To my mind that entire movement approached the whole question from the wrong direction. The crucial point, it seems to me, is to start with the human body and mind as they are and work up from that, rather than doing it from a top-down abstract understanding of how things ought to work. The latter approach almost always fails in practice, and not just in training minds -- there's a reason why an experienced plumber who doesn't know a bit of physics is much better at repairing plumbing than a theoretical physicist who knows, in the abstract, all about the laws governing water under pressure!
I think it's one of the corollaries of Murphy's Law that any large system that works will be found to have grown organically from a small system that works. Building the small system is therefore the first step.
There's also the far from minor fact that we don't have to begin from scratch. An ordinary Renaissance intellectual who had mastered the seven liberal arts and the art of memory, could process ideas using the conceptual algebra of the Lullian art of combinations, and had a working knowledge of three or four languages and so could compare different linguistic structures for understanding any phenomenon, could run rings around most of our modern hotshot thinkers. That might be a workable small system to start with; once it works, build from there.
That is to say, your regrets, real as they are, may be misplaced. The entire approach may have been fatally flawed from the beginning. That being the case, it may be worth considering another try from a different direction.
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branchandroot
Re: A query on particular accents/elocution
Date: 2025-04-29 03:34 am (UTC)I think it's one of the corollaries of Murphy's Law that any large system that works will be found to have grown organically from a small system that works. Building the small system is therefore the first step.
There's also the far from minor fact that we don't have to begin from scratch. An ordinary Renaissance intellectual who had mastered the seven liberal arts and the art of memory, could process ideas using the conceptual algebra of the Lullian art of combinations, and had a working knowledge of three or four languages and so could compare different linguistic structures for understanding any phenomenon, could run rings around most of our modern hotshot thinkers. That might be a workable small system to start with; once it works, build from there.
That is to say, your regrets, real as they are, may be misplaced. The entire approach may have been fatally flawed from the beginning. That being the case, it may be worth considering another try from a different direction.