The Trouble with Tom Read Online Free Page B

for the moment, let us assume that as you hold this book open with one hand, you are holding a piece of ivory in the other. It is two feet long, and the thickness of a man's thumb. Now, if you were to make this piece of ivory descend with great force upon the head of your closest neighbor, they would inform you that it is an item possessing great hardness. Yet, were you to rest this ivory rod between two chairs, and then sit upon it, you would find it possessed a surprising flexibility. One might have assumed that as this item is hard, it was therefore not flexible. Its hardness, although not actually opposed to flexibility, seems incompatible at first glance. This is what second glances are for: an assertion demands proof through actual observation, rather than mere assumptions.
    Writing in his book Elements of Logick in 1748, the Scottish logician William Duncan explains:
    Ivory for instance is hard and elastic; this we know by experience, and indeed by that alone. For being altogether strangers to the true nature both of elasticity and hardness, we cannot by the bare contemplation of our ideas determine, how far the one necessarily implies the other, or whether there may be a repugnance between them. But when we observe them to exist both in the same object, we are then assured from experience, that they are not incompatible.
    Elements of Logick was the boning knife of the Scottish Enlightenment: it sliced argumentation clean of bloated classical artifice, tearing away its Latinate fat to reveal a Greek skeleton of Euclidian logic. Duncan wielded self-evident propositions and a geometrical progression of proofs and assertions to build arguments: his was the elevation of mathematical logic to rhetoric. Elements of Logick influenced revolutionary intellectuals and scientists alike—and when you realize that to be the former was also often to be the latter, you begin to understand the era of Franklin and Paine. When their fellow rationalist Jefferson fatefully claimed that "we hold these truths to be self-evident," he was laying out the destiny of his continent as a mathematical statement.
    But then there is that problem with our ivory rod. Certain truths are not self-evident: that is why they must be examined and spelled out. They are not common sense. And that is why Common Sense itself, weirdly enough, is not common sense at all. This strange little book, so often cited as a model of plainspoken clarity, is something altogether more subtle. Only its language is straightforward: its form and aims are not. Common Sense is in fact at least three separate arguments, none of which many Americans in 1776 would have been inclined to entirely agree with. Yet Paine makes one argument imperceptibly slide into the next, like the telescoping segments of a collapsible spyglass. By the time you realize what he's doing, he's already folded you up and put you in his pocket.
    Paine begins with his most outrageous implication: all kings are illegitimate . He does this by denying that most precious possession of monarchs, their noble bloodlines. "Could we take off the dark covering of antiquity," Common Sense dryly notes, "and trace them to their first rise . . . we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang." Granted, a loyal subject may say, perhaps that's true; in fact, it has to be true for Shakespeare's history plays to work. But an unsavory past does not always dictate reform in the present. It would not be very practical. The great benefit of kings in the present, one might think, is that no matter how compromised the monarchy's origins are, they have become a safe and predictable form of government.
    Except that they are not. "The whole history of England disowns the fact," Paine snaps. 'Thirty kings and two minors have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the [Norman] conquest, in which time there have been (including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen