Thursday, July 19, 2007

The Pitfalls of calling Hinduism a "way of life"

7/19/2007 1:33:36 AM B.N.Hebbar
It became hip and fashionable among some Hindus a few decades ago to say that Hinduism is a way of life and not a religion. And this has been parroted by many without thinking, ever since. Unfortunately, religions that do not wish the Hindus well have used this to its detriment by saying "So, Hinduism is a way of life. This means you Hindus don't have a religion. Your religion then can be our religion. Why don't you adopt ours. You may keep your way of life."

It is thus important to insist that Hinduism is a religion, philosophy and way of life, all rolled into one. These three are not mutually exclusive categories. A tradition can be all three at once as it is in the case of Taoism [Dao-de jiao as the Chinese call it] in China and Shintoism [Kami-no-michi as the Japanese call it] in Japan. Usually, nationally based religions tend to be all three at once than missionary religions.

Why are some Hindus hesitant to call Hinduism as a religion when it has all the elements that characterize a religion? Let's check each of these.

1. Deities: Hinduism has them.
2. Piety and worship: Hinduism has them.
3. Prayers and liturgy: Hinduism has them
4. Scriptures: Hinduism has them.
5. Doctrines: Hinduism has them.
6. Sacred Space: sanctified places of worship and pilgrimage. Hinduism has them.
7. Sacred Time: feasts and fasts. Hinduism has them.
8. Sacred Persons: priests and monastic. Hinduism has them.
9. Rituals: Hinduism has them.
10. Sacraments: sanctification of the important stages of life. Hinduism has them.
11. Miracles and Mysticism: Hinduism has it.
12. Code of Ethics: Hinduism has it.
13. Contemplative practices: Hinduism has them
14. Humanism: Hinduism has it.

The cultural part makes Hinduism more than a religion. It is here that it is also a way of life. One need not exclude the other. Hindus should [as the Taoists and Shintoists have] celebrate their faith as all three [religion, philosophy and way of life] rolled into one.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Hilaire Belloc: Defender of the Faith

FREDERICK D. WILHELMSEN

Had we had ten Hilaire Bellocs in the English-speaking Catholic world in the past fifty years, we might have converted the whole kit-and-caboodle and avoided the mess we find ourselves in today. Hilaire Belloc, coupled in memory always with his great friend G. K. Chesterton, made the defence of the Faith the main business of his life. He wielded a mighty sword.
Hillaire Belloc(1870-1953)
With that impossible declaration behind me, I might better begin with a story told about him — he was a man who collected myths about his person, and I cannot verify the truth of this. Upon being honored with a papal decoration well into his old age, Belloc refused to put out the money needed to buy the medal and grumbled: “What would they say if I changed my mind?”
Hilaire Belloc was not built to fit any cloth fashioned by mortal man. Although he often groused about his own age (I do not mean his chronological age — he always complained about that! — but his moment in time), Belloc would have been impossible in any other age. Growing up as he did, in the twilight of the reign of Queen Victoria, blinking brilliantly in nonsense verse and radical politics in the time of King Edward VII, a child prodigy called by his aunt “Old Thunder”, Hilaire Belloc reposed upon a broad upper-middle-class English society that read him, first adored him, then good-naturedly put up with him, and finally isolated him. “I was once welcome in that house”, he commented wistfully when the automobile in which he was driving passed the home of an exceedingly rich man. His intransigent defense of all things Catholic first amused a literate and basically skeptical gentry looking for novelty; then offended; finally, it was considered intolerable.
A. N. Wilson in his biography of Belloc wrote: “If I created a character in a novel as Hilaire Belloc, people would not believe it.” Belloc was a paradox: a lyrical poet who never read any contemporary poetry; a rhymester whose high finks still charm children; an artilleryman on bivouac at Toul who smelled the Revolution as “France went by”; an aging monarchist who savored the last charge of Charles I at Naseby; the most versatile and certainly the finest English prose stylist in this and possibly any century, who grumbled from the liberty of his battered old boat, the Nona, “dear reader, read less and sail more” even as he lusted for bigger and better-paying audiences; the perpetual wanderer tramping Europe, burning for adventures even as he sang the praises of a rooted peasantry and a hearth steeped in seasonable traditions that “halted the cruelty of time”; the enemy of the rich and of capitalist greed, who once asked for a bucket of money as a birthday gift; the passionate advocate of Truth, who once groused, however, “that the truth always limps”; the drummer boy of an English-speaking Catholicism he helped make proud of itself.

