Victoria, Lady Welby (1837-1912)1

Victoria, Lady Welby (1837-1912)1

WILLIAM ANDREW MYERS

All closed figures are vicious as ideals or symbols for the thinkers. Outlook itself is not enough: there must be out-way, a way out, an ever-fresh start.

Welby

I.  INTRODUCTION BIOGRAPHY

The life of Victoria, Lady Welby presents several anomalies: a woman with no formal education, her social position, incisive mind, and indus-trious correspondence enabled her to engage in probing discussion with the most important minds of the English-speaking world at the turn of the century. Her position in the Victorian English aristocracy notwith-standing, her reformist ideas on religion and language and her philosophy of interpretation place her firmly among the early twentieth century’s most progressive and original thinkers. Largely unknown now except to specialists in Victorian life and letters, semioticians, and scholars of C.S. Peirce (with whom she corresponded during the last decade of her life), Welby’s work on meaning was influential in its time and still merits study and development.

II. BIOGRAPHY

Victoria Alexandria Maria Louisa Stuart-Wortley was bom April 27, 1837 into an aristocratic family both sides of which could claim generations of minor nobility behind them.2 Her early life was marked by the fact that one of her godmothers became Queen Victoria five days after her baptismal ceremony. Her father died when Victoria was seven years A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 1-24.© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. old, and so the most important influence on her childhood was her mother, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley.3 Lady Emmeline was a writer of poems, plays, and travel narratives. Her prodigious output (“29 books of poetry, travel, and drama between 1833 and her death at the age of 49 in 1855”)4 is all the more remarkable for her having spent many of those years in arduous travel.Victoria suffered from ill health in childhood, including a bout of scarlet fever, and her “weakened constitution” was deemed an appropriate reason to educate her privately at home. But, curiously, it was also deemed an appropriate reason for Victoria to accompany her mother on her travels, which after the death of Victoria’s father had become Lady Emmeline’s obsession.5

Thus at age 12, Victoria accompanied her mother on a long journey to North and South America, and produced her first book from the experience. A Young Traveller's Journal of a Tour in North and South America During the Year 1850 was written for other twelve-year-olds and illustrated with engravings made from Victoria’s sketches of such scenes as Niagara Falls and a southern cotton plantation. Appearing in 1852, the book is enthusiastic, charming, and naive, praising, for example, the cleanliness and evident happiness of the plantation slaves and their children. Yet in this can be seen seeds of what became Victoria’s habitual independence of mind, for on the issue of slavery she was willing to set her own observations against prevailing establishment opinion in England. In fact, Paul Chipchase calls the book “a little masterpiece of fresh observation”6 - but his examples are of natural phenomena.They were indefatigable tourists, gathering sights and sounds vora-ciously. In the northeast alone Victoria records visits to Albany, Niagara Falls, the Navy Yard, Cambridge Observatory, Faneuil Hall, the Atheneum, the Custom House, the State House, notes seeing Chantrey’s “Washington” and Hiram Powers’ “The Greek Slave,” the latter sculp-ture one of the most famous artworks of its time. She also was treated to audiences with numbers of illustrious Americans, including Prof. Agassiz, Daniel Webster, and President Zachary Taylor (it was his plan-tation the pair visited after their meeting with him in Washington). Thus it went from New York to New Orleans, Vera Cruz to Havana, Panama to Peru.7

Within a year of their return to England, Emmeline and Victoria made a tour of the Iberian peninsula, taking in Morocco in the process; 1853 found them travelling through northern Europe. From January to October, 1855, they toured the Middle East, the journey ending with the death of Lady Emmeline - of dysentery and the effects of a leg broken earlier on the trip - in the desert. She died after the pair were abandoned by their escorts, and Victoria, also suffering fever, had to wait for help from Beirut.8Thus orphaned, Victoria lived with various relatives and was also taken in by the Queen, becoming, in 1861, Maid of Honor to the court. While she later wrote disparagingly of the aridity of intellectual life in London,9 she did in the two years before her marriage encounter many of the great political figures of the time, who, according to her daughter and biographer, would “devote a thoughtful attention to her unorthodox views on foreign - above all American - policy.”10 In 1863, Victoria married Sir William Earle Welby, who after his father’s death in 1875 took the additional surname Gregory. Victoria published under the name Hon. Lady Victoria Welby-Gregory until 1890, then as Hon. Lady Welby, and from 1893 on as Victoria Welby, sometimes V. Welby.11 Sir William died in 1898. Of their three children, two survived to adulthood: Sir Charles Glynn Earle Welby (1865-1938), from whom present members of the Welby family are descended, and Emmeline Mary Elizabeth (“Nina”) (1867-1955), who published two collections of her mother’s letters as well as poetry, history, and trans-lation under the name Mrs. Henry Cust.12Upon her son’s marriage in 1887, Victoria lost the use of the title, Lady, with her first name, that right passing to her new daughter-inlaw, and became Victoria, Lady Welby. She frequently corrected correspondents’ understandable confusion over her proper title, explaining to Peirce in 1903:May I confess that in signing my book “V. Welby” I hoped to get rid as far as possible of the irrelevant associations of my unlucky title? I am called “V. Lady Welby” merely to distinguish me from my son’s wife, now Lady Welby; which is a custom of ours. Thus I have no right to be called Lady Victoria Welby.... You will understand my desire to be known as simply as possible though I cannot altogether ignore the “Hon.” conferred upon me as Maid of Honour to the late Queen. But the only honour I value is that of being treated by workers as a serious worker.13Victoria Welby’s first book published in adulthood was Links and Clues (1881), a collection of 104 meditations and interpretive essays on religious ideas and language. The book was not well received,although a second edition was published in 1883. But responses to the book greatly widened the circle of people who corresponded with Welby and visited her at Denton Manor. She settled into working habits during this period which she followed to the end of her life. These included writing brief essays which she then had printed and circulated to friends and acquaintances, soliciting responses. She would then enter into sometimes lengthy discussions by mail, and occasionally held small seminars at her home. Frequently she had copies made of letters from one correspondent which she would sent to another in hopes of getting the two to engage in direct discussion. It was in this way that she tried, evidently unsuccessfully, to bring C. S. Peirce and Bertrand Russell together by mail.14 She thus worked as an intellectual clearing house, trying to bring together “serious workers” from disparate fields.

