Heraclitus actually said than we know
about any other pre-Socratic philosopher. Unfortunately, we don’t
necessarily know more about what he meant. Like Anaximander,
Heraclitus wrote in prose, but he chose to express himself in
aphorisms—short, pithy outbursts with puzzling messages that seem
to dare the reader to make
sense of them. Rather than
review the great varieties of
scholarly effort in recent
years trying to convey the
many possible meanings of
Heraclitus’s fragments, here
I concentrate on the
meaning attributed to
Heraclitus’s views by the
generations that followed
him in the Greek and
Roman world in the years
after his death. The picture

28 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

that emerges from the commentators of that
early period is fairly uniform, if perhaps
misguided, but after all, that picture has
guaranteed Heraclitus’s fame for centuries and
has been influential in the history of ideas.
One of Heraclitus’s most famous aphorisms
concerns fire. He wrote: “There is an exchange
of all things for fire and of fire for all things.”12
Many commentators understood Heraclitus to be
naming fire as the basic stuff of reality and
therefore to be in the line of Milesian
cosmologists who tried to reduce all things to one element. Others
realized that Heraclitus was using the image of fire in a more subtle,
figurative sense. There is something about the nature of fire that gives
insight into both the appearance of stability (the flame’s form is stable)
and the fact of change (in the flame, everything changes).

Heraclitus drew some striking conclusions from this vision:

Reality is composed not of a number of things but of
a process of continual creation and destruction.

But these passages too should be understood symbolically and not

literally.
Another one of Heraclitus’s aphorisms evokes the image of
flowing water:
Heraclitus explained this idea by saying “Everything flows and
nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”15
Commentators interpreted Heraclitus to be saying that the only
thing that does not change is change itself; on this account, not
fire but change would be the ultimate truth about reality, and fire
would be change’s best example, as well as a metaphor standing
for change.
Heraclitus was called the Dark One and the Obscure One
because of the difficulty of his aphorisms. Justifiably or not, his ideas
were interpreted pessimistically by later Greeks, and this
understanding was handed down to posterity. According to this

Heraclitus 29
 “War is father and king of all.”
“Conflict is justice.”13

“You cannot step into the same river twice.”14

30 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

interpretation, his ideas create more than merely a philosophy—they
constitute a mood, almost a worldview of nostalgia and loss:

You can’t go home again. Your childhood is lost.

The friends of your youth are gone.
Your present is slipping away from you.
Nothing is ever the same.
Nevertheless, there was
something positive in
the Heraclitean
philosophy. An
unobservable Logos—a
logic—governed change
that made change a
rational phenomenon
rather than the chaotic,
arbitrary one it
appeared to be.
Heraclitus wrote:
“Logos is always so.”16
This Logos doctrine
deeply impressed Plato
and eventually became
the basis of the notion
of the laws of nature. It is also directly related to a doctrine
claimed by Christianity. Both God and Christ are equated with
Logos in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos],
and the Word [Logos] was with God and the Word [Logos] was God”
(John 1:1); “And the Word [Logos] was made flesh, and dwelt among us”
(John 1:14).

Parmenides
Heraclitus’s successor Parmenides (ca. 515–ca. 440 b.c.e.) went a step
further than his predecessor.

Parmenides 31
 In effect, he said that you can’t step
in the same river once.

Parmenides
begins with what he
takes to be a self-
evident truth:
“It is.” This claim is
not empirical—not
one derived from
observation; rather,
it is a truth of Reason.
It cannot even be
denied without self-
contradiction. If you
say, “It is not”
(i.e., nothing exists),
then you’ve proved
that “It is,” for if
nothing exists, it’s not
You Cannot Step in the Same River Once
nothing; rather, it is
something that exists.
Parmenides believed that Being is rational, that only what can be
thought can exist. Since “nothing” cannot be thought (without thinking of
it as something), there is no nothing, there is only Being. From the mere
idea of Being it follows that Being is uncreated (if it were created, it
would have been created from nothing, but there is no nothing),
indestructible (if it were destructible, it could turn into non-Being,
but there is no non-Being), eternal (if it were not eternal, then it would
eventually become non-Being, which is impossible), and indivisible
(if it could be divided, there would be spaces of non-Being between its
parts, but there is no non-Being). Furthermore, Being is spherical,
because only a sphere is equally real in all directions. (Maybe this notion
is related to the idea of the twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein,
who claimed that space is curved?) Being has no holes (no vacuum)
because, if Being is, there can’t be any place where Being is not.

