Augustus De Morgan

“ President of Queens' College, Cambridge, one of the class of rational paradoxers. Under this name I include all who, in private life, and in matters which concern themselves, take their own course, and suit their own notions, no matter what other people may think of them. These men will put things to uses they were never intended for, to the great distress and disgust of their gregarious friends. I am one of the class, and I could write a little book of cases in which I have incurred absolute reproach for not "doing as other people do." ”

“ Now the little body question is a perfect parallel to the great soul question in all its circumstances. The only things in which the parallel fails are the following: Every one who believes in a future state sees that the soul question is incomparably more important than the body question, and every one can try the body question by experiment to a larger extent than the soul question. The proverb, which always has a spark of truth at the bottom, says that every man of forty is either a fool or a physician ”

“ Hence, a bigotted party had influence enough with the late short-lived administration [I think he is wrong as to the administration] of Wellington, Peel, &c., to confer munificent royal pensions on three writers whose sole distinction was their advocacy of the Newtonian philosophy. A Cambridge professor last year published an elaborate volume in illustration of Gravitation, and on him has been conferred a pension of 300l. per annum. A lady has written a light popular view of the Newtonian Dogmas, and she has been complimented by a pension of 200l. per annum. ”

“ Walsh's system is, that all mathematics and physics are wrong: there is hardly one proposition in Euclid which is demonstrated. His example ought to warn all who rely on their own evidence to their own success. ”

“ Let the medical witness produce his register, and let his evidence be for the jury, as is that of an engineer or a practitioner of any art which is not attested by diplomas.
"Let any man who practises without venturing to put his name on the register be liable to fine and imprisonment. ”

“ Variable motion is an essential property of matter. Laplace's demonstration of the parallelogram of forces is a begging of the question; and the attempts of them all to show that the difference of twenty minutes between the sidereal and actual revolution of the earth round the sun arises from the tugging of the Sun and Moon at the pot-belly of the earth, without being sure even that the earth has a pot-belly at all, is perfect quackery. The said difference arising from and demonstrating the revolution of the Sun itself round some distant center. ”

“ B. is a Cambridge man; the Oxford men do not confuse the elementary terms of logic. O dear old Cambridge! when the New Zealander comes let him find among the relics of your later sons some proof of attention to the elementary laws of thought. A little-go of logic, please!
Mr. B., though apparently not a Hutchinsonian, has a nibble at a physical Trinity. ”

“ Let the register give the name, address, and asserted qualification of each candidate—as licentiate, or doctor, or what not, of this or that college, hall, university, &c., home or foreign. Let it be competent to any man to describe himself as qualified by study in public schools without a diploma, or by private study, or even by intuition or divine inspiration, if he please. ”

“ Mr. Brougham was his counsel; and managed to get him acquitted. Years and years after this, when Mr. Brougham was deep in the formation of the London University (now University College) , Mr. Wirgman called on him. "What now?" said Mr. B. with his most sarcastic look—a very perfect thing of its kind—"you're in a scrape again, I suppose!" "No! indeed!" said W., "my present object is to ask your interest for the chair of Moral Philosophy in the new University!" He had taken up Kant!
Mr. Wirgman, an itinerant paradoxer, called on me in 1831: he came to convert me. ”

“ The curve was calculated on the law that, whatever quantity of oil might be in the lamp, the position of equilibrium just brought the oil up to the edge of the cylinder, at which a bit of wick was placed. As the wick exhausted the oil, the cylinder slowly revolved about the pivots so as to keep the oil always touching the wick.
Great discoveries are always laughed at; but it is very often not the laugh of incredulity; it is a mode of distorting the sense of inferiority into a sense of superiority, or a mimicry of superiority interposed between the laugher and his feeling of inferiority. ”

“ THE STATUS OF MEDICINE. I have known a medical man—a young one—who was seriously of the opinion that the country ought to be divided into medical parishes, with a practitioner appointed to each, and a penalty for calling in any but the incumbent curer. How should people know how to choose? The hair-dressers once petitioned Parliament for an act to compel people to wear wigs. ”