Notable scientists, theologians, clergy, religious sceptics, linguists, architects, philosophers, visionaries, and outright cranks entered in at one time or another. The resulting collection of letters alone occupies some eight and a half feet of shelf space in the Welby Archive at York University, Ontario, Canada. In a cursory browse of the list of 461 correspondents represented in that collection, the eye picks out such names as J. M. Barrie, Paul Cams.The two volumes of letters edited by Welby’s daughter, Nina Cust, reveal preoccupations with precision in theological and religious language, care in the use of metaphor to express “higher” reality, impli-cations of scientific discovery for the human future, and methods of interpretation. While most of her early writing is devoted to religious and theological themes ranging from discussions of religious scepticism to apologetics, by at least 1890 Welby had become fully convinced that the key to solving the vexed questions of religious knowledge and faith and the effects of scientific knowledge on our understanding of human life and the cosmos was in the development of a viable framework of interpretation. In 1897 she published Grains of Sense, “Dedicated to the Misunderstood,” which makes the case for linguistic reform and the importance of early education in what she tentatively called “sensifics” but later named “signifies” - the study of the highest level of linguistic meaning. During the same period she produced “Meaning and Metaphor” (1893) and “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation” (1896). Whereas Grains of Sense, which included allegory and brief excursions into the interpretation of metaphors for thought and meaning, was apparently aimed at a literate general audience, the latter two essays appeared in journals more directed at professional scholars and present somewhat more systematically Welby’s case for developing a science of interpretation.During this decade Welby also produced, in addition to her numerous brief papers privately circulated, two collections of quotations from scientific and philosophic publications with her commentary illustrating carelessness and incoherence in language usage and the need for reform. The fist of these compendia, titled A Selection of Passages from “Mind” (January, 1876, to July, 1892), “Nature” (1870, and 1888 to 1892), “Natural Science” (1892), Bearing on Changes and Defects in the Significance of Terms and in the Theory and Practice of Logic, appeared in 1893, marked “For Private Circulation Only.” The second collection was The Witness of Science to Linguistic Anarchy (1898), and here again the writing of professional scientists is held up to detailed and disapproving scrutiny.In 1903 appeared What is Meaning?, the work on interpretation which brought her to the attention of C. S. Peirce and certainly her most important work philosophically. Her final book was Signifies and Language (1911). Victoria Welby died March 19, 1912.

III. PHILOSOPHY

1. Beginnings of a Philosophy of Interpretation

Welby’s writings during the 1880s and ’90s repeat three themes: first, that the physical evidence sufficient to test scientific hypotheses is only the lowest kind of knowledge human beings require for an adequate understanding of reality; second, that all knowledge whatsoever is based upon acts of interpretation; and third, that interpretation happens at distinct levels, with the highest revealing the ultimate significance of ideas in their widest possible context. Coupled with these themes is the linguistic principle that metaphor is unavoidable in the adequate expression of meaning, but the use of any metaphor must be closely connected to the literal import of its words if it is not to be misleading, ambiguous, or just silly. Welby developed these themes and the principle of metaphor through hundreds of letters, numerous one - to two - page papers interpreting scriptural texts or religious ideas, and several essays specifically on interpretation. Her exchange with the agnostic Lucy Clifford is typical of her approach to matters of proof and evidence.Clifford had written, sometime between 1882 and 1885:We start from such different standpoints, you and I... I feel that we know nothing, have evidence of nothing. Of all the vanished millions, could never one have given some hint of the secret in Heaven - if Heaven there be - or earth; of life that had been or life that would be, if secret there is?16

Welby replied:

What is greatness? What is goodness? What is affection? Are they real in the sense of being worth believing in, reverencing, and living for? Take intellectual or moral greatness, where is the outside evidence? Can a surveyor or civil engineer measure or weigh it?... I’ll give you outside evidence of my “light beyond” and “nucleatic life” (a million times more delicate in grain and powerful in ray-force than any sense-known vibration, a million magnitudes beyond any microscope our eyes could use) when you give me substantial proof (such as we hang criminals by) of there being any such thing as good at all in your sense - worth striving for, because real, as well as altogether lovely and desirable. Take affection: your love for your child. What real evidence can you give me of it? The actress can give me all its outward signs; and if you appeal to life-long acts of devotion, how do I know the motive is what you say it is? It might only be the old selfishness in a new form or a mere animal instinct.... [sic] But more. Even if you prove your love, how can you prove that the object of love is not a mere figment of your thought, but real and worthy? What is ultimate - outside or inside, outward or inward? Is not all we know like layers of husk - outside in relation to one thing, inside to another? When you say to me “there’s no proof of anything you say, it’s all your fancy,” may I not say “and there’s no proof of there really being anything to prove it to” - no proof that the very idea of proof at all does not rest upon a fallacy (a survival of the days when a persistent Ego was postulated or assumed) and will not soon itself become an exploded superstition or obsolete fancy?... [sic] Of course we are far apart. I rejoice to know it. That is why we need each other.17

Welby over and over insists on distinctions between the level of literal language and the level of “sense,” which she characterizes as the true

meaning of an expression. It is not too much to claim that elucidating the sense of “sense” was - intellectually, at least - her life’s work.

In Links and Clues she identifies four levels of scriptural interpreta-tion, vastly different in results, given the aim that

