156 – You, your language and your material
It is true that [Burke] never denied the reality of natural rights. Like
Hume he admitted that the social contract may be true merely as a bit of
hypothetical history, and much more than Hume he was convinced that
some of the conventions of society are inviolable. Just what these
immovable principles are he never tried to say – property, religion, and
the main outlines of the political constitution would probably have been
among them – but he certainly believed in their reality. However, again
like Hume, he believed that they were purely conventional. That is to say,
they arise not from anything belonging to nature or to the human species
at large, but solely from the habitual and prescriptive arrangements that
make a body of men into a civil society.
Sabine uses the past tense to report that Burke did or believed certain
things (e.g. ‘denied’, ‘admitted’, ‘was convinced’, ‘tried’, ‘believed’).
These are treated as (past) events in Burke’s mental life. But when
Sabine wishes to emphasise either his own point of view (‘it is true’)
or the ideas themselves, which are just as present to Sabine as he
writes as they were to Burke and his contemporaries when Burke
wrote about them, he shifts to what is called the ‘universal’ present
tense. (Sabine slips up once: ‘he believed that they were purely conventional’.) The activity of Burke’s thinking is a past event in history;
what he thought about is still ‘present’ to the modern reader in Burke’s
texts.
Hence it is usual to use the present tense to write about
what you find in texts no matter when they were written. If you
are a literature student, in particular, you need to remember this
convention, since most of your writing is about what is found in
texts. You might write that Milton believed so and so, but that in
Paradise Lost he says such and such.
There is a problem with yet another dimension of time that
you must keep in mind as you write about literature. This is that
you should be careful about the time dimension in which you operate
while you read a work and the space–time sequence of words on the
printed page. That is to say, you should avoid making statements like
this:
It is true that [Burke] never denied the reality of natural rights. Like
Hume he admitted that the social contract may be true merely as a bit of
hypothetical history, and much more than Hume he was convinced that
some of the conventions of society are inviolable. Just what these
immovable principles are he never tried to say – property, religion, and
the main outlines of the political constitution would probably have been
among them – but he certainly believed in their reality. However, again
like Hume, he believed that they were purely conventional. That is to say,
they arise not from anything belonging to nature or to the human species
at large, but solely from the habitual and prescriptive arrangements that
make a body of men into a civil society.
Sabine uses the past tense to report that Burke did or believed certain
things (e.g. ‘denied’, ‘admitted’, ‘was convinced’, ‘tried’, ‘believed’).
These are treated as (past) events in Burke’s mental life. But when
Sabine wishes to emphasise either his own point of view (‘it is true’)
or the ideas themselves, which are just as present to Sabine as he
writes as they were to Burke and his contemporaries when Burke
wrote about them, he shifts to what is called the ‘universal’ present
tense. (Sabine slips up once: ‘he believed that they were purely conventional’.) The activity of Burke’s thinking is a past event in history;
what he thought about is still ‘present’ to the modern reader in Burke’s
texts.
Hence it is usual to use the present tense to write about
what you find in texts no matter when they were written. If you
are a literature student, in particular, you need to remember this
convention, since most of your writing is about what is found in
texts. You might write that Milton believed so and so, but that in
Paradise Lost he says such and such.
There is a problem with yet another dimension of time that
you must keep in mind as you write about literature. This is that
you should be careful about the time dimension in which you operate
while you read a work and the space–time sequence of words on the
printed page. That is to say, you should avoid making statements like
this: