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Aquinas’s Theory of Perception
Aquinas’s Theory of Perception
An Analytic Reconstruction
Anthony J. Lisska
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To Professor Robert G. Turnbull, who first convinced a then rather young philosopher not to abandon his work with Thomas Aquinas but to rethink through the lenses of linguistic analysis the philosophical chestnuts found plentifully in the texts of Thomas, and who, with a most gracious philosophical soul and a magnanimity of collegial spirit, encouraged this young philosopher to attempt a refutation of his own reading of Aquinas on phantasms, this book is gratefully and with deep appreciation dedicated.
Preface
This book is the result of several years spent undertaking research and writing on the difficult issues surrounding Thomas Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception. It presents an attempt to ‘reconstruct’ and interpret the texts of Thomas on sense knowledge. The emphasis in this inquiry, accordingly, is directed towards developing a philosophical analysis of the internal and the external senses, with particular reference to the internal sense of the vis cogitativa. Approaching the texts of Aquinas from contemporary analytic philosophy, this study suggests a modest ‘innate’ or ‘structured’ interpretation for the role of this inner sense faculty. Furthermore, this analysis sheds light on the workings of what Aquinas calls the ‘agent intellect’ (intellectus agens) and its corresponding cognitive process of abstraction. Inner sense and abstraction are two concepts in general Aristotelian epistemology and philosophy of mind that require rethinking and tough-minded analysis.
The research that results in this book began several years ago under the thoughtful tutelage of the late Robert G. Turnbull. It has been refined over the years by many readings of papers at professional meetings, papers at all three divisions of the American Philosophical Association, and more than several publications, along with many summers and two sabbaticals spent worrying about Aquinas on perception. Research was partly funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Grant. An earlier National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar was undertaken with the late Roderick Chisholm at Brown University.1 Robert C. Good Grants from Denison University and the Denison Mellon Program in the Humanities enabled the author to augment regular sabbaticals with additional time affording the possibility to complete drafts of this book. The author acknowledges with sincere gratitude these sources of funding, all of which were indispensable for the completion of this extended study on Thomas Aquinas.
The author’s first attempt at providing an elucidation of the principles of intentionality in Aquinas was written for Professor Chisholm. The analysis of phantasm and sense datum first was read at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Earlier attempts at unearthing the ‘logic’ of the vis cogitativa and its role in perception were read as papers at the Central and Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association with variations at other conferences. The author expresses his gratitude for invitations to contribute papers by the late Ralph McInerny and the late Norris Clark, SJ. The author’s 2006 Presidential Address for the American Catholic Philosophical Association discussed in some detail several issues treated in
1 Over the last quarter of the 20th c., Professor Chisholm was known as one of the foremost contemporary philosophers concerned with perception theory and the thesis of intentionality.
this monograph.2 Essays central to this topic have appeared in Analytical Thomism (2006), Semiotica (2010), The Thomist (1973; 1976), International Philosophical Quarterly (1976), and Thomistic Sources (forthcoming). A major paper on the Vis Cogitativa and the perception of individuals was presented at the International St Thomas Aquinas Society’s meeting held in conjunction with the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association (1999). A sabbatical spent at the University of Oxford enabled the author to present his work to several philosophers in residence and to engage in productive discussions with Sir Anthony Kenny, the then Master of Balliol College. Over the years, Sir Anthony has been warmly supportive of this project, which overlaps in many areas with his own substantive work on Aquinas and the philosophy of mind. The author is grateful to him for his engaging conversations in Oxford, in Granville, and more recently at his Headington retirement home, and for his suggestions of the role of inner sense in Aquinas. The author spent part of a Minnesota summer with a John Haldane seminar at the University of St Thomas; he expresses his profound gratitude to Professor Haldane, of the University of St Andrews and now of Baylor University, for stimulating conversations and astute criticisms on several issues considered in this monograph. On several occasions, both Professors Kenny and Haldane visited Denison University. The author has learned very much from the astute writings of Father Fergus Kerr, the former editor of Blackfriars at Oxford.
Over the years, Robert Turnbull, Peter Machamer, Peter McCormick, Ron Santoni, Alan Hausman, John Boler, Joan Franks, Harry Heft, Norris Clarke, Mary Sirridge, Alasdair MacIntyre, Kevin White, John Deely, John Rist, Henry Veatch, Jonathan Jacobs, Douglas Rasmussen, and Ralph McInerny in the United States, Lawrence Dewan in Canada, Anthony Kenny, Brian Davies, John Haldane, and Dorian Scaltas in the United Kingdom, and Roger Pouviet in France have offered valuable comments and astute criticisms. Recent conversations with two philosophers interested in Aquinas on inner sense, James South of the Department of Philosophy at Marquette University and Leo White of Morgan State University, have been particularly fruitful and productive. Two younger scholars, Mark Barker and Daniel De Haan, have been keenly interested in the topics considered in this book. In particular, the author expresses his profound gratitude to his friends Alan Hausman and James South, both of whom undertook the supererogatory task of reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of this work. Professor South’s efforts are indeed noteworthy. He worked through the entire draft manuscript with thoughtful and critical eyes, and then he and the author undertook extensive and thorough conversations on the manuscript. Professor South’s insights have rendered this analysis more sophisticated both philosophically
2 ‘A Look at Inner Sense in Aquinas: A Long-Neglected Faculty Psychology’, in Michael Baur (ed.), Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 1–19. In his role as president, the author selected as a general theme of this 2006 national meeting of the ACPA ‘Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind’, with Sir Anthony Kenny and John Haldane along with the late Kurt Pritzl serving as plenary speakers.
and historically, and have assisted in removing some serious potholes and muddles from the arguments in this book. My Denison Philosophy colleagues as well as many Denison academic administrators have been supportive of this ongoing project.
The author received three sets of significant and thorough insights from anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press; the author expresses his deep gratitude for the thoughtful analyses these reviewers offered for an earlier draft of this book. The author also expresses sincere appreciation to Ms Eleanor Collins from Oxford University Press for her marvellous assistance as editor with early drafts of this study, and to Ms Sarah Barrett for her outstanding copy-editing work. Of course, any philosophical problems and infelicities—or downright mistaken accounts—that remain rest squarely on the shoulders of the author. As always, the author depends on the deft proofreading eye of Marianne Lisska in order to render his writing style more direct and perspicuous.
The constant attention and thoughtful encouragement over the last quarter of a century that Alan Hausman and Robert Turnbull have given to the author’s work on Aquinas and perception theory deserve special mention. The author’s first attempt to elucidate a consistent account of Aquinas’s theory of perception came while reading Descartes with Alan Hausman; the question kept haunting the author—how did Aquinas really differ on perception theory from Descartes? The first extensive study of Aquinas on phantasms took place with Robert Turnbull; his cogent remarks have made this work more consistent and less ridden with woolly arguments. It was Professor Turnbull who first urged the author to use analytic philosophy in order to look at the important texts of Aquinas through a different set of lenses. That advice indeed has made the author’s philosophical career. It is to the late Professor Robert G. Turnbull that this study of Aquinas on perception, covering issues so dear to his own philosophical soul, is warmly dedicated.
Granville, OH, USA
25 March 2016
Summary
Introduction: On Reconstructing Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of Perception 1
1. Setting the Problem: History and Context 8
An introductory discussion suggesting the place of Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul in Aristotelian studies in general and the renewed interest in theories of direct realism.
2. Aquinas on Intentionality 32
A discussion of how intentionality theory is grounded in the writings of Aquinas and how this theory has influenced nineteenth- and twentiethcentury philosophy. An analysis of the ‘Principles of Intentionality’ as fundamental building blocks for Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
3. Aquinas and Empiricism: From Aquinas to Brentano and Beyond 64
An indication of how Aquinas’s theory of perception goes beyond the standard Cartesian and Lockean model commonly called ‘representationalism’. Connections with the perception theories of naturalism found in Thomas Reid and James Gibson and contemporary discussions gleaned from Hilary Putnam and John Haldane.
4. Epistemological Dispositions: Causal Powers and the Human Person 91
An account of the significant Aristotelian distinction on ‘act and potency’ suggests how this paradigm is important in moving beyond the limits of representationalism; an account of cognitive dispositions differing from innate ideas and a rejection of physicalism as an adequate account of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind are developed.
5. Objects and Faculties: Teleology in Sensation 120
An analysis of the proper and common sensibles in Aquinas’s theory of perception and a discussion of the distinction between sense organ and sense faculty; an indication of the importance of the inner sense of the vis cogitativa and its connection with the incidental object of sense.
6. Preconditions of Visual Awareness: Object and Medium 149
Further development in terms of the necessary conditions for sight; a discussion of the intentional act of seeing explicating Aquinas on sensation; an analysis of the importance of the diaphanum or medium, and the role light plays in seeing.
7. The Necessary Conditions for Perception: A Triadic Relation 166
A discussion proposing that a triadic relation between Object, Medium, and Faculty is an illustrative model for considering sensation and perception in Aquinas; this schema of direct realism transcends and moves beyond the limits of both standard direct and representational accounts.
8. The Sensus Communis: The First of the Internal Sense Faculties 194
A discussion of the internal senses in general indicating differences in structure from the external senses; an analysis of the difference between ‘senses’ and ‘sensorium’. An explication of what Aquinas and Aristotle often refer to as the ‘seat of consciousness’ and a discussion of how this internal sense faculty of the sensus communis combines the sensible forms received from the external senses, all along arguing against several contemporary Aquinas scholars who suggest that a phantasm is the object of the sensus communis. At this level, Aquinas is for the most part similar structurally to Berkeley and Hume.
9. The Imagination and Phantasia: A Historical Muddle 219
An elucidation is offered of this moderately tricky internal sense faculty which Aristotle sometimes refers to as the ‘phantasia’, suggesting that Descartes in the Sixth Meditation blurs the sensus communis with the imagination; this conceptual blur leads one down the slippery slope of representationalism; an argument is offered indicating how several contemporary Aquinas commentators have not developed four-square accounts of the imagination or of phantasia
10. The Vis Cogitativa: On Perceiving the Individual 237
A analysis of the most difficult internal sense faculty in Aquinas’s account of sensation and perception; this faculty, through an innate structure, provides for the awareness of the incidental object of sense, which is the primary substance (the individual) of a natural kind in Aquinas’s theory of reality; it is here that Aquinas, by introducing intentiones non sensatae, enlarges his perception theory beyond what Berkeley and Hume affirmed.
11. The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense: Part 1
A thorough analysis of the necessary conditions for understanding the concept of phantasm in Aquinas, suggesting that there are three categories of similitudo, one of which is the phantasm, and offering an extended argument indicating that a phantasm is neither a sense datum nor always an image. There are three distinct categories of phantasm in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
273
12. The Role of Phantasms in Inner Sense: Part 2
A continuation of Chapter 11, indicating that there are three distinct categories of phantasm, one corresponding to each faculty of the internal sensorium, with special reference to the perception of individuals through the vis cogitativa. A proposal is put forward suggesting that the analysis of the phantasm-rich vis cogitativa is a necessary condition for a more sophisticated analysis of the role of abstraction with the intellectus agens than what one finds in standard Aquinas commentaries.
Introduction On Reconstructing Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of Perception
Oxford philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny once wrote the following about intentionality theory in Aquinas: ‘One of the most elaborate, and also one of the most puzzling, accounts of the harmony between the world and thought is Aquinas’s doctrine of the immaterial intentional existence of forms in the mind.’1 Kenny, and his philosophical predecessor in analytic philosophy studies of Aquinas, Peter Geach, moreover, directed much of their attention to the intricate account of the abstraction process found in Aquinas’s writings, especially the Summa Theologiae, I qq. 79–85. Often these texts in the Summa are seen as the principal canon for Aquinas’s account of mental awareness. For the most part, however, analytic philosophers have paid little attention to the analysis of sensation and perception, and even less attention to Aquinas’s grand exposition and commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, the Sentencia Libri De Anima with its informed and perspicuous analysis of the internal sense faculty of the vis cogitativa
The principal goal of this study is to eliminate some of what Kenny called the ‘puzzling’ issues in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind. In particular, this project focuses attention on the epistemological materials propaedeutic to concept formation, for which the process of abstraction with the agent intellect (intellectus agens) is a necessary condition. This study embarks upon an analysis of the process of perception, with special attention paid to the nature, scope, and workings of the internal senses or ‘inner sense’. The analysis articulates the ‘logic’ of these concepts central to Aquinas’s account of sensation and perception. Like Kenny, Geach, and John Haldane, in order to elucidate effectively the perception texts found in the writings of Aquinas, the techniques of contemporary analytic philosophy have been utilized extensively. Accordingly, the method undertaken in this analysis is rooted in how contemporary analytic philosophers undertake their craft. This philosophical interpretation depends substantively on the exceptionally lucid analyses that Haldane has provided over the last two
1 Anthony Kenny, ‘Aquinas: Intentionality’, in Ted Honderich (ed.), Philosophy Through Its Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 82.
decades on the role of analytic philosophy and the development of Aquinas’s theory of intentionality. It may be the case that, in considering issues central to a viable contemporary philosophy of mind, Haldane’s category of ‘Analytical Thomism’ achieves its best success. In discussing Aquinas’s theory of mind, Haldane writes that Aquinas ‘makes claims about the nature of the world, the process of cognition, the semantics of natural language, and the character of truth […] all of which provide illustrations of both ontological and epistemological realism’.2 The purpose—what Aquinas might call the telos of this philosophical undertaking—is similar to what Kenny articulated in his The Metaphysics of Mind: ‘an employment of the techniques of linguistic analysis can go hand in hand with a respect for traditional, and indeed ancient, concepts and theses in philosophy.’3 This study is a systematic, building-block integrated account of Aquinas’s theory of perception.4
In order to direct attention to those philosophers using analytic philosophy as a means to elucidate the philosophical concepts central to the texts of Aquinas, Haldane introduced the term ‘Analytical Thomism’.5 The analytic method undertaken in this study is in concert with the general direction of Haldane’s suggestions. Moreover, the position advocated in this study is that, contrary to some contemporary Aquinas scholars like Mark Jordan, Aquinas did develop first-rate philosophical work, and furthermore that this keen philosophical analysis is exhibited in his Aristotelian commentaries. Jordan once wrote: ‘In short, no single work was written by Aquinas for the sake of setting forth a philosophy. Aquinas chose not to write philosophy.’6 This study rejects Jordan’s theological reductionism, which will be treated in more detail in an appendix to Chapter 1. Readers familiar with my earlier book, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction, 7 will readily recognize several familiar streams and methods of philosophical analysis. The author’s intention is that this present analytic monograph will be of benefit both to novices coming to the work of Aquinas with little background in medieval philosophy and to academically trained philosophers and also historians of psychology generally interested in medieval theories of mind.
2 John Haldane, ‘Mind–World Identity Theory and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in John Haldane and Crispin Wright (eds), Reality, Representation, and Projection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33.
3 Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. ix.
4 The author is indebted to an anonymous reviewer who offered this analogy about the structure of the argument undertaken in this book.
5 John Haldane, ‘Analytical Thomism: A Prefatory Note’, The Monist 80(4) (1997), 485–6; also Haldane, ‘What Future Has Catholic Philosophy?’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (annual supplement, Proceedings of 1997 Annual Meeting), 77–90. See also ‘Thomism and the Future of Catholic Philosophy’, ed. Haldane, special issue, New Blackfriars 80(938) (1999).
6 Mark Jordan, ‘Theology and Philosophy’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 233. Ralph McInerny and Leo Elders, among others, reject the Jordan interpretation.
7 Anthony J. Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
The Lacuna in Aristotle’s De Anima
In Book II of his On the Soul, Aristotle developed in detail his analysis of the external senses; however, he offers precious little substantive analysis of the internal senses. He refers to the phantasia, which is often translated as ‘imagination’, but he writes little about the nature and scope of inner sense. Aquinas’s account, on the other hand, is far more developed and substantial. The principal textual referent for this study is Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul (Sentencia Libri De Anima), which is an often neglected yet vastly important Aquinas text for the philosophy of mind. In commenting on Aristotle’s masterful psychological text, Aquinas develops his own more sophisticated theory of mind. Martha Nussbaum wrote that Aquinas’s Commentary ‘is one of the greatest commentaries on the work’.8 Moreover, Haldane’s recent work in the philosophy of mind travels in the same direction as the overall goals of this inquiry. Hence, this study goes beyond the limits exhibited by several writers on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, even important commentators like Kenny and Geach, who remain principally with the texts in the Summa Theologiae and who consider primarily the process of abstraction with the intellectus agens and concept formation with the intellectus possibilis. This analysis goes beyond the texts of the Summa Theologiae in directing its focus towards sensation and perception. Accordingly, this study develops in a progressive manner, beginning with a general theory of intentionality in Aquinas, proceeding through the external senses, and using these materials as propaedeutic for an analysis of inner sense with special reference to the inner sense faculty of the vis cogitativa. Within each chapter, moreover, this study assembles textual referents for Aquinas’s claims in the philosophy of mind. In several ways this book, with its extensive compilation of substantial textual references, should prove a valuable source for scholars seeking Aquinas’s texts on various aspects of his philosophy of mind. In considering Aquinas’s texts, one must remember what Kenny once suggested; the scholarly output from Aquinas—referring only to those works generally agreed to be authentic—amounts to over eight and a half million words.9 Hence, the compilation of Aquinas texts in this volume should be useful to scholars working with the philosophy of Aquinas; furthermore, each text is located within the vast Aquinas corpus.