we are looking therein for the word of God; for the highest, the deepest and purest, in one word, the most Divine truth we can bear... we must ask ourselves also, Do we want to know what the Bible says only; or what it means?... Do we want to know what is eternally true, and what true of certain ages and races - “temporally” true; what the Holy Scriptures would say equally and in the same terms if written now, or 2000 years hence, and what they said at certain times, and to certain people, and in certain circumstances?The first level is the literal, which leads to “utter shipwreck” because of the large number of clearly metaphorical texts. “Well may He say that the letter killeth; by contracting, and by deadly work of disunion, leading astray and hiding truth.”Next, “the equal, the level,” for example, treating all passages in the Old Testament as being on one level, and all in the New Testament as being similarly on their own level.The principle of the higher and lower requires no Scripture broken; it requires only our Lord’s own rule of interpreting and expanding the lower by the higher, the lesser by the larger, that which “hath been said” by the greater truth which includes, and thus supercedes and replaces it.Thirdly, context. Welby comments that considering context brings us to “truer and more wholesome ground,” but notes the difficulty of knowing “where we are to draw the line in interpreting by context; where the context ends, and where we ought rather to search for parallels.”The fourth level is the “tendency of the whole, taken as a whole.” But this interpretive stance leads us back to the principle of the higher and lower, because we go astray if we neglect the relationship of a “whole” to other wholes, i.e., other texts which bear on its meaning. So in the end, Welby argues, it is the principle of higher and lower which is the true principle of Biblical interpretation.The application of this principle involves, first, asking whether a passage or test is “attainable by man” without any special divine illu-mination, i.e., if it is really an expression of some merely human insight, not necessarily dependent on any higher truth. The higher, she says, is that which is “beyond and above any natural religion or standard.” Second, the interpreter uses the higher thus identified “as a test and interpretation for all the rest.” Too slavish a fixation upon the literal errs by letting “the written letter of the Word interpret for us the living glory of the Logos.”In other contexts, though, Welby is quite interested in the literal level of language. In Grains of Sense she argues against the claim (of Huxley and others) that the meanings of words can be quite arbitrarily assigned, so long as a writer is consistent in ensuring that meanings are “rigidly attached” to their words. “... [A]s if it was possible to secure such rigid attachment, especially in the very cases where perfect fitness is most needed,” Welby sniffed.On the same ground she attacked Lewis Carroll, “a prince of humourists,” for failing “to see that such a practice [of arbitrary stipulations], become common, would strike at the heart of humour itself: and should also overlook the tremendous part that associations called up by terms and phrases play in the effect of his Wonderland books.”Right use of language depends, Welby holds, on expanding our awareness of associative possibilities of language, dependent though they may be on a range of literal meanings. Unlike many linguistic reformers, Welby wants more expressiveness, more thoughtful metaphor in language, not more literalness and arbitrary stipulation definition. “[W]e want a much larger proportion of meaning to expression,” she says: “Then we may hope for a larger proportion of sense to meaning, and of significance to sense, bringing out untold treasures now buried in dumbness and, as we are, unspeakable.”Welby proposes - over and over in different forums - that the study of sense, meaning, and significance should be systematized, built into a discipline, and taught to the young. “The Thinker was once called the Seer, or the Magician and the Wizard, then the Prophet, then the Philosopher, then the Mystic; whereas now he is proud to be called the Critic. Let us hope that in the future he will be called the Interpreter or the Translator, and that there will be ‘chairs of interpretation.’She comments that while experts have claimed that human eyes and ears could be trained to much higher acuity than is common, “that would be useless without a corresponding rise in the power to interpret, to express clearly and fully what we perceived and inferred.”The name she proposes in Grains of Sense for this new science is “sensifics” (though she later settled on “signifies” for her philosophy of interpretation).One largely sympathetic reviewer of Grains of Sense complained that some of Welby’s examples were strained, but proceeded to reveal in his very criticism that he had missed the message:  we cannot

regard the criticism of the title of ‘The Descent of Man’ as anything else than a piece of quibbling. The word ‘descent’ is not a metaphor but the description of an actual fact, and should not be contrasted with ‘ascent,’ which has a moral and theological connotation quite foreign to the objective spirit and purpose of Darwin’s inquiry.”Welby takes lavish pains to show that it is precisely words like “descent” as used by scientists which are metaphors and require thoughtful reflection and careful interpretation if they are not to obscure their author’s meanings.In her Monist essay of 1893 Welby argues for an awareness of figu-rative language which will clarify particular usages:

[W]e might begin by learning better what part symbolism plays in the rituals of expression, and ask ourselves what else is language itself but symbolism, and what it symbolizes. We should then examine anew the relations of the “symbolic” to the “real”; of image, figure, metaphor, to what we call literal or actual. For this concerns us all. Imagery runs in and out, so to speak, from the symbolic to the real world and back again.But the very terms “metaphorical” and “literal” are chaotically ambiguous, Welby says, and much misunderstanding in modern culture comes from our mistakenly “postulating an absolute Plain Meaning to be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have been virtually assuming that our hearers and readers all share the same mental back-ground and atmosphere.” We further assume, she says, that we have clear agreement upon the application of the distinction between the figurative and the literal, so that “we may safely play upon all the chords of imagery, reserving without difficulty for serious use a body of terms which are direct expressions of ‘fact.’... [T]his is precisely one of the most dangerous of presuppositions.”Fully to understand the workings of figurative language requires attention to the denotative function of a particular usage - as a starting point. But it also requires, Welby proposes, awareness of the fact that such language can bring forward meanings from a realm of reality inaccessible to the merely literal. There is a superficial tension in her writing of this period. On the one hand, she insists that we have lost control of our language and must regain it if we are to progress scientifically and philosophically; on the other hand she treats language almost as an organism with its own history and rules of natural selection. It may be, she says, the “the ordinary modern metaphor like the ordinary modern analogy is a mere rhetorical device,” yet some figurative usage are ancient and “hail from an altogether deeper and more authentic source.” The tension is resolved by recognizing that the needed control of language is not through an arbitrary power over expression, but thoughtful awareness of the expressive powers inherent in language itself.Some of her own flights of metaphor are aimed at correcting the overuse of earthbound foundation and basis metaphors and raising the awareness of Copemican imagery of solar focus and orbit:  it is conceivable that some [images] may be found to belong to that as yet mysterious energy on which natural selection plays and of which variation is the outcome or the sign. What we find in language may thus be, as it were, not merely the “scarred and weatherworn” remnant of geologic strata but sometimes the meteorite, the calcined fragment of earlier worlds of correspondence, ultra-earthly, cosmical.She proposes that we must try the experiment of investigating the “grades of validity in metaphor and analogy in modern science” in an effort to “have recognized clearly the powerful though hidden effects upon us of organized mental picture brought in surreptitiously with verbal imagery, or by comparison;...”

