European Culture & The Romantic Movement

The romantic movement opened up contemporary thinkers to more objective ways of looking at the world, other than just deriving everything from Christianity, which, pre-enlightenment, was the only prevailing school of thought.

Rousseau was an important figure in the changing process, challenging the long standing dogma and trying to make clear that thinkers were just using God to fill in the gaps where contemporary science was lacking, but as science and reason develops and begins to filter through in to mainstream society, these gaps begin to be filled, with Rousseau nudging the revolution along with his philosophical underpinnings.

Rousseau himself became known to be a sort of 'lone walker', fascinated with all things nature, he marvelled at mountains and enjoyed walking among them, trying to place humanity in some sort of place against natures wonders. This new naturalistic way of thinking however was many a time met with a cold reception, as many refused to attempt to open their minds, which resulted in his being run out of town on more than one occasion. Contemporary thinkers likely stifled their guffaws as he described to them how listening to the waves at the beach could make all his fears and worries melt away, his painful experiences be alleviated by mother natures truest beauties. Truth for Rousseau could at last be found in all things natural and he wanted the rest of society to indulge in these freedoms of pleasure, thinking and new form. He proclaimed time and again that man is virtuous and beautiful but that man had been corrupted by the trapping of civilisation and that we should return to our natural form, but he was in time slightly shot down by Voltaire, who preferred it to be thought that science helped us out of the caves and encouraged us to build ourselves up.

Of course we all know what it is like to be stuck in a system, and sometimes there is nothing better than getting lost in nature so I can understand Rousseau's thoughts, but it is impossible to keep running away, no matter how beautiful and enticing nature is and always will be.

Rousseau was not a man of simple words however, he travelled many places, bringing back his stories of the tribes in Tahiti for example, who seemed so perfectly content with living in and amongst nature.
 It was Hobbes however who had said that the state of nature was brutish and animalistic, but Rousseau counters this, claiming that property ownership was wrong, and was what bound us to an ugly life, forbidding us from the passions and sensibility which man should experience.

In a general sense it would be easy today to claim Rousseau to be some sort of tree-loving anti-government hippy, but what I see is a very enlightened man for his time. It takes a lot of time and emotional and spiritual energy to become as enlightened in this natural sensibility, and the frustrations he must have felt are unimaginable. We could all say "you can't live like that" but having recently camped in nature with bare essentials I found it a very enlightening experience to be able to sit and think clearly for a change with nothing but the mountains and the ever changing Welsh weather!

Gradually as more people became more aware of the changing political climate and mood, more began to adopt this feeling of reform in thinking and the French Revolution begins which shocks left and right politics into a new reform period, the result of which is that the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man' are drawn up, with much credit being due to Rousseau.

"Men are born and remain free and equal"

The old order came under vicious attack during the reform period, as the new order drew together under the idea of 'we the people' - promoting passion and change. The New World was changing everything, but not without great terror and violence, as Prussia planned to attack Paris in 1792, and eventually in 1793 the demise of the King under the Guillotine.

Rousseau was definitely a thinker ahead of his time, which I appreciate is easy to say, but I can not help but feel his words seem to hold true more and more every day
                                
                                              -"Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains."  

William Lane Craig on Logical Positivism

David Hume in HCJ

Suggested to be the most intelligent man on the British Isles of his time, David Hume was an empirical philosopher who became well known in a short space of time for his groundbreaking ideas which even today are still mulled over in our brains, albeit in a somewhat blinkered way, as his views and theories are enough to break anyone's sense of reality, reducing them to quivering wrecks in the corner of the room, a paranoid jerking sensation overcoming them every few seconds. 
Luckily though this is not an epidemic case and actually Hume's work is extremely interesting and enlightening for our world views. 

He held the belief that all human ideas and envisioning are synthesised from simpler atoms of understanding- complicated ideas are made up of previously experienced basic ones. 
Being an empiricist his focus was mainly on the idea of sense data and the reasoning that everything we know and feel is based on the senses we pick up from the surrounding world. 

