Monthly Archives: June 2018

Poetry as circuit control

As further discussed in Bohm and Hiley on “active information“, McLuhan, prompted in different ways in the late 1940s by Innis, Havelock, Giedion and the cybernetics work at MIT of Wiener and Deutsch, began to investigate how literature and contemporary science might illuminate each other. Here are a texts from 1951 to 1955 discussing this notion:

the electron valve you [Norbert Wiener] describe [in The Human Use Of Human Beings]  represents a principle discovered in 1870 by Arthur Rimbaud and applied to poetry and painting since that time. Your account of the uses of the vacuum tube in heavy industry is an exact description of the poetic techniques of Joyce and Eliot in constructing their works. Their use of allusion as situational analogy effects an enormous amplification of power from small units, at the same time that it permits an unrivalled precision. Their stripping of rhetoric and statement corresponds to your observation that “it is no longer necessary to control a process at high-energy-levels by a mechanism in which the important details of control are carried out at these levels.” Stephane Mallarmé made this observation about his own poetic technique in 1885. (McLuhan to Norbert Wiener,  March 28, 1951, Norbert Wiener Papers M.I.T.)

I’m interested in such analogies with modern poetry as that provided by the vacuum tube. The latter can tap a huge reservoir of electrical energy, picking it up as a very weak impulse. Then it can shape it and amplify it to major intensity. Technique of allusion as you use it (situational analogies) seems comparable to this type of circuit. Allusion not as ornament but as precise means of making available total energy of any previous situation or culture. Shaping and amplifying it for current use. (McLuhan to Pound, June 12, 1951, Letters 224)

As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence or to recall the dead. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press, 1954)

The technique of an Eliot poem is a direct application of the method of the popular radio-tube grid circuit to the shaping and control of the charge of meaning. An Eliot poem is one instance of a direct means of experiencing, under conditions of artistic control, the ordinary awareness and culture of contemporary man. (Counterblast, 1954)

If print was the mechanization of the handicraft of writing, the telephone was the electrification of speech itself, a big step past the telegraph. Gramophone and movie were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electrification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves. (Historical Approach to the Media, 1955)

The simplest way to get at Joyce’s technique in language, as well as to see its relation to TV, is to consider the principle of the electronic tube. The paradox of the electronic tube is that it is the means of breaking the conductor in an electric circuit. The tube permits the electrons to escape from the wire that ordinarily conveys them. But the tube controls the  conditions of escape. It liberates electrons from the wire but it provides a new context in which they can be repatterned. The cathode inside the tube is one end of the broken conductor and the anode is the other. The anode attracts and receives the billions of electrons that are “boiled” off the surface of the cathode. When a tube is connected into an alternating-current circuit, the anode is positive during half of each cycle. During the half cycle when the anode is negative, electrons cannot reach the anode. It is this characteristic of an electronic tube which enables it to act as a rectifier, changing alternating currents into direct current.
The grid is the controlling or “valve” electrode of the tube. It is located between the cathode and the anode in the path of the electrons. By voltage control the grid acts as trigger for the electronic flow. Grid bias blocking electronic flow is recentralized by signal voltage. Signal voltage is a trigger that releases full flow of current through the tube. But this flow stops when anode voltage becomes negative. Cycle then repeats. The load of current on this cycle is a motor.
When current is too weak for direct flow, it can, in a vacuum tube, be used as signal voltage on the grid of the tube. Then every variation in the shape of the wave will be faithfully reproduced in the output wave of the tube. Thus a tiny amount of energy can be exactly controlled or stepped up instantly to very high potentials.
Now metaphor has always had the character of the cathode-anode circuit, and the human ear has always been a grid, mesh, or, as Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake, Earwicker. But Joyce was the first artist to make these aspects of language and communication explicit. In so doing, he applied the principles of electronics to the whole history of culture. The entire cyclic body of Finnegans Wake is suspended between a predicate and a subject. The cathode-anode aspect of metaphor and language Joyce first extended to syntax. He took the charge of meaning out of the wire of direct statement into the vacuum-tube of the self-contained poetic drama of his “all nights newsery reel.” (FW 489)
Metaphor means a carrying across. All speech is metaphoric because any oral sound is a gesture towards externalizing an inner gesture of the mind. The auditory situation is a carrying across from a silent situation. Writing is metaphor for sound. It translates, or metamorphizes the audible into the visual. There is necessarily discontinuity in metaphor. There has to be a leap from one situation to another. (‘Radio and Television vs. The ABCED-Minded’, Explorations 5, 1955)

Charles Cochrane and “problems of time”

When Charles Cochrane died prematurely in 1945, age 56, his obituary in The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science1 was written by Harold Innis, Cochrane’s friend and colleague at UT.2

Many of the stations in Cochrane’s life described by Innis were also true of Innis himself: born in Ontario, served in WW1, returned to teach at UT and to participate in its administration, active in organizations of his field. More, it is clear that Innis fully shared many of Cochrane’s intellectual persuasions, especially what he called “the philosophic approach“.

The first text cited by Innis in the obituary came from one of Cochrane’s last publications, published in 1944 at a time of intense discussions between the two of them3:

[Cochrane] outlined the importance of [Thucydides] in discovering the “dynamic or principle of motion . . . in history itself, i.e., in the relationship between the aspirations and ideals of men, on the one hand, and, on the other, the material circumstances upon which their satisfaction depends”4

Since both “the aspirations and ideals of men” and their “material circumstances” are subject to incessant change, often in complex interaction with each other, and since the historian cannot extract herself from these contexts and is therefore necessarily “biased” by her situation in them, how could a “dynamic or principle of motion” be formulated for history that would not be merely a reflection of the “wills or personalities” of the formulators?5  How could it not be arbitrary and therefore not a “principle” at all?

Innis never claimed to have solved this riddle. But he knew where its nub was located:

this paper [‘The Newspaper in Economic Development’ from 1942] is designed to emphasize the importance of a change in the concept of the dimension of time, and to argue that it cannot be regarded as a straight line but as a series of curves depending in part on technological advances. (…) The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time.6

Time “cannot be regarded as a straight line but as a series of curves”. That is, time, like space, is plural. On the one hand it is “a series” that, if not “a straight line”, is perpetually different.  On the other hand, it demonstrates repeated cycles or “curves” which are perpetually the same.

“The philosophic approach of Cochrane” amounted, for Innis, to the attempt to discover the  “dynamic or principle of motion in human history” as the consideration of this plurality. The obituary, short as it is, returns to this notion over and over again:

History written from the philosophical background of classicism differs sharply from history written from the Augustinian point of view with its emphasis on will, personality, and unpredictability. Paradoxically classicism assumed the unpredictable in the incalculable, in fortune or in chance, whereas Augustine admitted the possibility of understanding the unpredictable by emphasizing personality or individuality. A society dominated by Augustine will produce a fundamentally different type of historian, who approaches his problem from the standpoint of change and progress, from classicism with its emphasis on cyclical [repetition]7 and the tendency to equilibrium.

He [Cochrane] has traced the problem of weaving [together] the major strands of Graeco-Roman civilization, namely order and progress. (…) His contribution to the philosophy of history is shown in the development of general concepts at the basis of progress and the adjustment of order to meet the demands of change…

The great question was whether the historian, in “the study of toxins and antitoxins of the body politic”, has done justice to the plurality of time as both “order and progress”.

He [Cochrane] “ventured to defy the accepted convention [Innis: of dissociating classical and Christian studies] and to attempt a transition from the world of Augustus and Vergil to that of Theodocius and Augustine…”8

The history of western civilization could not be in the business of merely “dissociating”, but neither could an “attempt [at] a transition” ignore that “the philosophical background of classicism  differs sharply from (…) the Augustinian point of view”. The demand was to do justice to both identity and difference.  Moreover, this demand applied first of all to the historian’s own situation:

The social scientist is asked to check [ie, both stop and proof] his [own] course and to indicate his [own] role in western civilization. His answer must stand the test of the philosophic approach of Cochrane.

Absent such proof, Cochrane’s work stood as an indictment:

To the social scientist, he [Cochrane] might have said, your cycles, your theories of civilization, and your “creative” politics are the new fantastica fornicatio.