32 Chapter 1 The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER IX.
THEIR AMUSEMENTS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

Of amusements for women in the first century of colonial life, we

can almost say there were none. There was in New England no
card-playing, no theatre-going, no dancing. The solemn Thursday
lecture was the sole mid-week gathering. Occasionally there was the
excitement of Training Day. In the South the distances were too
great from plantation to plantation for frequent friendly meetings. As
time went on, coöperation in gathering and storing the various food-
harvests afforded opportunities for social intercourse. Apple-parings
and corn-huskings were autumnal delights, but when these were
over, the chafing youth found no recreations through the long, snowy
months in country homes, and but scant opportunity for amusement
in town. No wonder that they turned eagerly to the singing-school,
and found in that innocent gathering a safety-valve for the pent-up
longing for diversion which burned in young souls then as now. We
can but wonder how, ere the singing-school became a force, young
New Englanders became acquainted enough with each other to think
of marriage; and we can almost regard the establishment of the
study of fugue and psalm singing as the preservation of the
commonwealth.
In Virginia the different elements of life developed characteristic
pastimes, and by the first quarter of the eighteenth century there
were opportunities of diversion offered for women.
We have preserved to us an exact account of the sports which
were enjoyed by both Virginian men and women. It may be found in
the Virginia Gazette for October, 1737:—
We have advices from Hanover County that on St Andrews
Day there are to be Horse Races and several other
Diversions for the entertainment of the Gentlemen and
Ladies, at the Old Field, near Captain John Bickertons, in that
County if permitted by the Hon Wm Byrd Esq Proprietor of
said land, the substance of which is as follows viz:
It is proposed that 20 Horses or Mares do run around a
three mile course for a prize of five pounds.
That a Hat of the value of 20s be cudgelled for, and that
after the first challenge made the Drums are to beat every
Quarter of an hour for three challenges round the Ring and
none to play with their Left hand.
That a violin be played for by 20 Fiddlers; no person to
have the liberty of playing unless he bring a fiddle with him.
After the prize is won they are all to play together and each a
different tune, and to be treated by the company.
That 12 Boys of 12 years of age do run 112 yards for a hat
of the cost of 12 shillings.
That a Flag be flying on said Day 30 feet high.
That a handsome entertainment be provided for the
subscribers and their wives; and such of them as are not so
happy as to have wives may treat any other lady.
That Drums Trumpets Hautboys &c be provided to play at
said entertainment.
That after Dinner the Royal Health His Honor the
Governor’s &c are to be drunk.
That a Quire of Ballads be sung for by a number of
Songsters, all of them to have liquor sufficient to clear their
Wind Pipes.
That a pair of Silver Buckles be wrestled for by a number of
brisk young men.
That a pair of handsome Shoes be danced for.
That a pair of handsome Silk Stockings of one Pistole value
be given to the handsomest young country maid that appears
in the field.
 With many other whimsical and Comical Diversions too
numerous to mention.
And as this mirth is designed to be purely innocent and void
of offence, all persons resorting there are desired to behave
themselves with decency and sobriety; the subscribers being
resolved to discountenance all immorality with the utmost
rigor.
There is a certain rough and noisy heartiness in this rollicking
Racing Day in old Virginia that speaks of boisterous cheer akin to the
days of “merrie England,” and which seems far from disagreeable
when contrasted with the dull yearly round of sober days in New
England. Virginia and Maryland men had many social clubs “to
promote innocent mirth and ingenious humour,” but of course within
these clubs their consorts and daughters were not guests. A ball or a
country dance were the chief amusements of Southern women, and
very smart functions some of these balls were, though they did begin
in broad daylight.
An early account was given by a travelling Virginian, William
Black, of a Government Ball in the Council Room at Annapolis in
1744.
The Ladies of Note made a Splendant Appearance. In a
Room Back from where they Danc’d was Several Sorts of
Wines, Punch and Sweetmeats. In this Room those that was
not engaged in any Dancing Match might better employ
themselves at Cards, Dice, Backgammon, or with a cheerful
Glass. The Ladies were so very agreeable and seem’d so
intent on Dancing that one might have Imagin’d they had
some Design on the Virginians, either Designing to make
Tryal of their Strength and Vigour, or to convince them of their
Activity and Sprightliness. After several smart engagements in
which no advantage on either side was Observable, with a
mutual Consent about 1 of the Clock in the Morning it was
agreed to break up, every Gentleman waiting on his Partner
home.
 The method in which a ball was conducted somewhat more than a
century ago in Louisville was thus told by Maj. Samuel S. Forman,
who visited that town as a young man.
After the managers had organized the Company by drawing
numbers and appointing the opening with a Minuet, Uncle
was called on and introduc’d to a Lady for the opening scene.
The Managers who distributed the numbers called Gentⁿ No.
1, he takes his stand—Lady No. 1, she rises from her seat,
the Manager leads her to the floor and introduces Gentⁿ No.
