Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions

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D. Appleton, 1864 - 446 pages
Progress : its law and cause -- Manners and fashion -- The genesis of science -- The physiology of laughter -- The origin and function of music -- The nebular hypothesis -- Bain on the emotions and the will -- Illogical geology -- The development hypothesis -- The social organism -- Use and beauty -- The sources of architectural types -- The use of anthropomorphism.
 

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Page 71 - The Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control " — we shall presently have a separate organization here also.
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 - Civitas, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body...
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. And...
Page 60 - In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with the unknowable ; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be the unknowable.
Page 224 - The foregoing facts sufficiently prove that what we regard as the distinctive traits of song, are simply the traits of emotional speech intensified and systematized. In respect of its general characteristics, we think it has been made clear that vocal music, and by consequence all music, is an idealization of the natural language of passion.
Page 2 - The current conception is a tcleological one. The phenomena are contemplated solely as bearing on human happiness. Only those changes are held to constitute progress which directly or indirectly tend to heighten human happiness. And they are thought to constitute progress simply because they tend to heighten human happiness. But rightly to understand progress, we must inquire what is the nature of these changes, considered apart from our interests.
Page 32 - We may suspect a priori that in some universal 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 131 - All observable phenomena may be included within a very few natural categories, so arranged as that the study of each category may be grounded on the principal laws of the preceding, and serve as the basis of the next ensuing. This order is determined by the degree of simplicity, or, what comes to the same thing, of generality of their phenomena.
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...

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