People From London

"The young Housman wrote home that he had absented himself from Jowett's lectures in disgust at the Professor's gross ignorance of Greeek. Here we must make allowance for a juvenile excess of rigour; but any page of the original edition of Jowett's famous translation of Plato will supply some evidence in favour of Housman's stern judgment. Even if one could forgive Jowett's deficiencies as a scholar and his reluctance to take action to amend them, what can we say of his openly expressed aversion to research, of his opposition to every scheme calculated to advance sound learning in the University, of his not only failing to perform what are usually held to be the duties of a Professor, but actually coming forward as the main adversary of the interests he might have been expected to protect? Yet it is impossible to ignore the distinctive contribution to the traditions of the Chair made by this remarkable man. The Plato and the Thucydides are defective in point of scholarship; but as literature they have great merits, and they reached, and still reach, a wide public."

"Mr Jowett's forte is mental philosophy. How has this or that metaphysical question presented itself to different minds, or to the same mind at different times? Under what contradictory aspects may a particular religious sentiment or moral truth be viewed? What phenomena does an individual mind exhibit at different stages in its growth? What contrasts do we find in the ancient and modern world of thought? This is the class of questions Mr Jowett delights to ask and to answer. He is strongly negative. He is fond of dwelling on contradictions rather than resemblances. He is content with stating a difficulty without attempting a solution of it."

"Jowler [Jowett] preached yesterday in Chapel amidst intense excitement, no people in Chapel. He looked so fatherly and beautiful and brought out the best bell-like silvern voice with quite rich tones that he had hitherto hidden in the depth of his stomach, and preached the most lovely little practical sermon in a quite perfect style with the most wonderful grace. I have only said all this laud in anticipation of having to confess that though I felt how beautiful it was in its way, it was most unsatisfying to me. It was just Platonism flavoured with a little Christian charity: Christianity is gutted by him: it becomes perfectly meaningless, if it is only an attempt to take some useful moral hints from just what happens to strike you in a very good, "perhaps I may be excused in saying" a Divine life. He is perfectly self-sufficient; self-dependent, without any consciousness of anything beyond a certain human weakness in carrying out his ideal; there is not an atom of the feeling of prayer, of communication with God, of reliance on any one but self. He even begs pardon for using as vague an expression as "sharing in the Spirit of God." I admire the Symposium with all my heart and soul; but I must have something more to have brought God down to death to procure for me."

"He was a keen and formidable controversialist, and was usually found on what was, for the time, the unpopular side. His contribution (an essay on The Interpretation of Scripture) to the famous Essays and Reviews, which appeared in 1860, brought him into strong collision with powerful sections of theological opinion, to which he had already given offence by his commentaries on the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans. His views were, indeed, generally considered to be extremely latitudinarian. Latterly he exercised an extraordinary influence in the Univ., and was held in reverence by his pupils, many of whom have risen to eminence."

"I have been very fortunate in this latter respect (Greek and Latin Composition), having got for my tutor the very best man in the University—Jowett, to whom it is pleasant in every way to be attached, both in regard of studies and of general intercourse."

"First come I. My name is J–W–TT. There's no knowledge but I know it. I am the Master of this College, What I don't know isn't knowledge."

"Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the [Oxford] common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizons of the place."

"In philosophy he was content to be critical; he saw that one philosophy had always been succeeded by another, and the leader of to-day was forgotten tomorrow; each therefore, he concluded, had grasped part of the truth, but not the whole truth. His speculations ended in compromise, and thus, here also, he was unfitted to be a leader. For himself he had almost a horror of falling under one set of ideas to the exclusion of others... Jowett only went a step beyond the philosopher who condemns all systems but his own. Yet indirectly he left his mark even on philosophy. By him his pupil T. H. Green was stimulated to the study of Hegel, and no influence has been greater in Oxford for the last thirty years than Green's. But the chief traces of Jowett's influence will be found in other spheres. His essays and translations must secure him a high place among the writers of his time, and in every history of English education in the second half of the nineteenth century he will occupy a prominent place."

"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique."

"Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge."

"One man is as good as another until he has written a book."

"I hope our young men will not grow into such dodgers as these old men are. I believe everything that a young man says to me (p. 250)."

"Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard (p. 244)."

"[The office of the interpreter] is to read Scripture like any other book."

"Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at the door."

"Learn just enough of the subject [metaphysics] to enable your mind to get rid of it."

"We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?"

"Research! Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value."