At my last count, Hilaire Belloc wrote 153 books. The business has to do with vigor, an enormous lust for life, and a willingness to make mistakes. Belloc did not give a damn for what anybody thought of him. He wrote his life of King James II in a hotel on the edge of the Sahara in ten days: “It is full of howlers and is the fruit of liberty.” He walked to Rome as a young man, coming in upon the Appian Way on a mule drawn cart — but with his feet dragging on the road so his vow would not be broken.
His vigor was legendary, and I have mentioned as well his lust for life. Belloc — and this is a key to understanding his role as a Catholic apologist — was a man totally at home in this world, but one who knew it was an illusion to be so at home. There was not a trace of Manicheanism in him, and he called puritanism, in his biography of Louis XIV, an “evil out of the pit”, meaning the pit of hell. A mountain climber, he was even more a sailor. His Hills and the Sea and The Cruise of the Nona are classics. If The Path to Rome is the work of a young genius, rollicking and rolling his way over mountain and valley toward the Eternal City, The Four Men, on the contrary, called by its author “A Farrago”, was penned in solitude mixed with melancholy. Grizzlebeard, the Poet, and the Sailor are all extensions of Myself, and Myself is Belloc. Only when life is lived close to the senses, when the intelligence is engaged immediately on what is yielded to man through the body, is the paradox of sadness in created beauty brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after page of Belloc’s writing is troubled by a deep and troubled gravity, heightened by his profound communion with the things of his world: English inns; old oak‑burnished and sturdy; rich Burgundy and other wines” that port of theirs” at the “George” drunk by the fire with which he began this book; the sea and ships that sail — but, please, “no abomination of an engine”; the smell of the tides. These loves run through Belloc’s essays, recurring themes testifying to a vision movingly poetic in its classic simplicity. His eyes are fixed on the primal things that always nourished the human spirit, on the things at hand. He wrote:
Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have no part, I know nothing.
It was this very man, rooted in this world and not in the next, who was to become the first defender of the Catholic Church in England during his lifetime. A key to his understanding of things spiritual was his vivid awareness that all things good pass, that life is filled with what Allan Tate called “rumors of mortality”. In an essay named “Harbour in the North”, Belloc brings his little cutter under a long seawall, and there meets another small vessel. The pilot declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a harbor of whose fame he has heard. “In that place I shall discover again such full moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without failing.” The stranger, of course, is Belloc’s Sailor; and Myself, Belloc himself, answers from his own boat — the Ship of Mortality — “You cannot make the harbour . . . . It is not of this world.”
An almost savage realism mixed with Belloc’s sensibility, and his meditations on death are the most moving in all English letters. Read of the execution of Danton, written in the fires of early youth; of the murder of King Charles I; of the deathbed conversion of King Charles II; and, finally, in his Elizabethan Commentary, one of his last books, Belloc reveals himself: “She felt that she was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will feel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of Azrael.” Belloc’s emotional skepticism is at its purest in an essay called “Cornetto of the Tarquins” in his Towns of Destiny. Speaking of those tombs which are of the origins of us all, he tells us of “the subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed on Rome and from which we all inherit — then as I thought to myself, as I looked westward from the wall, how man might say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not whence it came, nor whither it goes”. Confessing himself to be of a skeptical mind, in a famous letter to Chesterton on the occasion of Chesterton’s conversion, Belloc’s skepticism was conquered by his faith, but the temptation to despair remained with him all his life. To me, this has always seemed strange because Heideggerian angst and dread before the specter of the Nothing seem the peculiar and often awful temptations of those with a metaphysical bent of mind — and Belloc had none at all. In The Cruise of the Nona, he wrote “of the metaphysic . . . who can see it and who can bite into it? It is of no use whatsoever.” Altogether without philosophical preoccupations, he was nonetheless haunted by the temptation that at bottom there is no answer to the riddle of human existence. His conquest of that aberration made his faith something hard, crystal clear, without compromise. Of religions other than the Catholic he had an Olympian contempt and an impatience only barely disguised and then imperfectly. He would not have fared well in these days of ecumenical tea parties, and the so‑called New Church would have bewildered him. Belloc frequently took pains to point out that tolerance is always of a lesser evil that cannot be vanquished at the moment, but vanquished it ought to be.
From whence, then, came his lyrical Catholicism, for which he was to sacrifice fame, all possibility of wealth — Belloc died a poor man — and every avenue — there were many of them — for a public career in politics? Born and baptized in the Church, a Catholic from childhood, his love and appreciation of the Faith came to him when young, but it came somewhat slowly. Of his inner life he tells us very little. French on his father’s side, Belloc — it must be remembered — did his military service in the French artillery, thus delaying his entrance into Oxford when he finally made up his mind to remain an Englishman. His spoken French remained that of a rough cannoneer. Latin European culture was the air he breathed in his youth and to which he returned whenever he could, even sailing across the channel to replenish his reserves of wine.
Were I to seek one scriptural passage which sums up Belloc’s vision of the Faith, it would be: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Mt 6:30). Aided here by a powerful visual imagination which was brought to bear in his many military histories, Belloc could see the Church at work down the ages — and he adored what he saw. The Church made Europe and in so doing quickened the old Roman Order, in disrepair but by no means destroyed by the Germanic tribes from the north. All our typical Western institutions were either created by Catholic men from out of nothing or were inherited from our pagan forefathers and then quickened from within by the yeast of Christianity. Although the terms incarnational and eschatological were not current in Belloc’s lifetime, he is a prime instance of a man with an incarnational understanding of religious truth. Belloc looked for blessings everywhere, and the whole of Christendom was for him an immense network of actual graces.
Making his own the Thomistic insistence that grace perfects nature, the inheritance of classical antiquity, he maintained, was preserved and transfigured in the fires of Faith. In our world — at least as Belloc knew it in what might have been its twilight: the subject is foreign to my paper today — men achieved a free peasantry that marked the whole of Europe for centuries. In that ordo orbis, justice flourished and free men discovering thus their liberty exercised it through two millennia in the creation of a culture that Belloc once called “the standing grace of this world”. There we all experienced not only a free citizenry but the sacredness of marriage, the dignity of men, chivalry, the steady rejection of Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the sacramental universe. These are to be found in Catholic Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and are to be found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this earth.

