Phenomenological Time, Historical Time, and The Writing of History

Mark E. Blum University of Louisville

Any historiographical theory requires a specificity of instances to enable its value

to be grounded in facts that all can deliberate. My historiographical contribution is a

contention that all human generations share among its populace several distinct historical

logics. While civilization changes, the human judgment that considers the past, the

present, and the possible future, operates within invariant pre-reflective organizational

categories that are inter-generational, indeed, seemingly permanent factors of the

judgment of homo sapiens. For purposes of my demonstration I choose several Tudor-

Stuart personalities and twentieth-century Tudor-Stuart historians. This is a purely

random selection for purposes of this essay; as one discerns in depth the thought of any

culture in any generation—all capture attention and interest. We will consider some

historical conflicts, both among the Tudor-Stuart personalities and the twentieth century

historians who study them, that are derived ultimately from the difference in the

respective ‘historical logics’.

Among the significant Tudor-Stuart thinkers, all of whom had both informal and

formal conceptions of history, we can discern with a reflective reading some weighty

metaphorical differences as each ponders the notions of what becomes, endures, or

changes in time:

Out of the old fields must grow the new corn (Edward Coke) .1

It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from superinducing and engrafting new things upon old (Francis Bacon). 2

How be yt his wytte and hys lernynge fynde a better waye, then not onely I (whyche am but a playne soule and can inuent no neweltyes, but am content to stande to the olde order and lawes), but also then all they, whyche for this

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realme in specyall, and for the whole chyrche of Cryst in generall, haue made those prouysyons of old: I neyther can nor wyll forbede any man to folowe hym. (Thomas More). 3

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York (Shakespeare). 4

At a glance, one is aware of how conceptions of change and duration differ among Coke,

Bacon, More, and Shakespeare, regarding the tempo, process, and determinism or

indeterminism of temporality and history. One sees in Coke’s articulation of a favorite

proverb a flow of time and events assumed to embrace everyone that are a continuity,

gradually changing within established forms. In Bacon a quantum is posed where new

forms interrupt the connectedness of the historical flux. Thomas More represents what

can be described as a continuum in historical judgment: a sequence of related events is

established according to the will of the perceiver that suggests a historical direction, yet

always with the recognition that others may envision a separate continuum of a differing

order in the same factual context. Shakespeare insists upon a dialectical movement

where through antitheses a new order is formed.

In essence, these are four differing ‘historical logics’ that order the particulars of

happenings into an event whose temporal implications differ. Each of the men surfaces

with his metaphorical aphorism what I will consider his “historical logic” or what can

also be termed his characteristic “event-structure.” Each of us has our favorite idiomatic

expressions, even aphorisms, arguably developed from typifying metaphors that enable

us to make sense of the world. What I will examine as our own immediate sense of

temporality, and through mature refinement, our historical reasoning, is surfaced by such

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‘informal’ linguistic expressions. Yet, these ‘informal’ expressions are themselves fruit

of a deeper logical structure which will be examined as ‘historical logic’.

In this essay, these Tudor-Stuart thinkers, as well as several twentieth century

historians who studied them, will be viewed as each having distinct “historical logics” by

which they structured events. Given the spatial constraints of an essay, I will examine in

depth only two Tudor-Stuart personalities in their respective historical logics, Edward

Coke—who will be seen as a “continuity” thinker, and Francis Bacon—who will be seen

as a “quantum” thinker. In my epistemological introduction to the concept of historical

logic, I will point out that there is a deeper, logical foundation for the nuanced differences

of the four historical logics that comprehend human thought––which I treat in my full-

length book,5 that of an “aggregate” formulation of an event, and that of what I term a

“pure quantum” organization. Coke was an “aggregative thinker” and Bacon a “pure

quantum” mind. Thus, I will offer a thorough presentation of the roots of all historical

thinking in this selection. The historians will be Geoffrey Elton, who shares with Coke

the historical logic of continuity, and one of his most distinguished students Arthur

Joseph Slavin, who shares with Bacon a quantum historical logic. Again, there is a

presentation of the “aggregative” and the “pure quantum” that underlie these more

nuanced historical logics. Elton and Slavin as twentieth century historians present an

interesting pairing. The teacher and the student developed a civil, but distinctly contrary

view of the Tudor-Stuart epoch that will enable me to depict the manner in which

historical writing reflects a personal historical logic that asserts itself in the face of even

rigorous cultural training. Each offered interpretations of the same Tudor-Stuart

personalities in their context, which enables me to consider how one ‘historical logic’

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perceives another, even across centuries. I will show how the historical logics I examine

are inter-generational, their cognitive bases recurring in their distribution among a

population continually in human experience

What do I mean by "logic", and why is this logic "historical"? I have a conception

of logic that is shared by Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and other contemporary

phenomenologists. Logic itself begins with the division of a field of perception into parts

and wholes that establish a quantitative order as well as dependency-independency relations

among these parts and wholes.6 Moreover, this initial division of the field of particulars into

part-whole relations creates temporality for the mind. Temporality is experienced as the

moving attention of the conscious mind which is directed by the sequential order of parts

and wholes and the relations of their dependence and independence.7 Husserl has called the

part-whole alignments of a field of particulars in judgment "temporal concretums" (1970, 2:

488). Each "temporal concretum" is a judgment about a state of affairs. Each judgment is

"history" in the most immediate sense of a temporal experience––as in the sentential

predication itself there can be seen syntactically a sequence of attentive moments, and

semantically a before, during, and after. [The ‘microhistorical’ nature of the sentence will be

analyzed and its method of clear discernment elucidated.] The syntax and semantics of the

sentential judgment generate in their constituting sequence and meaning temporal-spatial

relations that are the foundation of logic, because the order created enables higher order

relationships to be established such as causality.

The quantitative-qualitative, temporal-spatial division of a state of affairs within the

synchrony of the sentential judgment, and the diachronic, semantic development of this

‘micro-history’ sentence by sentence throughout the thought development that addresses the

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event(s) is akin to the diaeresis discussed by the Greek philosophers, a dividing of nature

"according to its natural joints."8 I will show how what seems a "natural joint" in an in-

common state-of-affairs differs among historical logics. Each of the four major historical

logics is a style of diaeresis with temporal implication as it constructs events according to a

logic of parts and wholes. Each style of historical judgment considers its analysis naturally

"objective". The resultant, differing temporal-spatial orders which can be seen in the same

state of affairs put into question the notion of one common "objectivity". Each historical

order can create its own objective set of facts, yet its temporal-spatial order does not exclude

the authority of the other logical orders. Complementary or overlapping histories can be an

outcome. One may speak of “multiple objectivities” whose varying configurations of the in-

common experience or attended person, place, or thing enable a broader understanding

analytically than the synthesis of one historical mind can offer. From a Kantian perspective,

each of our predications takes on the synthetic configuration of our inhering diaeresis, but

we are able a posteriori to analytically see and comprehend the argument of another

person’s diaeresis in its event-structure and argument.9

Language conveys to conscious perception the temporal-spatial order of parts and

wholes that form a foundational historical logic. While I will track the verbal language of

the historians and historical persons I study in this essay, one can find these same part-whole

configurations of dependency and independency in the pre-verbal, figural perception which

precedes verbal language in the infant,10 accompanying the maturing person throughout a

life of consciousness. I have written of the percept as temporal concretum with its

constituting temporal phases elsewhere.11 In effect, the perceptual moment configures what

is attended, guiding the sequence of attentive moments with the same part-whole alignment

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to be seen in the verbal predication, which one then may assert is an outgrowth of the

perceptual style of configuring an event. The verbal in its growing refinements over the

maturation of one’s language adheres, nonetheless, to its earliest figural and verbal part-

whole diaeretical pattern. Kant, Husserl, and modern psycholinguists assert that without

this part-whole division—in perceptual as well as verbal language—language itself would

be impossible.12 The selection of an appropriate grammar for communicating a state of

affairs requires the mind to have established an initial morphological differentiation of what

is judged. This individual proclivity is present even in the infant (Langer, 1986). As the

child matures, the language of the culture provides a grammar which will convey the

complex quantitative order with its dependencies and independencies and the temporal

implications of these relationships. The characteristic grammatical style I have discerned in

the sentences of the person that recurs in each sentence written communicates the logic of an

individual's pre-reflective diaeresis. This diaeresis is, as I have indicated, figural as well as

verbal. I will call this recurrent logical-grammatical pattern in a person's non-verbal and

verbal expression a 'micro-historical order' because of the temporal-spatial movement it

expresses.

The structure and evidence of phenomenological history: the temporal thought path and the non-temporal ‘fact’.

The ‘micro-historical’ moment is in each act of attending. Attention in human

awareness is with us every moment of a waking day. The movement of our attention is

ordinarily not an aspect of what we notice, rather the objects that capture our attention,

the persons, places, things, and so forth. The historical methodology I introduce whose

prominent tool is a stylistic examination of the syntax and semantics of sentential

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construction requires one to dwell upon ‘how’ we attend, noticing the infusion

semantically of a pattern of terms that orient us to a special preference in change and

duration, of past, present, and future. In attending, we know durations, breaks, and

various movements of our attention. Our attentional movement creates temporality in the

characteristic sequences of how we organize what we regard. Even before the sentential

organization of predicating what is known, there is a perceptual ‘attending.’ This

diaeretical pattern establishes what the temporal sequence of knowing the event will be,

and thus establishes the foundation for the higher-level conceptions that the person will

seek intuitively to find an accord with what is attended. Past becomes present as well as

expectational future in a distinct design that inheres in our perspectival understanding.

Our praxis is so informed and guided by this temporal pattern of regard, even as we enter

the temporal structures given or asserted to us by others.

Kant recognized that attention creates the inner sense, and in that creation the

sequence of what is known, and with that sequence, temporality itself: “In every act of

attention the understanding determines the inner sense, in accordance with the

combination which it thinks, to that inner intuition which corresponds to the manifold in

the synthesis of understanding (Critique of Pure Reason, 1965, p. 168, note [B 157]).”

