Discussing "The Devil's Dictionary" By Ambrose Bierce

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "The Devil's Dictionary," which was written by Ambrose Bierce and first published as a book in 1906 before being republished in 1911.

Get a copy of my edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at my website: 

VollrathPublishing.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Bierce's Family, Civil War Service, Journalism, Anti-Corruption Work, Fiction Writing, And Disappearance
• 10:52 The Voyages Of Books
• 13:11 General Notes On The Devil's Dictionary
• 14:30 Abnormal, Absolute, Absurdity, Accordion, Appetite, Armor
• 16:35 Bore, Boundary
• 17:42 Commonwealth, Conservative, Conversation, Corporation, Corsair
• 20:39 Danger, Debt, Decide, Deliberation, Education
• 23:10 Effect
• 27:22 Existence, Ghost, Harangue, Historian, Impartial, Labor
• 28:35 Logic, Mind, Multitude, Pyrrhonism, Rational, Reason, Reasonable, Resolute, Retaliation, Soul
• 34:28 Bierce Anticipating The Smartphone

Transcript

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, which is on the southeastern border of the state. He was born in a log cabin, and he was the 10th of 13 children who all had names beginning with the letter A. They were Abigail, Amelia, Anne, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia. And his father's name was Marcus Aurelius Bierce, which doesn't begin with an A, but if you have a name like Marcus Aurelius, the name of a famous Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, then you have no problem with unusual names or doing unusual things with names like giving all your kids names that begin with the letter A. Ambrose Bierce was apparently of entirely English ancestry, and all of his ancestors came to North America between 1620 and 1640. And his mother was a descendant of William Bradford, and whose writing we've looked in another episode of this podcast. If you're interested, you can go and check that out. Bierce was apparently critical of people who put too much importance on these kinds of genealogical questions. And as we've talked about elsewhere, being descended from a specific notable person maybe is not that valuable, but knowing about your ancestry, about your heritage certainly is. And so we know a little bit about Bierce's heritage in particular. His parents were poor, but they loved reading and they conveyed to Bierce a love of reading and of writing and that of course would affect him later in his life. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Bierce would have been about 19 and he joined the 9th Indiana Infantry of the Union Army. He served in Western Virginia, was present at the Battle of Philippi, which was the first organized action of the war. And at the Battle of Rich Mountain, he apparently was mentioned in a newspaper for rescuing a wounded comrade under fire. He was also present at the Battle of Shiloh. And because I'm aware that I have some listeners in the United States and some listeners in Europe and elsewhere, it's worth pausing here for a minute because I suspect that we won't all necessarily have the same knowledge of the American Civil War. One thing I had pointed out to me by a non-American at some point in the last 15 years is that the American Civil War is a very early industrial war. Americans will often think about World War I as the first time that a lot of new, very destructive technology was used and all sides were surprised by how destructive it was. But the American Civil War in military history is an earlier version of that that is less severe than World War I. And people will look at the Crimean War, which is a decade earlier and didn't involve the United States at all, but it did have some of this modern technology. They started to use the telegram, railways, emerging technologies at that time. But then the American Civil War is a step further. And so as Americans, it's a very important part of our history and we study it and talk about it. But it was interesting for me to learn that students of history outside of America also market for certain reasons. It has its position, not only in the history of America, but in the military history of the world. In part for the massive destruction it brought on by the use of these technologies, not only the railroad and the telegraph, but the steamship and the ironclad and mass-produced weapons. Now, the part that a listener in Europe might not know about is that for many Americans, the name of the Battle of Shiloh has a bit of an ominous ring. And while it was nothing compared to some of the battles that would later take place in the war, Shiloh was a very early battle. It was April, 1862, that was the worst battle up to that point in terms of the number of men killed. There were 3,500 men killed over two days. And the Union forces outnumbered the Confederate forces and they took more casualties, but the battle still resulted in a Union victory. And in middle school in the early 2000s in North Carolina, they had us read a firsthand account of the Battle of Shiloh. And I don't remember many of the details of it, but I remember being moved by it. The guy was describing the rain and the sound of the guns and how they couldn't see anything. It was in the middle of the night. And all of this matters because Ambrose Bierce would go on to