Episode 113 - Letter to Herodotus 2 - Principles of Thinking
Date: 03/18/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2431-episode-one-hundred-thirteen-letter-to-herodotus-02-principles-of-thinking/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads a large block of the Letter to Herodotus covering both the epistemological opening (sections 37-38: grasping ideas attached to words; the three-part canon of sensations, anticipations, and feelings) and the full physics summary (nothing from nothing through atoms moving continuously — roughly the equivalent of Lucretius’ Book 1). Discussion focuses on what Epicurus means by “grasping the ideas attached to words” and how Epicurean ideas formed from observation differ from Platonic eternal forms, with Joshua contributing the Académie française as an analogy for attempted language regulation and a story from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe about Anglo-Saxon versus Norman French word pairs. The group traces John Tyndall’s phrase “mental images” from his 1870 Belfast address back to Epicurus’ terminology in this very letter, and wrestles with the third leg of the canon — prolepsis/anticipation — which both the Diogenes Laertius cow-counting example and DeWitt’s broader interpretation leave somewhat ambiguous. The panel concludes that Epicurus moves inductively from observation to general rules, then deductively from those rules to specific conclusions about the imperceptible, drawing a parallel with Torquatus’ statement in On Ends that fire is hot and snow is white — distinguishing things evident to sensation from things requiring inferential reasoning.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 113 of Lucretius Today, a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum we’ll walk you through the study of Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
Today we continue our review of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus and introduce Epicurus’ views on principles of clear thinking. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity, or use words devoid of meaning. For this purpose it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation if we are really to have a standard to which the problem of investigation or reflection or mental inference may be referred.
Besides, we must keep all our investigations in accordance with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accordance with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen.
Having made these points clear, we must now consider things imperceptible to the senses. First of all, that nothing is created out of that which does not exist; for if it were, everything would be created out of everything with no need of seeds. And again, if that which disappears were destroyed into that which did not exist, all things would have perished, since that into which they were dissolved would not exist. Furthermore, the universe always was such as it is now and always will be the same, for there is nothing into which it changes; for outside the universe there is nothing which could come into it and bring about the change.
Moreover, the universe is bodies and space, for that bodies exist is witnessed by sensation itself in the experience of all men, and in accordance with the evidence of sense we must judge of the imperceptible by reasoning, as I have already said. And if there were not that which we term void, and place, and intangible existence, bodies would have nowhere to exist and nothing through which to move, as they are seen to move. And besides these two, nothing can even be thought of either by conception or on the analogy of things conceivable, such as could be grasped as whole existences and not spoken of as the accidents or properties of such existences.
Furthermore, among bodies some are compounds and others those of which compounds are formed. And these latter are indivisible and unalterable, if that is all things are not to be destroyed into the non-existent, but something permanent is to remain behind at the dissolution of compounds. They are completely solid in nature and can by no means be dissolved in any part. So it must needs be that the first beginnings are indivisible, corporeal existences.
Moreover, the universe is boundless, for that which is bounded has an extreme point, and the extreme point is seen against something else; so that as it has no extreme point, it has no limit, and as it has no limit it must be boundless and not bounded.
Furthermore, the infinite is boundless both in the number of the bodies and in the extent of the void. For if on the one hand the void were boundless and the bodies limited in number, the bodies could not stay anywhere but would be carried about and scattered through the infinite void, not having other bodies to support them and keep them in place by means of collisions. But if, on the other hand, the void were limited, the infinite bodies would not have room wherein to take their place.
Besides this, the indivisible and solid bodies, out of which too the compounds are created and into which they are dissolved, have an incomprehensible number of varieties in shape. For it is not possible that such great varieties of things should arise from the same atomic shapes if they are limited in number. And so in each shape the atoms are quite infinite in number, but their differences of shape are not quite infinite, but only incomprehensible in number.
