[Scene: FRANKLIN’s house at
36 Craven Street, London. A young HACKETT (limbs intact; about 17, let’s say)
is walking whistling quietly through the hallways, apparently intent on some
errand. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and his waistcoat is unbuttoned. The
part of the house he is in is clean, almost bare, with a sort of Quaker
severity, and brightly lit by the morning sun. He is suddenly surprised by the
ringing of a bell. He recognizes the tone; it is the back workroom.]
HACKETT: (cheerfully, under
his breath) Blast. (He turns and heads to the back of the house.)
[It is darker here ‘behind
the baize’, and the door he approaches is plain deal. HACKETT pauses
respectfully. He has been told never to enter this room unannounced. He knocks
discreetly, shortly.]
HACKETT: Dr. Franklin?
[The door swings open and we
see FRANKLIN. He is not as old or as stout as he will become. He is in fact
about 57. He, too, is dressed rather casually, even more so than HACKETT. His
rumpled clothes, dirty breeches, and tired expression seem to indicate that he
has been up working most of the night. Hackett can see the workroom behind him.
In contrast to the rest of the house it is crammed full of apparatus, chemical
and mechanical, but mostly in good but crowded order. There is, however, a
worktable visible cluttered with various glass vials, a mess of notes, and a
wax tray bristling with pins and a variety of thin knives. FRANKLIN is wiping
his hands on a rough cloth.]
FRANKLIN: Ah. Roger. (He
throws the cloth aside.) Good morning, lad. (He reaches to a side table.) I
need you to run this package over to Mr. Hewson; it’s the joint I’ve been
promising him. Skin it on over to him. I’ve been keeping it in the cold room, but
it won’t last forever. No dawdling. (He wipes his forehead.) If the night is
any indication, today will be a scorcher.
[Franklin hands over the
bundle. It is not very large, and HACKETT can tell by handling it that it has
been wrapped in several layers of cheesecloth and butcher’s paper. It is sealed
with string bound twice around and once over.]
HACKETT: Yes, sir. That’s
Mr. Hewson, of the Academy?
FRANKLIN: That’s right. Tell
him … (he smiles strangely) Tell him we must meet again soon and pick a bone
together. (he stretches and sighs) Inform the girls I’m not to be disturbed
until one, and then I’ll want lunch. (yawns) (almost to himself) I must be
getting old. These days I seem to need a few hours of sleep now and then. (to
HACKETT, briskly) Go on, be off with you. Remember, no rambling.
HACKETT: Right you are, Dr.
Franklin. (he touches his forelock and turns, as FRANKLIN shuts the door.)
[Scene cuts to LONDON
STREET. You know the sort of things: cobblestones, rancid gutters, clopping
horses drawing carts full of barrels, shops open and people going in and out,
street vendors, men in tricorn hats and walking sticks, ladies with skirts covered
by traveling cloaks, urchins running around, rough men lounging at corners and
at the mouths of ally-ways, chatter,
squeals, and the occasional shout. Through it all young HACKETT wends his way
with purpose, now dressed in jacket and hat, and the package tucked under his
arm. He whistles loud and earnestly now, not caring who hears him, amusing
himself.]
[Suddenly a kind of sixth
sense seems to strike him, or perhaps he heard something. He stops and looks
behind him. He is just in time to see a dog stop too and sit down, looking at
him expectantly. It is a kind of greyish-brown dog, scruffy, a little over
medium size. It pants appealingly and twitches its eyebrows, whining a little.
It is obviously interested in the bundle under HACKETT’s arm, smelling
something. Hackett turns without saying anything and goes on his way. He hears
the dog still behind him but chooses to ignore it.]
[In a bit he turns a corner,
and as he does something catches the edge of his eye. He looks back, and the
dog is still there, trotting now. Its head is held low, and it does not stop
when it sees HACKETT looking at him. The boy turns and speeds up a bit, and the
dog matches his pace. Finally, HACKETT turns.]
HACKETT: Scat! Get along
now!
[The dog just stares at him.
HACKETT resumes his walk, even faster now, and the dog follows immediately,
matching his pace. The boy keeps looking behind himself, getting faster. The
dog follows intently. The boy races through the crowd, evoking laughs sometimes
and sometimes curses when he heedlessly clips people as he passes. In his wild
career he turns recklessly into a street.]
[And skids to a halt halfway
into it. He has taken a wrong turn in his haste. This street is a dead end,
strewn with rubbish, blocked off by a high brick wall. It ends in dim shadows;
there are no windows or doors, and no loungers down its length. HACKETT looks
around desperately, seeking anything that will help him, then tries to run
out.]
