The following is adapted and expanded from a talk at Games in Action 2022 at the University of British Columbia.

In my recent post Mysteries of Reading feat. John Carey and Gillian Rose, we looked at elitist views of literary intellectuals around the turn of the 20th century:

In The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, John Carey paints a picture of literary intellectuals around the turn of the 20th century reacting to developments like population boom (resulting in e.g. the suburbification of the English countryside) by fixating on the concept of 'the mass', a sort of vulgar, soulless, blob against which the intellectual defines themself. These views were mutually reinforcing with other trending ideologies like phrenology, eugenics, and anti-democratic belief.

This reminded me of Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916), a mathematician and writer of the same era as Carey's intellectuals. Despite her interest in many of the same (now morally or scientifically condemned) topics, Boole had a notable tendency to dodge many of the worst tendencies within her fields of interest. Her best known work, Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, provides insight into how she accomplished this.

Philosophy and Fun of Algebra

Written to engage children with mathematics, Philosophy and Fun of Algebra meshes sagely instructiveness with wry, imaginative mysticism, calling to mind The Phantom Tolbooth or A Wrinkle in Time (with a slider pulled from 'literature' towards 'textbook').

To get to algebra, we start at arithmetic, defined as "dealing logically with facts which we know (about questions of number).” She imagines a dialogue in a society where people are trying to figure out unknown numbers but can’t with arithmetic alone—leading to a lot of guessing and arguments over guesses.

How stupid we’ve all been! We have been dealing logically with all the facts we knew about this problem, except the most important fact of all, the fact of our own ignorance.

...In this problem, besides the numbers which we do know, there is one which we do not know, and which we want to know. Instead of guessing whether we are to call it nine, or seven, or a hundred and twenty, or a thousand and fifty, let us agree to call it x, and let us always remember that x stands for the Unknown. Let us write x in among all our other numbers, and deal logically with it according to exactly the same laws as we deal with six, or nine, or a hundred, or a thousand.

—Mary Everest Boole, Philosophy and Fun of Algebra

Boole goes on to describe how the algebraic mindset has implications beyond manipulating numbers with a story of two babies and a metal pot. One baby reaches out to play with the metal tea-pot, having learned that tea-pots are cool and pleasant, The other baby cries, having learned that metal tea-pots are hot and painful to touch.

Now you will observe that both these babies have learnt by experience. Some people say that experience is the mother of Wisdom; but you see that both babies cannot be right; and, as a matter of fact, both are wrong. If they could talk, they might argue and quarrel for years; and vote; and write in the newspapers; and waste their own time and other people’s money; each trying to prove he was right. But there is no wisdom to be got in that way. What a wise baby knows is that he cannot tell, by the mere look of a tea-pot, whether it is hot or cold. The fact that is most prominent in his mind when he sees a tea-pot is the fact that he does not know whether it is hot or cold. He puts that fact along with the other fact:—that he would very much like to play with the picture in the tea-pot supposing it would not burn his fingers; and he deals logically with both these facts; and comes to the wise conclusion that it would be best to go very cautiously and find out whether the tea-pot is hot, by putting his fingers near, but not too near. That baby has begun his mathematical studies; and begun them at the right end. He has made an Algebra for himself.

Phrenology and Beyond

Today, phrenology is reasonably a poster child for racist pseudo-science. Boole found phrenology convincing: the idea that personality qualities like trust, perseverance, or venerance are tied to physical structures of the brain which may vary in size and strength, and that the skull, being sutured over the brain, might reflect that underlying shape. In antiquity, the heart was considered the seat of intelligence, and while Islamic medicine in the middle ages conceived of links between mental deficits and the brain, much of what we now understand about the brain's structures and their relationship with personality/thought was only starting to be developed during Boole's lifetime; research during the 19th century mainly focused on the brain's relationship with motor functions (source: skimming Wikipedia).

As far as I can tell, Boole never applied phrenology to race, mainly using it to grasp at a notion which could not yet be proven but does generally conform to our modern understanding: that the relative development of different physical regions of the brain deeply influences our personalities and instincts. While Boole uses more explicitly moral-coded language, it's not far off from a pop psychological discussion of the frontal cortex or the amygdala (or for that matter the discredited "lizard brain") today. As her favored theory in an emerging field, she entertained its implications, noted where it might overlap with other theories, but warned against dogmatic adherence: "So I shall express no opinion about the truth of phrenology, but only say that, if not true it was well invented; for it answers as a summary or skeleton of all that is known on the subject of brain action. And its terminology is convenient."

While it's easy to laugh off an idea like phrenology once the dust has settled on both a moral and scientific consensus, how are we to approach the unsettled controversies of our own time? As with the two babies, caution and enthusiasm both have their pitfalls. Boole's dizzyingly adventurous thought is a valuable example. Her personal spirituality (while eccentric) manifests primarily through Christian concepts, and she was preoccupied with finding the underlying unities between science and faith (e.g. that the spirit of God might be synonymous with the forces of nature: electricity, magnetism, etc.). She was a passionate fan of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and set out to correct misinterpretations and argue that his theories were not incompatible with a Biblical creation. Eugenics, which appealed to so many of her contemporaries eager to cull the world of the undesirables around them, Boole addresses only sideways through a condemnation of the parental desire to control the outcomes of their children. She notes that Darwinian evolution selects not for some simple accumulation of size or strength, but for a balance of attributes against varying circumstances, which calls into question the very premise of breeding a superior man. Further, she decries the domination of children's destinies with moving clarity:

...the farmer has a much greater amount of control over the circumstances of his flock than we have over those of our children. He can shut the flock up on his own farm; we cannot, we must not shut up our children.

—Mary Everest Boole, The Message of Psychic Science to the World

Boole's passions ranged far more esoteric, as you can probably tell from the title of the just-quoted book. Chapter titles include: On Mental Hygiene in Sickness, Thought Transference, and On Homeopathy. Every topic explored with passionate hope and algebraic handling of the object of ignorance. There is an intellectual courage here that I aspire to. A willingness to be 'wrong', potentially ludicrously so, and still to show up and act upon the world with care and intention.

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My business [as a teacher] is not to judge what is good or bad conduct, but to see that you learn how to be perfectly honest with yourself... no one who is consciously and deliberately dishonest to serve his own selfish purposes can ever do as much harm to other people as is done every day by men and women who have muddled their own brains with crooked logic.

—Mary Everest Boole, Philosophy and Fun of Algebra

Additional Notes

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