He was one of the first in the group of revered philosophers to be referred to as a sort of 'social scientist' in the sense that he liked to focus on people, and why they are how they are, how they react to situations and so on; he quite enjoyed the study of Newtonian laws and tried to apply many of these laws to human behaviour. This makes me think back to the essay concerning human understanding, in which he is describing how there are varying schools of philosophy in the early times used for different means- one school would produce ideas to perpetuate the mass humans pleasure, and encourage them to continue in the way they were thinking, I assume leading to more consumerism and lavish living- whilst the more learned new schools of philosophical thought were more about questioning what it was mankind was missing in their thought; studying what we DON'T know as a race. It is easy to talk about things we know (or think we know as Hume may have said) but more difficult and in fact more challenging and exciting and indeed exemplar of being more learned to think and talk about everything we are yet to know. 

Do you think you know the unknowns!?

I use this illustration purely as it is an interesting visual example and brings me on quite nicely to my next discussion. Hume presented a theory called 'Logical Positivism' in which he studied how knowledge is obtained and verified and what to believe and what not to believe. This is the part which begins to send your head whizzing around, but is also the most interesting.
Essentially what is outlined is that there is no absolute truth, everything is based in probability.
I think this is reasonable to say because although science can prove things for fact, there is never a 100% certainty about all things. We took the example in the lecture of letting a pencil fall from your hand- you could do it a thousand, a million times even and could reasonably infer with a degree of certainty that the pencil would fall to the ground, and this is something which is verifiable because it has been done so often, but it is not absolute fact because there is still a minute chance that the pencil could fly to the ceiling- just because this may not have happened, it doesn't make this an impossibility. The sun will 'rise' (although this is a fakery of the mind) every day and go down every night but this does not mean it will happen the following day.


This is also related to Hume's idea of causation. 
Taking the example of the billiard balls- if you were to hit the white ball with the cue, and the ball were to hit another ball and make it move, you could infer that the white ball made the other ball move as that sounds reasonable and you can say that you saw it, but what if there were an unseen energy that made the ball move? As we can not see the causation, we can not rule out that there is another possible explanation for why the ball moved, but we can not see it so we will never know. 


I think this sort of thinking is essential for journalists because we need to learn that yes, everything is not always as it seems, but also that before making a story or reporting on something that you are entirely sure of your facts, and that you have considered every single angle on how it could also be wrong and falsified- more on this in a bit. 
This is also very well supported by Chris' YouTube video which serves to show that you create situations in your mind to fill the visual story- and that we should be wary of this because it is not always the actual case and is a dangerous way of thinking, something Hume was very aware of and very cautious with, also referred to as induction theory- the notion that we draw on inferences from past experience. What becomes apparent though of course is that just because an event has occurred no matter how many times it does not mean that it always will be the same. Just because you hang all pictures from a nail, does not mean that ALL pictures are hung from nails on the wall.



My personal belief is that whilst it can be a little distracting to run off into own thought, it is a saving grace that we have it as many can find solace in the hiding places of their minds and of course great inventions are normally a synthesising of ideas so only in this respect do I disagree with the notion that 'brain wandering' is a dangerous activity. 


Lastly of course, and probably my favourite for the endless discussion possibilities, is the idea of verificationism and falsification principles. Hume particularly enjoyed this as his work would have been based on him also making sure that it was all true or rather all verifiable in the contexts and borders of the work, because as we start to think in these ways we discover there is no 'truth' only verifiable or non verifiable statements. Everything must have independent verification if it is to be considered seriously in any way. If a statement is non-verifiable it is neither true nor false and has no scientific value. A.J Ayer describes this and likens it to the quacking of a duck- it may as well just be background noise if it is non-verifiable. 


Similarly non-contradiction shows us that if we take the notion that there are lifeforms on another planet, we could say this is provisionally true (because we don't know but can assume) but are non contradictory as we can not verify this for fact or non fact. 
I will let Dr.Craig take it from here.


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NB: Not sure this embed worked :/ uploaded it separately instead above


So having listened to this lecture it did get me thinking about a few things.
I've always been very interested in the brain and have always been the one to question as much as possible, something I think the human race is forgetting to do in contemporary times, and all this study makes me think back to Descartes and why I particularly enjoy his work. 
We talk about verifiable and non verifiable, and yet while you are certain there is a computer screen in front of you, it is only really as real as your brain allows you to think feel and see that it is. Descartes talks about the perfect image and the shadow of a chair and all of that way of thinking but I have always said to myself, how do I know the chair is even there to begin with? Yes you can see it, touch it, sit in it and know its shape, feel is bend and shape under your weight and see the material which created it, but people often forget we barely use 10% of our brain capacity in the day to day lives we lead, so who is to say the brain has not merely created a fictional visual world for their millions of electronic pulses to exist in? 


I could go on and on but I feel this would be slightly going off the point and maybe would be better saved for a blog in my own free time! Just remember- almost everything, if not everything, is probably falsifiable and unfalsifiable.

Early Journalism

So in this lecture we began to see and to make the more apparent links in the timeline of journalism! I'm not sure about others but it has often been difficult to make them, so having a big timeline up and explained by Chris certainly helped!

So humans are 35,000 years old and of course it is impossible to theorise what happened between then and first recorded, well, anything!- which was 6,000 years before Christ.

First writing was the Chinese pictographic writing- every character had a word- eventually led to to Chinese typewriters, obviously some time later though, which used simplified pictures to create phrases.
Following this was cuneiform writing, again a pictorial writing which was fairly abstract; lines and a few symbols to create complicated ideas. Created with a 'cune' - a type of knife used to cut clay and stone to write on tablets with- able to utilised by all of the eastern areas of Europe.

Then of course comes the Lindesfame Gospel; an old style Latin/Anglo Saxon typography. Very few books of it survive but Christianity in the western world saved this ancient type of writing after writing it all out into the faster developing forms of type and print.

It did astound me how progress happened over such a long time frame with no exact ideas of dates and brings to mind the importance, as a journalist, of dating and timing events, so that arguments and ideas can be created and relayed with surety- an imperative of journalistic accuracy.
1920's sees Caxton's printing press which is outstripped by the 20 years later Gutenberg's printing press which become jovially known as 'Bible making machines' - the Bible of course being the first book to go in to mass production! Printing press has massive benefits to the imparting of knowledge between generations- all that was lost before will be lost no more! Einstein says it gives man a kind of immortality as they now had the ability to save the ideas of the deceased.
Then comes the Renaissance and the selling of books for money and thus a new industry.

1517 and the reformation by Martin Luther promotes the Bible being mass produced and the church begin to encourage literacy so all can be joined by the word of the book.
What follows is mostly to do with the wars of the Tudors and the Spanish all today with America and its riches to be had!
Most notably, 1620- Mayflower and the American colonies and the Stuarts, 1641-51 and the English Civil War, Tudors making England wholly Protestant and defined as non Catholic, 1660 Stuart Monarchy back in power, Charles II promising an easy going monarchy, 1660 Addison publishes writing which is witty and broad minded, undogmatic and not like a puritan, 1667 of course puts the spotlight on John Locke, and his open minded and considerate writing, and finally followed some more less notable political 'confusements' as we referred to them in our lecture.

Finally in 1688 the Stuarts are deposed and William of Orange comes from Holland to take the reigns over the English, whilst the rest of the Stuarts make haste and flee to Ireland and Scotland.
1690 and the battle of the Boyne, the mopping up of the infidels and its recording in history, 1700 and Newton, made ever famous because of his word being able to be spread through writing, and then in 1702 comes the first ever Newspaper! and a form of Journalism is born! Mass money was then to be made in printing and commercialism through advertisement and insurances all offered by people through the newspaper.

Times move on again and the English dissolves elements of sovereignty to join with Scotland which prompts the war on the Jacobite's. Tribal people from the Scottish clans who had no national identities but all seemed at war together- often referred to as the 'Tartan' people. They eventually get totally destroyed by the English armies who line up with their canons and cut down the Scottish- defending themselves with simple swords and shields.
After all the bloody history this is why the Union Flag becomes known as 'The Butcher's Apron' as it contains colours from all the flags the English armies harmed in some way or other, or in the case of the Scottish, totally eradicated.

Seminar Paper

Joseph Addison in ‘The Spectator’ 1712

So having read the article it seems Addison is primarily concerned with a few major things. Mostly his ‘rant’ if you will seems to be about style of writing and most importantly, the methodical construction of a discourse. He makes clear the distinction between his creative writing, referred to as his ‘Wild compositions which go by the name of Essays’ and his Daily Papers he bestows on the public, written with regularity and method.

