[in progress] William Wollaston's "The Religion of Nature Delineated"

[David Gross]

I'm working on a particularly tough nut now: William Wollaston's "The Religion of Nature Delineated." It was an important book in 18th C. rationalist enlightenment philosophy... very influential in its time and left a lot of marks in the U.S. Founding Father generation (e.g. "the purfuit of happinefs"). It still has interest... anticipated Kant's categorical imperative, etc.

There aren't any good e-versions of it out there. The reason probably is that Wollaston was one of those crazy scholars of his era that knew Latin & Greek & Hebrew backwards and forwards, and so he peppers his text with all of the above. OCR doesn't stand a chance.  I've tried as best I can to enter the correct characters, but I don't actually know those languages.

I've got a first draft ready, after about a month's steady work. I could use some proofreading help, in three areas in particular:

1. general typos (the use of the long-s in particular I'm sure has led to several)
2. suggestions for improved use of commas. They did this weirdly in the 18th century, and I think a new edition could do well by bringing the practice up to date, but it isn't my strong suit
3. if you happen to know ancient Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, please consider giving the book a gander and pointing out to me any obvious faults

If you're interested, drop me a line and I'll send you a draft.

[Alex Cabal]

I don't know any of those languages either, and I haven't done too much raw transcription.  Have you tried working with Distributed Proofreaders?  This is their bread and butter, and I'm sure they'd be happy to help in some capacity, especially since it doesn't look like Gutenberg has this book yet.

If you'd like to prepare it for Standard Ebooks, then it sounds like we'll have to do some significant spelling modernization.  I'm not sure what you're referring to with comma placement, but generally we leave that stuff alone (with some exceptions like removing the archaic "comma plus em-dash" construct).

There's certainly precedent for taking a more editorial role and adjusting commas, though.  I know for a fact this happened to Pride and Prejudice, for example.  One of the Gutenberg editions has an absurd amount of superfluous commas, and yet other PD editions have them largely edited out.

Go ahead and send over what you have, along with a link to your page scan source, and I'll take a glance.  I don't think I have enough time right now to actually assist in a complete 1st-stage transcription proofread though.

Re. Tolstoy, I just finished proofreading today and there are a lot of things to be tweaked. A handful of typos, and mostly just house style issues. Most of them are quick regex type things so I'll take care of those.  I'll publish the updated repo to Github and send you a link to a few issues.  You can expect that later this week.

[David Gross]

I'll look into Distributed Proofreaders. Thanks for the tip.

I've done spelling modification as I've gone along to eliminate the many archaic spellings.  Here's an example of the comma issue:

...I should close the book with a full persuasion, that the same vein of good sense, which showed itself in the former and much greater part of it, ran through the other also: especially having arguments à priori, which obliged me to believe, that the author of it all was the same person.

I've seen this sort of thing before in 18th c. texts. I'm not sure what the rule was, exactly, but it's shown here in the commas "persuasion, that" and "believe, that".  We no longer use commas in this way, and it's distracting to read now. I think it's probably worthwhile to purge those commas in the same spirit as the spelling modernization.

I'm also taking the liberty of expanding the obscure abbreviations he uses in his footnotes and trying to locate the sources of the quotes he uses there so I can indicate them more precisely. Many editions of the book already include translations of the footnotes by John Clarke (also long out of copyright).

So for instance, this cryptic footnote from the original:

    Ubi virtus, si nihil situm est in ipsis nobis? Cic. הוא עמוד התורה והמצוה רשות לכל אדם נתונה אם רצה להטות עצמו לדרך טובה Maim. הרשות היא הבחירה Nahh. Ab.

With Clarke's help became:

    Ubi virtus, si nihil situm est in ipsis nobis? “Where is virtue then, if there be nothing within our own power?” Cic. הוא עמוד התורה והמצוה רשות לכל אדם נתונה אם רצה להטות עצמו לדרך טובה “There is a power given to every man, if he be but willing to incline himself to the way that is good--This is the support of the law and the commandments.” Maim. הרשות היא הבחירה “This power is what we call free will” Nahh. Ab.

And after my tenacious Googling, becomes the yet more legible:

    Ubi virtus, si nihil situm est in ipsis nobis? “Where is virtue then, if there be nothing within our own power?” (Cicero, Academica). הוא עמוד התורה והמצוה …רשות לכל אדם נתונה אם רצה להטות עצמו לדרך טובה “There is a power given to every man, if he be but willing to incline himself to the way that is good⁠… This is the support of the law and the commandments.” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkot Teshubah, V, 1, 3). הרשות היא הבחירה “This power is what we call free will” (Isaac Abravanel, Nahalot Abot).

[Alex Cabal]

I see what you mean.  You're right, the 2nd example is definitely archaic and could be removed.  The 1st example I think could stay, though.  Ultimately this would be an editorial decision, and we'd list you as 'editor' in the metadata so people know that changes have been made.  Pride and Prejudice had the same problem, as I mentioned--those kinds of comma splices where everywhere in the edition Gutenberg chose to host, even though other contemporary editions had removed them.

Excellent that you're expanding the references, we already do that on a lot of our older Roman philosophical texts for the same reason, so that's right on point.  I'm also doing it for Kingdom of God for those people who aren't familiar with the abbreviations of the various Christian books.

I think this would definitely be an interesting addition to our corpus, though again, you should chat with DP first to see if they can help in the 1st-phase transcription.

[David Gross]

Okay; wow but that was a lot of work. I think I have a completed version of the book, though. Any remaining typos have fooled me three times already at least. I made an attempt to make the punctuation of Wollaston's tangled sentences more legible, but some were pretty much beyond repair and will have to remain for-adventurous-readers.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/davgross/wililam-wollaston-the-religion-of-nature-delineated

P.S. I didn't get any bites from the DP crowd, so the latin/hebrew/greek footnotes are largely unproofread by competent readers of those languages (though I double-checked them as best I could with on-line sources when I could find them).

P.P.S. Did you ever get that Tolstoy repo fork set up?

[Alex Cabal]

Thanks David!  I already see a few issues on a quick glance so I'll open Github issues for them.