The Ends of Resistance: Making and

Unmaking Democracy Alix Olson And

Alex Zamalin
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-ends-of-resistance-making-and-unmaking-democ
racy-alix-olson-and-alex-zamalin/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State Dawn

Chatty

https://ebookmass.com/product/syria-the-making-and-unmaking-of-a-
refuge-state-dawn-chatty/

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Alex Eric

Hernandez

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-making-of-british-bourgeois-
tragedy-alex-eric-hernandez/

In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the

Photographic Unseen Alix Beeston

https://ebookmass.com/product/in-and-out-of-sight-modernist-
writing-and-the-photographic-unseen-alix-beeston/

Making Better Choices: Design, Decisions, and Democracy

1st Edition Phelps

https://ebookmass.com/product/making-better-choices-design-
decisions-and-democracy-1st-edition-phelps/
Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking
of Sense 1st Edition Gavin Williams

https://ebookmass.com/product/hearing-the-crimean-war-wartime-
sound-and-the-unmaking-of-sense-1st-edition-gavin-williams/

Women and the Politics of Resistance in the Iranian

Constitutional Revolution Maryam Dezhamkhooy

https://ebookmass.com/product/women-and-the-politics-of-
resistance-in-the-iranian-constitutional-revolution-maryam-
dezhamkhooy/

Homer and the Poetics of Gesture Alex C Purves

https://ebookmass.com/product/homer-and-the-poetics-of-gesture-
alex-c-purves/

Arranged Marriage: The Politics of Tradition,

Resistance, and Change Péter Berta

https://ebookmass.com/product/arranged-marriage-the-politics-of-
tradition-resistance-and-change-peter-berta/

The ends of empire : the last colonies revisited Robert

Aldrich

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-ends-of-empire-the-last-
colonies-revisited-robert-aldrich/
THE ENDS OF RESISTANCE
THE ENDS OF RESISTANCE

Making and Unmaking Democracy

ALIX OLSON AND ALEX ZAMALIN

Columbia University Press

New York
 Columbia University Press
Publishers since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2024 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-55578-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Olson, Alix, author. | Zamalin, Alex, 1986- author.
Title: The ends of resistance : making and unmaking democracy / Alix Olson and
Alex Zamalin.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023027866 (print) | LCCN 2023027867 (ebook) | ISBN
9780231204989 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231204996 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Political participation—United States—History—21st century. |
Government, Resistance to—United States. | Social movements—Political
aspects—United States—Case studies. | United States—Politics and
government.
Classification: LCC JK1764 .O47 2023 (print) | LCC JK1764 (ebook) | DDC
323/.0440973—dc23/eng/20230725
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027866
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027867
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at
cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
Cover design: Chang Jae Lee
Cover image: © Shutterstock
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1 The End of Resistance: Reformation Over Transformation

2 Neoliberal Resistance: Privatizing Rebellion
3 Democracy Domesticated: Resistance as Restoration
4 Making Suspicious Citizens: Racializing and Criminalizing
Resistance
5 Unruly World Building: Toward a Critical Infrastructure of
Demanding Hope

Notes
Index
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many forms of radical kinship have made this book possible.

We would like to express our profound gratitude for
encouragement and care offered by Alison Powell, Barra Cohen,
Pamela Means, Sarah Kowal, Lyndell Montgomery, David Vine,
Heather and Henry Frechette, Brian and Kip Hardy, Jaime Masick,
Tristin Chipman, Emily Saliers, Laura Olson, Gary Olson, Kathleen
Kelly, Liz Devlin, Barbara Cruikshank, Angie Willey, Angelica Bernal,
Kevin Henderson, Sarah Tanzi, Stu Marvel, Susan Ashmore, and
Ken Carter.
Thank you to all of the dedicated faculty and staff, and the fierce
students at Oxford College, Emory University, and Rutgers University
who make teaching politics and feminism such hopeful work.
Deep appreciation goes to our editor Wendy K. Lochner, who
believed in our book from the beginning.
Special love to our children, Sam and Anita Zamalin, and Zinn and
Gray Olson-Masick, for bringing your questions and laughter to our
lives.
And continued solidarity with all of those working in resistance
toward a better world.
 Chapter One
THE END OF RESISTANCE
REFORMATION OVER TRANSFORMATION

