Ancient Greek Planets, Stars, Astrology

When the Greeks learned to recognise the five planets known in antiquity, they gave them names derived from their character. Venus, whose brightness Homer had already celebrated, was called "Herald of the Dawn" ('Εωбϕóρος) or "Herald of Light" (фωбφóρος) or on the other hand "Vespertine" ("Εбπερος), according as she was considered as the star of the morning or that of the evening (the identity of these two being not yet recognised). Mercury was named the "Twinkling Star" (Στíγßων), Mars, because of his red colour, the "Fiery Star" (Άῦρóεις), Jupiter the "Luminous Star" (Φαέθων), Saturn the "Brilliant Star" (Φαíνων), or perhaps, taking the word in another sense, the "Indicator." Now, after the fourth century other titles are found to supersede these ancient names, which are gradually ousted from use.

The planets become the stars of Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, Kronos, ('Ερμοŭ, 'Αϕροδϭτηζ Ϻτλ. ἀбτἧρ). Now this seems due to the fact that in Babylonia these same planets were dedicated respectively to Nebo, Ishtar, Nergal, Marduk, and Ninib. In accordance with the usual procedure of the ancients, the Greeks substituted for these barbarous divinities those of their own deities who bore some resemblance to them. Clearly exotic ideas, the ideas of Semitic star-worship, have come in here, for the ancient mythology of Hellas did not put the stars under the patronage of the Olympians nor establish any connection between them. Thus the names of the planets which we employ to-day, are an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a Babylonian nomenclature.

Astral Mysticism

The marvels of nature produce on us a mysterious impression. The view of immensity elevates us above the vulgarities of life. This feeling, innate in man, astral religion has seized upon and developed splendidly in order to make it a source of morality. Theologians celebrate the spiritual joys which this religion has in store for its adepts, the intensity of which renders all material delights insipid and contemptible; in a hundred ways they contrast the meanness of earthly with the splendour of heavenly things. How should the worshippers of the sky take delight in chariot-races, or be seduced by the songs and dances of the theatre, they who have the privilege of contemplating the gods and of listening to their prophetic voices? How utterly do their thoughts, which move among the stars, scorn from the heights of this resplendent abode the gilded palaces and the pompous luxury of wealth! They heap not up silver and gold, treasures worthy of the dark places of the earth from which avarice draws them, but they fill their souls with spiritual riches and make them masters of all nature, in such wise that their possessions extend to the confines of the East and of the West. Even the privations of exile cannot touch them, since under all climes they find the same stars at the same distance from their watchful eyes. Can they but mingle with them, and their souls mount to the bright regions to which they are drawn by their kinship with the heavenly fires, it matters but little to them what earth they tread with their feet. Absorbed in her sublime researches, our reason will disdain the perishable goods of this life and the gross pleasures of the multitude. She will free herself from all the carnal desires aroused in her by the body, fashioned of earth. Thus devotion to science is surrounded in sidereal worship with a halo of religion. The exaltation of intellectual life, which alone is divine, leads here to asceticism.

Astral mysticism, we see, conceived a blissful state of mind where man, even on earth, freed himself of all that was earthly, emancipated himself from the needs of the body, as from bonds, and from the impulses born of it, to devote himself to the contemplation of nature and of the starry sky, which imparted to him direct knowledge of divine activity. This ideal, sternly ascetic, in that it set the satisfaction of bodily instincts in sharp opposition to the aspirations of sovereign reason, led to a life of self-renunciation, illumined only by the sacred joys of study. But has man's will the power to choose this happy lot? Does not astrology formulate a principle destructive of all morality and all religion, the principle of fatalism?

Fatalism indeed is the capital principle which astrology imposed on the world. The Chaldeans were the first to conceive the idea of Necessity dominating the universe. This is also one of the ruling ideas of the Stoics. From the Alexandrine period, it spread over the whole Hellenic world, and at the close of paganism it is still against this doctrine that the efforts of Christian apotogetics are mainly directed, but it was destined to outlast all attacks and even to impose itself on Islam. For, Mahommedanism is, in this respect, the heir of paganism.

The capital objection which its adversaries, whether heathen or Christian, never ceased to advance against it, -- the dialectic of Carneades made already brilliant use of this weapon, -- is the same that the defenders of the doctrine of free will have never ceased to repeat -- namely, that the absence of free will destroys responsibility: rewards and punishments are meaningless if men act under a dominating necessity; if they are born heroes or criminals, morality entails no merit and immorality no reproach. We cannot set forth here the metaphysical discussions provoked by this controversy, which always has been, and always will be, carried on. But, from a practical point of view, Stoicism proved by facts -- an irrefutable argument in ethics -that fatalism is not incompatible with a manly and active virtue. Nay more, it was possible to regard it as giving a religious basis to virtue, if virtue resulted from the accord of microcosm and macrocosm which found its highest expression in ecstasy. Some modern thinkers, like Schleiermacher, have made true religion consist in the feeling, on the part of the creature, of absolute dependence on the infinite Cause of the universe. Astrology, by strengthening this feeling of dependence, has been a source of real piety. Its professors elevate to a duty complete resignation to omnipotent fate, cheerful acceptance of the inevitable. They declare themselves submissive to destiny even the most capricious, like an intelligent slave who guesses his master's wishes in order to satisfy them, and can make the harshest servitude tolerable. This passionate surrender, this eagerness to submit to divine Fate inspired certain souls in days of old with feelings so fervent as to recall the rapture of Christian devotion, which burns to subject itself to the will of God.

Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian Astrology

Babylonian astrology was very primitive. A strong magical system of correspondences was developed, linking heaven and earth; it was this magical world view that was taken over by the Greeks and mathematically developed into Aristotle's cosmology and what we know today as astrology. The Babylonians were practical people, interested in learning from their omens the tides of war and the coming of the floods so necessary for their agriculture. The Greeks were trying to build up a mathematical picture of the cosmos as a whole and for that reason are considered the forerunners of science.

But Greek astrology was not a science. Astrology came to the Greeks as a full-blown magical system, its assumptions and operating principles unquestioned. The Greeks wove astrology into their "scientific" cosmology, setting the pattern for astrologers to attach their "art" onto each new up-and-coming science, more and more ascribing astrology to physical influences and obscuring the magical principles upon which it was based.

Thus, Greek astrology used the same magical "principle of correspondences," adding the characteristics of their native gods to the planets and stars. Astrologers have long claimed that the characteristic influences of the stars were determined through patient observation over many centuries. This is totally false; the astrological nature of the signs and planets is determined strictly on the basis of their magical correspondences. Thus, Pisces (the Fish) is called a water sign, red Mars is associated with war, quick and elusive Mercury governs the metal quicksilver (mercury), planets in opposition are in disharmony, and so on.

It was the Egyptians who contributed planetary aspects (system of Places): the idea that planets at particular angles (opposition, square, trine) represent omens foretelling events on earth. The Greeks merely superimposed the Egyptian system of Places on the Babylonian zodiac (way of Anu) to come up with what we know today as astrology.

Astrology: Magic or Science?

Can astrology be disproved? Literally thousands of volumes have been written on the subject over the ages, attacks and defenses, apologies and interpretations. Proponents have claimed astrology as a "science" and an "art," a true interpretation of the inner workings of the universe. Opponents have mostly attacked astrology on physical grounds, citing the old classical arguments: the question of twins, the time of birth versus time of conception, the immense distances to the planets and stars, and so on.

But very few writers have come to the nub of the matter: astrology is false because it is a system of magic, based on the magical "principle of correspondences." In fact, astrology--or at least its prehistoric predecessor--probably arose concurrently with the magical world view of early civilized man, astrology and magic adding to each other and being developed and used by the priests to lend "cohesiveness" to the evolving city-states. By the time cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing had been developed, astrology in some form or other was already a part of man's culture.

Thus, several thousand years have gone into the development of astrology, into its theory and practice. Astrology proper began in Babylonia as a system of omen-reading to foretell the fate of kings and realms. More or less simultaneously, the Egyptians developed their system of Places, based on "planetary aspects." Then the Greeks took over both the Babylonian and Egyptian systems, combining them into a complex mathematical cosmology. Under the Greeks, astrology became available to the common man; astrologers today use virtually the same system as the Greeks, or endless variations thereof.

As a result of astrology's long history, confused development, and obscured theoretical bases, it is common for writers and astrologers to state that the ancient "art" cannot be disproved, that modern man lacks the necessary "cosmic insights" to grasp its truths. Even the great humanist Petrarch attacked astrology only by making fun of astrologers, leaving the cosmological arguments relatively untouched. Very few writers indeed have associated astrology with its magical bases; a reasonable search reveals that only Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, and Richard Cavendish, in The Black Arts ( 1967), have properly identified astrology as magic.

This confused state of affairs is precisely the astrologers' aim: as long as they can obscure the fact that astrology is nothing more nor less than magic and totally unrelated to physical science, they can continue to find customers willing to part with hard-earned funds. For, after all, astrology is a practical "art"; it has provided many an astrologer with a lifelong living.

Marriage as an American Partnership

In America marriage is the social institution designed to harness for the benefit of society (as well as of the marital partners) the energy of an intimate partnership. Marriage is always a social contract, although the social functions it fulfills are more prominent in some societies than in our own. This is in part because we think of it, ideally, as initiated and maintained simply for the benefit of the two people who fell in love. In our society when two adults who are able to support themselves fall in love they are expected to get married.