"As we survey the various stages of evolution, from the simplest one-cell creatures up to man. we see a steady improvement in the methods of learning and adaptation to a hostile world. Each step in learning ability gives better adaptation and greater chance of survival. We are carried a long way up the scale by innate reflexes and rudimentary muscular learning faculties. Habits indeed, not rational thought, assist us to surmount most of life's obstacles. Most, but by no means all; for learning in the high mammals exhibits the unexplained phenomenon of "insight," which shows itself by sudden changes in behavior in learning situations -- in sudden departures from one method of organizing a task, or solving a problem, to another. Insight, expectancy, set, are the essentially "mind-like" attributes of communication, and it is these, together with the representation of concepts, which require physiological explanation. At the higher end of the scale of evolution, this quality we call "mind" appears more and more prominently, but it is at our own level that learning of a radically new type has developed -- through our powers of organizing thoughts, comparing and setting them into relationship, especially with the use of language. We have a remarkable faculty of forming generalizations, of recognizing universals, of associating and developing them. It is our multitude of general concepts, and our powers of organizing them with the aid of language in varied ways, which forms the backbone of human communication, and which distinguishes us from the animals. (p. 304)"

"To take another simile [that the brain is like a machine], if we imagine a great library containing books which have a vast number of cross references one to another, then should one whole shelf be burned, it might be possible to reconstruct the lost books -- but somewhat less perfectly than at first. (p. 302)"

""Information" in most, if not all, of its connotations seems to rest upon the notion of selective power. The Shannon theory regards the information source, in emitting the signals (signs), as exerting a selective power upon the ensemble of messages. In the Carnap-Bar-Hillel semantic theory, the information content of statements relates to the selective power they exert upon ensembles of states. Again, at its pragmatic level, in true communicative situations [...] a source of information has a certain value to a recipient, where "value" may be regarded as a "selective power." Gabor, for example, observes that what people value in a source of information (i.e., what they are prepared to pay for) depends upon its exclusiveness and prediction power; he cites instances of a newspaper editor hoping for a "scoop" and a racegoer receiving information from a tipster. "Exclusiveness" here implies the selecting of that one particular recipient out of the population, while the "prediction" value of information rests upon the power it gives to the recipient to select his future action, out of the whole range of prior uncertainty as to what action to take. Again, signs have the power to select responses in people, such responses depending upon a totality of conditions. Human communication channels consist of individuals in conversation, or in various forms of social intercourse. Each individual and each conversation is unique; different people react to signs in different ways, depending each upon their own past experiences and upon the environment at the time. It is such variations, such differences, which gives rise to the principal problems in the study of human communication. (p. 244-5)"

""SIGNIFICS" - OR MENTAL HYGIENE (p.219)"

"[...] we can strip off all grammatical clues to sentence structure, all affixes and prepositions, and yet still achieve communication. Thus restricted to nouns, simple "stories" can be told in word chains: Woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police.... Again, the reader's past experience of his language is sufficient to restore the missing elements, sufficiently accurately for the purpose. But of course, not only does the reader have experience of sentence structure, enabling him to supply the missing syntactical elements, but also he has experience of typical contexts in which the various words are used; many words bear an aura about with them. It might be more difficult to tell a tale about a policeman who robbed a woman, for instance, with so little redundancy! (p.122)"

"Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. After continued use, many metaphorical words become incorporated into the language and lose their original significance; words such as "explain," "ponder," "see (what you mean)" we no longer think of as metaphorical. Metaphors arise because we continually need to stretch the range of words as we accumulate new concepts and abstract relationships. A printed text is not simply a chain of individual words, picked one at a time; it is a whole. It has a structure, but it has meaning for us only if it represents a continuity of our experience of past texts. A text in some strange foreign language set up an abrupt change in our experience, a discontinuity, and we make nothing of it. Given a translator's dictionary we may decipher some of the words and attain some understanding, though this understanding through translation has been achieved by projecting the text onto our own language; that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)"

"Language performs an essentially social function; it helps us to get along together, to communicate and achieve a great measure of concerted action. Words are signs which have significance by convention, and those people who do not adopt the conventions simply fail to communicate. They do not "get along" and a social force arises which encourages them to achieve the correct associations. (p.69)"

"All that we have to do is to pick them out of the dictionary and string them in the right order.... (p.68)"

"The suggestion that words are symbols for things, actions, qualities, relationships, et cetera, is naive, a gross simplification. Words are slippery customers. The full meaning of a word does not appear until it is placed in its context, and the context may serve an extremely subtle function -- as with puns, or double entendre. And even then the "meaning" will depend upon the listener, upon the speaker, upon their entire experience of language, upon their knowledge of one another, and upon the whole situation. Words do not "mean things" in a one-to-one relation like a code. Words, too, are empirical signs, not copies or models of anything; truly, onomatopoeia and gestures frequently seem to possess resemblance, but this resemblance does not bear too close examination. A cockerel may seem to say cook-a-doodle-do to an Englishman, but a German thinks it says kikeriki, and a Japanese kokke-kekko. Each can paint only with the phonetic sound of his own language."