Thus it will not do to treat figurative language as the free creation of the writer who can invent without scruple or limit any terminology desired. We will not know until we have tried the experiment of inves-tigating hidden sources of metaphor in our language whether it will be worth the effort, but we are at the mercy of language if we do not try. “For after all, whether we like it or no, we are heliocentric; the world and all that is in it is cosmically generated.”Finally, she argues, the great aim of linguistic study is enhanced significance, both in the sense that language will be richer, more significant as a result of such study, and in the sense that life itself will be more valuable, more significant to us.. meaning - in the widest sense of the word - is the only value of whatever “fact” presents itself to us. Without this, to observe and record appearances or occurrences would become a worse than wasteful task. Significance is the one value of all that consciousness brings, or that intelligence deals with; the one value of life itself.... To “signify” is the one test of the important. The significant is alone worth notice. The realities we try to express, as well as language itself, impose limits on our powers of expression. Language usage is not arbitrary, Welby says; control of language means being mindful of the deep connections of language to thought and of thought to the world. She has a theological conception in mind when she explores the sources of significance:

A “fact” in itself as evident to the senses, apart from its meaning and effect, from what it conveys and manifests to intelligence, is like - the black marks upon this paper, or the noises made in speaking. But there is an undying reality which is conveyed alike through sounds, black marks, etc., or events; through the acts of an individual equally with the narration of such acts, and most of all, with the conception of them. That reality, that substance, that precious and eternal treasure, is the Meaning, the Object, the Gist of all we know as fact; timeless, spaceless, yet energetic, creative, fruitful. This is the reality of revelation spiritual and material, - and more, Divinely Natural; this is the reality of the Divine in the Human proclaimed through incarnation; the heavenly in the earthly, the holy and wholesome nature in both.38

This ontological realism applied to language also shows up in her queer little allegory, “A Royal Slave” (1897), in which a convention is held of “Sign and Speech in grand array, with Talk, Scribble, a crowd of little Letters and Syllables arranged in groups, a few Colons and Commas curling and dotting gaily about, and a pompous Full Stop...” The Slave is Man, and the meeting is to give new orders (e.g., “you are to say ‘phenomenal’ when you mean ‘exceptional’ ”), all intended to keep the Slave in a perpetual state of confusion. For as Language says, “We must stand none of his nonsense, but all take care to be as ambiguous as we can, and see that he is well confused; or he will be getting some clear ideas of his own and some notion of his own power: and where should we be then?”39

Despite the whimsical approach to the problem of the control of meaning in that ephemeral piece, Welby regarded the problem as the 

deepest facing humanity, and she did not see solutions in any of the commonly recommended remedies. For example, we gain little by care-fully setting out fixed definitions of terms, as all the logic textbooks recommended:

But surely we forget that in the first place, this is often precisely the most impossible thing to do; as a fixed meaning, the same for all, unaffected by context of any kind, applies only, if at all, to a small proportion of ordinary words: and secondly, that to define every word which needs it would at once render all important works simply unreadable.40

Definition is no panacea, she goes on, because thus exalted it would hinder the evolution of language and thus its ability to express “changes in the psychological atmosphere.” Moreover, the problems of significance are prior to those of definition.41

In the essay just quoted, Welby proposes a classification of different meaning-terms: “Signification” refers to “the value of language itself”; “import” to the “intellectual character of the logical process.” The former is the purview of philology, the latter of logic. Next comes “sense,” which she connects to physical science.

[Tjhree main current senses of the word should be borne in mind. There must certainly be some “sense” both as meaning and as judgment in observation and experiment to give them any value whatever... But in another “sense” Sense is the inevitable starting- point and ultimate test of scientific generalization..,42

Asking whether these three senses of “sense” might be accidental or revelatory of a deeper connection, she cites philological evidence for the latter alternative and then comments that “the word seems to give us the link between the sensory, the sensible and the significant: there is apparently a real connection between the ‘sense’ - say of sight - in which we react to stimulus, and the ‘sense’ in which we speak or act.”43 Finally, “significance” carries connotations of importance or value. Something has significance “because it demands serious attention and, it may be, decisive action: or because it must modify more or less pro-foundly our mental attitude towards the nations or races affected by it, and towards the problems called social.”44 Significance is in the purview of philosophy, poetry, and religion. All together, these make up the scope 

of meaning (or intent, as she often parenthetically calls it). This outline and terminology is connected to fields of study; when she later regu-larizes her terms, the final structure is a hierarchy of interpretive functions (see below).

What she wants to argue in “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation” is her familiar thesis that scientific and philosophical writers are paying too little attention to the needs of interpretation, ignoring the conditions of meaning, and that the great need is for systematic study of meaning -

1. e., signification, import, sense, and significance - and its incorpora-tion in education.45 Her most fully developed attempt to initiate this new study, apart from her extensive correspondence, was her book, What Is Meaning?.

2. The Science of Signifies

Welby’s major philosophic work opens with a reiteration of the thesis of “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation,” but sets out the aspects of meaning in a somewhat different (and clearer) structure: “Only those trained from the first to detect (1) the sense, (2) the meaning, and (3) the significance, - that is the tendency, the intention, and the essential interest of what is brought before their notice, - can hope to emerge from the present bondage to the plausible.”46 This triad forms the basic hierarchy of the movements of the understanding in interpretation (or, as she sometimes calls it, translation). Our whole mental life consists of translations or interpretations of the basic “facts” which are present to us (and even facts are interpreted before they can signify anything), and these interpretations take place in the three ways named in the triad.

Sense, meaning, and significance “may also be put as signification, intention, and ideal value. From this point of view, the reference of sense is mainly instinctive, of meaning volitional, and of significance moral;... Signifies emphasises the relation of the sign in the widest sense to each of these, recognizing that there is here an ascending grade of practical importance.”47 This structure now more clearly shows why merely careful definition will not solve the expressive problems Welby so lavishly pointed out in her collections of bad examples: definition only deals with the lowest level of understanding, the denotations of terms.

At that first level, sense, we attend to the possibilities of significa-tion; but there is, Welby says, “strictly speaking, no such thing as the Sense of a word, but only the sense in which it is used - the circum- 

stances, state of mind, reference, ‘universe of discourse,’ belonging to it.”48 This leads to the second level, intention or meaning, which reveals the speaker’s or writer’s expressive aim, to which later analysts of the pragmatics of language such as Wittgenstein and Austin were to devote so much fruitful attention.

We must understand the use (i.e., intention) because no expression can be understood properly outside its context of utterance. It is at this level that metaphor and analogy are to be understood, essentially as modifications of the sense possibilities (significations) of the terms which make them up. Context awareness is essential because meaning is not static; it is not static because linguistic signs are essentially translations, i.e., intermediaries, of world to mind, and the interrelationship of mind and world is always in flux.49 Otherwise, we could not explain psychological progress from the primitive to the civilized.50 At the same time, Welby frequently calls for closer connection between analogical and metaphorical usage to the sense (denotation) of the words used.

