It has also been what the philosophers call an ontology — a description of reality conceived not as mere matter, but as active, self-organizing substance with a striving toward consciousness. Tradition has made this ontological outlook the framework in which thought and matter, subject and object, mind and nature are reconciled on a new spiritized level. Accordingly, I regard this process-oriented view of phenomena as intrinsically ecological in character, and I am very puzzled by the failure of so many dialectically oriented thinkers to see the remarkable compatibility between a dialectical outlook and an ecological one. For the reader imbued with the conventional wisdom of our era, I cannot emphasize too strongly that society in the form of bands, families, clans, tribes, tribal federations, villages, and even municipalities long antedates State formations. The State, with its specialized functionaries, bureaucracies, and armies, emerges quite late in human social development — often well beyond the threshold of history. It remained in sharp conflict with coexisting social structures such as guilds, neighborhoods, popular societies, cooperatives, town meetings, and a wide variety of municipal assemblies.
Like flowers in a dreary wasteland, they will provide the colors and scents that obscure a clear and honest vision of the ugliness around us, the putrescent regression to an increasingly elemental and inorganic world that will no longer be habitable for complex forms of life and ecological ensembles. It infiltrates those levels of our bodies that somehow make contact with the existing primordial forms from which we may originally have derived. Beyond any structural considerations, we are faced with the need to give an ecological meaning to these buried sensibilities. In the case of our design strategies, we may well want to enhance natural diversity, integration, and function, if only to reach more deeply into a world that has been systematically educated out of our bodies and innate experiences. Today, even in alternate technology, our design imagination is often utilitarian, economistic, and blind to a vast area of experience that surrounds us. A solar house that symbolizes a designer’s ability to diminish energy costs may be a monument to financial cunning, but it is as blind and deadened ecologically as cheap plumbing.
While digging the Somerset Coal Canal in southwest England, he found that fossils were always in the same order in the rock layers. As he continued his job as a surveyor, he found the same patterns across England. He also found that certain animals were in only certain layers and that they were in the same layers all across England.
At
the same time it must be clearly understood that the truth
of such a general principle is no warrant for all the particular
interpretations which mythologists claim to base upon it,
for of these in fact many are wildly speculative, and many
hopelessly unsound. Nature-myth demands indeed a recognition
of its vast importance in the legendary lore of
mankind, but only so far as its claim is backed by strong
and legitimate evidence. The relation of morbid imagination stir dating to myth is peculiarly
308well instanced in the history of a widespread belief, extending
through savage, barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediæval
life, and surviving to this day in European superstition. This belief, which may be conveniently called the Doctrine
of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift or magic
art, can turn for a time into ravening wild beasts. What we are especially concerned with is the fact of its prevalence
in the world.
Classical Tragedy vs. Modern Tragedy
The fish tanks, “sun tubes,” and ponds that use fish wastes to nourish the plant nutriment on which they live are merely the simplest examples of a wide-ranging ecological system composed of a large variety of biota — from the simplest plants to sizable mammals — that have been sensitively integrated into a biotechnical ecosystem. To this system, humanity owes not only its labor, imagination, and tools but its wastes as well. Science’s defense against this kind of critique is that order may imply a rational arrangement of phenomena that lends itself to rational comprehension, but that none of this implies subjectivity, the capacity to comprehend a rational arrangement. To all appearances, nature is mute, unthinking, and blind, however orderly it may be; hence it exhibits neither subjectivity nor rationality in the human sense of self-directive and self-expressive phenomena. Nevertheless, subjectivity, even in its human sense, is not a newly born result, a terminally given condition. Subjectivity can be traced back through a natural history of its own to its most rudimentary forms as mere sensitivity in all animate beings and, in the view of philosophers such as Diderot, in the very reactivity (sensibilité) of the inorganic world itself.