And the atoms move continuously for all time, some of them falling straight down, others swerving, and others recoiling from their collisions. And of the latter some are borne on, separating to a long distance from one another, while others again recoil and recoil whenever they chance to be checked by the interlacing with others, or else shut in by atoms interlaced around them. For on the one hand the nature of the void which separates each atom by itself brings this about, as it is not able to afford resistance, and on the other hand the hardness which belongs to the atoms makes them recoil after collision to as great a distance as the interlacing permits separation after the collision. And these motions have no beginning, since the atoms and the void are the cause.
These brief sayings, if all these points are borne in mind, afford a sufficient outline for our understanding of the nature of existing things.
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that for us this morning. We’re now entering a new phase of the Letter to Herodotus that is going to take us through the rest of the letter in terms of relatively deep discussion of physics. But before we go into that, I think it’s very important for us to drop back and make sure we talk about the big picture before we get too far into the details.
As we were talking just before the episode started, it looks to me like what we’ve just covered through line 45 might be roughly equivalent to what Lucretius takes the entirety of Book 1 of his poem to discuss. Here we have what may be the most basic aspect of the Epicurean system of physics. And it’s intriguing to me that the very last line says: “These brief sayings, if all these points are borne in mind, afford a sufficient outline for our understanding of the nature of existing things.” So there’s something about what we’ve just heard that Epicurus considered to be particularly important.
I also mentioned before we started that it’s interesting to compare this section to what we think existed as the twelve fundamentals of nature. Diogenes Laertius records that Epicurus had a book specifically devoted to the fundamentals of physics, and we have several renditions of that list on the forum. It does appear to me as I was comparing them while Martin was reading that the majority of those twelve are covered in what we’ve just discussed.
One thing I’d like to ask you both: when Epicurus says in paragraph 45 “these brief sayings afford a sufficient outline” — do we think he’s talking about the raw physics from “nothing is created out of nothing” through to the end, or does he also include the epistemological opening about grasping ideas attached to words?
Joshua:
That’s not an easy question to answer. I’m not sure I could give a good answer. We can hold it and possibly come back to it at the end of the episode. Do we want to go back and start with those first two paragraphs on the ideas attached to words?
Cassius:
Yes, let’s do that. He says: “We must grasp the ideas attached to words in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity, or use words devoid of meaning.” What do you make of that, Joshua?
Joshua:
To me I think that part of what he’s trying to get around here is this problem you’ll see in philosophy — there can be quite a lot of bickering over words. To get around that and into the actual heart of the problem you’re trying to discuss, if you never get through the problem of language and into the actual meat of the inquiry, you’re getting nowhere. And you’re absolutely right to say that we do bring this up quite a lot.
Cassius:
One aspect that sometimes gets discussed is the nature of language itself — some people assert that there may be, to some extent, a natural meaning of a word, because of the way vocabulary and language arises in human development. There’s something natural about what a particular word should mean, as opposed to it being entirely a matter of convention. I’m not sure I’ve even expressed that well enough to discuss it. Is the meaning of a word totally a matter of convention, or is there something natural about it?
Martin:
The way we learn language is not that we read a dictionary, but that we listen and talk just like this. So there is an intuitive part of it — it’s conventional, but it’s an implicit convention, because we learned without structured learning, just by listening and by practice. You may perceive it as natural, but really it’s conventional in a learned way.
Cassius:
Because we’re not Platonists, I think we would say that the word “ideas” does not have a supernatural meaning here. What do we mean when we say an idea is an idea? Is it a picture? A definition made up of words? When we say we must grasp the idea attached to a word, what is an idea in this case?
Martin:
If you’re talking about a concrete object, it’s something like a picture. But if you talk about something that is not a particular object, then the word “picture” doesn’t quite fit. What we’re doing is using the idea to refer to things so as to judge the inferences of opinion. In the Epicurean perspective, an idea does not have an independent existence of its own outside of what we create as humans. But we can postulate that a similar civilization of advanced aliens would produce the same ideas — not because they exist independently, but because the world is similar here as it is there, and these ideas are formed for survival in the respective environment.