“Such perversions of intellectual activity,” Augustine called, “fantastica fornicatio, the prostitution of the mind to its own fancies.”9

 

 

  1. ‘Charles Norris Cochrane, 1889-1945’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 12:1, 1946, pp. 95-9. All citations in this post come from this obituary, unless otherwise noted. ↩
  2. Seven years later, Innis himself would die prematurely at age 58. ↩
  3. See Grant on Innis and Cochrane and Cochrane on “an all-pervasive change in outlook” in Athens. ↩
  4. ‘Charles Norris Cochrane, 1889-1945’, originally in Cochrane’s review of Thucydides, by John H. Finley, Jr, 1942, in Classical Philology, 39:1, January 1944, 57-59. For discussion, see Cochrane on “an all-pervasive change in outlook” in Athens. ↩
  5. “Christian realism meant an emancipation from the moral and intellectual difficulties of classical antiquity. To Augustine man was ‘the efficient cause of his own activity’. History became the history of wills or personalities.” (Innis in ‘Charles Norris Cochrane, 1889-1945’, citing Christianity and Classical Culture. ↩
  6.  ‘The Newspaper in Economic Development’, originally 1942, the first chapter of Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946. ↩
  7. Innis has “change” here, not “repetition”.  The substitution has been made to clarify the contrast at stake in this passage between Augustinian “progress” and classical “order”. Of course, both are types of “change”, but, as Innis says in this same passage, each “differs sharply” from the other. ↩
  8. Innis in his obit citing Cochrane’s ‘Preface’ to Christianity and Classical Culture (1940, revised and corrected 1944) with the interpolation by Innis “of dissociating classical and Christian studies”. ↩
  9. Innis citing Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture again. Cochrane has “prostitution of mind”, not “of the mind”. ↩

Lindberg before and after Foundations

McLuhan was very taken with John Lindberg’s 1953 Foundations of Social Survival. He reviewed it at length early in 1954 and discussed it in two important lectures that same year.1

In considering Lindberg’s book, it is helpful to look at essays he wrote 10 years before and 10 years after it. In 1944 he published ‘The Long Sleep: An Essay on Swedish Nationalism‘.2 and in 1964 ‘The Secret Life of Dag Hammarskjöld’.3

The central thesis of the 1944 ‘Long Sleep’ essay was carried forward to Lindberg’s book a decade in the future and even to his 1964 Hammarskjöld article :