In a different but connected vein, the research undertaken in the writing of this book suggests that inner sense in Aquinas is more highly developed and cognitively significant than normally acknowledged either by English-speaking philosophers, especially in the twentieth century, or by neo-scholastic historians of philosophy. In the Aristotelian Commentary, Aquinas uses the phantasia as a generic concept, fitting under it the vis imaginativa (imagination), the vis cogitativa (particular reason), which is called the vis aestimativa when found in brute animals, and the vis memorativa
8 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘The Text of Aristotle’s De Anima’, in Nussbaum and Amelie Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.
9 Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10–11. If one includes the works of some doubtful authenticity, the word count exceeds 11 million words.
(sense memory). The important faculty for understanding the ‘logic’ of perception, especially the perception of individuals, is the vis cogitativa. In the literature, however, one finds little substantive work dealing with the vis cogitativa. One set of articles, written in the 1940s, perspicuously pondered this absence of serious philosophical work: ‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’.10 More recently, Dorothea Frede argued that the vis cogitativa is, for Aquinas, ‘an embarrassment’.11 The research undertaken for this book underpins an argument that a productive analysis of this ‘forgotten sense’, referred to as an ‘embarrassment’, offers an interpretation of an important cognitive aspect of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind in which he suggests a non-reductionist analysis of inner sense. In a manner akin to several versions of Gestalt psychology, the argument put forward suggests that the vis cogitativa is a structured cognitive act that provides an awareness of the individual as an individual of a natural kind. This analysis depends on a reconstructed interpretation of the role of phantasm in Aquinas’s writings. Later chapters in this book demonstrate that there exist at least three different uses of phantasm in Aquinas, with one connected structurally with each of the internal sense faculties with the exception of the sensus communis. This analysis of phantasm depends on a further explication of a much-used term in Aquinas’s writings, similitudo—often translated as ‘likeness’. There are three distinct uses of similitudo, and one use is further divided into the three specific uses of phantasm. The following argument is that, quite the contrary, not only is this important inner sense faculty of the vis cogitativa no longer ‘forgotten’, but without its functioning as an important cognitive faculty in Aquinas’s theory of intentionality, his philosophy of mind would be an embarrassment. The significance of this study lies in this reconstruction and interpretation of the varied texts found in the writings of Aquinas. The analysis in this book is, accordingly, made from whole cloth, and is not reducible to a patchwork of disconnected philosophical texts.
Phantasm and the Vis Cogitativa
A principal goal of this treatise is to offer an analysis of the role of phantasm in the vis cogitativa. In the Posterior Analytics, when considering concept formation with his famous ‘army in retreat’ metaphor, Aristotle suggests that out of aisthesis (sense perception) comes memoria-mneme (repeated sense perception), and from the latter comes emperia (experience—the ‘experience’ of a veteran when compared to a rookie). The vis cogitativa is the faculty by which human perceivers are aware of individuals as individuals of a natural kind; this awareness is then stored in the sense memory (vis memorativa). The intellectus agens next ‘abstracts’ the species
10 Julien Peghaire, ‘A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas’, Modern Schoolman 20 (1942–3), 123–40, 210–29.
11 Dorothea Frede, ‘Aquinas on Phantasia’, in Dominik Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 170.
intelligibilis from the phantasms found in the sense memory. The argument developed in this book is that a reconstructed account of the vis cogitativa sheds great light on the abstractive process as dependent on memory, which Aristotle suggests with the illusive analogy of the army in retreat. Aquinas himself considers these same issues in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics. The results of the arguments in this book on inner sense connect nicely with the previous work of Kenny and Geach on intellectual abstraction.
This monograph provides a contemporary explicatio textus discussing the ‘logic’ of the texts central to Aquinas’s account of perception. In addition to the principal arguments, following most chapters, the book includes appendices and at the end a well-developed subject and name index. The book itself contains an important cache of Aquinas texts, probably one of the better collections available in print today. Most of the translations from Aquinas’s writings that appear in this study are modifications of existing English translations or passages specially translated by the author for this book. The commonly used translation of Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, by Foster and Humphries, appeared over fifty years ago; it was republished under the auspices of the late Ralph McInerny at the University of Notre Dame through his Dumb Ox imprint. However, this earlier translation was not from the critical Leonine text, but was based on the 1925 Pirotta edition. The Leonine edition of the Commentary on the Soul, edited by the French Dominican R.-A. Gauthier, appeared in 1984, nearly a century after the Leonine translation venture was undertaken. The 1984 Leonine edition used a different editorial format dividing the texts. McInerny’s Dumb Ox edition contains a very useful concordance on the Pirotta and Leonine editions.12 A new English translation of this Leonine Latin edition prepared and arranged by Robert Pasnau was published in 1999.13 Pasnau argues that the texts in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae are more approachable source materials in Aquinas for understanding perception theory than texts in the Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul The thrust of the argument in this book disputes that judgement. Pasnau seems less concerned about inner sense than the author of this study. Pasnau is also less interested in the physiological aspects of Aristotle‘s theory and the comments of Aquinas, which he claims dominate the texts in the Commentary. 14 In this present book, however, the argument will be articulated and the case defended proposing that the Commentary offers the stronger argument for a complete theory of perception, considering both external and inner sense faculties, than what we find in the more limited analysis of perception issues in the Summa Theologiae. The texts in the Summa Theologiae, moreover, will be augmented by substantive textual references to the Summa Contra
12 Cf. Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 251–70.
13 Robert Pasnau (translator), Thomas Aquinas: A Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). I reviewed Professor Pasnau’s translation in The Medieval Review (Apr. 2000).
14 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas: Commentary, 10–13.
Gentiles, De Veritate, and Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima, among other writings of Aquinas.15
In addition to Kenny and Haldane, in the general area of Aquinas studies with special reference to the philosophy of mind, the late Norman Kretzmann, along with his former student Pasnau, started several critical projects translating and writing commentary on medieval texts that are slowly finding their way into mainstream philosophical academia. Kretzmann and another former student, Eleonore Stump, edited the Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, 16 which exhibits a largely analytic perspective in its essays on Aquinas. Pasnau’s Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature17 adds a fresh while not always widely accepted perspective to analytic studies in Thomas’s philosophy of mind.18 Stump’s Aquinas, 19 published in the Routledge ‘Arguments of the Philosophers’ series, adds substantive analyses on Aquinas’s theory of mind. Kenny’s recent essay ‘Cognitive Scientism’ continues his discussion of contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind that are connected with the medieval tradition.20 The recent festschrift for Kenny21 contains, among other important philosophy essays, Haldane’s recent account of Kenny’s interpretations of Aquinas on mind.22 Fergus Kerr wrote that Kenny’s Aquinas on Mind has become ‘the classical interpretation in the Anglophone academy of [Aquinas’s] philosophical psychology’.23 In her Aquinas, Stump disagrees with the analysis put forward by Kenny.24
Within the confines of this study, a considerable number of Aquinas scholars, both within and beyond the analytic tradition, who have offered substantive accounts of Aquinas on mind are subject to critical analysis and substantive commentary. The argument proposed here is that none of this select group of philosophers has quite got
15 Many of the texts from the Commentary are based on the Foster–Humphries translation. Likewise, many of the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles texts are modifications of the early 20th-c. Shapecoat translations. In many cases, I have modified or retranslated these texts.
16 Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
17 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The author, as a member of the 2003 Program Committee for the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, set up a successful ‘Author Meets the Critics’ panel, with Anthony Kenny and Mary Sirridge serving as analytic critics of Pasnau’s book.
18 Pasnau is the editor of the Aquinas Project, under the auspices of the Hackett Publishing Company. He also translated and edited a monograph on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind dealing with these issues in the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on Human Nature (Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002); see also his Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). In this latter work, Pasnau appears to question the direct realism claims in Thomas that will be articulated later in this present study.
19 Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003, 2005).
20 Anthony Kenny, ‘Cognitive Scientism’, in Kenny (ed.), From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 149–62.
21 John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
22 John Haldane, ‘Kenny and Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Mind’, in Cottingham and Hacker, Mind, Method, and Morality, 119–39.
23 Fergus Kerr, OP, ‘Thomistica III’, New Blackfriars 85(1000) (2004), 628.
24 Stump, Aquinas, 531, n. 107.
it right in providing an explicatio textus of inner sense in Thomas. To offer a substantive yet critical analysis of Aquinas’s significant account of inner sense under the general rubric of sensation and perception is the teleological principle on which this study has been undertaken. For example, in his Medieval Philosophy, Kenny is perplexed by the vis cogitativa: ‘Aquinas does not succeed in making clear what he regards as the equivalent human capacity.’25 The goal of this inquiry is to exhibit intellectual sympathy along with a determination to render as lucid as possible an account of Aquinas on perception, with special emphasis on inner sense. Where possible, the author adopts a willingness to ascertain and explain the philosophical relevance of Aquinas’s integrative work on mind without ‘cheerleading’ or ‘score-keeping’. The result of this analysis offers a coherent yet complex and a sophisticated yet not obscure narrative that is philosophically significant for contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind. This book offers an explicatio textus of the numerous aspects of Aquinas’s view, and traces the intricate relations between those aspects. In the end, this analysis is, as noted above, one of whole cloth and not an isolated set of scattered texts and disconnected commentary.