write a lot of horror stories, some of them having to do with the Civil War. And he also wrote a memoir called What I Saw of Shiloh, which was focused on this event in particular. And also, as we'll see, he was a bit of a misanthrope. Some people found his criticism to be cruel at times. And it's easy to imagine that these kinds of experiences, like fighting at the Battle of Shiloh, though that wasn't the only combat he saw, would affect him for the rest of his life. He was later accepted at West Point. And his application was endorsed by General Sherman, best known for his march to the sea that destroyed the Confederate industry, economy, and transportation lines. In June of 1870,1864 at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Beers sustained a traumatic brain injury, though he would return to active duty just a few months later in September, and he was discharged in January of 1865, which was only a few months before Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in April of that year. So Beers was in the army for almost the entire Civil War. And then in 1866, he got back in and he went on an expedition across the Great Plains in the Midwest to inspect certain military installations out there. And he traveled by horseback and wagon from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, California, which is a long way. And he was given the rank of brevet major before resigning. And a brevet is a kind of a qualifier that means you may not necessarily have all the authority of that rank, or you may not have it permanently. So it's sort of a qualified major, but a major is an officer's rank. So before he left, he was an officer of some kind. He then stayed in San Francisco for a while, and he made a name for himself as a contributor and editor of newspapers and magazines. He also lived and wrote in England from 1872 to 1875, writing for a magazine out there called Fun. After that, he went back to San Francisco, and he worked for a little while as a local manager for a New York mining company in the Dakota Territory, which was the area that later became the states of North and South Dakota. But eventually that mining company failed, and he returned to San Francisco and went back to journalism. And he continued writing until he was one of the most influential journalists on the West Coast. And because I like to connect these guys together when I can, another writer at whom we've looked who was writing around this time in the San Francisco area would have been John Griffith Cheney, better known as Jack London, though Jack London was only born in 1876, so he would have been 34 or 35 years younger than Ambrose Bierce, so he was in the next generation. But as a writer in that area at that time, he certainly would have been aware of Bierce. And there's at least one instance of Bierce using his influence to fight corruption. The U.S. government had given the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad Companies large low-interest loans in order to build the first transcontinental railroad, and Collis P. Huntington, who was an executive at the Central Pacific Railroad Company, persuaded a member of Congress to introduce a bill that was going to forgive those loans, which were for $130 million or $4.9 billion in today's money. And the only way that the railroad companies could pull this off is if they could do it secretly. But Bierce went to Washington and started to make trouble about this issue, and apparently the executive, Huntington, confronted Bierce on the steps of the Capitol building and told him to name his price, meaning he would buy off Bierce also. Bierce's answer apparently ended up in newspapers across the country. He told him, quote, my price is $130 million. If when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the treasurer of the United States, end quote. And there was such a public outcry over this issue that the bill was defeated. So I think it's safe to say that both Bierce and his publisher, William Randolph Hearst, a major figure in his own right who sent Bierce to Washington in the first place, were instrumental in defeating that bill and making sure that the railroad companies paid back the money that the government had loaned them at low interest. In 1899, he moved to Washington, D.C., and one of the four places that he lived in was in Logan Circle. So if you're in D.C., you can at least go look at the address. I don't think it's a museum or anything, but it's 18 Logan Circle. It's a beautiful brick building with a sort of a turret on one side and bay windows on the other. All the houses around Logan Circle are pretty nice. Though Bierce was mostly known for his journalism during his lifetime, he also wrote a number of short stories that were rather experimental. And some people now say that they helped to pioneer what we now call psychological horror. He wrote 249 short stories, 846 fables, and then another 300 or so stories about a funny character named Little Johnny. Probably the best known of his short stories is called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. And when I was reading that one, I realized that among the most striking episodes of The Twilight Zone that I ever saw was a rendition of this story. So if you go and read that one, you might recognize it from somewhere. And of Bierce's horror