Tag: books

Mailvox: The Significance of the Refutation

Can you explain how the refutation of Kant affects our life today in simplified terms that anyone can understand?

Most people have never heard of Immanuel Kant, but almost everyone lives inside a concept he created. The idea sounds humble enough. Human reason can’t truly know reality as it is, only how it appears to us through our limited human senses. That sounds modest and even wise. But once you accept the idea as a real limitation, a strange thing follows. If nobody can actually know how things really are, then every statement about reality becomes just one more opinion, one more “perspective,” and none of those opinions or perspectives can ever be proven true. Refuting Kant’s idea and showing that it isn’t a rule or a real limitation is extremely significant because it puts the possibility of actual knowledge back on the table.

Here are five ways the refutation of Kant’s idea about unknowability changes your world.

First, expertise and “the science.” For decades, people were told to accept various statements because experts agreed or studies showed, and to treat the matter as settled and beyond any possibility of question. Kant’s rule props this up: if reason can’t reach reality directly, then truth becomes whatever the credentialed authorities say it is, because there’s no independent reality you can check them against. Refuting the rule restores the obvious: there is a real world, then those expert scientific predictions either come true or they don’t, and an expert who keeps being wrong is wrong no matter how many credentials he holds. You’re not dependent upon either the experts or the scientists; you’re allowed to check reality yourself.

Second, the idea that everyone has their own truth” This phrase is everywhere now, and it descends directly from Kant’s idea. If reality is locked away and we only ever see our own version of it, then your truth and my truth are just two filtered views and neither can be more correct than the other. Refuting the doctrine eliminates this. There is one reality. People can be honestly mistaken about it, and perspectives can be particually correct, but “true for me” stops being a relevant position. Some claims match reality and some don’t, and which is which is not up to how you feel about it.

Third, morality. If we can’t know how things really are, then we also can’t know how things really should be, and right and wrong collapse automatically into preference, culture, or power, with the strongest, loudest voice defining it. This is why so many moral arguments today end in “who are you to judge.” Refuting unknowability reopens the possibility that good and evil are real features of the world, discoverable like other truths, not just labels we stick on things we happen to like or dislike. That changes how seriously you can take a moral claim, your own included.

Fourth, science and discovery itself. Kant’s rule says human reason can’t identify anything about reality that isn’t already handed to us through experience. But that’s not how the greatest discoveries actually worked. The planet Neptune was found by pure calculation first: a mathematician worked out that something unseen had to be tugging on Uranus, predicted exactly where to point the telescope, and there it was. The same thing happened with antimatter, predicted on paper before anyone detected it. Reason reached out and grabbed a piece of reality nobody had experienced yet. If Kant’s rule were true, those triumphs couldn’t have happened. Refuting it explains why the human mind really can discover the world, not just sort the impressions it’s given.

Fifth, your ability to have confidence in your own thinking. The quiet cost of Kant’s rule is humility turned into paralysis: who am I to claim I know anything, when the smart position is that real knowledge is impossible? That mindset trains people to defer, to hedge, to assume the truth is forever out of reach and someone else’s call. Refuting the doctrine gives that back. Your reasoning is a real instrument that makes real contact with the real world. You can investigate, conclude, and stand on what you find. You will not be right about everything, and partial knowledge is still the human condition. But the door to truth was never locked and reality was never off limits. Kant just declared that it was, and a lot of people placed false trust in his assertions for two hundred and fifty years.

The refutation of Kant is therefore akin to a creature that thought it was a fish discovering that it’s simply been swimming in water this whole time, and realizing that not only can it breathe in the air and walk on the land too, but also that it has wings and can fly.

In related news, VERIPHYSICS: THE RETURN OF THE REAL is now available for preorder in hardcover and paperback editions from NDM Express. They should be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores next week. It contains both The Treatise, The Refutation, and the Agrippan Trilemma challenge.

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Common Sense Calculus

I’m not going to lie. I think I would have grasped calculus a lot more easily, and perhaps even remembered it better, if it had been taught to me by starting with the actual meaning of the symbols instead of with all the jargon and symbols unconnected to the underlying concepts, as it used to be taught to 15-year-old American boys instead of not being taught to university graduates.