He generally makes the point that for his daily papers he tends to have considered his entire plan for the discourse before writing, so that when ink touches paper it has an orderly flow of ideas and argument which can be conveyed and understood easily.

He then carries on his discussion with the reader by giving an example of an associate of his who does not write or even discuss in tongue with flow or practice, and who in fact seems to be, as Addison refers to him, “one of the most Eminent Immethodical Disputants of any that has fallen under my Observation”.

This man is Tom Puzzle, who Addison explains is supposedly a learned man, but not so much so that he can explain and eradicate any doubts or holes in his lecturing about issues of the world or common concerns on the home front amongst such topics of unreasonableness of bigotry and priest-craft. Addison explains that “This makes Mr. Puzzle the Admiration of all those who have less Sense than himself, and the Contempt of those who have more.”

Addison then continues on to talk about his friend and associate Will Dry, another most learned man aligned with Addison in the sense of producing what is to be considered a ‘good discourse’, and he explains how Tom Puzzle is fearful of him because of Mr. Dry’s tendency to break his arguments with simple questions, or when Mr. Puzzle is running off a question asked of him, Mr. Dry simply responds with a “what then?” which stops Puzzle dead in his talks.

Having listened to this as a fairly narrative description of what we have read then, I invite you to discuss what you think about Addison’s work as a form of journalism, how interesting it is and the ideas it raises, and what his criticisms of Puzzle say about approach to writing at the time, and the importance of accuracy and conformity in writing.

Was there a strict social rigidity when it came to producing work? (Taking into consideration all the philosophical discussions we have already had about thinking and learning and knowing)

Was there a need to prove oneself as an established writer by having work published rather than lending talent to the art of discussion?

Can we see many similarities to Addison’s general argument today? How often do newspapers or more specifically, individuals in newspapers i.e. columnists critique writing rather than current events? (Though I guess book reviews are a prime example of this)

Thomas Hobbes & John Locke: The roots of Empirical Philosophy?

It is often suggested that British philosophy is the home of empiricism, that empiricism is what the English are famed for in this field, and John Locke is one of the more interesting figures to look at in this respect and we covered him in detail in Tuesdays lecture.

A typically British painting of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller

Philosophers in the time of the 17th century began thinking about the application of their philosophical theories, applying them to what they described as a 'state of nature' - briefly, an imagined world in which people are perhaps self governed and self reliant and not particularly ordered. They thought about their concepts in relation to this situation so they could be discussed and revised based on what they thought would happen under such ideas.

The first man to lay down a treatise of a social contract was Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 'Leviathan'. He surmised that in the state of nature people were violent aggressive and incapable of working or living together. He explained that people, he believed, would be apolitical and asocial, that the lives of people in this state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". So, suggesting an occurrence where by people came together to discuss their social construct, a number of contracts would be put in place, outlining primarily that there would be a sovereign entity whose job it would be to protect the rights of its individuals and their interests. This in effect then would be a god-like figure, but not someone all powerful, as both Hobbes and Lock wanted to demystify the political system, which I will describe in more depth later. By having this one powerful person chosen, the power of every other individual is taken away, but this person is to protect the people, and stop bellum omnium contra omnes- war of all against all. Ironically enough, Leviathan is a reference to the Old Testament, its use of course being the sea monster much feared but Hobbes in this case using the title to show the destruction of man and also highlighting the flaws of contemporary religion.

So this was Hobbes' idea of the perfect social contract, which came under a fair amount of criticism for its advocating of dictatorship. His contemporary John Locke also criticised him but has been busy writing up his own idea of the social contract and by 1689 had published his 'Second Treatise of Government' which differed in a few ways from Hobbes. It essentially agreed people would come together to form a social contract but Locke believed that people would not immediately be brought together to war with one another- he described his thoughts that people have within them a natural 'sense' of good and moral right, and generally that humans were actually innately rather nice, (perhaps sharing a few cups of tea and a good old chin wag) and opposed to this idea of killing straight away because common interests might not be agreed upon. If we cast our minds back to Descartes we can see Locke is disagreeing with his idea that God is outright an already existing all powerful being all around us, and Locke also argues that when we are born we are a fresh slate able to learn and be taught but have natural intuitive ideas of morality- an opposition to the Church who tell us that we all have Original Sin inside us, even just after being born. 

