Literature

I spare my readers the account of my delight on coming home, my happiness while there, and my sorrow on being obliged to bid them, once more, a long adieu.

I returned, however, with unabated vigor to my work—a more arduous task than anyone can imagine, who has not felt something like the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous, turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty, while, at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior's more potent authority, which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give. I can conceive few situations more harassing than that wherein, however you may long for success, however you may labor to fulfill your duty, your efforts are baffled and set at naught by those beneath you, and unjustly censured and misjudged by those above.

I have not enumerated half the vexatious propensities of my pupils, or half the troubles resulting from my heavy responsibilities, for fear of trespassing too much upon the reader's patience.

But I particularly remember one wild, snowy afternoon, soon after my return in January: the children had all come up from dinner, loudly declaring that they meant "to be naughty," and they had well kept their resolution, though I had talked myself hoarse, and wearied every muscle in my throat, in the vain attempt to reason them out of it. I had got Tom pinned up in a corner, whence, I told him, he should not escape till he had done his appointed task. Meantime, Fanny had possessed herself of my work-bag, and was rifling its contents—and spitting into it besides. I told her to let it alone, but to no purpose, of course.

"Burn it, Fanny!" cried Tom: and this command she hastened to obey. I sprang to snatch it from the fire, and Tom darted to the door. "Mary Ann, throw her desk out of the window!" cried he: and my precious desk, containing my letters and papers, my small amount of cash, and all my valuables, was about to be precipitated from the three-storey window. I flew to rescue it. Meanwhile Tom had left the room, and was rushing down the stairs, followed by Fanny. Having secured my desk, I ran to catch them, and Mary Ann came scampering after. All three escaped me, and ran out of the house into the garden, where they plunged about in the snow, shouting and screaming in exultant glee.

What must I do? If I followed them, I should probably be unable to capture one, and only drive them farther away. If I did not, how was I to get them in? While I stood in this perplexity, I heard a voice behind me, in harshly piercing tones, exclaiming—

"Miss Grey! Is it possible? What, in the devil's name, can you be thinking about?"

"I can't get them in, sir," said I, turning round, and beholding Mr. Bloomfield, with his hair on end, and his pale blue eyes bolting from their sockets.

"But I insist upon their being got in!" cried he.

"Then, sir, you must call them yourself, if you please, for they won't listen to me," I replied, stepping back.

Science

Octopuses possess a rich behavioral repertoire and the largest nervous systems among invertebrates. Alongside squids and cuttlefish, octopuses are believed to have evolutionarily separated from humans more than 700 million years ago. Given that long divergence, we should be a very different species. And we are... in some ways.

Octopuses have striking morphological features such as camera-like eyes, an incredibly adaptive coloration system, and eight arms with more suckers than we have fingers or thumbs. And yet—they are like us. Even though octopus brains and vertebrate brains have no common anatomy, they both support similar features such as forms of short and long-term memory, versions of sleep, and the abilities to recognize individual people and explore objects through play.

In an octopus, the majority of neurons are in the arms themselves—nearly twice as many as in the central brain. Each arm has about 300 suckers and each sucker contains up to 10,000 neurons. Octopus suckers attach to surfaces as a local reflex. Since chemoreceptors line the sucker rim, the octopus can taste surfaces as it moves. There are also mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors present: the former provide information on touch and pressure, while the latter supply information about muscle activity.

When contact is detected, the sucker will automatically contract and attach. The mechanoreceptors trigger the reflex to keep what is there from getting away. The taste buds on the sucker rim then more slowly provide information on whether or not the object should be repulsed or retained. In this way, octopuses can ensure that a food item like a crab cannot scuttle away.

With such versatile suckers, octopuses have shown that smart can be spineless. Their arms can maneuver without input from the brain. Even an arm that is surgically removed can reach and grasp objects. How an octopus coordinates eight such arms in locomotion is still unknown.