Belloc understood a rooted life, close to nature, as being humanly superior to the massification produced by modern civilization. Give a man a farm, a small business, an artisan’s anvil, a boat to sail, wine to drink — suffuse all this with the love of Christ; center man’s life around liturgical rhythms; and that man — at least Man writ in the large and taken by the handful — is happier than his industrial counterpart. A Catholic culture tends — and tends is the operative word — toward this kind of life. Tempering greed and avarice, man is then more than himself. As A. N. Wilson notes, in his introduction to a new edition of The Four Men, Belloc knew that his ideal was doomed, and his only consolation was an unholy glee in letting everybody else know that the world was going to hell: “I told you so.”
Hilaire Belloc, spreading his many talents and his incredible energy through the essay, a respectable body of very good verse, military history, nonsense novels, biography and books of travel, studies on the road, political polemics, economic theory, concentrated it all into a center, into a synthesized focus: the apostolate of history. Credo in unam, sanctam, apostolicam eccelesiam, we all recite — but Belloc took the note of apostolicity seriously. I do not mean this in the sense that Belloc showed a lively interest in controversy concerning the apostolic succession. He took that as a settled issue: Roma locuta est, causa finita. I mean it rather in the sense that he understood himself to be a man called to be an apostle. Ronald Knox, in his panegyric at Belloc’s grave site, called him more a prophet than an apostle. Possibly both Knox and I are right because Hilaire Belloc was a missionary in Protestant England, and his principal weapon was history. I doubt that this was a conscious decision, a free act exercised at one crucial moment in his life. By temperament and talent, Belloc was an historian. He soon concluded, shortly after his disillusion with parliamentary politics (he served two terms, one as a Liberal and one as an Independent), that the English‑speaking world had been lied to about its past and about its present, that this lie was bound up with the Protestant establishment, which officially dates from 1689 but which in fact reached far deeper into the English past.
Agreeing with Cobbett (whom, however, he rarely cited and who apparently had little direct influence on him: the two men converged in their historical judgment) that the Protestant Reformation “was the rising of the rich against the poor”, Belloc unpacked layer after layer of “official history” and turned over its foundation, a Great Lie. The religious zealotry of a handful of heretics was used by the mercantile and landed classes of England, aided by the lust of Henry VIII, to abolish the old Catholic Order. If Belloc had any real enemy, it was the Whigs. Of the Earl of Shaftsbury, he wrote: “He is probably in hell.” William of Orange he called that “little pervert”and, of course, the man was just that! Although Belloc never quoted Samuel Johnson’s famous “The Devil was the first Whig”, the whole weight of Belloc’s historical writing yields the same conclusion. But although Belloc loathed the Whigs, he had little in common with the Tories. A populist Catholic radical, a burned‑out republican by middle age, a man chastened into royalism, he would have been out with Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ‘45.
Time prohibits my detailing Belloc’s revolution in English historical writing. Suffice it to say — and this is said formally and altogether without rhetorical emphasis — that one man, Hilaire Belloc, turned the whole writing of British history around. Since Belloc, nobody can get away with understanding the Reformation as the work of high‑minded souls bent on liberty and democracy, noble souls who brought England out of the darkness of Catholic superstition and medieval obscurantism. Others footnoted Belloc and traded on his vision. They did well in doing so, but the vision was his — as was the persecution of silence that followed on his work.
If by their fruits ye shall know them, then the fruits of the Revolt against Rome have been sufficiently documented; more important, they have so pained the bones of all of us that to know them well is to revolt against the Revolt. Men were cheapened in their dignity. They cringed Calvinistically under a cruel and implacable God who damned most of them from all eternity to hell, and who filled the barns of the saved. The beauty and grandeur, even languor, of an old order of things gave way to a severity and grimness of style and manner that choked off man’s natural response to the beauty of the world God had created. Belloc would have none of it, and he exposed the fraud. Behind the psalm‑singing fanatics, there reposes the weight of what he called The Money Power, the new Capitalism and Banking System, that enslaved Europe to its greed. Belloc detailed it all in lavish description in book after book — toward the end, he was repeating himself. If his prose never bored, his arguments often did. The modern world, built on money and heresy, has had and has as its enemy the Catholic Church and the Order she has created. Quite clearly, Mr. Belloc, as he was called in his old age, did not like the modern world — gray, anonymous, bereft of beauty, craftmanship ignorant of nobility, shorn of dignity. Yet, as already noted, the England of his own time was probably the only place he could have flourished as he did. Winston Churchill offered him a high honor, in the name of the king, in the twilight of Belloc’s life, when the bombs were bursting over Britain. Belloc turned him down courteously.
Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, in a piece about liturgy a short time ago, that the only apologetic the Church has for her truth are her saints and her art. Neither are to be found anywhere else within the broad sweep of man’s adventure through time as they are in the Church. Belloc, I think, would have agreed in part with the cardinal. How often did our author pause before tower and church, the easy grace of French and English villages unspoiled by industrialism, as they broke upon vision at dawn and then heightened and blessed the woods and hills surrounding them? How often did he not speak of the Cathedral of Seville as the first marvel of Western art — and this from a man French and not Spanish in temperament? And did he not write the finest panegyric to Saint Joan of Arc — none is better — and do it in an English that matched the French of her own time? No: if the Faith be not the answer to the human heart, then there is none. But Belloc would probably have added to Ratzinger’s saints and art the entire social order brought into being by men who sensed, often obscurely, that if Christ’ were not in the marketplace, he was nowhere. And this, I hasten to add, from a man who held that the center of existence was the tabernacle of the altar. Those close to him have witnessed to his deepening devotion to the Eucharist as the years bent him down. Indeed, Belloc insisted, it was the hatred for and attack on transubstantiation that formed the center of the bitterness moving the English reformers in the sixteenth century. Read Belloc on Cranmer. They turned all the altars around and made of them tables and thus first obscured and finally denied what it is that gave life to Catholic churches and left all others temples reminiscent of tombs.

Faith is to be fought for and, once won — if won only precariously — cherished and watered, but not watered down. So too with the civilization crafted into being for us by the Faith: it must be loved and defended. We might all read Belloc’s meditation “Wall of the City”: within, the busy commerce of decent men who go about the pots and pans of life and who worship God as he is carried through the streets in the monstrance — and without, the enemy! Belloc articulated that enemy for his own time. The enemy is the barbarian, but he always used the word analogically; and the older barbarian before the walls comes off better than his modern counterpart for Belloc. “The Barbarian” within is the man who laughs at the fixed convictions of our inheritance. He is the man with a perpetual sneer on his lips. He is above it all: he judges the poor believer in the street or in the church, some old woman huddled before a shrine of the Virgin mumbling her beads, and he judges her harshly. It is hard enough to come by belief and to live in it, but to throw it away for a cheap joke is despicable. Such are the Barbarians.
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers .... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
Belloc is describing just about everyone you met at your last cocktail party or faculty meeting. Barbarians are everywhere.
Listen to Belloc again in words written from the solitude of the Sahara as he pondered the ruins of Timgad:
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.
Of these men he added — and this too from the desert — “Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.” When our Lord vanishes from the household shrines of the West, the drums are muted and men worship abstractions — as they do today — new idols. But behind them there is an awful power, and it is not of this world.