[The dog suddenly appears at
the mouth of the alley. All trace of whimsical beggary has left its demeanor.
Its hackles are raised, its teeth are bared and foaming, and there is a low
growl in its throat that is growing in intensity with each step it takes toward
HACKETT. Hunger and the chase have aroused wolfish instincts.]
[HACKETT backs away slowly
into the dim end of the street. The easiest solution is to simply let the dog
have the bundle, but he knows that he would have to pay for it, either out of
his wages or his hide, and possibly both. Also, he does not want to fail
FRANKLIN; the lad’s honor is engaged, as it were, in this mission. He does not
want to fail. But no ideas are coming; nothing in the debris of the alley
suggests a weapon; there is not even a rock or a half-brick to throw.]
[Finally, the dog has him up
against the back wall. In desperation, he lashes out with the bundle itself,
hoping, perhaps, to stun or surprise the beast and then dash away. Instead the
dog latches onto the package in mid-air, sinking its teeth firmly in. For a
moment there is a grim tug-of-war, the dog lashing its head back and forth and
HACKETT desperately trying to pull it back. The dog wrenches it out of his
hands and he falls sideways, knocking over a barrel of rubbish.]
[The fall collapses the
barrel into a heap of garbage and staves. HACKETT looks at it in a daze, then
picks up one of the staves, stands up, and staggers over to where the dog is
savagely worrying away at the bundle. HACKETT lams into the beast with furious
kicks and blows, his dander being well up now, and after an intense contention,
the dog runs howling back into the streets. HACKETT bends down shakily to pick
up the package.]
[It has been ripped and
torn, and is oozing red, but the strings, though loose, are still holding it
together. HACKETT draws a shaky breath, puts it on top of an up-ended barrel,
and starts untying it, hoping to fix it up a little better before delivering it
to its destination.]
[The last knot comes loose,
and he peels back the tattered outer layer of paper. The inner folds come
loose, and the wrappings unfurl. Uncurling a bit with its sudden release is the
arm of a little child.]
[Scene:BOB: (voiceover,
breathless) What did you do?
OLDER HACKETT: (voiceover)
What could I do? [The younger HACKETT looks around furtively, then follows the
narration.] I wrapped it back up as quick as I could and hurried it over to Mr.
Hewson. I never felt so guilty in my life. [The young HACKETT looks nervously
at the people he passes.] I felt as if any moment someone would stop me and
demand to see what I carried. I imagined what they would do to me if they did.
I reached the house and insisted that I deliver it directly to the doctor
myself - just imagine if a servant had taken it to the kitchen! - under color
of delivering Mr. Franklin’s message. [Pantomime of HEWSON coming to the door
and accepting the package, then looking in consternation as the boy hurries
away without waiting for a gratuity.]
[Scene: Early afternoon that
day. FRANKLIN is sitting at table, eating. HACKETT is standing nearby, a towel
over his arm, waiting on his master. There is a peculiar look on the lad’s
face, as if he finds it hard to believe that the older man can be so calm and
yet be trading so dangerously in human flesh. FRANKLIN is enjoying his meal and
seems be oblivious to HACKETT’s strained looks, though he glances over every
time the boy shifts his weight nervously or clears his throat in a strained
manner. FRANKLIN draws near to the end of his meal and takes a sip of wine.]
FRANKLIN: (naturally, but
with a portentous hint in his voice, like a teacher questioning a student) So
tell me, HACKETT, how was Mr. Hewson? Did he look well? Did he say naught about
my gift?
HACKETT: (with a casual
effort) Aye, sir, well enough. He sends his thanks, of course.
FRANKLIN: Nothing else?
HACKETT: I must confess I
did not linger, sir. I was eager to return home.
FRANKLIN: Ah. (He returns,
unconcerned, to finishing his meal.)
HACKETT: (after a tense
pause) Mr. Hewson, he’s a physician, is he not, sir?
FRANKLIN: (enthusiastically)
He is indeed. One of the finest in London, if not in all of Britain, I would
say. (pointedly) His knowledge of anatomy is unsurpassed. I owe him a great
debt in that area.
HACKETT: Ah. (this explains
a lot) I was wondering why you sent him … that gift.
FRANKLIN: Indeed. (he takes
the cloth from HACKETT and wipes his lips firmly. He is done with ‘breakfast’.)
Tell me, lad, did anything happen to that package along the way? (ominously)
Did you have cause to open it?
HACKETT: (taken by surprise)
I … I … (rushing) A dog tried to snatch it from me, sir! I needed to wrap it up
again. And … (horrified – not so much at the contents of the package, but at
the necessity of revealing to his master that he knows) and I saw what it was!
FRANKLIN: (accepting it
calmly. He cuts his eyes toward the door, where a maid might very well be
eavesdropping) We’ll not speak of that, right now. That shocked you, didn’t it
boy?
HACKETT: (quietly) Yes, sir.
FRANKLIN: Well, let me
assure you, Hackett, this was no Hellfire Club jape. And there was neither
homicide nor witchcraft in it, either.
This is all for the benefit of mankind, and it’s nothing that the King’s
College of Surgeons doesn’t do in the plain light of day, by Royal Charter.
Every thief or murderer hung on the gallows is liable for public anatomical
dissection, as an added final horror to a life of crime.
[The look on HACKETT’s face
indicates he is willing to listen, to accept FRANKLIN’s reassurances, but still
puzzled about the meaning of it all.]
FRANKLIN: (reasonably,
quietly. This is an old argument for him) But for all the never-ending flow of
rascals who ride the one-legged wooden horse, there is an appalling paucity of
corpses for the anatomist’s pit. For every body available there are at least
six or seven surgeons waiting, and often they have to share it out piecemeal.
And all the while there are masses of friendless, familyless carcasses going to
rot in the common grave!
HACKETT: It do seem a shame,
sir.
FRANKLIN: (rising from the
table) Right now I – and hundreds of men like me – are searching into the
wonders and the mysteries of the human anatomy. It is a book that nature has
written, if we dare to read it. There are discoveries being made every day, that
may prolong life, ease pain, and even conquer the very infirmities that brought
about the end of so many of the poor people we anatomize. How many of this
unfortunate company, if they could be called back for a moment and made to
realize the benefits of this final necessary sacrifice, would deny this last
grace of their otherwise futile existence?
HACKETT: Well … I suppose
not … but there are many what hold that rendering their body makes ‘em unfit
for the Last Trump. How can God fit ‘em back together if they’re scattered all
about London in so many doctors’ cabinets?
FRANKLIN: (amused) HACKETT,
that is a very simple way of thinking. For one thing, it sets an absurd limit
to the omnipotent power of the Deity.
HACKETT: (hurriedly) Oh, I
didn’t say I believe it!
FRANKLIN: For another thing,
it shows a misunderstanding of the nature of the body itself. It does not hang
around in a box for all eternity, like a sentry waiting on duty for the call to
be relieved. It decays, dear boy, it rots into dust.
HACKETT: (solemnly) Yes,
sir.
FRANKLIN: And that dust
turns to earth, and that earth feeds the worms, and the worms might feed a
robin, and the robin a cat, and the cat a hog, and a man might feed on the hog,
not knowing how many times that what had been the flesh of his fellow man has
passed through the guts of so many others before it reached his.
HACKETT: (looking a little
green) It hardly bears thinking of, Mr. Franklin.
FRANKLIN: (slaps him on the
shoulder) Nonsense, lad! It’s just the way of the world! No worse than the
thought that the eggs you had for breakfast has parts of the insects that the
hen had scratched up the week before. It’s all been broken down and filtered
and changed again … “Imperious Caeser, dead and turned to clay, may stop a hole
to keep the wind away” … why, our own living flesh is being built and
replenished and sloughed off every day. We’re not so much a solid body as a
sort of wave, made up of the force that impels the form forward, picking up the
water in front of it and leaving the old water behind.
HACKETT: That’s all very
well, sir, but … (quietly, afraid to be overheard) a child’s arm?
FRANKLIN: Ah, yes, my point.
(rubs his forehead) Well, the point is, Roger, is that the child doesn’t need
it anymore, and we do, and it would be a shame if it just went to waste falling
to slime in a hole. What Mr. Hewson might find out studying that arm could help
thousands of other children live many happier and healthier years. (kindly,
confidingly, almost condescendingly) Do you understand, lad?
HACKETT: Yes, I think I do
sir. It was a bit of a shock, though.
FRANKLIN: I understand. I
should have been more frank with you, perhaps, but one never knows how folks
will take these things. (firmly) However, I am glad that you know now. It
should simplify some things about my studies; indeed, you could be a great help
in my new endeavor. What do you say, Hackett? Can I take you deeper into my
confidence? (his tone is enticing, offering a closer relationship, almost an
equality of persons, an adventure) Will you help me in the Great Work?
