The Postcard
A postally unused postcard bearing no publisher's name.
Although the card was not posted, someone has written a recipient's name and address across the undivided back:
Master John Pirrie Feuerbach,
37 Claremont Terrace,
Edinburgh,
Scotland.
Interestingly, a stamp design has been drawn in colour in the space designated by the publisher for a stamp.
On the front of the card is written the date 31 10 05.
Ludwig Feuerbach
John Pirrie had a famous namesake - Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (28th. July 1804 – 13th. September 1872) was a German anthropologist and philosopher.
An associate of Young Hegelian circles, Feuerbach advocated atheism, and many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of religion.
He is best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which was translated into English by George Eliot. The book provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Feuerbach claimed in the book that every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. He stated that therefore God is nothing else than human: he is the outward projection of a human's inward nature.
This projection is dubbed a chimera by Feuerbach, who also claimed that God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the concept of benevolence. He stated:
"A God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise,
is no God.
Qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine
because of their godly association. The qualities
themselves are divine, therefore making God
divine, indicating that humans are capable of
understanding and applying meanings of divinity
to religion, and not that religion makes a human
divine."
He claimed that it appeals to humankind to give positive qualities to the idol of their religion, because without these qualities, a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, and there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God.
Therefore, Feuerbach stated, when humans remove all qualities from God, God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being. Additionally, because humans are imaginative, God is given positive traits, and there holds the appeal. God is a part of a human through the invention of a God.
'Mrs. Warren's Confession'
So what else happened on the day that the card was written?
Well, on Tuesday the 31st. October 1905, a second New York performance of George Bernard Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, was canceled by order of the New York City Police Department.
NYPD Commissioner William McAdoo had watched the New York premiere at the Garrick Theatre the night before, and pronounced the play to be:
"Revolting, indecent, and
nauseating where it was
not boring."
Theater manager Samuel W. Gumperts was arrested, and warrants were issued for the actors and actresses.
Harry Harlow
The day also marked the birth in Fairfield, Iowa of the American psychologist Harry Harlow, known for his controversial experiments on rhesus monkeys.
Harry Frederick Harlow is best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.
He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Harlow's experiments were ethically controversial; they included creating inanimate wire and wood surrogate "mothers" for the rhesus infants. Each infant became attached to its particular mother, recognizing its unique face.
Harlow then investigated whether the infants had a preference for bare-wire mothers or cloth-covered mothers in different situations: with the wire mother holding a bottle with food, and the cloth mother holding nothing, or with the wire mother holding nothing, while the cloth mother held a bottle with food.
The monkeys overwhelmingly chose the cloth mother, with or without food, only visiting the wire mother that had food when needing sustenance.
Later in his career, he cultivated infant monkeys in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged intensely disturbed. Some researchers cite the experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.
A survey published in 2002 ranked Harlow as the 26th. most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Harry died on the 6th. December 1981.
'Bumpy' Johnson
Also born on the 31st. October 1905, in Charleston, South Carolina, was Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson. Johnson's nickname 'Bumpy' was derived from a bump on the back of his head.
Bumpy was the African-American crime boss of the mob in New York City's Harlem section.
Johnson was under a federal indictment for drug conspiracy when he died of congestive heart failure on the 7th. July 1968, at the age of 62.
He was at Wells Restaurant in Harlem shortly before 2 a.m., and the waitress had just served him coffee, a chicken leg, and hominy grits, when he fell over clutching his chest. He was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, NYC.
Bumpy's wife Mayme Hatcher, whom he married in October 1948, just six months after their first meeting, died in May 2009 at the age of 94.
