This document discusses the value of artistic pursuits according to William James and R.G. Collingwood. It summarizes James' concept of "value blindness" as the tendency to judge others' experiences and values from a limited personal perspective without understanding their feelings and meanings. The document argues that engaging with artworks using Collingwood's view of art as expression understood historically can help overcome value blindness by providing exposure to different perspectives and experiences. This in turn provides a reason why artistic pursuits have value by helping develop moral awareness and more accurate judgments of others.
This document discusses the value of artistic pursuits according to William James and R.G. Collingwood. It summarizes James' concept of "value blindness" as the tendency to judge others' experiences and values from a limited personal perspective without understanding their feelings and meanings. The document argues that engaging with artworks using Collingwood's view of art as expression understood historically can help overcome value blindness by providing exposure to different perspectives and experiences. This in turn provides a reason why artistic pursuits have value by helping develop moral awareness and more accurate judgments of others.
Artistic Pursuits David Collins * Ryerson University Abstract. Within philosophical aesthetics, discussions of value tend to focus on the aesthetic values of particular things (e.g. artworks, or natural objects), leaving the question of the value or worth of creating and experi- encing art a pressing question for artists, art educators and policy makers comparatively unaddressed. Drawing on R. G. Collingwoods account of art, this paper oers an answer to the question why the pursuit of artistic activities is valuable, arguing that, when artworks are engaged with as ex- pressions to be understood historically, in Collingwoods sense, doing so can oer a solution to the moral and epistemic problem of value-blindness discussed by William James in his essay On ACertain Blindness in Human Beings, and so gives at least one reason why artistic pursuits are of value. 1. Introduction Discussions of aesthetic value tend to focus on the aesthetic values of things, leaving unanswered the broader question of why aesthetic activi- ties and experiences are themselves worth engaging in. Why should peo- ple bother with art in the rst place, rather than spending their time on other things that might give them pleasure or be worthwhile in other ways? What good are works of art beyond their entertainment value or the enjoyment that can be derived from them? Without a ready answer to questions such as these, no satisfactory reply can be given to one who re- duces aesthetic judgments to mere personal taste and thinks that some- ones judgment of a work of art as good just means that she likes that sort of thing, or to those who dismiss art as frivolous as just entertainment. * Email: [email protected] 193 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits The aim of this paper is to provide an answer to such questions by putting forward a position on the value of engaging in artistic pursuits both the creation of artworks by artists and their reception by spectators drawn from the thinking of William James, and in doing so to highlight the relevance of James philosophy to questions in aesthetics. As Richard Shusterman (2011) notes, James never wrote directly on aesthetics, despite his frequent use of examples from art and literature to illustrate his ideas (2011: 347-49), and perhaps it is because of this that there has been al- most no discussion of James thought in relation to aesthetic concerns. While Shusterman has applied sections of The Principles of Psychology to an account of aesthetic experience, I wish here to examine James 1899 Talks to Students on Some of Lifes Ideals, particularly his essay On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, arguing that an engagement with art, when done in light of R. G. Collingwoods idea of art as expression and using his method of historical understanding, can oer a solution to the blindness with which James is concerned and this, in turn, provides an answer for why artistic pursuits are valuable. 2. James and Value Blindness A few years prior to 1899, James was riding through the mountains of North Carolina when his carriage passed several coves, patches of land between the hills that had been roughly cleared and settled by homestead- ers. Describing the scene encountered, James writes: The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had gir- dled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the [wood] chips... (1899a: 842) His immediate impression was, as he puts it, one of unmitigated squalor (Ibid.: 842). The forest that had once stood was destroyed, with the clear- ing seeming to be without a single element of articial grace to make up 194 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits for the loss of Natures beauty (Ibid.: 842-43). However, when his driver, a native of the area, remarked that the regions inhabitants took pride in these coves and were only happy when getting one of [them] under cul- tivation (Ibid.: 843), James was struck by the dierence between his way of taking the scene and theirs. He felt at once that hed missed the whole inward signicance of the situation (Ibid.: 843); that he had been blind to the meaning and value the clearings had for those whod built them and in whose lives they featured. Following this realization, it occurred to James how the settlers would see the coves: the stumps would appear as reminders of their hard work, with the crude cabins and fences speaking of safety for themselves and their families. The clearing, James writes, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sung a very paean of duty, struggle, and success (Ibid.: 843). This incident inspired On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, in which James discusses the common tendency of thought of which his ini- tial judgment of the coves ugliness was an instance. This tendency, the blindness James refers to, is an habitual lack of awareness of the feelings of others, especially