Possessed of a highly poetic and prophetic mind, Belloc possessed as well a sharply honed intelligence. His The Servile State is a prolonged syllogism with not a metaphor in the whole book. His general thesis, argued in 1909, that the West was moving toward neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism is today a commonplace. It happened. We can either mourn or delight in our consumerist society. I get the impression that Belloc did a little of both. Be that as it may, his “distributist society” lies outside the scope of this paper. His Survivals and New Arrivals is closer to my subject. Islam, he predicted, will return because Islam is a permanent menace to the Faith. Islam has returned. Bible Christianity or Bibliolatry could return but probably will not: Belloc was wrong. Fundamentalism is with us everywhere today in the United States: vulgar, as Belloc said it always was, primitive in thought, as Belloc pointed out; sophisticated in its use of an electronic technology which he could not have predicted. Arianism, the modern name of which is modernism, has come back with a vengeance in the Church. Belloc sketched that possibility as well. All of his predictions in this interesting book were closely reasoned, but such argumentation, he admitted it, is often mocked by the mystery of the future. His reasoning prowess truly came into its own in several controversies: one with Coupon on medieval Catholicism, where Coupon got the facts right but turned the picture upside down; one with H. G. Wells on the origin of man, where Belloc complained privately that the Church hampered him because it has swallowed “all that Hebrew folklore”; and, finally, one with Dean Inge, where Belloc nails his enemy to the wall.
After answering point by point Dean Inge’s objections to Catholicism — some of them were infantile: no man can be an Englishman and a Catholic; others were vicious: the Church is “ a bloody and treacherous association” and an “imposter” — Belloc concluded his open letter with the following peroration. I beg your leave to read it as he wrote it:
There wholly escapes you the character of the Catholic Church .... You are like one examining the windows of Chartres from within by candle‑light but we have the sun shining through . . . . For what is the Catholic Church? It is that which replies, co‑ordinates, establishes. It is that within which is right order; outside the puerilities and the despairs. It is the possession of perspective in the survey of the world .... Here alone is promise, and here alone is foundation. Those of us who boast so stable an endowment make no claim thereby to personal peace; we are not saved thereby alone .... But we are of so glorious a company that we receive support, and have communion. The Mother of God is also our own. Our dead are with us. Even in these our earthly miseries we always hear the distant something of an eternal music, and smell a native air. There is a standard set for us whereto our whole selves respond, which is that of an inherited and endless life, quite full, in our own country. You may say, “all that is rhetoric.” You would be wrong, for it is rather vision, recognition, and testimony. But take it for rhetoric. Have you any such? Be it but rhetoric, whence does that stream flow? Or what reserve is that which can fill even such a man as myself with fire? Can your opinion (or doubt or gymnastics) do the same? I think not! One thing in this world is different from all others. It has a personality and a force. It is recognized and (when recognized) most violently hated or loved. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it is the night.
In haec urbe lux sollennis,Ver aeternum, pax perennis Et aeterna gaudia.
He once wrote that the French are blessed by the capacity to criticize themselves and to surmount their own criticism. Be that as it may, Hilaire Belloc rarely criticized the Church. He loved her altogether too much. He never answered personal attacks by fellow Catholics. It would have been, he said, a sin against his own body. Times change, and today a Catholic writer can make a good living attacking his own Mother. But Hilaire Belloc, coupled in memory always with his great friend G. K. Chesterton, made the defence of the Faith the main business of his life. He wielded a mighty sword. “Gigantes autem erant in terram in diebus illis.” “There were giants upon the earth in those days” (Gen 6:4). But the sword of Hilaire Belloc was buried with him. I gravely doubt whether we shall see his like again.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. “Hilaire Belloc: Defender of the Faith.” In The Catholic Writer: The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute 2 (1989): 83-95.
Reprinted by permission of The Wethersfield Institute.
THE AUTHOR
The late Dr. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen was professor of philosophy and politics at the University of Dallas, Irving, Texas. He wrote over 250 articles and fourteen books, among them Christianity and Political Philosophy, Citizen of Rome, and Being and Knowing. Just before his death in early 1996, he was at work on a collection of adventures and reflections of life and sailing the high seas entitled, Under Full Sail: Reflections and Tales.
Copyright © 1989 Ignatius Press

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

David Daiches


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David Daiches
Daiches on the cover of Two Worlds and Promised Lands
Born:
September 2, 1912Sunderland, England
Died:
July 15, 2005Edinburgh, Scotland
Occupation:
Literary critic, scholar,
Nationality:
Scottish
Writing period:
1935 - 1994
Subjects:
English and Scottish literature and culture
Debut works:
The Place of Meaning in Poetry
David Daiches (September 2, 1912July 15, 2005) was a Scottish literary historian and critic, scholar and writer. He wrote extensively on English and Scottish literature and Scottish culture.
Contents[hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
3 List of published works
4 References
//

[edit] Early life
He was born in Sunderland, England, in a Jewish family with a Lithuanian background. He moved to Edinburgh while still a young child, about the end of World War I, where his father, Rev. Dr. Salis Daiches became a prominent rabbi. He studied at George Watson's College and won a scholarship to University of Edinburgh where he won the Elliot prize, and went on to Balliol College, Oxford where he became the Elton exhibitioner.
Daiches is the father of Jenni Calder, also a Scottish literary historian. His brother was the prominent Edinburgh QC Lionel Daiches.