Many U.S. progressives were heartened when, shortly after Donald

Trump’s election in 2016, a new hashtag developed on Twitter:
#resist. This simple injunction was printed on black bumper stickers
in white block lettering, signaling a direct confrontation with power.
Soon the slogan appeared on suburban yard signs on trimmed green
lawns across America, often propped next to those proclaiming “Hate
Has No Home Here” (below a heart in the colors of the American
flag) or “Not My President” (and in smaller letters “Love. Trumps.
Hate”). If these lawn signs stressed the power of love as resistance,
others embraced liberal inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism,
declaring in English—but also in Spanish and Arabic—“No Matter
Where You’re From, We’re Glad You Are Our Neighbor.”
These public displays of resistance against Trump were just the
tip of the iceberg. The 2017 Women’s March on Washington, the day
after Trump’s inauguration, was prompted by feminist umbrage at
Trump’s egregious behavior toward women, as encapsulated by his
infamous brag that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do
anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” For many of the five hundred
thousand people who attended the D.C. Women’s March, satellite
marches across major U.S. cities and eighty-four countries around
the world (five million people in total), a profound sense of dread
filled the air. After all, protesters mused grimly, what would happen to
individual rights, communities, and the planet with an authoritarian
racist xenophobe, blatant misogynist, and climate denier as U.S.
president? At the same time, these gatherings facilitated optimism
that resistance to Trump would be fierce, that Americans would be
vigilant in speaking truth to power and would rally the moral strength
to defend democracy against a path of tyranny. That mass action,
the largest in U.S. history, swiftly ignited an expansive
countermovement to the Trump regime that formalized as “the
Resistance.” This umbrella term included pro-choice liberal feminists,
race-conscious progressives, LGBTQIA activists, citizens taking a
stand against climate change, immigration rights advocates, those
invested in economic equality, and more.
One of the headliner speakers at the Women’s March, the
acclaimed documentarian Michael Moore, defiantly ripped up a copy
of the Washington Post whose front-page headline read “Trump
Takes Power,” and vowed to “end the Trump carnage.”1 A month
later, Moore launched “The Resistance Calendar,” which allowed
anyone to post what he called “Anti-Trump, pro-democracy” events
in the United States. Its stated mission was to be a “24/7
clearinghouse of the already MASSIVE resistance to Trump, to the
Republican Congress, and, yes, to many of the spineless
Democratic politicians out there.… Our goal is his removal from
office—and the defeat of any politician who isn’t with us. WE ARE
THE MAJORITY.”2 Many of these resisters would go on to support
the #MeToo movement, a viral campaign to raise public awareness
of sexual violence against women; occupy airports to contest
Trump’s racist immigration policies, like the Muslim ban; and fight
against his attempts to dismantle Barack Obama’s signature health
care policy (the Affordable Care Act of 2010).
By 2018, headline articles in Time magazine would describe “the
Resistance” as a “participatory democracy,” where “hundreds of
thousands of volunteers, allied with thousands of autonomous
groups, are doing the grunt work of propelling their neighbors to the
polls, using tactics tailored to their communities.”3 The Resistance
was credited with helping Democrats take back the House of
Representatives in November 2018 and with the massive Black
Lives Matter rally turnouts in the summer of 2020, when the murder
of George Floyd sparked global protest against police brutality and
structural racism. When Democrat Joe Biden was elected as
president in fall 2020, many commentators rejoiced at how four
years of steady opposition to Trump had led to his downfall and the
illiberal menace he represented for U.S. democracy—and the world
more broadly. As a headline in The Atlantic affirmed, “Joe Biden Is
the Candidate of the Resistance. A suburban revolt against Trump
helped Democrats win the House in 2018.”4
No doubt, resistance is a crucial concept for any mode of
liberatory, revolutionary, or transformative politics. A majority for “the
99%,” a concept itself popularized by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street
movement, cannot be built without contesting hierarchical forms of
authority and unjust (and interlocking) systems of power. Bodies in
alliance—congregating and laying claim to space as public space; in
motion on the streets; announcing discontent, self-determination,
and a commitment to struggle—affirm temporary expressions of the
popular will.5 They can also build more sustained movements that
demand vital concessions from political elites. Saying no to
disenfranchisement, effacement, and oppression is a way of
practicing freedom in the present and inaugurating a horizon of new
possibilities. This is why democracy, and the popular rule on which it
is based, has long been associated with unruly rebellion,
unannounced uprisings, and (as a corollary) elite condemnation of
“the mob,” “anarchy,” and “lawlessness.” Democracy is an empty
notion without these continuous interruptions and pivotal eruptions
as collectives arrive on the stage of history to recognize their rage,
grievances, and refusals. Think of the 1886 May Day general
railroad strike, which saw 350,000 workers across Chicago, New
York, Detroit, and Cincinnati demand an eight-hour workday; the
U.S. Communist Party organizing the Unemployed Councils and rent
strikes in the 1930s during the Great Depression, when a multiracial
coalition of workers refused to pay exorbitant rents to price-gouging
landlords, opposed evictions, and agitated for cash relief payments
for the unemployed; the Marxist Black Panthers storming the
California legislature in 1967 to decry poverty and demand an end to
anti-Black police violence; or the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, during
which the inchoate LGBTQ “community” poured onto New York
City’s Christopher Street, risking their lives to resist the state’s
coercive hold on gender/sexuality and catalyzing a radical gay
liberation movement.
In these examples, resistance is a transformative praxis because
the co-organization of capitalism, so-called representative
democracy, and state violence are fundamentally challenged. Those
who have been subjugated rise up to identify (often interrelated)
injustices, take aim at its underlying causes, contest existing power
relations, and insist on remaking the world in their image—or at least
on making the subversive claim that “another world is possible.” So
how did we get to this present moment in which #theresistance is
associated with pithy lawn signs in the suburbs; social media profile
photos adorned in “I Stand With (fill-in-the-blank)” frames; tepid “get
out the vote” campaigns; and champagne toasts in the street
celebrating the feat of ushering moderate Democratic politicians into
office? As an NBC News article put it, “Almost everyone involved in
the ‘Resistance,’ from scrappy new startups to venerable stalwarts
like the American Civil Liberties Union, are turning their focus to the
midterms, in which Democrats are trying to seize control of Congress
from Republicans.”6 Even more striking are the ways resistance has
become associated with a patriotic spirit of bipartisanship that would
have filled Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush with glee.
Conservative groups like the Lincoln Project—with its demands to
defeat the “scourge of Trumpism” by recommitting to “order, civility
and decency,” American exceptionalism, and the Founding Fathers
themselves—have taken shape as what the New York Times called
“the other resistance: the republican one” or what Politico coined “the
belle of the resistance ball.”7
Our arrival at this disconcerting moment, we contend, is not
exclusively because widespread loathing of (the antihero archetype
that is) Donald Trump managed to unite a loose coalition of
oppositional forces against his fascist agenda. While it is patently
true that when neofascism looms, any battle against it will resemble
resistance, we argue that what we call the current landscape of
restorative resistance is part of a longer and dangerous political
history.
As Wendy Brown has established, insofar as a politics of
resistance is animated by a desire to be free from power, it may
produce a “tendency to reproach power rather than aspire to it, and
to disdain freedom rather than practice it.”8 Our concern, then, is not
with the rage directed toward Trump (as a legitimate object) per se
but with what we term the restorative posture underpinning this
resistance, which persists in a post-Trump era.
Our analysis takes as its point of departure the rebellious spirit of
the late 1960s, a moment infused by expanding social movements
actively promoting (and cross-fertilizing) visions of a more just world:
vibrant antiwar mobilizations confronting U.S. imperialism; feminist
and gay liberation activists challenging everyday power relations;
socialism enlivened by Students for a Democratic Society, and direct
democracy by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; civil
rights and Black Power insurgencies countering white supremacist
capitalism. Beginning in the 1970s, neoliberal ideologues—or what
Lisa Duggan calls “pro-business activists”9—hell-bent on opposing
the downward distribution of the world’s resources, waged a wide-
ranging attack on stirring revolutionary possibilities. They
systematically dismantled the (limited) U.S. welfare state, privatizing
and deregulating everything in sight, and implemented policies that
entrenched economic inequality. Collective labor organizing was
crushed by bipartisan legislation and abetted by sympathetic courts.
The hegemony of political centrism depressed and disciplined
youthful radical activism. Public space became roundly surveilled in
the name of national security and law and order. Defunded social
institutions of democratic life like public schools and community
centers were supplanted by massive prisons and militarized police
forces.
We suggest that one of the underexamined strategies of this
political, economic, and cultural project that worked to reconstruct
“the everyday life of capitalism” was the active reimagining of
resistance.10 If we are to imagine and work toward a different political
order, we must attend to how the political and discursive life of
democracy—explicitly shaped by nearly five decades of neoliberal
rule—has delimited the conditions of possibility for deploying
resistance. Equally, we must apprehend the ways in which “anti-
restorative,” unruly, or otherwise transformative resistances have
been annexed, ridiculed, marginalized, or unequivocally criminalized.
Clearly, political concepts do not emerge in a vacuum. How
resistance is understood, articulated, and circulated in the popular
imagination is fundamentally tethered to knowledges that are
produced and organized by political, economic, and intellectual elites
and corporate media. These discourses, policies, and logics
circumscribe the ways we imagine belonging—to one another, to a
community, and to the world—as well as what it means to be free. If
we want to make sense of how power is exercised and how power
relations become sustained or fundamentally reshaped, we need to
follow resistance as an object of inquiry.
This book engages in a critical analysis of the present by telling a
particular story about the political life of “resistance.” We undertake
this problematization because, as we demonstrate, what is said and
done in the name of resistance in this moment has high political
stakes. Neither resistance nor democracy are ahistorical
abstractions, and we exist at a juncture when the futures of both are
at stake. The optimism that we are living through a golden age of
resistance in the United States is misplaced, particularly as dominant
formulations of resistance are emptied of an indispensable critique of
neoliberal capitalist values and experimental visions of another kind
of world. The vibrant energy that animates insurgent struggle is also
what elites unfailingly aim to capture and mold to fit their ruthless,
for-profit agendas. Reactionary and reformist forces are doing this
work on a daily basis. Accordingly, rather than rejoice at the modes
of resistance we have seen taking shape during and since the Trump
years, or raise a champagne toast to any semblance of a “return to
normal,” this book raises an alarm about the end(s) of resistance and
what it relays about the future of our world.
 RESISTANCE INSTITUTIONALIZED: MATURITY, CIVILITY, AND
RESTORATION
The structure of feeling that rose up around resistance during the
Trump presidency was about “saying no” to his odious brand of
sovereign power rather than a critical engagement with power
relations as a transformative project. Four years of agitated and even
gleeful clamors for Trump’s impeachment reflected a deep public
desire for democratic institutions to be the resistance: the cruelly
optimistic fantasy that formalized political norms, procedures, and
representatives can do the work of resisting in our place. Elites were
more than prepared to play this role, eager to usher political
grievances safely into the charmed circle of establishment life. After
all, neither crushing (public/ized) social movements or allowing
radical critiques to percolate is a sound political strategy for
preserving legitimacy. Instead, as Chris Hedges puts it, democratic
elites have long functioned as a “safety valve” for the status quo,
addressing the glaring excesses of oligarchic rule (exposed by social
justice movements) without rebuking its basic mechanisms.11 Once
resistance is institutionalized and rendered compatible with existing
power relations, its transformative impulse is dulled and the center
further legitimized and duly restored.
This institutional enshrinement of resistance is captured by the
remarkable photograph of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kneeling side by side and
draped in kende cloth in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter
protests. The press conference was announced as an opportunity for
Democrats to reveal police reform legislation that they would “fight
like hell” to pass. At a deeper level, however, it was a moment of
opportunism as Democrats worked to undermine Black Lives
Matter’s grassroots viability while coopting a tepid version of its
vocabulary—through the promise of reform. In Pelosi’s words,
“Today this movement of national anguish is being transformed into a
movement of national action as Americans from across the country
peacefully protest to demand an end to injustice.… The martyrdom
of George Floyd has made a change in the world.”
 As resistance is taken up as “constructive critique” of the status
quo, the underlying suggestion is that struggles against exploitation
and injustice can be achieved within a more diverse, inclusive, and
unified neoliberal democracy. Given this recuperation, it is
unsurprising that California music producer Robert Ray Barnes
would set up the Black Lives Matter Foundation (which collected $4
million in donations in 2020) directed toward bringing together cops
and local residents for coffee shop meetings and community
dinners.12 This profound revisioning of a radical agenda, one aimed
at exposing and dismantling racial capitalism, is also what eased its
ready pairing with market logics. #BLM’s early and unabashed calls
for a massive redistribution of wealth and resources were quickly
supplanted by an antidiscrimination discourse nested in a politics of
racial representation and corporate-sponsored calls for greater
upward mobility for the Black professional and managerial class. To