The analysis put forward in this book should be of interest to historians of philosophy, persons working in the general area of Aristotelian and Aquinian studies in the philosophy of mind, philosophers concerned about the nature of intentionality theory, and persons familiar with the history of psychology. In addition, this book might serve as educational material for those philosophers committed to teaching the history of philosophy from the vantage point of analytic philosophy. If one is to teach the history of philosophy, one must teach it well. And to teach it well demands that it be understood correctly. This book attempts to provide background material, textual reference, conceptual elucidation, and connections with contemporary philosophy in sufficiently robust detail. Hence, this study should assist those philosophers interested in medieval philosophy but trained in analytic philosophy to make better conceptual sense of Aquinas on matters pertaining to sensation and perception. O Quam Spes!
25 Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 235.
1
Setting the Problem
History and Context
The beginnings of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century with the writings of Russell and Moore focused attention on questions concerning perception theory. These epistemological issues in turn became dominant in much twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. Given the continuing interest in this set of topics, it is not surprising that analytic philosophers often used the tools and techniques of the discipline in order to elucidate conceptually the texts on perception found in the writings of philosophers central to the history of philosophy. Analytic philosophers writing about sensation and perception have frequently discussed these issues in the texts of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, and Kant, among others prominent in the history of Western philosophy since the seventeenth century.
The same cannot be said, however, about textual and structural discussions of medieval philosophers. Until recently, few analytic philosophers treated in detail the issues of sensation and perception as elaborated by their medieval counterparts. Moreover, such treatment, when it did occur, frequently utilized models drawn from early modern philosophy that were then in turn foisted upon the writings of the medievals. In opposition to this general ‘Whiggish’ trend in history of philosophy writings found in recent analytic philosophy, this book attempts to deal analytically with the epistemology and philosophy of mind of sensation and perception as discussed by one significant medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1226–74).1 This approach in undertaking philosophical analysis is similar in structure to what Haldane has termed ‘Analytical Thomism’.
The term ‘philosophy of mind’ is a category convention of recent philosophical analysis. Ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophers discussed more than several issues central to what today is referred to as the philosophy of mind, especially intentionality theory and the structure of various mental acts like memory, imagining, and
1 The exact year of Thomas’s birth has been contested for centuries. This monograph is in agreement with Simon Tugwell in asserting that sufficient evidence now exists indicating that 1226 is the correct year. Some documents state that Thomas was 48 when he died in 1274: Simon Tugwell, ‘Introduction’, in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 1–129. Torrell argues that 1225 is the appropriate year of Thomas’s birth: Jean-Pierre Torrell, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
knowing. These inquiries, however, pertained to studies of the natural philosophy of anima or soul, with Aristotle’s De Anima serving as the principal text for such philosophical work. In considering the history of what contemporary philosophers call the philosophy of mind, Haldane once wrote that the ‘classic text on the subject’ was Aristotle’s De Anima; ‘it is barely an exaggeration to say that medieval and renaissance philosophy of mind consists of commentaries and reflections on that work.’2 This present study focuses attention on one such substantive commentary, that of Thomas Aquinas.
Perception Theory and Analytic Philosophy
Setting the stage for this study on Aquinas and perception theory requires a discussion both of the analytic tradition and of the development of classical neo-Thomism. It is in the realm of analytic philosophy where significant recent creative and constructive work in Aquinas’s philosophy of mind has arisen.3
This study on Aquinas follows in the wake of renewed interest in Aristotelian philosophy of mind—a study of merely historical interest when foundationalist epistemology dominated discussions in English-speaking philosophy. Moreover, as Kenny noted, unless a person merely lists what a philosopher has said, in doing the history of philosophy one cannot help but philosophize. Ted Honderich commented on the importance of scholarship in the history of philosophy:
Philosophy has a peculiarly close relation with its own traditions. The problems and arguments of the great thinkers of the past are a permanently present element in the contemporary debate. At any time a significant portion of the best work in philosophy is historical, enriching the current practice of philosophy with ideas arrived at by thinking through and reassessing the work of one of the great philosophers in the near or distant past.4
It is in the spirit of Kenny’s observation and Honderich’s assertion that this book on Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception has been undertaken. The arguments developed in the following chapters attempt to shed light from the perspective of analytic philosophy on those issues in sensation and perception discussed by Aquinas but so far mainly neglected in studies in the history of philosophy.
Aquinas and Teleology: A Naturalist Reconstruction
When initially reading Aquinas on the philosophy of mind, one is almost overwhelmed with the teleology running through the discussion. Propositions like ‘The knowing
2 John Haldane, ‘History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 333.
3 John Haldane, ‘The Metaphysics of Intellect(ion)’, in Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 38–55.
4 Ted Honderich, ‘Introduction’, in Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat (eds), Philosophy As It Was (New York: Penguin, 1984), 3.
faculty is made for the act of knowing, which in turn is made for the object of knowing’ evoke a quandary. A first response is often ‘How quaint!’ quickly followed by a dismissal, especially by philosophers who cut their philosophical teeth on modern issues in the philosophy of mind and who have a deep distrust of any suggestion of teleology. Historians of philosophy need to offer Aquinas a little breathing room on this kind of talk. Aquinas is, one might argue, a type of ‘naturalist epistemologist’ who would be comfortable theoretically with the position that through evolution, homines sapiententes (rational animals) adapted to the environment so that these complex knowing organisms could develop and relate cognitively to the external world in the best possible manner. Twentieth-century psychologist James Gibson articulated a similar theory, often referred to as an ‘ecological perspective to perception theory’.5 Aquinas would fit into this category of contemporary cognitive theorists speculating on why human knowers developed in certain ways. Of course, like Augustine with his evolutionary theory of Rationes Seminales, Aquinas had God hovering in the background. Nonetheless, Aquinas would in principle agree with the theoretical position affirming that a human’s knowing capacities have adapted to the objects in the external world. It follows that neither the criterial question nor the foundationalist issue pursued by modern philosophers is paramount in Aquinas’s discussion. Aquinas assumes that human persons acquire knowledge; his question, like Gibson’s, is: how is this awareness or knowing situation possible? How can this human phenomenal experience be explained? Haldane suggests that what Aquinas undertakes in developing his philosophy of mind is to ‘explain’ how knowledge is possible and not to ‘justify’ the knowing process. The general thrust of this book is in agreement with Haldane’s suggestions.6
From Ontology to the Philosophy of Mind
In beginning this analysis, distinctions between epistemology and the philosophy of mind require discussion. Epistemology or theory of knowledge often is seen as rooted in Plato’s Theatetus and developed forward through the canon of Western philosophy; the philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology, on the other hand, is found in philosophical works principally of analytic philosophers following the Second World War. Epistemology traditionally is the study of the nature and conditions of knowledge, especially the justification for knowledge claims and the discussion of means or modes of arriving at true propositions. While seeds of the philosophy-of-mind studies
5 The author credits his understanding of Gibson’s ecological perception theory to conversations with his Denison colleague Harry Heft, who knows the work of Gibson as well as any person around. Heft’s published work develops several Aristotelian themes common with Gibson’s analysis. Cf. James Gibson, ‘The Perceiving of Hidden Surfaces’, in Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (eds), Studies in Perception (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 422–34. Both Edward Mahoney and James Ross appreciated this structural similarity.
6 James South kindly reminded the author that Gilson in his discussion of Thomist Realism holds a similar position.
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I saw seemed beautiful dream-pictures—every where grace, beauty, splendor of coloring, steeped in Elysian repose. It is impossible to describe the glory of that passage across the river. It paid me for all the hardships of the Desert.
When we touched the other shore and mounted the little donkeys we had taken across with us, the ideal character of the scene disappeared, but left a reality picturesque and poetic enough. The beasts were without bridles, and were only furnished with small wooden saddles, without girths or stirrups. One was obliged to keep his poise, and leave the rest to the donkey, who, however, suffered himself to be guided by striking the side of his neck. We rode under a cluster of ruined stone buildings, one of which occupied considerable space, rising pylon-like, to the height of thirty feet. The Shekh informed me that it had been the palace of a Shygheean king, before the Turks got possession of the country. It was wholly dilapidated, but a few Arab families were living in the stone dwellings which surround it. These clusters of shattered buildings extend for more than a mile along the river, and are all now known as Merawe. Our road led between fields of ripening wheat, rolling in green billows before the breeze, on one side, and on the other, not more than three yards distant, the naked sandstone walls of the Desert, where a blade of grass never grew. Over the wheat, along the bank of the Nile, rose a long forest of palms, so thickly ranged that the eye could scarcely penetrate their dense, cool shade; while on the other hand the glaring sand-hills showed their burning shoulders above the bluffs. It was a most violent contrast, and yet, withal, there was a certain harmony in these opposite features. A remarkably fat man, riding on a donkey, met us. The Shekh compared him to a hippopotamus, and said that his fat came from eating mutton and drinking om bilbil day and night. At the end of the town we came to a sort of guard-house, shaded by two sycamores. A single soldier was in attendance, and apparently tired of having nothing to do, as he immediately caught his donkey and rode with us to Djebel Berkel.