HACKETT: I …
OLDER HACKETT (voiceover):
The great Dr. Franklin was asking me to be, in effect, a part of history. What
could I do?
HACKETT: Of course I will,
sir. (hesitates) But I don’t quite understand exactly what we’re doing.
FRANKLIN: (happily, with
hardly suppressed glee for an opportunity to speak of it) Come with me to the
laboratory, and I’ll explain.
[Cut to the back-room door
again, which FRANKLIN is unlocking. HACKETT is excitedly nervous; he has never
been allowed in before. The older man pauses, with a little smile on his face,
like a magician about to pull off a trick, aware himself of the portentousness
of the occasion. Then he simply turns the handle and goes in, HACKETT following
in his wake.]
[Once in FRANKLIN steps
aside, letting HACKETT come forward and get a good look as the older man
quietly shuts the door behind them. The young man walks in slowly, looking
around. He has had glimpses of the room before, but never before seen it in all
its glory.]
[Its main feature is a large
worktable – big enough, indeed, to hold a body – that sits in the middle of the
room with a huge lamp hanging over it. There is a pinned and dissected frog in
a wax tray on it and several stoppered bottles of chemicals, some lengths of
wire and plate, and a Leyden jar contraption. A pile of notes and diagrams are
off to one side, and some surgical knives.]
[On another table against
the wall is a chemical laboratory; against another wall is a keyhole desk and
chair, cluttered with books and papers, pen and ink; another wall is taken up
with a honeycomb of cubbies and shelves, bursting with materials and tools of
various kinds. FRANKLIN moves to the center table.]
FRANKLIN: First, as an
introduction, let me show you a little trick, my boy. [indicates the specimen
in the tray] Now, this creature is quite dead, is it not?
HACKETT: (examining it) I
should say so, sir. It looks like its heart’s been cut out.
FRANKLIN: Indeed, it has;
here it is on the tray beside it. Would it surprise you to know that it beat
for a full six minutes afterward?
HACKETT: (in awe, peering at
the pale lump closely) Good Lord …
FRANKLIN: Every living
thing, every piece of a living thing wants to live. Only insurmountable
injury makes it stop. Now, watch this. [he attaches some nearby wires into
prepared slits in the frog’s body] Touch nothing, but watch closely.
[HACKETT leans in, and
FRANKLIN makes a few theatrical adjustments to his apparatus. He looks at
HACKETT meaningfully, then turns over a switch. There is an arc and a spark and
an audible sizzle, and to HACKETT’s amazement the frog’s legs begin to do a convulsive
little dance.]
HACKETT: (excited wonder)
It’s alive again! Alive!
FRANKLIN: (self-satisfied)
No, not really. If I leave the electrical fluid flowing long enough, the
muscles will stop; in fact, they’ll be cooked. [turns off the switch. The
movement ceases] But they want to be alive.
HACKETT: (uncertain,
watching the frog go still) But that’s not life?
FRANKLIN: Just a mockery of
life. For now. (intensely) But I am on the trail of an idea, an idea so
momentous in import, that if I succeed it shall change the very idea of life
and death itself. Not since Prometheus stole fire from the gods would there be
anything to compare. Tell me, lad, have you ever heard of the ship of Theseus?
HACKETT: Aye, sir, it’s a
famous paradox. The ship of Theseus is repaired piece by piece, as it falls
apart and ages. Is it the same ship after every bit of the original has been
replaced?
FRANKLIN: Smart boy. And
what do you think is the answer?
HACKETT: (thinking deeply)
It seems to me, Dr. Franklin, that it is the idea of the ship that
remains the same, and gives it form. (making the connection) Just as you say
our own bodies are being rebuilt constantly with food and drink!
FRANKLIN: Exactly! Right
now, we replace lost limbs with wooden pegs and hooks. These are but mumchance
makeshifts, at best. But what if we could take an entirely healthy limb, good
skin and bone and muscle, and graft it onto the living stump? What if we could
replace worn-out hearts as easily as a clockmaker replaces a worn-out
mainspring?
HACKETT: (aghast) Sir,
you’re speaking a horror story, a terrible fantasy! Even if it were possible …
(looking a little green) … who could stand for it?