writing generally, or the stories that could be categorized that way, the great horror writer Howard Philip Lovecraft called Bierce's fictional work, quote, grim and savage, end quote. And he praised it generally. And William Dean Howells, an American literary critic and novelist and short story writer, and also the editor of The Atlantic magazine for a long time, said, quote, Mr. Bierce is among our three greatest writers, end quote. And Bierce graciously responded, quote, I'm sure Mr. Howells is the other two, end quote. And H.L. Mencken, at whose writing I'm most proud, said, quote, I'm sure Mr. Howells is we've looked in another episode of this podcast, said that Bierce was, quote, the one genuine wit that these states have ever seen, end quote. In October of 1913, when Bierce was 71, he left Washington D.C. to tour his old Civil War battlegrounds. And by December, a couple months later, he had gotten through Louisiana and Texas and was crossing into Mexico via El Paso. And Mexico at that time was in the middle of a revolution. He joined up with one of the armies in that revolution as an observer and witnessed a battle and traveled with that army. And his last known communication was a letter that he wrote to a friend on December 26th, which he closed by saying, quote, as to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination, end quote. And after that, he vanished without a trace. His body was never found and nobody knows what happened to him, though there are some theories about it. And though I had read some of Bierce's short stories last year, I wasn't expecting to talk about him this month. But my wife and I spent a long weekend in Pittsburgh in January. And Pittsburgh is a really beautiful city. My sister went to school there, so I had been there as a teenager, but I hadn't been back in 20 years. I certainly hadn't been back as an adult. And it's really a nice place. We spent most of the weekend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, which is a really nice museum. But almost across the street within a block of the museum is a little bookshop called the Caliban Bookshop. It's Caliban with a C, the character in The Tempest, not Taliban with a T, Caliban, C-A-L-I-B-A-N. And it's a very beautiful little store. It was raining and we had the stroller. And unfortunately, as used bookstores with character often are, it was a little bit cramped, which is usually nice, but it wasn't made for somebody to walk around in there with a stroller. And so we got in the door and we could move about three feet and then we had to park the stroller and there was a fair amount of foot traffic. So I said, okay, I've got about five minutes in here and then we're going to have to leave because we're causing a traffic jam. But I wanted to see what was in there. And in those five minutes, just glancing at the shelves immediately around the front door, I found an Everyman's Library edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. And Everyman's Library, their hardcover editions, that's maybe my favorite publisher of old books. My only regret is that they don't publish everything that you can think of. I quickly found a nice old edition of Vanity Fair. And the third thing I found was an old edition of Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. And it had written in somebody's handwriting to James on the event of his 28th birthday. And then it has a name signed, but I can't read it. And it gives the date 1956. So somebody gave this copy to somebody named James on their 28th birthday in 1956. And somehow it maybe stayed with him for 70 years and maybe he passed away, or maybe he donated it and went on a long adventure and it ended up in the Caliban Bookshop. And now I have it. And now I'm going to tell you guys about it. Who knows what happened between 1956 and 2025 with this book. But I like to think about that kind of thing, how a particular copy of a book moves around and who reads it and who's influenced by it. So I snatched up those three books and then we had to get out of there. But I definitely want to get back to the Caliban Bookshop when I can, when I don't have a stroller and I can spend a little more time in there. But the Devil's Dictionary is a dictionary. It's an alphabetical order and it's just a whole bunch of entries for different words, but the descriptions are a little bit pointed or funny or insightful. It's not a normal dictionary. And these were originally published as individual one-off entries that were put separately in the newspaper, or most of them were, or some number of them were. And then they were compiled into a book first called the Cynics Word Book, published in 1906. And then it was published again in 1911 under the title The Devil's Dictionary. So this would have been toward the end of Bierce's life in that period when he was living in Washington, though maybe some of the entries he had written much earlier. And a lot of the entries are just funny or they're teasing someone or a profession or a type of person or people generally. But some of them reflect a more subtle knowledge of politics and philosophy. And this book is fun because you don't have to sit down and read it for a long time. You could just read one entry and then set it down and you won't forget where you were when you pick it up again. Or if you have