The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-­form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning—in common-sense terms—of the two principal symbols that are used in calculating.

These dreadful symbols are:

(1) d which merely means “ a little bit of.” Thus dx means a little bit of x; or du means a little bit of u. Ordinary mathematicians think it more polite to say “ an element of,” instead of “ a little bit of.” Just as you please. But you will find that these little bits (or elements) may be considered to be indefinitely small.

(2) f which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “ the sum of.” Thus fdx means the sum of all the little bits of x or fdt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of.”

Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dxs, which is the same thing as the whole of x. The word “integral” simply means “the whole.” If you think of the duration of time for one hour, you may (if you like) think of it as cut up into 3,600 little bits called seconds. The whole of the 3,600 little bits added up together make one hour.

When you see an expression that begins with this terrifying symbol, you will henceforth know that it is put there merely to give you instructions that you are now to perform the operation (if you can) of totalling up all the little bits that are indicated by the symbols that follow.

That’s all.

If anyone is interested in Castalia re-releasing this early 20th century introduction to Calculus, let me know. Although I have to say, I think we’d lose the parentheticals, which are unnecessary and don’t help at all.

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Napoleon at Chamartín

The fifth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

Napoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It returns the protagonist Gabriel to Madrid in the closing weeks of 1808, as the imperial Grande Armée, recovered from its humiliation at Bailén, marches on the capital with the Emperor himself at its head.

Gabriel’s Inés has vanished into another world. Discovered to be the lost heiress of one of the greatest houses in Spain, she has been carried off to a palace on the Cuesta de la Vega and groomed for a marriage of fortune to the young Count of Rumblar — the dissolute, easily led Don Diego, who divides his nights between gaming dens, comic masonic lodges, and the salons of the manolería, where the celebrated greengrocer beauty known as the Zaina holds court. Barred from the palace and reduced to flinging pebbles at a lighted window, Gabriel shadows his rival through this doomed demimonde — while behind the marriage scheme moves the afrancesado Santorcaz, who has his own secret plans for Inés.

Around this private drama, Madrid braces for the French. The city throws up earthworks and musters a citizen militia, and Galdós fills these chapters with the comic Gran Capitán playing at general, the swaggering bully Mañara, and the whole brawling life of the lower town. Then comes the unthinkable betrayal that Galdós renders into one of the great crowd scenes of European fiction, and the mob, sold out and maddened, falls upon Mañara.

Madrid falls. Napoleon installs himself at Chamartín, just north of the city, and from his headquarters dictates the decrees that will remake Spain entirely to his design. Amid the wreckage Gabriel is captured and swept out of the conquered capital in a chained column of deported “patriots,” driven past the Emperor’s own coach on the road by Chamartín, and sent toward a city about to endure the most terrible siege of the entire war.

Napoleon at Chamartín is at once a panoramic chronicle of a nation’s capital under siege, a savage comedy of Madrid society, and a love story pursued through a falling city, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.

Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

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10 Readers Wanted

If this cover image particularly appeals to you, and if you’re the sort of reader who really likes to read a certain style of book and has read the entire series, preferably multiple times, I’d like to run a rough draft we will be publishing soon past you. So get in touch, please. But only email if you’ve actually got the time to read it this week and you’re willing to send back a pre-publication review with suggestions about what you think works, and what you think doesn’t. I’ll freely admit that I don’t know enough about this specific genre to be confident about my impressions.

Don’t worry about typos and inconsistencies. That sort of thing, I can handle. It’s more what works, what doesn’t work, and so forth.

In almost completely unrelated news, VERIPHYSICS: The Recovery of the Real will be released in hardcover and paperback this coming week. It’s the two ebooks combined, plus a significant paper.

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A Refutation, Reviewed

The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.

A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.

The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.

The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.

Worth reading. Excellent work by Day

That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.

UPDATE: A second review has been posted.

I would like to thank Vox for writing this excellent book. Since Kant is the foundational philosophical thinker of the “Enlightenment”, its easy to see why many people cannot think straight these days. I enjoy reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Vox mentions that he may have called Kant a heretic and that sounds spot on.