FRANKLIN: (reasonably) It is
amazing what people can accept when their life is on the line. And it’s no
fairy tale. Three thousand years ago the Hindoos were rebuilding noses, cut off
as criminal punishment, using skin grafts from their own bodies. Don’t you
think that we modern men, with our science and our discoveries, can do slightly
better? And not only might this process supply living men with lively parts, it
could very well provide life itself again into a body which it has vacated!
HACKETT: (full of dread) But
this is blasphemy. (shocked realization; this is beyond medicine) It is
usurping the place of the Almighty!
FRANKLIN: (amused at his
alarm) As a child of God, ‘I must be about my Father’s business.’ And ‘these
things you shall do, and greater.’
HACKETT: (after a pause; he
is considering the argument) Even so, sir …
FRANKLIN: (chuckles) Come,
come, my boy, it may never even come to that! The problems – and the process –
are proving devilishly tricky, and quite elusive, as it is. I will be quite
happy if I succeed in merely replacing a little toe. As for restoring life
itself … well, it will need more than stimulating a piece of flesh. I believe
that it involves some combination of chemistry and electricity, but in what
proportion and in what order confounds me at the moment. But come over here and
look at this. (he moves to the shelves and the specimen jars) It’s quite
fascinating. There is a sort of newt from Amazonia …
[HACKETT moves with
uncertainly but with growing interest as FRANKLIN pulls a jar of cloudy liquid
with a pale lizard floating in it, a melancholy expression on its face.]
OLDER HACKETT: (voiceover)
And so little by little the Doctor drew me into his plans, enticing me along,
filling my own head with his dreams and enthusiasms. In time, familiarity
overcame my squeamishness, and I found myself becoming quite dedicated to the
cause myself …
[Quick cut to HACKETT,
running through a graveyard at night, a shrouded corpse over his shoulder, with
shouts and the baying of hounds pursuing him.]
OLDER HACKETT: As old Ben
said, it’s surprising what a body can get used to.
[Cut to HACKETT assisting
FRANKLIN (in shirt sleeves and white leather aprons) at dissecting a body,
unidentifiable as to age or sex as it is flayed open – like the frog - on the
backroom table.]
OLDER HACKETT: Night after
night we toiled away at the doctor’s research. It was not all dirty shovels and
bloody knives. There were painstaking chemical processes, experiments on
specimens, and the ransacking of the literature and correspondence with other
natural philosophers from all of Europe. [FRANKLIN is shown busy at the
convoluted jars and alembics on the chemistry table, while HACKETT reads to him
from a battered leather tome.] Often I would read aloud to him while he
undertook tedious procedures, and with my strange memory, prodigious even then,
I might draw some inference from the work that might not have impressed
another, even one as sharp as old Mr. Franklin.
He said he could feel himself drawing ever nearer to some great
illumination but (FRANKLIN adds a drop of liquid that turns his beaker into a
foaming mess; he hastily knocks it into a nearby tin bucket on the floor) the
solution he was pursuing constantly evaded him. [HACKETT puts the book aside to
help his master.]
OLDER HACKETT: That’s not to
say we didn’t have some successes. The major breakthrough was something Ben
came to call his Meat Glue. [cut to the two men bending over the table: a hand
and arm stretched out before them. The hand and arm are quite obviously from
different bodies; the hand is rough and tanned and hairy, the arm is smooth and
white] The trouble with attaching the parts of the body together is one cannot
do stitching fine enough. Oh, maybe you can get the skin together, and a few
major blood vessels, but the nerves – which are like fine wires – are much too
small and delicate. [FRANKLIN reaches out and tenderly lifts up the arm; the
hand flops a bit, but the parts stay together. FRANKLIN quickly attaches the
battery to the end of the arm, nods his head, and HACKETT throws the switch.
The fingers twitch convulsively. FRANKLIN smiles.] It ultimately turned out to
be almost useless, as the Meat Glue failed to work on living flesh. [cut to a
chaotic scene involving two stray cats, a lot of blood, and FRANKLIN and
HACKETT trying to control the situation.] What use could it be except for a
mortician, trying to make a beautiful corpse? [Cut to a scratched and
disappointed FRANKLIN putting the jar of Meat Glue – a light yellow, sticky,
translucent goop – away on the shelves, with the despondent HACKETT cleaning up
behind him.] Still, the research went on.
OLDER HACKETT: But as much
as I was now in Ben’s confidence, I couldn’t help but feel that there was some
inner process going on, something he wasn’t telling me. The old man could be
such a sphinx. Perhaps he was afraid that I would sell his ideas to someone
else, or even claim them as my own; with my memory that would not be difficult.