We now approached the mountain, which is between three and four miles from the town. It rises from out the sands of the Nubian Desert, to the height of five hundred feet, presenting a front
completely perpendicular towards the river It is inaccessible on all sides except the north, which in one place has an inclination of 45°. Its scarred and shattered walls of naked sandstone stand up stern and sublime in the midst of the hot and languid landscape. As we approached, a group of pyramids appeared on the brow of a sandhill to the left, and I discerned at the base of the mountain several isolated pillars, the stone-piles of ruined pylons, and other remains of temples. The first we reached was at the south-eastern corner of the mountain. Amid heaps of sandstone blocks and disjointed segments of pillars, five columns of an exceedingly old form still point out the court of a temple, whose adyta are hewn within in the mountain. They are not more than ten feet high and three in diameter, circular, and without capital or abacus, unless a larger block, rudely sculptured with the outlines of a Typhon-head, may be considered as such. The doorway is hurled down and defaced, but the cartouches of kings may still be traced on the fragments. There are three chambers in the rock, the walls of which are covered with sculptures, for the most part representing the Egyptian divinities. The temple was probably dedicated to Typhon, or the Evil Principle, as one of the columns is still faced with a caryatid of the short, plump, bigmouthed and bat-eared figure, which elsewhere represents him. Over the entrance is the sacred winged globe, and the ceiling shows the marks of brilliant coloring. The temple is not remarkable for its architecture, and can only be interesting in an antiquarian point of view. It bears some resemblance in its general style to the Templepalace of Goorneh, at Thebes.
The eastern base of the mountain, which fronts the Nile, is strewn with hewn blocks, fragments of capitals, immense masses of dark bluish-gray granite, and other remains, which prove that a large and magnificent temple once stood there. The excavations made by Lepsius and others have uncovered the substructions sufficiently to show the general plan of two buildings. The main temple was at the north-eastern corner of the mountain, under the highest point of its perpendicular crags. The remains of its small propylons stand in advance, about two hundred yards from the rock, going towards which you climb the mound formed by the ruins of a large pylon, at the foot of which are two colossal ram-headed sphinxes of blue
granite, buried to their necks in the sand. Beyond this is a portico and pillared court, followed by other courts and labyrinths of chambers. Several large blocks of granite, all more or less broken and defaced, lie on the surface or half quarried from the rubbish. They are very finely polished and contain figures of kings, evidently arranged in genealogical order, each accompanied with his name. The shekh had a great deal to tell me of the Franks, who dug up all the place, and set the people to work at hauling away the lions and rams, which they carried off in ships. I looked in vain for the celebrated pedestal; it has probably become the spoil of Lepsius.
While taking a sketch of the mountain from the eastern side, I found the heat almost insupportable. The shekh looked over my shoulder all the time, and at the end pronounced it temam —“perfect.” I then proposed climbing the mountain, as he had said one could see the whole world from the top. He was bound to go with me wherever I went, but shrank from climbing El Berkel. It would require two hours, he said, to go up. After eating a slice of watermelon in the shade of one of the pillars, I took off my jacket and started alone, and very soon he was at my side, panting and sweating with the exertion. We began at the point most easy of ascent yet found it toilsome enough. After passing the loose fragments which lie scattered around the base, we came upon a steep slope of sliding sand and stones, blown from the desert We sank in this nearly to the knees, and slid backward at each step at least half as far as we had stepped forward. We were obliged to rest every three or four steps, and take breath, moistening the sand meanwhile with a rain of sweat-drops, “Surely there is no other mountain in the world so high as this,” said the shekh, and I was ready to agree with him. At last we reached the top, a nearly level space of about ten acres. There was a pleasant breeze here, but the Ethiopian world below was dozing in an atmosphere of blue heat. There was too much vapor in the air to see the farthest objects distinctly, and the pyramids of Noori, further up the river, on its eastern bank, were not visible. The Nile lay curved in the middle of the picture like a flood of molten glass, on either side its palmy “knots of paradise,” then the wheat fields, lying like slabs of emerald against the tawny sands, that rolled in hot drifts and waves and long ridgy
swells to the horizon north and south, broken here and there by the jagged porphyry peaks. Before me, to the south-east, were the rugged hills of the Beyooda; behind me, to the north and west, the burning wilderness of the Great Nubian Desert.
As I sought for my glass, to see the view more distinctly, I became aware that I had lost my pocket-book on the way up. As it contained some money and all my keys, I was not a little troubled, and mentioned my loss to Shekh Mohammed. We immediately returned in search of it, sliding down the sand and feeling with our hands and feet therein. We had made more than half the descent, and I began to consider the search hopeless, when the shekh, who was a little in advance, cried out: “O Sidi! God be praised! God be praised!” He saw the corner sticking out of the sand, took it up, kissed it, and laid it on one eye, while he knelt with his old head turned up, that I might take it off. I tied it securely in a corner of my shawl and we slid to the bottom, where we found Achmet and the young shekhs in the shade of a huge projecting cliff, with breakfast spread out on the sand.
It was now noon, and only the pyramids remained to be seen on that side of the river The main group is about a third of a mile from the mountain, on the ridge of a sand-hill. There are six pyramids, nearly entire, and the foundations of others. They are almost precisely similar to those of the real Meroë, each having a small exterior chamber on the eastern side. Like the latter, they are built of sandstone blocks, only filled at the corners, which are covered with a hem or moulding; the sides of two of them are convex. On all of them the last eight or ten courses next the top have been smoothed to follow the slope of the side. It was no doubt intended to finish them all in this manner One of them has also the corner moulding rounded, so as to form a scroll, like that on the cornice of many of the Egyptian temples. They are not more than fifty feet in height, with very narrow bases. One of them, indeed, seems to be the connecting link between the pyramid and the obelisk. Nearer the river is an older pyramid, though no regular courses of stone are to be seen any longer. These sepulchral remains, however, are much inferior to those of Meroë.
The oldest names found at Napata are those of Amenoph III. and Remeses II. (1630 B. C. and 1400 B. C.) both of whom subjected Nubia to their rule. The remains of Ethiopian art, however, go no further than King Tirkaka, 730 B. C.—the Ethiopian monarch, who, in the time of Hezekiah, marched into Palestine to meet Sennacherib, King of Assyria. Napata, therefore, occupies an intermediate place in history between Thebes and Meroë, showing the gradual southward progress of Egyptian art and civilization. It is a curious fact that the old religion of Egypt should have been here met face to face, and overthrown, by Christianity, which, starting in the mountains of Abyssinia, followed the course of the Nile northward. In the sixth century of our era, Ethiopia and Nubia were converted to Christianity and remained thus until the fourteenth century, when they fell beneath the sword of Islam.
We rode back to the town on our uneasy donkey saddles. As I wanted small money, the shekh proposed my calling on Achmedar Kashif, the Governor of Merawe and Ambukol, and asking him to change me some medjids. We accordingly rode under the imposing stone piles of the old kings to the residence of the Kashif, a two-story mud house with a portico in front, covered with matting. It was the day for the people of the neighborhood to pay their tulbeh, or tax, and some of his officers were seated on the ground in the shade, settling this business with a crowd of Arabs. I went up stairs to the divan, and found the Kashif rolling himself in his shawl for dinner, which his slaves had just brought up. He received me cordially, and I took my seat beside him on the floor and dipped my fingers into the various dishes. There was a pan of baked fish, which was excellent, after which came a tray of scarlet watermelon slices, coffee, pipes, and lastly a cup of hot sugar syrup. He readily promised to change me the money, and afterwards accepted my invitation to dinner.
I stayed an hour longer, and had an opportunity of witnessing some remarkable scenes. A woman came in to complain of her husband, who had married another woman, leaving her with one child. She had a cow of her own which he had forcibly taken and given to his new wife. The Kashif listened to her story, and then detaching his seal from his buttonhole, gave it to an attendant, as a
summons which the delinquent dare not disobey A company of men afterwards came to adjust some dispute about a water-mill. They spoke so fast and in such a violent and excited manner, that I could not comprehend the nature of the quarrel; but the group they made was most remarkable. They leaned forward with flashing teeth and eyes, holding the folds of their long mantles with one hand, while they dashed and hurled the other in the air, in the violence of their contention. One would suppose that they must all perish the next instant by spontaneous combustion. The Kashif was calmness itself all the while, and after getting the particulars—a feat which I considered marvellous—quietly gave his decision. Some of the party protested against it, whereupon he listened attentively, but, finding no reason to change his judgment, repeated it. Still the Arabs screamed and gesticulated. He ejaculated imshee! (“get away!”) in a thundering tone, dealt the nearest ones a vigorous blow with his fist, and speedily cleared the divan. The Kashif offered to engage camels and a guide for New Dongola, in case I chose to go by the Nubian Desert—a journey of three or four days, through a terrible waste of sand and rocks, without grass or water. The route being new, had some attractions, but I afterwards decided to adhere to my original plan of following the course of the river to Ambukol and Old Dongola.