[edit] Career
During World War II, he worked for the British Embassy in Washington, DC, producing pamphlets for the British Information Service and drafting (and delivering) speeches on British institutions and foreign policy.
Daiches first published work was The Place of Meaning in Poetry, published in 1935. He was a prolific writer, producing works on English literature, Scottish literature, literary history and criticism as well as the broader role of literature in society and culture. His The Novel and the Modern World (1939) was well-received and his expertise on the modern period led to his co-editing The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962). He also wrote the two-volume A Critical History of English Literature and edited the Penguin Companion to Literature - Britain and the Commonwealth (1971). He wrote biographical and critical works on Virginia Woolf, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, D. H. Lawrence, John Milton, and Sir Walter Scott. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes, books on Scotch Whisky, the King James Bible, and the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, a biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and a volume of poetry.
Starting at the University of Edinburgh, he had a long and influential career teaching in the UK, the US and Canada. He taught or held visiting posts at Balliol College, The University of Chicago, Cornell University, Jesus College, Cambridge, Indiana University, The University of Minnesota, McMaster University in Canada, Wesleyan University in Ohio, and The University of California; besides setting up the English Department at the newly founded Sussex University. From 1980-86 he was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. Daiches chaired the panel of judges for the Booker Prize in 1980.

[edit] List of published works
The Place of Meaning in Poetry (1935)
New Literary Values; Studies in Modern Literature (1936)
Literature and Society (1938)
Poetry and the Modern World: A Study of Poetry in England Between 1900 and 1939 (1940)
Virginia Woolf (1942)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1947)
A Study Of Literature (For Readers And Critics) (1948)
Robert Burns (1950)
Stevenson and the Art of Fiction (1951)
A Century of the Essay: British and American (1951)
Willa Cather - A Critical Introduction (1951)
Two Worlds : A Jewish Childhood in Edinburgh (1956) (memoirs)
Literary Essays (1956)
Critical Approaches to Literature (1956)
The Present Age in British Literature (After 1920) (1958)
Two Studies: The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman: Impressionist Prophet (1958)
Robert Louis Stevenson - a Laurel Reader (1959) editor
A Critical History of English Literature (1960) two volumes
The Novel and the Modern World (1960)
White Man in the Tropics: Two Moral Tales (1962)
D. H. Lawrence (1963)
George Eliot: Middlemarch (1963)
English Literature (1964)
Milton (1964)
The Idea of a New University. An Experiment in Sussex (1964) editor
The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth Century Experience (1964)
More Literary Essays (1968)
The King James Version of the English Bible (1968)
Scotch Whisky: Its Past and Present (1969)
Some Late Victorian Attitudes (1969) Ewing Lectures
A Third World (1971) (memoirs)
Penguin Companion to Literature - Britain and the Commonwealth (1971) editor
Sir Walter Scott and His World (1971)
Robert Burns and His World (1972)
Literature and Western Civilization (1972-6) editor with Anthony Thorlby, six volumes
Robert Louis Stevenson and His World (1973)
Bonnie Prince Charlie: The Life and Times of Charles Edward Stuart (1973)
Moses: Man in the Wilderness (1975) Moses: The Man and the Vision in the US
Was: A Pastime from Time Past (1975)
James Boswell and His World (1976)
Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (1976)
Glasgow (1977)
Scotland and the Union (1977)
Edinburgh (1978)
The Butterfly and the Cross (1978)
The Selected Poems of Robert Burns (1979)
Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Selected Political Writings and Speeches (1979) editor
Literary Landscapes of the British Isles. A Narrative Atlas (1979) with John Flower
A Companion to Scottish Culture (1981)
The Avenel Companion to English and American Literature (1981) editor
Literature and Gentility in Scotland (1982)
God and the Poets (1984) Gifford Lectures (1983)
A Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, 1730–1790 (1986) editor with Jean Jones and Peter Jones
Let's Collect Scotch Whisky (Jarrold Collectors Series) (1988)
A Wee Dram: Drinking Scenes from Scottish Literature (1990)
A Weekly Scotsman And Other Poems (1994)

[edit] References
Calder, John. "Obituary: David Daiches", The Guardian, July 18, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-02-21. (in English)
Baker, William. "Professor David Daiches", The Independent, July 18, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-02-21. (in English)
"David Daiches", The Times, July 25, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-03-27. (in English)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daiches"
Obituary
David DaichesProlific scholar and teacher whose works showed his mastery of literary criticism, history and culture John Calder Monday July 18, 2005The Guardian
As a small boy, the distinguished literary scholar and historian David Daiches, who has died aged 92, decided he would become the second Shakespeare, and his published writings certainly exceeded the bard's in length. At 11, he discovered that his father had, without telling him, given his poems to his school magazine, and the publication of one of them in a serious journal with no juvenile section attracted much attention.
But although he was to produce some creative literature of his own, it was as a teacher, critic, historian and scholar that Daiches was to make his mark. As director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University (1980-86), and earlier at Sussex University, where he was professor of English (1961-77) and dean of the School of English Studies (1961-68), he became one of the most prolific and respected academics of his time.