  • if we wish to understand the dilemma on the horns of which [Swedes] were tossed, we must examine Sweden’s relationships to the nineteenth-century world. This is a deep problem which has a bearing in the last analysis on the international conflicts which plague us today. Persons sensitive to the signs of the times, who lived at the end of the nineteenth century, were often haunted by unformulated fears. They were aware of certain distress signals, but they could not see the relation between their own acts and philosophy and the threatening misfortunes.
  • the dominant philosophy of the nineteenth century was essentially a belief in benevolent automatisms conceived as world-wide in scope.  As a matter of fact, the great achievement of that century was the striving for something which could truly be called a universal economic order.  While this world order affected the cultural and social fields as well as the political, its hard core remained economic.
  • the gradual growth of the system led to a break-down of old institutions and habits of life and the gradual emergence of similar, if not common, institutions and patterns of life all over the world. For our present purpose we need only to recall that the operation of this system required the international movement of merchandise, capital, and men, as well as of ideas. Its balance wheel, its unifying force so to speak, was what is loosely known as the “profit motive.” The movement of merchandise, capital, and men was considered as determined (…) by the general system of prices. Merchandise and/or the factors of production  would flow to places or occupations with higher remuneration until an “equilibrium” was reached, an equilibrium which also was alleged to achieve the maximum world income. National and international measures interfering with the intricate flow and counter-flow within this system were regarded as evil, in as much as they decreased income and hampered world integration.
  • The technical improvements of the new world system in production and transportation raised population and wealth to levels never previously approached. In the meanwhile, the classical economists watched from their Olympian heights the rise and fall of the well-being of individuals or groups. This was looked upon as part and parcel of the beneficial operation of “economic law”; “in the long run” the world would become a richer and fairer place in which to live. The enduring success of such a system ultimately rested upon the the explicit or implicit assumption of a common world economy, the interests of which overrode those of any individual interest or country.
  • Historically speaking, the underlying idea of [such a] universalism was as old as or older than Christianity itself. The Western heritage contained, however, another element no less potent than that of [economic] universalism— its name is brotherhood. From this root, many stems in the plant of social ideas had grown. To a true liberal economist, however, nobody could be said to be his brother’s keeper. On the contrary, hardened still further by arguments drawn from Darwinism he would argue that no good purpose would be served by protecting the weak whose lawful lot it was to be eliminated in the struggle for life by the normal processes of competition, starvation, and illness. Malthusianism was not without guilt in this growth of moral callousness.  It had assisted at the birth of Darwinism and had supplied the rationalizations needed by Western man to adopt a meager-hearted philosophy alien to his tradition. This suppression of an organic part of the Western tradition [namely, brotherhood] was more than ignoble; it was unwise and, in the end, tragic.
  • Almost from its birth the liberal world-economy had to contend with Western conscience as an enemy. This conscience whispered: if society makes us our brothers’ executioners, let us then change society and build anew. The movements of revolt against the liberal order drew their strength from this reaction, and civilization became increasingly a house divided against itself. The artificial separation of the two fundamental ideals contained in a common tradition, created tensions which (…) threatened both with frustration and psychopathic  conflicts.
  • From the beginning, the Western heritage had been characterized by a double allegiance of the individual symbolized by the Prince and the Church. Although history is filled with examples of the struggle between temporal and spiritual powers, the principle of dual allegiance was rarely, if ever, disputed. The Western world from the very beginning accepted the idea of a dual citizenship…
  • Nineteenth-century internationalism was a development in the right direction. The  mistake was not in applying internationalism in the economic sphere but in limiting it to this sphere, for a true balance could have been achieved only by extending internationalism to social and other fields as well. 

McLuhan certainly did not know of this 1944 essay. Nonetheless, it is important to make note of it and not only for the light it throws on Lindberg’s 1953 book which McLuhan did know and closely studied. It is also important as an early illustration of the sort of structural thinking to which McLuhan’s work itself would increasingly tend.

Lindberg posited a plurality of “basic” or “fundamental” “ideals” and was interested in their “balance” — or lack thereof.  Balance fails when one side of the “double allegiance of the individual” to such “ideals” is subject to “suppression” or “separation” relative to the other (“suppression” and “separation” both describing difference in relative value between related terms). In turn, according to Lindberg, it was just such imbalance that led to social conflicts within nations and to the two world wars of the twentieth century between nations: “The artificial separation of the two fundamental ideals contained in a common tradition, created tensions which (…)  threatened both” and have eventuated in “the international conflicts which plague us today” (in 1944).

The silent idea was that the ratio of economics and “brotherhood” extended over an axis stretching between extreme “separation” between them at the two ends of the axis to their “balance” in its middle.  At one end of the axis, “brotherhood” would be suppressed relative to economics; at the other end, economics would be suppressed relative to  “brotherhood”.  Lindberg’s claim was that social and international conflicts would be found to correlate with the extreme ratio positions near the end of the axis where “brotherhood” was relatively suppressed. Presumably poverty and stagnation would correlate with the contrasting extreme positions near the other end where economics were relatively suppressed.

Writing in the middle of WW2, Lindberg could see only a single solution: “extending internationalism [beyond that of a “common world economy”] to social and other fields as well”. This, he proposed, would achieve “a true balance” between our economic and technological developments, on the one hand, and our spiritual needs, on the other. McLuhan agreed. Where McLuhan parted company with Lindberg, however, was in McLuhan’s insistence that such “true balance” could not be achieved through the sort of broad social programs imagined by Lindberg. Instead, McLuhan thought, the structural balances and imbalances which mediate human psychology and sociology must be subjected to detailed investigation so that exactly this scientific study of their working might supply that spiritual “internationalism” (aka, an “external sensus communis”) needed to balance the economic one.4