Now if we could just convince the world to abandon Kant, things might improve. His notion of “…the thing-in-itself is unknowable by theoretical reason..” amazed me. Really??? Kant never did applied physics, medicine, or skilled trades, did he? That said, the world is heavily invested in Kant, just like Darwin, and seems to like to double down, not change its thinking. Indeed I enjoyed Vox pointing out that the current defenders of both have moved WAY beyond the original works in their defenses thereof.

Hegel’s thought confuses me too, perhaps he’s in the queue as well for a refutation? I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks an understanding of why we need a 21st Century philosophy that is actually workable.

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On the Print Edition

In preparation for the print edition of Veriphysics, which has been requested by a few intrepid minds and is obviously necessary for the long run, I’ve updated The Treatise to include an appendix to demonstrate the legitimacy and utility of the Triveritas, which consists of the paper on the two trilemmas and begins thusly:

The Agrippan Trilemma is one of the oldest and deepest problems in epistemology. First articulated by Agrippa the Skeptic, recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and reformulated for modern philosophy by Hans Albert in his 1968 Treatise on Critical Reason, it holds that any attempt to justify a claim must terminate in one of three failures: the chain of justification extends forever (infinite regress), loops back on itself (circularity), or stops at a premise that is itself unjustified (dogmatic stopping). Since these three options appear to exhaust the logical possibilities, and since none of them constitutes genuine justification, the Trilemma concludes that justified knowledge is impossible.

The major epistemological traditions of the modern era have each responded by conceding one horn. Foundationalism accepts dogmatic stopping, identifying certain beliefs as properly basic and terminating the chain there. Coherentism accepts circularity, holding that beliefs are justified by mutual support within a web. Infinitism accepts the regress, arguing that an infinite chain of reasons is not inherently defective. Each of these frameworks treats one horn as a feature rather than a defect. None defeats the Trilemma. Each surrenders to it.

This paper solves the Agrippan Trilemma. The solution is not a trick, not a reframing, and not a claim that the problem is somehow misconceived. The Trilemma is a legitimate argument. Its conclusion follows from its premises. The solution is to show that one of its premises is false: specifically, that the third horn, dogmatic stopping, is built on an amphiboly that, once identified, breaks the horn entirely.

The amphiboly is this: the Trilemma treats “terminates” as equivalent to “terminates arbitrarily.” It assumes that any stopping point is an unjustified stopping point, that all termination is epistemically equal, that there is no distinction between stopping because you have run out of reasons and stopping because you have run out of unchecked dimensions. This conflation is not argued for in the Trilemma. It is assumed. And it is false.

The Triveritas demonstrates that it is false. The Triveritas holds that warranted assent requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three independently necessary conditions: logical validity (L), mathematical coherence (M), and empirical anchoring (E). Each dimension terminates at its own bedrock: L at logical axioms, M at mathematical axioms, E at observation. The Triveritas takes the third horn. It terminates. But it terminates at three independent stopping points of fundamentally different kinds, each constraining the others. The probability of all three stopping points being wrong in a way that produces a coherent false positive is strictly lower than the probability of any single stopping point being wrong. This is proved mathematically and confirmed empirically across twelve historical cases spanning four centuries and seven fields.

Checked termination is not dogmatic stopping. The third horn breaks.

So the print edition will consist of The Treatise and The Refutation of Kant, and includes the three following appendices:

  • Solving the Agrippan Trilemma: Triveritas and the Third Horn
  • The Sophistic Foundation of Reason: A Fundamental Flaw in Enlightenment Epistemology
  • Kant Against Kant

It should be available in hardcover and paperback sometime next week. I already have plans for second, third, and possibly fourth volumes, but only the second is likely to be out this year. In the meantime, it should be interesting to see if anyone comes up with any substantive criticisms, or if, as with Probability Zero, no one will be able to do so.

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A Philosophical Bestseller

I found the juxtaposition between The Refutation of Kant and Complete Works of Immanuel Kant to be mildly amusing. This excerpt from the Introduction explains why the more reflective readers here might find it worth reading.