a house guest and they're sitting and waiting for you to make some food to have a copy of this on the bookshelf for the coffee table. This is an easy book to browse without reading the whole thing. It's thought-provoking without needing a tremendous amount of your attention in a given sitting. And I'm going to read a few of these that stood out to me for one reason or another. The entry for abnormal reads, quote, adjective, not conforming to standard in matters of thought and conduct to be independent is to be abnormal. To be abnormal is to be detested, end quote. So in matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be detested. The entry for absolute reads, quote, independent, irresponsible. An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins. Not many absolute monarchiesare left, most of them having been replaced by limited monarchies, where the sovereign's power for evil and for good is greatly curtailed, and by republics which are governed by chance." I thought that was a pretty good interpretation of an absolute monarchy that the monarch is free to do as he wants as long as he does what the assassins want, the people who might kill him. And then he describes republics as being governed by chance. And a number of the entries have to do with rhetoric, with the way that a certain word is used or the way that we might use a word ourselves. So the entry for absurdity is, quote, noun, a statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion, end quote. So what you would call an absurdity, if you'd say that's an absurdity, all you're saying is that that's different from your opinion. Or rather, that's what you really mean. The entry for accordion reads, noun, an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin, end quote. So I guess Bierce didn't like the accordion very much. I kind of like the accordion, but I also don't hear it very much. So maybe at that time it was more common to hear and it was kind of annoying. The entry for appetite reads, quote, noun, an instinct thoughtfully implanted by providence as a solution to the labor question, end quote. So God gave man an appetite, and I think here he's talking about an appetite for food, so that he would have to work. The appetite is the answer to the labor question. Who's going to work? Or why should we do work? Because we get hungry and we need to eat. And some of them are just sort of funny, as I mentioned. For example, the entry for armor reads, quote, noun, the kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith, end quote. And another in the same category is absurdity. These examples of how we use words in a certain way to talk about things we don't like. The entry for bore, B-O-R-E, reads, quote, noun, a person who talks when you wish him to listen, end quote. The entry for boundary reads, quote, in political geography, an imaginary line between two nations separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other, end quote. So this shows a bit of a cynical view that rights are not God-given or some kind of sacred thing. They're just imaginary. And this results in an interesting definition of a boundary, that on one side of the boundary, one country has imaginary rights, that if soldiers move across that boundary, the other country has the right to shoot them. But this is entirely an imagined agreement by the two parties. The two sides say, your rights go up to this line, and you have rights on your side of the line that I don't have, and I have rights on my side of the line that you don't have. And I forgot to mention, this dictionary is also studded with poetry that Bierce wrote and put under various made-up pen names. And they're often funny or creative in some way, or they have some kind of twist. And the entry for Commonwealth has one such poem that we can read. The entry reads, quote, an administrative entity operated by an incalculable multitude of political parasites, logically active, but fortuitously efficient. And the poem reads, this Commonwealth's capitals corridors view, so thronged with a hungry and indolent crew of clerks, pages, porters, and all attaches, whom rascals appoint and the populace pays, that a cat cannot slip through the thicket of shins, nor hear its own shriek for the noise of their chins. On clerks and on pages and porters and all, misfortune attend, and disaster befall. May life be to them a succession of hurts. May fleas by the bushel inhabit their shirts. May aches and diseases encamp in their bones, their lungs full of tubercles, bladders of stones. May microbes bacilli their tissues infest and tapeworms securely their bowels digest. May corncobs be snared without hope in their hair and frequent impalement their pleasure impair. Disturbed be their dreams by the awful discourse of audible sofas, sepulchrally hoarse, by chairs acrobatic and wavering floors, the mattress that kicks and the pillow that snores. Sons of cupidity cradled in sin. Your criminal ranks may the death angel thin, avenging the friend whom I couldn't work in." So first he's cursing all the superfluous people in government, but then he winds up by saying he was really mad that he couldn't get a job for his friend among those people. And that shows the kind of cynicism that's in a lot of Bierce's writing, that people will criticize government but in a pinch, if they