The third definition of secular is the one Taylor uses to describe Western nations today, and it focuses on “the conditions of faith” (3). He explains: Cournot`s work was largely unknown until the 1870s, and he was not the only social theorist besides Jevons to think of economic factors in terms of short-term versus long-term change. For example, Henry Sidgwick`s The Principles of Political Economy (1883) emphasizes the difference between short-run changes and longer-term “secular variations” in commodity production.36 Sidgwick expresses his many debts to Jevons` work, so his chosen terminology can be attributed to Jevon`s. Before secular variations in the motions of the ecliptic, moon, sun, and planets were well understood and accurately calculated, astronomers could only compile large tables to provide numbers for secular variations corresponding to past and future centuries. The slow acceleration of the moon`s motion was announced by Edmond Halley, but he did not gain a satisfactory understanding of this phenomenon. His Tabulae Astronomicae (1749) provided tables for corrections of lunar and solar motions. For example, the table for “Motus anomalie mediae et apogei solis” lists the corrections needed for the position of the sun by centuries, starting with the year 100 above, through 1600, 1700, 1800, etc. to reach the year 3100 below.59 Its tables for the positions of Jupiter and Saturn contain corrections over the centuries from 100 to 3100 AD. called “Aequatio Secularis” (secular equation). Another mathematician and astronomer, Leonhard Euler, published tables for the secular equations of the sun and moon in the first volume of his Opuscula varii argumenti (1746).
Later astronomers followed these two precedents.60 Richard Quain`s most widely read medical text of the late 1800s, A Dictionary of Medicine (1882), contained an article on the “periodicity of disease” that distinguished seasonal changes in disease prevalence from secular long-term progressions of generalized epidemics. The physician who wrote this article, John Netten Radcliffe, was a London health inspector and president of the Epidemiological Society in 1875-77, and he wrote several reports on the spread of epidemics. In this dictionary article, Radcliffe reports studies by medical authorities who have speculated that the secular course of an epidemic, which has no local explanation, is due to a hidden link to terrestrial climate patterns, repetitive weather phenomena, or astronomical cycles. After citing a long list of pandemics in recorded history, Radcliffe suggests: “In these phenomena we have evidence of secular pathological changes to which a clue is sought when studying their relationship with secular meteorological and telluric changes.” 14 The use of the term “secular” in a medical context is very rare or non-existent before the 1860s, according to book research. The link between the evolution of the disease and variations in terrestrial or celestial phenomena is much older. The idea that epidemics correlate with terrestrial conditions and possibly with weather or astronomical events was familiar to the medical profession for much of the nineteenth century, until the germ theory of disease transmission was accepted.20 The term “secular” had apparently made the leap from scientific to medical texts in the 1860s. Earth sciences, such as physical geography, geology, oceanography, meteorology, and climatology, inherited their use of the term “secular,” in terms such as “secular tendency” and “secular variation,” from the field of astronomy. Why is it important to distinguish between these three types of definitions of “secular”? Taylor believes this is historically and philosophically important to us. If we adopt the position of definition #2, then we will misinterpret the historical events that paved the way for the era described in definition #3, which will lead to further confusion regarding the times in which we live. So, here are, for your Christmas Eve pleasure, 20 of my favorites, 10 from the ecclesiastical section and 10 lay people.
A widely used political science textbook from the 1960s offered the same conception of a secular tendency: after suggesting that the transfer of the idea of a long-term “secular variation” from astronomy to economics had been achieved in the writings of Cournot and Lardner, whom Jevons consulted, it must be said that the merit of having integrated this concept into economic theory goes to the editor of Jevons. H. S. Foxwell. Virtually nothing about the economic views pursued by Cournot, Lardner, or Macleod has survived the critical views of Jevons and the marginal school of utility of economics.44 In the port of Cavite, three iguas of Manila, there is a parish church responsible for a beneficent diocesan priest. You don`t have to be an academic to encounter the concept of a “secular” trend or variation. An October 2017 headline on the UK website Daily Mail read: “That`s right! You`re really more likely to lose your hair in the summer and fall, according to a 12-year study. Readers saw the following quote from this study: “The results of this secular trend study suggest that hair loss in the population is significantly correlated with seasonality.” 5 The idea of a secular trend can sometimes be encountered in such reports of new medical research. Other sciences occasionally use the term “layman.” Visitors to the Science Daily blog, whose attention was drawn in 2017 to the headline “Earth`s magnetic field easier than we thought,” learned about “patterns of Earth`s magnetic field evolving on the order of 1,000 years,” including “paleomagnetic secular variation.” 6 Radcliffe is also said to have seen other mentions of secular changes in the pages of the London Lancet by doctors studying the physical cycles of life. For example, Dr.
Samuel Haughton`s speech to the British Medical Association in 1868 begins with this statement: Johannes Kepler published Brahe`s observations in the Rudolphine Tables (1627).