1, & so on till the floor is full. After all the Company have been
thus call’d out then the Gentⁿ are free to seek his Partner but
no monopoly. Lady at the head chooses the figure, but it is
considered out of order for one Lady to head a figure twice
unless all have been at the head. If there happen to be some
ladies to whom from mistake or otherwise have been passed
the Managers duty is to see to it. And another Custom was for
a Gentⁿ to call on a Lady & inform her of an intended ball &
ask permission to see her to the place & see her safe home
again. If the Gentⁿ does not draw such Lady for the first
Contra Dance he generally engages her for the first Volunteer.
At the Refreshments the Gentⁿ will by instinct without
Chesterfieldian monition see that his betterhalf (for the time
being) has a quantum sufficit and that without cramming his
jaws full until he has reconducted her to the ball-room, then
he is at liberty to absent himself for a while. There were two
young gentlemen there from New York who were much
attached to each other. They promised to let each other know
when a ball was on foot. At one time one came to the other
and told him to prepare his pumps against such an evening.
The answer was—Pumps out of order, must decline. No Sir
that will not do. Then Sir you have been buying Several pair
of handsome Mocassons for New York Ladies. If you will lend
me one pair & you will put on one pair (it wont hurt them) I will
go. Snaps his fingers—the very thing. The next ball after this
Moccasons became very fashionable. So many fashions have
their origins from Necessity.
 A traveller named Bennet gives us an account of the amusements
of Boston women in the middle of the century, when dancing was
slowly becoming fashionable.
For their domestic amusements every afternoon after
drinking tea, the gentlemen and ladies walk the Mall, and from
there adjourn to one anothers house to spend the evening,
those that are not disposed to attend the evening lecture
which they may do if they please six nights in the seven the
year round. What they call the Mall is a walk on a fine green
Common adjoining to the south east side of the town. The
Government being in the hands of dissenters they dont admit
of plays or music houses; but of late they have sent up an
assembly to which some of the ladies resort. But they are
looked upon to be none of the nicest, in regard to their
reputation, and it is thought it will be soon suppressed for it is
much taken notice of and exploded by the religious and sober
part of the people. But notwithstanding plays and such like
diversions do not obtain here, they dont be dispirited or
moped for the want of them; for both the ladies and
gentlemen dress and appear as gay in common as courtiers
in England on a coronation or birthday. And the ladies visit
here, drink tea, indulge in every little piece of gentility to the
height of the mode, and neglect the affairs of the family with
as good a grace as the finest ladies in London.
The Marquis de Chastellux writes of the Philadelphia assembly in
1780:—
The assembly or subscription ball, of which I must give an
account may here be introduced. At Philadelphia, there are
places appropriated for the young people to dance in and
where those whom that amusement does not suit may play at
different games of cards, but at Philadelphia games of
commerce are alone allowed. A manager or Master of
Ceremonies presides at the methodical amusements; he
presents to the gentlemen and lady dancers, billets folded up
containing each a number; thus fate decides the male or
female partner for the whole evening. All the dances are
 previously arranged and the dancers are called in their turns.
These dances, like the toasts we drink at table, have some
relation to politics; one is called The Successful Campaign,
another Bourgoynes Defeat, a third Clintons Retreat. The
managers are generally chosen from among the most
distinguished officers of the army. Colonel Mitchell, a little fat
squat man, was formerly the manager, but when I saw him he
had descended from the magistracy and danced like a
common citizen. He is said to have exercised his office with
great severity, and it is told of him, that a young lady who was
figuring in a country dance, having forgot her turn through
conversing with a friend, he came up to her and called out
aloud, “Give over, Miss, take care what you are about. Do you
think you come here for your pleasure?”
The dance, A Successful Campaign, was the one selected by
diplomatic Miss Peggy Champlin to open the ball, when she danced
in Newport with General Washington, to the piping of De
Rochambeau and his fellow officers. This was “the figure” of A
Successful Campaign. “Lead down two couples on the outside and
up the middle; second couple do the same, turn contrary partners,
cast off, right hand and left.” It was simple, was it not—but I doubt
not it was dignified and of sedate importance when Washington
footed it.
Stony Point was another favorite of Revolutionary days—for did
not General Wayne successfully storm the place? This dance was
more difficult; the directions were somewhat bewildering. “First
couple three hands round with the second lady—allemand. Three
hands round with the second gentleman—allemand again. Lead
down two couples, up again, cast off one couple, hands round with
the third, right and left.” I scarcely know what the figure “allemand”
was. The German allemande was then an old style of waltz, slower
than the modern waltz, but I can scarcely think that Washington or
any of those serious, dignified officers waltzed, even to slow time.
Another obsolete term is “foot it.”
 Come and foot it as you go
On the light fantastic toe,

