Augustus De Morgan

“ I had only to bring my mouth to their mode of speaking, which was done with ease in less than a week, and I was everywhere taken for a true-born Englishman; a privilege by the way of no small importance in a country, where each man, God knows why, thinks his foggy island superior to any other part of the world: and though his door is never free from some dun or other coming for a tax, and if he steps out of it he is sure to be knocked down or to have his pocket picked, yet he has the insolence to think every foreigner a miserable slave, and his country the seat of everything wretched. ”

“ Suppose a country in which dress is always of one color; suppose an importer who brings in cargoes of blue stuff, red stuff, green stuff, etc., and exhibits dresses of these several colors, that person is the similitude of Miss Burney. It would be a delightful change from a universal dull brown, to see one person all red, another all blue, etc.; but the real inventor of pleasant dress would be the one who could mix his colors and keep down the bright and gaudy. Miss Burney's introduction was so charming, by contrast, that she nailed such men as Johnson, Burke, Garrick, etc., to her books. ”

“ There they were left by Panurge, who took his chair by Pantagruel just as the soup was removed, but he made up for the want of that part of his dinner by a pint of champagne. The learning of the university had whetted their appetites; what they each ate it is needless to recite; good wine, good stories, and hearty laughs went round, and three hours elapsed before one soul of them recollected the hungry students of Pontemaca.
"Epistemon reminded them of the business in hand, and orders were given for a fresh dozen of hermitage to be put upon table, and the royal attendants to get ready. ”

“ Every branch of exact science has its paradoxer. The world at large cannot tell with certainty who is right in such questions as squaring the circle, etc. Mr. Weyman Lee [344] was the assailant of what all who had studied called demonstration in the question of annuities. He can be exposed to the world: for his error arose out of his not being able to see that the whole is the sum of all its parts.
By an annuity, say of £100, now bought, is meant that the buyer is to have for his money £100 in a year, if he be then alive, £100 at the end of two years, if then alive, and so on. ”

“ Nothing can be more correct, or more identically logical: +5 and -5, standing alone, are jargon if +5 and -5 are to be understood as without reference to another quantity. But those who have "formed to themselves some other idea" see meaning enough. The great difficulty of the opponents of algebra lay in want of power or will to see extension of terms. Maseres is right when he implies that extension, accompanied by its refusal, makes jargon. One of my paradoxers was present at a meeting of the Royal Society (in 1864, I think) and asked permission to make some remarks upon a paper. ”

“ Every one then, who has the good of science at heart, must pray for the interference of his highness to put a stop to all the disputes about nothing, and by his decision to convince all gainsayers that the science of nothing is taught in the best manner in the universities, to the great edification and improvement of all the youth in the land.'
"Here Pantagruel whispered in the ear of Panurge, who nodded to Epistemon, and they two left the assembly, and did not return for an hour, till the orator had finished his task. ”

“ Must a man have but one wife? Nay, may not a man have a new wife while the old one is living? There was a famous instrumental professor forty years ago, who presented a friend to Madame ——. The friend started, and looked surprised; for, not many weeks before, he had been presented to another lady, with the same title, at Paris. ”

“ Not one opinion of any other man is referred to, in the way of agreement or of opposition. Not even a town is mentioned: there is nothing which brings a capital letter into the middle of a sentence, except, by the rarest accident, such a personification as Justice. A likely book to want an Edimbourg godfather!
Saint-Martin is great in mathematics. The number four essentially belongs to straight lines, and nine to curves. The object of a straight line is to perpetuate ad infinitum the production of a point from which it emanates. ”

“ The right claimed for woman is to have the education of a rational human being, and not to be considered as nothing but woman throughout youthful training. The maxims of Mary Wollstonecraft are now, though not derived from her, largely followed in the education of girls, especially in home education: just as many of the political principles of Tom Paine, again not derived from him, are the guides of our actual legislation. ”

“ It is clear that he would buy a life annuity if he should buy the first £100 in one office, the second in another, and so on. All the difference between buying the whole from one office and buying all the separate contingent payments at different offices, is immaterial to calculation. ”

“ Here all the company unanimously cried out against the Swede, that it was impossible: for in England, the land of liberty, the only thing its worst enemies could say against it, was, that they paid for their liberty a much greater price than it was worth.—Every man there had a fair trial according to laws, which everybody could understand; and the judges were cool, patient, discerning men, who never took the part of the crown against the prisoner, but gave him every assistance possible for his defense. ”

“ The religious world—to use a name claimed by a doctrinal sect—had long set its face against amusing literature, and all works of imagination. Bunyan, Milton, and a few others were irresistible; but a long face was pulled at every attempt to produce something readable for poor people and poor children. In 1795, a benevolent association began to circulate the works of a lady who had been herself a dramatist, and had nourished a pleasant vein of satire in the society of Garrick and his friends; all which is carefully suppressed in some biographies. ”

“ If, then, of a thousand persons, 500 be sure to die within a year, and the other 500 be immortal, Lee's price of an annuity to any one of these persons is the present value of one payment: for one year is the term which each one has an even chance of surviving and not surviving. But the true value is obviously half that of a perpetual annuity: so that at 5 percent Lee's rule would give less than the tenth of the true value. It must be said for the poor circle-squarers, that they never err so much as this. ”