could, they would get the same kind of position, a superfluous position whose salary is paid by the public for their own friends. And another kind of cynicism that can be found throughout these entries is the idea that things don't ever really improve or they can't really or everything is equally stupid. For example, the entry for conservative reads, quote, noun, a statesman who is enamored of existing evils as distinguished from the liberal who wishes to replace them with others, end quote. So the only difference between a conservative and a liberal is that a conservative likes the current evils and a liberal wants new evils. And the entry forfor conversation reads, quote, noun, a fare for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor, end quote. And way back in 1906 or 1911 or earlier, whenever he wrote this particular entry, Pierce defined a corporation as, quote, noun, an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility, end quote. And for a corsair, which is another word for a pirate, Pierce writes, quote, a politician of the seas, end quote. So whatever a pirate is on the seas, a politician is on land. And the entry for danger was only a short verse of four lines. For danger, Pierce writes, quote, a savage beast which when it sleeps, man girds at and despises, but takes himself away by leaps and bounds when it arises, end quote. So as long as there isn't any actual danger, people are very brave. But when the danger actually appears, they disappear. For debt, he writes, quote, an ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave driver, end quote. For decide, to decide, to make a decision, Pierce writes, quote, verb, to succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set, end quote. I found that to be a very interesting and metacognitive definition of deciding. And there are a couple other definitions that are sort of in that area that we'll get to. But he's saying that deciding is simply succumbing to one set of influences, that there are two sets of influences that are pushing on you. And when you decide on something, you just give in to one of them, one of those sets of influences. Whereas we normally think of making a decision as being decisive, as being an act of agency, which that's a whole other discussion. But I like how short this definition is also, because it introduces that problem of free will very briefly. And if that is what happens when we make decisions, it's possible that that means that what we ought to be doing is making sure that the set of influences that we succumb to belongs to the thing that we care about the most, that you shouldn't let some kind of mind game persuade you to do something in favor of what you oppose fundamentally. Similarly, he says of deliberation, quote, the act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on, end quote. So when you think you're deliberating about something, you're really just figuring out what your bias is, or what's more advantageous to you. And that might sound cynical, but it is a good thing to keep in mind if you're trying to do really good skeptical thinking, that you can deceive yourself into thinking that you're doing that when what you're really doing is just seeking a way for your own bias to come through. And this next one is something that I like a lot, because it summarizes, again, very succinctly, something that comes up a lot in conversations between my wife and I. For education, he writes, quote, that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding, end quote. I'll read it one more time. Quote, that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding, end quote. Under effect, he writes, quote, the second of two phenomena, which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a cause, is said to generate the other, which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog, except in pursuit of a rabbit, to declare the rabbit the cause of the dog, end quote. Now, this is a very important idea that you really have to keep in mind when you're trying to do any kind of thinking about history or politics or economics, which is that in our day-to-day lives, we have a clear sense of cause and effect, because we deal with objects, and they seem to interact with each other in a predictable way. If you knock over the cup, its contents are gonna be spilled all over your table. Now, there is a branch of philosophy that will challenge even that, but we can grant that for what we're gonna talk about right now. The trouble is the moment that you move away from anything that is immediately sensed and intuitive in that way, for example, if we're talking about crime, there's a common narrative that poverty causes crime. And part of the logic there is that often when you see a very poor place, there will also be a lot of crime there. And the cause of the crime must be the poverty. People don't have a job, they don't have money, so they have to steal to survive. And all would-be criminals would rather be doing a job somewhere, even a minimum wage job, but they can't get one, so instead they have to rob people. Now, the problem with this narrative is that if we just take the case of the United States, you can find all kinds of places, all kinds of zip codes all across the country that have a very low median income. They're very poor in a measurable