seems to refer to some definite step in dancing. Sheridan in The

Rivals thus uses the term in regard to dances:—
I’d foot it with e’er a captain in the county, but these
outlandish heathen allemandes and cotillions are quite
beyond me.
But “footing it” and “outlandish heathen allemandes” are not so
misty as another term, “to haze.” In the Innocent Maid they “hazed.”
“First three couples haze, then lead down the middle and back
again, close with the right hand and left.” In dancing the Corsino they
figured thus: “Three couples foot it and change sides; foot it again
and once more change sides; three couples allemand, and the first
fall in the middle then right hand and left.”
Dancing-masters’ advertisements of those days often give us the
list of modish dances: “Allemandes Vally’s, De la Cours, Devonshire
Minuets and Jiggs.”
Burnaby in 1759 wrote of a special pleasure of the Quaker maids
of Philadelphia: of fishing-parties.
The women are exceedingly handsome and polite. They
are naturally sprightly and fond of pleasure and upon the
whole are much more agreeable and accomplished than the
men. Since their intercourse with the English officers they are
greatly improved, and without flattery, many of them would not
make bad figures even in the first assemblies in Europe. Their
amusements are chiefly dancing in the winter, and in the
summer forming parties of pleasure upon the Schuilkill, and in
the country. There is a society of sixteen ladies and as many
gentlemen called The fishing company, who meet once a
fortnight upon the Schuilkill. They have a very pleasant room
erected in a romantic situation upon the banks of that river
where they generally dine and drink tea. There are several
pretty walks about it, and some wild and rugged rocks which
 together with the water and fine groves that adorn the banks,
form a most beautiful and picturesque scene. There are boats
and fishing tackle of all sorts, and the company divert
themselves with walking, fishing, going up the water, dancing,
singing, conversing, or just as they please. The ladies wear
an uniform and appear with great ease and advantage from
the neatness and simplicity of it. The first and most
distinguished people of the colony are of this society; and it is
very advantageous to a stranger to be introduced to it, as he
hereby gets acquainted with the best and most respectable
company in Philadelphia. In the winter when there is snow
upon the ground it is usual to make what they call sleighing
parties.
He says of New York society:—
The women are handsome and agreeable though rather
more reserved than the Philadelphian ladies. Their
amusements are much the same as in Pensylvania; viz balls
and sleighing expeditions in the winter, and in the summer
going in parties upon the water and fishing; or making
excursions into the country. There are several houses
pleasantly situated upon East River near New York where it is
common to have turtle feasts; these happen once or twice in
a week. Thirty or forty gentlemen and ladies meet and dine
together, drink tea in the afternoon, fish and amuse
themselves till evening and then return home in Italian
chaises, a gentleman and lady in each chaise. In the way
there is a bridge, about three miles distant from New York
which you always pass over as you return, called the Kissing
Bridge where it is a part of the etiquette to salute the lady who
has put herself under your protection.
It is evident from these quotations and from the testimony of other
contemporary authors that one of the chief winter amusements in
New York and Philadelphia and neighboring towns was through
sleighing-parties. Madam Knights, of Boston, writing in 1704 of her
visit to New York, said:—
 Their diversion in winter is riding sleighs about three or four
miles out of town where they have houses of entertainment at
a place called the Bowery, and some go to friends houses,
who handsomely treat them. Mr. Burroughs carried his
spouse and daughter and myself out to one Madam Dowes a
gentlewoman that lived at a farmhouse who gave us a
handsome entertainment of five or six dishes and choice beer
and metheglin, etc, all which she said was the produce of her
farm. I believe we met fifty or sixty sleighs that day; they fly
with great swiftness and some are so furious that they will
turn out of the path for none except a loaded cart.
There were few sleighs at that date in Boston.
Sixty-four years later, in 1768, a young English officer, Alexander
Macraby, wrote thus to his brother of the pleasures of sleighing:—
You can never have had a party in a sleigh or sledge I had
a very clever one a few days ago. Seven sleighs with two
ladies and two men in each proceeded by fiddlers on
horseback set out together upon a snow of about a foot deep
on the roads to a public house, a few miles from town where
we danced, sung, romped and eat and drank and kicked
away care from morning till night, and finished our frolic in two
or three side-boxes at the play. You can have no idea of the
state of the pulse seated with pretty women mid-deep in
straw, your body armed with furs and flannels, clear air, bright
sunshine, spotless sky, horses galloping, every feeling turned
to joy and jollity.
That older members of society then, as now, did not find sleighing
parties altogether alluring, we learn from this sentence in a letter of
Hannah Thompson written to John Mifflin in 1786:—
This Slaying match Mr Houston of Houston St gave his
Daughters, Dear Papa, Dear Papa, do give us a slaying—he
at last consented, told them to get ready and dress
themselves warm, which they accordingly did and came
running. We are ready papa. He ordered the Servants to have
some burnt wine against they came back. He desir’d them to
 step upstairs with him before they went. As soon as they got
in an Attick chamber, he threw up all the windows and seated
them in two old Arm Chairs and began to whip and Chirrup
with all the Spirit of a Slaying party. And after he kept them
long enough to be sufficiently cold he took them down and