“ In this year Jean Wood, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Virginia (Richmond) , [529] addressed a printed circular to "Dr. Herschel, Astronomer, Greenwich Observatory." No mistake was more common than the natural one of imagining that the Private Astronomer of the king was the Astronomer Royal. The letter was on the difference of velocities of the two sides of the earth, arising from the composition of the rotation and the orbital motion. The paradox is a fair one, and deserving of investigation ”

“ The State was allowed to patronize one particular Church, so that no one need trouble himself to choose a pastor from the mere necessity of choosing. But every church is allowed its colleges, its studies, its diplomas; and every man is allowed his choice. There is no proof that our souls are worse off than in the sixteenth century ”

“ The idea of the satire is not new. Dr. King, [567] in the dispute on the genuineness of Phalaris, proved with humor that Bentley did not write his own dissertation. An attempt has lately been made, for the honor of Moses, to prove, without humor, that Bishop Colenso did not write his own book. This is intolerable: anybody who tries to use such a weapon without banter, plenty and good, and of form suited to the subject, should get the drubbing which the poor man got in the Oriental tale for striking the dervishes with the wrong hand. ”

“ There is a point which I should gravely recommend to writers on the orthodox side. The Unitarians in England have frequently contended that the method of proving the divinity of Jesus Christ from the New Testament would equally prove the divinity of Moses. ”

“ Assoc. has applied a similar salve to the coal panic; it is fit that science, which rubbed the sore, should find a plaster. We ought to have an iron panic and a timber panic; and a solemn embassy to the Americans, to beg them not to whittle, would be desirable. There was a gold panic beginning, before the new fields were discovered. For myself, I am the unknown and unpitied victim of a chronic gutta-percha panic: I never could get on without it; to me, gutta percha and Rowland Hill are the great discoveries of our day ”

“ This rough process may serve, with sufficient certainty, to show that the proportion of paradoxes to books of sober demonstration is on the increase; and probably, quite as much as the proportion of heterodoxes to books of orthodox adherence. So that divinity and medicine may say to geometry, Don't you sneer: if rationalism, homœopathy, and their congeners are on the rise among us, your enemies are increasing quite as fast. But geometry replies—Dear friends, content yourselves with the rational inference that the rise of heterodoxy within your pales is not conclusive against you, taken alone ”

“ There is no differential calculus, no Taylor's theorem, no calculus of variations, &c. in mathematics. There is no quackery whatever in mathematics; no % equal to anything. What sheer ignorant blackguardism that!
"In mechanics the parallelogram of forces is quackery, and is dangerous; for nothing is at rest, or in uniform, or in rectilinear motion, in the universe. ”

“ Euclid. He then proceeds thus:
"The same spirit that animated those philosophers who sent Galileo to the Inquisition animates all the philosophers of the present day without exception. If anything can free them from the yoke of error, it is the [Walsh] problem of double tangence. But free them it will, how deeply soever they may be sunk into mental slavery—and God knows that is deeply enough; and they bear it with an admirable grace; for none bear slavery with a better grace than tyrants. The lads must adopt my theory.... ”

“ It will be a sad reverse for all our great professors to be compelled to become schoolboys in their gray years. But the sore scratch is to be compelled, as they had before been compelled one thousand years ago, to have recourse to Ireland for instruction. ”

“ They have invented a kind of accumulated or constructive evidence; by which many actions, either totally innocent in themselves, or criminal in a much inferior degree, shall, when united, amount to treason. ”

“ I cannot expect that on a sudden you and your friends will come to my conclusion, that the present philosophy of the Schools and Universities of Europe, based on faith in witchcraft, magic, &c., is a system of execrable nonsense, by which quacks live on the faith of fools; but I desire a free and fair examination of my Aphorisms, and if a few are admitted to be true, merely as courteous concessions to arithmetic, my purpose will be effected, for men will thus be led to think ”