Locke doesn't totally deny the existence of God however, he simply thinks that God gave us the notion of thought and then went about his Godly business in a place where gods do business and in a roundabout way, sort of left us to get on with it. To further this, his book talks about the 5 senses, sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste, and how we suck senses into our brains which are then processed and lead to new and exciting ideas. He claimed that there was no idea in your brain that hasn't come from experience- a notion completely against Descartes who supported the idea that it was because of God that we were who were were and thought like we did and that everything had a seed originally planted by God. Locke was simply saying that we had a God-given ability to discover natural laws- it is accepted there will be man made laws and state laws but above these are our natural innate abilities to know right from wrong and good from evil.

He talks particularly of our Rights, basic human ones of course but also our right to liberty, to express yourself and to life and property. Sound familiar? Locke in fact played a big role in the development of the American constitution in a behind the scenes sort of way- "Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness"; something every American has the right to! As well as property which is thrown in there somewhere. So these then, as Locke outlines are our inalienable rights as human beings. He doesn't deny that there will be conflicts, he sees reason for a government, but one to protect the interests of the people. Where Hobbes says everyone must follow one leader Locke says that there should be laws to limit a Government so that people can live freely as they are naturally all 'good' people. 

To look at these last few paragraphs summatively

Locke was also interested in discussing Human Understanding- gaining REAL knowledge from experience and reasoning. It is slightly confusing however (or at least what I have thought on this) as it seems to go against the idea of innate ideas when he explains that we have been given, by God, the faculties to discover our own truth. 

Newton in his own right is obviously worldly known and famous in today's scientific spheres and rightly so. His initial approaches to the study of the sciences showed a new, more developed outlook on research which veered away from Aristotle and his firm principles of teaching. Newton seeked to find and explain new ways of universally understanding the world and quite often did this very well simply through his work in observation. He would observe an event and comment on it, reason as to how this happened and sometimes predict a similar outcome, but he never commented on WHY something had happened- which I think was a very mature approach to the sciences. When there are obvious gaps because we are slightly ignorant in a field, there is no need to try and explain something unexplainable. I like to think of it as explaining why the Earth is in a perfect balance, and why all the planets are aligned how they are and that sort of thing- its fairly impossible, yet easy to explain where they are and what this means for us. 

Newton was not simply a man of talk though, he gave the people rules for which to test his observation and predictions, again trying to make science a more universal subject and universally understood. 

Eventually his work 'Principia' was published in 1687 which outlined Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy. It was very complicated and difficult for the layman to understand but as it become more and more popular it was revised and reprinted and widely distributed so that all could become learners in this new and exciting contemporarily available field.

Isaac Newton

He did however come under many criticisms on his work mainly stemming from the Cartesian school. They were a fairly old school bunch who claimed that Newtons wonderful propositions of odd forces putting planets where they were sounded too much like magic. Newton tried to explain that science isn't interested in making things up, what the sphere of science didn't know it wasn't going to simply try and create an explanation that was false as there was no point in the deception. Critics however claimed he was trying to deconstruct God but Newton believed that actually his writing showed the people that the world around us and the space beyond was a beautiful masterpiece of gods omnipotency and freedom to be cryptic to our imperfect minds. 

The use of God was shown to be used for filling in the 'gaps' in knowledge of the time, but God was no longer needed as a compulsory source for education and learning.

Lecture One - History & Renaissance

Lecture one began with a look at Rafaels famous work, 'The School of Athens' which was painted it is thought between 1510 and 1511 and is a great celebration of the periods most celebrated philosophers and then 'modern thinkers'- although the painting itself was part of a commission to decorate the Stanze di Raffaello in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.

Personally I find it slightly ironic (from a modern perspective) that the leading figure in Christianty, the Pope, would want to have such a paintaing- a presentation of the leading me of maths and science, which as we know has not always gone hand in hand with religion, but it is worth thinking about the context of the period, as philosophies and education were impacted by religion fairly heavily thus- the Bible was a book people lived by and there was not even a thought of going against the Church or its opinions as the Church was still the single most powerful organisation of the time.

We then began going through the key players of the time. Aristotle for example, though taught by Plato and regarded to believe essentially in the same teachings, that of the universal, Aristotle began to take a different approach. He believe the universal existed in particular things, like an 'essence' which Plato believed the universal existed apart from particular things. In the picture it is interesting to note that the figures in the middle, Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) are painted to portray their differing views. Plato has his hand towards the heavens, representing his belief in the forms, whilst Aristotle holds firmly his book Nicomachean Ethics, and is gesturing outward to the ground and earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience.

