The science of epidemiology evolved to make sense of infectious diseases, not common chronic diseases like heart disease. Though the tools of epidemiology—comparisons of populations with and without the disease—had proved effective in establishing that a disease such as cholera is caused by the presence of micro-organisms in contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in 1854, it is a much more complicated endeavor to employ those same tools to elucidate the subtler causes of chronic disease. They can certainly contribute to the case against the most conspicuous determinants of noninfectious diseases—that cigarettes cause lung cancer, for example.
What makes it worth uttering is not its truth (the fact that something is true is never a sufficient reason for saying it), but the fact of its being the one truth which is important in the present situation.
Under English law, the House of Commons took the term “misdemeanor” to refer to distinctly public misconduct, including but not limited to actual crimes.6 Thus “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the standard basis for impeachment, represented “a category of political crimes against the state.”
Blake too knew that we become what we behold, that we, as Barfield would say, participate in it.
“Like the initiate of a secret society that has broken free from the undifferentiated collectivity,” Jung wrote, “the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims.” Without this secret, Jung argues, we too easily fall into the herd-mind of the mass and lose our individuality.”
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