“ It may serve to show philosophers how very near pure speculation comes to fable. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step: which is the sublime, and which the ridiculous, every one must settle for himself. With me, good fiction is the sublime, and bad speculation the ridiculous. The number of bishops in my list is small. I might, had I possessed the book, have opened the list of quadrators with an Archbishop of Canterbury, or at least with a divine who was not wholly not archbishop. Thomas Bradwardine [505] (Bragvardinus, Bragadinus) was elected in 1348 ”

“ Let all qualification which of its own nature admits of proof be proved, as by the diploma or certificate, &c., leaving things which cannot be proved, as asserted private study, intuition, inspiration, &c., to work their own way.
"Let it be highly penal to assert to the patient any qualification which is not in the register, and let the register be sold very cheap. Let the registrar give each registered practitioner a copy of the register in his own case ”

“ Had it not been for actual quotations given by one correspondent only (1st S. viii. 565) , that journal would have handed him down as a man of some real learning. An extraordinary man he certainly was: it is not one illiterate shoemaker in a thousand who could work upon such a singular mass of Sanskrit and Greek words, without showing evidence of being able to read a line in any language but his own, or to spell that correctly. ”

“ Four dialogues between an Oxford Tutor and a disciple of the common-sense philosophy, relative to the proximate causes of material phenomena. 8vo, 1824. A century of original aphorisms on the proximate causes of the phenomena of nature, 1835, 12mo. Sir Richard Phillips had four valuable qualities; honesty, zeal, ability, and courage. He applied them all to teaching matters about which he knew nothing; and gained himself an uncomfortable life and a ridiculous memory.
Astronomy made plain; or only way the true perpendicular distance of the Sun, Moon, or Stars, from this earth, can be obtained. ”

“ Let every man who chooses—subject to one common law of manslaughter for all the crass cases—doctor the bodies of all who choose to trust him, and recover payment according to agreement in the courts of law. Provided always that every person practising should be registered at a moderate fee in a register to be republished every six months. ”

“ The composition of rotations, &c., is not for the world at large: the paradox of the non-rotation of the moon about her axis is an instance. How many persons know that when a wheel rolls on the ground, the lowest point is moving upwards, the highest point forwards, and the intermediate points in all degrees of betwixt and between? This is too short an explanation, with some good difficulties.
The Elements of Geometry. In 2 vols. [By the Rev. J. Dobson, [530] B.D.] Cambridge, 1815. 4to. Of this unpunctuating paradoxer I shall give an account in his own way: he would not stop for any one ”

“ It is curious to see how completely the medical man of the nineteenth century squares with the priest of the sixteenth century. The clergy of all sects are now better divines and better men than they ever were. They have lost Bacon's reproach that they took a smaller measure of things than any other educated men ”

“ He is clear that "arts are not yet come to their solstice," and that posterity will bring hidden things to light. As to the difficulty of carrying food, he thinks, scoffing Puritan that he is, the Papists may be trained to fast the voyage, or may find the bread of their Eucharist "serve well enough for their viaticum." ”

“ They burnt that man, they whipped him, they imprisoned him, they did everything but what was Christian to him, all for his soul's health and the amendment of his excesses.
"But men would not submit. To the argument that the State was a father to the ignorant, they replied that it was at best the ignorant father of an ignorant son, and that a blind man could find his way into a ditch without another blind man to help him. ”

“ That is to say, no disciple ever called himself a Christian, or applied the name, as from himself, to another disciple, from one end of the New Testament to the other; and no disciple need apply that name to himself in our day, if he dislike the associations with which the conduct of Christians has clothed it.
WRONSKI ON THE LONGITUDE PROBLEM. Address of M. Hoene Wronski to the British Board of Longitude, upon the actual state of the mathematics, their reform, and upon the new celestial mechanics, giving the definitive solution of the problem of longitude. [570] London, 1820, 8vo. ”