Octopuses are indeed masters of distributed control. Hyper-redundancy is what makes octopuses so intriguing to researchers. There's redundancy in the sensors of the suckers, in the information processing in the brain, and in the structure of the body. The strong yet flexible hyper-redundant arms of the octopus endow it with high maneuverability but also place a great burden on its control system. It must interface incoming sensory information with the issuing of motor commands. Since the octopus arm does not have fixed joints or fixed linkages, it has infinite degrees of freedom. In other words, each arm has virtually unlimited ways to achieve the same goal with no constraints.

It is undoubtedly difficult to build a soft robot with the mechanical properties of an octopus arm. Arriving at that degree of soft manipulator form and the complexity of an octopus is dually challenging. The Grasso lab at Brooklyn College, run by psychology professor Frank Grasso, studies octopus motion instead by creating simulations in silica of what an appendage or sucker would be like. The first step is to look to biology to characterize movement. The next step is to build a model that captures what biology is doing. To do so, the Grasso lab uses neural networks inspired by octopus neuroanatomy. There are sensory inputs, motor outputs, and interneurons that model what the nervous system should do. In other words, the neural networks connect sensing in the world to outputs of the world.

"We're testing how the structure of the nervous system and the information that flows through it realizes behavior input," he says.

Table information adapted from https://mosaicscience.com/extra/does-brain-size-matter. Table and passage used under Creative Commons license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Philosophy/Religion

Even though in its subjective dimension, suffering seems almost inexpressible and not transferable, perhaps at the same time nothing else requires as much as does suffering, in its "objective reality," to be dealt with, meditated upon, and conceived as an explicit problem. Therefore, it also requires that basic questions be asked about it and the answers sought.

Medicine, as the science and also the art of healing, discovers in the vast field of human sufferings the best-known area, the one identified with greater precision and relatively more counterbalanced by the methods of "reaction" (that is, the methods of therapy). Nonetheless, this is only one area. The field of human suffering is much wider, more varied, and multi-dimensional. Man suffers in different ways, ways not always considered by medicine, not even in its most advanced specializations.

Suffering is something which is still wider than sickness, more complex, and at the same time still more deeply rooted in humanity itself. A certain idea of this problem comes to us from the distinction between physical suffering and moral suffering. This distinction is based upon the double dimension of the human being and indicates the bodily and spiritual element as the immediate or direct subject of suffering. Insofar as the words "suffering" and "pain" can, up to a certain degree, be used as synonyms, physical suffering is present when "the body is hurting" in some way, whereas moral suffering is "pain of the soul." In fact, it is a question of pain of a spiritual nature, and not only of the "psychological" dimension of pain, that accompanies both moral and physical suffering. The vastness and the many forms of moral suffering are certainly no less in number than the forms of physical suffering. But at the same time, moral suffering seems as it were less identified and less reachable by therapy.

It can be said that man suffers whenever he experiences any kind of evil. Suffering expresses a situation in which man experiences evil and in doing so becomes the subject of suffering. Even when man brings suffering on himself, when he is its cause, this suffering remains something passive in its metaphysical essence.

This does not, however, mean that suffering in the psychological sense is not marked by a specific "activity." This is, in fact, that multiple and subjectively differentiated "activity" of pain, sadness, disappointment, discouragement or even despair, according to the intensity of the suffering subject and his or her specific sensitivity. In the midst of what constitutes the psychological form of suffering there is always an experience of evil, which causes the individual to suffer.

Thus the reality of suffering prompts the question about the essence of evil: what is evil? This question seems, in a certain sense, inseparable from the theme of suffering. Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he ought—in the normal order of things—to have a share in this good and does not have it.

Historical/Founding Documents

Passage 1

Passage 2

Philosophy/Religion

When the division of labor has been [41] thorough once established, it is but a very small part of a man's wants which the produce of his own labor can supply. He supplies the far greater part of them by exchanging that surplus part of the produce [42] of his farmlands, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labor as he has occasion for. Every man thus lives by exchanging or becomes, in some measure, a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.

But when the division of labor first began to take place, this power of exchanging must frequently [43] has been very much clogged and embarrassed in its operations. One man, we shall suppose, has more of a certain commodity than he himself has occasion for, while another has less. The former, consequently, would be glad to dispose of, and the latter to purchase, a part of this [44] supposition.