I made preparations for giving the Kashif a handsome dinner. I had mutton and fowls, and Achmet procured eggs milk and vegetables, and set his whole available force to work. Meanwhile the shekh and I sat on the divan outside the door, and exchanged compliments. He sold me a sword from Bornou, which he had purchased from an Arab merchant who had worn it to Mecca. He told me he considered me as his two eyes, and would give me one of his sons, if I desired. Then he rendered me an account of his family, occasionally pointing out the members thereof, as they passed to and fro among the palms. He asked me how many children I had, and I was obliged to confess myself wholly his inferior in this respect. “God grant,” said he, “that when you go back to your own country, you may have many sons, just like that one,” pointing to a naked Cupidon of four years old, of a rich chocolate-brown color “God grant it,” I was obliged to reply, conformably to the rules of Arab politeness, but I mentally gave the words the significance of “God forbid it!” The shekh, who
was actually quite familiar with the ruins in Ethiopia, and an excellent guide to them, informed me that they were four thousand years old; that the country was at that time in possession of the English, but afterwards the Arabs drove them out. This corresponds with an idea very prevalent in Egypt, that the temples were built by the forefathers of the Frank travellers, who once lived there, and that is the reason why the Franks make a hadj, or pilgrimage to see them. I related to the shekh the history of the warlike Queen Candace, who once lived there, in her capital of Napata, and he was so much interested in the story that he wrote it down, transforming her name into Kandasiyeh Some later traveller will be surprised to find a tradition of the aforesaid queen, no doubt with many grotesque embellishments, told him on the site of her capital.
Dinner was ready at sunset, the appointed time, but the Kashif did not come. I waited one hour, two hours; still he came not. Thereupon I invited Achmet and the shekh, and we made an excellent dinner in Turkish style. It was just over, and I was stretched out without jacket or tarboosh, enjoying my pipe, when we heard the ferrymen singing on the river below, and soon afterwards the Kashif appeared at the door. He apologized, saying he had been occupied in his divan. I had dinner served again, and tasted the dishes to encourage him, but it appeared that he had not been able to keep his appetite so long, and had dined also. Still, he ate enough to satisfy me that he relished my dishes, and afterwards drank a sherbet of sugar and vinegar with great gusto. He had three or four attendants, and with him came a Berber merchant, who had lately been in Khartoum. I produced my sketch-book and maps, and astonished the company for three hours. I happened to have a book of Shaksperean views, which I had purchased in Stratford-on-Avon. The picture of Shakspere gave the Kashif and shekh great delight, and the former considered the hovel in which the poet was born, “very grand.” The church in Stratford they thought a marvellous building, and the merchant confessed that it was greater than Lattif Pasha’s palace in Khartoum, which he had supposed to be the finest building in the world.
The next morning the shekh proposed going with me to the remains of a temple, half an hour distant, on the eastern bank of the
river; the place, he said, where the people found the little images, agates and scarabei, which they brought to me in great quantities. After walking a mile and a half over the sands, which have here crowded the vegetation to the very water’s edge, we came to a broad mound of stones, broken bricks and pottery, with a foundation wall of heavy limestone blocks, along the western side. There were traces of doors and niches, and on the summit of the mound the pedestals of columns similar to those of El Berkel. From this place commenced a waste of ruins, extending for nearly two miles towards the north-west, while the breadth, from east to west, was about equal. For the most part, the buildings were entirely concealed by the sand, which was filled with fragments of pottery and glass, and with shining pebbles of jasper, agate and chalcedony. Half a mile further, we struck on another mound, of greater extent, though the buildings were entirely level with the earth. The foundations of pillars were abundant, and fragments of circular limestone blocks lay crumbling to pieces in the rubbish. The most interesting object was a mutilated figure of blue granite, of which only a huge pair of wings could be recognized. The shekh said that all the Frank travellers who came there broke off a piece and carried it away with them. I did not follow their example. Towards the river were many remains of crude brick walls, and the ground was strewn with pieces of excellent hardburnt bricks. The sand evidently conceals many interesting objects. I saw in one place, where it had fallen in, the entrance to a chamber, wholly below the surface. The Arabs were at work in various parts of the plain, digging up the sand, which they filled in baskets and carried away on donkeys. The shekh said it contained salt, and was very good to make wheat grow, whence I inferred that the earth is nitrous. We walked for an hour or two over the ruins, finding everywhere the evidence that a large capital had once stood on the spot. The bits of water jars which we picked up were frequently painted and glazed with much skill. The soil was in many places wholly composed of the debris of the former dwellings. This was, without doubt, the ancient Napata, of which Djebel Berkel was only the necropolis. Napata must have been one of the greatest cities of Ancient Africa, after Thebes, Memphis and Carthage. I felt a peculiar interest in wandering over the site of that half-forgotten capital,
whereof the ancient historians knew little more than we. That so little is said by them in relation to it is somewhat surprising, notwithstanding its distance from the Roman frontier.
In the afternoon, Achmet, with great exertion, backed by all the influence of the Kashif, succeeded in obtaining ten piastres worth of bread. The latter sent me the shekh of the camels, who furnished me with three animals and three men, to Wadi Halfa, at ninety-five piastres apiece. They were to accompany my caravan to Ambukol, on the Dongolese frontier where the camels from Khartoum were to be discharged. I spent the rest of the day talking with the shekh on religious matters. He gave me the history of Christ, in return for which I related to him that of the Soul of Mahomet, from one hundred and ten thousand years before the Creation of the World, until his birth, according to the Arab Chronicles. This quite overcame him. He seized my hand and kissed it with fervor, acknowledging me as the more holy man of the two. He said he had read the Books of Moses, the Psalms of David and the Gospel of Christ, but liked David best, whose words flowed like the sound of the zumarra, or Arab flute. To illustrate it, he chanted one of the Psalms in a series of not unmusical cadences. He then undertook to repeat the ninety attributes of God, and thought he succeeded, but I noticed that several of the epithets were repeated more than once.
The north wind increased during the afternoon, and towards night blew a very gale. The sand came in through the door in such quantities that I was obliged to move my bed to a more sheltered part of my house. Numbers of huge black beetles, as hard and heavy as grape-shot, were dislodged from their holes and dropped around me with such loud raps that I was scarcely able to sleep. The sky was dull and dark, hardly a star to be seen, and the wind roared in the palms like a November gale let loose among the boughs of a Northern forest. It was a grand roar, drowning the sharp rustle of the leaves when lightly stirred, and rocked my fancies as gloriously as the pine. In another country than Africa, I should have predicted rain, hail, equinoctial storms, or something of the kind, but there I went to sleep with a positive certainty of sunshine on the morrow.
I was up at dawn, and had breakfast by sunrise; nevertheless, we were obliged to wait a long while for the camels, or rather the pestiferous Kababish who went after them. The new men and camels were in readiness, as the camel-shekh came over the river to see that all was right. The Kashif sent me a fine black ram, as provision for the journey. Finally, towards eight o’clock, every thing was in order and my caravan began to move. I felt real regret at leaving the pleasant spot, especially the beautiful bower of palms at the door of my house. When my effects had been taken out, the shekh called his eldest son Saad, his wife Fatima, and their two young sons, to make their salaams. They all kissed my hand, and I then gave the old man and Saad my backsheesh for their services. The shekh took the two gold medjids readily, without any hypocritical show of reluctance, and lifted my hand to his lips and forehead. When all was ready, he repeated the Fatha, or opening paragraph of the Koran, as each camel rose from its knees, in order to secure the blessing of Allah upon our journey. He then took me in his arms, kissed both my cheeks, and with tears in his eyes, stood showering pious phrases after me, till I was out of hearing. With no more vanity or selfishness than is natural to an Arab, Shekh Mohammed Abd e’Djebàl had many excellent qualities, and there are few of my Central African acquaintances whom I would rather see again.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
OLD DONGOLA AND NEW DONGOLA.
Appearance of the Country Korti The Town of Ambukol The Caravan reorganized A Fiery Ride We reach Edabbe An Illuminated Landscape A Torment Nubian Agriculture Old Dongola The Palace-Mosque of the Nubian Kings A Panorama of Desolation
The Old City Nubian Gratitude Another Sand-Storm A Dreary Journey The Approach to Handak A House of Doubtful Character
The Inmates Journey to El Ordee (New Dongola) Khoorshid Bey
Appearance of the Town
I left Abdôm on the morning of February twentieth. Our road lay southward, along the edge of the wheat-fields, over whose waves we saw the island-like groups of palms at a little distance. For several miles the bank of the river was covered with a continuous string of villages. After skirting this glorious garden land for two hours, we crossed a sandy tract, overgrown with the poisonous euphorbia, to avoid a curve in the river. During the whole of the afternoon, we travelled along the edge of the cultivated land, and sometimes in the midst of it, obliging my camels to stumble clumsily over the raised trenches which carried water from the river to the distant parts of the fields. Large, ruined forts of unburnt brick, exceedingly picturesque at a distance, stood at intervals between the desert and the harvestland.