sense. And the crime is also very low in those places. And the type of place that I'm thinking of now is small American towns. Meanwhile, there are other zip codes where the median income is much higher, and yet so is the crime. And of course, looking at median income, you have to be careful because median income can mean there are some very rich people and some-very poor people in that zip code. But the point remains that you can find places that are very poor by definition and very low crime, and you can find other places where the median income is higher. And even if it's in an urban area and you say the cost of living is higher, fine, but it's not three times higher. You can find towns in America where the median household income is 51 and the median individual income is 26,000 a year. And I think the median income for the country, the household income is like 80 and the median individual income is something like 44,000. Places where the income, both the household and individual, is on average half of the national average, never mind what it would be in a city, and the crime is very low. And also if poverty were a direct cause of crime, then you would expect that every economic collapse or downturn would be accompanied by a crime wave. You should be able to look at the graph of the Dow Jones industrial average over time and another showing the murder rate over time and they should just be inverted, and they're not at all. But all of this is just one example of this problem, how once you get away from what's immediately sensed, determining what is the cause and what is the effect in a given process becomes very perilous. It's not easy to see which is the cause and which is the effect. Perhaps crime causes poverty, for example, or maybe it doesn't part. And this difficulty applies to other relationships as well. Bierce gives the example of the dog chasing the rabbit, and you might think that the rabbit caused the dog. An example that a teacher gave to us at some point was that if an alien came to earth and saw that some of the lawns were mowed, that you could find tall grass out in the wilderness, but most of the time where there was a house, there was also short grass, he might think that the short grass caused the house. Or you could say if there was a lawn mower in the garage and there were short grass outside on the lawn, he might think that the short grass caused the lawnmower. And again, this shows how our intuition for cause and effect maybe is reasonably good for things that we experience directly regularly, but we can't place so much trust in that immediate intuition for larger scale things. And that's what Bierce was getting at here. At one point he writes, quote, beauty in women and distinction in men are alike in this. They seem to the unthinking a kind of credibility, end quote. And here's another more philosophical one for existence. He again writes a verse of four lines, quote, a transient, horrible, fantastic dream wherein is nothing yet all things do seem from which we're awakened by a friendly nudge of our bedfellow death and cry, oh fudge, end quote. He defines a ghost as, quote, the outward and visible sign of an inward fear, end quote. He says that a harangue is, quote, a speech by an opponent who is known as a haranguetang, end quote. He says a historian is, quote, a broad gauge gossip, end quote. Somebody who's willing to gossip about all kinds of things. And he defines impartial as being, quote, unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting opinions, end quote. So a person is impartial when they can't see any advantage to be gained from taking either side. He defines labor as, quote, one of the processes by which A acquires property for B, end quote. And that might be a useful way to distinguish labor from industry or labor from work maybe. Not that we have to use the word labor this way, but labor could be working for someone else's profit. He defines logic as, quote, the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion. Thus, major premise, 60 men can do a piece of work 60 times a week as quickly as one man. Minor premise, one man can dig a post hole in 60 seconds. Therefore, conclusion, 60 men can dig a post hole in one second. This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed, end quote. And that one is both funny and useful because again, with that sensible, that sensed example, that example that we can see, we can perceive immediately that it's ridiculous. But we often try to use logic about things that we can't see, or we can't sense in any way. And we may well be very carefully and thoroughly using exactly this kind of goofy logic, of which Bierce gives an example here, without being aware of it. And that's one of the reasons why you have to be skeptical, even of logic. You have to be skeptical of your senses and of logic and reasoning because both can deceive you in different ways at different times. For mind, he writes, quote, a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature. The futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing.but itself to know itself with." Of the multitude, he writes, a crowd, the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration. In a multitude of counselors, there is wisdom, saith the proverb. If many men of equal individual wisdom are wiser than any one