“ The mission was satisfactorily performed, and Maseres remained as Attorney-General.
The Doctrine of Life Annuities [466] (4to, 726 pages, 1783) is a strange paradox. Its size, the heavy dissertations on the national debt, and the depth of algebra supposed known, put it out of the question as an elementary work, and it is unfitted for the higher student by its elaborate attempt at elementary character, shown in its rejection of forms derived from chances in favor of the average, and its exhibition of the separate values of the years of an annuity, as arithmetical illustrations. ”

“ It is this: if p be a prime number, the product of all the numbers up to p-1, increased by 1, is divisible without remainder by p. All mathematicians know this as Wilson's theorem, but few know who Wilson was. He was born August 6, 1741, at the Howe in Applethwaite, and he was heir to a small estate at Troutbeck in Westmoreland. He was sent to Peterhouse, at Cambridge, and while an undergraduate was considered stronger in algebra than any one in the University, except Professor Waring, one of the most powerful algebraists of the century. ”

“ Lee would have said, if alive, that I have put an extreme case: but any universal truth is true in its extreme cases. It is not fair to bring forward an extreme case against a person who is speaking as of usual occurrences: but it is quite fair when, as frequently happens, the proposer insists upon a perfectly general acceptance of his assertion. And yet many who go the whole hog protest against being tickled with the tail. Counsel in court are good instances: they are paradoxers by trade. ”

“ Montucla refers to his own anonymous book of 1754 as a curious book published by Jombert. [354] He seems to have been a little ashamed of writing about circle-squarers: what a slap on the face for an unborn Budgeteer!
Montucla says, speaking of France, that he finds three notions prevalent among the cyclometers: (1) that there is a large reward offered for success; (2) that the longitude problem depends on that success; (3) that the solution is the great end and object of geometry. The same three notions are equally prevalent among the same class in England. ”

“ An inquiry into the cause of what is called gravitation or attraction, in which the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the preservation and operations of all nature, are deduced from an universal principle of efflux and reflux. ”

“ Old Ben could not be a Fellow of the Royal Society, because he kept a shop: even though the shop sold nothing but philosophical instruments. Thomas Wright, similarly situated as to shop and goods, never was a Fellow. The Society of our day has greatly degenerated: those of the old time would be pleased, no doubt, that the glories of their day should be commemorated. ”

“ No reward has ever been offered by the government of either country. The longitude problem in no way depends upon perfect solution; existing approximations are sufficient to a point of accuracy far beyond what can be wanted. [355] And geometry, content with what exists, has long passed on to other matters. Sometimes a cyclometer persuades a skipper who has made land in the wrong place that the astronomers are in fault, for using a wrong measure of the circle ”

“ But it is not usual for a writer to publish two works in the same year, one of which takes a motto from the other. And the second work is profuse in capitals and italics, and uses Hebrew learning: its style differs much from the first work. The first work sets out from man, and has nothing to do with God: the second is religious and raps the knuckles of the first as follows: "Si nous voulons nous préserver de toutes les illusions, et surtout des amorces de l'orgueil par lesquelles l'homme est si souvent séduit, ne prenons jamais les hommes, mais toujours Dieu pour notre terme de comparaison." ”

“ The boyish satire on Newton is amusing. Speaking of old Benjamin Martin, [335] he goes on as follows:
"But the most elegant account of the matter [attraction] is by that hominiform animal, Mr. Benjamin Martin, who having attended Dr. Desaguliers' [336] fine, raree, gallanty shew for some years [Desaguliers was one of the first who gave public experimental lectures, before the saucy boy was born] in the capacity of a turnspit, has, it seems, taken it into his head to set up for a philosopher." ”

“ The Religious Tract Society (in 1863) republished some of H. More's tracts, with alterations, additions, and omissions ad libitum. This is an improper way of dealing with the works of the dead; especially when the reprints are of popular works. A small type addition to the preface contains: "Some alterations and abridgements have been made to adapt them to the present times and the aim of the Religious Tract Society." I think every publicity ought to be given to the existence of such a practice; and I reprint what I said on the subject in Notes and Queries. ”

“ There is a mistake about him which can never be destroyed. It is constantly said that, at his celebrated trial in 1792, for sedition and opposition to the Liturgy, etc., he was expelled from the University. He was banished. People cannot see the difference; but it made all the difference to Mr. Frend. He held his fellowship and its profits till his marriage in 1808, and was a member of the University and of its Senate till his death in 1841, as any Cambridge Calendar up to 1841 will show. ”

“ Perhaps dramatic talent found its best encouragement in the drama itself. But I cannot ascertain that any such power was directed at the multitude, whether educated or uneducated, with natural mixture of character, under the restraints of decorum, until the use of it by two religious writers of the school called "evangelical," Hannah More and Rowland Hill. [437] The Village Dialogues, though not equal to the Repository Tracts, are in many parts an approach, and perhaps a copy; there is frequently humorous satire, in that most effective form, self-display. ”