Cassius:
Martin, I think I’m agreeing with you totally. But now I’m getting concerned because I’m not hearing anything from Joshua, and I’ve been meaning to say this at the very beginning of the episode. You and I, Martin, have been through a lot of this when we went through the Lucretius episodes of the podcast. Joshua was not with us then, and I’m particularly interested in getting what I’d consider maybe a more generalist perspective on some of these issues from Joshua. Joshua, do you agree that ideas don’t exist in the universe floating somewhere independently?
Joshua:
No, I don’t think that you can separate an idea from the mind that conceives it. I think a mind is an emergent phenomenon of physical nature, and that an idea is a mental product of a mind. So without either nature or mind, you don’t get ideas — certainly not floating around in the ether.
One thing I do want to talk about: you don’t see this in English — we don’t have a regulating body for English usage. You do have the Oxford English Dictionary, which attempts to record and explain the use of every word in the English language, but in other places they do have government bodies whose purpose is to regulate the use of a language. French tends to be the one that comes up most — the Académie française. The idea is to retain the purity of the language as they think it should be retained. But to me, and I think to a lot of people particularly linguists, this is a losing battle. Words change all the time. And so it’s not clear to me that when Epicurus says “the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded,” he necessarily means that different people will have the same mental image. He may not here be talking about communication between people as much as he’s talking about our own individual understanding in our own investigation of nature.
Cassius:
That’s a very interesting point. He may not actually here be talking about the problem of communication so much as talking about our own understanding of our investigation of nature. If I’m working through some type of engineering or physics problem, I’m not interested in ambiguities among different languages or cultures — I’m attempting to unwind exactly what’s going on using symbols and words in my own mind, and those have to be clear without regard to talking to somebody else. In our own thinking, we need a sufficiently clear placeholder or symbol under each word, so we can continue our own thought without bogging down and going no further.
Joshua:
In terms of practicality, the thing I keep coming back to is that if you think there are ideas floating around in the universe, or if a supernatural god has defined certain ideas, then you’re going to spend your time on religion or on Platonic reasoning and you’re going to look for somebody else to tell you how to run your life. But Epicurus is saying that the nature of the universe is that there are no floating ideas out there — so it’s up to us to come to grips with our reality.
Well, it’s funny you say that because I’m thinking right now about a novel by Sir Walter Scott called Ivanhoe. This novel deals quite extensively with the distinction in England between the native Anglo-Saxon people and the French Norman conquerors. In the book there’s a swineherd and a jester having a conversation about this problem, and the jester makes the point that the animals the swineherd is working with — when they’re alive and need care — use English terminology: “swine,” for example. But after they’re killed and butchered and ready to be eaten, we start using French words. English words are used when you need to actually raise the animal, but when it’s ready to be consumed, the words are the French words. And in his mind, that kind of signified the political gap that was involved — the language of the ruling class versus the language of those who did the actual work.
Cassius:
That’s a great example. On the issue of mental images: I was fascinated to find in Wikipedia that William Brandt in 2013 traces the scientific use of the phrase “mental images” back to John Tyndall’s 1870 speech called “The Scientific Use of the Imagination.” And we have some familiarity with John Tyndall, because he was the one who gave that very contentious Belfast address in which he had quite a lot of praise for Lucretius and Epicurus. So while the scientific use of the phrase “mental images” could be traced to him, it’s clear where he got it from — he clearly got it from reading this very letter that we’re reading today.
Joshua:
Yes, indeed — and of course you can’t get too far in discussing Lucretius and Epicurus without referring to the films or specters flying through the air, which is associated with images in a different sense. Though I’m not inclined to pursue that too much further right this second.
Cassius:
Right. Let’s go to the next sentence in paragraph 38: “We must keep all our investigations in accordance with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accordance with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen.” Would we agree that this looks like a reference to what we understand to be the canon of truth — the sensations, the anticipations, and the feelings?
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s immediately what I thought when I looked at it, because this is something that’s coming up for us as we talk about Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, where she seems to have the view that Epicurus was more of an empiricist. But empiricism is based exclusively on sensation, and in the Epicurean canon we actually have three legs: sensation, feeling, and anticipation — which clearly seems to be what he’s referencing here.