But if this latter should chance to have nothing that the former stands in need [45] of, no exchange can be made between them. The butcher has more meat in his shop than he himself can consume, and the brewer and the baker would each of them be willing to purchase a part of it. But they have nothing to offer in exchange, except the different productions of their respective trades, and the butcher is already provided with all the bread and beer which he has immediate occasion for. No exchange can, in this case, be made between them. [46] He cannot be their merchant, and they cannot be his customers, and so as a result they are, altogether, less serviceable from one to the other, considered as a whole.

In order to avoid the inconvenience of such situations, every prudent man in every period of [47] society, after the first establishment of the division of labor must naturally have endeavored to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry. [48] Plenty of stuff was probably used for this purpose. In the rude ages of society, cattle are said to have been the common instrument of commerce; and, though they must have been a most inconvenient one, yet, in old times, we find things were frequently valued according to the number of cattle which had been given in exchange for them. The armor of Diomedes, says Homer, cost only nine oxen, but that of Glaucus cost a hundred oxen.

In all countries, [49] therefore, men seem at last to have been determined by irresistible reasons to give the preference, for this employment, to metals above every other commodity. Metals can not only be kept with as little loss as any other commodity, scarcely any thing being less perishable than they are, but they can likewise, without any loss, be divided into any number of parts, as by fusion those parts can easily be reunited again. This is a quality that no other equally durable commodities possess and that, more than any other quality, renders them fit [50] and being the instruments of commerce and circulation.

Historical Profile

Yesterday I heard Bizet's masterpiece for the twentieth time. Once more I attended with the same gentle [51] reverence once again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work completes one! Through it one almost becomes a "masterpiece" oneself. And, as a matter of fact, each time I heard Carmen it [52] will seem to me that I was more of a philosopher, a better philosopher than at other times.

To sit for five hours: the first step to holiness! [53] Can I just say that Bizet's tunes are the only ones I can basically stand? That other orchestration which is all the rage at present—the Wagnerian—is [54] brutal artificial and "unsophisticated." Hence its appeal to all the three senses of the modern soul at once. How terribly Wagnerian orchestration affects me! I call it the Sirocco. A disagreeable sweat breaks out all over me. All my fine weather vanishes.

Bizet's music seems to me perfect. It comes forward lightly, gracefully, stylishly. [55] It is lovable; and it does not sweat. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and thus remains popular. It possesses the refinement of a people, not of an individual. It is rich. It is definite. It builds, organizes, completes, and in this sense it stands as a contrast to the polypus in music, to "endless melody." Have more painful, more tragic accents ever been heard on the stage before? And how are they obtained? Without grimaces! Without counterfeiting of any kind! Free from the lie of the grand style! [56] On the other side of the coin: this music assumes that the listener is intelligent even as a musician. [57] Thereby it is the opposite of Wagner, who, apart from everything else, was the most ill-mannered genius on earth. Wagner repeats a thing so often that we become desperate, and ultimately believe it.

I become a better man, a better musician, a better listener when Bizet speaks to me. Is it in any way possible to listen better? I even burrow behind this music with my ears. I hear its very cause. I seem to assist at its birth. I tremble before the dangers which this daring music runs. [58] I attend the orchestra show once a week, regardless of the featured composer.

And, strange to say, at bottom I do not give it a thought, or am not aware how much thought I really do give it. For quite other ideas are running through my head the while. Has anyone ever observed that music [59] eradicates the spirit? It gives wings to thought, and the more one becomes a musician the more one is also a philosopher. The grey sky of abstraction seems thrilled by flashes of lightning. The light is strong enough to reveal all the details of things, to enable one to grapple with problems, and the world is surveyed as if from a mountain top.

With this I have defined philosophical pathos, and unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a small hailstorm of ice and wisdom, of problems solved. Bizet makes me productive. Everything that is good makes me productive. I have gratitude [60] beyond nothing else, nor have I any other touchstone for testing what is good.

Science

From the part of The Healing where we concisely presented the science of demonstration, you have already learned that some sciences are universal and some are [61] earthly, and that some are related to others. So now what you need to learn is that the science we are engaged in explaining is physics, which is a particular science in relation to what comes later.