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Daiches was born in Sunderland, but moved, at the age of six, to Edinburgh, where his father became rabbi to the city's two synagogues and de facto chief rabbi of Scotland. Being brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Scotland after the first world war was an experience he entertainingly described in Two Worlds (1956), an account of his schooldays and a moving tribute to his father, a powerful speaker, campaigner and scholar, who did much to integrate Scottish Jewry into Scottish life, while preserving its distinctiveness.
The Daiches had come from Lithuania, and a long succession of rabbinical scholars. David was the middle child of three, his brother Lionel having a distinguished career at the Scottish bar, and he grew up as a normal, middle-class Edinburgh boy, unable only to take part in sports on Saturdays.
"Being a Jew," he told the Guardian three decades ago, "was not as paradoxical or difficult as might be imagined. Children accept the world into which they are born, and it seemed to us that there was the secular world outside and the internal closed Jewish world of festivals and synagogue services. We were equally at home in both."
At George Watson's school, Daiches excelled in English, languages and history, won a scholarship at 15, and left with many prizes and a further scholarship to Edinburgh University. He distinguished himself there, too, won the prestigious Elliot prize and went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was the Elton exhibitioner. He returned to Edinburgh in 1935 to start his academic career as assistant in English, and was made a fellow and lecturer at Balliol the following year.
His first book, The Place Of Meaning In Poetry, was published in 1935. This was followed by New Literary Values (1936), Literature And Society (1938), The Novel And The Modern World (1939) and Poetry And The Modern World in 1940.
In 1937, he had gone to Chicago University as assistant professor of English, and was asked to stay there during the war. His next book, The King James Bible: A Study Of Its Sources And Development (1941), was followed by Virginia Woolf (1942). He stayed at Chicago until 1943, simultaneously producing pamphlets for the British Information Service - they were models of their kind - and, in 1944, became second secretary at the British embassy in Washington.
The then ambassador, Lord Halifax, was a rather stiff figure, and the embassy's main functions were to give out information about Britain, curry favour with President Roosevelt and report back to London on American politics. Isaiah Berlin did the latter in a witty and concise weekly brief; he, Daiches and a few coopted British journalists had to fight to get anything done in the atmosphere of aristocratic, old-boy red tape.
Because Halifax and his senior diplomats were often not up to it, Daiches had to provide, and often make, important public speeches in Washington. He had become, like his father, an eloquent speaker, able to explain British foreign policy and institutions in uncomplicated language, and he was also in demand for addresses at Burns' nights, formal dinners and business, university and special interest clubs, where he could exhibit his wide knowledge of literature, the arts, history and folklore.
After a brief period in Britain at the end of the war, Daiches and his family went to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York state, where he was professor of English from 1946 to 1951. There were more books too, Robert Louis Stevenson (1947), A Study Of Literature (1948), Robert Burns (1950) and, in 1951, Willa Cather: An Introduction. That same year he was was appointed as an English lecturer at Cambridge, becoming a fellow of Jesus College in 1957. He none the less returned frequently to America; he was visiting professor of criticism at Indiana University from 1956 to 1957.
During all this time, Daiches continued to turn out a stream of critical books and essays, and works on British and other authors. Critical Approaches To Literature and Literary Essays (both 1956) were followed by John Milton (1957), The Present Age (1958) and A Critical History Of English Literature in 1960.
Daiches had always been a liberal with a belief in wider educational opportunity, and this aspect of his enthusiam came into his own in the early 1960s. He threw in his lot with the expansion of higher education, inaugurated by the Conservatives. Six new universities were created and at Sussex, the first of them, he became professor and dean of English studies.
That move to Brighton had begun in Hyderabad, when, on a British Council tour, Daiches had met Asa Briggs, the man who was to become pro-vice chancellor at Sussex in 1961. As the two downed dry Martinis, Briggs became more and more eloquent about the new institution's prospects. "It was going to be the greatest thing since the foundation of the University of Bologna," Daiches recalled. "So I said, who is going to set up your English department, and he said something like, "You are, dear boy.'"
While at Sussex, Daiches also lectured at McMaster University, in Canada, at Wesleyan University, Ohio, and at the University of California. In 1966, he was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. He published George Eliot's Middlemarch in 1963 and, a year later, besides editing The Paradox Of Scottish Culture, documented some of his educational views in The Idea Of A New University.
In 1969, he published Scotch Whisky. Two years after that came A Third World, a second autobiographical volume, in which he voiced his reservations about the US and its educational failings. That year, too, there was Sir Walter Scott And His World, and the Penguin Companion To Literature: Britain And The Commonwealth. He was also joint editor of Robert Burns And His World. After the six volumes of Literature And Western Civilisation (1972-76), in 1977 came his social, economic and cultural history of Glasgow.
In 1980, two years after the appearance of his book on Edinburgh, Daiches moved back to the city. In the 1970s, he had recalled that, as a young man, he thought there were only two places he could root himself in - Jerusalem and the Scottish capital. He had always kept up his Scottish connections and knew everyone in literature there.
As he recalled: "My childhood memories, my feelings of growing up, of my holidays on the Fife coast, of walking on the Pentland hills - all that is most moving and vivid to me about a sense of place is of Scotland. I always wanted to return to Edinburgh."
In 1981, his Companion To Scottish Culture was published, and his last work, A Weekly Scotsman And Other Poems, appeared in 1994. But even in retirement, he never stopped writing.
He is survived by the two daughters and a son from his first marriage, to Isobel Mackay, who died in 1977. His second wife, Hazel Neville, whom he married in 1978, died in 1986.
· David Daiches, critic, historian, writer, born September 2 1912; died July 15 2005