The third level of understanding is significance, the largest possible context in which we apprehend a sign:

The Significance is always manifold, and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing its importance, its appeal to us, its emotional force, its ideal value, its moral aspect, its universal or at least social range.51

Analysis of significance, then, reveals why the content of a sign matters:

All science, all logic, all philosophy, the whole controversy about aesthetics, about ethics, about religion, ultimately concentrate upon this: What is the sense of, What do we mean by, What is the signifi-cance of, that is, Why do we care for, Beauty, Truth, Goodness? Why do we value experience? And why do we seek for Significance, and resume the value of innumerable observed facts under formulae of significance like gravitation or natural selection? Because we are the Expression of the world, as it were “expressed from” it by the commanding or insistent pressure of natural stimulii not yet understood.52

It will not be out of place here to note that Welby’s orientation to the idea of sensed “facts” - her valuable awareness that understanding 

does not start with correct apprehension of a world of fixed “meanings” - made her a most appropriate correspondent of William James and the English pragmatist, F. C. S. Schiller, whom she knew personally (not to mention the famous correspondence with Charles Sanders Peirce, virtually the only thing Welby is known for - to the extent that she is known - in the United States). In 1900 she wrote to Schiller, “I have studied and noted almost every line Professor James has written;.. and although she was strongly critical of the idea of forced choice in James’s “The Will to Believe” (“For there must always be, in these cases, a third alternative.... [W]e suffer not only from myopia but also from diplopia in mental vision”),53 she also wrote to James in 1905 that “Indeed, I am really an aboriginal pragmatist... We greatly need the distinction between (1) rigid and plastic, (2) static and dynamic - ‘truth.’ Things are just as real, and their account in symbol just as true (or untrue) in the one case as in the other.”54

Welby borrowed her use of the term “diplopia” from the psycholo-gist Hughlings Jackson and applied it, in good pragmatic form, to a critique of simple-minded dualism. She writes, for example (in an unfor-tunately unpublished letter), that the idea of darkness (evil) as the “background necessary to make the glory visible” must really be under-stood dialectically (although she does not use this word):

Are we not to learn that this radical dualism also is a question of stage in onward movement, and the condition of instead of the obstacle to, an ensuing synthesis? May it not depend in some true sense on that intellectual diplopia which should naturally develop into a higher type of vision called binocular; that our restlessness of thought, our persistent and deepening discontent under final dualisms, that increasing hunger for unity at any price which even tempts us to premature “reconciliations”, may be due to this undercurrent of predictive instinct, constantly fed by the revelation of continuity which science on all sides brings us?55

Interpretation likewise proceeds in stages, each one recapitulating and bringing forward the previous. The levels, sense, meaning, signifi-cance, are thus rather to be thought of as movements to ever more adequate, less limited and limiting, understanding.56 Welby several times applies her favorite analogy to the interpretive process, comparing the three levels of interpretation to the planetary, the solar, and the cosmical. While all “ ‘planetary’ knowledge is directly acquired...,” and “We are in full ‘touch’ with the world we inhabit,” knowledge at the higher 

levels is increasingly inferential. Yet it is at those levels that we become conscious of the fuller contexts in which anything that has importance to us, fits into our scheme of life.57

A developed theoretical understanding of analogy through applied signifies is needed for the advance of scientific knowledge, Welby argues, because analogical thinking is at the core of any understanding and behind any attempt to communicate. Analogy is indeed “the only method we have for most of our mental work...”58 Words can denote because we are able to perceive likenesses among the objects denoted. But considerable confusion results from our conflating different kinds of likeness. Welby gives the following classification: Casual likeness, where comparison is only “in one point, in one context, on one occasion, to one audience, etc.”; “General likeness of the whole, with unlikeness of constituents”; “Likeness in all but one point or feature”; “Valid analogy ringing true in character throughout”; “Equivalence”; and “Correspondence in each point and in mass or whole.”59 The further significance of such study is to be seen in the fact that analogy is the “primary presupposition” in the communication of thought, the likeness between our reader’s mind and our own.”60

Analogy and metaphor are unavoidable in expression, and indeed, a purely literal language, were it possible, would be so limiting to thought we could never communicate or even think the full range of possibilities inherent in the human interaction with the world. Likewise, linguistic ambiguity is unavoidable, and for the same reason that meaning is determined not merely by definition but also by use (the context, etc. of utterance). The issue is not elimination of these polysemic possibilities, but their proper control in thoughtful language use.

This possibility of control, of a self-conscious language mindful of the expressive powers of its terms, Welby found unaccountably ignored in works on language. She comments in her last book, Signifies and Language, on her amazement at the absence in language studies of any sense that language is a practical tool for human development:

The writers one and all treated language, not as you would treat muscle, as a means of work to be brought under the most minute, elaborate and unfailing functional control, but as you might treat some distant constellation in space and its, to us, mysterious move-ments.... It does not seem to have dawned upon any one, either specialist or “lay,” what a tremendous absurdity all this way of regarding language involves.61 

The science of signifies, the systematic study of significance, is intended ultimately to remedy this bizarre treatment of language as a distant constellation and restore the indispensable instrument of inter-action with the world. The fruits of such a restoration, Welby held, were to be a new access to truth and reality:

Truth is not innately mysterious. So far from trying to baffle us in order to enhance its command of us..., Reality throws wide her blessed arms, opens wide all ways and paths which lead to her very heart, the heart of the Real. She asks only that the word of the enigma shall become a fitting word: that the expression of Man who is to be her expression shall be worthily “incarnated”: that what is the very life-blood of man’s thinking shall be enriched by purification: that in such a Word, while wealth of connotation and association may be boundless, a confusing or impoverishing ambiguity shall be reckoned as intellectual disgrace, as spiritual anathema.62

IV. OTHER INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS

While Lady Welby’s philosophic work began with the perception that the language of the religious orthodoxy current in her time was inadequate to express precisely enough (and suggestively enough) the deep truths of human spiritual life, and while she occupied herself for roughly thirty years working out the foundations of a theory of interpretation - and in enlisting others in that work - to reform both religious and scientific language, her correspondence and a number of papers she published are evidence of a broader range of interests than this discussion has so far indicated. Even so, her papers on folklore and mental evolution, on eugenics, and on the philosophy of time, all have at their focus issues of interpretation.