Art as Likeness

In art a likeness is an arrangement of forms that corresponds to some aspects(s) of its subject. The subject may be known only to the artist, but the spectator must at least know the coordinates of the subject if he can have a meaningful relation to the work of art. The knowledge the spectator needs is (1) specific, such as the recognition of representative human or landscape forms, and (2) conventional, a recognition that the work of art presents only a part of the external subject of which it is a likeness. (That hypothetical Martian in his first contact with earth people could not read such art.) Discussing this article beforehand, the problem of how to write about art as likeness mounted; almost everything is still to be done. Was the problem how to describe the range of figurative styles in the U.S.? Or, was the problem a definition of realist-oriented paintings developing out of Pop art? The naturalistic time of Warhol's movies seems Post-Pop art, while the play of signs in his paintings is more like Pop art. Should figure painting be included along with place painting and object painting, in view of the inadequacy of so-called revivals of the figure? The last problem was the easiest to settle: rather than return to a version of the ranked genres of past art (figures first, still life last), it seemed more exact to set figurative painting as a whole against abstract art, rather than to revive past classificatory systems.

The success or, better, successes of abstract art have put figurative painting under various pressures. It is not that figurative art has ceased to be produced; on the contrary it is a statistical part of the multi style abundance of this century's art. (It is this abundance, this quantity, of artists and styles which is modern about modern art, and not one particular slice of the cake, not one privileged corner. Simple choices of one main line, one way, are nostalgic simplifications of present experience which is nothing if not copious.) In the early twentieth-century polemics of realism versus abstraction, all the vigor, all the subsequent influence, was with abstract artists, but there is no reason that texts, written by artists in defence of their own early work, should continue as limiting cases. To Malevich, realism belonged to the under-developed centuries or to the country; to Mondrian it was an adulteration of pure visual structure (eggs, not heads); and to Kandinsky the specificity of a realist work destroyed art's universality and spiritual élan. Thus, modernity, concentration, and spirituality came to be reserved for abstract art and critics have, on the whole, accepted, either as cultural reflex, or in sophisticated reworkings, these primitive views, which of course are no longer adequate to abstract art.

Much of the art criticism devoted to figurative art has been based on a tacit acceptance of the domination of abstract art. Hence those short-lived and embarrassing slogans about a return to the figure or about a New Figuration or Other Figuration. The first claim delegates realism to be merely the revival of an interrupted tradition and the second term tries to claim the rhetoric of abstraction for figurative art. The so-called Monster School of Chicago was presented some years ago as if it were a return (that word again) to deep feelings and real passion after an interim of merely ornamental abstract art. Such crude efforts to turn the tables came to nothing as group promotion, but individual artists in the group have prospered (and others have not). Bay Area Figurative painting is probably the best-known and longest‐ lived figurative group, parallel in certain respects to the East Hampton painters who have existed as an enclave within Abstract Expressionism for years. The common point of the two groups is a rediscovery of Manet and the substitution of him for Cézanne, the previously mandatory model of art and ethics. The adoption of Manet led to a more sensually unified style than was reachable from other points of departure while retaining legible imagery.

The East Hampton realists expanded Manetesque handling into an assertion of the autonomy of paint; it is as if they were enacting for their friends the abstract painters, the Ortega y Gasset—André Malraux view of Manet as the first modern painter (more paint than people). Alex Katz is the tough and adaptive artist to come out of this Long Island—Downtown New York group. In his figures (both the billboardscale heads and the off-life size, but otherwise illusionistic cutouts), the post-Manet style is persuaded into an art of deceptive blandness which, actually, is rooted in accurate notation and expansive painterliness. His recent series of big flowers, some derived from seed catalogues, some from stuffed vases, have the diffuseness of wallpaper, but with intricacy and modulation, not repetition, discovered within the spread (the reverse, that is to say, of Warhol's flowers). Katz exemplifies the graces and the double-takes of likenesses in art.

Apropos the position of the East Hampton painters, except for Katz, Fairfield Porter is absolutely their emblem: what is needed are less gestures of special tolerance towards "realists we like," than a recognition of present stylistic diversity. Only a pluralistic aesthetic is adequate for the first move towards seeing figurative painters straight and not as marginal courtiers or saboteurs around the thrones of abstract artists.

We have a fair vocabulary for defining our theories and experiences of art as an object, as an autonomous thing different from other classes of things in the world. We do not have, however, a comparable vocabulary to describe an aesthetics of figurative art. (Oddly, only the fantastic aspects of figuration have received particular attention, as in André Breton's writings.) Although art critics have been undiligent, art historians have addressed themselves to the problems of legibility and likeness. It is because of their work that there may be some possibility of improving simultaneously our power to see and to describe figurative art. Erwin Panofsky's iconographical studies and E. H. Gombrich's A rt and Illusion are well enough known by now, but there are other relevant studies: Richard Bernheimer's The Nature of Representation (New York University Press, 1961) is a systematic study of designation, and Sven Sandstrom's Levels of Unreality (University of Uppsala, 1963) is a survey of real and illusory space in murals of the Italian Renaissance. The methodology of the former book and the scrupulous analyses of the latter are relevant to the present problem, more so than any art criticism devoted to individual figurative artists.

One of the hangovers from abstract art theory of the first quarter of the twentieth century still present in this, the third quarter, is the separation of art into visual display, on the one hand, and literary content or description on the other. This view reduces the referential elements of a work to dead weight that slows down the real thing, formal structure. In fact, iconography is as visual and as active as color. For example, Thiebaud's Riverboat is a centered, near-symmetrical image; the placidity of the water permits the reflection to be, apart from color modifications, almost an inverted facsimile. Other recent Thiebauds have pursued reflections also, as well as repeated tree forms in groves, and lines of trees with individually distinct matching shadows. Apparently he is extending into the natural landscape the repetitiveness that he got before from identical or similar mass-produced objects. This doubling up and repeating of forms is not only a visual device, it is also an expressive one; the group of paintings and pastels referred to, then, marks a change in both Thiebaud's composition and in his iconography.

When I look at a painting that is like a scene or object known or presumed to exist apart from the image in the work, I experience a complex recognition. It is true that the figurative painting "stands in a relation of dependence upon another entity," to quote Bernheimer. In one sense, the absent entity is the real, the original, item; in another sense, the form of its representation is what is real, embodied in the painting, fixed on the canvas, spread on the paper. All figurative artists are engaged in translation; the work of art is of something, but the representation occurs in another medium. The object is recognized, but absent; it is present, but in translation. Thus what appear to be levels of reality in figurative art are, at the same time, to use Sandstrom's phrase, levels of unreality. Sylvia Sleigh's Bob's Greenhouse is a slice of deep space, but it only opens partially; the verdant interior returns us to the surface. Rosalyn Drexler's paintings of men and machines have a dual function, evoking and blocking a psychological drama. The still point of a painting at which figurative imagery becomes mute, where action is suspended, is not a result of the triumph of form over content, but of our awareness of the interaction of representation with medium, the coalescence of presence and absence.

In figurative painting all events occur in a perpetual present; even the past is only another present, like a flashback in the movies. The threshold between a painting and real space is a spatial, not a temporal experience (although symbols for time can be presented spatially). Costume does not separate us from historical paintings; the position of the frame, as a cut-off point, determines the intimacy or the distance of the scene in relation to the spectator. Marti Edelheit's anthologies of nudes appear to the spectator as one all-englobing tumult, with bodies pouring to the framing edge, echoing the scale of our own bodies. There is a kind of double focus, of present representation and absent model, of a translated world dominated by painting, in figurative art. Mirror-held-up-to-nature and loving-transcription-of-incredible event theories are static constructs, quite inadequate to present experience. An art that deals in likeness deals with problems, double-takes, illusions. Roy Schnackenberg's Lincoln Park, in which painted areas and modeled forms penetrate and enwrap one another, is a clear statement of the ambiguous threshold of figurative art, as the grass-colored platform thrusts forward carrying figures and litter, out in front of the painted landscape.

Environment, nonliving forces, organic

In the Darwinian struggle for existence there is first the struggle with environment, or with the nonliving forces--heat, cold, storm, wind, flood; the organic always at war with the inorganic out of which its power comes. The fateful physical and mechanical forces go their way regardless of the life that surrounds them and which draws its en-ergy from them. Gravity would pull down every tree and shrub and every animal that walks or flies. The wind and the storm would flatten down the flowers and grasses and grains like a steam roller, and often succeeds in doing so. See the timothy and wheat and corn struggle to lift themselves again. Behold how the trees grip the rocks and soil, and brace themselves against the wind! This struggle is, of course, not a conscious one. Apart from the origi-nal push of life, it can all be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. The bio-chemist will tell you why the plant leans toward the light, and why it rights itself when pressed down; but why or how matter organizes itself into the various living forms is a question before which natural philosophy is dumb. Neither chemistry nor physics can give us the secret of life. The ingenious devices to secure cross-fertilization among certain plants, devices for scattering the seed among others,--the hooks, the wings, the springs,--to me all seem to imply in-telligence, not apart from, but inherent in, the things themselves. Power of adaptation--to take advantage of wind and flood, of solid and fluid-is one of the mysterious attributes of life. And yet we know that vegetable life takes advantage of these things not, as we do, by forethought and invention, but by a mysterious inherent impulse.

How the bee and the bird battle with the wind, the fish with the waves and the rapids, the fur-bearers with the cold and the snow! how all living creatures struggle to escape or resist the dissolving power of the natural forces!

The ever-present instinct of fear in all wild crea-tures and in children, and the quickness with which it can be aroused in all persons, throw light upon the crueler aspects of this struggle for existence which is common to all forms of animal life. Had life never been beset with perils, we should have been strangers to the emotion of fear, as would all other creatures. Even the fly that alights on my paper as I write fears my hand. It is ever on guard against its natural enemies. This is the proof of the universal struggle. Among the lower forms the struggle or competition of the fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed, the sharp-eared, and the keen of scent with those less so; of the miscellaneous feeders with the more specialized feeders; and, among mankind, the com-petition of men of purpose, of foresight, of judgement, of experience, of probity, and of other per-sonal resources, with men who are deficient in these things; and, among nations and peoples, the in. evitable competition of those who cherish the high. est national ideals, the best-organized governments, the best race inheritance, the most natural resources, and so on, with the less fortunate in these respects --all this struggle and competition, I say, is benefi-cent and on the road to progress.