Cassius:
I was going to say “clearly” was a strong word there — I was going to get you to explain how “the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment” is a clear reference to anticipations. I know there’s a lot of discussion in various academic works treating this section of the letter as particularly difficult, since prolepsis is such a hard subject. We’re not going to come to a conclusion here that satisfies everybody, but we ought to talk about it. How does the phrase “immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or any one of the instruments of judgment” relate to what we understand as prolepsis or preconception or anticipation?
Joshua:
This continues to be one of the more difficult problems in Epicurean philosophy to get a hold on — exactly how the different legs of the canon fit together and what each one signifies. If we’re using the Letter to Herodotus as a high-level summary, let’s do the best we can to try to come up with something that gives us a hook to put our hats on. The first one about keeping our investigations in accord with our sensations — most people would say that’s the five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. And “the feelings existing in us” — most people would say that’s a reference to pleasure and pain.
Cassius:
Any hesitation on the feelings as a reference to pleasure and pain? No — I think that comes from Diogenes Laertius and his discussion of the canon. Then when we talk about “the immediate apprehensions, whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment” — that appears to be the three-legged canon’s third element. The word prolepsis in my understanding started out as a rhetorical ability to anticipate what an opponent in debate might say and come up with a response. Another example would be in chess, where you’re trying to anticipate the next couple of moves. In the canon as it pertains to Epicurean philosophy, it seems to involve the ability of the mind to collect sensory data and maintain it in such a way that when we encounter things in the world, we have some mental image or something to compare them against.
For example: I’m familiar with quite a lot of mammals, but probably not every mammal there is. If I were to come across a new animal and didn’t know how to sort it, I presume that based on my familiarity with mammals and reptiles and birds I would be able to at least get started on sorting it into one category or another. That’s because I have this preconception of what a mammal looks like in general, because I’ve seen so many specific examples.
Joshua:
I think that’s a very practical way of looking at it. The only other thing to mention before we move on is the Diogenes Laertius example — that as you grow up, you see a cow, you see another cow, you see a third cow, you assemble in your mind a picture or definition of a cow, and that picture or definition becomes a concept you then use to apply to new sightings of new animals, deciding whether the new animal conforms with that definition. That’s one alternative. DeWitt advances another suggestion — that Cicero’s Velleius in On the Nature of the Gods discusses preconceptions and anticipations as something all men are born with, leading them to form ideas about the nature of divinity. So there’s a potential meaning here of something unfolding from your genetic makeup that you’re born with. And there’s also the Epicurean theory that the mind itself can receive images or specters flowing from the structure of every physical thing, which can evoke responses in our brains without being actually perceived visibly through our eyes. We’re just left with an unfortunate situation where the texts don’t seem clear enough to allow us to be certain which interpretation is correct.
At any rate — we seem satisfied that when we talk about the preconception of a cow formed after seeing several different cows, this is not anything to do with a Platonic ideal form of “cowness.”
Cassius:
Exactly — that’s what I’ve done a very poor job of emphasizing today. The most important thing to keep in mind about anticipations or ideas or anything else is that there is not a supernatural realm or a Platonic realm that defines these things from the beginning of time for us. That fact — the rejection of those contentions — is hugely important. It basically means that we’re largely on our own as human beings, as living things. Many of the implications of Epicurean philosophy flow from that observation alone.
Now — the last thing before we move forward: “having made these points clear, we must now consider things imperceptible to the senses.” Is he not making the point here that for things perceptible to the senses we’ve just discussed the three elements of the canon to use in reaching opinions about them, and there’s a dividing line between how we attack perceptible versus imperceptible things?