be an antiracist ally translated into initiatives like “Buy Black” (in
support of Black-owned businesses), celebrating Black mainstream
entertainment, and clamoring for racial diversity among political
elites.
It was also during the era of the Resistance that the original Black
feminist impulse of #MeToo—commenced by civil rights activist
Tarana Burke in 2006 to combat intersectional violence and
domination—was reworked as the mandate to #BelieveWomen: an
acknowledgment of (primarily white) women’s (virtuous) standpoints
and rectification of individual men’s sexist attitudes and behaviors.
Rather than a critical analysis of structural power that linked
capitalist economic and misogynist predation and how this interplay
is racialized, #MeToo was taken up as a mass disclosure—a
publicizing of private, if collectively experienced, trauma. Predictably,
the corporate media seized the chance to spectacularize this outrage
at “toxic masculinity,” as well as the firing and criminal prosecution of
men from high-profile sectors. Time magazine celebrated #MeToo by
naming “The Silence Breakers” as its Person of the Year,13planting
Taylor Swift and Ashley Judd on its cover (Burke was notably
absent), while the New York Times jubilantly announced that the
movement had “brought down 201 powerful men.”14 The punishment
of a few toxic apples was heralded as resistance to patriarchy, while
the carceral technologies of the white supremacist state were
restored as inherent to the practice of resistance itself.15
We might also consider how the LGBTQIA+ resistance formation,
under the Trump regime, became characterized by a push to turn
transgender individuals into the new poster children of the U.S.
military. After Trump’s executive order banning transgender service
members from serving in the U.S. military, “Rise up and Resist!”
rallies rose up around the United States. These protests featured
posters with phrases like “I Stand with Trans Troops,” “Resist a
Gender Fascist America!” and “Heroes Come in All Genders.”
Importantly, while this effort was led by the advocacy group the Palm
Center, it was funded by the world’s first out transgender billionaire
philanthropist, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jennifer Pritzker, a top
Republican donor and Trump supporter.16 This move reveals the
material conditions of democratic resistance under neoliberalism—in
which private donors increasingly shape political advocacy agendas.
As a result, trans resistance becomes understood as a moral fight for
visibility and inclusion within a (deadly) institution that defines
“responsible” democratic citizenship, and queer politics, more
broadly, becomes aligned with an increasingly militarized social
order. Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, the world’s
largest LGBTQ media-advocacy organization, offered an
enthusiastic assessment of this strategy: “Colonel Pritzker’s voice
has been very critical to the debate about transgender military
service, not just because she is a veteran who understands what it
means to prioritize military readiness, unit cohesion, recruitment, and
retention, but also because she reminds us that this is not—and
never should be—a partisan political issue. It’s simply doing the right
thing.”17
As Dean Spade argues, such resounding endorsement of so-
called pragmatic resistance (as just another form of struggle for
equality and freedom) is “not actually pragmatic at all, since it
strengthens the very systems of harm we need to tear down and
further divides us from each other along lines of race, indigeneity,
gender, class, disability, and immigration status.” At the same time,
these affirmations eclipse and undermine grassroots trans-liberatory,
anticolonial, and anti-militarization agendas that threaten the
interests of “billionaires of any gender.”18 In the post-Trump era,
arguments for lifting the transgender service ban remained rooted in
neoliberal democratic logics of individual merit, choice, and patriotic
responsibility, as well as bolstering military efficiency, enhancement
of national security, and the restoration of an equal opportunity
America: “They can shoot as straight as anybody else can shoot,”
Biden confirmed, and an “inclusive force is a more effective force.”
This rebranding of the U.S. military as an evidential site of
democratic progress and liberation exemplifies the political elite
strategy of folding resistance into the restoration of institutions facing
legitimacy crises. As racial and economic justice-centered
movements gain ground in exposing the fundamental violence of the
state, advocacy for or highlighting the achievement of “inclusion” for
marginalized groups escalates. Recently, the Central Intelligence
Agency (an organization that has thrived on silencing opposition and
a central pillar of U.S. imperialism) rolled out a dozen “Humans of
CIA” videos—in an effort to recruit the communities they have
worked to decimate. In one, a thirty-six-year-old CIA employee
explains that she is a Latinx mother, daughter of immigrants, and
cisgender millennial with generalized anxiety disorder. “I am
intersectional,” she beams proudly as she strolls the CIA halls, “but
my existence is not a box-checking exercise.” Even the T-shirt under
her jacket bears a feminist raised-fist resistance symbol. “I used to
struggle with impostor syndrome,” she continues with a spoken-word
lilt, “but at thirty-six, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal
ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I’m
supposed to apologize for the space I occupy.… I am a walking
declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her
sentences.”19 In another video, a gay, second-generation Asian
American man asserts that the CIA has made “a lot of progress
toward living out our American values,” having warmly embraced his
husband as part of the CIA family. “We are all Americans,” he
concludes. “We are all CIA officers, and we all serve the same
mission.”20
 Not only does restorative resistance shore up institutions of the
state; as of late, it has become a rallying cry for the struggle against
impending ecological catastrophe. Consider, for instance, the 2017
inaugural “March for Science,” during which protesters congregated
across sixty cities to resist Trump’s assault on the reality of climate
change. Joined under the slogan “Unite Behind the Science,”
individual posters declared “Science not Silence,” “Fight for Facts,”
“Stand Up for Science,” and “Science: Speaking Truth to Power,”
while chants like “What do we want? Science! When do we want it?
After peer review!” filled the air. These ostensibly neutral slogans
claimed unequivocal deference to scientific authority as an
oppositional politics, while emphasizing march organizers’ key
contention that the march was fully nonpartisan. “Science is about
getting to the truth,” co-organizer Carrie Weinberg said. “It doesn’t
matter which side of the aisle someone is on, or what they’re
focused on. All that matters is whether or not they “believe in
science.” The chief executive officer of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, Rush Holt Jr., explained, “It’s not a
march pro or con GMOs or pro or con nuclear power. It’s about the
value of science and the power of evidence.”21
But defending the capital-T truth of science is not one that can or
does provide any political account of power: in whose hands
scientific evidence is held, how it is wielded, or which projects it
serves (typically, those of the military and transnational
corporations). This call is particularly disturbing given the vicious
history (and ongoing resonances) of Western scientific racism’s
supportive role in enslavement, exploitation, eugenics, and
colonialism—on the basis of the “evidence” of human hierarchical
inferiority. And indeed there are no collective actions capable of
disrupting climate devastation that do not entail resisting the
neoliberal project responsible for that devastation. Instead, the
restorative demand to “Make America Believe in Science Again”
touts the false magic of science and technology—as though these
are objective, sound, and even progress-oriented forces that can
save us from ourselves.
 Indeed, this mode of anti-Trump resistance in defense of “Truth”
surged throughout Trump’s relentless bashing of mainstream media
as liberal purveyors of “fake news” and the accompanying dip among
Republicans in trusting these news sources. In response, corporate
media outlets like the New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN, long the
object of left and progressive scrutiny, were suddenly defended and
resurrected as “real” news, responsible journalism, and impartial
sources of “non-alternative” facts.22 The Times ran a new television
advertising campaign with the tagline “The truth is hard to find. The
truth is hard to know. The truth is more important now than ever.”
And, tellingly, CNN’s CEO (recently acquired by Warner Discovery
under the world’s third-largest media conglomerate, AT&T) began
enlisting Republican leaders to appear on its broadcasts in service of
restoring a “civilized society.”
If the resistance formation under the Trump regime took shape as
“a return to normal” (of civility, decency, and equality), the Biden
administration has catalyzed this formation to restore (attachments
to) the social and political order. This push is encapsulated by
Biden’s insistence on “Redeeming the Soul of the Nation” (carrying
eerie resonances with Trump’s restorative project) by “Building Back”
an even greater neoliberal democracy. The heroic story about
resistance over the past four years has already taken shape as a
tale of triumph—a feel-good narrative of post-Trump deliverance, in
which power was righteously seized back in the name of restoring
unity and peace. As Biden put it, “You got voters registered. You got
voters to the polls. The rule of law held. Democracy prevailed. We
overcame.” This is a story in which liberal democracy prevailed
through opposing the garish excesses of healthy and functional
institutional norms; indecent, rage-filled, bewildering tweet conduct,
operating outside of the liberal charmed circle, signifies this
aberration. Through this account, democracy becomes naturalized
as a procedural object, and resistance is central to the restorative
health and preservation of its time-honored practices: “We, the
people” resisted Trump’s (and his cronies’) unorthodox disturbances
and came out more resilient in the march toward a more multiracial,
multigender capitalist democracy, one signified with a flourish by its
first woman vice president of color. Resistance thus entails fending
off the continued assault—from the radical right and the radical left
alike—of those who would block this arc of history in its naturalized
bend toward justice.
The prospects for regaining the transformative impulse of
resistance during the Biden presidency are grim. In the wake of the
2020 campaign, the Democratic Party has clearly telegraphed what
their governing platform will consist of: national reconciliation,
restoring faith in elected officials, and recalibrating expectations
about systematic transformation. Biden’s acceptance speech
outlined as his mission to “rebuild the backbone of the middle class”
while paying homage to all those who resisted Trumpism:
“Democrats, Republicans and independents. Progressives,
moderates and conservatives. Young and old. Urban, suburban and
rural. Gay, straight, transgender. White. Latino. Asian. Native
American.” But, Biden cautioned, it is now time to “lower the
temperature” of that furious resistance and to promote healing
among people with wholly different political visions. The “mandate” of
the people, he intoned, is to model “cooperation” and to widen
opportunity in slow and steady ways.23 As a result, transformative
resistance is targeted as uncivil, while leftist critiques of the Biden
administration are cast as disruptive to unity and treated as whiny,
impatient, and childlike demands.
Central to this return to the normal—of everyday life under
oligarchic rule—is restoring attachment to unquestioned respect for
sacred democratic institutions and the rule of law (and order). It is
through this quasi-religious rhetoric surrounding procedural
democracy that discourses surrounding resistance become steeped
in moralistic language about good and bad, mature and immature,
and civil and uncivil strategies for expressing discontent. This
reuptake of a Manichean narrative is clear in ubiquitous critiques of
resisters from Black Lives Matter rallies and recent mobilizations
against Atlanta, Georgia’s “Cop City” to the pro-Trump “Stop the
Steal” attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. Across these disparate
sites of resistance, political elites and the corporate media deploy
damning descriptions of anarchists, mobs, rioters, and domestic
terrorists, and shore up legitimate dissent as something to be
pursued through proper channels and elected officials. As Atlanta
police chief Darin Schierbaum characterized the “Stop Cop City”
resistance, a broad coalition of racial and environmental justice
activists protesting the construction of the nation’s largest militarized
police training center (on hundreds of acres of protected forestland),
“This is not a protest, this is criminal activity.”24 Likewise, Georgia
governor Brian Kemp condemned the “Cop City” resisters as “violent
activists,” asserting that they “chose destruction and vandalism over
legitimate protest, yet again demonstrating the radical intent behind
their actions.”25
The commendation of restorative resistance also relies on the
cultivation of decent democratic citizens invested in cultivating their
individual ethos, acting with moral integrity in order to be on the “right
side of history.” Whether calling people out (or “in”) in a principled
way, purchasing fair trade coffee and organic apples, or signing and
forwarding petitions, such practices position people self-righteously
in their own resistance bubble: to resist is to register a personal
choice and publicize a well-formed conscience. In this way, individual
expressions of morality are treated as the ultimate political act and
moral awakening as an end in itself. One can regularly post on social
media decrying migrant children being separated from their families
at the U.S.-Mexico border rather than campaigning for democratic
socialist candidates who want to abolish exploitative, racist
immigration policies. One can shop on Amazon for “Nevertheless,
She Persisted” T-shirts, or give a tax-deductible donation to the Red
Cross to address childhood hunger in lieu of discomforting boycotts,
inconvenient protests, and tedious horizontal movement making. If
this is the meaning of resistance, we never have to leave our
computer screens (much less our homes) while feeling smug and
effective.
Even when restorative modes of resistance do take discursive aim
at systems, structures, or institutions, they tend to champion reform
efforts. The uttering of radical concepts—intended to inspire critical
engagement with a system of unfettered capitalist elite rule—are
folded into the digestible grammar of policy proposals and
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
But Timothy Bright, Doctor of Physic, is the person who had the most
profound reverence for the medical art. “No one,” he said, “should
touch so holy a thing that hath not passed the whole discipline of
liberal sciences, and washed himself pure and clean in the waters of
wisdom and understanding.” “O Timothy Bright, Timothy Bright,” said
the Doctor, “rightly wert thou called Timothy Bright, for thou wert a
Bright Timothy!” Nor art thou less deserving of praise, O Timothy
Bright, say I, for having published an abridgement of the Book of
Acts and Monuments of the Church, written by that Reverend Father
Master John Fox, and by thee thus reduced into a more accessible
form,—for such as either through want of leisure or ability, have not
the use of so necessary a history.