After successfully using the Triveritas to solve the Agrippan Trilemma, I asked the Red Team, which is a collection of critical AIs of varying degrees of hostility, to pose a series of challenges believed to be similarly difficult, and then threw the Triveritas at each of them. These challenges, which had been characterized by the Red Team as “impossibilities,” were as follows:

  1. The Agrippan Trilemma
  2. The scientific demarcation problem
  3. The underdetermination problem
  4. The hard problem of consciousness
  5. Hume’s is-ought distinction
  6. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

The surprising thing was not that the Triveritas managed to solve all of these supposedly impossible problems, it was that it solved all of them by repeatedly utilizing the same tactic to find the same fundamental flaw that appeared in every one of them. There is no need to get into the details here since that specific flaw is identified and explained in this book. Indeed, it is the very reason this book exists, because after looking for the reasons for that reappearing flaw, which turned up again in a seventh case discovered independently by economist Steve Keen, it became apparent that this ubiquitous flaw traced back to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

“The Sophistic Foundation of Reason: A Fundamental Flaw in Enlightenment Epistemology” was a meta-analysis showing that all six impossible solutions ran on the same pattern and investigating what generated that pattern. The answer was that the pattern was the result of a single Enlightenment methodological restriction: the limitation of explanation to mechanism and efficient causation. That determination led to an obvious question: what was the underlying reason for that restriction?

The answer turned out to be Immanual Kant’s doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable.

Of course, if the doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable is creating a pattern that is reliably leading to errors across various different fields of science and philosophy, that naturally raises the question of whether the doctrine is correct or not. As I will demonstrate in this book, the doctrine is not correct. Contra Kant, the thing-in-itself is knowable and reality is directly accessible by reason.

Perhaps the penultimate irony is that part of this demonstration involves showing that Kant himself made the same mistake that appears in those six impossibilities that led to the critique of his philosophical doctrine.

The greatest irony can be found in Appendix B. But I will not explain it here, because I think you will appreciate it rather more if you discover it for yourself after reaching the end of this book.

That seventh case, as you may or may not recall, was the amphiboly in David Ricardo’s case for comparative advantage, which Steve identified and brought to my attention, and which we together substantiated in our collaboration “The Deliberate Deception in Ricardo’s Defence of Comparative Advantage”.

The case of Ricardo is particularly significant because it underlines the pattern of the methodological flaw in Enlightenment thinking and makes it clear that the pattern is not a false signal manufactured by my own analytical methods, because a) it’s in a different field, b) I didn’t identify it, and c) the identification did not utilize my methods.

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On The Refutation of Kant

I promised the release of two books today, and as you’ve seen, the first was the fourth volume of the Episodios Nacionales by Benito Pérez Galdós translated into English. It’s a very good historical novel about one of the more significant battles of the Peninsular War, and if you enjoyed any of the three previous novels, you will enjoy this one.

The second is the next book in the Veriphysics series. It’s entitled The Refutation of Kant: The Failure of the Modern Foundation and the Key to the Closed Door. It is an intellectual heavy-hitter, much more so than the Treatise which preceded it, and it’s not a book I was ever intending to write. To be honest, I hitherto considered Kant to be an immortal untouchable in the vein of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, although admittedly not on the basis of any particular knowledge of his works, principle of which is The Critique of Pure Reason.

Now, here’s where things get a little bit strange. You may recall, back in the days when the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism were riding high, I created a meme to mockingly summarize what I’d determined to be the core argument of philosopher Daniel Dennett. That was back in 2009.

The second of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism has died at the age of 82. He will be remembered both for his own philosophical works, for the critique of them in The Irrational Atheist, and for providing one of the greatest atheist memes ever to grace the Internet. – Another Horseman in Hell, 20 April 2024

And yet, that happens to be exactly where we landed today with the release of Veriphysics: The Refutation of Kant. This may require a little more explanation since probably it isn’t a priori obvious, so bear with me and allow me to explain how we somehow went from an atheist demoralizer in 2009 to a comprehensive destruction-in-detail of the core philosophical foundation of the Enlightenment in 2026.