He needn’t have worried. My ambition – and indeed my skills – could never have
reached so far. It’s a quite different talent to know something and being able
to do something. Still, there were times when I was denied access to the back
room, and once or twice I glimpsed an unfamiliar journal, like the ones we kept
notes in, that he would whisk unobtrusively out of sight.
NOTES on proposed Chapter
Four: Ben Franklin, the Modern Prometheus. [Not exactly followed, as it turns
out.]
1)Rose returns a copy of “Frankenstein” to the Bureau
library; Bob and Howard are surprised to find there is such a thing and go with
her.
2) The librarian is an elderly fellow missing a limb. He
knew Ben Franklin before there ever even was a Bureau.
3) Questions arise from the book that lead to his
reminiscences.
4) Franklin historically worked with electricity and human
dissection.
5) The librarian helped him assemble and revive a patchwork
anatomy into galvanic life.
6) It seemed to have no memory of its head’s former
personality although knowledge of things was quickly restored, as of through
well-worn passageways.
7) Even so there was something sub-human, sub-personal
about it and its actions; it could never be taught any form of empathy or
morality.
8) Finally, its actions became so destructive that it had
to be destroyed, much to Franklin’s regret.
9) Is it because life might be restored as a mechanical
process, but a soul is an act of creation (whether by God or parents), and once
the soul has departed something vitally human is removed from the equation?
10) There’s something … something about his missing limb
that fits into this narrative. Perhaps in the old riddle of the Argo: with
every part replaced, is it still the same ship? Or perhaps that missing parts
(even of mind) does not make one less human. (Aristotelian instantiation)
9/3/2019: Have a chapter
about “Ben Franklin: The Modern Prometheus”, told by an agent who knew him.
This is a fairly old conceit: Franklin (with his electrical experiments and
anatomical studies) as a Frankenstein. The teller was but a youth at the time.
Perhaps he is now missing a limb of some sort. The main idea is what makes a
human a human, and after the soul departs, if the body is galvanized back into
life, is that which lives really a human person or a soul-less automaton? Could
be brought on by Mary Shelley’s recent publication. The DEA has its own
library; that should be fun to consider. Perhaps the teller is the librarian.
Illness or incapacitation does not change a person’s personhood, not even of
the mind or brain, which is just a means of expressing the soul. The physical
book is not the story: the story is the story, but it needs a book to
instantiate itself.
John: The Franklin tale is
intriguing - would the characters' telling it be more dramatic than perhaps a
roundtable style reading of the account, either by the man in younger days or
by Ben himself?
Me: Ben being of course dead
by this time the options are 1) the librarian telling his tale or 2) reading a
document Franklin has left. I don't cherish the task of trying to reproduce
someone's known prose style, so the librarian telling the tale - like Culpepper
on Washington, but longer - seems to me the way to go.
Frankenstein Published Jan.
1, 1818
For nearly two decades
leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Franklin
lived in London in a house at 36 Craven Street. In 1776, Franklin left his
English home to come back to America. More than 200 years later, 15 bodies were
found in the basement, buried in a secret, windowless room beneath the garden.
– Smithsonian Magazine
“The most plausible
explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin
Franklin’s young friend and protege, William Hewson.”
BB2 takes place in 1807. 11
years before Frankenstein published.
Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie
des Geistes) 1807
Hegel describes a sequential
progression from inanimate objects to animate creatures to human beings. This
is frequently compared to Charles
Darwin's evolutionary theory. However,
unlike Darwin, Hegel thought that organisms had agency in choosing to develop
along this progression by collaborating with other organisms. Hegel
understood this to be a linear process of natural development with a
predetermined end. He viewed this end teleologically as
its ultimate purpose and destiny.
This could be the book Bob
takes to the Librarian, who scoffs at the confusion of Geistes with
Ghosts, but decides to keep it.
From
Leonard Wolf's The Annotated Frankenstien
The physician Erasmus Darwin
(1731-1802), grandfather of the more famous evolutionist Charles Darwin, was
one of the most distinguished scientists of his age. A friend of the Godwin
family, Darwin, a zestful womanizer and an audacious stutterer, was capable of
dominating any conversation despite his handicap. A corpulent man, Darwin gave
sound advice to his contemporaries on diet. His famous prescription for the
disease pallor et tremor a timore was "Opium. Wine. Food.
Joy."