call’d for the Mulled Wine and they were very glad to set close
to the Fire and leave Slaying for those who were too warm.
This I quote to execrate the memory of Mr. Houston and express
my sympathy for his daughters.
There were no entertainments more popular, from the middle of
the past century to the early years of this one, than “turtle frolics,”
what Burnaby called turtle-feasts. Every sea-captain who sailed to
the West Indies intended and was expected to bring home a turtle on
the return voyage; and if he were only to touch at the West Indies
and thence pass on to more distant shores, he still tried, if possible,
to secure a turtle and send it home by some returning vessel. In no
seaport town did the turtle frolic come to a higher state of perfection
than in Newport. Scores of turtles were borne to that welcoming
shore. In 1752 George Bresett, a Newport gentleman, sailed to the
West Indies, and promptly did a neighborly and civic duty by sending
home to his friend Samuel Freebody, a gallant turtle and a generous
keg of limes. Lime juice was the fashionable and favorite “souring” of
the day, to combine with arrack and Barbadoes rum into a glorious
punch. The turtle arrived in prime condition, and Freebody handed
the prize over to a slave-body named Cuffy Cockroach. He was a
Guinea Coast negro, of a race who were (as I have noted before) the
most intelligent of all the Africans brought as slaves to these shores.
Any negro who acquired a position of dignity or trust or skill in this
country, in colonial days, was sure to be a Guinea-boy. Cuffy
Cockroach followed the rule, by filling a position of much dignity and
trust and skill—as turtle-cook. He was a slave of Jaheel Brenton, but
he cooked turtle for the entire town. The frolic was held at Fort
George, on Goat Island, on December 23. The guests, fifty ladies
and gentlemen, sailed over in a sloop, and were welcomed with
hoisted flag and salute of cannon. The dinner was served at two, tea
at five, and then dancing begun. Pea Straw, Faithful Shepherd,
Arcadian Nuptials, were allemanded and footed, and the keg of limes
and its fellow-ingredients kept pace with the turtle. The moon was at
the full when the party landed at the Newport wharf at eleven, but the
frolic was not ended. For instead of the jolly crowd separating, they
went the rounds, leaving one member of the party at a time at his
own door, and then serenading him or her, till the whole company
had been honored in succession. When Sammy wrote to Mr. Bresett
he said:—
Upon the whole the entertainment had the preference over
all turtle frolics before it, and Mr George Bresetts health with
“Honest George” was freely drank in a cheerful glass by every
person; and at the request of the company I return you their
compliments for the foundation of so agreeable an
entertainment.
We find even so staid and dignified a minister and legislator as
Manasseh Cutler writing thus in Providence in 1787:—
This morning I received a polite invitation from Govenor
Bowen in the name of a large company to join them in a Turtle
Frolic about six miles out of town. Mr Hitchcock and other
clergymen of the town were of the party but much against my
inclination I was obliged to excuse myself.
The traveller who drives through the by-roads of New England to-
day is almost ready to assert that there is no dwelling too poor or too
lonely to contain a piano, or at the very least a melodeon or parlor
organ. The sounds of Czerny’s exercises issue from every
farmhouse. There may be no new farm implements, no sewing-
machine, but there will surely be a piano. This love of music has ever
existed on those rock-bound shores, though in early days it found a
stunted and sad expression in hymn tunes only, and the
performance of music could scarce be called a colonial
accomplishment. The first musical instruments were martial, drums
and fifes and hautboys. I have never seen, in any personal inventory,
the notice of a “gitterne” as in similar Virginian lists.
But in the early years of the eighteenth century a few spinets must
have been exported to Boston and Philadelphia, and perhaps to
Virginia. In 1712 an advertisement was placed in the Boston News-
Letter that the Spinet would be taught, and on April 23, 1716,
appeared in the same paper:—
Note that any Persons may have all Instruments of Music
mended or Virginalls or Spinnets Strung & Tun’d, at a
Reasonable Rate & likewise may be taught to play on any of
the Instruments above mentioned.
In August, 1740, a “Good Spinnet” was offered for sale, and soon
after a second-hand “Spinnet,” and in January, 1750, “Spinnet wire.”
On September 18, 1769, this notice appeared in the Boston
Gazette and Country Journal:—
It is with pleasure that we inform the Public that a few days
since was ship’d for Newport a very Curious Spinnet being
the first ever made in America, the performance of the
ingenious Mr. John Harris of Boston (son of the late Mr. Jos.
Harris of London, Harpsichord and Spinnet Maker deceased)
and in every respect does honor to that Artist who now carries
on the Business at his house a few doors Northward of Dr.
Clarkes, North End of Boston.
This first American spinet is said to be still in existence in a house
in Newport on the corner of Thames and Gidley streets. It has one
set of jacks and strings. The hammers have crow-quills which press
on brass strings. It has ancient neighbors. In Bristol, R. I., is a
triangular spinet four feet long, which is more than a century older
than the town which is now its home. It bears this maker’s mark,
—“Johann Hitchcock fecit London 1520.” If this date is correct, it is
the oldest spinet known, the one of Italian manufacture in the British
Museum being dated 1521.
At the rooms of the Essex Institute in Salem, Mass., is an old
spinet made by Dr. Samuel Blyth in that town. Henry M. Brooks,
Esq., author of Olden Time Music, has in his possession a bill for
one of these American spinets that shows that the price in 1786 was
£18. In the Memorial Hall at Deerfield, Mass., may be seen another