CHAPTER CCXXXVII.

MORE MALADIES THAN THE BEST PHYSICIANS CAN PREVENT BY REMEDIES.

—THE DOCTOR NOT GIVEN TO QUESTIONS, AND OF THE POCO-CURANTE
SCHOOL AS TO ALL THE POLITICS OF THE DAY.

A slight answer to an intricate and useless question is a fit cover to such a dish; a
cabbage leaf is good enough to cover a pot of mushrooms.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

Yet in his serious moods the Doctor sadly confessed with that Sir
George, whom the Scotch ungratefully call Bloody Mackenzie, that
“as in the body natural, so likewise in the politic, Nature hath
provided more diseases than the best of Physicians can prevent by
remedies.” He knew that kingdoms as well as individuals have their
agues and calentures, are liable to plethora sometimes and
otherwhiles to atrophy, to fits of madness which no hellebore can
cure, and to decay and dissolution which no human endeavours can
avert. With the maladies of the State indeed he troubled himself not,
for though a true-born Englishman, he was as to all politics of the
day, of the Poco-curante school. But with those of the human frame
his thoughts were continually employed; it was his business to deal
with them; his duty and his earnest desire to heal them, under God's
blessing, where healing was humanly possible, or to alleviate them,
when any thing more than alleviation was beyond the power of
human skill.

The origin of evil was a question upon which he never ventured.

Here too, he said with Sir George Mackenzie, “as I am not able by
the Jacob's Ladder of my merit to scale Heaven, so am I less able by
the Jacob's Staff of my private ability to take up the true altitude of its
mysteries:” and borrowing a play upon words from the same old
Essayist, he thought the brain had too little pia mater, which was too
curious in such inquiries. But the mysteries of his own profession
afforded “ample room and verge enough” for his speculations,
however wide and wild their excursions. Those mysteries are so
many, so momentous, and so inscrutable that he wondered not at
any superstitions which have been excogitated by bewildered
imagination, and implicitly followed by human weakness in its hopes
and fears, its bodily and its mental sufferings.