when these dier from our own, and is held by James to have negative moral and epistemic consequences. The moral danger is made clear in What Makes a Life Signicant, a companion talk given to the same students, in which James states that this blindness is at the root of most human injustices and cruelties (1899b: 861), and that an aware- ness of the feelings of others, and how these feelings inform their values, actions and lives, is of the most tremendous practical importance [and] the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political (Ibid.: 861). The epistemic consequence concerns the way value-blindness limits our awareness of the world, narrowing the scope of our feelings and judgments to a single perspective, thereby making our judgments of others and their actions more likely to be mistaken. If judging from a limited perspective leads us to misjudge those who are the very sources of the alternative per- spectives that would, if understood, put us in a better position to judge more accurately, these misjudgments are likely to reinforce our tunnel- vision, furthering our entrenchment in an insular understanding which is false insofar as it misses the dierences and diversity of experience that exist in life. The limitation this puts on our judgments relates back to the 195 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits moral concern; as James notes, judgments concerning the worth of things ... depend on the feelings the[y] arouse in us and so [i]f we were radically feelingless ... we should ... be unable to point to any one situation or ex- perience in life more valuable or signicant than any other (1899a: 841). While few of us are radically feelingless, having a narrower range of feeling limits the value and signicance we can nd in life, along with limiting the ways in which we are able to nd things valuable or meaningful. This leaves us less equipped to discriminate between the worth of things to judge one thing as better or worse than another and so restricts our ability to make the discriminations necessary for ethical judgments. The epistemic limitations to which this blindness leads can be seen throughout James examples. Comparing a dog and its human owner, he points out that, despite their living closely together, the owner is blind to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts and the dog to the delights of literature and art (Ibid.: 841). Just as we dont fully realize how these things are felt or experienced by dogs, they are incapable of fathoming what were doing when reading: as James notes, it would appear to them that we sit motionless, staring at an unchanging object. Each side misses what the experience is like for the other, and so their judgments of the nature and worth of these activities (to the extent, of course, that dogs can be imagined to judge) will miss the mark. This situation is echoed in a passage in which James contrasts Walt Whitman, immersed in the ow of public life whilst people-watching aboard the Brooklyn ferry, with a practically-minded man going about his daily business. The practical man, James writes, would likely characterize Whitmans activity as loang and judge it to be a waste of time (Ibid.: 854). Such an observer would similarly dismiss the behaviour of the boys described in Robert Louis Stevensons The Lantern-bearers, from which James quotes at length, who went around at night carrying tin lanterns under their coats, not for the light they shed (which was kept concealed) but as a sort of token of membership in a community of peers, the value of which seemed mainly to consist in its being a secret from others. In both cases, James suggests, an observer judging from the outside, with- out being aware of what the actions meant for the ones acting, would judge falsely. As he says, repeating a line of Stevensons for emphasis, to miss the joy is to miss all (Ibid.: 847), implying the meaning of a human action 196 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits lies in the reason why it is done as felt by the one acting, and so cant be captured by a description of the bare external facts. If value-blindness is the problem with which James is concerned, what solution does he oer? From what he says in certain places it would be easy to conclude that he thought the problem to be an unavoidable fact of human nature, and was drawing our attention to something we could do nothing about. For example, in one place he calls it the blindness with which we are al aicted (Ibid.: 841, my emphasis) and in another says that when one judges another persons actions, the judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter (Ibid.: 842, my emphasis). However, to draw this conclusion would be to take these phrases out of context. The greater part of James talk consists of a series of examples and quotations from people who, in the particular moments described, are not blind to the signicance of things as felt by others. James personal example shows not only how he became aware of his own blindness but how he overcame it by realizing not just that others would feel dierently, but what they would feel. The only example of his where we would necessarily miss the mark is that of the dog nding value in its buried bones; but it can be seen that this is because the dog has a dierent form of life. From James other examples, it would seem that when we do share a form of life with the one whose activity we are judging, understanding is possible so long as we dont miss the joy which, being a human joy, is imaginable to us and so, in principle, knowable. 3. Collingwood and Historical Understanding The sort of understanding James examples suggest would be an antidote for value-blindness is remarkably close to what Collingwood, in An Autobi- ography, termed historical understanding. He tells of an incident from his life similar to James realization in North Carolina. While working in Lon- don during the First World War, Collingwood would walk daily past the Albert Memorial and became captivated by its appearance. Everything about it was visibly mis-shapen, he writes; for a time I could not bear to look at it, and passed with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness, I forced myself to look, and to face 197 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits day by day the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it? ... What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what he had done and what he had tried to do? Had he tried to produce a beautiful thing; a thing, I meant, which we should have thought beautiful? If so, he had of course failed. But had he perhaps been trying to produce something dierent? If so, he might possibly have succeeded. If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault? Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did? (1939: 29-30) This train of thought contributed to the development of his method of historical understanding, which holds that you cannot nd out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements ... you must also know what the question was ... to which the thing he had said or written was meant as an answer (Ibid.: 31). While he refers here to uses of language, his approach to understanding extends to any purposeful human action, along with the artefacts that are the products thereof. His realization about the memorial that there was something its maker had been trying to do by making it, and that to properly judge its quality or success required an understanding of what this was is a clear example of this method being applied to an aesthetic object. Similarly, Collingwood writes of witnessing at a young age the painterly activities of his parents and their friends, seeing the various stages of the creative process and be- coming aware of an artwork not as a nished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record ... of an attempt to solve a denite problem through the medium or art form to which the work belonged (Ibid.: 2). A two-fold objection might be raised to the eect that making art is not always a matter of an artist having a denite problem in mind and try- ing to solve it by what he or she creates, and that to think so would con- tradict the position taken by Collingwood in The Principles of Art against the reduction of art to craft because the former is not merely a matter of executing a pre-formed plan, as one might follow a recipe (1938: 15-16). If, for example, Scott, the creator of the Albert Memorial, had made it in order to solve some problem through the medium of sculpture, it would, 198 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits seemingly, reduce the Memorial to a means to an end and so wouldnt t Collingwoods own standards for counting it a work of art-proper (Ibid.: 20-21). However, this second worry rests on an interpretation of Colling- woods remarks against craft being the essence of art as saying that real art couldnt involve craft or technique, but as Aaron Ridley has insisted, this is not what Collingwood was claiming, so there is no real contradic- tion here (Ridley 1999: 14-16). And indeed, one of the central points ar- gued in Collingwoods An Essay on Philosophical Method is that philosophical concepts overlap such that a distinction between concepts does not nec- essarily entail a dierence in referents (1933: 28-29, 31); in other words, to draw a conceptual distinction between the notions of craft and expres- sion is not to imply an exclusive disjunction between the thing to which each term is being used to refer, and so by Collingwoods standards a work being both one of craft and art-proper presents no problem. In response to the rst worry, Collingwoods writings show that he wasnt referring primarily to problems or questions a person has in mind prior to their solution. Reecting, in his Autobiography, on his own philo- sophical process he writes: when I am in the early stages of work on a problem[, u]ntil the problem has gone a long way towards being solved, I do not know what it is; all I am conscious of is [a] vague perturbation of mind, this sense of being worried about I cannot say what (1939: 4- 5). He holds this to be true of artistic creation, as can be seen from his example of a sculptor playing with clay, watching it take shape under his ngers, working out its form as he goes without planning in advance (1938: 22). Discussing his notion of art-proper as involving the expression of a particular emotion, Collingwood writes: Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is (Ibid.: 111). As Ridley explains, since expression for Collingwood is the working out of an emotion through a particular medium, the expression, being a clarication of that emotion that raises it to consciousness, just is the answer to the question What is it I feel? (Ridley 1999: 32), with the question itself becoming clear only once the answer has emerged. It is apparent from this that Collingwoods historical approach to un- derstanding can be applied to artworks without contradicting his aesthetic theory, with the problem to which the work is seen as a solution being the successful expression of a certain feeling of the artists. What remains 199 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits to be seen is what this has to do with James concern with value-blindness. 4. Aesthetic Engagement as a Solution to James Problem Even if one accepts that value-blindness, as James describes it, is problem- atic due to its moral and epistemic consequences, and that Collingwoods historical approach to understanding anothers actions would be an anti- dote to this, it could still be asked why art is of particular importance in this regard. Even if art can be understood historically, its not the only thing that can be and so it cant be claimed to be the solution to James problem. However, it can be seen as a solution insofar as artworks are expressions of artists feelings and perspectives, or ways of taking things, and so to understand them historically as expressions involves imaginatively recon- structing these feelings and perspectives for ourselves; thus, they can give us practice in becoming aware of ways of feeling other than our own. In other words, because expressive artworks convey or make clear an artists feeling towards something rather than just delivering information about it, they give us what Roger Scruton has called knowledge-what as opposed to the knowledge-that conveyed