Plato and Aristotle in Rafael's "The School of Athens"

It was Plato of course who introduced his 'Allegory of the Cave' or simply 'Cave Analogy' which was described to Illustrate in his work The Republic "our nature in its education and want of education".
It basically describes prisoners chained to, and facing a wall in a cave where they have no vision of the outside world. All they can see is shadows on the wall which they begin to ascribe forms to. Plato then makes the allegory that we are chained to a wall until we allow our minds to open as philosophers and understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as we can percieve the true form rather than the simple shadow the prisoner sees.

All that has been mentioned above is just a short set of examples of writing from the period, other works such as Ptolomey and his outspoken idea of the Earth being the centre of the Universe for example, Pythagorus and his use of numbers as a center of understanding the sphere of science, and Socrates and the beginning of philosophy are all much celebrated and important works which the Greeks re-readand eventually began to use and develop to show unchalleneable law and fact, lifting the dogma from the Church after so much time.

The lecture then steered towards Art in the Renaissance period juxtaposed with Dark Age art, how for example Rafael's version of the Madonna and Child painting shows Madonna looking human and sensual, a celebration of beauty and the human form, as oppsed to more classical portrayals which show her to be not true to human form or being but more a baron symbol, and it is these which were generally adapted for use by the Church.

We then moved on to talk about Protagoras and his idea of "man is the measure of all things" which has been much mirrored by writers and idealists, and the lecture began to swing around to Italy and Renaissance starting of course with Machiavelli who I had studied laboriously during AS History and so remain unfortunately rather turned off to his history! Personal feelings aside, it is important to take note of him as a key figure in the development of new politics and a turning away from the Church and religious advisers when it came to his involvement in the hierarchical system in Italy and the Florentine system and his highly criticised and revered book 'The Prince' which portrayed some startling views about power based on his philosophies and his reaction to Church pressure, and was essentially a 'how to' guide on getting power fast and staying there, an almost insult to Church teachings of prosperous behaviour and love for the fellow man and God.

Caesar Borgia was among the first to put Machiavelli's musings into practice, adopting his 'slogan' if you will, of "It is better to be feared than loved, for love is fickle but fear is constant".
He wasted no time in hiring a governor whose sole job it was to crush powerful individuals, making sure that Borgia was the only person possible of holding and keeping his power, but this was a smart move for the people began to hate not Borgia but the governor, so when Borgia felt that the job was done, he had the governor cut in half and left him in the street for the people to do as they please to him, and the people loved it. We summed this up by talking about his approach to property in relation to killing in the respect that it wasnt as noticed when someone was killed but if someones property was taken unlawfully then it could cause much more than anger- "for men forget the death of their fathers quicker than they forget their inheritance"

Moving on on to the 17th Century saw the age of Reason and the birth of what is considered modern philosophy, and no longer claiming authority from the ancients thus giving way to new ways of thinking and bringing forth a new era of modern thinkers such as Descarte who we looked at in detail.
We followed his story of formal education, and how he felt that he had learned nothing by the time he left education, only a recognition of his ignorance and the idea that what we learn is useless- an idea I find particularly interesting when you think about contemporary university; it astounds me to think what knowledge one could learn from academic institutions but there is a set sort of difference in learning academia and applying this to a lifetime of hardship and skills in contemporary living for example.
So Descartes went about deconstructing everything he had ever learned in his quest to question the unquestioned and unquestionable! He clearly wanted to gain a sense of surety about himself and the world around him and after breaking down everything in his head to the most base possible form he left himself with this, his most famous axiom and the bedrock of everything about a being- "I think, therefore I am"


This idea then puts the individual as the centre of all things, although it should be recognised that Descartes was not of the anti-God sect. He believed in the existence of a supreme being because he knew that something had had to have given him the power to think and rationale- which gave God the status of a perfect being amongst us, the imperfect beings. This in turn led to the idea of 'Cartesian Doubt', something I find myself struggling with as I doubt the simple world around me! But that is a whole other story which gets so philosophical I lose track of the thought process myself after a while...