As little did he wonder at the theories advanced by men who were in

their days, the Seraphic and Angelic and Irrefragable Doctors of the
healing art:—the tartar of Paracelsus, the Blas and Gas of Van
Helmont, nor in later times at the animalcular hypotheses of Langius
and Paullinus; nor at the belief of elder nations, as the Jews, and of
savages every-where that all maladies are the immediate work of
evil spirits. But when he called to mind the frightful consequences to
which the belief of this opinion has led, the cruelties which have
been exercised, the crimes which have been perpetrated, the
miseries which have been inflicted and endured, it made him
shudder at perceiving that the most absurd error may produce the
greatest mischief to society, if it be accompanied with presumption,
and if any real or imaginary interest be connected with maintaining it.

The Doctor like his Master and benefactor Peter Hopkins, was of the
Poco-curante school in politics. He said that the Warwickshire
gentleman who was going out with his hounds when the two armies
were beginning to engage at Edge-hill, was not the worst
Englishman who took the field that day.

Local circumstances favoured this tendency to political indifference.

It was observed in the 34th Chapter of this Opus that one of the
many reasons for which our Philosopher thought Doncaster a very
likeable place of residence was that it sent no Members to
Parliament. And Yorkshire being too large a county for any of its
great families to engage lightly in contesting it, the Election fever
however it might rage in other towns or other parts of the county,
never prevailed there. But the constitution of the Doctor's mind
secured him from all excitement of this nature. Even in the days of
Wilkes and Liberty, when not a town in England escaped the general
Influenza, he was not in the slightest degree affected by it, nor did he
ever take up the Public Advertiser for the sake of one of Junius's
Letters.

CHAPTER CCXXXVIII.

SIMONIDES.—FUNERAL POEMS.—UNFEELING OPINION IMPUTED TO THE

GREEK POET, AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE.—SENECA.—JEREMY TAYLOR
AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND WERE MEN
WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE.
 Intendale chi può; che non è stretto
Alcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole.
ORLANDO INNAMORATO.

Among the lost works of antiquity, there are few poems which I
should so much rejoice in recovering, as those of Simonides. Landor
has said of him that he and Pindar wrote nothing bad; that his
characteristics were simplicity, brevity, tenderness, and an assiduous
accuracy of description. “If I were to mention,” he adds “what I fancy
would give an English reader the best idea of his manner, I should
say, the book of Ruth.”

One species of composition wherein he excelled was that which the

Dutch in their straight-forward way call Lykzangen or Lykdichten, but
for which we have no appropriate name,—poems in commemoration
of the dead. Beautiful specimens are to be found in the poetry of all
countries, and this might be expected, threnodial being as natural as
amatory verse; and as the characteristic of the latter is passion with
little reflection, that of the former is, as naturally, to be at the same
time passionate and thoughtful.

Our own language was rich in such poems during the Elizabethan
age, and that which followed it. Of foreign poets none has in this
department exceeded Chiabrera.

There is a passage among the fragments of Simonides which is

called by his old editor consolatory, παρηγορικόν: but were it not for
the authority of Seneca, who undoubtedly was acquainted with the
whole poem, I should not easily be persuaded that so thoughtful, so
pensive, so moralizing a poet would, in any mood of mind have
recommended such consolation:

Τοῦ μὲν θανόντος οὐκ ἄν ἐνθυμοίμεθα,

Εἴ τι φρονοῖμεν, πλεῖον ἡμέρας μιᾶς·
let us not call to mind the dead, if we think of him at all, more than a
single day. Indeed I am not certain from what Seneca says, whether
the poet was speaking in his own, or in an assumed character, nor
whether he spoke seriously or satirically; or I cannot but suspect that
the passage would appear very differently, if we saw it in its place.
Malherbe gives the same sort of advice in his consolation to M. du
Périer upon the death of a daughter.

Ne te lasse donc plus d'inutiles complaintes;

Mais sage à l'avenir,
Aime une ombre comme ombre, et des cendres éteintes
Eteins le souvenir;

such a feeling is much more in character with a Frenchman than with

Simonides.

Seneca himself, Stoic though he was, gave no such advice, but

accounted the remembrance of his departed friends among his
solemn delights, not looking upon them as lost: “mihi amicorum
defunctorum cogitatio dulcis ac blanda est; habui enim illos, tanquam
amissurus; amissi tanquam habeam.”

My venerable friend was not hardened by a profession, which has

too often the effect of blunting the feelings, even if it does not harden
the heart. His disposition and his happy education preserved him
from that injury; and as his religion taught him that death was not in
itself an evil,—that for him, and for those who believed with him, it
had no sting,—the subject was as familiar to his meditations as to his
professional practice. A speculation which Jeremy Taylor, without
insisting on it, offers to the consideration of inquisitive and modest
persons, appeared to him far more probable than the common
opinion which Milton expresses when he says that the fruit of the
Forbidden Tree brought death into the world. That, the Bishop
argues, “which would have been, had there been no sin, and that
which remains when the sin or guiltiness is gone, is not properly the
punishment of the sin. But dissolution of the soul and body should
have been, if Adam had not sinned; for the world would have been
too little to have entertained those myriads of men, which must, in all
reason, have been born from that blessing of ‘Increase and multiply,’
which was given at the first creation: and to have confined mankind
to the pleasures of this world, in case he had not fallen, would have
been a punishment of his innocence: but however, it might have
been, though God had not been angry, and shall still be, even when
the sin is taken off. The proper consequent of this will be, that when
the Apostle says ‘Death came in by Sin,' and that ‘Death is the
wages of Sin,’ he primarily and literally means the solemnities, and
causes, and infelicities, and untimeliness of temporal death; and not
merely the dissolution, which is directly no evil, but an inlet to a
better state.”

As our friend agreed in this opinion with Bishop Taylor; and moreover
as he read in Scriptures that Enoch and Elijah had been translated
from this world without tasting of death; and as he deemed it
probable at least, that St. John, the beloved disciple, had been
favoured with a like exemption from the common lot, he thought that
Asgill had been hardly dealt with in being expelled from Parliament
for his “Argument,” that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life,
revealed in the Scriptures, man might be translated from hence,
without passing through death. The opinion Dr. Dove thought, might
be enthusiastic, the reasoning wild, the conclusion untenable, and
the manner of the book indecorous, or irreverent. But he had learnt
that much, which appears irreverent, and in reality is so, has not
been irreverently intended; and the opinion, although groundless,
seemed to him any thing rather than profane.

But the exemptions which are recorded in the Bible could not, in his
judgement be considered as showing what would have been the
common lot if our first parents had preserved their obedience. This
he opined would more probably have been euthanasy than
translation; death, not preceded by infirmity and decay, but as
welcome, and perhaps as voluntary as sleep.

Or possibly the transition from a corporeal to a spiritual,—or more

accurately in our imperfect language,—from an earthly to a celestial
state of being, might have been produced by some developement,
some formal mutation as visible, (adverting to a favourite fancy of his
own) as that which in the butterfly was made by the ancients their
emblem of immortality. Bishop Van Mildert shews us upon scriptural
authority that “the degree of perfection at which we may arrive has
no definite limits, but is to go on increasing as long as this state of
probation continues.” So in the paradisiacal, and possibly in the
millennial state, he thought, that with such an intellectual and moral
improvement, a corresponding organic evolution might keep pace;
and that as the child expands into man, so man might mature into
Angel.

CHAPTER CCXXXIX.

THE DOCTOR DISSENTS FROM A PROPOSITION OF WARBURTON'S AND

SHEWS IT TO BE FALLACIOUS.—HUTCHINSON'S REMARKS ON THE POWERS
OF BRUTES.—LORD SHAFTESBURY QUOTED.—APOLLONIUS AND THE KING
OF BABYLON.—DISTINCTION IN THE TALMUD BETWEEN AN INNOCENT BEAST
AND A VICIOUS ONE.—OPINION OF ISAAC LA PEYRESC.—THE QUESTION DE
ORIGINE ET NATURA ANIMARUM IN BRUTIS AS BROUGHT BEFORE THE
THEOLOGIANS OF SEVEN PROTESTANT ACADEMIES IN THE YEAR 1635 BY
DANIEL SENNERTUS.

Toutes veritez ne sont pas bonnes à dire serieusement.

GOMGAM.