of them, it must be that they acquire the excess of wisdom by the mere act of getting together. Whence comes it? Obviously from nowhere. As well say that a range of mountains is higher than the single mountains composing it. A multitude is as wise as its wisest member, if it obey him. If not, it is no wiser than its most foolish." And he gives an entry for Pyrrhonism. And something worth mentioning generally is that Bierce was also pretty well-read. In this book alone, he mentions Herodotus, Samuel Johnson, Desiderius Erasmus, Aristophanes, Francis Bacon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There's a passing reference to the Batra-Kamiamakia, the War of the Frogs and Mice, which is a kind of parody of the Iliad. And it's not exactly clear when it was written. Initially, they thought it was Homer, and then they thought it was 5th century BC. And now some people think it might have been written under the Roman Empire, which would have been the first few centuries AD. But Bierce mentions it. And he also has a knowledge of Islam that is unusual for writers at that time. He knows what a Hurri is. He knows who the Ulema are. And he uses these terms. He also uses the word Imam, but maybe that's a little more ordinary. And since 911, it's become more common in the United States to know about these words, though most people still don't, and that's fine. It doesn't really apply to their lives. But Bierce was writing 120 years ago or so. And along the line of more learned references, he has an entry for Pyrrhonism, at which we've looked on this podcast. You can check out that episode if you haven't already. He defines Pyrrhonism, quote, An ancient philosophy named for its inventor. It consisted of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern professors have added that, end quote. And that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's not a terrible summary in so few words. And under rational, he writes, quote, Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience, and reflection, end quote. And that's one of my favorites because it lists observation, experience, and reflection as delusions. That's something important to remember. Not that they are certainly false necessarily, but they can be. It's not enough to say, well, I'm a rational person. I base my worldview on these things. Those can also be misleading. And he defines reason as, quote, To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire, end quote. And that fits in with some of the other definitions he's given along that line. And some more examples of how he makes fun of political rhetoric are his definitions of reasonable, quote, Accessible to the infection of our own opinions. Hospitable to persuasion, dissuasion, and evasion, end quote. So somebody is reasonable if they are susceptible to your persuasion. That's who you call reasonable. And another in the same category is his definition of resolute, which is, quote, Obstinate in a course that we approve, end quote. So if you approve of what somebody is doing and they are stubborn about it, you say they are resolute. But if they're stubborn about something and you don't approve of it, you say they're obstinate. And it's interesting that a journalist or a writer who spent a lot of time as a journalist would have made a book like this and put in entries like this that point out the way that people use these words in a certain manipulative way. Because if you read the papers a lot, you start to see this. And once you start to see it, you can't unsee it. Though there are many journalists who apparently never notice this. So it's not that everybody sees it. He defines retaliation as, quote, The natural rock upon which is reared the temple of law, end quote. Of the soul, he writes, quote, A spiritual entity concerning which there hath been brave disputation. Plato held that those souls which in a previous state of existence, antedating Athens, had obtained the clearest glimpses of eternal truth entered into the bodies of persons who became philosophers. Plato was himself a philosopher. The souls that had least contemplated divine truth animated the bodies of usurpers and despots. Dionysius I, who had threatened to decapitate the broad-browed philosopher, was a usurper and a despot. Plato, doubtless, was not the first to construct a system of philosophy that could be quoted against his enemies. Certainly, he was not the last, end quote. And that's a funny one that I thought I would mention because we looked recently at Plato's writings on the soul. And the one we can finish with is his definition of a telescope, quote, A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily, it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice, end quote. And that is just a wild, unintentional anticipation of the smartphone, that a smartphone is almost a telescope with a bell on it. He says the telescope does for the eye what the telephone does for the ear, and the telephone can bring you all kinds of things.kinds of unnecessary details from far away. And the mercy of the telescope is that it doesn't yet have a bell on it, so you go and look at it. But that is what a smartphone does. It rings, or it dings, or it buzzes, and then you go and look at something that's far away. But I will leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.