The inner sense is temporality, as Kant makes clear in sentences that precede this

passage: “For all inner perceptions we must derive the determination of lengths of time

or of points of time from the changes which are exhibited to us in outer things, and that

the determinations of inner sense have therefore to be arranged as appearances in time in

precisely the same manner in which we arrange those of outer sense in space (ibid., p.

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168 [B 156].” What I will demonstrate is that attention is given its compass by a pre-

reflective structure of regarding that is its inhering distinctive personal historical logic.

These temporal increments are articulated in a judgment by phrases and clauses,

which Husserl calls ‘time-stretches,’ which culminate in a ‘temporal concretum,’ that is

the sentential judgment as a whole (Husserl, 1970, 2: 484-489, 507-522). A

phenomenological understanding of historical experience appreciates that phenomenal

time as well as the larger abstractions of societal time are generated by the consciousness

of the perceiver. The language of the perceiver constructs the state-of-affairs, i.e. event,

‘time-stretch’ by ‘time-stretch.’ The summation of what the event is and means is the

‘temporal concretum’ of the entire judgment. How one attends the phases or ‘time-

stretches’ of an experience or in one’s reflection upon an experience—known in person

or in one’s inquiry at a distance—can be demonstrated, as I argue, as a style of knowing.

As Husserl, Gottlob Frege, his contemporary, saw the design of sentential judgments

in the alignment of its syntax and semantics as the distinctive path of “thought” which

differentiated how a person cognized reality. Frege recognized the movement of attention

that determines a “state-of-affairs” as a distinctive path of thinking which may differ

among individuals even as the same conclusion is reached. Appreciation of the

understandings and insights of an individual thinker that eventuate in a conclusion that

may be shared with others must be discerned in the entire process of the thought itself in

all phases of the grammatical judgment, if the distinctive contribution to understanding of

each individual is to be appreciated.. Frege’s insights, derived from mathematical

thinking, were recognized as analogous to any thought process.13 The path of a thought

can employ differing event-structures that manipulate the same or similar sets of facts

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and arrive at the same conclusion, while exhibiting differing relationships in the process

of coming to that conclusion. The thought paths between 3+ 4 = 7 and 32 – 2 = 7 are

different, even as the same numerical systems, and the identical sum (or state-of-affairs)

is arrived at by each thought path.14 Each thought path offers a different ‘sense’ of what

transpires; differing phases of a mathematical operation offer differing perspectives, even

as the same sum may be realized. Although a mathematician, Frege understood a

mathematical operation as a grammatical expression that consisted of parts whose

semantic and syntactical linkages completed what he termed one’s ‘sense’ of perceptual

or ideational experience.15 In what we normally consider a historical judgment, the

thought process of what is attended may take up the same facts, and conclude with the

same summation, but the wording can indicate differing trains of thought, differing ways

of attaching and deliberating evidence to what may be agreed upon.

These trains of thought are the historical logics of, respectively, continuity,

quantum, continuum, or dialectic. There are two thought paths that actually underlie

even these diaeretical patterns—the ‘aggregative’ and what I will term here a ‘pure’

quantum. These more foundational configurative diaereses of the aggregative and the

pure quantum seem to indicate an earlier evolutionary stage of mind; the nuanced

variations of them—the continuity and continuum forms of the aggregative and the

quantum and dialectical forms of the pure quantum are recognizable variants, an

assumption based upon their syntactic and semantic elements (as well as their non-verbal

part-whole configurative designs). These more fundamental thought paths were

discerned by Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1965, p. 204 [A 170, B 212).

Kant indicated that in examining the a priori thought-forms that were “anticipations of

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perception,” two ways of constellating a state-of-affairs were to be recognized in any

address of an event—one was called the aggregative constellation, the other the quantum.

He writes in the Critique of Pure Reason that a ‘mark’ of fine silver is composed of

thirteen thalers. It is a quantum thus perceived, that is an immediate conceptual

interdependence, an abstract manifold that coheres its material evidence. On the other

hand, seeing the thirteen thalers in as a summation of each individual thaler in its separate

presence is the configuration of an aggregate, an incremental sequence “such an

aggregate is not generated by continuing without break (the) productive synthesis of

certain kind, but through repetition of an ever-ceasing synthesis (1965, [A 170, B 212]).”

Kant did not further investigate the grammar of judgment for the distinctions of

how an aggregative or a quantum organization of attention are articulated

grammatically, but Edmund Husserl sketched such a study. Husserl was also a

mathematician in his early thought as he discerned the temporality generated by the

sentential judgment in its grammatical forms. Mathematical thought and its symbol

systems enabled a symbolic logic that could track grammatical expressions as they

formed what Husserl would call ‘meaning-patterns’. Husserl saw the science of

meanings as necessitating a new inquiry into grammar that can expose the elementary

cognitive operations that are conveyed by grammatical expression. Grammar is the

handmaiden of thought, and its rules of expression are foundationally, if not in all its

mechanisms of articulation, rules that stem from thought. Husserl challenged his

contemporaries, and, of course, those who came after, to determine “the primitive

meaning-patterns” which generated the essentially different points-of-view that were

potentially co-present among observers in the in-common state-of-affairs (Husserl, 1970,

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2: 518-519). Determining these patterns leads to the ability of the historical analyst to see

“multiple objectivities” in the reports and action patterns of past lives. Ironically,

Husserl’s search, which included his own sense of Kant not offering sufficiently refined

tools of analysis to capture the “meaning-patterns,” could have been developed by him

with attention to the aggregative/quantum distinction of Kant which provides the essential

1 Endnotes

? As cited in W.S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1937), 478-479. Holdsworth writes: “’Out of the old fields must grow the new corn,’ was the favourite proverb of (Coke)—out of the old authorities in the law must come the new rules and principles needed to guide the acitivities of all men in the English state.”

2 Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 46 (Aphorism XXXI).

3 Thomas More, The Apology in The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 9, ed. J.K.B. Trapp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 168 (Chapter 49, lines 15-21).

4 William Shakespeare, Richard III in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 576 (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 1-2).

5 See Mark E. Blum, Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic: The Foundational Logics of Western Historical Thinking (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 85-104. Further reference is to this text and edition.

6.. Immanuel Kant discusses the foundational significance of part-whole division in Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1968) under "The Axioms of Intuition", pp. 197-201, A 163, B 203 - A166, B 207. Further reference is to this edition. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay, 2 volumes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), especially 2: 435-492 "Investigation Three: On the Theory of Parts and Wholes". Further references to these editions will be cited parenthetically..

7.. Kant explores describes the temporal flow engendered by the quantitative pattern in Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 198-199, A 163, B 204; and, pp. 208-209, A 177, B 219. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2: 482-489, where 'parts and wholes' are discussed as the pre-reflective quantitative orders that establish temporal continuities and discontinuities. 8.. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms, A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University, 1967), pp. 34-36.

9 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 119 [B 114-B116].

10 See Jonas Langer, The origins of logic, one to two years (New York: Academic Press, 1986).

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difference in paths of meaning-formation in thought. Nuanced differences exist, formed

over the evolution of human cognition, but they are traceable to the more foundational

difference between the aggregative and the quantum modes of structuring an event in

experience in the grammar of cognition (cf. Blum, 2006).

11 See Mark E. Blum, “The Historical Logic of Non-Verbal Expression in Everyday Life and the Arts: The Perceptual Foundation of the Precept,” in Analecta Husserliana, Volume CVI (2010): pp. 39-69.

12.. Kant does not discuss the relationship between grammar and logic in detail, but does state that the rules of grammar are a reflection of the a priori relations of logic as they constitute temporal-spatial experience. Grammar for Kant is always incomplete in its grasp of logic's potential. Cultural improvement includes the progress in fashioning a grammar that reveals more of logic's implicit existence. See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1950), p. 70.

Edmund Husserl in the Fourth Investigation of his Logical Investigations sketches a "logico-grammatical theory of forms" that provides a new approach to the investigation of the origin of grammar and its meaning. Husserl speaks of "primitive forms"--categorically discrete sets of semantics and syntax that each convey distinctive time-constituting interrelationships of part and whole. He suggests that a new analysis of grammar can reveal these "primitive forms" and the temporalities they suggest. The result of this analysis presents grammar not solely as the communication of a literal meaning--a predication about a subject, but also as a means of communicating the historical order conveyed by the state of affairs. See Logical Investigations 2: 518-522 (Par. 13). His sketch of the such an analysis informs my own analyses.

Jonas Langer, a contemporary psycholinguist interested in the child's development of logic and language has established empirical evidence of the precedence of part-whole discrimination in the process of language acquisition; Langer, The origins of logic, one to two years (New York: Academic Press, 1986).

The many writings of the philosopher and linguist Anton Marty expose the lively debate over the congruence and differences between logical thought and grammar; see, for example, "Über das Verhältnis von Grammatik und Logik," Symbolae Pragenses, Festgabe der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Alterthumskunde in Prag. 42. Versammlung Deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Wien 1893 (Prag, 1893), pp. 99-126.

13 See Gottlob Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, trans. Hans Kaal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 151-158.

14 See Frege’s letter to Bertrand Russell, December 28, 1902 in The Frege Reader, ed. Michael Beaney (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 255.

15 See Frege’s discussion of the role played by grammar in creating the paths of “thought” in

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Hayden White, who F.R. Ankersmit recently characterized as a Kantian who has

not yet been properly examined as one,16 wrote of this deeper, pre-reflective organization

of the structure of events in his major work of Metahistory: “In order to figure ‘what

really happened’ in the past, therefore, the historian must first prefigure as a possible

object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents. This pre-

figurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive and pre-critical in the economy of

the historian’s own consciousness….it is constituted not only of a domain which the

historian can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. It is also constitutive of the

concepts he will use to identify the objects that inhabit that domain and to characterize the

kinds of relationships they can sustain with one another.”17 I would like you to picture a

mansion now—a museum, if you will, of a new historical reality, that of the multiple

objectivities which co-exist at any time. Its main floor exhibits the literal language of

historical events as recounted by the great historical thinkers, each separate room a

grouping of these thinkers by their tropic discourse. This main floor in its many

exhibiting rooms is the achievement of Hayden White. Then, climb the staircase to the

next grand floor, that second floor housing in separate rooms the philosophical ideas that

have been spawned by the intellectual insight that tropes have enabled as the youth

became a man. This second floor is the work of Stephen C. Pepper, who called each

grouping of argument-forms he discerned by prose terms that roughly correspond to

White’s discernment of the more poetic language of tropes.18 White went deeper than

Pepper, even as he was beholden to him. White’s synchronic tropic grammar may

generate the diachronic argument-forms of Pepper. But, there is a basement workshop

Einleitung in die Logik (August, 1906) in Nachgelassene Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969), 201-218.

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that houses the grammatical primitive forms whose enérgeia is used in the shaping of the

ergon housed on the floors above ground, chamber by chamber. Enérgeia is the

equivalent of Aristotle’s formal cause as a process, and ergon is the equivalent of his

final cause as a finished end. 19 The enérgeia of grammar in both its non-verbal figural

forms and verbal forms generate a distinct entelechy towards the finished concepts of

understanding. I work in this basement. For every argument-form there is a trope “that

characterizes the kinds of relationships” its entelechy suggests, and for every conceptual

argument and the trope that engenders its purview, there are non-verbal and verbal

grammatical elements that generate the proto-historical logic that gradually is refined

into the higher levels of grammatical and ideational abstraction with maturation. The

historical logic and accordant praxis of a thinker relies upon this maturing, developmental

base of his or her own thought. This stylistic ideation begins to find its articulation from

one’s earliest years, guided by the a priori constellations of the person’s mind from

infancy.20

The grammatical evidence of the aggregative and quantum bases of the historical logics of continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic

Philosophers of language have identified grammatical stylistic habits that

differentiate how a sentential judgment reflects either the quantum or the aggregative

establishment of facts and their organization. The quantum predication is realized with a

‘nondissective’ grammar.21 ‘Non-dissective’ means that a general state-of-things is

communicated by choice of grammar, a state-of-affairs that is more significant than any

particular moment of it. The dialectical logic, and there are several forms of it, rely upon

nondissective grammar to impart the comprehending whole—which we know of in what

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I term the orthodox dialectic, of thesis, antitheses, and synthesis. The quantum is also

present in several forms.

. The aggregative predication is realized with a ‘dissective’ grammar.22 A

‘dissective’ grammar stipulates, separates, i.e. dissects a state-of-affairs into increments.

There are several derived historical logical forms from the aggregative constellation.

One is that of continuity, where a conceptual whole is posed, much like the quantum, but

it is composed of isolated instances that function as wholes on their own. To comprehend

the difference between the quantum whole and that of the aggregative whole, I have

discussed the philosophical argument between Gottlob Frege, who as a quantum thinker

16 “White’s ‘New Neo-Kantianism,” in Re-Figuring Hayden White, ed. Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domaríska, and Hans Kellner (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 34-53.

17 Hayden White, Metahistory, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 30-31.

18 Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses, A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942).

19 F.E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms, A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967), pp.55-56, 61-62.

20 See, in addition to the aforementioned Jonas Langer, The Origins of Logic, One to Two Years (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1986,), 16ff., L. Bloom, Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Research monograph no. 59 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1970); L. Bloom, P. Lightbown, and L. Hood, Structure and variation in child language. Monographs of the society for research in child development, 40, no. 2 (Chicago: Chicago University, 1975); L. Bloom and L. Hood, What, when, and how about why: a longitudinal study of early expressions of causality. Monographs of the society for research in child development, 44, no. 6 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979).

See, also, Carol Chomsky, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10 (Cambridge: M.I.T., 1969), p. 1. Jean Piaget’s stage of “formal reasoning” corresponds to the maturation of this syntactical ability; see Piaget, The construction of reality in the child (New York: Basic Books, 1954). My research into children ages 12 and 13 is valuable in seeing the presence and ideational effects of a cognitive orientation; Blum, Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic: The Foundational Logics of Western Historical Thinking, (New York: Peter Langer, 2006), pp. 439-475.

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developed set theory, and Bertrand Russell who opposed set theory with the additive

integration of separate wholes (Blum, 2006, pp. 94-104). Another form of the aggregative

I term a continuum historical logic, where wholes are but nominative place-holders for an

argument, and never being seen as substantial. Only discrete individuals of person, place,

or thing are deemed as real. The simple sentential judgment “The snow fell” is a non-

dissective grammatical articulation; “mass nouns,” such as ‘snow’ impart a generalized

qualitative state-of-affairs, without the specificity of the ‘ever-ceasing synthesis (as Kant

phrases it),’ which isolates a person, place, or thing, as articulated by the aggregative

thinker. “The snowflakes fell” is a dissective articulation; the count noun of

“snowflake” making possible incremental address of the event. For example, the noun

phrase “Nansen, who explored the Arctic”…is nondissective. A non-restrictive clause

impels Nansen into a continuous magnitude of discovery. The noun phrase “The arctic

explorer Nansen” is dissective in its assignment of a nominal property that is discrete in

its static adherence to the subject noun An aggregative thinker might also say ”Nansen,

the arctic explorer,”… using a restrictive phrase to give his character its determinate

property.

Some of the grammatical differences that differentiate the quantum/nondissective

from the aggregative/dissective vision are:

• The individualities) that constitute the quantum cognitive orientation in the sentential

judgment are non-dissectively stated through an attribution that encourages the vision of a

continuous magnitude where the parts are either not clearly distinguished from one another,

or are implied to be in a system of relations: a preference for non-count and plural nouns,

21 See Eli Hirsch, Essence and Identity in Identity and Individuation, ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York: New York University Press, 1971), pp. 45 ff.

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indefinite articles, the weak sense of "the", or determiners such as "some", "many", "few",

"every", and predicate adjectives that articulate a general condition. Non-restrictive phrases

or clauses carry the meaning of the subject into a predication that imparts a generalized,

open-ended state-of-affairs.

• The individualities that constitute the aggregative cognitive orientation in the sentential

judgment are dissectively stated through an attribution that encourages the vision of a ‘ever-

ceasing synthesis.’ Distinct moments in time or locations in space impart with dissective

specificity through preference for definite articles, pre-modifying adjectives, adverbs that

are specific in terms of time, place, and manner, and count and proper nouns. Restrictive

phrases or clauses stipulate a quality, a particular condition of a time, place, or manner.

The historical logic of continuity: G.R. Elton and Edward Coke

On Continuity Logic

The stance towards history that can be termed continuity has these conceptual premises about any

event in time:

Each moment of a historical event is an instance of an overarching issue, institution, law,

etc. which individuals contribute to in their interaction. Nonetheless, each individual who

participates in a historical episode is distinct and separate. History expresses a dual reality in each

moment: that of the life path of each individual, and that of the higher reality which encompasses the

interaction of these individuals.

The overarching realities as institutions, values, geopolitical settings, etc. usually exist

before and after the life path of the individual begins and ends. History as manifested by these

overarching realities depends upon the interactions of the participants. Nonetheless, the continuing

22 See Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), pp. 54 ff.

17

history of the overarching realities gives their presence significance as a final cause. The final cause

provides motive and direction for the individual decisions and actions.

The individuals are relatively free in each moment to choose their direction and manner of

engagement. Circumstances may determine their options, but the ultimate decision to act in the flux

of time is contingent upon the individual will.

The individuals that interact in a moment each come from differing personal histories and

meet at a crossroads of their separate existences, as it were. In their interaction which generates the

historical episode, a shared time coexists with the separate time each individual possesses. The

shared time is lent by the overarching realities that inform and set boundaries for the culture of the

participants. Individual time is recognized because of the separateness of each individual's life path.

The separate time, however, is measured by the general standards of the overarching reality, such as

that of linear chronology.

One can predict with some probability how the individuals who generate the historical

episode will interact, and the consequences of these interactions for each of them as well as for the

overarching reality to which they contribute. The reason for this relative certainty lies in the

"properties" carried by each agent and patient in the historical moment. There are predictable actions

associated with the properties brought to a situation which are linked in some lawful way to the

overarching reality--for example, the psychology of persons can be understood within the social-

psychological dynamics of institutions which have arisen from constants in human intercourse.

The properties brought to a time and place are conceived as categorical essences. Whether

human traits or Aristotelian topics, they persist through every differing temporal-spatial moment.

Objectivity is attributable to experience by dint of these properties. There is then an a-historical

18

quality to the historical experience of continuity thinkers in the sense of the sameness of the

properties over time, even when they are assumed to be in ever different manifestations. This a-

historical sense is largely sublimated into the ascription of objective properties. These unchanging

properties, expressed especially in the modifying adjectives and qualifying adverbs that individuate

and locate persons and things in their historical moment, are always expressed in the flux of

changing historical experience--thus, never known a-historically.23 However, the very notion of

continuity is enhanced by the sameness of the properties. To some extent the awareness of the

overarching reality which is an aegis of every particular moment lends a sense of permanence, but

the overarching reality is also moving in time through the individual realities that are guided by it.

Thus, an event in "English history" is temporal both in its particularity and in its general flow.

The passage of history is an incremental continuity. Historical episodes that are entailed

by the same overarching realities contribute to a continuity in that they are assumed to succeed one

another in a linear fashion, remaining the same in their essential properties. The separate

individualities that coexist in one encounter are also conceived as having life paths formed by

successive interactions that continue with the same essential tenor. Historical episodes are

incremental for the individual histories and the history of the overarching realities in that their

successive times and places can be specified as points in the continuity of their respective life paths.

23. One can comprehend the categorical properties as independent essences associated with an entity through the classical Greek concept of methexis. The historical logic of continuity sees independent entities coalesce with a property at a specific moment in time. Both the property and the entity have separate career paths, the property a universal that is neither augmented or diminished in its association with the entity at a specific moment in time. The 'intersection' '' between the property and the entity which is expressed logically-grammatically in sentences of continuity thinkers is that momentary coalescence.