McLuhan described this idea in direct reference to Lindberg in his 1954 lecture on ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’:

in the modern world we have through the very perfection and instantaneity of our means of communication made it impossible to resolve the conflicting claims of the numerous societies and cultures which are now in close association. Neither can we hope to impose any one culture on all the others and reduce them to a single form. But (…) we now have the key to the creative process which brings all cultures into existence (namely the extension5 into social institutions of the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process).6 

The notion had been set out for Harold Innis in a letter from McLuhan early in 1951:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences… (Letters, 221)

In fact nearly all of McLuhan’s writings between 1949 and 1954 were focused on the problem of defining “the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process” as reflected in the arts, especially literature.  Like Lindberg, McLuhan found that ratios were key: between experience and world, eye and ear, innovation and tradition. But central problems remained.  How to specify such “ideals” and their balances and imbalances to enable their objective identification? On this basis, how to probe their interaction with one another and their “extension” into society and the environment? And how to communicate these ideas to bring their study into collective investigation? Questions like these would dominate the remaining quarter century of McLuhan’s life.

Lindberg’s 1964 article7 on Dag Hammarskjöld applies these same ideas to his countryman and erstwhile friend who became the General Secretary of the UN.  Here it is not the world or the tradition that has become unbalanced between an international system and the demands of conscience, but Dag Hammarskjöld as a person (and, by extension, the UN itself):

We all carry masks, but in Dag the cleavage of personality went deeper (…) to understand his need for a mask is to move close to the core of his personality.

Both in conversations with Lindberg8 and in his published writings, Hammarskjöld is said to have argued that

the civil servant had the obligation to cut the lifeline between private conviction and public action (…) Private convictions could not stand in the way of expediency (…) [since] Hammarskjöld was convinced of the [overriding] need of an integrated world community as a condition of survival.

Hammarskjöld, says Lindberg, “never reconciled his beautiful sayings of humility and love with his exercise of power.” This pushed him, in Lindberg’s view, to an extreme imbalance between the “ideals” of power and brotherhood:

The man who believed in the “meaninglessness of killing” became nevertheless a prototype of the savior with the sword. He became a man who led the peace organization to armed intervention and to deeds of lawless violence, well knowing that that world integration because of nuclear progress is no longer possible by means of arms, but only by moral leadership.

The danger was that Hammarskjöld’s “extreme” solution might set a precedent:

In Hammarskjöld’s case, we had the savior[with the sword] hidden behind the mask of the peace-loving, level-headed and clever diplomat, dying in pursuit of peace; although next time it may well be a madman or worse masquerading as savior.

Samantha Power and Nikki Haley have meanwhile demonstrated how prescient were Lindberg’s fears concerning “a madman or worse”.  As personified by them, the UN has become the very archetype of “expediency” pursuing “armed intervention and (…) deeds of lawless violence” through the “suppression” of “moral leadership”. 

Matthew 5:13… 

 ἐὰν δὲ τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ, ἐν τίνι ἁλισθήσεται;

but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?

  1. For details, see John Lindberg. ↩
  2. ‘The Long Sleep: An Essay on Swedish Nationalism‘, American Swedish Historical Museum Yearbook for 1944. ↩
  3.  ‘The Secret Life of Dag Hammarskjöld’, Look Magazine, 28:13, 30 June 1964. ↩
  4. For discussion, see McLuhan’s new sciences: “only the authority of knowledge”. ↩
  5. “Extension into social institutions” is what McLuhan, following Innis, characterized as “the power of the new media of communication to penetrate and transform all existing institutions and patterns of thought” (‘The Later Innis’, The Queen’s Quarterly, 1953). ↩
  6. In his lecture McLuhan attributed this idea regarding “the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process” to Lindberg.  But it is instead the notion at the heart of all of McLuhan’s writings between (roughly) 1949 and 1954. ↩
  7.  ‘The Secret Life of Dag Hammarskjöld’, Look Magazine, 28:13, 30 June 1964. The citations which follow are selections from this article. It is possible that McLuhan knew of this article. Compare Lindberg, 1964, “The problem (for Hammarskjöld) became, fundamentally, one of how to create success out of failure, and of making failure a criterion of success” with McLuhan, 1972, “Failure Through Success and Success Through Failure” (Take Today, 279). ↩
  8. “Dag and I had (…) bitter discussions about the relations between state and individual, and, more particularly, the primacy of human conscience.” ↩