In her 1891 paper delivered to the International Folk-Lore Congress, Welby reviews trends in ethnological interpretation of aboriginal religion, arguing that there was at the time a salutary new willingness to understand primitive experience on its own merits, replacing the arrogant stance of civilized superiority common to missionary journals and travellers’ tales. The leading idea in this new ethnology that she finds congenial to her own understanding of human mental evolution is that of “continuity in link between all things at all times and in all places, continuity 

both simultaneous and successive; the repudiation of all unfathomable gulfs except in the one sense of distinction, not division;...”63 Both as content of primitive ontology and as understanding of human social evolution, this awareness of continuity, Welby believes, can be a cor-rective to the analytical habits of civilized ontology, and may possibly generate a further advance in human understanding of the world:

[T]he frank acceptance of ties with the most humble or despised of nature’s forms and conditions of existence,... may surely prove, when we have learnt to assimilate it, the starting-point of an ascent so worthy and so fruitful of all good, that it is difficult to find a word with pure enough associations to define it with.64

The guiding conception of continuity as a cosmological principle and the attendant denial of real division in the world also guided Welby’s treatment of “mental evolution” in two papers written around the same time as the one on folklore. Her thesis in both is that the primitive belief in ghosts is incorrectly understood as a distorted world picture, because that would suppose that primitive societies had somehow adopted a world view which could not be adapted to facts of nature necessary for survival. Two alternative interpretations are, first, to “suppose an absolute break and reversal in the evolution in mind, wherein a perma-nently distorted picture of the universe is created, and the real and significant suddenly abdicates in favour of the baseless and unmeaning”; and, second, “to ask whether there is some reality answering to these crude conceptions, which thus form part of a continuous mental development, and may be described as faulty translation...”65 On the principle of continuity, Welby regards the former alternative as incoherent.66

Welby’s interest in the work of Francis Galton on eugenics produced two brief notices in 1904 and 1905 presented at meetings where Galton spoke. She had no evident interest in the technicalities of the discus-sion, but offered a perspective on the future of humanity; while the eugenics debate of the time centered upon proposed restrictions on marriages, Welby’s interest was in proposals which would make the most advantageous use of the latent powers in individuals - especially women - for the improvement of humanity. Women, Welby thought, express an “instinct of devotion” which displays itself in their role as mothers. But “a large proportion of civilised women find themselves from one or another cause debarred from this social service in the direct sense.”67 

Yet, she argues, “There is another kind of race-motherhood open to, and calling for, the intelligent recognition of and intelligent fulfillment by, all women.” This is connected to “the specialised mental activities of women as distinguished from those of men,” revealed in “the part primitively borne by women in the evolution of crafts and arts, including the important one of healing”; in the necessity “of their meeting physical coercion by the help of keen, penetrative, resourceful wits”; and finally their role “in the evolution of language.”68 While civilization tends to distort these powers by channelling them into trivial or bizarre pursuits (e.g., fortune-telling!), “We are... failing to enlist for true social service a natural reserve of intelligence.”69 Welby claims that she is not speaking only of the intellectual powers of biological women, noting “the common heritage of humanity which gives the man a certain motherhood and the woman a certain fatherhood of outlook, perhaps also in intellectual function,”70 and also that “No mental function is entirely unrepresented on either side.”71 Nevertheless, her proposal for the recovery of these mental powers which comfortable civilized life tends to allow to atrophy is that all girls should be trained “for the resumption of a lost power of race-motherhood which shall make for her own happiness and well-being, in using these for the benefit of humanity.”72

Welby’s comments on this topic are brief and sketchy, hardly worth notice, except for their suggestiveness in showing how consistently she was concerned for the fate of humanity and believed that the function of education was to raise minds into their highest powers of discernment and expression. This consistent preoccupation apparently motivated Welby’s excursion into the metaphysics of time, which she treated in two brief pieces. In “Time as Derivative” she argued that time can be defined (metaphorically) in terms of space, but space cannot be defined in terms of time; space is the prior concept. Time becomes thinkable through a process of translation “of diversity-m-position, through change-exposition, into succession.”73 Understanding time as an “original category,” rather than as “room for experience causes misunderstanding in debates over the meaning of claims about human immortality and has damaged our ability to understand the human future, because, she seems to think, such a reification of time leads to a fatalism at odds with our true freedom to control our destiny.74 

V. WELBY’S INFLUENCE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SIGNIFICS

In her lifetime it was primarily through her correspondence and friend-ships that Welby had her strongest influence. Many writers comment on the force of her personality, and her published letters are full of references to fruitful debate with a wide variety of thinkers. Yet, with a notable few exceptions, it is hard to trace a direct impact on other thinkers of her work. In the correspondence with Charles Peirce, for example, begun near the last decade of each of their lives, each thinker explains positions already arrived at and notes similarities (triadic concepts of meaning, for example), but there is little evidence that either led the other in any important new directions. Peirce in fact takes pains in one letter to Welby (March 14, 1909) to disclaim any influence on him of her triad, sense, meaning, significance:

I now find that my division nearly coincides with yours, as it ought to do exactly, if both are correct. I am not in the least conscious of having been at all influenced by your book in settling my trichotomy

Yet a number of writers have worked out lines of development that connect Welby to all of the major movements in linguistic philosophy of the 20th century.76 Influence tracing is a notoriously inexact histor-ical pursuit, but two well-attested directions of signific thought are worth mentioning here. The first is in the work of Charles K. Ogden, who is best known for his co-authorship of The Meaning of Meaning. Ogden, a young Cambridge student, had stayed at Welby’s home, and it was through her that he studied Peirce’s semiotic theories, as she gave him access to Peirce’s letters. After something of an apprenticeship with Welby, Ogden became an eager proponent of language study as including the psychological and sociological contexts of usage, i.e., the pragmatics of language, even though in The Meaning of Meaning he criticizes Welby’s vagueness and lack of technical sophistication.77