Since you have learned that each science [62] have a subject matter, the subject matter of physics is the sensible body insofar as it is subject to change. What is investigated is the necessary accidents belonging to the body subject to change as such—that is, the accidents that are termed essential—and also the attendant features that attach to the body, inasmuch as it is, whether [63] forms accidents or derivatives of the two.

Now, these bodies are considered natural things and so, too, is whatever is accidental to them. All of them are called natural in relation to that power called nature. [64] Some of them are subjects, for it, some of them effects, motions, and dispositions proceeding from nature. If, as was explained in the science of demonstration, natural things have principles, reasons, and causes without which the science of physics could not be attained, then the only way to acquire [65] generic knowledge of those things possessing principles is simple. First, one must know their principles and, from their principles, to know them, for this is the way to teach and learn that gives us access to the authentic knowledge of things that possess principles.

[66] Also, if natural things do possess certain principles, then either each and every one of them has those principles, or they do not hold any principles in common. In the latter case, it would not be unlikely that the science of physics establishes the existence of those principles and at the same time [67] identify their essence. If these natural things do share certain first principles in common—namely, those that are undoubtedly principles of their shared subjects and states—then the proof of these principles will not belong to the discipline of natural philosophers (as was shown in the part of The Healing dealing with the science of demonstrations), but to another science. The natural philosopher must simply accept their existence as a postulate and conceptualize their essence as [68] full real.

Moreover, natural things possess certain common principles and certain principles more specific to their group ([69] however, belonging to one of their genera, such as the principles of growth). Some principles are even more specific than these (for instance, within one species, the principles of humanity). In addition, they possess essential accidents common to them all all, common to their genus, or common to their species. Thus, the right course of intellectual teaching and learning consists in starting [70] for what is more common and proceeding to what is more specific.

Modern/Influential Thinkers

Sixty-five years ago this month, representatives to the United Nations General Assembly came together to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a worldwide [71] reckoning that all members of our human family are born possessing certain equal and inalienable rights. These same rights are reflected in the founding documents of the [72] United States and, we cherish them as part of our national character.

[73] Therefore, as President Obama has said, just because some truths are self-evident doesn't mean they are self-executing. We have to work relentlessly to make them real. We must constantly question and challenge [74] themselves to be on the right side of history—to do our part so that more and more of our fellow human beings can enjoy the rights and freedoms that are the birthright of all mankind.

Our history is filled with champions who have fought to bring us closer to our ideals, from Dr. King and the thousands who marched on Washington fifty years ago to "Battling" Bella Abzug, from [75] the United States to the United Nations, and countless others. I know everyone in this room believes, as I do, that continuing their work at home and expanding it around the globe is our great commission as the inheritors of their legacy.

For me, the struggle for equal human rights is [76] deep personally. It's essential to who I am as an American. I can never forget that I am the daughter of proud citizens who suffered the indignities of Jim Crow. Nor can I forget that, in 1964, the year of my birth, in many parts of this great country, people who looked like me could not vote or marry someone who looks like my husband. The unfinished battle for equality and human dignity is not only what drives me as a public servant: it is my central duty as the mother of my two children to make sure they never [77] encountered any limitations on their dreams because of who they are or what they look like.

Make no [78] mistake; advancing democracy and respect for human rights is central to our foreign policy. It's what our history and our values demand, but it's also profoundly in our interests. That is why the United States remains firmly committed to promoting freedom, opportunity, and prosperity everywhere. We stand proudly for the rights of women, the LGBT community, and minorities. We defend the freedom for all people to worship as they choose, and we champion open government and civil society, freedom of assembly, and a free press.

[79] We sometimes face painful dilemmas as the immediate need to defend our national security clashes with our fundamental commitment to democracy and human rights, as we seek to secure these core interests. We make tough choices.

Still, over time, we know that our core interests are inseparable from our core values, [80] and that our avowal of dedication to democracy and the rights of Homo sapiens utterly buttresses the security of the nation. So, the fact is: American foreign policy must sometimes strike a difficult balance—not between our values and our interests, because these almost invariably converge with time, but more often between our short and long-term imperatives.