Each historical logic has its own form of methexis to integrate what is normally known as traits or characteristics, usually carried by adjectival or adverbial grammatical constituents, with the subject wholes. Continuum logic will also pose categorical universals in a momentary coalescence with an entity in an 'intersectional' meeting. Quantum and dialectical logics, on the other hand, will see each moment as a total situation. The properties participate alongside the entities as dependent moments of that situation as a whole. The dialectical and quantum vision of methexis is the kind of relation described in Plato's analysis of this state of affairs; see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 136-138.

19

There is a telic direction for the history of the overarching realities and the individual

participants, but not a telos, given the enduring properties possessed by them. History is telic in that

all participants seek to express their respective natures, and that collective agreements arrived at over

time must be considered in their inertial presence. None of these histories converge towards a goal

conceived as beyond them, however. Rather, the individuals and the overarching realities continue

to realize their essential properties in ever new episodes.

A style of historical judgment that is characterized as 'continuity' reflects the awareness and

expression of a greater totality than that being judged in the moment. The greater totality precedes

the events considered, is the aegis under which the current moment transpires, and is often imputed

to be a goal or terminus that will be the outcome of the historical moment. The greater totality is in

its most extensive sense space and time as objective dimensions in which all events have ever

transpired. Continuity exists in temporal-spatial relations because of this one objective spatio-

temporal totality in which all things occur in the universe. Spatially, each discrete point, can be

located in this greater constant. There are other "fields" which contain the present event nested

within this greater unity. Continuity in historical judgment benefits the culture in securing a constant

background and foundation for single moments of temporal-spatial change. It presumes the

existence of a reality not immediately the subject of observation or deliberation.

Temporally, each moment can be plotted as an increment in a linear progression of

moments. Human relations, for example, have certain characteristic outcomes. Nonetheless, there

is an open-endedness to the telic direction. No event necessarily has to follow the linear progression

that has been its ancestor. There is room for accident and change in conceiving historical events, a

'probability' of certain future constellations will be derived from the greater reality that has existed.

G. R. Elton was a continuity thinker. I will discuss how the temporal framework of

what is "Tudor-Stuart" was conceived by him in accord with this distinctive historical

logical purview. I will counterpoint his intellectual perspective with a Tudor-Stuart

20

personality, Edward Coke, whose continuity logic strongly influenced how law in Stuart

society was conceived. The parallel in the structure of their sentential judgments will be

replicated in the conceptual parallels of their historical vision.

For easier reference I repeat the logical-grammatical characteristics of the sentential

judgment articulated by the continuity thinker:

1. A moment in time or an occasion in a specific place imparted with dissective specificity. Definite articles, adjectives, and adverbs that characterize time, place, and manner are used to convey the bases for an incremental moment within the larger temporal or spatial universe.

2. The specific moment or occasion will be stated as part of a greater spatial or temporal reality (which by inference begins and continues beyond this instance).Example: "his speech on July 4 was in the spirit of the Constitution..." or "The king of England visited India...".

3. Stative verbs (usually infinitives, copulars, and intransitives, verbs of being or having, so-called middle verbs and auxiliary verbs) convey an extended duration and continuity for the action denoted.

4. Nominalization and individualization: nouns dominate semantics, and in particular count and proper nouns. These types of nouns further greater specification through modification. This enables a clear picture of the differing individualities whose paths cross in a historical episode. Each person, place, or thing that participates in the specific moment is particularized through articles, differentiators, adjectives, and specifying adverbs.

5. Property-oriented perspective: adjectives, relative and nonrelative clauses, prepositions, and other grammatical ploys attribute properties to the separate parts and wholes that share the specific episode. 6. Typification: a conventional language is used to impart the state of affairs, appealing rhetorically to a common, shared objective universe.

7. Loose syntax (polysyndeton): creates logopoetic, phanopoetic and myelopoietic space for a more thorough focus upon individual entities and the variations in their actions and/or properties.

8. Pre- and/or post-states explicitly stated or inferred by comparison: indicating incremental change, yet continuity.

21

G.R. Elton in circumscribing that which is "Tudor” reflects both in his philosophy

of history, and in the characteristic sentences that carry this vision, the traits of the

continuity thinker:

(1) 1485 is the beginning of Tudor rule, and 1603 the end of it, and since the dates so conveniently circumscribe the life of one dynasty they have proved long-lived illusions. (2) In the history of England nothing decisive happened in either 1485 or 1603. (3) It may be natural to contrast 'the Tudors' with 'the Yorkists' who came before them and 'the Stuarts' who followed them but once one can free oneself of these schematic dynastic preoccupations and look at events and people individually, one soon discovers that there are points of more profound significance in the sixteenth century than the accession of Henry VII or the death of Elizabeth. (4) But it is better to accept these old categories and make them do new work than attempt to set up new categories which will only create new confusions and quarrels....(5) But let us remember that the potentialities for change contained in so long a period as a hundred and twenty years are not lessened by the simple device of giving those years a family name.24

The passage imparts the continuity thinker's sense of constant, incremental change,

preservation of the typical, yet awareness of distinct individual differences that contribute

to the common reality. Each of the above sentences reflect the eight logical-grammatical

criteria. Note the dominance of nouns in each sentence, and the particularization of each

by adjective phrase and specifying preposition. Note also the overarching reality which

entails these diverse particulars. In sentence (1) "the life of one dynasty" entails "Tudor

rule" and its sub-species, the years 1485 and 1603. In (2) "the history of England" entails

the same years. In sentences (3), (4), and (5) the entailing overarching realities are the

explicit or implicit "us" who exercise the diverse acts of consciousness which discover 24. G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 2nd ed.(London: Metheun, 1974), vii-viii. The numbering of the sentences my addition for the purpose of textual discussion. Elton's key works on the character of the Tudor era, besides the above, are The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1953); Policy and Police, The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1972); Reform and Renewal, Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1973); Reform and Reformation, England 1509-1558 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1977); The Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1986); Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Papers and Reviews, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1974-1992. Further reference to these editions of the texts are in parentheses.

22

properties. In each of these sentences the entailing 'greater whole' is formulated in a

manner that suggests a continuity beyond the particulars studied, be it the life of dynasties

or the interpreter.

While Elton brings into question the kinds of properties that might define the

existence of either Tudor or Stuart rule, the semantics of each sentence imply that it is the

changing categorical properties that are the medium of determining the actual nature of

these dynasties. Categories such as the "end" or the "beginning", or if an event is

"decisive" or not, or if an event is "a point of profound significance" are as much

categorical properties as the general--and according to Elton 'indefinite'--categories "Stuart"

or "Tudor". The stative verbs in each sentence help establish the enduring quality of these

categorical appreciations.

Although continuity is the pervasive logic of Elton, those familiar with his writings

may think first of his thesis that there was a "revolution" in Tudor society promoted by

Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s. Elton's early coining of the term "revolution" reflected the

continuity thinker's emphasis upon the individuality of cultural achievement, but

achievement in the name and under the aegis always of overarching realities (1973, 158-

159). Elton sees Cromwell as a man dedicated to converting the wealth of the Church to

national purposes, curbing the problem of unemployment in the Kingdom, and generally

rationalizing the government for the good of the commonwealth. Cromwell is depicted as

an effective administrator who knew how to reframe continuities in English society in the

service of significant reform: "Continuity and law were the wisely chosen poles which

carried the banner inscribed reform and renewal (1973, 160)."

23

Edward Coke's approach to English law reflects the same philosophy of history,

and the same logical-grammatical style of expressing it, as Elton. Elton's remarks on the

use of established categories --"But it is better to accept these old categories and make them

do new work than attempt to set up new categories which will only create new confusions

and quarrels"--captures Coke's decision to integrate the several distinct bodies of English

law into the authority of the common law. W. S. Holdsworth emphasizes the 'continuity'

Coke achieved by 'making old categories do new work' in his history of English law: "It is

therefore very probable that, if all the other rivals of the common law had been equally

successful, the English legal system would have been split into many fragments. Coke's

writings were largely instrumental in saving English law from this fate; for, if he had not

restated and adapted its principles to modern needs, even the victory of the Parliament

could hardly have enabled it to gain so decisive a victory of its rivals.".25 Coke articulates

this vision of continuity in his Proeme introducing the second part of the Institutes with this

sentence:

We in this second part of the Institutes, treating of the ancient and other statutes have been enforced almost of necessity to cite our ancient authors, Bracton, Britton, the Mirror, Fleta, and many other records, never before published in print, to the end the prudent reader may discern what the common law was before the making of every of those statutes, which we handle in this work, and thereby know whether the statute be introductory of a new law, or declaratory of the old, which will conduce much to the true understanding of the text it selfe.26

In this sentence one sees the plethora of nouns, the modifying adjectives which

differentiate them, the polysyndeton which sets off separates entities, the stative verbs

which impart enduring acts and states, and the reference to pre- and post-states which give

25. W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 2nd ed., Volume V (London: Metheuen & Co., 1945) 492. Further reference to this text and edition is in parentheses.

26. Edward Coke, The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, Vol. I, (Buffalo, N.Y.: William S. Hein, 1986) A7.

24

the state of affairs deliberated by the text its temporal flux as well as its continuity. The

notion of the governing whole is located both in the overarching "text it selfe" and "the

true understanding (of it)"--both of which constituted by a comprehension of the constantly

changing relationships of the parts--in this instance, the categories of the common law.

Elton's vision of historical movement parallels Coke's vision of the incremental

transformation of the common law--each impelled and structured by the logical-

grammatical style that informs the thought. Elton writes:

History treats fundamentally of the transformation of things (people, institutions, ideas, and so on) from one state into another....history deals in movement from state A to state B.27

This notion of flux--"from one state into another"--imparts to events a frieze-like

immobility that stills motion while representing it. The logic of categories and its vehicle,

the grammar of nominalization, are the instruments for this notion of 'states' that endure and

gradually transform by the augmenting and loss of properties. Categorical language seeks

to preserve a continuity and commonality in depicting reality. Institutional realities are

created by this categorical vision because categories stress the properties that are common

to diverse particulars, and the consequent commonality is the leaven of institutional

activity. David Starkey, a Tudor historian who is a continuum thinker, differentiates

himself from Elton by characterizing Elton's vision as "institutional" history.28 Elton, who

evidently fulfilled Kant's notion of the genius by becoming fully aware of the regulative

principles governing his intuitive grasp of historical order, remarks on his preference for

27. G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967) 11. Further reference to this text and edition is in parentheses..