The second line of influence was through Welby’s friendship with the politically radical Frederik Van Eeden. As Gerrit Mannoury points out, despite Van Eeden’s extremely opposite social and political orien-tation from Welby’s, the two felt a strong intellectual kinship, and it was through Van Eeden that signifies became a movement in Holland. Moreover, Mannoury, himself one of the leaders of that movement, says, Van Eeden: 

was not merely a talented and devoted disciple of Lady Welby but he added to her line of thought an element which was foreign to her work, namely, careful precision in the formulation of subtle distinc-tions and cautious deductions.78

VI. CONCLUSION

Recent republication of Welby’s two books on signifies along with a Festschrift celebrating the 150th anniversary of her birth79 have made Welby’s work on language accessible again after decades of neglect. Her daughter’s two collections of correspondence are long out of print, and in any case are not well suited to the demands of scholars, since the chronologies are blurred and there is considerable elision. This is unfortunate because one chief aspect of Welby’s value as a “serious worker,” as she told Peirce she wanted to be known, transcends her intellectual work itself: her letters reveal an enthusiastic, questing personality devoted to bringing like minds together. In this she is the model of a life spent in the collaborative pursuit of the mind’s best access to the true and the real. MARY ELLEN WAITHE and SAMANTHA CICERO

I. BIOGRAPHY

Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was born in Wales in 1848. She was the oldest of ten children of a family of landed gentry. Her father was squire of the parish of Llangarron, in Herefordshire England. She grew up in a large house filled with maids and governesses. Jones’ family lived, during her early teenage years (from 1861-1864) near a town about thirty miles outside Capetown South Africa. There she learned German and read Schiller and Goethe, learned French and read Voltaire, Moliere, Racine, and Corneille. She developed a taste for languages, literature, music, and mathematics. She says in her autobiography, As I Remember, that when she returned from South Africa:

I had the use of my mind. I knew how to learn, though not what to learn. It was partly at school, and from an Essay Society to which I belonged afterwards, and a Moral Science undergraduate acquaintance, but principally at College, that I learnt what to learn, or rather, what there was to learn.1

Upon the family’s return to England Constance was enrolled for about a year in a ladies’ boarding school in Cheltenham. There her language studies and arithmetic were continued and supplemented with Italian. Constance was about 19 years of age when her schooling was considered to be completed. Years at home followed. A young man who was a friend or her brother and an undergraduate at Cambridge introduced her to Fawcett’s Manual of Political Economy, stimulating her interest in moral philosophy. Constance later borrowed Mill’s Logic from the boy’s mother.2

It is to this early introduction to “Moral Science” that Jones attrib-

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 25-49. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

utes her eventual decision to pursue the Moral Science Tripos at Girton College, Cambridge. That course of study included moral and political philosophy, “mental philosophy” (psychology, metaphysics and episte-mology) logic, and political economics.3 She studied under Henry Sidgwick, James Ward and John Neville Keynes. Jones’ university education was financed with some difficulty by her paternal aunt, “Mrs. Collins” who had long supported the idea of her niece receiving a higher education. Girton College was selected because it “was the only Woman’s College that we knew of at that time.”4 Jones began at Cambridge in October, 1875, however, despite her family’s rather advantageous circumstances, theirs was a large family, and apparently the educations of her younger brothers had priority over Constance’s own. The result was that she missed several terms, at significant detriment to her professional advancement.

Nevertheless, her reputation was substantial so that on Ward’s and Sidgwick’s recommendation she was given the opportunity to complete the half-finished translation by Elizabeth Hamilton of Hermann Lotze’s Mikrokosmus.5 The work saw four editions in Jones’ lifetime, and its first publication was given advance notice by Bernard Bosanquet in the preface to his translation of Lotze’s Metaphysics and Logic. Jones completed her studies at Girton in 1880 with a Class 1 pass in her examinations.

Four years later, in 1884, Jones was invited to return to Cambridge as Lecturer in logic at Girton College. During this period, her interests turned toward what would come to be known an analytic philosophy. She compiled her lecture notes that would much later become her Primer of Logic, an elementary logic text, published in 1905.6 Her development of her view of categorical propositions however, had begun during the late 1880’s, was completed in 1889, and published the following year as Elements of Logic as a Science of Propositions. In it, she develops the idea that if the law of identity is a significant assertion it must be an assertion of, as she calls it, “Denomination in Diversity of Determination.” Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones appears to have been very modest about the important idea she originated. Jones’ discovery drew powerful praise from her colleagues Stout and Schiller for its importance to the field of logic and for its originality. It would influence Bradley to modify his own view of identity, and be adopted by Keynes. However, once her theory was presented as his own by a recently graduated Cambridge student, Bertrand Russell, it was some time until anyone pointed out that his views had not only been anticipated by Frege (whom 

he acknowledged), but by originally by Jones (whom he did not acknowledge). The remainder of Jones’ professional life was spent refining her idea, and re-issuing gentle reminders that her development of the law of identity as the law of significant assertion historically preceded and is logically prior to the sense-reference distinction of Frege and the nearly analogous distinction that Russell makes between the meaning of a term and its extension. Referring in 1910 to her 1890 and subsequent works:

I reached what I think are interesting and enlightening results (in apparent accordance with Frege, whose view seems to be endorsed by Mr. Bertrand Russell), and Professor G. F. Stout, by whom this logical adventure of mine was approved and befriended, has now, I think, reached a true solution and with a clearness of statement which leaves nothing to be desired, has steered the labouring barque of the proposition into smooth waters. (See his lecture on The Nature of Universals and Propositions, December, 1921.)7

The modest Miss Jones, who had formulated what others including giants in philosophy like Schiller and Stout recognized as an axiom of logic, volunteered for the difficult-to-fill position of Librarian at Girton from 1890 to 1893, and attended McTaggart’s Hegel lectures at Cambridge. Vacations were spent travelling to Bologna and Heidelberg for philosophy conferences. Her appointment as Vice-Mistress of Girton came in 1896, and upon the retirement of Miss Welsh in 1903, Jones became Mistress of Girton College.

“Miss E. E. C. Jones” as she is often listed, was active in professional associations. At a time when philosophers had strong interests in “mental philosophy” including psychology, she was one of the earliest members the Society for Psychical Research founded by Sidgwick. She was a very active member of the Aristotelian Society and participated in symposia with such philosophers as F. C. S. Schiller, Bernard Bosanquet, G. F. Stout, and J. S. Mann. For more than twenty years she was a regular presenter of papers at Society meetings, and many of those papers were published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. For two years (1914-1916) she served on the Executive Committee of the Society. She was also a regular presenter at Mind Association meetings, and that association’s journal Mind became a forum for many of Jones’ writings. In addition, she presented her work at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. 