by a factual report i.e. knowing what it is like to feel a certain way, rather than knowing that someone feels this way (see Scruton 2007: 34-35). This is not unlike Aristotles point that po- etry captures the meaning of events while records chronicling what hap- pened when (what Collingwood refers to as scissors-and-paste history) give only the bare external facts of the matter (see Aristotle 1984: 234-35). This view can also be seen in Collingwoods distinction between betray- ing an emotion, which makes the percipient aware that someone feels a certain way, and expressing one, which allows the percipient to experience something of that emotion for him or herself, and thereby know, to some extent, what it feels like (1938: 122-24). James takes a similar view to Aristotle and Collingwood as to the kinds of meaning to be found in poetic expression versus the scissors-and-paste sort of history, prioritizing the higher vision of an inner signicance over what is known in the dead external way (1899a: 848), and the view that art is something that shows us the former is implicit in his writings. No- tably, all the examples James gives in his talk involve aesthetic matters, 200 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits either being taken from poets and novelists or describing an appreciation of natural beauty; even in his dog example he chooses art and literature as the objects of human signicance to which the dog is blind. Moreover, his discussions of the poets Whitman and Wordsworth depict them as seeing a greater range of signicance than the practically-minded due to their imaginative openness to other perspectives and feelings. The prac- tical man seeing Whitman as a loafer is in a position towards him com- parable to the dogs position towards its owner; knowing only one way to take what he observes and assuming it to be the extent of the truth, he fails to see Whitmans attunement to the ow of life for what it is, just as the dog cant see reading for what it is. A similar point is made when James speculates that Wordsworths neighbours tightly and narrowly in- tent upon their own aairs would have thought the poet walking in the countryside, lled with ... inner joy, responsive ... to the secret life of Nature roundabout him, to be a very insignicant and foolish person- age (Ibid.: 849-50). It should be noted that James wouldnt hold to any hard-and-fast categorization of people as either practical or imaginative, but rather thinks of these as attitudes anyone can take up, although those habitually entrenched in one would be less likely or less able from want of practice to take up the other. Only in some pitiful dreamer, James writes, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of in- sight into ... the vast world of inner life beyond us ... illuminate our mind (Ibid.: 847, my emphasis). It isnt a stretch to suppose that James would hold aesthetic engage- ment to be another way for the common practical man to rise above this hard externality, sharing in Emersons view that artists are free, and ... make free (1844: 301). If artists see more of the inner signicance of things by looking beyond the limitations of their own practical needs and habits, and if they express this signicance through their work, it follows that an engagement with these works as expression to be understood rather than as entertainment to be consumed, as Collingwood would have insisted (see Collingwood 1938: 78-82 on amusement art) can allow oth- ers to see as the artist did, looking past their own personal concerns to imaginatively identify with the concerns of another. If the ability to walk a mile in anothers shoes would help combat value-blindness, artists, in 201 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits making works that express and thus make public a part of their emotional experience of the world, can be seen as oering us a pair of their shoes to try on. Collingwood is not alone among philosophers in this understanding of art; for example, Scruton says an artist presents us with a way of seeing (and not just any way of thinking of) his subject (1981: 582) and writes that paintings present to us a vision that we attribute not to ourselves but to another man; we think of ourselves as sharing in the vision of the artist... (Ibid.: 581, my emphasis). Admittedly, if taken literally this is false (we would not claim, for example, that Picasso literaly sawa persons eyes on the same side of their face, nor their nose as a triangle) but it should be noted that these references to seeing and vision are at least somewhat metaphorical. Rather than thinking of a work as reproducing the visual ex- perience of the artist, it is more tting to see it as the expression of an inner emotional or imaginative experience she had while perceiving her subject not what she saw, but what she felt as she saw it. To experience the work feelingly is to become aware of the way the artist felt when perceiving it, based on the works expressive qualities. As Collingwood describes (1938: 306-09), the process an artist goes through while creating a work of art- proper involves her adopting the positions of both creator and spectator: when a painter is working she is both painting and looking at what is tak- ing shape on the canvas, seeing and feeling the results of her brushstrokes; when a composer writes a song he is attending to how the notes he chooses sound together; when a poet writes she is reading as she goes, assessing the eects of her word choice and prosody. In this sense, when we experience a work of art we do perceive something the artist perceived: the work it- self. If this work counts as the successful expression of a feeling the artist had, it does so because she saw, heard or read in what she had done some- thing she recognized as capturing this feeling; and if we take the nished work before us as having been felt about in this way by the artist when she perceived it, we can attempt to get on the artists wavelength, so to speak, and imaginatively reconstruct this feeling for ourselves. Moreover, since Collingwood holds any work of art-proper to be a cer- tain thing rather than a thing of a certain kind (Ibid.: 114), the account of art he oers is