Myriads of different types of animal and vege-table life fit into the scheme of organic nature without conflict or hindrance, but when there is conflict, the strong prevail. The small and the gigantic, the feeble and the mighty, the timid and the bold, the frail and the robust--birds, insects, mice, squirrels, cattle--exist in the same landscape and all prosper. Only when there is rivalry do the feeble go to the wall, which means only that their numbers are kept down. The cats do not exterminate the mice and rats, nor do the hawks and owls exterminate the other birds; they are a natural check on their undue increase. Nature's checks and balances are all important. When species subsist upon species, as weasels upon rodents and hawks upon other birds, there seems to be some law that keeps the bloodthirsty in check. Why should there be so few weasels, since they appear as prolific as their victims? Why so few pigeon hawks, since the hawks have no natural enemies, while the trees swarm with finches and robins?

The conflicting interests in Nature sooner or later adjust themselves; her checks and balances bring about her equilibrium. In vegetation rivalries and antagonisms bring about adaptations. The mosses and the ferns and the tender wood plants grow beneath the oaks and the pines and are favored by the shade and protection which the latter afford them. The farmer's seeding of grass and clover takes better under the shade of the oats than it would upon the naked ground. In Africa some species of flesh-eaters live upon the leavings of larger and stronger species, and in the tropics certain birds become benefactors of the cattle by preying upon the insects that pester them. Fabre tells of certain insect hosts that blindly favor the parasites that destroy them. The scheme has worked itself out that way and Nature is satisfied. Victim or victor, host or parasite, it is all one to her. Life goes on, and all forms of it are hers.

The Price of Development

The biological law of the supremacy of the strong over the weak, of the fit over the less fit, which prevails throughout the world of living things, gives us pause when it is applied to human history and to the relations of man with man. Yet it is true that the price of development is the struggle for life. The road of evolution is an uphill road. When struggle ceases, progress ceases, and evolution becomes devolution. Our strength is the strength of the obstacles we overcome. The living machine, contrary to the non-living, gains power from the friction it begets.

When we open the book of the biological history of the globe, we find, to begin with, no force but that which we call brute force, no justice but power, no crime but weakness, no law but the law of battle. The victory is to the strong and the race to the swift. And it is well. It is on this plan, as I have so often said, that the life of the globe has come to what we behold it. Man has come to his present estate, the trees in the forest, the grasses and flowers of the field, the birds in the air, the fishes in the sea, have each and all attained their present stage of development through the operation of this law of natural competition, and the survival of the fittest. Though marked by what we call cruelty and in-justice, in the totality of its operations it is a beneficent law. If it were not so, how could the world of living things have attained its present develop-ment? If it were a malevolent law, would not life have suffered shipwreck long ago? The world of living things and of non-living still merits the primal approval--"Behold, it is very good!" Not your good, nor my good, but a general good, the good of all. Nature's scheme, if we may say she has a scheme, embraces the totality of things, and that the totality of things is good who but a born pessi-mist, a radically negative nature, can deny? Mixed good undoubtedly it is, but is there, or can there be, any other good in the universe? Good forever freeing itself from the non-good, or from the fetters of evil--good to eat, to drink, to behold, to live by, to die by--good for the body, good for the mind, good for the soul, good in time, and good in eternity?

From solar systems to atoms and molecules, the greater bodies, the greater forces, prevail over the lesser, and yet flowers bloom, and life is sweet, sweet for the minor forms as well as for the major.

Inert matter knows only the laws of force. In the world of living matter, up to a certain point, the same rule prevails. In the fields and woods the more vigorous plants and trees run out the less vigorous.

In the dryer meadows in my section of the Catskills the orange hawkweed completely crowds out the meadow grasses; it plants itself on every square inch of the surface, and every four or five years the farmer has to intervene with his plow to turn the battle in favor of the grass again. In the gardens, unless the gardener take a hand in the game, the weeds choke down or smother all his vegetables. The weeds are rank with original sin and they easily supplant our pampered and cultivated cereals and legumes.

In the animal world there are few exceptions to the rule of the supremacy of power. There is no question of right or wrong, of mercy or cruelty. It is not cruel or unjust for the bird to catch the insect, or for the cat to catch the bird, or for the lion to devour the lamb, or for the big fishes to eat up the little fishes. It is the rule of nature, and never a question of right or wrong.

Biological laws are as remorseless as physical laws. The course of animal evolution through the geologic ages is everywhere marked by the triumph of new and superior forms over the old and inferior forms. Among the lower races of man, our remote savage ancestors, might ruled. The strong and prolific tribes supplanted those that were less so, and, among the nations, up to our own day, the rule of natural competition, or survival of the fittest, has held full sway. Those nations which are dominant are so by virtue of their superior qualities, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not a question of might except in so far as this question is linked with the question of moral and intellectual superiority.

Is there, then, no such thing as equity, justice, fair play in the world? Shall I seize my neighbor's farm and despoil him of his goods and chattels because I am stronger than he? Shall one state in-vade and despoil another, or seize its territory, because it is stronger and considers itself more fit to survive?

The rule of might, as I have said, prevails throughout the world of matter and of life below man, and long prevailed in pre-human and human history. But the old law of nature has been limited and qualified by a new law which has come into the world and which is just as truly a biological law in its application to man as was the old law of might. I refer to the law of man's moral nature, the source of right, justice, mercy. The progress of the race and of the nations is coming more and more to depend upon the observance of this law. Without it there is no organization, no coöperation, no commerce, no government. Without it anarchy would rule, and our civilization would crumble and society disintegrate.

The Power of Choice

Think how we come into the world, what an important thing it is to each of us and to the world, and yet how fortuitous and haphazard it all is, and what precautions are often taken to prevent our coming!

See the deformed, the half-witted, the lowbrowed, the degenerate, that come. The great army of the common, the few capable of higher and finer things. Nature apparently finds her account in one class the same as in the other, in Pat as well as in Paul, in the inferior races as well as in the higher.

In our manufacturing affairs we aim to turn out the best article possible-the best shoe, the best hat, the best gun, the best book; but Nature makes no such effort in the case of man, though she does in the case of the lower orders. Probably every individual bird or bug or four-footed beast in a state of nature is perfect of its kind, that is, suited to its place in the scheme of organic life. But how different with man! It is the price he pays for his freedom, his power of choice. The birds and the beasts have no power of choice, they are entirely in the hands of Nature. They are all moulded to one pattern.

The advantage that comes to man from his power of choice is greater variation, hence greater progress. He crosses or reverses or turns aside the laws of Nature, or bends them to his will, and for this privilege he pays the price of idiocy, deformity, and the vast mass of commonplace humanity. His gain is now and then men of exceptional ability, geniuses, who lead the race forward. We know that every improved breed of chicken or sheep or swine will come true. Cultivated fruit relapses in the seed, and cultivated persons often do the same.

On the other hand, rude and ordinary humanity now and then far transcends itself in its offspring, just as the new and choice apple or peach or plum has its humble origin in a seedling.

Popular Music in 20th Century

At the opening of the twentieth century the decisive influence of the ragtime pianists fell on white audiences tiring of the minstrel show and willing to pay to hear black performers. At the same time the American band was being heard everywhere, promoted by John Philip Sousa, the most successful musician of his time, and testifying among other things to pugnacious nationalism. Both phenomena would modulate into dance bands playing vigorous dance music. Burgeoning displays of sheet music in neighborhood stores, often music calling itself rag, attracted a diverse public, much of which never heard the concerts of the creators of ragtime. Modest as well as prosperous homes had a keyboard, either a piano or the less expensive reed organ: the industry built 107,000 harmoniums a year in 1900, and 177,000 pianos. By 1909, the figure was 364,000 pianos. Piano music was available beyond the proportion of the population that could play: by 1925, more than half the pianos produced were automatics, using player rolls for current hits (see Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: a History). Such instruments, giving out more and better sound than the evolving phonograph had yet mastered, tuned the audience more closely than ever before to the latest fad in music.

A boom in social dancing began during the second decade of the twentieth century, along with the first recognition of music called jazz. Nat Shapiro quotes Variety as estimating that in the mid-1920s there were 60,000 dance bands playing on the dance floors of jazz age America. Beginning in 1920, radio broadcasting brought recorded and live music into homes, posing an economic challenge to pianos and combining with the Depression in 1929 to decimate record and phonograph sales. The music that America absorbed through these media came mostly from New York, from Tin Pan Alley publishing houses and from the flourishing Broadway stage, reproduced also in vaudeville houses across the country. When in the middle of the 1920s recording engineers developed microphones to replace recording horns, a new softer "crooning" performance became possible and stylish on records and over the radio.

Al Jolson's songs on screen in 1927 opened another medium. When the Depression crippled the New York musical theater, Hollywood studios became the patrons of much of professional songwriting, for the movies that were the country's largest entertainment indulgence during the 1930s. The record industry struggled back late in the decade, dominated by the big swing bands and their vocalists. As the war overtook the United States, a significant economic struggle surfaced in musical entertainment. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers ( ASCAP) had been formed in 1914 to collect performance royalties for the owners of song copyrights. By 1939 it held monopoly power over popular music performance, and a contract dispute with radio broadcasters led to the formation of Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) as a rival guild. Following a ten-month interval in 1941 during which no ASCAP music could be played on the radio, causing a boom in classical, folk, and public domain music generally, ASCAP entered into a new broadcast contract, but BMI continued and grew. BMI, growing out of the dispute where its rival stood for established interests, came to represent popular music from outside the New York-Hollywood establishment, and local markets compared with the network emphasis of ASCAP. An institution had appeared to reflect the regional, rural, and minority interests in the music world that would gain great audience support after the war.