If you’ve been following the Veriphysics site, then you’ll know that after developing the Triveritas in the Treatise, I started testing it against various epistemological challenges. Some of you are aware of my proof of Free Will that utilized it, and a few brave souls have even started profitably making use of it themselves. But it wasn’t until it solved the 2,000-year-old conundrum known as the Agrippan Trilemma that I realized there was something truly special here. I ran the notion of its potential significance past the Red Team, and Grok suggested that while solving the Trilemma was impressive, the Triveritas couldn’t be considered of historic philosophical significance unless and until it could successfully address other, equally difficult epistemological challenges. Grok provided a list of six “impossibilities” ranging from Hume to Godel, and declared that nothing and no one could successfully expect to solve them.

The Triveritas solved five of them and provided further confirmation that the sixth one was actually impossible. This was remarkable, but what was truly astonishing was the fact that it solved all of five in exactly the same way, using exactly the same method despite the very different nature of the problems. So I concluded this meant there was a deeper pattern that somehow linked all of these different intellectual puzzles, even though they were constructed by different people in different fields over a period of time that spanned centuries.

How was that even possible?

After performing a meta-analysis of all six problems, both Trilemmas, and a few more epistemological challenges, the answer, somewhat to my surprise, pointed at Immanuel Kant. Because the answer was that the pattern of the same flaw across all five papers was the result of a single Enlightenment methodological restriction: the limitation of explanation to mechanism and efficient causation. Which led to an obvious question: what was the underlying reason for that restriction?

The reason turned out to be Kant’s doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable.

Of course, if the doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable is creating a pattern that is reliably leading to errors across various fields of science and philosophy, that raises the question of whether the doctrine is correct or not. And as I demonstrate in The Refutation of Kant, the doctrine of unknowability is not correct. Kant’s argument for it not only fails once, it fails twice, for two different reasons that are substantiated in no little detail in the book.

Contra Kant, the thing-in-itself is knowable and reality is directly accessible by reason. The great irony of the Enlightenment is that despite elevating Reason to the status of a literal goddess, and despite claiming its objective to be liberating Reason and freeing the mind of Man from the chains of his Christian tradition, the Enlightenment imprisoned Reason, subjected it to a metaphysical vivisectomy, and bound the mind of Man far more tightly than the pagan and Christian philosophers had even imagined possible.

This book is neither a light nor an easy read. But it may be, quite literally, the most important book published in the last 250 years. Because Kant’s foundational error has propagated through every modern science, every modern philosophy, every modern concept, and every modern thought. It has fundamentally restricted not only the way you think, but the very concepts that lie under the words you utilize.

And that’s what brought us all the way back to a minor little meme about one of the New Atheists created 15 years ago.

The methodological decision to restrict explanation to mechanism and efficient causation produced Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. This success created an overwhelming presumption that the restriction was not a restriction but a discovery: this is how reality works, and the method’s success proves it. The success in physics provided apparent empirical confirmation of the metaphysical claim, even though the success was in physics and the metaphysical claim was about all of reality.

In other words, you can trust [fill-in-the-blank] because physicists produce amazingly accurate results. If you don’t understand how comprehensively this refutation of Kant’s unknowability doctrine necessarily alters the very way you think about the world on a daily basis, that’s fine, that’s what the book is there to explain to you. It will literally free your mind. And you don’t need to follow all the technical details for it to make sense to you; they are there so you can be confident that its conclusions will withstand any and every critical attack lodged against the refutation and its inevitable consequences.

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BAILÉN by Benito Pérez Galdós

The fourth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

July 1808. Napoleon’s armies are invincible. They have crushed Austria, humiliated Prussia, and forced the Tsar to the negotiating table. Now twenty thousand French soldiers occupy Andalucía, and all Europe waits for Spain to submit as every other nation has submitted.

Gabriel Araceli, a young Spanish soldier who survived the slaughter of the Dos de Mayo and the French firing squads in Madrid, rides south with the ragged army assembling to challenge the Empire. Around him march raw recruits, militia volunteers, and hard-bitten regulars — fourteen thousand men with short rations, blistering heat, and the knowledge that no army on the continent has yet beaten Napoleon in open battle.

But Gabriel is fighting two wars. On the parched plains before Bailén, he faces Dupont’s veteran infantry and the terrible French marines. In the intercepted letters he carries in his coat, he faces something worse: the news that Inés, the woman he loves, is to be made legitimate and married to another man — his own commanding officer’s son. While the armies clash under a pitiless Andalusian sun, while men kill each other for a mouthful of water and the guns fall silent for want of powder, Gabriel must reckon with the possibility that victory on the battlefield will mean defeat in everything that matters to him.