To call these activities “governmental” rather than “administrative” and to see in them evidence of a fully developed State rather than political functions of the most rudimentary kind is not mere word-play. In political ideologies of all types, the abuse of terms like government and administration turn the State into the template for a free society, however much its functions are reduced to a “minimum.” Ultimately, this confusion provides the State with the ideological rationale for its maximum development, notably the Soviet-type regimes of Eastern Europe. Like the market, the State knows no limits; it can easily become a self-generating and self-expanding force for its own sake, the institutional form in which domination for the sake of domination acquires palpability. As victim and aggressor, woman and man are thus brought into blind complicity with a moral system that denies their human nature and ultimately the integrity of external nature as well.
What are two ways to measure geologic time?
It is not proposed here
to enquire specially into this Aryan mythology, of which so
many eminent students have treated, but to compare some of
the most important developments of mythology among the
various races of mankind, especially in order to determine
the general relation of the myths of savage tribes to the
myths of civilized nations. The argument does not aim at a
general discussion of the mythology of the world, numbers
of important topics being left untouched which would have
to be considered in a general treatise. The topics chosen
are mostly such as are fitted, by the strictness of evidence
and argument applying to them, to make a sound basis for
the treatment of myth as bearing on the general ethnological
problem of the development of civilization. Nevertheless, allegory has had a share in the development
of myths which no interpreter must overlook. The fault of
the rationalizer lay in taking allegory beyond its proper
action, and applying it as a universal solvent to reduce dark
stories to transparent sense.
The direct involvement of humanity with nature is thus not an abstraction, and Dorothy Lee’s account of the Hopi ceremonials is not a description of “primitive man’s science,” as Victorian anthropologists believed. From the very outset of human consciousness, it enters directly into consociation with humanity — not merely harmonization or even balance. Nature as life eats at every repast, succors every new birth, grows with every child, aids every hand that throws a spear or plucks a plant, warms itself at the hearth in the dancing shadows, and sits amidst the councils of the community just as the rustle of the leaves and grasses is part of the air itself — not merely a sound borne on the wind. Ecological ceremonials validate the “citizenship” nature acquires as part of the human environment. But this formal similarity is not at issue in discussing the preliterate outlook toward society.
We will refrain from using derived measures and stay with the well-known original ttr, but use the simple mechanism of dividing our samples into size bands in order to adjust for sample size. In this paper, we have measured how widely, i.e. with how many different topics/domains, words are being used on the social media platform Twitter. For this purpose we have developed the so-called U-score, a measure which can be computed for each word and which tells us something about the applicability of a word.
The destruction or abandonment of the whole property of the dead
may plausibly, whether justly or not, be explained by horror or abnegation;
but these motives do not generally apply to cases where only part of the
property is sacrificed, or new objects are provided expressly, and here the
service of the dead seems the reasonable motive. Thus, at the funeral of
a Garo girl, earthen vessels were broken as they were thrown in above the
buried ashes. For good cases of the breaking of vessels and utensils given to the dead, see
‘Journ. Cases of formal sacrifice where objects
are offered to the dead and taken away again, are generally doubtful as to
motive; see Spix and Martius, vol. Now the sacrifice of property for the dead is one of the
great religious rites of the world; are we then justified in
asserting that all men who abandon or destroy property as
a funeral ceremony believe the articles to have spirits, which
spirits are transmitted to the deceased?
To count the
fingers on one hand up to 5, and then go on with a second
261five, is a notation by fives, or as it is called, a quinary notation. To count by the use of both hands to 10, and thence
to reckon by tens, is a decimal notation. To go on by
hands and feet to 20, and thence to reckon by twenties, is a
vigesimal notation. Now though in the larger proportion of
known languages, no distinct mention of fingers and toes,
hands and feet, is observable in the numerals themselves,
yet the very schemes of quinary, decimal, and vigesimal notation
remain to vouch for such hand-and-foot-counting
having been the original method on which they were
founded. There seems no doubt that the number of the
fingers led to the adoption of the not especially suitable
number 10 as a period in reckoning, so that decimal
arithmetic is based on human anatomy.