When the war ended, the entertainment industry responded to the ready money of a new public, more urbanized, but less in touch with Broadway sophistication, and with expanding young families preparing to be the next generation of popular music consumers -- raised with unprecedented pocket money and leisure time and with an unsuspected susceptibility to the energies of rock and roll they would first hear in 1954. Carl Belz describes the recording industry in the years after the war as dividing its market in the interest of stability and consequently producing for the general market dull, or at least highly controlled and predictable, music. Small independent record companies sold to the country and Western and rhythm and blues markets, while the major companies guided the music of the largest pop market down a narrow channel, with a slow succession of new songs and much repetitive recording by competing stars.

Rock and roll, which the industry learned to ride to a staggering new sales volume, also jarred that industry into new patterns: new companies, new small-group recording economics, new audience definitions, and new relationships to radio broadcasting. Some of the story can be told in terms of technical innovations. Television as the surging home entertainment medium turned radio stations toward the disc jockey format of record programming. New sizes, speeds, and materials for the records themselves may have had wide implications. Belz makes an interesting analysis of the cultural meaning of the shift from 78 to 45 rpm records, as streamlining the experience of recorded music toward casualness, especially for young audiences, while their parents bought the more substantial 33 longplaying records that emerged at the same time in the early 1950s. The later movement of rock and its audience into long-playing records reflects the triumphing cultural and economic power of the same young generation, along with a growing seriousness and self-confidence of the makers of rock music.

The relationship of popular culture to ideology in the 1960s and into the 1970s has become of interest to academic sociology, although the alarmed interest of politicians has given way to accommodation. The relationship of the entertainment favored by highly visible classes of teenagers and young adults to the behavior of that audience, and especially its use of drugs, is probably now still too current an issue for full perspective and confident judgment. The history of popular music suggests that it is very unlikely that musical entertainment can induce new behavior, or even introduce new ideas to the audience it must court in order to sell itself. Though popular music has been blamed in the past for undermining community standards or otherwise damaging society, it is a new phenomenon for popular music to have the pervasive presence that prosperity and the portable radio and tape deck have given it lately, and for such conspicuous economic power to be vested in a youth audience. The history of popular music that is now happening cannot be fully schematized and managed by the patterns of earlier popular music. Its development has always been contingent, surprising, and even discontinuous except when we rationalize it with hindsight, and it is continuing that unpredictable development now.

As rock has evolved in the last quarter of a century and brought, among other things, self-conscious seriousness to popular music, it has prompted an immense volume of reportage and analysis, much of it empty but some perceptive and judicious. The attention that rock has demanded has occasioned the first widespread, serious critical attention to the popular arts in general. Nostalgia, publicity promotion, and the university environment of a part of the proprietary audience of rock have contributed to the growing critical and scholarly interest in popular music of the past as well as the present. We are in the process of discovering a heritage; it is certain to contribute to the understanding of our own culture.

What Personality Is

The sources of man's behavior (his observable action) and his subjective experience (such as thoughts, feelings, and wishes) are twofold: the external stimuli that impinge on him and the internal dispositions that result from the interaction between inherited physiological characteristics and experience with the world. When we focus on the former, we note that a person acts in such-and-such a way because of certain qualities in a situation. For example, he attacks a friend because the friend insulted him, or he loses interest in a lecture because the teacher is dull or uninformed, or he fails in his program of study because the necessity of supporting himself through school leaves insufficient time for studying. It is evident that a man's behavior varies greatly from moment to moment, from circumstance to circumstance, changing with the changing conditions to which he is exposed.

Still, even as we recognize the dependency of behavior on outside stimuli, we are also aware that it cannot be accounted for on the basis of the external situation alone, but that in fact it must arise partly from personal characteristics. For example, the same quantity of alcohol that will induce loss of control and dilapidated behavior in one individual will produce scarcely noticeable effects in another. Some of this variation, of course, can be laid to momentary physical and social conditions. For instance, when the social circumstances of drinking are friendly and benign, a person may be less guarded and more inclined to permit himself to get drunk than when the situation is hostile or dangerous. Moreover, the amount and type of food in the stomach before and during drinking also determine the alcoholic effect by influencing the rate of absorption of the alcohol into the bloodstream and its subsequent effects on the brain.

But some of the variations in the effects of alcohol or any other stimulus result from stable personal characteristics that are almost always in operation in all situations. Body weight, for example, is quite influential in determining the physiological and psychological effects given quantities of alcohol can produce. Then too, psychologically, some persons are more concerned than others with exercising controls or restraints over behavior, so they keep the lid on the dilapidating and disinhibiting effects of alcohol, sometimes even until they lose consciousness or go to sleep. But other personality characteristics can lead a person to lose control very rapidly and grow either depressed, unruly, and hostile, or exceedingly sociable and outgoing. Or, to take a nonalcoholic example, one person may virtually never get discouraged and give up trying to accomplish something even when the circumstances warrant it, while another quits trying at the first evidence of trouble.

It is certain that a person's behavior is governed not only by momentary external stimulation, but also by the stable attributes he carries about with him. Clearly, then, we must identify these attributes, or dispositions, if we are to understand and predict psychological reactions. For these attributes are what we mean by personality. And the identifiable reactions are the end result of the interplay between them and immediate situations. In short, both external stimuli and personality must be taken into account in understanding and predicting human behavior and subjective experience.

Physiology Psychophysiology and Work

In all human work, the body is involved, and knowing how it functions is highly important in understanding the possibilities and limitations of how people do work. The interesting amalgam of psychology, industrial engineering, and work physiology, that throughout Europe is called ergonomics, recognizes this. So it is important in any systematic study of working life to give full consideration to the physical and physiological condition of the human body. This must include not only such human engineering phenomena as fitting the man and the machine, but also what kind of limits are set in terms of time and space and all the other physical factors that affect effective performance.

There is a very large part of physiology -- indeed, most of what is found in texts and journals of physiology -- that is of no direct relevance to the topics discussed in this volume. Some physiological topics, like the relation of nutrition to human performance or the physiology of various athletic or sporting events, are of only tangential interest. But some are directly relevant, such as what physical factors in the environment affect the functioning of the body and thus affect work performance; what sorts of physiological changes precede, accompany, or follow upon certain forms of human performance; and the relations of psychological functions to physiological functions.

The study of healthy individuals as their behavior is affected by the environment comprises an important part of psychology as well as of the social and biological sciences. It is also the focus of environmental physiology, which is a discipline a bit broader than that of work physiology.

Choosing a Method for Measuring Workload

The first and foremost factor to keep in mind in choosing a methodology to address some particular workload question is the purpose or goal of the research. This is true whether the selection is from among the kinds of methods discussed here or from other sources.

The method selected must provide measures that allow the detection of operationally important changes in the operator's ability to satisfy job demands as a function of the workload variables being manipulated. It is not sufficient that a given measure or pattern of measures merely reveal decrements for one configuration of demands in relation to some other configuration; rather, the decrements must be meaningfully relatable to critical operational tasks in terms of operator reliability, system safety, or probability of meeting job goals.

Alternatively, and this is much more difficult to establish, the method should provide for compelling predictions of the extent to which the operator could satisfy the job demands under operational conditions, even where no decrements are found for a given workload configuration. At the same time, every possible effort within reason and the scope of available resources should be made to design the research so that maximum generality is possible across systems. Clearly, when the method and dependent variables to be measured are selected, commitments are implicitly made to a particular realm of discourse as regards system-workload parameters. The researcher must ensure that the basic problem or question which gave rise to the research in the first place can, in fact, be handled within that realm of discourse; the importance of the selection of dependent variables has been noted in considerable detail elsewhere.

The most pressing and difficult problem in assessing workload effects, whatever the method selected, is that of developing reliable, valid, quantitative criteria to reflect system performance. Criteria against which to evaluate research results are needed. Compelling distinctions must be available to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable, good from acceptable, and excellent from good performances of the system. The distinctions must be quantitative and reliable, and they must permit the disentanglement of operator performance, machine performance, and system (operator-machine) performance. Ultimately, what is needed is a method that permits assigning the reliable variance, as appropriate, to the human, to the machine, and to the human-machine interface.

For some specific questions, this may appear to be a deceptively approachable question. For example, in order to determine which of two instrument landing systems makes the smaller contribution to pilot workload, it should be possible to obtain accurate measures of such performances as the deviation of the aircraft from the glide slope and the localizer, and perhaps from command airspeed. Comparisons of these measures of performance obtained with the two displays should provide an index of their workload-inducing properties. However, it is entirely conceivable that one display would lead to smaller errors only because the pilot could, by working harder, take advantage of some peculiarity of that display in holding to the proper course. At the same time, the pilot might very well be less able to respond appropriately to some emergency condition that might arise from some other quarter. Thus, in this specific example, an additional variable would be needed -- a variable that would shed light on how much of the pilot's workload capacity was being used up by each display.

The example is admittedly highly artificial, but one intent is merely to illustrate how what might appear to be a simple measurement problem might not be so simple or easily solved after all. Another purpose served by the example is to suggest that when conclusions based on a specific set of measures are drawn, the results may imply extrapolations that go well beyond the circumstances under which the measurements were made.