Cochrane on “an all-pervasive change in outlook” in Athens

In 1944 Charles Cochrane reviewed Thucydides by John Findley.1 Cochrane’s review is noteworthy in the context of Eric Havelock’s ongoing work on the Sophists and Socrates at that time, and of the close relationship at UT between Cochrane and Harold Innis2. The short review characterized in some detail Finley’s description of “an all-pervasive change in outlook” in Athens in the fifth century BC, which Findley attributed to the deep influence of the Sophists:

Professor Finley now proceeds to examine the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the
period covered by [Thucydides’] History — a period which, as he remarks, the historian relived with such intensity.3  This he depicts as a time when the “realistic” thinking of the Sophists made its first and deepest impression on Athens; and he attributes to the impact of Sophism an all-pervasive change in outlook, best described perhaps as the victory of conceptual over symbolic or poetic modes of thought. In this connection Mr. Finley has much of interest and value to say, especially with regard to the so-called antithetic style of discourse in relation to the contemporary mind. Sophistic influence, as he sees it, operated in two ways. In the first place, it provided a fresh impulse to scientific investigation and, therewith, to the “search for causes” in terms of which to understand characters and events. Secondly, it invented in rhetoric a vehicle for “logical” expression, i.e., for identifying and defining the concepts which, according to the findings of contemporary reason, constitute the pattern of things. Both these influences, which are to be discerned in the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in the earliest extant samples of Athenian prose literature, are also, as Mr. Finley argues, fully illustrated in the work of the historian.4

Just what had occasioned this “all-pervasive change in outlook” was a question on everybody’s mind. For the Toronto school — Innis, Havelock and McLuhan — the emerging answer was: literacy.

In fact, a hint of this answer appears in Cochrane’s review in a phrase intended by him to suggest mediation only in the vague sense of a middle term. The mind of Thucydides was shaped, says Cochrane, by the “attempt to discover a via media between earlier theories of historical causation, based on religious and philosophical principles, and the rank mechanistic or sensationalistic materialism” of some of the Sophists.

For Cochrane, Thucydides’ work was therefore an attempt:

to develop a position in the light of which man, while denied all capacity to transcend the world of nature or the material world, might still be regarded as in some sense a genuine agent, the “maker” of his own history. To see Thucydides in this context is, we feel, essential to an adequate appreciation of his work and of the claim that it would live as a “possession forever”. Like most of his “advanced” contemporaries — the Sophists of the Periclean age — the historian was strictly and consistently ἄθεος; as such, he rejected in toto the element of myth which had so far dominated the writing of history. But, unlike the majority, he refused to throw the old gods overboard only to deify “fate” or “chance”. Accordingly, he discovered the hormé — dynamic or principle of motion in human history — not in any general hypothetical principle but in history itself, i.e., in the relationship between the aspirations and ideals of men, on the one hand, and, on the other, the material circumstances upon which their satisfaction depends.5  

It would be this “relationship” between mind and environment, each at work on the other, that the Toronto school would thematize as the research field of “communications”.

 

  1. John H. Findley, Thucydides, HUP, 1942. Cochrane had published his own Thucydides book in 1929, Thucydides and the Science of History, OUP, 1929. ↩
  2. See Grant on Innis and Cochrane. ↩
  3. Thucydides lived from c 460 BC to c 400. His History covers the three decades following the start of the war between Athens and Sparta in 431 BC. ↩
  4. Charles N. Cochrane, Review of Thucydides, by John H. Finley, Jr, 1942, in Classical Philology, 39:1, January 1944, 57-59. The citations in the remainder of this post come from this same review. ↩
  5. Importantly, the last part of this passage — “the “dynamic or principle of motion in human history . . . in history itself, i.e., in the relationship between the aspirations and ideals of men, on the one hand, and, on the other, the material circumstances upon which their satisfaction depends” — was cited by Harold Innis in his obituary for Cochrane (‘Charles Norris Cochrane, 1889-1945’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 12:1, 1946, pp. 95-97). ↩