IDEALISM IN AMERICA


INTRODUCTION
Idealism: Idealism is the philosophical view that the mind or spirit constitutes the fundamental reality. It has taken several distinct but related forms. Objective idealism accepts common sense realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things), whereas subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism. Plato is often considered the first idealist philosopher, chiefly because of his metaphysical doctrine of Forms. The 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley was one of the major exponents of idealism. He held that the object of knowledge is an idea and that ideas can exist only in the mind; therefore, objects can exist only as objects of consciousness.
Other well-known idealists are Immanuel Kant who held that it is impossible to gain knowledge of the world by either reason or sense experience alone, his successor Johann Gottlieb Fichte who postulated a creative Ego as the ultimate source of reality, which generates all change and all knowledge, Georg Hegel for whom reality is absolute Spirit or Reason, which manifests its development toward total self-consciousness in every aspect of experience from nature to human history, and the English Hegelian F. H. Bradley who argued that ordinary experience is fragmentary and contradictory and therefore appearance; reality, the Absolute, is a unified totality, which can be known only through a unique and absolute, perhaps mystical, experience. Idealism has never really been a popular philosophical position among American philosophers, the best known idealist perhaps being Josiah Royce.
Personalism: Personalism is a fairly loose term used to describe nearly any philosophy that emphasizes the person as the basic concept in the explanation of reality (metaphysical personalism) as well as the basic unit of value (ethical personalism). Although personalism did not develop as an explicit philosophy until the early 20th century, it has many historical antecedents in the views of philosophers who stressed the primacy of personal experience. Nearly all metaphysical personalists have some form of a God or godlike reality at the center of their philosophy. The ethical aspect of personalism stresses human rights and respect for persons and holds that wrongdoing is destructive of the personality of the wrongdoer. Explicit personalism has been developed in France by Charles Renouvier, in Germany by William Stern, and in the United States by Borden Parker Bowne.
Critical EssayThe Fallacy of Epistemological Idealism
Josiah Royce (1855-1916)
Josiah Royce (picture) was born in Grass Valley, California, on November 20, 1855. Grass Valley was a mining town which was about five years older than he was. Living among rough-handed pioneer people, the sensitive, timid boy who lacked physical strength and skill very early became aware of the value of an established social order because his environment was devoid of it.
When his sixtieth birthday was celebrated, Royce, reviewing his mental development, expressed his strong feeling that his deepest motives and problems had centered about the idea of a community, although this idea had come only gradually to his clear consciousness. A platonist vein in his mind caused him to base the idea of human community upon a theory of life and upon a conception of the nature of truth and reality.
Royce was the leader of the idealistic school in the United States. His idealism differed profoundly from Green and Bradley. The influence of evolution (Le Conte and Spencer), the utilitarianism of Mill, and close association with William James enabled Royce to maintain an empirical and naturalistic temper. He was predisposed to individualism and religion. He acquired a strong interest in symbolic logic and mathematics which became factors in his methodology. His studies of Lotze, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Schelling fed his idealistic interests. And Romanticism supported his interest in literature and music.
Royce became a leading proponent of philosophical idealism whose thought dominated American philosophy until World War I. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley where he began to attract his teachers' attention because of his seriousness, intelligence and abilities. It was at this time that Royce's interest turned from religion to which he always felt sincere devotion to a search of understanding, which resulted in the discovery of philosophy. Though the university curriculum included no instruction in philosophy whatsoever, Royce succeeded in getting some sympathetic help from his instructors in geology and literature. He received his B.A. degree in 1875 and the university was able to arrange for him an additional year of study in Goettingen, Germany, where he specialized in philosophy under Lotze, Wundt, and Windelband.
On his return from Germany, the president of John Hopkins University, who had previously been president of the University of California, offered Royce a fellowship to continue his graduate work. Two years later he was granted his doctor's degree. After receiving his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University (1878), he returned to the University of California as an instructor of English. But his heart was set on philosophy. While he was at John Hopkins, Royce had met William James who promised the young philosopher help in his ambition. A vacancy eventually occurred at Harvard and he was invited to teach at Harvard on a temporary basis. In 1885 he became a regular member of the philosophy department at Harvard, where he taught until his death on September 14, 1916.
During all these years Royce's life may have appeared monotonous to the outsiders, but actually it was characterized by an intense if not exciting development of his system of idealistic philosophy and by a long series of publications, among which The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), his Gifford Lectures on The World and the Individual (1900-01), and The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) are the most outstanding. Royce's idealism combined the rationalism of system building and proof of the Absolute with traits of American philosophy: the appeal to experience, voluntarism, and the focus on ideas as plans of action, not as purely cognitive entities. This combination led to the characterization of his position as a voluntaristic idealism. According to Royce, God is not just all-knower but is also cosmic purpose. To be an individual, then, is to embody purpose.
The infinity of mutually interpreting and intercommunicating selves constitutes the absolute self, the absolute community, which is, as the whole, a conscious unity of all the parts. Royce's idealism gave rise to important ideas for the philosophy of religion and ethics. He also exhibited a profound interest in logic, and his work in this area greatly influenced his overall philosophical position. Idealistic metaphysics was to him the guarantee not only for absolute certainty, but also for a rule over the whole life by right judgment, directed by the sense of absolute truth. Royce's theoretical thinking, however, was always connected with and supported by his experience of religious life. His mother had been his first teacher in philosophy and the Bible his first textbook. Although he could claim to be born nonconformist and to be without connection with "any visible religious body," it was religious problems that drove him as the foundation of human solidarity and social loyalty, as the binding element of a community.
While in Royce's Religious Aspects of Philosophy the influence of Hegel is prevalent, Royce later, in The World and the Individual came closer to Fichte and Schopenhauer, and shifted his emphasis from thought, which in the earlier work designates the processus of the Absolute, to will, calling himself "a voluntarist and empiricist who yet believes in the Absolute." To Royce, will, as the manifestation of the Absolute, seems fit to reconcile idealist metaphysics and human experience; to corroborate in man the cardinal virtues of courage, industry, loyalty, and solidarity; and above all to unite the religious conception of God with the philosophical idea of the Absolute.
While the Absolute had been conceived at first as the universal knower, as the unity of infinite thought, in Royce's later development the God of the idealist is presented as "no merely indifferent onlooker upon this our temporal world of warfare and dust and blood and sin and glory." Absolute reason is not abandoned by Royce but, according to him, does not exclude but rather implies absolute choice, and the divine unity of reason and will implies freedom of the individual which, in accordance with Kant, belongs not to the phenomenal and temporal world but to a higher order of which man is a part.
In his last years, Royce studied the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and, in The Problem of Christianity (1913), exposed a triple logic of perception, conception, and interpretation. Voluntarism became an integral factor in Royce's theory of knowledge. Knowing is characterized as an act. An idea, to become cognitive, must be part of a judgment or itself is a judgment. This change, however, confirms Royce's early conviction that all reality is reality because true judgments can be made about it. The decision as to which judgments are true and which are false is up to the infinite thought of the Absolute, Supreme Being.
For about thirty years, Royce and William James were intimate friends and staunch adversaries. James secured Royce's appointment as professor at Harvard University. While criticizing one another, they inevitably also influenced one another, be it by provoking contrasting ideas or by agreeing on certain views. Royce sometimes expressed his sadness about being forced to attack the philosophy of James to whom he felt himself obliged for practically everything he had written. James, whose criticism of Royce's books sometimes could be devastating, once exclaimed, "Two hundred and fifty years from now, Harvard will be known as the place where Josiah Royce once taught."
Royce starts with finite ideas and finds that they possess "internal" and "external" meaning. Reality is knowable as an intimate and all-inclusive consciousness or self, into which human selves enter to supply the content. Thought can know an object only in so far as idea and object have come within a single unity of consciousness where they can be compared. Royce bases his philosophy upon a theory of the relation of our ideas to reality. Our ideas are essentially purposes, or plans of action (internal meaning). All plans must materialize into action.
The ideal's fulfillment, plans that have met the requirements of action, represent external meaning. Thus purposes are incomplete without an external world in which purposes are realized. The external is therefore meaningless unless it is the fulfillment of some (internal) purpose. But whose purpose does the world fulfill? Royce answers -- the Absolute's. But what is the Absolute? Royce replies, unlike the English Neo-Hegelians, the Absolute is a kind of collection of persons. But how can a collection of persons entertain purposes? Royce finds an answer in the psychological analysis of the individual.
A person is an organization of activities about a central purpose. Life's problem is to harmonize desires and integrate them into a self, which is an achievement. The integration of individual purposes into a self creates a little Absolute. The integration of little Absolutes forms a larger self, the "beloved" community, whose purposes would stabilize the world.
Royce's ethics is presented in The Philosophy of Loyalty. He deduces the idealistic world-view from the basic moral principle: loyalty to loyalty, loyalty to a cause. Causes must form a system making universal loyalty possible. Loyalty implies faith in a universal cause which is the highest good (spiritual value). This principle implies a spiritual meaning, a unity of values revealing the eternal spiritual life upholding truth and goodness.
In The Radical Academy
Books by and about Josiah Royce
Essay: Immortality, by Josiah Royce
Essay: Metaphysical Idealism, by Josiah Royce
Elsewhere On the Internet
The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, by Josiah Royce