dilapidated one, made by Stephanus & Keene. This belonged once
to Mrs. Sukey Barker, of Hingham.
In the Newport Mercury of May 17, 1773, is advertised, “To be sold
a Spinnet of a proper size for a little miss, and a most agreeable tone
—plays extremely easy on the keys. Inquire of the Printer.”
Advertisement of the sale of spinets and of instruction on the spinet
do not disappear from the newspapers in this country even after
formidable rivals and successors, the harpsichord and forte-piano,
had begun to be imported in comparatively large numbers.
The tone of a spinet has been characterized concisely by Holmes
in his poem, The Opening of the Piano,—the “spinet with its thin
metallic thrills.” I know of nothing more truly the “relic of things that
have passed away,” more completely the voice of the past, than the
tinkling thrill of a spinet. It is like seeing a ghost to touch the keys,
and bring forth once more that obsolete sound. There is no sound
born in the nineteenth century that at all resembles it. Like
“loggerheads” in the coals and “lug-poles” in the chimney, like church
lotteries and tithingmen, the spinet—even its very voice—is extinct.
Since in the News-Letter first quoted in this chapter virginals are
named, I think the musical instrument of Queen Elizabeth must have
been tolerably familiar to Bostonians. Judge Sewall, who “had a
passion for music,” writes in 1690 of fetching his wife’s “virginalls.” I
cannot conceive what tunes Madam Sewall played on her virginals,
no tawdry ballads and roundelays, no minuets and corams; she may
have known half a dozen long-metre psalm tunes such as the Judge
set for so many years in meeting.
“Forte-pianers” were imported to America, as were other musical
instruments. It is said the first one brought to New England was in
1785 by John Brown for his daughter Sarah, afterwards Mrs.
Herreshoff. It is still possessed by Miss Herreshoff, of Bristol, R. I.
The first brought to “the Cape” was a Clementi of the date 1790, and
found for many years a home in Falmouth. It is in perfect
preservation, a dainty little inlaid box lying upon a slender low table,
with tiny shelves for the music books, and a tiny little painted rack to
hold the music sheets, and a pedal fit for the foot of a doll. It is now
owned by Miss Frances Morse, of Worcester, Mass. An old
Broadwood piano, once owned by the venerable Dr. Sweetser, may
be seen at the rooms of the Worcester Society of Antiquity; and still
another, a Clementi, at the Essex Institute in Salem.
By the beginning of this century piano-playing became a more
common accomplishment, especially in the large towns, though
General Oliver said that in 1810, among the six thousand families in
Boston, there were not fifty pianos. Rev. Manasseh Cutler writes in
1801, from Washington, of a young friend:—
She has been educated at the best schools in Baltimore
and Alexandria. She does not converse much, but is very
modest and agreeable. She plays with great skill on the Forte
Piano which she always accompanies with the most delightful
voice, and is frequently joined in the vocal part by her mother.
Mr. King has an excellent Forte-Piano which is connected with
an organ placed under it, which she plays and fills with her
feet, while her fingers are employed upon the Forte-Piano. On
Sunday evenings she constantly plays Psalm music. Miss
Anna plays Denmark remarkably well. But the most of the
psalm tunes our gentlemen prefer are the old ones such as
Old Hundred, Canterbury, which you would be delighted to
hear on the Forte-Piano assisted by the Organ. Miss Anna
gave us some good music this evening, particularly the
Wayworn Traveller, Ma Chere Amie, The Tea, The Twins of
Latma (somewhat similar to Indian Chief) Eliza, Lucy or
Selims Complaint. These are among my favourites.
In February, 1800, Eliza Southgate Bowne wrote thus in Boston:—
In the morning I am going to look at some Instruments;
however we got one picked out that I imagine we shall take,
150 dollars, a charming toned one and not made in this
country.
In June she said enthusiastically of her “Instrument:”—
I am learning my 12th tune Oh Octavia, I almost worship
my Instrument,—it reciprocates my joys and sorrows, and is
 my bosom companion. How I long to have you return! I have
hardly attempted to sing since you went away. I am sure I
shall not dare to when you return. I must enjoy my triumph
while you are absent; my musical talents will be dim when
compared with the lustre of yours.
The most universal accomplishment of colonial women was the
making of samplers, if, indeed, anything could be termed an
accomplishment which was so rigidly and prosaically part of their
education. I can well imagine the disgrace it would have been to any
little miss in her teens a century ago not to be able to show a
carefully designed and wrought sampler. On these samplers were
displayed the alphabet, sometimes in various shaped letters—thus
did she learn to mark neatly her household linen; bands of
conventional designs, of flowers, of geometrical patterns—thus was
she taught to embroider muslin caps and kerchiefs; and there were
gorgeous flowers and strange buildings, and domestic scenes, and
pastoral views, birds that perched as large as cows, and roses that
were larger than either; and last and best of all (and often of much
satisfaction to the genealogist), there was her name and her age,
and sometimes her place of birth, and withal a pious verse as a
motto for this housewifely shield. Of all the relics of old-time life
which have come to us, none are more interesting than the
samplers. Happily, many of them have come to us; worked with wiry
enduring crewels and silk on strong linen canvas, they speak down
through the century of the little, useful, willing hands that worked
them; of the tidy sempstresses and housewives of those simple
domestic days. We know little of the daughters of the Pilgrims, but
Lora Standish has sent to us a prim little message of her piety, and a
faded testimony of her skill, that makes her seem dear to us:—