28. David Starkey, The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London and New York: Longman, 1987), 2.

25

categorical sameness and the 'institutionalization' of the myriad differences that emerge in

events:

As for history's preoccupation with the particular, that must be seen in its proper light....No historian really treats all facts as unique; he treats them as particular. He cannot--no one can--deal in the unique fact, because facts and events require reference to common experience, to conventional frameworks, to (in short) the general before they acquire meaning (1967, 11).

Thus, when Elton looks at a particular set of data, such as the existence of the Privy

Chamber in Tudor era, he is drawn towards the Tudor historian Neville Williams's

understanding that links it to the institutional development of the political party. Individual

acts must find a subsumption under a plausible institutional aegis. He is sympathetic with

raising the arbitrary, personal nature of human encounter in the Privy Chamber to a

categorical system of relations.29 He refrains from agreement with Williams only on the

grounds Max Weber applies to claims of extended continuity--the adequacy of the assertion

requires facts that may not be available, even though the notion itself is coherent and likely.

The “lived experience” and judgments of Elton and Coke are readily recognized as

derived from their characteristic diaeresis of states-of-affairs. Both Elton and Coke were

continuity thinkers. The continuity thinker's quantitative pattern of parts and whole,

symbolically expressed, is:

[Cn(pqr)Bn(pqr)An(pqr)]: 30

where Cn and Bn are intersecting parts governed by An. 'Pqr' are differentiators that individuate both

parts and wholes. The order conveyed by these grammatical features in the recurring diaeresis of the

sentential judgment generates the temporal experience that is carried by the continuity thinker in

every episode of judgment. The part-whole design of this sentence will correspond as a continuity

logic to the general formula:29. G. R. Elton, "Presidential Address, Tudor Government: The Points of Contact," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1976) 227.

26

The essential relations of parts and whole that generate the temporal concretum of continuity

are the '' intersection and the '' entailment or inclusion signs. The entailment sign makes 'An' a

whole that is to some degree comprised of the intersection of 'Bn' and 'Cn'. Had 'BnCn' coalesced

with 'An' completely, this would have expressed a quantum vision where 'AnBnCn' (see below in

discussion of Slavin and Bacon). As a time stretch design, 'CnBnAn' generates the aspect of

continuity because an overarching field of reality is established within whose domain the an

incremental moment 'BnCn' exists without exhausting the field. Other incremental moments are

implied as possible. The horizon of a future emerges and thus also a past. All will transpire as

increments of the continuous field of 'An'. The individual careers of these increments ‘Bn’ and ‘Cn’

have taken them into this common moment. But, in a larger or simply another scheme of things,

they have other aspects of their existence which are not yet shown. Thus, the state of affairs of the

individualities 'Bn' and 'Cn' also generate a sense of future and past temporal-spatialities. Continuity

for the individualities 'Bn' and 'Cn' is generated by the implied career paths of their respective

totalities.

I select sentences from major works by Elton and Coke over the career of their

thought with the guide of a random number table to demonstrate the recurrence of this

pattern in every sentence written by these men.31 The synchronic recurrence of the logical-30 The use of brackets and parentheses in symbolic expressions follows the standard usage of Hans Reichenbach, Elements of Symbolic Logic (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 105, 147, and 237, in Reichenbach's discussion of "closed expressions." See also Rudolf Carnap's Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications, 1958, 7, in his discussion of brackets and parentheses is in accord with Reichenbach.

For models of the correlation and juxtaposition of grammar with their symbolic value, see Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1987), and a discussion of this method of notation in James D. McCawley, Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic* *but were ashamed to ask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 87ff. Further reference to these texts and editions.

31. Random numbers are taken from William Mendenhall, Dennis D. Wackerly, and Richard L. Scheaffer, Mathematical Statistics with Applications, 4th edition (Boston: PWS-Kent, 1990) 785 (Table 12). The first digit of line 1, column 1 will provide the page; the second digit of line 1, column 2 will provide the sentence number on that page. The resulting selection is page 1, sentence 5.

27

grammatical pattern in each sentence will be the a priori guide to the diachronic

development of a point of view about any state of affairs.

Elton (1955):32

A period of war extending over nearly a century and a half was bound to leave a profound mark, though even by contemporary standards England suffered little in the fighting.

[Bip [sa A period of…extending over nearly a century and a half [∙ Ci[sb (it) was bound to leave a profoundp mark [Ai [sc war [Bj [se in the fighting [∙ Cj [sf England suffered little [⊂Ajp [sg though even by contemporaryp standardsAj]]]]]]]]]]]]]].

In the above sentence there are two complete clauses, each having the structure of a totality

containing two intersecting parts. The intersecting parts mix properties that in this

specified state of affairs adhere to the totality. Note that the parts 'Ci' and 'Bi', 'Cj' and 'Bj'

are in the properties they convey merely a phase or aspect of the totalities rather than

instantiating the whole in that moment as we will see with the quantum thinker. The

totalities are 'Ai' and 'Aj'--"war" and "standards". These totalities persist in every time

before and after the events they contain. The properties as they meet in the intersecting

event create the incremental step in historical experience. Thus, the properties of sa and sb

in the 1955 sentence are perceived as categorical properties that can be manifested again

and again in history--either another period or mark, but their intersecting occurrence in this

specific moment generates the event sb--the "leaving" of such a sign. One knows the

significance of this sign by the overarching reality sd "war" which entails such occurrences.

In the second clause the temporal intersection of the properties se and sf produce the event

interaction of patient and agent, which is measured by the overarching sg--"standards".

32. G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (London: Metheun, 1955) 1 (sentence 5).

28

Elton's temporal concretum experience in each event is what I have termed the dual

reality promoted by each episode of judgment in the continuity thinker: knowing the

incremental development of a larger reality through the separate interactions of individuals

or individual properties that have their own careers in existence. Categorical properties

share with institutions the same ordering and explanatory presence Elton refers to when he

says that facts or events "require reference to common experience, to conventional

frameworks, to (in short) the general before they acquire meaning (1967, 11)." Elton

reflects on the nature of war, especially "extended periods" of war, and the particular

experience of England in this instance. These categorical realities--war and England--have

their own separate histories in the existence of humankind, but they occur under the aegis

of standards--which enable Elton and the reader to comprehend the particular quality of

England's incremental experience. History's continuity reflects the infinite sameness of

properties as they leave their characteristic stamp on existence.

The sense of incremental movement is provided by the specifying of a time and

place on an imputed linear scale. The semantics of the sentence in the above example

establish this time line both explicitly and implicitly in the comparative reference to

standards that have existed before and now. Moreover, the syntactic design in which

individual properties intersect creating a common moment imply in their coincidence

separate individual histories: as in geometry, two intersecting lines at one point establish

that both are coincident with the point and separately traversing their own paths.

The ideational implications of this logical design pervade the conscious historical

style of Elton. His history will include many interacting individuals, each of whom has his

or her own agenda. However, the coincident point where a common event between the two

29

or more intersecting individuals is generated will be the one objective truth which furthers

these individuals in their separate fashions. The incremental moment establishes an

objective reality in common for the separate individualities and for the overarching reality

that comprehends these separate individualities, at least in this moment. Ultimately, each

individual goes his or her own way, even beyond the overarching realities that define this

particular time. This dual consciousness, that of an individual path, yet one that is always

governed by some overarching meaning greater than the individual, is what differentiates

the continuity thinker from the quantum or dialectical treatment of the collective synthesis.

The latter historical logics constitute the greater whole out of the existent individuals

themselves.

The dual consciousness of individual fulfillment and the furtherance of a common

ordering whole is extremely salient in Elton's mind, and in his construction of historical

narratives. Elton's critical essays provide examples of his attention to the many crossing

paths of individuals that contribute to their separate objectivities as well as to the

overarching reality they have in common. One of the characteristics of his essays that

promotes this dual reality is the inclusion of the arguments of many historians who have

written on a common issue. The point of view of each as well as the documents necessarily

pertinent to all of them are articulated. The key moment of Elton's discussion, however, is

when the right answer is offered by him: there can only be one objective meaning to a

document and one conclusion for that history which erects the common objectivity. The

idea of ‘one’ objective entailer is not essential to this logical construct at the level of

diaeresis. What the continuity thinker posits is an ‘overarching’ organizer for particulars.

There can be an overarching organizer that does not warrant the modernist distinction of

30

univocal objectivity; one can conceive a continuity thinker in the age of religious wars

seeing a revealed history as that organizer. In this respect, the diaeresis serves as the

skeletal structure for the age’s understanding of what organizes discrete events.

The same logical-grammatical pattern in each sentential judgment, and

consequently, the same conscious attention to interacting individuals who contribute to an

overarching reality continues throughout his career. One sees the pre-reflective logical-

grammatical pattern and a conscious position to issues that reflects this pattern, for

example, in his Cook Lectures of 1990. I select a sentence again by the same random

number used previously:33

However, I can only preach what I believe, and I do believe in those entrenched positions concerning the reality of historical studies.

[Bip [sa I can only preachCi what I believep [∙ Cip [sb and I do believeci in those entrenched positionsp [Ai [sc concerning the reality of historical studies]]]]]].

The overarching reality 'Aip', "the reality of historical studies", is given certain properties

by Elton's cognitive decisions, namely what he contributes to them that is a lasting set of

properties offered by his disciplinary judgment.

Elton begins to argue in this introductory paragraph that his historiographical

beliefs have more of a claim to sound historical method than the approaches of other

historians that he will deliberate. For Elton, a judgment is either identical with objectivity

or wrong. By deliberating his own judgments, he argues in the Cook lectures that his

career of thought approximates historical objectivity in the issues he judges. Although his

initial focus is his own career of thought, that career becomes a standard for the discipline

33. G. R. Elton, Return to Essentials, Some Reflections on the Present State of History (Cambridge/New York/Port Chester/Melbourne/Sydney: Cambridge University, 1991) 3 (first page, sentence 5).