The approach to measurement described by Cotterman and Wood in their evaluation of performance in a space-vehicle simulator, as cited in the preceding section, appears to show considerable promise as a technique for converting "raw" performance measurements to probabilities of meeting criterion requirements. However, there is a gap between their application and the typical workload-measurement situation. Specifically, in the case of the Lunar Excursion Module, the maximum values of various parameters could be specified quite readily; for example, engineering specifications dictated that the impact velocity of the vehicle on landing could not exceed specified values without risk of damage. Such precision is less clearly identifiable in the majority of aircraft operating situations where, typically, rather broad latitude is possible in the flight parameters without risk of entering unsafe conditions of flight. Thus, in some areas of application, the specifications required by the Cotterman and Wood procedure might be a bit arbitrary. Perhaps, at least for research purposes, it would be necessary and profitable to set up much more stringent criteria than normal; but neither can they be made too stringent, for the difficulty level must logically permit the typical operator from the population of successfully employed operations to be capable of performing satisfactorily under normal conditions.

Where quantitative measures of "secondary tasks" are available from either system measures or measures of experimental tasks, the paired-comparisons scaling procedure could be used to develop a scale of workload or task difficulty. If adequate numbers of subjects were made available, and if suitable tasks and measurement situations could be agreed upon, substantial progress might even be made toward the development of a generalized method of specifying operator workload.

Tax Considerations Retirement

Taxes obviously play an important part in planning the financial aspects of retirement. Keeping track of taxes owed and forms to be filed by certain dates is time-consuming. Federal, state, and local income taxes, school and real estate taxes, personal property, wage, and Social Security taxes, to say nothing of estate, inheritance, and gift taxes, must all be considered to insure that only the required minimum amount is paid. Fortunately, Federal and state income taxes on gross income are usually greatly reduced after retirement.

Federal income tax law allows you to double your exemptions after age 65 to $4000 for a married couple. You may also continue to reduce your taxable income by charitable contributions or other deductible expenses such as real estate and other taxes and loan interest. Under certain circumstances, no income taxes are due on the realized gain on the sale of a home up to $100,000.

Currently, all Social Security benefits are free of local, state, and federal income taxes, and probably will be free of most other taxes based on income. Company pensions are usually exempt from local and state income taxes, but are subject to Federal income tax. A company pension may be taxed, depending on the pension plan provisions and the way the money is paid.

Part-Time or Partial Employment After Retirement

A successful retirement is usually an active one that may include continued partial employment. Such employment can provide additional inflation protection. Depending on annual earnings, Social Security payments may be reduced or suspended. Check with the local Social Security office to determine the effect of employment. Company retirement and other benefit plans will probably not be affected, but it is well to check on this before accepting employment. Obviously, a part-time job will increase taxes, including continued payment of Social Security tax. The decision whether to continue working after retirement also depends on personal inclination and other factors, but financial considerations such as possible reductions in Social Security or company benefits should be carefully reviewed.

Private Savings and How They Can Be Use

Other assets at retirement are the third leg of the stool. They might include savings in a savings account or money-market mutual fund, stocks, bonds, real estate or other property, cash values of life insurance contracts, income payable or cash values of annuities, amounts owed to you by others, and the market value of personal property you wish to sell.

It is best to enter retirement with an adequate cash reserve for emergencies and other unexpected expenditures. Most important financially, however, is a satisfactory annual retirement income. You may have to sacrifice some savings or other assets to attain the desired income level.

There is wide range of options for using savings. For example, you might put some or all life insurance contracts on a paid-up basis, thus lowering anticipated expenses rather than drawing from savings to pay the premiums. A reverse mortgage on your home will increase your mortgage and decrease your equity but add periodic payments from the mortgage company to your planned income. You can also liquidate other investments and reinvest the proceeds in a mutual fund which permits periodic withdrawals. The following example illustrates several options:

James Johnson retires at age 65. He owns his home, which has a market value of $75,000, and has savings accounts worth $15,000, $100,000 of life insurance with a cash value of $40,000, and stocks worth $10,000. His annual income prior to retirement was $25,000. His company retirement plan will pay him $5,500 a year during his lifetime, and then $2,750 to his wife, Vera, for her lifetime, if she survives him. Social Security will pay him $8,000 per year plus an additional $4,000 per year for Vera who is also 65. Their total retirement income for the first year, therefore, is anticipated to be $17,500.

Of his $25,000 gross salary before retirement, $20,000 remained after taxes. According to current tax law, no taxes will be due on any of his income after retirement, including savings account interest and stock dividends.

Therefore, his total retirement income of $17,500 equals about 88 percent of his $20,000 net income after taxes prior to retirement. He wishes to raise his post-retirement income closer to his pre-retirement net earnings without digging too deeply into savings and other assets.

His first decision is to stop paying life insurance premiums of $1000 annually and to use dividends on the policies to purchase paid-up life insurance. This reduces the principal amount of the insurance immediately from $100,000 to $70,000, to which will be added each year such amounts of paid-up insurance as dividends will purchase. By taking this step, he reduces his income needs from $20,000 to $19,000. His $17,500 retirement income is now 92 percent of his post-retirement goal.

Next, he sells stock for $10,000 which he invests in a money-market mutual fund, electing a 10 percent ($1000) annual withdrawal, payable monthly. If the money-market fund earns 10 percent each year, as many did in 1979, the value of the investment will remain at $10,000. If it earns more than 10 percent, the investment will grow. If it earns less, the investment will decrease. With this $1000 per-year withdrawal from the fund, retirement income increases to $18,500. However, about $100 in Federal and State income taxes will be due, so the net income is $18,400, or about 97 percent of the $19,000 goal. Withdrawing interest on savings yields $825, bringing the total spendable income to $19,225, or slightly over 100 percent of the goal.

These steps leave the equity in his home, the cash values of life insurance policies (which increase each year), the money-market fund, and the savings account. In the years ahead, withdrawals from one or more of these assets can provide more income to cover increasing expenditures due to inflation or other causes. Because of a reduction in work-related expenses and a fully paid mortgage, expenditures may be lower than anticipated, possibly freeing surplus funds for investment in savings or a money-market fund.

Retirement Forms of Payment

Life Annuity: Benefits are paid monthly as long as you life. However, payments cease entirely at your death, with no payment to your spouse or estate.

Joint and Survivor Annuity: Benefits are paid monthly as long as you live. Following your death, your spouse continues to receive a portion of the income for the rest of his or her life.

Life Annuity with Term Certain: Benefits are paid monthly for as long as you live with the guarantee that they will be paid for a minimum period, for example, five or ten years. If you die before the end of the guaranteed period, benefit payments will continue to your named beneficiary to the end of the period. If you die after the end of the guaranteed period, benefits cease, with no further payment.

Cash Refund Annuity: Benefits are paid monthly for as long as you live. At your death, if the sum of all benefits paid to you does not equal the initial lump-sum value of the annuity, the difference is paid to your named beneficiary as a death benefit.

Installment Payment: You or your named beneficiary receive monthly benefits for a fixed period of time. Payment of the benefits does not depend on how long you live.

Lump Sum: One payment is made for the full value of your benefit. Federal law allows you to defer paying taxes on a lump sum from a pension, profit-sharing, or thriftand-savings plan if you set up an IRA and transfer the lump sum directly to the IRA. In this way, you can defer receiving such a lump sum until any age from 59 1/2 to 70 1/2. Various other conditions must be met to qualify for these tax exemptions. If you have such lump sums available to you, the advice of a lawyer or a knowledgeable accountant will be helpful.

Generally, the options have equivalent actuarial value. That is, based on average life expectancies, the benefits payable under the different options are adjusted so they all have the same value at retirement. Because the death benefits differ, the amounts paid can vary considerably. Table 3 shows benefits under different options for a male employee and his wife, both age 65. (Actual amounts will depend on individual plan provisions and your and your spouse's ages at retirement.)

As an example, the 65-year-old man could elect to receive $1,000 per month for life with no benefits payable after death. This might be the best choice for a single man but a married man might wish to provide continuing income to his wife. If he decides that half his benefits should go to his wife after his death, his monthly retirement income would drop to $874, but following his death, his wife would continue to receive $437 (half of $874) for the rest of her life. Alternatively, the couple might take the lump sum of $103,979 and go on the round-the-world trip they always wanted and still have "plenty left over." However "plenty left over" may not be much since taxes must be paid on the whole amount in that year. Furthermore, if the man were to choose the $1000-per-month life annuity and live exactly 15 years, the average life expectancy of a 65year-old man, he would receive a total of $180,000, over $76,000 more than the lump sum.

The best option to select depends on each individual's tax situation and the need for death benefit protection for dependents. One word of caution: For plans that offer lump-sum distributions, keep in mind that if you need to withdraw funds from the lump sum in order to live, you may outlive the principal.

Company and Employer Retirement Plans

If you have been employed throughout the years prior to retirement, you probably will have earned retirement income from your employer's retirement or deferred profit-sharing plan. In addition to providing pension benefits at retirement (normally between ages 65 and 70), such plans usually have some provision for early retirement, and may also provide death and disability benefits. Since your company designed its own plan, it may differ from others, and it is important to familiarize yourself with the description of the plan provided by your employer. The plan will be either a "Defined Benefit" or "Defined Contribution" plan.

If the plan is a "Defined Benefit" plan, it will be relatively simple for you to anticipate what your retirement income will be. As the term implies, the benefit you receive under the plan is defined by a formula that applies to all participants. Your employer contributes the amount needed to provide the defined benefit. Here are some examples of retirement benefit formulas:

• A flat benefit, such as $10 per month, for each year of your employment prior to retirement
• A percentage of your average annual salary for the five years preceding your retirement
• A percentage of the salary you receive each year of your employment prior to retirement Others are more complex:
• 20 percent of your average annual salary for the five years prior to retirement which was covered by the Social Security Wage Base, plus 45 percent of such average salary which was not covered by the Social Security Wage Base, or
• 3/4 percent of the salary you receive each year prior to retirement up to the amount of the Social Security Wage Base, plus 2 percent of the excess of such year's salary over the Social Security Wage Base, or
• 50 percent of your average annual salary for the five years prior to retirement less 50 percent of the Primary Social Security benefit you receive, prorated for services less than 30 years at retirement.