Lora Standish is My Name.

Lord Guide my heart that I may do thy Will
Also fill my hands with such convenient skill
As will conduce to Virtue void of Shame,
And I will give the Glory to Thy Name.
 A more ambitious kind of needlework took the form of what were
known as mourning pieces. These were regarded with deepest
affection, for were they not a token of loving remembrance? They
bore stiff presentments of funeral urns, with drooping willows, or a
monument with a bowed and weeping figure. Often the names of
dead members of the family were worked upon the monument. A still
more ambitious sampler bore a design known as The Tree of Life. A
stiffly branched tree was sparingly hung with apples labelled with the
names of the virtues of humanity, such as Love, Honor, Truth,
Modesty, Silence. A white-winged angel on one side of this tree
watered the roots with a very realistic watering-pot, and was
balanced with exactness, as were evenly adjusted all good
embroidery designs of that day, by an inky-black Satan who bore a
pitchfork of colossal proportions and a tail as long as a kite’s, and so
heavy that he could scarce have dragged it along the ground—much
less with it have flown.
For many years a favorite and much praised accomplishment was
the cutting of paper in ornamental designs. This art was ambitiously
called Papyrotamia, and it was of special usefulness in its application
to watch-papers, a favorite lover’s token of the day. The watch
proper at that time was separate and removable from its case, which
was of gold, silver, shagreen, or lacquer. Of course the watch did not
fit closely into the case, and watch-papers were placed within to
serve as a cushion to prevent jar and wear; sometimes the case
would hold several. Artistic and grotesque taste could be used in the
manufacture of these tokens of regard. I have seen them cut in
various open-work designs from gilt and silver paper, embroidered in
hair, painted in water colors. One I have has two turtle-doves billing
over two hearts, and surrounded by a tiny wreath; another,
embroidered on net, has the words “God is Love;” another has a
moss rose and the words “Rejoice and blossom as a rose.” Another
bears a funeral urn, and is evidently in memoriam. Still another, a
heart and arrows, and the sentimental legend “Kill me for I die of
love.” Jefferson, writing as a young man, bitterly deplores his
inadvertent tearing of watch-papers which had been cut for him by
his beloved Belinda. Watch and watch-papers had been accidentally
soaked in water, and when he attempted to remove the papers, he
says, “My cursed fingers gave them such a rent as I fear I shall
never get over. I would have cried bitterly, but that I thought it
beneath the dignity of a man.” And he trusts the fair Becca will give
him another paper of her cutting, which, though but a plain round
one, he will esteem more than the nicest in the world cut by other
hands.
Nothing can be more pathetic than the thoughtful survey of the
crude and often cumbersome and ludicrous attempts at decorative
art, through which the stunted and cramped love of the beautiful
found expression, until our own day, in country homes. The dreary
succession of hair-work, feather-work, wax flowers, shell-work, the
crystallization with various domestic minerals and gums of dried
leaves and grasses, vied with yarn and worsted monstrosities, and
bewildering patchwork. Occasionally some bold feminine spirit, made
inventive through artistic longing, gave birth to a novel, though too
often grotesque form of decoration.
A most interesting symbol of exquisite neatness, unbounded
patience, and blind groping for artistic expression was Rhoda
Baker’s “Leather-Works.” Rhoda Baker lived in a small Rhode Island
village, which was dull at its birth and slow of growth and progress.
She had a nature so timid, so repelling, and so wholly introspective,
that, after nearly fifty years of shy and even unwilling “keeping
company” with a preaching elder of the time,—a saint, almost a
mystic,—she died without ever having given to the quaint, thin,
pleasant-faced, awkward man, one word of encouragement to his
equally timid, his hinting and halting love-making. During those
patient years of warm hopes, but most scanty fruition, he had built a
house on an island which he owned in Narragansett Bay, with a
window where his beloved Rhoda could sit sewing when she
became his wife, and watch him happily rowing across the Bay to
her; but great lilac bushes grew up unchecked, and shaded and
finally hid the window at which Rhoda never sat to welcome her
husband-lover. After her death the Elder so grieved that he had
naught to remind him and speak to him of his beloved, that he boldly
decided to name his boat for her; but as he could not conscientiously
say she had ever encouraged him by word or look in his incipient
love-making, and he must be strictly honest and chivalrously
respectful to her memory, he painted upon the boat in black letters
this truthful yet dimly consoling legend, “Rhoda Wouldnt.” Poor
Elder! Many a time had he ventured a-courting, and slowly entering,
after his unanswered assault upon the door-knocker, had found the
kitchen of this elusive Rhoda vacant,—but her rocking-chair was
slowly rocking,—so he sadly left the deserted room, the
unwelcoming house.
He sacrificed his life to his affection for his dead love. He had all
his days a fear, a premonition, that he should lose his life through a
horse, so he never rode or drove, but walked, rowed, or sailed, and
lived on an island to escape his dreaded doom. When Rhoda’s
brother died in a distant town, the Elder was bidden to the funeral,
and he honored his Rhoda’s memory by his attendance, and he had
to ride there. As he left the house of mourning, a fractious young colt
ran away with him, threw him out of the wagon, and broke his neck.
His sweetheart’s “Leather-Works” still exist, to keep fresh this New
England romance. I saw them last summer in the attic of the Town
Hall. Rhoda left them in her will to her church, and they are now the
property of the village church-guild. The guild is vigorous and young,
so can bear this ancient maiden’s bequest with cheerful carriage and
undaunted spirits. The leather-works are many and ponderous. One
is a vast trellis (which may have been originally two clothes-horses),
hung with elaborately twisted and tendrilled vines, bearing minutely
veined leaves and various counterfeit and imaginary fruits. The
bunches of grapes are made of home-cast leaden bullets, or round
stones, covered dexterously and with unparalleled neatness and
imperceptible stitches with pieces of old kid gloves or thin leather;
and to each a common dress-hook is attached. The stem of the
bunch has corresponding eyes, to each of which a grape is hung. By
this ingenious means the bunches of grapes could be neatly dusted
each week, and kept in repair, as well as easily shaped. On this
trellis hung also Roses of Sharon, a mystic flower which Rhoda’s
sister Eunice invented, and which had a deep spiritual signification,
as well as extraordinary outline and intricate composition. Every leaf,
every grape, every monstrous fruit, every flower of these Leather-
Works, speaks of the æsthetic longing, the vague mysticism, the
stifled repression, of Rhoda Baker’s life; and they speak equally of
the Elder’s love. It was he who moulded the bullets, and searched on
the shore for carefully rounded stones; and he who haunted the
country saddlers and repair-shops for waste strips of leather, which
he often deposited in the silent kitchen by the rocking-chair, sure of
grateful though unspoken thanks. Many a pair of his old boot-tops
figures as glorious vine leaves; and he even tanned and dressed
skins to supply swiftly the artist’s materials when genius burned. It
was he who tenderly unhooked the grapes and pears, the fruits of
Eden and the Roses of Sharon, when the trellis was transported to
the Town Hall, and he reverently placed the trophies of his true love’s
skill and genius in place in their new home. I always rather resent the
fact that Rhoda did not bequeath the Leather-Works to him, when I
think of the vast and almost sacred pleasure he would have had in
them; as well as when I remember the share he had in the
preparations for their manufacture. And the Leather-Works speak
still another lesson, as do many of the household grotesqueries seen
in New England, a lesson of sympathy, almost of beauty, to those
who “read between the lines, the finer grace of unfulfilled designs.”
 CHAPTER X.
DAUGHTERS OF LIBERTY.