31

all historians share. This is not presumption, rather the normal outcome of a continuity

perspective. A historian is conceived to be one worker upon the wall of truth--his work is

objective, and lends to the greater objectivity if it is thorough. In fact, Elton is modest in

his initial statements. He characteristically apologizes as early as the second sentence of

these lectures to all the historians whose views will not be mentioned (1991, 3). He does

not merely apologize to them, but also to his conception of the discipline itself: the

continuity thinker must ideally include all the significant individuals who traverse a

common issue if the exercise is to be a thorough deliberation.

The historical logic of the quantum: Arthur Joseph Slavin and Francis Bacon

On Quantum Logic

Quantum historical logic suggests these conceptual premises:

A singular whole is constituted by the functional interdependence of its parts. A

generational norm, an age, an epoch can be distinguished by the dynamic attributes expressed by

individuals which collectively generate its character.

When the functioning members begin to diverge, loosening the interdependent ties that

give them a common identity, the common product ceases. The quantum disappears leaving

individualities that form new constellations--not necessarily with each other.

Thus, individuals have separate career paths, even though the quantum vision stresses the

collective, interdependent nature of individual existence. Their career paths may diverge markedly

because unlike the career paths perceived by continuity thinkers there is no assumption of constant

overarching realities that inform everyone. Quantum memberships may differ.

32

Individuality is known qualitatively, that is by the specific function which contributes in a

time to the quantum singularity shared with others. The qualities of individuals are not seen as static

properties, rather as processes, active functions in relation to the milieu of the time.

Quantum historical logic suggests discontinuity in history. Each state of affairs is unique

or a moment in a larger singular set of states of affairs. As functions change among the members, the

product of their interdependent activity also changes its character.

The functional activity of one or more members instantiate the whole in that moment.

There is no assumption of an overarching reality. The greater whole is the members collectively.

Thus, there will be no belief in the necessary continuity of institutions. As the quantum collective

changes, the existing institutions are necessarily affected by the change in the persons who instantiate

them. Institutions are then viewed as agreements of willing individuals rather than as greater wholes

that entail their members.

A common, objective history is realized for the quantum thinker in recognizing the

sameness and shared character of willed actions that create the interdependent human operations

which effect history in certain periods.

Time for the quantum thinker is not measured quantitatively, rather qualitatively. Time is

a duration of a quantum. There is no axis upon which a quantum is plotted as an increment in a

series. Thus, tracking the specific time and place of an occurrence is less significant to the quantum

thinker than describing the phases generally of an interdependent reality [Nietzsche's dictum that the

historian need only come within 50 years of a date if the character of the time was captured.]

33

The quantum as a form of historical judgment does not evoke the vision of a seemingly

infinite chain of cause and effect that is the essence of historical vision of continuity. The

discontinuity thinker might agree with the substance of Kant's criticism of Leibniz's notion of

continuity in nature: "For observation and insight into the constitution of nature could never justify

us in the objective assertion of the law of continuous gradation. The steps of this ladder, as they are

presented to us in experience, stand much too far apart (548, A 668, B 696)."

History for the quantum thinker is periodic, epochal, aeonic, that is, whole states which have

no necessary relationship with the preceding states, nor with the states that follow. George Iggers in

his discussion of the differences between the terms "historicism" and "historism" has articulated the

difference between continuity and discontinuity in one's vision of history among German historians,

respectively, as "historicity" and "historism".34 The quantum logic of historism represents the

34. The many uses of both the terms "historicism" and "historism" make my reference to these terms problematic. My use of "historism" is that of a vision of historical events as belonging to a singular time, whereas "historicism" implies an ever changing flux of events that nevertheless is bound together by some continuous linkage. My definitions of these terms accomodate them to the historical logics I see as their foundation. Iggers speaks of the "historism" of "The German Historical School" "with its emphasis upon diversity and individuality...in contrast to the attempts by Hegelians to see in historical development a unified, logical process;" George Iggers, The German Conception of History, The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, revised edition (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University, 1968), 297.

Essentially, Iggers seems to describe "historism" as a view of distinct historical periods with common characteristics for a time. The singularity of that time belies the effort to track or predict long term continuities. "Historicism", on the other hand, perceives history as the changing, yet continuous existence of certain characteristics and themes. Iggers refers to Karl Popper "who sharply distinguishes between 'historicism,' which 'insists upon historical prediction, and 'historism' which 'analyses and explains the differences between the various sociological doctrines and schools, by referring either to their connection with predilections and interests prevailing in a particular historical period...or their connection with political or economic or class interests (297)."

It is the unified, logical process that characterizes continuity and dialectical history in my theory. Thus, I use of the term historicism for the historical logics that have features which create continuities over time. Historism will be chiefly quantum logic that sees the absolute singularity of periods, or other forms to be discussed in the text which discourage the notion of the continuity of ideas, institutions, or other linking phenomena in history. My use of the terms then may depart from others who use the distinction between German "historicism" and German "historism." F. R. Ankersmit, for example, considers Ranke a "historist" because no speculative prediction is involved in his theory of history. I consider Ranke a "historicist" because of the continuity logic I will demonstrate (see below in Chapter Six). See Ankersmit, History and Tropology, The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 6-7 (fn 11).

34

characteristics of a period by showing the functional interdependence of all the particulars which

constitute it. As functional relations between particulars alter so does the assumption of a totality in

common, be it a shared 'period' of time or a mutual cultural form. Moreover, for the quantum thinker

a totality exists only within the activity that realizes it. There is not the continuity thinker's

assumption of a stable totality, such as an 'institution' that entails a moment, that precedes or

succeeds a moment in time. An 'institution' for the quantum thinker is a sterile abstraction which

reifies the practices of a time.

The historical logic of the quantum in Tudor-Stuart personalities and historians of

this age are represented, respectively, by Francis Bacon and Arthur Joseph Slavin. Slavin's

interpretation of the political character of the Tudor age reflects a quantum orientation. His

thesis in The Tudor Age and Beyond is that the Tudor age manifested a "permanent crisis

(1987, vii)."35 The point of view and logical-grammatical structure of his sentences impart

a diaeresis of the age that underscores its quantum character:

(1) Because to speak of a "permanent crisis" is to run against the grain of ordinary usage, in which the word "crisis" signifies a brief moment of truth or a decisive turning point, some explanation is in order. (2) Modern historians have reshaped the word to mean even very long periods of time in which there is fundamental continuity within a society without there being a stable equilibrium. (3) The term "crisis" now implies decisive conflict without total revolution. (4) It serves usefully to indicate a period in which the ideas, values, assumptions, beliefs, and institutions that give form to individual experience lose their binding force (1987, vii, my numbering).

I list again the logical-grammatical criteria for quantum historical logic so that I can

begin my explication of Slavin's orientation.

1. The individualit(ies) that constitute the quantum or quantums in each sentential judgment are nondissectively stated through collective attribution: a preference for

35. Additional works by Professor Slavin that characterize the Tudor age are Renaissance Monarchies and Representative Institutions (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1963); Politics and Profit (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1966); Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1968); Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Tudor Men and Institutions (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1972); and, The Precarious Balance, English Government and Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973).

35

noncount and plural nouns, indefinite articles, the weak sense of "the", or determiners such as "some", "many", "few", "every".

This permits them to be seen as individualities, yet be recognized as members of an interdependent collective that constitute a quantum whole.

2. The quantum or quantums in each sentence to be realized by the individualities are also nondissectively stated. The nondissective articulation of both the quantum and its individual, constituting members create a historical time that endures with a generally shared quality or qualities. The specificity of exact temporal-spatial locations, each with different properties, are avoided because it would weaken the sameness in the life of each quantum phase.

3. Process-oriented: in each sentence proposition a functional process will be juxtaposed to the quantum state of affairs realized.

A whole state or process complete in itself is described, rather than an incremental piece of a greater reality. The nondissective articulation of the nouns that are the individual members of the quantum or the quantum as whole insure the process described by the sentence dominates, rather than entities with separate properties.

4. Dynamic verbs in combination with stative verbs create the functioning of an operational reality which while active in a specific time realizes an essentially atemporal principle or quality. Deverbal and verbal nouns and gerunds reinforce the time-bound, process-oriented reality.

5. Experimental language: logopoeia seeks to demonstrate the atypical, specialized, or seldom seen.

6. Tight sentence structure (asyndeton) emphasizes interdependence of entities in their mutual relations, rather than the separate career paths of individualities in the polysyndeton of continuity logic.

7. As a rule, no reference to pre- or post- aspects of the state of affairs described.

Each sentence in Slavin's above political-social characterization of the Tudor age

offers a functional instantiation of its collective or abstract noun, rather than as in the

continuity thinker linking the properties of separate nominal entities to the entailing count

or proper noun. "Crisis" is the abstract noun so explicated in three of the four sentences;

sentence (2) offering the functional or operational description of how the collective noun

36

"historians" handle the concept "crisis". Moreover, each sentence introduces a separate

functional reality of "crisis", its totality the inferred sum rather than one continuous,

overarching presence separate and above each participating member as in the continuity

thinker's postulation of a collective reality. The succinctness of each of Slavin's sentences

when compared to Elton's or Coke's serves to highlight the instantiation of the concept--the

functional interdependence of the forest is seen rather than each tree. Process is the rule,

not the properties of things: he judiciously uses one modifier before the key noun, the

modifier usually representing an action in time, and the noun almost always a verbal or

deverbal noun. His use of the transitive verb to impel action reinforces this process.

The logical formula that creates the part-whole relations which are the foundation

of Slavin's quantum temporal concretum is that of the quantum thinker:

[f(An)(pqr)≡An(pqr)]:

where 'f(An)' are two or more related events that instantiate 'An'. I denote the events 'f(An)' rather than as a 'Bn' and 'Cn' as with the continuity thinker. The latter thinker sees events as having separate careers that meet in a specific moment at an intersection of experience, and never totally equivalent to an 'An'. The quantum thinker sees all interacting ideas as members of the same family of experience.

