The Doctor, Volume 4

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McGowan & Company Limited, 1874
 

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Page 166 - A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has "gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.
Page 167 - And grotesque in relation to scientific culture as many of the religions of the world have been and are — dangerous, nay destructive, to the dearest privileges of freemen as some of them undoubtedly have been, and would, if they could, be again — it will be wise to recognize them as the forms of a force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper and...
Page 166 - Can we pause here? We break a magnet, and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking ; but, however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life...
Page 59 - Examination, like fire, is a good servant, but a bad master; and there seems to me to be some danger of its becoming our master. I by no means stand alone in this opinion. Experienced friends of mine do not hesitate to say that students whose career they watch, appear to them to become deteriorated by the constant effort to pass this or that examination, just as we hear of men's brains...
Page 166 - In the lowest organisms we have a kind of tactual sense diffused over the entire body ; then, through impressions from without and their corresponding adjustments, special portions of the surface become more responsive to stimuli than others. The senses are nascent, the basis of all of them being that simple tactual sense which the sage Democritus recognized 2,300 years ago as their common progenitor.
Page 167 - ... a theory which converts the Power whose garment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting by broken efforts as man is seen to act. On the other side we have the conception that all we see around us, and all we feel within us — the phenomena of physical nature as well as those of the human mind — have their unsearchable roots in a cosmical life, if I dare apply the term, an infinitesimal span of which is offered to the investigation of man.
Page 167 - nascent senses" are spoken of, when "the differentiation of a tissue at first vaguely sensitive all over " is spoken of, and when these processes are associated with " the modification of an organism by its environment," the same parallelism, without contact or even approach to contact, is implied. Man the object is separated by an impassable gulf from man the subject. There is no motor energy in intellect to carry it without logical rupture from the one to the other.
Page 166 - Darwin to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude. We need clearness and thoroughness here. Two courses, and two only, are possible. Either let us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matters.
Page 76 - That mercury is probably a true vital antidote against the syphilitic virus, and that it is capable of bringing about a real cure. That, in practice, a good many cases are really cured by •mercury ; the cure being proved by the restoration to good health ; and, in some cases, by renewed susceptibility to contagion.
Page 167 - Then there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, reverence, wonder — and not alone the sexual love just referred to, but the love of the beautiful, physical and moral, in Nature, Poetry, and Art. There is also that deep-set feeling which, since the earliest dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated itself in the religions of the world.

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