The next morning was hot and sultry, with not a breath of air stirring. I rose at dawn and walked ahead for two hours, through thickets of euphorbia higher than my head, and over patches of strong, dark-green grass. The sakias were groaning all along the shore, and the people every where at work in the fields. The wheat was in various stages of growth, from the first thick green of the young blades to the full head Barley was turning a pale yellow, and the dookhn, the heads of which had already been gathered, stood brown and dry. Djebel Deeka, on my right, rose bold and fair above
the lines of palms, and showed a picturesque glen winding in between its black-purple peaks. It was a fine feature of the landscape, which would have been almost too soft and lovely without it.
Before nine o’clock we passed the large town of Korti, which, however, is rather a cluster of small towns, scattered along between the wheat-fields and the river. Some of the houses were large and massive, and with their blank walls and block-like groups, over which the doum-tree spread its arch and the date-palm hung its feathery crown, made fine African pictures—admirable types of the scenery along the Nubian Nile. Beyond the town we came upon a hot, dusty plain, sprinkled with stunted euphorbia, over which I could see the point where the Nile turns westward. Towards noon we reached the town of Ambukol, which I found to be a large agglomeration of mud and human beings, on the sand-hills, a quarter of a mile from the river. An extensive pile of mud in the centre denoted a fortress or government station of some sort. There were a few lazy Arabs sitting on the ground, on the shady side of the walls, and some women going back and forth with water-jars, but otherwise, for all the life it presented, the place might have been deserted. The people we met saluted me with much respect, and those who were seated rose and remained standing until I had passed. I did not enter the town, but made direct for a great acacia tree near its western end. The nine camels and nine men of my caravan all rested under the shade, and there was room for as many more. A number of Arabs looked on from a distance, or hailed my camel-men, to satisfy their curiosity regarding me, but no one came near or annoyed us in any way. I took breakfast leisurely on my carpet, drank half a gourd of mareesa, and had still an hour to wait, before the new camels were laden. The Kababish, who had accompanied me from Khartoum, wanted a certificate, so I certified that Saïd was a good camel-man and Mohammed worthless as a guide. They then drank a parting jar of mareesa, and we went from under the cool acacia into the glare of the fierce sun. Our road all the afternoon was in the Desert, and we were obliged to endure a most intense and sultry heat.
The next day I travelled westward over long akabas, or reaches of the Desert, covered with clumps of thorns, nebbuk and the jasmine tree. The long mountain on the opposite bank was painted in rosy light against the sky, as if touched with the beams of a perpetual sunrise. My eyes always turned to it with a sense of refreshment, after the weary glare of the sand. In the morning there was a brisk wind from the north-east, but towards noon it veered to the southwest, and then to the south, continuing to blow all day with great force. As I rode westward through the hot hours of the afternoon, it played against my face like a sheet of flame. The sky became obscured with a dull, bluish haze, and the sands of the Beyooda, on my left, glimmered white and dim, as if swept by the blast of a furnace. There were occasional gusts that made the flesh shrink as if touched with a hot iron, and I found it impossible to bear the wind full on my face. One who has never felt it, cannot conceive the withering effect of such a heat. The earth seems swept with the first fires of that conflagration beneath which the heavens will shrivel up as a scroll, and you instinctively wonder to see the palms standing green and unsinged. My camel-men crept behind the camels to get away from it, and Achmet and Ali muffled up their faces completely. I could not endure the sultry heat occasioned by such a preparation, and so rode all day with my head in the fire.
About three o’clock in the afternoon we approached the Nile again. There was a grove of sont and doum-trees on the bank, surrounding a large quadrangular structure of clay, with square towers at the corners. Graveyards stretched for nearly a mile along the edge of the Desert, and six large, dome-like heaps of clay denoted the tombs of as many holy men. We next came upon the ruins of a large village, with a fort and a heavy palace-like building of mud. Before reaching Edabbe, the terminus of the caravan route from Kordofan, the same evening, I rode completely around the bend of the Nile, so that my dromedary’s head was at last turned towards Wadi Halfa. I was hot, tired, and out of temper, but a gourd of cool water, at the first house we reached, made all right again. There were seven vessels in the river, waiting for the caravans. One had just arrived from Kordofan, and the packages of gum were piled up along the shore. We were immediately followed by the sailors, who were anxious that I should
hire their vessels. I rode past the town, which does not contain more than thirty houses in all, and had my tent pitched on the river bank.
The Nile is here half a mile broad, and a long reach of his current is visible to the north and south. The opposite bank was high and steep, lined at the water’s edge with a belt of beans and lupins, behind which rose a line of palms, and still higher the hills of pale, golden-hued sand, spotted like a leopard’s hide, with clumps of a small mimosa. The ground was a clear, tawny yellow, but the spots were deep emerald. Below the gorgeous drapery of these hills, the river glittered in a dark, purple-blue sheet. The coloring of the midAfrican landscapes is truly unparalleled. To me, it became more than a simple sense; it grew to be an appetite. When, after a journey in the Desert, I again beheld the dazzling green palms and wheat-fields of the Nile, I imagined that there was a positive sensation on the retina. I felt, or seemed to feel, physically, the colored rays—beams of pure emerald, topaz and amethystine lustre—as they struck the eye.
At Edabbe I first made acquaintance with a terrible pest, which for many days afterwards occasioned me much torment—a small black fly, as venomous as the musquito, and much more difficult to drive away. I sat during the evening with my head, neck and ears closely bound up, notwithstanding the heat. After the flies left, a multitude of beetles, moths, winged ants and other nameless creatures came in their place. I sat and sweltered, murmuring for the waters of Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, and longing for a glass of sherbet cooled with the snows of Lebanon.
We were up with the first glimmering of dawn. The sky was dull and hazy, and the sun came up like a shield of rusty copper, as we started. Our path lay through the midst of the cultivated land, sometimes skirting the banks of the Nile, and sometimes swerving off to the belts of sont and euphorbia which shut out the sand. The sakias, turned by a yoke of oxen each, were in motion on the river, and the men were wading through the squares of wheat, cotton and barley, turning the water into them. All farming processes, from sowing to reaping, were going on at the same time. The cultivated land was frequently more than a mile in breadth, and all watered
from the river The sakias are taxed four hundred and seventy-five piastres each, notwithstanding the sum fixed by Government is only three hundred. The remainder goes into the private treasuries of the Governors. For this reason, many persons, unable to pay the tax, emigrate into Kordofan and elsewhere. This may account for the frequent tracts of the finest soil which are abandoned. I passed many fine fields, given up to the halfeh grass, which grew most rank and abundant. My dromedary had a rare time of it, cropping the juicy bunches as he went along. The country is thickly settled, and our road was animated with natives, passing back and forth.
About noon, we saw in advance, on the eastern bank of the Nile, a bold, bluff ridge, crowned with a large square building. This the people pointed out to us as the location of Old Dongola. As we approached nearer, a long line of mud buildings appeared along the brow of the hill, whose northern slope was cumbered with ruins. We left the caravan track and rode down to the ferry place at the river, over a long stretch of abandoned fields, where the cotton was almost choked out with grass, and the beans and lentils were growing wild in bunches. After my tent had been pitched in a cotton-patch, I took a grateful bath in the river, and then crossed in the ferry-boat to the old town. The hill upon which it is built terminates abruptly in a precipice of red sandstone rock, about a hundred feet in height. Four enormous fragments have been broken off, and lie as they fell, on the edge of the water. A steep path through drifts of sliding yellow sand leads around the cliffs, up to the dwellings. I found the ascent laborious, as the wind, which had veered to the west, was as hot as on the previous day; but a boatman and one of my camel-men seized a hand each and hauled me up most conveniently. At the summit, all was ruin; interminable lines of walls broken down, and streets filled up with sand. I went first to the Kasr, or Palace, which stands on the highest part of the hill. It is about forty feet in height, having two stories and a broad foundation wall, and is built mostly of burnt brick and sandstone. It is the palace of the former Dongolese Kings, and a more imposing building than one would expect to find in such a place. Near the entrance is an arched passage, leading down to some subterranean chambers, which I did not explore. It needed something more than the assurance of an old Nubian, however, to
convince me that there was an underground passage from this place to Djebel Berkel. A broad flight of stone steps ascended to the second story, in which are many chambers and passages. The walls are covered with Arabic inscriptions, written in the plaster while it was yet moist. The hall of audience had once a pavement of marble, several blocks of which still remain, and the ceiling is supported in the centre by three shafts of granite, taken from some old Egyptian ruin. The floors are covered with tiles of burnt brick, but the palmlogs which support them have given away in many places, rendering one’s footing insecure. Behind the hall of audience is a passage, with a niche, in each side of which is also an ancient pillar of granite. From the tenor of one of the Arabic inscriptions, it appears that the building was originally designed for a mosque, and that it was erected in the year 1317, by Saf-ed-deen Abdallah, after a victory over the infidels.