Your employer will, on request, estimate the retirement incomes, at any ages you choose. In making these estimates, the employer will probably assume no change in your salary or in the Social Security law prior to your retirement age. You will have to make reestimates to take account of such changes.

If your company has a Defined Contribution plan, the contribution made to the plan on your behalf is defined by a formula. The formula might be similar to the following:

The company will contribute each year to its retirement plan on your behalf a percentage of your salary for that year (10 percent, for example).

The company will contribute each year to its retirement plan on your behalf a percentage of your salary up to the Social Security Wage Base, plus a percentage of your salary which is in excess of the Social Security Wage Base.

At retirement, you will be entitled to the accumulation of the contributions made on your behalf and all investment income earned by such contributions. In a Defined Contribution plan, it is almost impossible to predict how much the funds will grow, and therefore how much retirement income they will provide. However, the company can make estimates based on various assumed rates of growth, annual changes in the Social Security Wage Base, changes in your salary, and actuarial rates by which lump-sum amounts are converted to annual payment of retirement income

Even though income from the Defined Contribution plan is difficult to predict, it is essential that you obtain an estimate so that you can calculate how much additional savings you should have in reserve at retirement, and the rate at which you may have to withdraw from savings.

In addition to, or in lieu of, retirement plans, your company may have a deferred profit-sharing or a thrift-and-savings plan. A deferred profit-sharing plan is designed to distribute a share of the company's profits to its employees each year. It is similar to a defined contribution pension plan because individual allocations are determined by a formula, but differs in that the amount of profits available for distribution is never known until the year is ended. In a thrift-and-savings plan, the employer matches a proportion of your contribution. For example, for every dollar you save, the employer might contribute $.25 or $.50, or some other amount. Your retirement benefits from such plans will be based upon the amount in your account at retirement from contributions made on your behalf and investment income on those contributions. Once again, it is suggested that you obtain from your employer estimates of the lumpsum or annual income payment available from these plans at your retirement.

Sources of Retirement Income

It has been said about the three sources of retirement income that, like a three-legged milking stool, support is needed from every one: Social Security, company or individual retirement plans (including Keogh and IRA), and personal savings.

Social Security

On retirement at age 65, you are entitled to Social Security benefits but must apply for them. Visit your local Social Security office with your Social Security card in hand at least four months before reaching 65 to get the wheels turning. Your first Social Security check will arrive within the first ten days of the second month after you retire. The amount will be automatically indexed to inflation. Assuming inflation continues, and depending on its severity, you can expect annual increases, probably in July. Also, after your first year of drawing Social Security benefits, you may receive a further increase due to recalculation of your benefits, taking your last calendar year's earnings into account. Your Social Security payment can be automatically deposited in your checking account at your request, for convenience and safety.

The Annual Events

In regulating the seasonal requirements of a pastoral and grain economy, the determination of the year was of supreme importance. The continuity of careful observations which preceded, and the precision involved in settling the exact length of the year, entitle this achievement to be regarded as one of the half-dozen great cultural feats in the history of mankind. Since the Egyptian priests had already established a year of 365 days by 4241 B.C., we may conclude that the recognition of the year as a unit of time antedates the beginnings of the great calendar civilizations. Associated with the passage of the seasons in the everyday life of neolithic man, two classes of events contributed to the first crude appreciation of the year as a natural unit of time. One is concerned with the behavior of the stars, the other with that of the sun's shadow.

The stars rise earlier every night. If a star is seen rising exactly at sunset on a particular day, it will be seen well above the horizon when the sun sets a few weeks later. If a star is in the west at sunrise and in the east at sunset in March, it will reach its highest point in the sky when the sun goes down, about three full moons later, i.e. at the end of June. After six months it will be already setting in the west at sunset, unless it is very near the pole. If it is a circumpolar star, as are those in the constellations of Cassiopeia and of the Great Bear in our latitude, it will be sloping down towards the northern horizon. A circumpolar star seen at midnight directly above the pole, will be seen directly below the pole ("lower culmination") at midnight six months later.

The majority of the stars are below the horizon at lower culmination. So they are only visible after nightfall during part of the year. At midwinter, in the latitude of London, Orion, with its three bright stars forming the belt, is visible most of the night, rising just after sunset and setting in the early morning hours before sunrise. By March 21st (vernal equinox) it has reached its highest point (crosses the meridian) in the heavens at sunset, and is seen setting about midnight. By midsummer it sets before sunrise and has not yet risen by sunset. So it is invisible in the summer sky.

All these appearances occur with perfect regularity after the lapse of the same number of full moons. Thus the sun's apparent position among the fixed stars is not constant. Since the stars rise earlier every day, the sun, while, partaking of the apparent diurnal rotation of the celestial sphere, also seems to be slipping back a little in the opposite direction, like the moon only not so fast. In the course of a year it slips back through a complete circle to its original position. A common early estimate of the time taken to do so was twelve 30-day months or 360 days, hence the division of the great circle of the sun's track in the heavens into the three hundred and sixty degrees which have persisted to our own time. From the standpoint of an earth-observer, the constellations cross the meridian above the pole at midnight, when the sun occupies a position on the opposite side of the celestial sphere. When the sun is on the same great semicircle joining the celestial poles, they will pass over the horizon of the observer by day. Consequently they will not be visible to the naked eye, being screened by the brightness of the sun.

The successive positions of the sun in the heavens during its annual retreat below the eastern horizon in the circle called the ecliptic were mapped out by the ancient priesthoods in milestones corresponding to the twelve months of the year. These milestones, the zodiacal constellations, were groups of stars whose rising and setting positions roughly corresponded to that of the sun at a particular season. Owing to the slow rotation (precession of the equinoxes) of the equinoctial circle about the ecliptic, the sun's position among the fixed stars at a particular season is not the same as it was in ancient times, here shown. When the sun occupies the position of Aries (i.e. is seen in the same direction as Aries would be seen if visible), it sets and rises with the latter, which is therefore invisible. A month later, when the sun is in Taurus, Taurus rises and sets with the sun and is invisible. Aries is seen rising just before sunrise where the sun rose a month earlier. When the sun was in Aries, Taurus would have been setting for about an hour after sunset where the sun would sink below the horizon a month later. The constellations corresponding to the sun's position during the summer months (Taurus and Virgo, Gemini and Leo, Cancer) had northerly risings and settings, describing large arcs and therefore remaining long above the horizon in the winter night sky. The constellations mapping out the sun's position in the winter months (Pisces and Scorpio, Aquarius and Sagittarius, Capricorn) have southerly risings and settings, describing short arcs above the horizoin and being conspicuous during the short summer nights.

The number of days which elapse between the rising of a star just before sunrise or its setting just before sunset on two successive occasions is the period in which the sun gets back to its same position relative to the fixed stars. The Egyptian year of 365 days was based on the heliacal rising * of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Sirius is a winter star, rising at sunset about the beginning of January. Early in March it is already setting by midnight. After being invisible throughout the night in June, Sirius reappears on the eastern horizon a few minutes before sunrise on a day in July. This happened at the time when the flooding of the Nile brought assurance of food and prosperity to the Middle Kingdom. The advanced state of astronomical knowledge in the calendar civilizations of antiquity need not surprise us, when we take stock of the astronomical knowledge of living peoples whose cultural development is in other respects very primitive.

Measurement of Time Monthly Events

Strictly speaking in order of time, the first class of uniformities from which the measurement of time proceeded were in all probability the lunar phenomena, from which we got the grouping of days into months and weeks (quarter months).

There are still backward peoples who have not learned to reckon in years of equivalent length. The recognition of the month is wellnigh universal even among hunting tribes with no settled agriculture. Moonlight is a circumstance of enormous importance in the everyday life of people who have crude means of artificial illumination. Even today in remote parts of the country the time of full moon is chosen for a long night journey.

An interval of roughly thirty days separates one full moon or new moon from another. The two half moons, the first "quarter" when waxing and the third "quarter" when waning, complete the division of the month into quarters, which roughly correspond to our week. Near the sea it is noticed that the tides are exceptionally), high when the moon is invisible through the whole night (new moon) and when it is full. At first and third quarter (half moons) the high-water mark is exceptionally low. The most important thing connected with the changing appearance of the moon is that as the moon waxes and wanes it rises towards the east a little later every day. At first quarter it is already high in the heavens at sunset, setting about midnight. The full moon rises about sunset, is at its highest about midnight, and sets towards sunrise. At the third quarter the waning moon does not rise till about midnight, is seen at its highest point ("crosses the meridian") about sunrise, and is visible during the morning by daylight.

The moon seems to partake of the general motion of the celestial sphere, rising in the east and setting in the west. If it rises at the same time as a particular star cluster on a particular night in the month, the same constellation will rise a little earlier than the moon on the night following. A week later it would already be above the pole at moonrise. Thus the moon itself seems to be slipping backwards in the opposite direction to the apparent rotation of the sun and fixed stars, so that it gets back to where it was before after a definite interval of days and nights, i.e. what we call roughly a month. Alternatively we may say that it rotates round the earth in about a month in the same direction as the earth's axial or diurnal motion. Whichever way we look at it, the moon has a motion of its own, independent of the apparent motion of the fixed stars.

The Beginning of Science

We start with the conquest of time and distance. That is to say, the kind of knowledge we need to keep track of the seasons and to find our whereabouts in the world we inhabit. One depends upon the other. Making a calendar and navigating a ship depend on the same kind of knowledge, and we shall not be able to keep the two issues apart. Much of the mystery which enshrouds contemporary discussion of Relativity will present no difficulty if the use of the ship's chronometer is grasped firmly at the outset. All measurements of time depend on making measurements in space, and localization in space depends on measurements of time.