Bailén is the fourth novel in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales, the great historical cycle that follows Gabriel Araceli from Trafalgar through the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars. In this volume, Galdós delivers one of the finest battle narratives in nineteenth-century fiction — the engagement that shattered the myth of Napoleonic invincibility and changed the course of European history.

Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers. To receive a new translation every week and support the translation efforts, become a paid subscriber to the Castalia Library substack which has already produced and released more than a dozen original translations from Spanish and Japanese, most of which had never before been available in English.

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of its 46 volumes have ever been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.

EXCERPT

On the following day we made a movement along the left bank, upstream, as far as a point well above Mengíbar. We understood nothing of it; but Santorcaz, whether from vanity or because he had truly penetrated Reding’s intention, told us:

“Our general knows what he is about, and is a man who understands the philosophy of marches.”

Halting on the banks of the Guadalimas, part of the army occupied itself with incomprehensible movements, and having spent more than a day at this, we found ourselves once more before Mengíbar at nightfall on the 18th, a point which the division of the Marqués de Coupigny had reached some hours earlier. The two armies being reunited, there was no halt beyond what was strictly necessary to collect the provisions of which we stood in such want, and well into the night we took the road for Bailén. We were fourteen thousand men. Everything announced that we were about to have a formal encounter with the French army.

According to our intelligence, Dupont remained at Andújar, reinforced by Vedel’s division. Had they engaged our third corps and the reserve which, having crossed the river at Marmolejo, were situated on the right bank? We believed so, unless Castaños were waiting to attack in earnest until the first and second divisions should fall upon the rear of Dupont’s army, descending from Bailén. Was this the object that guided us on our march? So it seemed.

While the moment of the drama drew near, far from us and upon the flanks of the imperial army, a thousand dramatic convulsions were hastening the catastrophe, tormenting the enemy by degrees. The bodies and columns of guerrilleros, commanded by Don Juan de la Cruz, the Conde de Valdecañas, and the cleric Argote, had scattered like a deadly swarm through the towns and hamlets commanding the French headquarters in the first foothills of the sierra north of Andújar. So furiously did those ardent countrymen pursue the French, and with such rapidity did they disperse to avoid attack, that the invaders found it utterly impossible to be tranquil for a single moment. The powerful giant swatted those venomous horseflies with a blow of his hand; but they returned to buzz about him, tormented him with their terrible stings, and escaped unharmed, fearing neither sword nor cannon, for these weapons were not made for mosquitoes.

The French could not stir from their headquarters save in large detachments: frequently a thousand men were sent to fill a few water-jugs at the nearest spring. If by chance small parties ventured out to forage, they were dispatched by the guerrilleros in less time than it takes to say a creed. Rather than suffer the French to seize a granary, the people burned it: the springs were fouled with mud and dung so they could not drink: the mills were dismantled and their stones buried so that not a single grain could be ground. Woe to any Frenchman who fell behind on the march! He felt himself seized by a thousand furious hands, dragged off by the women, pinched by the children, and knifed by the men, until his existence was extinguished with a terrible shock in the cold depths of a well. The invader found no shelter anywhere, and forcibly confined within the limits of his headquarters, he saw men and nature conspired alike against him.

For this reason, raging and desperate, he longed to fight a pitched battle, confident in his skill and habit of war; and lamenting the stupefaction of the commander-in-chief, he cried: “Let us fight a battle, and though half the army perish, the other half will conquer a puddle to drink from and a handful of dry wheat to put in our mouths.”

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A Strong and Based Performance

First, congratulations to Sarah Hoyt, who was the winner of the Summer 2026 Based Book Sale with 346 sales of her novel No Man’s Land.

Second, it was an excellent performance by Castalia House, which placed four of its books in the top ten. I very much hope that these books will serve as an intriguing introduction to Castalia for those readers who have not encountered us before. And if you’re already a Castalia reader, I hope you’ll post ratings and reviews for those books on Amazon after you finish them.

There are more details and statistics there.

In other book-related news, you can expect announcements about not one, but TWO new Castalia House releases tomorrow.

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