Warburton has argued that “from the nature of any action morality
cannot arise, nor from its effects;—not from the first, because being
only reasonable or unreasonable, nothing follows but a fitness in
doing one, and an absurdity in doing the other;—not from the
second, because did the good or evil produced make the action
moral, brutes from whose actions proceed both good and evil, would
have morality.” But Warburton's proposition is fallacious, and his
reasoning is inconclusive; there is an essential difference between
right and wrong, upon which the moral law is founded; and in the
reductio ad absurdum upon which he relies, there is no absurdity.
The language of the people is sometimes true to nature and
philosophy when that of the learned departs widely from the one,
and is mistaken in the other. When we call a beast vicious, we mean
strictly what the word implies; and if we never speak of one as
virtuous, it is because man reserves the praise of virtue to his own
kind. The word good supplies its place. A horse that has any vice in
him is never called good.

“In this case alone it is,” says Lord Shaftesbury, “we call any creature
worthy or virtuous, when it can have the notion of a public interest,
and can attain the speculation or science of what is morally good or
ill, admirable or blameable, right or wrong. For though we may
vulgarly call a horse vicious, yet we never say of a good one, nor of
any mere beast, idiot, or changeling, though ever so good-natured,
that he is worthy or virtuous.

“So that if a creature be generous, kind, constant, compassionate,

yet if he cannot reflect on what he himself does, or sees others do,
so as to take notice of what is worthy or honest; and make that
notice or conception of worth and honesty to be an object of his
affection, he has not the character of being virtuous; for thus, and no
otherwise, he is capable of having a sense of right and wrong; a
sentiment or judgement of what is done through just, equal and good
affection, or the contrary.”

The Jews upon this subject agree with the common and natural
opinion; and the Talmud accordingly, when any mischief has been
done by an animal, distinguishes between an innocent beast and a
vicious one, the owner of an innocent one being required to pay only
half the amount of an injury thus, as it was deemed, casually
incurred. There have been cases in which the laws have considered
a beast as guilty of a crime, and amenable therefore to penal justice.
In the year 1403 Simon de Baudemont, Lieutenant at Meulont of
Jhean Lord of Maintenon the Bailiff of Mantes and Meulont, signed
an attestation making known the expences, which had been incurred
in order to execute justice on a Sow that had eaten a child. “For
expences with the jail the charge was six sols. Item, to the
executioner who came from Paris to Meulont to put the sentence in
execution by the command of our Lord the Bailiff and of the king's
Attorney, 54 sols. Item, for the carriage that conveyed her to
execution, 6 sols. Item, for ropes to tie and haul her up, 2 sols, 8
deniers. Item, for gloves 12 deniers; amounting in the whole to 69
sols, 8 deniers.” It must be supposed the Executioner insisted upon
the gloves, as a point of honour, that no one might reproach him with
having sullied his hands by performing upon such a subject.

When Apollonius was introduced to the King of Babylon, the King

invited him to sacrifice with him, for he was about to offer a Nisean
horse to the Sun, selected for its beauty and adorned with all pomp
for the occasion. But the Philosopher replied, “O King do you
sacrifice after your manner, and give me leave to sacrifice after
mine.” He then took frankincense, and prayed, saying, “O Sun,
conduct me so far as it seemeth good to me and to thee. And let me
become acquainted with virtuous men; but as for the wicked, let me
neither know them nor they me.” And throwing the frankincense in
the fire he observed the smoke, how it ascended and which way it
bent, and just touching the fire when it seemed that he had sacrificed
enough, he said to the King that he had performed the rites of his
country, and forthwith withdrew that he might have nothing to do with
blood and slaughter. Afterwards when the King took him where were
many lions, bears and panthers reserved for sport, invited him to go
with him and hunt them, Apollonius replied, “King, you should
remember, that I did not chuse to be present at your sacrifice, much
less should I like to see animals wounded, and by the pain of their
wounds rendered more ferocious than nature has made them.”
Isaac la Peyresc thought differently from the Talmudists and the
French Lawyers. He says, quoting the Apostle, Ubi non est lex,
neque prævaricatio est. Where ‘no law is, there is no transgression.’
Prævaricatio autem eadem est, quæ transgressio legis: illa ipsa
proprie quæ peccatum imputationis labe infecit. Quod ut
compingatur in oculos: pecudes actualiter et materialiter eadem
faciunt, quæ transgrediuntur homines; incestant, rapiunt, occidunt;
non erit tamen uspiam adeo supinus qui dicat, pecudes peccare ad
similitudinem transgressionis hominum; quia pecudes quæ hæc
peccant, sequuntur tantum suam naturam et suam materiam; neque
legum transgrediuntur ullam, quia nulla eis data est cujus
transgressione formetur in eis et imputetur peccatum.

Yet it cannot be doubted that in such a case Peyresc himself,

disregarding his own arguments would have ordered the Sow to be
put to death.

This author derives peccatum from pecus, for, says he, “as often as
a man wilfully departs from that right reason which constitutes him
man,—as often as under the impulse of that brute matter which he
has in common with beasts, he commits any action fitting in a beast,
but unworthy in man, so often he seems to fall below his own
species, and sink into that of a brute.” “Latini nomen peccati mutuati
sunt à pecore. Quoties enim homo delirat à rectâ ratione illa quæ
hominem constituit; quoties impulsu materiæ suæ quam habet
communem cum brutis, quid agit dignum pecore, et indignum
homine, toties cadere videtur à specie suâ, et incidere in speciem
pecoris sive bruti.”

Pecunia is known to be derived from Pecus, wealth, of which money

is the representative, having originally consisted in cattle. As money
is proverbially the root of all evil, this etymological connection might
be remarkable enough to be deemed mysterious by those who are
fond of discovering mysteries in words.

“Brutes,” Hutchinson says, “are made in scripture objects to inculcate

the duties in society, and even emblems of spiritual and divine
perfections. Many of them are more strictly bound in pairs than is
common between men and women; many both males and females
take greater care and pains, and run greater risques for the
education and defence of their young, than any of our species. Many
of them excel us in instructing their young, so in policy, in industry, in
mechanical arts and operations. And there are other species among
them, examples to deter men from the vices in society.” “The power
in brutes,” he says, “is by the same agent as that in the body of man,
and they are made of the same species of dust; most of them are
guided by what is called instinct; some of them are tamed and
disciplined and their powers made serviceable to men, and all of
them are subject to the immediate power of God, when he pleases to
direct them. Mechanism is carried so far in them, that in the parts or
degrees of sensation they excel man; that by every one of their
actions man might see the ne plus ultra of sense, and know how to
distinguish the difference between them and the decayed image in
him, to value it accordingly, and excite a proportionate zeal in him to
recover the first perfections in that image, and augment them to
secure the pleasure of exercising them upon the most desirable
objects to all eternity.” So far so good, but this once influential writer
makes an erroneous conclusion when he says, “if you allow anything
farther than mechanism to Brutes, imagine that they have souls, or
think, or act the part of souls: you either begin to think that you have
no soul, or that it is, such as are in Brutes, mortal.”

The question de Origine et Naturâ Animarum in Brutis was brought

before the Theologians of seven Protestant Academies in the year
1635, by Daniel Sennertus Professor of Medicine at Wittemberg, of
whose Institutes Sir Thomas Browne says to a student in that art,
“assure yourself that when you are a perfect master of them you will
seldom meet with any point in physic to which you will not be able to
speak like a man.” It was the opinion of this very learned professor
that what in scholastic language is called the form of every perfect
thing, (distinguished from figure,—forma est naturæ bonum, figura,
artis opus) though it is not a soul, yet even in precious stones is
something altogether different from the four elements, and that every
soul, or living principle, is a certain quintessence; the wonderful
operations in plants, and the more wonderful actions of brute
creatures, far exceeding all power of the elements, had convinced
him of this. But for asserting it, Freitagius the medical Professor at
Groninghen attacked him fiercely as a blasphemer and a heretic.
Sennertus being then an old man was more moved by this outrage
than became one of his attainments and high character. So he laid
the case before the Universities of Leipsic, Rostock, Basle, Marpurg,
Konigsberg, Jena, Strasburg, and Altorff, and he requested their
opinion upon these two propositions, whether what he had affirmed,
that the souls of brute creatures had been created at first from
nothing by the Deity, and were not of an elementary nature, but of
something different, was blasphemous and heretical, or whether it
were not an ignorant opinion of his assailant, that brute animals
consisted wholly of elementary matter, both as to their body and
soul?