We are constantly hearing the statement reiterated, that the

Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution was the first
association of women ever formed for patriotic purpose. This
assertion shows a lamentable ignorance of Revolutionary history; for
a century and a quarter ago, before the War of the Revolution,
patriotic societies of women were formed all over the country, and
called Daughters of Liberty. Our modern bands should be
distinguished by being called the first patriotic-hereditary societies of
women.
As we approach Revolutionary days, it is evident that the women
of all the colonies were as deeply stirred as were the men at the
constant injustice and growing tyranny of the British government,
and they were not slow in openly averring their abhorrence and
revolt against this injustice. Their individual action consisted in the
wearing only of garments of homespun manufacture; their concerted
exertions in gathering in patriotic bands to spin, and the signing of
compacts to drink no more of the taxed tea, that significant emblem
of British injustice and American revolt.
The earliest definite notice of any gathering of Daughters of Liberty
was in Providence in 1766, when seventeen young ladies met at the
house of Deacon Ephraim Bowen and spun all day long for the
public benefit, and assumed the name Daughters of Liberty. The
next meeting the little band had so increased in numbers that it had
to meet in the Court House. At about the same time another band of
daughters gathered at Newport, and an old list of the members has
been preserved. It comprised all the beautiful and brilliant young girls
for which Newport was at that time so celebrated. As one result of
this patriotic interest, the President and the first graduating class of
Brown University, then called Rhode Island College, were clothed, at