I ascended to the roof of the palace, which is flat and paved with stones. The view was most remarkable. The height on which Old Dongola is built, falls off on all sides, inland as well as towards the river, so that to the east one overlooks a wide extent of desert—low hills of red sand, stretching away to a dim, hot horizon. To the north, the hill slopes gradually to the Nile, covered with the ruins of old buildings. North-east, hardly visible through the sandy haze, rose a high, isolated peak, with something like a tower on its summit. To the south and east the dilapidated city covered the top of the hill—a mass of ashy-gray walls of mud and stone, for the most part roofless and broken down, while the doors, courts and alleys between them were half choked up with the loose sand blown in from the Desert. The graveyards of the former inhabitants extended for more than a mile through the sand, over the dreary hills behind the town. Among them were a great number of conical, pointed structures of clay and stones, from twenty to thirty feet in height. The camel-men said they were the tombs of rossool—prophets, or holy men. I counted twentyfive in that portion of the cemetery which was visible. The whole view was one of entire and absolute desolation, heightened the more by the clouds of sand which filled the air, and which, in their withering heat, seemed to be raining ruin upon the land.
I afterwards walked through the city, and was surprised to find many large, strong houses of stone and burnt brick, with spacious rooms, the walls of which were plastered and whitewashed. The lintels of the doors and windows were stone, the roofs in many places, where they still remained, covered with tiles, and every thing gave evidence of a rich and powerful city. Now, probably not more than one-fifth of the houses are inhabited. Here and there the people have spread a roofing of mats over the open walls, and nestled themselves in the sand. I saw several such places, the doors, or rather entrances to which, were at the bottom of loose sand-hills that constantly slid down and filled the dingy dwellings. In my walk I met but one or two persons, but as we returned again to the river, I saw a group of Dongolese women on the highest part of the cliff. They were calling in shrill tones and waving their hands to some persons in the ferry-boat on the river below, and needed no fancy to represent the daughters of Old Dongola lamenting over its fall.
Some Dongolese djellabiàt, or merchants, just returned from Kordofan, were in the ferry-boat. One of them showed me a snuffbox which he had bought from a native of Fertit, beyond Dar-Fūr. It was formed of the shell of some fruit, with a silver neck attached. By striking the head of the box on the thumb-nail, exactly one pinch was produced. The raïs took off his mantle, tied one end of it to the ring in the bow and stood thereon, holding the other end with both hands stretched above his head. He made a fine bronze figure-head for the boat, and it was easy to divine her name: The Nubian. We had on board a number of copper-hued women, whose eyelids were stained with kohl, which gave them a ghastly appearance.
Soon after my tent had been pitched, in the afternoon, a man came riding up from the river on a donkey, leading a horse behind him. He had just crossed one of the water-courses on his donkey, and was riding on, holding the horse’s rope in his hand, when the animal started back at the water-course, jerking the man over the donkey’s tail and throwing him violently on the ground. He lay as if dead for a quarter of an hour, but Achmet finally brought him to consciousness by pouring the contents of a leathern water-flask over his head, and raising him to a sitting posture. His brother, who had
charge of a sakia on the bank, brought me an angareb in the evening, in acknowledgment of this good office. It is a good trait in the people, that they are always grateful for kindness. The angareb, however, did not prove of much service, for I was so beset by the black gnats that it was impossible to sleep. They assailed my nose, mouth, ears and eyes in such numbers that I was almost driven mad. I rubbed my face with strong vinegar, but it only seemed to attract them the more. I unwound my turban, and rolled it around my neck and ears, but they crept under the folds and buzzed and bit until I was forced to give up the attempt.
Our road, the next morning, lay near the river, through tracks of thick halfeh, four or five feet high. We constantly passed the ruins of villages and the naked frames of abandoned sakias. The soil was exceedingly rich, as the exuberant growth of halfeh proved, but for miles and miles there was no sign of life. The tyranny of the Turks has depopulated one of the fairest districts of Nubia. The wind blew violently from the north, and the sandy haze and gray vapor in the air became so dense that I could scarcely distinguish the opposite bank of the Nile. The river was covered with white caps, and broke on the beach below with a wintry roar. As we journeyed along through the wild green grass and orchards of sont, passing broken walls and the traces of old water-courses, I could have believed myself travelling through some deserted landscape of the North. I was chilled with the strong wind, which roared in the sont and made my beard whistle under my nose like a wisp of dry grass. Several ships passed us, scudding up stream under bare poles, and one, which had a single reef shaken out of her large sail, dashed by like a high-pressure steamer.
After two or three hours we passed out of this region. The Desert extended almost to the water’s edge, and we had nothing but sand and thorns. The wind by this time was more furious than ever, and the air was so full of sand that we could not see more than a hundred yards on either hand. The sun gave out a white, ghastly light, which increased the dreariness of the day. All trace of the road was obliterated, and we could only travel at random among the thorns, following the course of the Nile, which we were careful to
keep in view My eyes, ears, and nostrils were soon filled with sand, and I was obliged to bind my turban so as nearly to cover my face, leaving only space enough to take a blind view of the way we were going. At breakfast time, after two hours of this martyrdom, I found a clump of thorns so thick as to shut off the wind, but no sooner had I dismounted and crept under its shelter than I experienced a scorching heat from the sun, and was attacked by myriads of the black gnats. I managed to eat something in a mad sort of way, beating my face and ears continually, and was glad to thrust my head again into the sand-storm, which drove off the worse pests. So for hours we pursued our journey. I could not look in the face of the wind, which never once fell. The others suffered equally, and two of the camel-men lagged so, that we lost sight of them entirely. It was truly a good fortune that I did not take the short road, east of the Nile, from Merawe to New Dongola. In the terrible wastes of the Nubian Desert, we could scarcely have survived such a storm.
Nearly all the afternoon we passed over deserted tracts, which were once covered with flourishing fields. The water-courses extend for nearly two miles from the river, and cross the road at intervals of fifty yards. But now the villages are level with the earth, and the sand whistles over the traces of fields and gardens, which it has not yet effaced. Two hours before sunset the sun disappeared, and I began to long for the town of Handak, our destination. Achmet and I were ahead, and the other camels were not to be seen any longer, so as sunset came on I grew restless and uneasy. The palms by this time had appeared again on the river’s brink, and there was a village on our left, in the sand. We asked again for Handak. “Just at the corner of yon palms,” said the people. They spoke with a near emphasis, which encouraged me. The Arabic dialect of Central Africa has one curious characteristic, which evidently springs from the want of a copious vocabulary. Degree, or intensity of meaning is usually indicated by accent alone. Thus, when they point to an object near at hand they say: henàk, “there;” if it is a moderate distance off, they lengthen the sound into “hen-a-a-ak;” while, if it is so far as to be barely visible, the last syllable is sustained with a full breath—“hen-aa-a-a-a-àk!” In the same way, saā signifies “an hour;” sa-a-a-ā, “two
hours,” &c. This habit of speech gives the language a very singular and eccentric character.
We pushed on till the spot was reached, but as far ahead as the sand would permit us to see, could discern no house. We asked again; the town commenced at the next corner of the palms ahead of us. I think this thing must have happened to us five or six times, till at last I got into that peculiarly amiable mood which sees nothing good in Heaven or Earth. If my best friend had come to meet me, I should have given him but a sour greeting. My eyes were blinded, my head dull and stupid, and my bones sore from twelve hours in the saddle. As it grew dark, we were overtaken by four riders mounted on fine dromedaries. They were going at a sweeping trot, and our beasts were ambitious enough to keep pace with them for some time. One of them was a stately shekh, with a white robe and broad gold border and fringe. From what the people said of him, I took him to be the Melek, or King of Dongola.
Meanwhile, it was growing dark. We could see nothing of the town, though a woman who had been walking beside us, said we were there already She said she had a fine house, which we could have for the night, since it was almost impossible for a tent to stand in such a wind. As I had already dipped into the night, I determined to reach Handak at all hazards, and after yet another hour, succeeded. Achmet and I dismounted in a ruined court-yard, and while I sat on a broken wall, holding the camels, he went to look for our men. It was a dismal place, in the gathering darkness, with the wind howling and the sand drifting on all sides, and I wondered what fiend had ever tempted me to travel in Africa. Before long the woman appeared and guided us to a collection of miserable huts on the top of the hill. Her fine house proved to be a narrow, mud-walled room, with a roof of smoked dourra-stalks. It shut off the wind, however, and when I entered and found the occupants (two other women), talking to each other by the light of a pile of blazing corn-stalks, it looked absolutely cheerful. I stretched myself out on one of the angarebs, and soon relapsed into a better humor. But I am afraid we were not lodged in the most respectable house of Handak, for the women showed no disposition to leave, when we made preparations for sleeping. They