Joshua:
Well, the problem is we’re coming into atoms and void, and atoms are imperceptible to the senses because they’re so small — and of course we don’t have a scanning electron microscope in the third and fourth century BC in Athens. What he seems to be raising is: having made it clear that the canon of truth deals with sense perception, how do we get a handle on things we cannot perceive with our senses — which includes atoms? Lucretius gives a number of examples — for instance, the statue by the city gate where people always rub the statue in a certain place, wearing it smooth, actually wearing away the atoms of bronze every time they do that. You call this deductive reasoning, Cassius?
Cassius:
I’d call it deductive, yes — is that correct, Martin?
Martin:
No — that’s inductive. Deductive reasoning is such that the conclusion will always be true if the premises are true, from the general to the particular. Inductive reasoning is making generalized conclusions based on specific scenarios — from the particular to the general. Deductive is also called top-down reasoning. So what you’re describing there — building a general rule from specific observations — is inductive.
Cassius:
So: I’ve seen 15 squirrels, and I conclude from seeing 15 squirrels that all squirrels are gray — that’s inductive?
Martin:
Yes. But that inductive reasoning is not logic in the strict sense — it doesn’t have 100% conclusiveness. By using induction, we can be clearly wrong.
Cassius:
How do we explain this process to people in common terminology? DeWitt talks about “chain reasoning” and so forth. The very next sentence from Epicurus is “for if it were, everything would be created out of everything with no need of seeds.” He’s looking around and seeing that things do need seeds, and so he’s concluding that nothing is created from nothing. And what I think we want to call that is inference.
Martin:
Signs. There’s a word — inference from signs.
Cassius:
That may be exactly what Philodemus’ work is focused on. There’s a book called Philodemus on Methods of Inference: A Study in Ancient Empiricism by Estelle Allen De Lacy and Philip Howard De Lacy that I regularly refer to on the forum as having one of the best descriptions in its appendix of this whole topic of whether Epicurus was an empiricist or a logician or not. So maybe for now we just talk about inference and leave the problems of formal logic to another day. The issue that Epicurus raises — the difference between handling things perceptible to the senses versus things imperceptible — is something Torquatus addresses in a parallel passage.
I want to throw in one more thing before we move forward. I think there’s a good analogy here between what we discussed very recently on the podcast with the Torquatus presentation in On Ends. Looking at around line 30 in Book 1, Torquatus is talking about the issue of Epicurus saying that there is no reason for debate to show why pleasure is a matter for desire and pain is a matter for aversion. Here’s the quote I think is directly relevant: “These facts, he thinks, are simply perceived, just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white, and honey is sweet. No one of which facts we are bound to support by elaborate arguments. It is enough merely to draw attention to the fact. But there is a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand and a hint and a direction of the attention on the other. The one process reveals to us mysteries and things under a veil so to speak; the other enables us to pronounce upon patent and evident facts.”
So I think that is the analogous issue: when the facts are patent and evident, you rely on your sensations and feelings and you consider those to be the primary test of truth. When you move to another subject that is “under a veil” — where your sense perception doesn’t have the capacity to get you the information you’d like to have — you have to use another method: inference from observation that involves reasoning.
Martin, are you okay with the way I said that?
Martin:
Oh, I drifted away, sorry.
Cassius:
I consider that one of my more brilliant statements of the day and there you missed it. So that’s all right. Joshua, is that a decent summary for the moment?
Joshua:
Yeah, I think that’s good. And bringing in Torquatus was good, because he does explain things rather well through Cicero. There’s no doubt you can bounce between Lucretius, Torquatus in On Ends, and the Letter to Herodotus and you ought to be seeing the same issues discussed from different perspectives and at different levels of detail.
Cassius:
Right. And one thing to caution about — this is just a high-level summary, so it will not always show how Torquatus got to his conclusions. That means in the discussion we need to do what we’ve just done — refer to Torquatus and other texts to get a glimpse of how we got there, so we can then see why Epicurus makes these statements in the letter. The very first example being the issue of nothing coming from nothing.
Martin, your thought on this?
