Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Volume 1Williams and Norgate, 1868 |
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abstract action aggregation alike analogy animals astronomy become body cause centre centrifugal force changes character classification comets common complex Comte concrete mathematics consciousness considered contrast creatures crust crustaceans deposits Devonian differentiation direction distinct division Earth emotions equal evidence evolution excitement exist fact Fauna feeling force formations forms fossils functions further geological gradually gravity greater groups heat Hence heterogeneous higher homogeneous Hugh Miller human Hydrozoa ideas illustrated implies increasing individual inference John Herschel kind less manifest mass matter ment mental mode modifications mollusks motion muscular nature nebulæ Nebular Hypothesis nervous observation orbits organic original period phenomena planets present prevision produced progress races relations respect ring rotation satellites Saturn scarcely sensations Silurian Sir Charles Lyell social society Solar System species specific gravity spheroid stars strata structure successive sundry supposed surface theory things tion trace tribes truth vocal
Popular passages
Page 204 - But now, this large amount of nervous energy, instead of being allowed to expend itself in producing an equivalent amount of the new thoughts and emotions which were nascent, is suddenly checked in its flow. The channels along which the discharge was about to take place, are closed. The new channel opened — that afforded by the appearance and proceedings of the kid — is a small one ; the ideas and feelings suggested are not numerous and massive enough to carry off the nervous energy to be expended....
Page 107 - But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
Page 389 - ... as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves...
Page 389 - CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended...
Page 2 - ... the reality of Progress as its accompaniments — not so much the substance as the shadow. That progress in intelligence seen during the growth of the child into the man, or the savage into the philosopher, is commonly regarded as consisting in the greater number of facts known and laws 1 understood : whereas the actual progress consists in those internal modifications of which this increased knowledge is the expression.
Page 141 - ... which is M. Comte's definition of " the most simple phenomena," Docs it not indeed follow from the familiarly admitted fact, that mental advance is from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the general...
Page 31 - We may suspect a priori that in some law of change lies the explanation of this universal transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous. Thus much premised, we pass at once to the statement of the law, which is this : — Every active force produces more than one change — every cause produces more than one effect.
Page 162 - First, who commanded that the ulna, or ancient ell, which answers to the modern yard, should be made of the exact length of his own arm.
Page 3 - Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization,...
Page 59 - Alike in the external and the internal worlds, he sees himself in the midst of perpetual changes, of which he can discover neither the beginning nor the end. If, tracing back the evolution of things, he allows himself to entertain the hypothesis that all matter once existed in a diffused form, he finds it utterly impossible to conceive hqw this came to be so, and equally, if he speculates on the future, he can assign no limit to the grand succession of phenomena ever unfolding themselves before him.