They all answered the questions more or less at large, the Leipsic
Doctors saying officii nostri duximus esse ut in timore Domini ea sub
diligentem disquisitionem vocaremus. They saw nothing irreligious in
the opinion that God at the creation had formed the bodies of brutes
from elementary matter, and created their souls ex nihilo; after which
both were reproduced in the natural course of generation; these
souls however were not immortal, nor so separable from the matter
with which they were united, as to survive it, and exist without it, or
return again into their bodies; but when the animals died, the animal
soul died also. Thus the excellence of man was unimpaired, and the
privilege of the human soul remained inviolate, the prerogative of
man being that God had breathed into him the breath of life, whereby
he became a living soul. Thus they fully acquitted Sennertus of the
charge brought against him; and waiving any such direct
condemnation of his accuser as he had desired, condemned in
strong terms the insolent manner in which the accusation had been
preferred.

The Theologians of Rostock replied more briefly. Dismissing at once

the charge of blasphemy and heresy as absurd, they treated the
question as purely philosophical, saying, “Quod de elementari naturâ
animarum brutorum dicitur, de illo nostrum non est disserere.
Arbitramur, hæc non solum Philosophorum, sed et libertati, super his
modestè, veritatis inveniendæ studio, philosophantium permittenda;
quos nimium constringere, et unius hominis, Aristotelis, alteriusve,
velle alligare opinioni, pugnare videtur cum naturâ intellectus
humani, quem nulli opinioni servum Deus esse voluit.” Concerning
the second question, they were not willing, they said, to draw the
saw of contention with any one; “Si tamen, quod sentimus dicendum
est, respondemus, illum qui cœlum et terram ex nihilo creavit, non
eguisse ullâ materiâ, ex quâ brutorum animas produceret; sed illi
placuisse iis quæ Moses recitat verbis compellare terram et aquam,
et ad solius Omnipotentis nutum et imperium, ex subjectis quæ
compellârit, animas emersisse.” This answer Sennertus obtained
through his friend Lauremberg the Horticulturist and Botanist, who
advised him at the same time to disregard all invidious attacks;
“Turbas tibi dari quòd liberè philosophari satagis, id ipse nôsti, neque
novum esse, neque insolens, hâc ætate. Eandem tecum sortem
experiuntur omnes eleganter et solidè eruditi, quibus qui paria facere
non valet, invidet et oblatrat. Tu verò noli hoc nomine te quicquam
macerare neu obtrectationem illam gravius vocare ad animum. Nota
est orbi tua eruditio, tua virtus et ingenuitas, quæ ea propter nullam
patietur jacturam. Tu modo, ut hactenus fecisti, pergito bene mereri
de Republicâ literariâ, et mihi favere, certò tibi persuasus, habere te
hîc loci hominem tui amantem, et observantem maxime.”

Zuinger answered more at large for the Faculty at Basle. They bade
him not to marvel that he should be accused of heresy and
blasphemy, seeing that the same charge has been brought against
their Theologians, who when they taught according to Scripture that
God alone was the Father of the spirits as their parents were of their
bodies, and that the reasonable soul therefore was not derived from
their parents, but infused and concreated θύραθεν à Deo ἀμέσως
were accused either of Pelagianism, as if they had denied Original
Sin, or of blasphemy, as if they had made God the author of sin.
They admonished him to regard such calumnies more justly and
quietly, for evil and invidious tongues could never detract from that
estimation which he had won for him in the Republic of Letters.
Nevertheless as he had asked for their opinion, they would freely
deliver it.

First then as to the postulate which he had premised in the Epistle

accompanying his Questions, that wherever there is creation,
something is produced from nothing, (ubicunque creatio est, ibi
aliquid ex nihilo producitur) if by this he intended, that in no mode of
creation, whether it were κτίσις, or ποίησις, or πλᾶσις there was no
substrate matter out of which something was made by the
omnipotent virtue of the Deity, in that case they thought, that his
opinion was contrary to Scripture, forasmuch as it plainly appeared
in the book of Genesis, that neither the male nor female were
created from nothing, but the man from the dust of the ground, and
the woman from one of his ribs, tanquam præcedentibus corporum
materieribus. But though it is indubitable that the creation of the soul
in either parent was immediately ex nihilo, as was shewn in the
creation of Adam we see nevertheless that the name of creation has
been applied by Moses to the formation (plasmationi) of their bodies.
But if Sennertus's words were to be understood as intending that
wherever there was a creation, something was produced in this
either ex nihilo absolutely, or relatively and κατά τι out of something,
some preceding matter, which though certainly in itself something,
yet relatively,—that which is made out of it, is nothing, (nihil, aut non
ens) because it hath in itself no power, liability, or aptitude that it
should either be, or become that which God by his miraculous and
omnipotent virtue makes it, they had no difficulty in assenting to this.
As for example, the dust of which God formed the body of Adam was
something and nothing. Something in itself, for it was earth; nothing
in respect of that admirable work of the human body which God
formed of it.

As for the question whether his opinion was blasphemous and

heretical, it could be neither one nor the other, for it neither
derogated from the glory of God, nor touched upon any fundamental
article of faith. Some there were who opined that Chaos was created
ex nihilo, which they understood by Tohu Vabohu, from which all
things celestial and elementary were afterwards mediately created
by God. Others exploding Chaos held that heaven, earth, water and
air, were created ex nihilo. But they did not charge each other with
blasphemy, and heresy because of this disagreement, and verily
they who thought that the souls of brutes were originally created by
God ex nihilo appeared no more to derogate from the might, majesty
and glory of God, than those who held that brutes were wholly
created from the element. The virtue of an omnipotent God became
in either case presupposed.

There was no heresy they said in his assertion that the souls of
brutes were not of an elementary nature, but of something different:
provided that a just distinction were made between the rational soul
and the brute soul, the difference being not merely specific but
generic. For the rational soul is altogether of a spiritual nature and
essence, adeòque Ens uti vocant transcendens, bearing the image
of God in this, that properly speaking it is a spirit, as God is a Spirit.
2d. The rational soul as such, as Aristotle himself testifies, has no
bodily energies, or operations; its operations indeed are performed in
the body but not by the body, nor by bodily organs; but the contrary
is true concerning the souls of brutes. 3dly. The rational soul, though
it be closely conjoined with the body and hypostatically united
therewith, nevertheless is separable therefrom, so that ever out of
the body sit ὑφιστάμενον aliquod; but the souls of brutes are
immersed in matter and in bodies, so that they cannot subsist
without them. Lastly, the rational soul alone hath the privilege of
immortality, it being beyond all controversy that the souls of brutes
are mortal and corruptible. These differences being admitted, and
saving the due prerogative, excellence, and as it were divinity of the
rational soul, the Theological Faculty of Basil thought it of little
consequence if any one held that the souls of brutes were of
something different from elementary matter.

They delivered no opinion in condemnation of his assailant's

doctrine, upon the ground that the question was not within their
province. “Certum est,” they said, “uti formas rerum omnium
difficulter, et non nisi a posteriori, et per certas περιστάσεις,
cognoscere possumus; ita omnium difficillimè Animarum naturam
nos pervestigare posse, nostramque, uti in aliis, ita in hac materiâ,
scientiam esse, ut scitè Scaliger loquitur, umbram in sole. Ac non
dubium, Deum hic vagabundis contemplationibus nostris ponere
voluisse, ut disceremus imbecillitatis et cæcitatis nostræ conscientiâ
humiliari, cum stupore opera ejus admirari, atque cum modestia et
sobrietate philosophari.” They declared however that the rational
soul differed from that of brutes in its nature, essence, properties and
actions, and that this was not to be doubted of by Christians: that the
soul of brutes was not spiritual, not immaterial, that all its actions
were merely material, and performed by corporeal organs, and they
referred to Sennertus's own works as rightly affirming that it was
partible, et dividatur ad divisionem materiæ, ita ut cum corporis parte
aliquid animæ possit avelli, inferring here as it seems from a false
analogy that animal life was like that of vegetables, quæ ex parte a
plantâ avulsâ propagantur.