Slavin's first sentence then reads:

Because to speak of a "permanent crisis" is to run against the grain of ordinary usage, in which the word "crisis" signifies a brief moment of truth or a decisive turning point, some explanation is in order.

[f(Ai)p [sa Because to speak of a “permanent crisis” [⋀f(Aj)p [sb is to run against the grain of ordinary usageAj, in which the word "crisis" signifies a brief moment of truth or a decisive turning pointp [≡Aij [sc some explanation is in order

Slavin sees a contrasting reality between the concept of "permanent crisis" and "crisis." The

need for an explanation ‘Aij’ is the quantum whole that is instantiated by this conflicting

37

use of terms ‘f(Ai) and f(Aj). Slavin sets his readers into a quantum perspective of history

with his deliberation, underscoring the notion of the Zeitgeist of the Tudor era, and at the

same time inferring the how language is used has certain time-bound conventions. Slavin’s

logopoeia is to affirm an interdependence of persons in past times as well as the

interdependence of present persons who are affected by how the definition of “crisis” is

commonly understood. Thus, Slavin tells us that there is no “private” meanings, but rather

all of us are part of a publicness of common meaning, a ‘necessary’ state-of-affairs beyond

our choosing. The temporal concretum of a quantum logic is not the dual reality known in

continuity logic, that is an individual separate from an overarching reality even when the

individual contributes to that higher, collective order. Rather, the individual conceived in a

quantum logic is embedded in an interdependent membership with all other persons who

are assumed to have the same characteristics, by dint of their individual acts. In each

episode of judgment one becomes a species member. There are two moments to this

understanding in the pattern of the sentential judgment. First, one acts as an individual,

then one reflects on the equivalence of that act with the interdependent reality it

instantiates. The sentential judgment thus permits individuality but one that is immediately

qualified in its significance. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose logical-grammatical style is that

of a quantum thinker, states that there is no such thing as a private language.36 The

corollary I assert here is that for the quantum thinker there is no such thing as a private

person--only individuals whose actions have public consequences.

Francis Bacon's quantum historical vision has the same logical-grammatical

characteristics as Slavin's sentences, and Bacon's philosophy of history is similar. The

stress on periodicity is paramount, as is the subtle emphasis upon his conception of reality,

38

arrived at through deliberate choice. Bacon's Novum Organum is a testament to the

discontinuity of generations and ages, as well as upon the significance of his new mode of

inquiry and interpretation. Bacon's emphasis upon the conceptual preferences of a time

that institute a distinct orientation to reality reflects both the quantum thinker's attention to

and use of neologisms.37 For example, Bacon's focus upon the "idols" of language as the

lever of a generation's historical understanding and action has its parallel in Slavin's

attention to the lexicons and methodologies of historical periods. Bacon writes in the

Novum Organum:

(1) But the Idols of the Market-place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through the alliances of words and names. (2) For men believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words react on the understanding; and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive (my enumeration).38

Although this is a reprint of the standard translation of the Latin by James Spedding,

Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denton, it preserves the essential logical-grammatical

36. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1958), especially paragraphs 269 and 275. One can see the logical-grammatical traits that generate a quantum orientation in Wittgenstein's sentences, for example his statement on the limitations of a "private language":

And sounds which no one else understands but which I 'appear to understand' might be called a "private language (269)."

[f(Ai)1 [sa And sounds which no one else understands [f(Ai)2 [sb but which I 'appear to understand' [= [sc might be called [Ai) [sd a "private language"]]]]]]]].

37. D. R. Woolf's study of Bacon's historical thinking points to several of the logical attributes that I will demonstrate; The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1990). For example, Woolf underscores Bacon's constellation of distinct periods in history (p. 153); he indicates Bacon's attention to the functional dynamics of historical action (p. 152); and, also stresses Bacon's cognitive-linguistic innovation, for example his table of historical areas (p. 151).

38. Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960) 56. Further reference to this text and edition is in parentheses.

39

style of Bacon's thought. The Tudor and Stuart era had as a convention longer sentences

comprised of several independent clauses. But, within the independent clause of Bacon

asyndeton is the rule. Each sentence, as well as each independent clause, imparts a

differing function of the "idol". The only adjectives occur in (2), and then "sophistical and

inactive" are behaviors. Experimental language is the theme of the Bacon's essay. Every

generation "idols" of language must be broken in order to enable one to approach truth.

Bacon's comprehension of the relativity of language and meaning anticipates Ernst Mach's

decree that every generation must employ new scientific language to further progress in the

sciences; and, it is a precursor of the deconstructive emphases of the late twentieth century.

This recurring philosophy of language is the lever by which discontinuity in historical

norms is effected by cultural radicals.

To assure the reader that Bacon's English has these characteristics, I cite his essay

"Of Innovations" which captures his sense of quantum changes in history, and the

significance of new beginnings rather than continuity:

As the Births of Living Creatures, at first, are ill shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the Births of Time. Yet notwithstanding, as Those that first bring Honour into their Family, are commonly more worthy, then most that succeed: So the first President (if it be good) is seldome attained by Imitation.39

The subject complements of each sentence are processes carried by verbal nouns. Each

sentence with its separate clauses transmit a nuanced difference of the abstract concept that

is the fruit of the essay's extended investigation. There are not properties that accrue to

Innovation, rather functional guidelines that differentiate the singularity of innovation from

the typicality of imitation.

39. Francis Bacon, The Essays 1625, Francis Bacon (Yorkshire, England: Scolar Press, 1971) 139.

40

Interestingly, Bacon's program for codifying English law, a program developed in

contrast, if not competition with Coke, clearly separated the "antiquities" of older law from

the utilitarian restatement of them. Rather than a code that integrated the old and new, the

"antiquities" would be housed in libraries, and the promiscuous use of them be prohibited.40

Bacon's emphasis upon the quantum differences among generations which

authorize new terminology and methodologies can be seen in Professor Slavin's approach

to the Privy Chamber in the Tudor England of Henry VIII. Unlike Professor Elton who

treats the Privy Chamber as a place of political faction, possibly the root of an extended

continuity that leads to political party, Slavin finds it to be a phenomenon expressive of a

singular Tudor political convention that fulfilled a distinct need in the time of cultural

crisis––it was the solution by the King for "action at a distance." Members of the Privy

Chamber were walking symbols of the King's authority, carrying "the sanctity of the royal

body" to any place they were sent.41 This singular convention has been isolated by

Professor Slavin's use of innovative heuristic concepts that bring out behavioral facts

heretofore not adequately grasped by Tudor historians.

Chief among the concepts that Slavin uses to explain the authority located in the

monarch's own person or mediately through representatives at a distance is that of

patrimonial governance, a concept developed in its political pregnancy by Max Weber.42

Patrimonial governance depended upon the immediate word and gestural sign or symbol of 40. W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 487.

41. Arthur Joseph Slavin, "On Henrician Politics: Symbols, Signs, Political Culture, and Actual Politics," 28. This paper was presented at a conference to be held at the Huntington Library, June 5-6, 1995. Eight invited papers, which includes Professor Slavin's, are considered sufficiently authoritative to "remap" the meaning of Tudor and early Stuart politics. The other contributors include Professors Paul Christianson, Patrick Collinson (Elton's successor as Regius at Cambridge), Barbara Harris, Norman Jones, Kevin Sharpe, Annabel Patterson, and Mark Mishlansky. Several of these papers will be published as a special number of the Huntington Library Quarterly, edited by Professor Slavin.

41

the monarch's will in contradistinction to the impersonal authority of codified law,

impersonal even when the monarch prescribed the law within its channels. As Professor

Slavin states this antinomy:

Was there not a contradiction between the goal of making a rational-legal order the basis of politics and government, with its elevation of the prescriptive authority of a sovereign monarchy, and the fact that in order to do so there had to be a renewed emphasis on the essentially traditional or medieval gift relationship between the king and his leading subjects, a tie that subordinated prescriptive authority to distributive ties (1983, 221).

Another way to put this polarity is to see the discontinuous effects that emanate in

the contingent decisions of the monarch in its opposition to the continuous effects of

decisions housed in the institutions of law. Quantum changes in political authority and

practice are the consequence of a patrimonial style of governance. The discontinuity of

Henry VIII's will and its effects were reinforced by the discontinuity brought into the

structure of Tudor institutions that reinforced his will. An example of this institutional

discontinuity is the emergence of the Privy Chamber as a center of political power,

facilitated by the monarch's personal will in distributing authority. This innovative

reinforcement of his authority enabled Henry VIII to gain support for his attack on the

traditional religion in all its institutions. Professor Slavin's cognitive orientation--the ability

to see quantum shifts in social discourse and behavior--is perfectly suited to have discerned

the significance of Henry VIII's "patrimonial" authority in its range of practices.

A symbolic analysis by random number of the quantitative sentence patterns of the

discontinuity thinkers Arthur Joseph Slavin and Francis Bacon reveal the following part-

42. See Slavin, "G.R. Elton and his Era: Thirty Years On," Albion 15, 3 (1983) 221 (fn 50). Further reference to this text and edition is in parentheses.

42

whole relationships over the career of their writings.43 I begin with an early example of

Slavin's historical judgment from an article written in 1965:

Eventually Barre turned up, tardily boasting of his role as the true husband of Sadler's consort.44

[f(Ai)p [sa Eventuallyp Barre turned upf(Ai)1 [⋀f(Aj)p [sb tardilyp boasting of his role(Ai)2 [≡Aijp [sc as the true husband Ai of Sadler's consortp]]]]]].

One sees how the appearance "as true husband" is instantiated in the functional acts of

"turning up" and "boasting". The quantum thinker will consider enduring properties, but

express them always within operational processes as functional traits. Using the Kantian

mode of “specification” which all quantum thinkers naturally employ, we see Professor

Slavin considering a functional trait as a synthesizing principle, which is instantiated by

persons in certain circumstances.

The Protestant historians, beginning with Hall and Foxe, added strident nationalism to the story.45

[f(Ai) [sa The Protestant historians…added, [⋀f(Aj) [sb beginning with Hall and Foxe (added) [≡ Aij [sb strident nationalism to the story ]]]].