We used to think of man as a tool-bearing animal, and to divide the preliterate stage of his existence into an old stone age and a new stone age. We now know that the social achievements of mankind before the beginning of the written record include far more important things than the perfection of axes and arrowheads. Three discoveries into which he blundered many millennia before the dawn of civilization in Egypt, Sumeria, or Turkestan, are specially significant. With the aid of the dogs which followed him and prowled about his camp fires, he began to herd instead of to hunt. He learned to scatter millet and barley, to store grain to consume when there were no fruits to gather. He collected gold nuggets and bits of meteoric iron, and, it may be, noticed the formation of copper from the green pigment that he used for adornment, when it was heated in the embers. The sheep is an animal with seasonal fertility, and cereal crops are largely annual. In domesticating the sheep and learning to sow cereals, man therefore made a fateful step. The recognition of the passage of time now became a primary necessity of social life. In learning to record the passage of time man learned to measure things. He learned to keep account of past events. He made structures on a much vaster scale than any which he employed for purely), domestic use. The arts of writing, architecture, numbering, and in particular geometry, which was the offspring of star lore and shadow reckoning, were all by-products of man's first organized achievement, the construction of the calendar. Shakespeare anticipated Sir Norman Lockyer when he wrote: "Our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally."

Science began when man started to plan ahead for the seasons, because planning ahead for the seasons demanded an organized body of continuous observations and a permanent record of their recurrence. In an age of wireless transmission, of mechanical clocks and cheap almanacs, we take time for (granted. Before there were any clocks or simpler devices like the hour-glass or the clepsydra for recording the passage of time, mankind had to depend on the direction of the heavenly bodies, sun by day and the stars by night. Already in the hunting and food gathering stage the human race had probably learned to associate changes in vegetation, the mating habits of animals, and the recurrence of drought or floods, with the rising and setting of bright stars and star clusters immediately before sunrise or in evening twilight. When the great agrarian revolution reached its climax in the dawn of city life, a technique of timekeeping emerged as its pivotal achievement. What chiefly remain to record the beginnings of an orderly routine of settled life in cities are the vast structures which bear eloquent witness to the primary social function of the priesthood as custodians of the calendar.

The temple, with its corridor and portal placed to greet the transit of its guardian star or to trap a thin shaft of light from the rising or setting sun of the quarter-days; the obelisk or shadow clock; the Pyramids facing equinoctial sunrise or sunset, the pole and the southings of the bright stars in the zodiac; the great stone circle of Stonehenge with its sight-line pointing to the rising sun of the summer solstice -- all these are first and foremost almanacs in architecture. Nascent science and ceremonial religion had a common focus of social necessity in the observatory-temple of the astronomer-priest. That we still divide the circle into 360 degrees, that we reckon fractions of a degree in minutes and seconds, remind us that men learned to measure angles before they had settled standards of length or area. Angular measurement was the necessary foundation of timekeeping. The social necessity of recording the passage of time forced mankind to map out the heavens. How to map the earth came later as an unforeseen result.

It is a common belief that mathematics is the hallmark of science, and some people are apt to imagine that the introduction of a little mathematics into subjects like economics entitles them to rank as genuine science. The truth is that science rests on the painstaking recognition of uniformities in nature. In no branch of science is this more evident than in astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, and the parent of the mathematical arts. Between the beginnings of city life and the time when human beings first began to sow corn or to herd sheep, ten or twenty thousand years -- perhaps more -- may have been occupied in scanning the night skies and watching the sun's shadow throughout the seasons. Mankind was learning the uniformities which signalize the passage of the seasons, becoming aware of an external order, grasping slowly that it could only be commanded by being obeyed, and not as yet realizing that it could not be bribed. There is no hard and sharp line between the beginnings of science and what we now call magic. Professor Elliot Smith rightly says that magic is the discarded science of yesterday. The first priests were also the first scientists and the first civil servants. As custodians of the calendar, they created an organized body of reliable knowledge from the common experience of herdsman and cultivator.

To understand how a science of astronomy is possible, we have to acquaint ourselves with uniformities of nature, once familiar features of the everyday life of mankind. They are no longer part of the everyday life of people who live in large cities. So, many readers of this book will need to be told what they are. Looking at them retrospectively we can arrange them under four headings.

The Coming of the Calendar

A much abused writer of the nineteenth century said: up to the present philosophers have only interpreted the world, it is also necessary to change it. No statement more fittingly distinguishes the standpoint of humanistic philosophy from the scientific outlook. Science is organized workmanship. Its history is co-extensive with that of civilized living. It emerges so soon as the secret lore of the craftsman overflows the dam of oral tradition, demanding a permanent record of its own. It expands as the record becomes accessible to a widening personnel, gathering into itself and coordinating the fruits of new crafts. It languishes when the social incentive to new productive accomplishment is lacking, and when its custodians lose the will to share it with others. Its history, which is the history of the constructive achievements of mankind, is also the history of the democratization of positive knowledge. This book is written to tell the story of its growth as a record of human achievement, a story of the satisfaction of the common needs of mankind, disclosing as it unfolds new horizons of human wellbeing which lie before us, if we plan our new resources intelligently.

Whether we choose to call it pure or applied, the story of science is not something apart from the common life of mankind. What we call pure science only thrives when the contemporary social structure is capable of making full use of its teaching, furnishing it with new problems for solution and equipping it with new instruments for solving them. Without printing there would have been little demand for spectacles; without spectacles neither telescope nor microscope; without these the finite velocity of light, the annual parallax of the stars and the microorganisms of fermentation processes and disease would never have been known to science. Without the pendulum clock and the projectile there would have been no dynamics nor theory of sound. Without the dynamics of the pendulum and projectile, no Principia. Without deep-shaft mining in the sixteenth century, when abundant slave labour was no longer to hand, there would have been no social urge to study air pressure, ventilation, and explosion. Balloons would not have been invented, chemistry would have barely surpassed the level reached in the third millennium B.C., and the conditions for discovering the electric current would have been lacking.

For this reason the chapters which follow will not adopt the customary division of science into separate disciplines, such as chemistry or biology. The topics dealt with will be grouped under six main themes; the story of man's conquest of time reckoning and earth measurement, of material substitutes, of new power resources, of disease, of hunger, and of behaviour. When the language of mathematics is used, no advanced knowledge will be assumed, and it will present no difficulties if the reader is prepared to do a little work on the examples given. If difficulties arise the reader should not be too easily discouraged, or give up hope. If one chapter or page is difficult to follow, as likely as not the next will be especially easy. The most difficult ones come at the beginning.

If the execution of the task is novel, there is no originality in the conception. The reader who is tempted to think so should reflect on the words with which the great German chemist Liebig addressed the Royal Academy of Sciences at Munich in 1866. Speaking of the Development of Ideas in Physical Science, Liebig said:

The history of physical science teaches us that our knowledge of things and of natural phenomena has, for its starting point, the material and intellectual wants of man and is conditioned by both. . . . Man is not born acquainted with sensible objects and their properties and effects; these notions must be gained by experience. . . . All these conceptions have sprung or have been derived from sensible marks. . . . Since natural phenomena are interconnected like knots in a net, the investigation of particular phenomena evinces that they have in common certain conditions, which as remarked are active things. . . . Having the facts it is our subsequent business to establish their connexion. The facts themselves are obtained through sensual perceptions; when these are imperfect, so will be the knowledge reared on them. We can have no general theoretical propositions except by means of induction, and inductions can be framed only through sensual perceptions. . . . Manifestly therefore the truth of explanations does not depend on the principles of logic alone. . . . The first explanations can, manifestly, be neither definite nor limited, and they must change just in proportion as the facts are more distinctly ascertained and as the unknown ones belonging to the conception are discovered and incorporated in it. The earlier explanations are therefore only relatively false and the latter only therein truer that the contents of the conceptions of things are more comprehensive, determinate and distinct. . . . The conception of time which belongs to the composite notion of velocity was first developed fifteen hundred years after Aristotle. For short intervals the Greeks had not clocks or time measures. . . . Charlemagne's endeavours by the establishment of schools to elevate the intelligence of the rude and ignorant priesthood of the age could have no result, the soil on which culture thrives being not yet prepared. The development of culture, i.e. the extending of man's spiritual domain, depends on the growth of the inventions which condition the progress of civilization, for through these new facts are obtained. . . . Only the free man, not the slave, has a disposition and interest to improve implements or to invent them; accordingly, in the devising of a complicated machine, the workmen employed upon it are generally co-inventors. . . . Greek civilization travelled through the Roman Empire and the Arabians into every European country. . . . The members of the newly originated intellectual class were at first occupied in gaining possession of the treasures of ancient learning. . . . The position and employment of the learned of those times concurred in withdrawing them from contact with the productive classes. Accordingly the literature of that age gives no indication of the degree of the popular civilization and culture; for the knowledge circulating through the masses and absorbed into their thinking, a knowledge originating in their improved acquaintance with physical laws, was not yet stored up in books and was wholly foreign to the learned. . . . With the extinction of the slavery of the ancient world and the union of all the conditions for the evolution of the human mind, progress of civilization and culture is thenceforth assured, indestructible, imperishable. Most of the facts from which the investigator elaborated empirical ideas he had long since received from the metallurgists, the engineers, the apothecaries, and had resolved their inventions into conceptions which the producing classes received back . . . the craftsman, technician, agriculturalist, physician, as in Greece, ask counsel of the theorist. . . . The history of nations informs us of the fruitless efforts of political and theological powers to perpetuate slavery, corporeal and intellectual. Future history will describe the victories of freedom which men achieved through investigation of the ground of things and of truth, victories won with bloodless weapons and in a struggle wherein morals and religion participated only as feeble allies. . . .