In the introduction to the
1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley refers to the
"experiments of Dr. Darwin . . . who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a
glass case, till by some extraordinary means, it began to move with voluntary
motion." It is a curious reference, which has been illuminated . . . by a
personal communication from Darwin's biographer, Desmond King-Hele, who writes,
"Mary Shelley's remarks can, I think, be regarded as recording a mixed-up
remembrance by Byron and Shelley of what Darwin wrote in his first note
to The Temple of Nature. It is entitled 'Spontaneous Vitality of
Microscopic animals' . . . Darwin does refer to a 'paste composed of flour and
water' in which 'the animalcules called eels' are seen in great abundance and
gradually become larger, even in a 'sealed glass phial.' He also refers to the
vorticelli coming to life after being dried. Put this together and stir it up,
and you might arrive at Mary's report." Darwin's most famous works, The
Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature, are treatises written
in quite skillful if endless heroic couplets.
On February 19, 1807, Aaron
Burr was arrested in Alabama for alleged treason and sent to Richmond,
Virginia, to be tried in a U.S. circuit court.
{Erasmus} Darwin’s Zoonomia
Darwin's most important
scientific work, Zoonomia (1794–1796), contains
a system of pathology and a chapter on 'Generation'.
In the latter, he anticipated some of the views of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
which foreshadowed the modern theory of evolution.
Erasmus Darwin's works were read and commented on by his grandson Charles
Darwin the naturalist. Erasmus Darwin based his theories
on David Hartley's
psychological theory of associationism.[9] The
essence of his views is contained in the following passage, which he follows up
with the conclusion that one and the same kind of living filament is and has
been the cause of all organic life:
Would it be too bold to
imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist,
perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind,
would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from
one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with
animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new
propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations;
and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent
activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its
posterity, world without end![10]
Erasmus Darwin also
anticipated survival of the fittest in Zoönomia mainly when
writing about the "three great objects of desire" for every organism:
"lust, hunger, and security."[10] A
similar "survival of the fittest" view in Zoönomia is
Erasmus' view on how a species "should" propagate itself. Erasmus'
idea that "the strongest and most active animal should propagate the
species, which should thence become improved".[10] Today,
this is called the theory of survival of the fittest.
His grandson Charles Darwin, much less libidinous and who led more of an
invalid life, and who is not known to have illegitimately fathered children, or
fathered children he did not plan, acknowledge and raise, posited the different
and fuller theory of natural selection. Charles' theory was that natural
selection is the inheritance of changed genetic characteristics that are better
adaptations to the environment; these are not necessarily based in
"strength" and "activity", which themselves ironically can
lead to the overpopulation that results in natural selection yielding
nonsurvivors of genetic traits.
Erasmus Darwin was familiar
with the earlier proto-evolutionary thinking of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo,
and cited him in his 1803 work Temple of Nature.
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (baptised
25 October 1714; died 26 May 1799), was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution,
philosopher and deist. He
is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics.[1] In
1767 he became a judge in the Court
of Session.
As such, Burnett adopted an
honorary title based on the name of his father's estate and family seat, Monboddo
House. Monboddo was one of a number of scholars involved at
the time in development of early concepts of biological evolution.
Some credit him with anticipating in principle the idea of natural
selection that was read by (and acknowledged in the writings
of) Erasmus Darwin. Charles
Darwin read the works of his grandfather Erasmus and later
developed the ideas into a scientific
theory.[
He believed that
contemporary people suffered many diseases because they were removed from the
environmental state of being unclothed and exposed to extreme swings in climate.
Charles
Dickens knew of Monboddo and wrote in his novel, Life and Adventures of
Martin Chuzzlewit about "(...) the Manboddo
doctrine touching the probability of the human race having once been
monkeys".[16] This
is significant because Martin Chuzzlewit was published decades
before Darwin wrote his theory of evolution.[17]
Monboddo was a pioneer in
regard to many modern ideas and had already in the eighteenth century realized
the value of "air-baths"[18] (the
familiar term which he invented) to mental and physical health. In his writings
Monboddo argued against clothes as unnatural and undesirable from every point
of view for both mind and body.
Burnett in his earlier years
suggested that the orangutan was a form of man,
although some analysts think that some of his presentation was designed to
entice his critics into debate.
Lord Monboddo, a caricature
by John Kay
The orangutan was at this
time a generic term for all types of apes. The Swedish explorer whose evidence
Burnett accepted was a naval officer who had viewed a group of monkeys and
thought they were human. Burnett may simply have taken the view that it was
reasonable for people to assume the things they do and the word of a naval
officer trained to give accurate reports was a credible source. Burnett was
indeed responsible for changing the classical definition of man as a creature
of reason to a creature capable of achieving reason, although he viewed this
process as one slow and difficult to achieve.