Monday, July 16, 2007

World's Fastest Broadband Connection at 40 Gbps


Sunday, July 15, 2007
"A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection. Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" An article in Press Esc notes an analyst study of the increasing demand for fiber-to-the-home in Europe.
12:57:28 AM
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Friday, July 06, 2007

Does adding more RAM to your computer make it faster?


Thursday, July 5, 2007

Up to a point, adding RAM (random access memory) will normally cause your computer to feel faster on certain types of operations. RAM is important because of an operating system component called the virtual memory manager (VMM).
When you run a program such as a word processor or an Internet browser, the microprocessor in your computer pulls the executable file off the hard disk and loads it into RAM. In the case of a big program like Microsoft Word or Excel, the EXE consumes about 5 megabytes. The microprocessor also pulls in a number of shared DLLs (dynamic link libraries) -- shared pieces of code used by multiple applications. The DLLs might total 20 or 30 megabytes. Then the microprocessor loads in the data files you want to look at, which might total several megabytes if you are looking at several documents or browsing a page with a lot of graphics. So a normal application needs between 10 and 30 megabytes of RAM space to run. On my machine, at any given time I might have the following applications running:
A word processor
A spreadsheet
A DOS prompt
An e-mail program
A drawing program
Three or four browser windows
A fax program
A Telnet session Besides all of those applications, the operating system itself is taking up a good bit of space. Those programs together might need 100 to 150 megabytes of RAM, but my computer only has 64 megabytes of RAM installed.
The extra space is created by the virtual memory manager. The VMM looks at RAM and finds sections of RAM that are not currently needed. It puts these sections of RAM in a place called the swap file on the hard disk. For example, even though I have my e-mail program open, I haven't looked at e-mail in the last 45 minutes. So the VMM moves all of the bytes making up the e-mail program's EXE, DLLs and data out to the hard disk. That is called swapping out the program. The next time I click on the e-mail program, the VMM will swap in all of its bytes from the hard disk, and probably swap something else out in the process. Because the hard disk is slow relative to RAM, the act of swapping things in and out causes a noticeable delay.
If you have a very small amount of RAM (say, 16 megabytes), then the VMM is always swapping things in and out to get anything done. In that case, your computer feels like it is crawling. As you add more RAM, you get to a point where you only notice the swapping when you load a new program or change windows. If you were to put 256 megabytes of RAM in your computer, the VMM would have plenty of room and you would never see it swapping anything. That is as fast as things get. If you then added more RAM, it would have no effect.
Some applications (things like Photoshop, many compilers, most film editing and animation packages) need tons of RAM to do their job. If you run them on a machine with too little RAM, they swap constantly and run very slowly. You can get a huge speed boost by adding enough RAM to eliminate the swapping. Programs like these may run 10 to 50 times faster once they have enough RAM!
Here are some interesting links:
How RAM Works
How Virtual Memory Works
Check your virtual memory settings
About the Virtual Memory Manager
11:46:58 PM
Posted By Bhavesh Shah Comments (0) Computers