Emerson begins his essay “Character” with four paragraphs on morals, three of them opening with that very word. “The will constitutes the man,” he writes. In this Emerson is little different from the most influential of all Victorian philosophers, John Stuart Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.”
Parmenides put it more pithily: “Thinking and being are one and the same.” So consciousness is intrinsic to life. Comparatively weak in the most primitive organisms, it gradually grows stronger and more intelligent as nervous systems become more complex, until it evolves into symbolic and self-reflexive thought.
Philosophy and religion are old enemies of probability. Philosophers from the earliest times have wished to distinguish themselves from the spinners of mere rhetoric by offering certainty. Parmenides distinguished sharply between truth, associated with Being, and the opinion of men, called “likely” and associated with non-Being. Logical reasoning is intended, by Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and their followers, to establish the foundations of knowledge beyond all doubt, and correspondingly likelihoods are banished as other people’s business.
The point to be stressed here is that any educational institution, if it is to function well in the management of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning, must have the means to give clear expression to its theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.
Keys had noted associations between heart-disease death rates and fat intake, Yerushalmy and Hilleboe pointed out, but they were just that. Associations do not imply cause and effect or represent (as Stephen Jay Gould later put it) any “magic method for the unambiguous identification of cause.”