At one time he said that
humans must have all been born with tails, which were removed by midwives at
birth. His contemporaries ridiculed his views, and by 1773 he had retracted
this opinion (Pringle 1773). Some later commentators have seen him as anticipating evolutionary theory.
He appeared to argue that animal species adapted
and changed to survive, and his observations on the progression of primates to
man amounted to some kind of concept of evolution.
Burnett also examined feral
children and was the only thinker of his day to accept them
as human rather than monsters. He viewed in these children the ability to
achieve reason. He identified the orangutan as human, as his sources indicated
it was capable of experiencing shame.
William Godwin (3
March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and
novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and
the first modern proponent of anarchism.[2] Godwin
is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a
year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an
attack on political institutions,
and Things
as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an
early mystery novel which attacks aristocratic privilege.
Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical
circles of London in the 1790s. He wrote prolifically in the genres of novels,
history and demography throughout his life.
In the conservative reaction
to British radicalism,
Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the pioneering feminist
writer Mary Wollstonecraft in
1797 and his
candid biography of her after her death from childbirth.
Their daughter, later known as Mary
Shelley, would go on to write Frankenstein and
marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
With his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, Godwin set up The Juvenile Library,
allowing the family to write their own works for children (sometimes
using noms de plume) and translate and publish many other books,
some of enduring significance. Godwin has had considerable influence on British
literature and literary culture.
Believing in the
perfectibility of the race, that there are no innate principles, and therefore
no original propensity to evil, he considered that "our virtues and our
vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and
if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be
extirpated from the world." All control of man by man was more or less
intolerable, and the day would come when each man, doing what seems right in
his own eyes, would also be doing what is in fact best for the community,
because all will be guided by principles of pure reason.
Such optimism was combined
with a strong empiricism to support Godwin's
belief that the evil actions of men are solely reliant on the corrupting
influence of social conditions, and that changing these conditions could remove
the evil in man. This is similar to the ideas of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft,
concerning the shortcomings of women as due to discouragement during their
upbringing.
In Political Justice Godwin
had acknowledged that an increase in the standard of living as he envisioned
could cause population pressures, but he saw an obvious solution to avoiding
distress: "project a change in the structure of human action, if not of
human nature, specifically the eclipsing of the desire for sex by the
development of intellectual pleasures".[36] In
the 1798 version of his essay, Malthus specifically rejected this possible
change in human nature.
In his first edition
of Political Justice Godwin included arguments favouring the
possibility of "earthly immortality"
(what would now be called Physical Immortality),
but later editions of the book omitted this topic. Although the belief in such
a possibility is consistent with his philosophy regarding perfectibility and
human progress, he probably dropped the subject because of political expedience
when he realised that it might discredit his other views.[38] Godwin
explored the themes of life
extension and immortality in his gothic
novel St. Leon,
which became popular (and notorious) at the time of its publication in 1799,
but is now mostly forgotten. St. Leon may have provided
inspiration for his daughter's novel Frankenstein.[39]
[My musings] Franklin
invented a thing he called “Meat Glue”, a special substance that could never
have been simply ‘discovered’, as it was made through several separate chemical
and electrical processes. He wanted to use it at first to re-attach severed
limbs to living bodies, but found it only worked on dead tissue; living bodies
rejected it, even if they were their own limbs. He went on from there to
reviving a dead body with unharmed tissues.
“Did Franklin leave any
notes?’ ‘Nope, after that experience he burned all the notebooks and never
spoke of it again. As he put it to me, he was going to work more on making
better human beings from the inside out, with the material at hand, so to
speak. He swore me to secrecy, and we never spoke of it again. Oh, with my
memory, I could write it all down again, step for step, but I never would, not
even under torture. That’s going with me to the grave, which will be any month
now, if I’m any judge of horseflesh.’ He chuckled.
He must earlier have sworn
Bob to secrecy before he tells the tale. Title: ‘Butcher’s Meat’ because that’s
the lie that Franklin tells Hackett at first as he’s delivering body parts, and
what a certain kind of philosopher thinks that is all a human is. Can talk
about the ‘standing wave’ theory of body and soul: a wave is composed of the
energy of compels the wave forward and the water that it picks up to embody
itself as it goes along. The wave cannot exist as a wave without both, no
matter that they can be clearly distinguished.
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