Martin:
Yes, and this is a high-level summary, so it will not give in most cases how Torquatus got there. That means in the discussion we need to do what we’ve just done — we refer to other texts where we have a glimpse of how we got there, so we can then see why he makes these statements about physics. The very first example being the issue of nothing coming from nothing — and he’s going to quickly go to nothing being destroyed to nothing, and what he does in Lucretius is give a great deal of detailed examples of what he’s observing to support his premises. Each of the issues in that chain of reasoning has examples, and if he could not give examples then the reasoning itself would presumably be invalid. Your reasoning has to be backed up by evidence in order to be considered valid.
Cassius:
Right — and as 45 says, we’re about to go into a series of observations from which these brief sayings afford a sufficient outline for our understanding of the nature of existing things. So we ought to be able to understand the high-level assertions he’s making and why he thinks them particularly important — without necessarily getting all the details, because Epicurus himself told us last week that we regularly need the conclusions but not always the details.
Joshua:
One thing I want to talk about, Cassius — and you’re going to have to help me out here — we’ve encountered this idea before where people will suggest that Epicurean physics is merely an ad hoc justification for supporting the ethics. In other words, he didn’t actually do any work to come up with the physics — he was simply attempting to justify his ethical conclusions by coming up with a set of scientific assertions regardless of their truth.
Cassius:
Yes, that’s exactly the assertion — that he was attempting to simply justify his ethical conclusions by coming up with scientific assertions regardless of their truth. And it seems clear to me with the amount of emphasis he puts on studying nature that that certainly can’t be true. As we see in this letter, it was the study of nature that he found his own happiness chiefly to reside in. And when Lucretius was writing to Memmius — who for all we know didn’t know a thing about Epicurus — he gives all the detailed observations that support the argument. That’s part of where you’re going: when you’re trying to convince someone — even convince yourself — of the truth of the assertions of Epicurean philosophy, you need to point to the evidence that shows why you’re making these assertions. You have to prove to yourself or to someone else, using observation, that this is true. These assertions about physics are not just invented to justify his ethical conclusions — his ethical conclusions arose from these observations which he tied to reality.
Joshua:
I have one more story to tell from one of our A Few Days in Athens discussions last week, and I think I’ll save that for my concluding comments. Let’s go to closing comments.
Martin:
I don’t have a conclusion yet.
Joshua:
What I just said will have to stand in for my conclusion.
Cassius:
Okay. Well, what I wanted to say — and Joshua, I hope you can join us tonight for our next A Few Days in Athens book discussion — is that one of the participants, Scott, was discussing his view that identity can be a very dangerous thing. We ended up talking about flags and some current events, while trying to stay away from the politics of it. Scott was raising the point that if you end up identifying with some particular group or position, rather than being more flexible as an individual, it’s much easier to get into fights. And Kevin, who is actually a philosophy professor, made the joke about “oh, you’ve been to Belfast in Northern Ireland” — the point being that both levels of detail are very critical.
If you simply look at flags — if you simply look at the highest level — you get divorced from practical application. If you just look at what outward appearances are, the flag or something like that, it’s very easy to get polarized and ignore all the complexities of whether you can really get along with somebody or not. But on the other hand, if you totally ignore flags and totally ignore identities, you can easily end up dead very quickly. If you’re faced with a fork in a road and one has the flag of your country and the other has the flag of the country at war with yours, and you go down the wrong road ignoring those flags, you could easily end up dead as a result.
So both levels are important. The Herodotus level allows you to crystallize the information in your mind, make it into something understandable that allows you to rapidly refer to it when you need it. But at the same time, the level that Lucretius provides — or that Epicurus provided in his full 37 books on nature — is where you learn the material and gain the confidence that there’s good reason to accept it. Because it is so important that the things we discuss be true, and not just something we find comfortable. What we find comfortable might kill us. We often choose pain in the short term to achieve greater pleasure, and unless we’re intelligent about how we make those choices between pleasure and pain we can defeat the purpose of our ultimate goal.
Okay, we’ll come back next week and continue with the Letter to Herodotus. Thanks, and talk to you soon.
Joshua:
Sounds good. Okay, bye.