II. WORKS

Jones was a prolific writer in philosophy, and almost all of her work was in analytic philosophy; however, she also published some work in ethics. We will first survey her ethical writings before turning to an exploration of her analytic philosophy.

1. Ethics

Jones’ works in ethics include A Primer of Ethics8 and two papers on the effect of social conditions on the development of moral character. In addition, Jones was an able defender of Sidgwick’s moral philosophy. She published a series of articles on Sidgwick’s ethical hedonism, and edited Sidgwick’s lectures on Green, Spencer and Martineau.

(a) A Primer of Ethics. The Primer she describes as:

... a very brief and elementary introduction into the Science of Conduct. It has no claim to originality, and is substantially a compi-lation from those recognised authorities on the subject whose views it reports, and with whose works I hope that it may lead the reader to make acquaintance at first hand.9

In the opening chapter she addresses the question: What ought I to do? How do I know what I ought to do?, and Why should I do what I see to be right? Here, she mentions the connection between ethics and politics, and the questions they have in common concerning the identi-fication of the good for humans. Here, she identifies self-regarding and social moral theories: the virtue tradition and hedonism on the one hand, and social justice theories on the other. The former she identifies in its historical origins with what she calls Greek Common Sense Morality through the development of hedonism and its modern utilitarian expo-nents. In the second chapter she addresses the questions: What do we mean by good, right, ought? What element is it in character or conduct which is the object of moral approval and disapproval? She touches on the familiar “ought implies can” argument, the question whether something can be good in itself, the question of justified punishment for failing to do that which one ought to do and the question of exculpating circumstances, unintended and unforseen consequences of acts, etc. In short, she has prepared an introductory level exploration of the field of moral inquiry for her students. 

In the third chapter, Jones looks at moral psychology: the relation-ship between desire and pleasure; the nature and role of moral conscience, practical reason and the moral emotions, and an overview of the question of free will and determinism. The fourth chapter, “Greek Common-Sense Morality” begins with an overview of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics focussing on his method: following the experience of what acts are called praiseworthy, rather than the experience of what people do, and leading to an analysis of human virtue. The chapter concludes with an all-too brief summary of Kant’s criticism of Aristotelian method. Chapter five, philosophical intuitionism, is primarily an account of Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics and its criticism of the shortcomings of intuitionism. The chapter closes with an analysis of how Bishop Butler’s principle of rational benevolence can be applied to resolve the antagonisms between moral intuitionism and utilitarianism. The didactic part of the text concludes with a chapter outlining the relationship of ethics to politics and an exploration of how the methods of ethics might assist in the development of a just politic. There follows an eleven page glossary of terms, a lengthy list of published questions from Cambridge University examinations, and a list of suggested readings for students preparing for Ethics in the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge.

(b) Other Ethical Writings. Jones has two articles by the title “Character and Circumstance.” The first is a commentary on remarks by Bernard Bosanquet made in a symposium of the Aristotelian Society. The second article by that name is a discussion piece in International Journal of Ethics where she expands on her earlier remarks. In the first “Character and Circumstance” she takes issue with Bosanquet’s position that char-acter has more power to shape a person’s circumstance than a person’s circumstances have to shape his or her character. In a brief rebuttal to Bosanquet’s position offered in a symposium, Jones argues that change of environment that touches consciousness has the power to effect the development of character. This, after all, she says, is what educational theory is concerned with: “... desperately disadvantageous circum-stances, while they last, may make a case as hopeless as a desperately disadvantageous character. And it must not be forgotten that for any one of us ‘Circumstance’ includes the character of others, and that among the disadvantages of circumstances may be their deteriorating effect on the character with which they are in interaction.”10

The second article by the name “Character and Circumstance” focuses on the effect that circumstance, custom, surroundings, etc. can have on 

the formation of a person’s moral character.11 She explores the perplexing cases of those who seemingly rise above their circumstances and live lives or perform acts of extraordinary virtue. She examines also the case of those raised in the best of circumstances, with every possible benefit, whom most would find morally deficient in character. Her analysis does not seek to resolve the issue whether a person may be excused for lacking moral virtues when he or she is a “victim of circumstances.” Rather, Jones attempts to address the difficulties in distinguishing a person’s moral character as something independent of the forces shaping a person’s consciousness of experience.

The year 1894 found Jones in a lively exchange of articles with Mary Gilliland (about whom we have found nothing further), F. H. Bradley and

J.  S. Mackenzie on the rationality of hedonism as a moral philosophy. She entertains and attempts to overcome a number of objections made by others to Ethical Hedonism which she defends as a rational philos-ophy. We will not itemize all of the objections that Jones claims to refute, rather, we direct the reader to this lively series of interchanges.12 Jones’ replies are addressed primarily to criticisms made of her view by Professor J. S. Mackenzie. The main objections to Ethical Hedonism that she refutes are

(1) that it depends upon psychological hedonism which is universally rejected;

(2) that pleasure is an ambiguous, impossible, irrational and undesir-able end to attain, and is not intrinsically valuable;

(3) that pleasure is what the hedonist seeks and that individual plea-sures are not the same as pleasure, they differ qualitatively and therefore cannot be added and enjoyed simultaneously. Even if pleasures could be summed, the preference for a large quantity of some pleasure to smaller quantities of others is morally base;

(4) Ethical Hedonism cannot account for individual variations in the capacity and preference of pleasure, therefore it cannot promote the general happiness, and the desire to do so is inconsistent with individual ethical hedonism.

Jones rejects psychological hedonism, and defends the role of reason in approving moral ends.13 Reason, she says

... declares that Happiness is intrinsically worth having, and con-duciveness to happiness, the test of right action - it is because of this, that [the rational hedonist or utilitarian] adopts the so-called 

“hedonistic” End. And if Reason tells us that it is Happiness - excel-lence of Feeling - that makes any portion of consciousness intrinsically desirable, then the Volition that promotes Happiness is good; and since we cannot have good conduct without a good will (for conduct involves Volition) it appears that the promotion of the Hedonistic End involves both the supremacy of Reason and, the conscious direction of the Will to right. We have thus, it would seem, not a mere one-