Brief Historical Review of Dream Interpretation

In the study of dreams two basic problems must be addressed. These problems have different histories. They require separate methods of investigation and pursue different goals. The psychologically more important and practically more useful goal is determining the meaning of dream content. Does this content offer unknown information, the conscious knowledge of which can relevantly help dreamers to change behavior to make their lives more secure? Since its beginning, humanity has tried numerous means and invented many rituals to accomplish this desirable end. The purpose of the second basic problem is to discover the causes of dreaming and the determinants of specific dream contents. Which factors external to the process of dreaming and emanating from the dreamers' physical surroundings or from physiological processes of the body influence the content of dreams? When and how do these factors work? This second line of inquiry has undergone tremendous changes in the last decades, that the movements of sleepers' eyeballs indicate that they are dreaming. It is interesting that the connection between dreams and eye movement in sleep has been considered by hunters and country people to be a sign of dreaming in dogs for a long time. Humans sometimes discover human traits in animals but less frequently animal traits in humans, especially when the traits concern mental life. However, inquiries regarding the significance of dream content show relevant insight into and grasp of the meaning of dreams beginning in antiquity. At the same time, fanciful and unsound symbolic interpretations were also advanced, particularly of the concrete nouns or of the objects to which those nouns referred. The capricious method of interpreting dream symbols has been by far the more popular one.

The first written mention of a dream was carved on a stela in Babylon circa 3000 B.C. This monument commemorates a statesman for his outstanding achievements. The text reveals that the man had been God-fearing and that his dream confirmed it. Unfortunately the stela, now in the British Museum, does not reproduce the dream or its analysis. At the time, Babylon was a theocracy, and its priests were naturally interested in a prominent man's religious beliefs. The practice of consulting dreams before making a decision in important matters, private or public, was maintained late into the 16th century A.D. Numerous individuals continue doing so in their private lives even today.

Dreaming is not an abnormal activity, but it is so sensitive to what occurs in the body that it frequently reveals severe personality changes that have taken place or that are imminent as a result of physical disease, particularly of the brain. This had been recognized already in the 5th century B.C. by Hippocrates. The great advances in neuropsychiatry and biochemistry, made possible by highly sensitive and reliable detection devices, have enabled scientists to study the body processes that accompany dreaming. Eye movements are much better indicators of dreaming states and nondreaming sleep states than whole-body movements are, the physiology of dreaming has become an object of intensive research. This book attempts to contribute to the understanding of grossly psychopathological dreams that are not apprehensible without knowledge of underlying organogenic disorders.

The universal interest in dreams is prompted by the basic need for security. This need engenders the desire for knowledge of the future. Thus, by far the most frequent use of dreams has been prognostication of future events. People want to know whether a wish will be fulfilled or a disaster prevented. As early as old Babylonian times, priests were professional soothsayers who based their predictions on analyses of clients' dreams. The whole life of Babylonians was arranged in harmony with dream interpretations. This practice was maintained by many up to the 17th century in Europe. The famous Egyptian dreambook was written in the 2nd millennium B.C. and has been republished and translated into many languages, finding readers even today. Antiphon, a Greek in the 4th century B.C., wrote the first large, dictionarylike dreambook for practical, professional interpretations. He stated clearly that dreams are not created by supernatural powers but by natural conditions and that natural connections exist between peoples' futures and the content of their dreams. The first entirely preserved dreambook is of Artemidorus, a Greek physician who lived in Rome in the 2nd century A.D. The book includes material from the Egyptian version.

The ancient Greeks made great advances in the investigation of dreams. Plato ( 429-347 B.C.) noted that even good men dream of uncontrolled and violent actions, including sexual aggression. These actions are not performed by good men in waking states but are openly acted out by criminals without guilt. He deduced that normal people have antisocial inclinations motivated by aggressive and sexual desires. Freud identified these inclinations as basic instincts. Plato remarked further that dreams contain visual memories of earliest childhood, memories that are long forgotten in waking life. Democritus ( 5th century B.C.) stated that dreams are not products of immaterial soul (as Plato taught) but originate as a result of penetration of visual impressions of the material environment; these impressions influence our imagination, which explains why dream imagery is similar to perceptions of reality. Aristotle ( 384-322 B.C.), too, recognized the psychological nature of dreams and denied their supernatural origin. He stated emphatically that dreams can predict future events. His idea was that dreams result from sense organ movements that, in turn, produce images. Aristotle admitted that sometimes dreams can be of limited prognostic value and that prognosis must have a natural basis (a disturbing physical illness, for example); Hippocrates discovered earlier that onset of physical diseases affecting the brain can be revealed by the patient's dreams.

Hippocrates was "the father of medicine." He was also named "the first psychoanalyst", who translated Freud Interpretation of Dreams. Hippocrates was the first to separate medicine from philosophy and theology. He was as rational and empirical about dreams as he was about diseases and their causes. His dream criterion of a nonpsychogenic illness affecting mental functioning was a dream in which the dreamer's past experiences were represented in an illogical and unreal manner. The more abnormal the dream events were, the more urgent he considered the need for therapy. Healthy people (in other words, nonpsychotics) realistically reexperience their past in dreams, and reports of their dreams do not violate standards of logic and reality. Hippocrates was born on the island of Kos, within sight of the Asia Minor coast. On this island was a famous temple of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine. The temple was a healing place, the equivalent of a medical school. Hippocrates belonged to the Aesculapians and probably was introduced by them into the arts of dream interpretation and of using dreams as therapeutic devices. In many parts of the world and in many different epochs, incubation has been used as a means of healing. It was practiced also in Kos; there were about 300 Aesculapian healing centers in Greece alone at the time. In these places patients would be assigned a room with a bed. In the evening a priest would tell the patients that they were to sleep and dream and that in the morning the priest would return to ask the patients about their dreams. In the morning, the priest not only listened to the dream reports but made the patients actually act out all the roles they had performed in their night dreams, as actors on a stage; the priest would assume the role of other characters from the same dreams.

The obvious purpose was to make the dreamers more conscious of their intrapsychic inconsistencies and to make them experience these incompatibilities and roles intensively. This method and its variants have been revived in recent times, and good results have been claimed. During all periods of time, the interpretation and the therapeutic use of dreams were rational and psychological (in a minority of people) and irrational and superstitious (in the majority). So it was in Greece. The disastrous Peloponnesian war affected freedom of speech and writing. The clearheaded Hippocrates was cautious when he wrote about dreams. He said that he was concerned only with little, less important dreams, dreams originating not with gods but with mortals. He left interpretation of "great" dreams to others. As a physician, Hippocrates was interested in how diseases of the body or mind influence dream content. His thesis that illnesses change dreams is significant. He saw a basic problem that is still largely unsolved. How can some dreams (and these are not rare) reveal a physical illness and particularly a debilitating psychological condition before any noticeable outward signs appear?

Artemidorus, the Greek 2nd century A.D. physician in Rome, wrote perhaps the most popular dreambook in history. He used all literary sources known in his time. His dreambook has been translated into many languages and has been republished continually for at least 16 centuries. It is astonishing how much faith was put in the prognostic value of dreams. Some of the most important decisions of individuals and even of states were made in accordance with the interpretation of dreams. Artemidorus could not discourage this practice but tried to warn against uncritical acceptance of interpretations. He advised dream analysts to study the personality traits of dreamers to avoid mistakes in the interpretation of their dreams. He emphasized a modern point: Dreams are products of the mind and are not exclusively results of external sensory impressions. However, he also made a politically cautious note that possibly dreams were messages from gods. A century earlier, Cicero considered it impossible that divine powers created human dreams. Cicero thought that if gods wished to reveal something to humans, they would rather communicate with people who were wide awake and who could hear well than with sleepers who snored. Empirical verification, he added, was required to determine whether dreams had any predictive value. Imperial Rome was dangerous to prominent and simple folks alike. Disasters and loss of life threatened frequently. Cicero, a republican, was murdered by political enemies. One of his dreams, which he interpreted himself, made him follow the wrong strongman.

On his way to Rome to fight Pompey for rule over the Empire, Caesar stopped at the Rubicon river. It was the psychological and administrative frontier of Italy. Crossing the river would mean an irreversible challenge to the older man, Pompey. During the night before the announced crossing, Caesar had a disturbing, incestuous dream. Later he decided to cancel the order to march but his chief of staff pleaded that the troops were rested and eager and that instead of being a bad omen, the dream was a good sign. The chief argued that just as Caesar possessed his mother in his dream, so he would possess Italy, which was the "mother" of them all. He persuaded Caesar, and the crossing took place as planned. In pre-Christian times, a dream of incest with mother was believed to be favorable, predicting among other things a happy return from war. Interpretation of objects or animals seen in dreams seems capricious. To the Assyrians, seizing a snake meant that the dreamer would be protected by an angel. The Egyptians thought that seeing a snake in a dream indicated that a dispute would be settled. According to the Greeks, a snake signified sickness and enmity; and a powerful snake, a severe illness. The Jews were reassured by dream snakes because it meant that the dreamers' livelihoods were assured: Bitten dreamers' livelihoods would be doubled; dreamers who killed snakes would lose their livelihoods. A French, 19th-century dreambook affirms that dreaming of a skin disease such as pimples or scabies means getting money and that the amount of riches increases with the severity of the illness.

Viewing feces in dreams as symbols of gold is an old tradition. So is the occasional custom of assigning to verbs occurring in dreams meanings that are opposite of the meanings ascribed to the verbs in standard dictionaries. This is still done today, especially by psychoanalysts. Throughout the ages people have disagreed least about sex symbols. There have always been many of them in all cultures and languages, but agreement regarding their specific meanings has been relatively highest. Two facts appear to explain this: Sexual behavior is conditioned by human anatomy and biology, which are the same everywhere; sexual functions are inevitably essential to our origin.