"The theory of communication is partly concerned with the measurement of information content of signals, as their essential property in the establishment of communication links. But the information content of signals is not to be regarded as a commodity; it is more a property or potential of the signals, and as a concept it is closely related to the idea of selection, or discrimination. This mathematical theory first arose in telegraphy and telephony, being developed for the purpose of measuring the information content of telecommunication signals. It concerned only the signals themselves as transmitted along wires, or broadcast through the aether, and is quite abstracted from all questions of "meaning." Nor does it concern the importance, the value, or truth to any particular person. As a theory, it lies at the syntactic level of sign theory and is abstracted from the semantic and pragmatic levels. We shall argue … that, though the theory does not directly involve biological elements, it is nevertheless quite basic to the study of human communication -- basic but insufficient."

"Physically, we transmit signals or signs -- audible, visual, tactual. But the mere transmission and reception of a physical signal does not constitute communication. A sign, if it is perceived by the recipient, has the potential for selecting responses in him. Physically, when we communicate, we make noises with our mouths, or gesticulate, or exhibit some token or icon, and these physical signals set up a response behavior."

"The dictionary definition of communication [...] includes the communication of goods and supplies. [...] But transport of goods is not communication in the sense we are adopting here, and does not raise the same subtle and difficult questions. What "goods" do we exchange when we send messages to one another?"

"It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth."

"Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite—an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure in discipline, and a covert homophilia."

"I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings."

"The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask."

"NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Where else but in Texas would men set up to administer space?"

"Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle."

"It was clumsy and cruel and thoughtless and without consideration. Step by step, the west blundered and floundered into a dilemma they never completely comprehended and never in fact sought: from the very beginning, they argued in cliches."

"I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living."

"When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long."

"That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience."

"The fabulous Eva, Government Glad-Hand Girl No. 1 of the extravagant political novelette that is Argentina."

"For Prince William at least it was decided on the day of his birth what he should do: Find a presentable wife, father a male heir (and preferably a male "spare" as well), and keep the show on the road. By yet another exercise of that notorious "magic," it is now doubly and triply important that he does this simple thing right, because only his supposed charisma can save the country from what monarchists dread and republicans ought to hope for: King Charles III. (Monarchy, you see, is a hereditary disease that can only be cured by fresh outbreaks of itself.)"

"When I first met Kate I knew there was something very special about her. I knew there was possibly something that I wanted to explore there. But we ended up being friends for a while and that was a good foundation. I do generally believe now that being friends with one another is a massive advantage. It just went from there. I knew over the years, I knew that things were getting better and better and we went through a few stumbling blocks as every relationship does, but we picked ourselves up and carried on. From were you had the odd problem when you are first getting to know each other, those have all gone and it is just really easy being with each other, it is really fun and I'm extremely funny and she loves that so it's been good."

"I think at first they were a bit surprised that it had happened, then they realised it was really nice and it was good fun and we got on really well, they were good friends of ours as well so we had a good giggle with them as well."

"I'm not an expert. I've been reliably informed it's a sapphire with some diamonds. But I'm sure everyone recognises it from previous times."

"We had been talking about marriage for a while so it wasn't a massively big surprise. I took her up somewhere nice in Kenya and I proposed. … I'd been planning it for a while but as any guy out there will know it takes a certain amount of motivation to get yourself going. I was planning it and then it just felt really right out in Africa. It was beautiful at the time. I had done a little bit of planning to show my romantic side."

"It made a real big difference with everyone not trying to sort of snap a picture every time I was walking around the streets. I hope it just continues for Harry as well when he is there."

"I was just talking with friends and they said it was good idea and I just sort of liked the idea."

"My plans aren't quite solid. I'm hugely disorganized, you see, so once I sort it out you'll probably find out."

"Of course, Harry and I are both quite upset about it - that our mother's trust has been betrayed and even now she is still being exploited."