This sentence of Professor Slavin was randomly selected from an article written in 1990.

43. As with the continuity thinkers, I use William Mendenhall, Dennis D. Wackerly, and Richard L. Scheaffer, Mathematical Statistics with Applications, 4th edition (Boston: PWS-Kent, 1990) 785 (Table 12). The first digit of line 2, column 1 will provide the page; the second digit of line 2 of Column 2 will provide the sentence number on that page. The resulting selection is page 2, sentence 6.

44. Arthur Joseph Slavin, "Parliament and Henry VIII's Bigamous Principal Secretary," The Huntington Library Quarterly XXVIII, 1 (1965), 1.

45. Arthur Joseph Slavin, "Telling the Story: G.R. Elton and the Tudor Age," Sixteenth Century Journal XXI, 2 (1990) 152.

43

Francis Bacon's characteristic sentence is demonstrated in two letters taken from

periods approximately thirty years apart. The first is to Lord Treasurer Burghley, his uncle

William Cecil:

And if your lordship shall find now or at any time, that I do seek or affect any place, whereunto any that is nearer unto your lordship shall be concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man.46

[f(Ai)p [sa And if your lordship shall find that I do seek or affect any place, whereunto any that is nearer unto your lordship shall be concurrent...now or at any timep [⋀f(Aj) [sb say then [≡Aij [sc that I am a most dishonest man]]]]]]]].

In the above sentence, Bacon's interdependent quantum reality is the principle "I am a most

dishonest man", which is instantiated both by the functional inquiry, and a further statement

by the inquirer. The instantiating acts occur in a cause-effect relation to each other.

Quantum thinking keeps all instantiating acts within the quantum so instantiated.

Thus, even though Bacon offers a sequence of instantiating acts, they do not occur in times

separate from the quantum governor. As all is but the one time of the quantum rather than

separate times, causal analysis is more finely descriptive for the quantum thinker, less

driven by substantiating a hypothesis that seeks to verify the casual alignment of event ‘a’

to event ‘b’. I believe this is the reason Bacon attacked hypothesis-driven inquiry: it

reified separate temporal moments as being necessarily conjoined. Good science merely

describes what occurs. The physicist Ernst Mach, who was a form of dialectical thinker—

termed by me a ‘morphological’ thinker (Blum, 2006, pp. 253-257), a quantum derivation,

presented a physics that eschewed any distinct and separate efficient cause altogether,

demanding rather a phenomenologically acute description of any perceived moment.47

46. Francis Bacon, "Letters from the Cabala," The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Basil Montagu, Three Volumes (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850) 3: 2. Further citation from Bacon is from this text and edition.

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Conclusion: A Dialogical Resolution for Representational ‘Validity’48 in Historical Writing, Is it Possible?

At this point it is valuable to reflect upon the interactions among individuals whose

thinking reflect the two historical logics thus far presented in Tudor times and among

Tudor historians. Values with their concomitant emotions are involved in these logical

differences. Coke's preference for continuity led him to write in the margin of a copy of

Bacon's Novum Organum sent to him by the author: "Advice to the author \ First restore

what the wise ones have written \ And prepare to renew what is just and the law."49 The

lifelong struggle between the two men had personal and political grounds, but the

difference in their conceptions of history certainly exacerbated their relations.

A counter example is provided by the cooperative relations and mutual respect

evidenced in the dialogue of G.R. Elton and Arthur Joseph Slavin. Each man's intellectual

and social development benefited from an age aware of the many interpretations that may

be given a 'fact'.50 Moreover, historians in our century have a metacognitive awareness of

their own interpretative styles as well as the styles of others.51 Not that the natural conflicts

47. See Robert Musil, Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1980), especially pp. 15-16, where Musil points out the purely descriptive approach to physical phenomena that eschews causal analysis.

48 I choose the term “representational ‘validity’” because what is at issue are the verbal ‘representations’ that are in accord with the historical-logical structure of part-part, part-whole in a sentential judgment. As F.R. Ankersmit so clearly argues in his recent publication––“Representation as a Cognitive Instrument,” History and Theory, Vol. 52,2 (May, 2013), pp. 171-193, ‘truth’ is not at issue where there is a conflict over the manner of representing chosen ‘meanings.’ ‘Truth’ is what will be the search which links Elton and Slavin for finding some way to use each other’s vocabulary.

49. Hastings Lyon and Herman Block, Edward Coke, Oracle of the Law (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 289.

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of point of view are obviated, but they certainly are tempered by an awareness of the

logical premisses within which another thinker operates.

It is natural to appreciate in others first what is akin to one's own logic. Elton's

short biography of the legal historian Frederic William Maitland praises his 'continuity'--of

interest, effort, and research method (all individual studies entailed by and leading towards

his larger purpose); his distaste for generalizations, thus a focus on documentary detail; his

working out from these specifics towards categorical truths--"coping stones"; his breadth in

the law, yet his respect for the boundaries that differentiate each expression of law (1985,

23-26).

It is this respect for boundaries and differences that enabled Elton to cultivate

students whose views often radically diverged from his own. Yet, he was quick to

challenge logical formulations that differed, demanding warrant. One instance of such a

difference will illustrate how metacognitive sensitivity to the presence and effects of

differing logic can bring a mutual accommodation among thinkers. Elton, in personal

correspondence with Slavin, questions Slavin's and Joel Hurstfield's linking of wardships in

the 16th century to a persistence of feudal practices:

50. G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, 55.

51. See G.R. Elton's chapter on "Research" in The Practice of History, pp. 51ff. for analyses of several historians, and his careful analysis of F.W. Maitland's legal historical style in F.W. Maitland (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1985). Further reference is to this text and edition. Professor Slavin has written numerous articles probing the connections between Elton's style of analysis and narrative and his treatment of Tudor facts. Arthur Joseph Slavin, "G.R. Elton and his Era: Thirty Years On," Albion 15,3 (1983): 207-229; "Telling the Story: G. R. Elton and The Tudor Age," Sixteenth Century Journal XXI,2 (1990): 151-169; "G.R. Elton on Reform and Revolution," The History Teacher 23,4 (1990): 405-431; "G.R. Elton and the Narrative Art," Gordon Schochet (ed.), Reformation, Humanism, and Revolution: Proceedings of the Folger Institute for the History of British Political Thought (1990); and, "The Tudor State, Reformation, and Understanding Change: Through the Glass Darkly," in Paul Fideler and Thomas Mayer (eds.), Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992), 223-253.

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It is a pity that Hurstfield perpetuated confusion when he called those fiscal devices feudal, instead of using the contemporary term, prerogative; they were actually death duties, and any links with anything genuinely to be called feudal were purely verbal and dimly historical!"52 A new totality had emerged in English institutions replacing feudal institutions, one whose defining properties might be called those of the "gentry": I have for years maintained that we should regard the centuries from (perhaps) 1300 or the middle of the 13th century, to the middle of the 19th, as the age of the gentry--an era during which society was structured around a political system which embodied social hierarchy, the supremacy of landownership, an essentially aristocratic mode of life, the dominance of the common law, the special function of representative institutions, and the institution of personal monarchy. In that long period I certainly discern turning points, watersheds, even revolutions--but the social structure remained extraordinarily stable because all changes in fact expressed themselves in the absorption of the new elements in the old framework.53

Slavin defends the concept "feudal" in his response as more apt for describing the personal

bonds created between king and recipient of a wardship:

I do say 'no proper feudal system was in being.' But there were elements left over from another age, none more deserving of the name 'feudal' than wardship. I do not think it enough to see in it a taxation system, particularly in light of the efforts made to control aristocratic marriages and the descent of dynastic lands from Henry VII's time through that of James I.54

The logical strength of the quantum thinker is in using organizing concepts that emerge

from the sensual detail of concrete practices. The logical weakness of that thinker is in

extrapolating that concept and its instantiating practices forwards and backwards in order to

create temporal continuums. Quantum thinking is not an aggregative sequence, it stresses

the coincidence and interdependence of the particulars of a time. Slavin saw distinct

practices that had their origin in the feudal period, but could they justly be called a

52. G. R. Elton, Letter to Arthur Joseph Slavin, September 4, 1976.

53. G.R. Elton, Letter to Arthur Joseph Slavin, September 4, 1976.

54. Arthur Joseph Slavin, Letter to G.R. Elton, November 26, 1976.

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'continuity'? The logical strength of the continuity thinker is to track the aggregative

addition and deletion of properties in an entailing whole. Slavin was called to thought by

the authority of Elton's point of view. He was already hesitant in his assumption of a

feudal continuity when he emphasized that "no proper feudal system was in being."

Within a decade, Slavin substituted Weber's concept of "patrimonial" government

for this seeming persistence of feudal practices. Patrimony is governance by the

sovereignty of one's bodily presence and will, rather than with reliance on law. As a

quantum thinker Slavin required that a concept impart a whole that could be measured by

the functional interdependence of all of its parts. Patrimonial practices can be instituted in

any system of government given a distinct problem that required its methods; this seemed

to be the case, rather than a continuity of the feudal idea within institutional practices. The

instituting of the Privy Chamber with its reliance upon the bodily presence of the king and

its symbolic extension was an example of how a patrimonial style could be innovative and

self-renewing in an age where it competed with other ideas of sovereignty.

Elton was to finally accept Slavin's argument that patrimony was the best concept

for describing certain strategies by which the Tudor sovereign governed, although his

acceptance remained within his overall picture of an age of the king under law.55 Through

the force of his distinctive logic, Slavin gained Elton's recognition of the singular practices

of a time. The sensitive continuity thinker will recognize that his logical weakness is

generalization in the service of narrative continuums. Elton took a long look at practices

such as wardship, and other 'gifting' relationships within Slavin's concept of patrimony.

Although the ideal typicalities encompassed under Elton's rubric "the age of the gentry" did

not change as standards for the historical flux, there was a respect and room made for

55. G.R. Elton, Letter to Arthur Joseph Slavin, September 19, 1994.

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another point of view. Given the salience of one's dominant logic, this is perhaps the best

that can be expected.

49