They entered also into some curious criticism metaphysical and

philological upon certain texts pertinent to the questions before them.
When the dust became lice throughout all the land of Egypt, the
mutation of the dust into lice was to be understood: so too in the
creation of Adam, and the formation of Eve, there could be no doubt
concerning the matter from which both were made. But when water
was miraculously produced from the rock, and from the hollow place
in the jaw, ibi sanè nemo sanus dicet, aquam è petrâ aut maxillâ à
Deo ita fuisse productam, ut petra aut maxilla materiam aquæ huic
præbuerit.

The answer from Marpurg was short and satisfactory. There also the
Professors waived the philosophical question, saying Nos falcem in
alienam messem non mittemus, nec Morychi in alieno choro pedem
nostrum ponemus, sed nostro modulo ac pede nos metiemur, nobis
id etiam dictum putantes, τὰ ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς. Nobis
nostra vendicabimus, Philosophis philosophica relinquentes.
Tertullian they said had asserted that Philosophers were the
Patriarchs of Heretics, nevertheless a philosophical opinion, while it
keeps within its own circles, and does not interfere with the
mysteries of faith, is no heresy. They adduced a subtle argument to
show that upon the point in question there was no real difference
between something and nothing. Creatio ex nihilo intelligitur fieri tum
ratione sui principii, quod est nihilum negativum; tum ratione
indispositionis, ob quam materia, ex quâ aliquid fit, in productione
pro nihilo habetur. Quamvis igitur animæ bestiarum dicerentur in
Creatione ex potentiâ materiæ eductæ, nihilominus ob
indispositionem materiæ quam formæ eductæ multum superant, ex
nihilo creatæ essent. And they agreed with Luther and with those
other Divines who held that the words in the first Chapter of Genesis
whereby the Earth was bade to bring forth grass, herbs, trees and
living creatures after their kind, and the water to bring forth fishes,
were to be strictly understood, the earth and the waters having ex
Dei benedictione, activè et verè produced them.

The answer from Konigsberg was not less favourable. The dispute
which Freitagius had raised, infelix illa σύῤῥαξις they called it, ought
to have been carried on by that Professor with more moderation.
Granting that the souls of brutes were not created separately like
human souls but conjointly with the body, it still remained doubtful
quomodo se habuerit divinum partim ad aquam et terram factum
mandatum, partim simultanea brutalium animarum cum corporibus
creatio. For earth and water might here be variously considered, 1,
as the element, 2, as the matter, 3, as the subject, and 4, ut mater
vel vivus uterus ad animalium productionem immediatâ Dei
operatione exaltatus. Water and earth themselves were first created,
and on the fifth the vital and plastic power was communicated to
them, in which by virtue of the omnipotent word they still consist.
They were of opinion that the souls of brutes and of plants also, were
divinely raised above an elementary condition, it being always
understood that the human soul far transcended them. The
expression of Moses that formed every beast and every fowl out of
the ground, proved not the matter whereof, but the place wherein
they were formed.

The Faculty at Jena returned a shorter reply. The ingratitude of the

world toward those who published their lucubrations upon such
abstruse points, reminded them they said of Luther's complaint in
one of his Prefaces: Sæpe recordor boni Gersonis dubitantis num
quid boni publicè scribendmn et proferendum sit. Si scriptio omittitur,
multæ animæ negliguntur, quæ liberari potuissent; si verò illa
præstatur, statim Diabolus præstò est cum linguis pestiferis et
calumniarum plenis, quæ omnia corrumpunt et inficiunt. What was
said of the production of fish, plants and animals might be
understood synecdochically, salvâ verborum Mosaicorum integritate,
as the text also was to be understood concerning the creation of
man, where it is said that the Lord formed him of the dust of the
earth, and immediately afterwards that he breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life.

The Strasburg Divines entered upon the subject so earnestly that

their disquisition far exceeds in length the whole of the
communications from the other Universities. Sennertus could not
have wished for a more elaborate or a more gratifying reply. The
Faculty at Altdorff said that the question was not a matter of faith,
and therefore no one could be obnoxious to the charge of heresy for
maintaining or controverting either of the opposite opinions. They
seem however to have agreed with neither party; not with Freitagius
because they denied that brute souls were of an elementary nature,
not with Sennertus, because they denied that they were created at
first from nothing. It is manifest, said they, that they are not now
created from nothing, because it would follow from thence that they
subsist of themselves, and are not dependent upon matter, and are
consequently immortal, which is absurd. It remained therefore that
the souls of brutes, as they do not now receive their existence from
mere nothing, so neither did they at the first creation, but from
something pre-supposed, which the Peripatetics call the power of
matter or of the subject, which from the beginning was nothing else
and still is nothing else, than its propension or inclination to this or
that form. Quæ forma multiplex, cum etiam in potentia primi subjecti
passiva præcesserit, per miraculosam Dei actionem ex illa fuit
educta, actumque essendi completum in variis animalium speciebus
accepit.
Sennertus either published these papers or prepared them for
publication just before his death. They were printed in octavo at
Wittenberg, with the title De Origine et Natura Animarum in Brutis,
Sententiæ Cl. Theologorum in aliquot Germaniæ Academiis, 1638.
Sprengel observes that none of the Historians of Philosophy have
noticed,—

Cætera desunt.

CHAPTER CCXL.

THE JESUIT GARASSE'S CENSURE OF HUARTE AND BARCLAY.—

EXTRAORDINARY INVESTIGATION.—THE TENDENCY OF NATURE TO
PRESERVE ITS OWN ARCHETYPAL FORMS.—THAT OF ART TO VARY THEM.—
PORTRAITS.—MORAL AND PHYSICAL CADASTRE.—PARISH CHRONICLER
AND PARISH CLERK THE DOCTOR THOUGHT MIGHT BE WELL UNITED.

Is't you, Sir, that know things?

SOOTH. In nature's infinite book of secresy,

A little I can read.
SHAKSPEARE.

The Jesuit Garasse censured his contemporaries Huarte and

Barclay for attempting, the one in his Examen de los Ingenios, the
other in his Icon Animorum, to class men according to their
intellectual characters: ces deux Autheurs, says he, se sont rendus
criminels contre l'esprit de l'homme, en ce qu'ils ont entrepris de
ranger en cinq ou six cahiers, toutes les diversitez des esprits qui
peuvent estre parmy les hommes, comme qui voudroit verser toute
l'eau de la mer dans une coquille. For his own part, he had learnt, he
said, et par la lecture, et par l'experience, que les hommes sont plus
dissemblables en esprit qu'en visage.

Garasse was right; for there goes far more to the composition of an
individual character, than of an individual face. It has sometimes
happened that the portrait of one person has proved also to be a
good likeness of another. Mr. Hazlitt recognized his own features and
expression in one of Michael Angelo's devils. And in real life two
faces, even though there be no relationship between the parties,
may be all but indistinguishably alike, so that the one shall frequently
be accosted for the other; yet no parity of character can be inferred
from this resemblance. Poor Capt. Atkins, who was lost in the
Defence off the coast of Jutland in 1811, had a double of this kind,
that was the torment of his life; for this double was a swindler, who
having discovered the lucky facsimileship, obtained goods, took up
money, and at last married a wife in his name. Once when the real
Capt. Atkins returned from a distant station, this poor woman who
was awaiting him at Plymouth, put off in a boat, boarded the ship as
soon as it came to anchor, and ran to welcome him as her husband.

The following Extraordinary Investigation, cut out of a Journal of the

day, would have excited our Doctor's curiosity, and have led him on
to remoter speculations.

“On Tuesday afternoon an adjourned inquest was held at the

Christchurch workhouse. Boundary-row, Blackfriars-road, before Mr.
R. Carter, on the body of Eliza Baker, aged 17, who was found
drowned at the steps of Blackfriars-bridge, on Saturday morning, by
a police constable. Mr. Peter Wood, an eating-house-keeper, in the
Bermondsey New-road, near the Brick-layers Arms, having seen a
paragraph in one of the Sunday newspapers, that the body of a
female had been taken out of the Thames on the previous day, and
carried to the workhouse to be owned, and, from the description