| CONTENTS | |
| 1. The Heretics and the Magazine | 13 |
| 2. Editorship | 18 |
| 3. Industrial Issues | 22 |
| 4. Philosophy, Theology, Psychology | 26 |
| 5. Women's Lib and Birth Control | 30 |
| 6. War-Time Cambridge | 35 |
| 7. Post-War Cambridge-Translation to Soho and Bloomsbury | 41 |
| 8. Ogden's Legacy to Me | 49 |
Evocative language which is employed primarily to produce effects by suggestion may (as is obvious in all poetry) be highly misleading if interpreted as though it had a scientific function. Thus the phrase “Significant Form” meaningless if we ask logically “significant of what ?” may be of value in giving the mind a certain direction, which may help to account for its appeal to certain readers.Here Ogden and Richards link up with their “Meaning of Meaning” philosophy and warnings against “Word Magic”. A further article in the same quarterly (signed I.A.R. and C.K.O.) demonstrates the link under the title “The Art of Conversation”. The article introduces the famous triangle, later reproduced in the first chapter of The Meaning of Meaning.
The Act of Thought is at the apex, Symbol and Referent at the two angles on the base of the triangle. Between the Act of Thought and the Referent there is a relation, and also between the Act of Thought and Symbol; but there is only an imputed relation along the base of the triangle between symbol and the thing referred to. Confusion had been caused by “the superstition that words are in [triangle chart page 48] some way parts of things or always imply things corresponding to . . .. that the base of the triangle is always filled in”. Thus beauty does not always imply the thing called significant form.This sort of analysis was to prove of wide application. To quote the concluding sentence of “The Art of Conversation”,
In all the main topics of discussion — Aesthetics, Ethics, Religion, Politics, Economics, Psychology, Sociology, History — the same types of defining relations occur, and thus a theoretical mastery of any one of them gives confidence in the attack upon the others.In this same issue of the first quarter of 1920, it is “T.L.” (Ogden’s at least fourth nom de guerre standing for “The Limit”), who discusses among other recent works some by Lowes Dickinson, H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. Russell, “safely installed in his chair in Pekin University”, is said to be “unmasked” by Max Eastman “as a mere bourgeois humanitarian professor”, but to be defended by “Miss D. W. Black of Girton College traversing Eastman’s strictures with characteristic controversial aplomb”. I quote theme early developments in Ogden’s writing, both con- Ogden as Editor and Polymath 49 uctive and quizzical, for three reasons — first, to illustrate the wide horizon yet consistency of his thinking; secondly, to mark a characteristic topicality in the application of his thinking, turning from international affairs to the peace-time discussions that were exercising Bloomsbury at that time on art and philosophy; and lastly, as befits an editor of individual memorials, to account for Ogden’s mental activities in the gap between the early Cambridge days to which my own and Dora Russell’s memories belong and the point where I. A. Richards’s begin. The Cambridge Magazine of this period certainly provides grounds for J. L. R. Anderson’s plea for reassessment, which closes this volume. I cannot, however, claim knowledge of Ogden apart from his writings during this early, or indeed the later, interwar era. Living in America, I returned to Cambridge in 1921 just as C.K. was leaving. After 1929 I was centred in Birmingham, and not being a London clubman (C.K. is said to have been a member of at least half-a-dozen), I saw too little of him in later life. So I gladly yield to others among his surviving friends for further memories. Taking my life as a whole, however, he was, I consider, the greatest man friend I have had. Of course I never used his first name; contrariwise I was occasionally addressed in letters as “Dear Flip”, though more often just “P.S.F.” At any rate, as I shall recount in the next section, he definitely influenced my thought more than anyone else did.
Value consists in QUALITIES (e.g. just hot or cold) or QUANTITIES (i.e. measured degrees of temperature). Characters, if not quantified, are referred to as ATTRIBUTES; if quantified, as VARIABLES.
The observer counts {{ Similar ITEMS which manifest with varying frequency {{ Various VALUES of one or more CHARACTERS
imply a coupling of two occurrences in the relation of cause and effect in that fatigue thus defined is a theory positing a whole process; it holds that a specified result is found associated with a specified set of conditions. But it is dangerous to assume before investigation that such a process actually takes place.I then quoted from my own Ph.D. thesis, which was very much of an Ogden model : “The use of the word fatigue by definition implies that existence of the very process that we are trying to demonstrate. The word in the earlier stages of argument, must be dropped altogether.”
Some ten years back, while changing a number of Americanisms into English for the International Library of Psychology I was unable to get away from the feeling that this foolish process was like putting wax lights back into a Club because certain old men had not got used to the electric system. But it was worse than a waste of time. From the point of view of an International Language it was dearly a step in the wrong direction.(2) The independent departmentalism of sociological languagerings me to the second impact of Ogden’s way of thinking on my view of the relation of economics with the other social sciences. The last two words in the title of the Statistical Method in Economics and Political Science is some indication of a plea for closer ties and, in Chapter IV of that book, I gave details of what I conceived to be the interrelations of the two disciplines. In his Cambridge Magazine reviews of books on economics, political science or social psychology and particularly in his appreciation of Jeremy Bentham’s standpoint (wider than that of his monolithic Utilitarian followers) Ogden was emphatically against the specialists:
Get in, get out, get over, get under, get across; and then — get busy.
Put in, put out, put over, put under, put across; and then — put wise.
In the same way that “get ready” has taken, or is taking, the place of “prepare”, “put wise” will one day come as naturally to our ears as “inform”, “orientate”, or even “tip the wink”.
It was Archbishop Whately, a divine full of Christian charity who said “The more I see of men, the more I like dogs” ; and for my part, the more I read of the older Benthamites (particularly of that intrepid, but somewhat monolithic ratiocinator, James Mill) the more I feel it essential that one should first have read the humorous and very human Bentham — even on such typically neoUtilitarian points as the practical value of the hedonic calculus.Unfortunately, modern economists and other social scientists have adopted the monolithic ratiocinating James Mill rather than the polylithic, all-in or, at least, more - in Bentham as a model. Though nearly all agree on the desirability of integration, most of them have departmentally “kept themselves to themselves” instead of getting together. I have indeed had to go on preaching (as well as, I hope, practising)** the needful integration of the social sciences throughout my life. At present sociology seems to be ignoring economics as much as economics ignores sociology.
| Contents | ||
|---|---|---|
| Notes on Contributors | vii | |
| Illustrations | viii | |
| PART A : INTRODUCTORY | 1 | |
| PART B : OGDEN AS EDITOR AND POLYMATH | 12 | |
| Cambridge 1909-1919 and its Aftermath. P. Sargant Florence | 13 | |
| A Voice of Reason in the First World War Martin and Eva Kolinsky | 56 | |
| "My Friend Ogden" Dora Russell | 82 | |
| Co-Author of the "Meaning of Meaning" I. A. Richards | 96 | |
| An Improbable Friendship Marjory Todd | 110 | |
| Talent Scout and Editor Lord Zuckerman | 122 | |
| PART C : THE INVENTION OF BASIC ENGLISH | 133 | |
| PART D : EXAMPLES OF BASIC ENGLISH | 177 | |
| PART E : C. K. OGDEN AS AUTHOR | 187 | |
| PART F : C. K. OGDEN : A PLEA FOR REASSESSMENT | 187 | |
| Appendix -- List of books edited by Ogden | 245 | |