CH 202 HONORS MIDTERM
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David Fenimore
Fall 2010
Please email your midterm as an attached Word file to my WebCampus mailbox.
Deadline Friday evening 11:59 p.m.
I. Pick two (2) of these groups of quotations and do the following for each group:
1) Identify the writer of each (please number your answers using the numbers of the
quotations, for example “5.____, 6._____, 7.______”) (1+1 points)
2) Explain in a 100-word paragraph why each set of quotations you’ve chosen have been
grouped together. What is the idea, or debate over ideas, common to them all? Connect the
quotations in at least one meaningful way. In this part of your answer, you can refer to the
quotations by either number or writer’s name. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar, but
write clearly. (4+4 points) – TOTAL PART I = 10 points
GROUP 1
1. A prince must not worry about being cruel as long as he can keep his subjects united and loyal.
2. There is really no difference between laymen [common people] and priests, princes, and bishops … They
are all the same, and an ordinary man may have true understanding …
3. It is a very beautiful thing, most gratifying to the sight, to behold the body of the moon … just like the
earth’s surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys …
4. The qualities of bodies … within reach of our experiments … are the universal qualities of all bodies
whatsoever… the argument from induction cannot be evaded by hypotheses. F=ma.
GROUP 2
5. Leaving aside imaginary things … and referring only to those which truly exist …
6. There are only two ways of discovering truth. One starts with generalities and takes them to be settled and
immovable. The other derives middle axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and
unbroken ascent, arriving at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way.
7. Because our senses deceive us sometimes, I was willing to assume that there was nothing which existed
the way our senses present it to us. I noticed that, while I wished in this way to think everything was false,
it was necessary that I—who was doing the thinking—had to be something.
GROUP 3
8. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed …
9. … we may become masters and possessors of nature …
10. … if there was a machine shaped like our bodies which imitated our actions … we would always have two
very certain ways of recognizing that it was not a true human being.
11. A new species would bless me as creator; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.
GROUP 4
12. …as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a
nation can be governed either justly or happily.
13. In the state of nature, every man is enemy to every man, and life is … nasty, brutish, and short.
14. Nothing is more peaceable than man in his primitive state, restrained by natural pity from doing harm to
anyone, even after receiving harm himself … According to the wise Locke, “Where there is no property,
there is no injury.”
15. … led by an invisible hand … every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly
free to pursue his own interest his own way …
II. Pick two (2) of these topics and write a brief and pointed 250-word essay on each. Write
inductively, with as many details as possible. Do not write an introduction; instead get right down
to your analysis. Avoid substituting rhetorical flourishes for specific evidence. Spelling and
grammar don’t count if your essays are readable. (20+20 points) – TOTAL PART II = 40 points
1. Hard Times (for These Times)
Children in a factory seemed to be always cheerful, enjoying the mobility natural to their age.
… the average age at which children enter the factories is ten years … –Andrew Ure, from “The
Philosophy of Manufactures” (1835)
“Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. … You can only
form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts. Plant nothing else,” said Thomas Gradgrind.
… But there was something in this girl [Sissy] which could hardly be set forth in a tabular form
… those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the
last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck … – Charles Dickens, from
Hard Times(1854)
Dickens’s novel appears as the Industrial Revolution is transforming Western Europe. Write a short
essay in which you show how Hard Times dramatizes and summarizes one of the major narratives of
the first half of this course: the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution; or Enlightenment
and Romanticism; or the political science of governing a capitalist (i.e. property-owning) society. Make
as many specific references as you can to the readings and lecture points from the course.
2. Nature or Nurture?
But it is certain that the ideas of God and the soul have never been present in sense
experience … our ideas or notions, being real things which come from God, to the extent that
they are clear and distinct, in that respect cannot be anything but true. – René Descartes
(1637)
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any
ideas. Most of the ideas we have depend wholly upon our senses … – John Locke (1690)
Published in 1690, Locke’s theory of knowledge disagreed with Descartes’s argument that the mind or
“soul” comes into being equipped with innate ideas such as mathematical reasoning and the existence
of a perfect being. Instead Locke claimed that the physical environment shapes the human mind from
birth. How does Locke’s theory follow from the inductive method of Bacon and Newton, and influence
the work of Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens?
3. Monsters Here, Monsters There
Gradgrind: A square wall of a forehead … a bald head all covered with knobs like the crust of a
plum pie … Bounderby: … a great puffed head, swelled veins in his temples, a strained skin to
his face, inflated like a balloon … Mrs. Blackpool: A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters,
stains, and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy. Tom: … such a monster
… Harthouse: putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer … a kind of agreeable demon …
the cavity where his heart should have been – Dickens, Hard Times
Hard Times seems full of more “monsters” than Frankenstein. Compare the warnings (from Latin
monstrum = “omen”) in each novel. In what way(s) are Shelley and Dickens saying the same thing?