particularly suited to providing a solution to the prob- lem James raises. Because value-blindness is likely to come about through 202 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits the attribution of a general or universal emotion to someone in order to understand her behaviour, as this will lead one to overlook any particular- ities of what she is actually feeling that may not be contained within the general concept, people will be less likely to be blind to the actual feel- ings of others if they habitually engage with artworks by (i) taking them to be expressions of particular rather than general feelings e.g., as express- ing a particular feeling the artist felt on a certain occasion that could be described as an instance of, say, sadness, rather than expressing sadness- in-general and (ii) seeking to understand them in their particularity. En- gaging with art in this way is likely to better prepare one to recognize and understand more correctly the feelings of the other people one encoun- ters in life, which Collingwood and James would agree will be particular occurrences of unique feelings rather than instances of generic, universal emotions. Also, insofar as an active engagement with art involves attend- ing closely to perceptual details as potential sources of meaning, it could be said to give practice in understanding the emotions of others as revealed through body language, facial expression, tone of voice, etc. perhaps to a greater degree than other forms of moral education, since these things must rst be perceived before they can be conceived or understood as ex- pressing (or even betraying) such-and-such a feeling. 5. Conclusion The position outlined above as to the benets of engaging with art may sound similar to the common (and admittedly vague) claim that art broad- ens ones horizons. However, by specifying that it is our range of perspec- tives as to the possible value or signicance of things that is in question, the current position makes clear just what is broadened, and how. By holding that it is the perspective the artist took to her subject that is benecial to engage with, this view avoids the problems arising from assuming that a works content for example, the characters and situations in a narra- tive is what is to be identied or empathized with. There is a dierence between imagining oneself in the place of a ctional character and imag- inatively adopting the artists way of viewing people and their behaviour, just as there is a dierence between imagining being in the place depicted in a painting and attending to the painters way of seeing this place and 203 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits learning to be able to see like this for ourselves. In the case of a narra- tive work, it is a question of identifying with, for example, Shakespeare and his understanding of the human condition as expressed in, say, Ham- let, rather than with the character of Hamlet and his actions. This applies equally to non-representational art; we can learn through their works to hear feelingly like Beethoven or Chopin or Mingus did, or to see with feeling similar to the way Pollock or Kandinsky or De Kooning saw. Art has the potential to take us out of ourselves and allow us to feel, understand and take the world as another has taken it, which is morally and epistemically benecial insofar as it helps us break the habit of value- blindness James warns against and makes us less likely to judge the actions of others narrowly or falsely. While this may sound to some as if it were an invitation to relativism, James is not saying we cant judge others who feel or value dierently than we do; rather, he implies that were only in a posi- tion to judge when we do so with an understanding of what things are like for them. It would be a mistake to read James pluralism as saying that any feeling is as good as any other; in APluralistic Universe, he explicitly states that one persons vision may be more or less valuable than anothers (1909: 34). Of course, we cant be in a position to judge this comparative value un- less we understand what the dierent visions involve and as both James and Collingwood would insist, we can only do so from the inside. It is my suggestion that works of art, when understood historically as expressions of anothers way of taking and feeling towards parts of the world can give us practice in doing just this. References Aristotle (1984), Poetics, trans. I. Bywater. In The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, New York: Random House, pp. 219-66. Collingwood, R. G. (1933), An Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Cla- rendon Press. (1938), The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1939), An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Emerson, R. W. (1844), The Poet. In B. Atkinson, ed., The Essential Writ- 204 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013 David Collins James, Colingwood and the Value of Artistic Pursuits ings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: The Modern Library, 2000, pp. 287-306. James, William (1899a), On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. In G. E. Myers, ed., Wiliam James: Writings 1878-1899. New York: Library of America, 1992, pp. 841-860. (1899b), What Makes a Life Signicant. In G. E. Myers, ed., Wiliam James: Writings 1878-1899. New York: Library of America, 1992, pp. 861-880. (1909), APluralistic Universe. In B. Kuklick, ed., Wiliam James: Writings 1902-1910. New York: Library of America, 1987, pp. 625-819. Ridley, Aaron (1999), R. G. Colingwood. New York: Routledge. Scruton, Roger (1981), Photography and Representation, Critical Inquiry 7:3, 577-603. (2007), Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. New York: Encounter Books. Shusterman, Richard (2011), The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James, British Journal of Aesthetics 51:4, 347-361. 205 Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2013
The Romance of Mathematics
Being the Original Researches of a Lady Professor of Girtham College in Polemical Science, with some Account of the Social Properties of a Conic; Equations to Brain Waves; Social Forces; and the Laws of Political Motion.