"Evolutionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people whose chief food was bear-meat, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... his faculty of Discourse may be regarded as marking another distinct stage in the evolutionary movement—a stage, moreover, the operations of which throw light upon the whole nature of cerebral representations. The faculty of rational Discourse, as Max Mueller pointed out, is denominated in ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... chairman of the Cordeliers Club, the most bloodthirsty, most Evolutionary club of France, had just ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... dropped, as he muttered, "Imitativeness—the mark of a mind of low evolutionary order, or of ..." his words faded ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... official translation, and the menace revealed in the Chinese original partly cloaked: for by transferring Eastern thoughts into Western moulds, things that are like nails in the hands of soft sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear to the steel-clad West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which may be repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is studied the more convinced must the political student be that in this affair of the 18th January we have an international coup destined to become ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... and psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists, especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring just those precise advantages ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... very light, dry pollen, easily blown by the wind, is often fertilized through that agent also, just as grasses, plantains, sedges, birches, oaks, pines, and all cone-bearing trees are. As might be expected, a plant which has not yet ascended the evolutionary scale high enough to economize its pollen by making insects carry it invariably overtops surrounding vegetation to take advantage of every breeze ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... drama, he is an actor in it. He is in the streets, he makes speeches to the people, he seeks to restrain them; he believes, with too good reason, that the Republic is premature, and, in the Place de la Bastille, before the evolutionary Faubourg Saint Antoine, he dares to proclaim ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... intimate as it is in the latest system of natural science. The original doctrine of the origin of species, Spinoza would have found entirely in harmony with his general philosophy, although what he would have thought of subsequent evolutionary extravaganzas, it is impossible to say. Darwinian biology made man consubstantial with the animal kingdom; Spinoza's metaphysics makes man's body consubstantial with the infinite attribute of extension or matter, and his mind consubstantial with the ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... testimonies of the world-saviors regarding the means and end of liberation. Below them on the evolutionary ladder stand the mystics, earth-bound, but soul-free; below them, in turn, yet far above common humanity, stand the men of genius, caught still in the net of passion, but able, in their work, to reflect something of the glory of the supernal world. Let ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in the fire of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Mr. Spencer's theory is the extension of this evolutionary process to mind and spirit in the development of thought and feeling. He does not say that mind resides in the molecules, but that their movements attend (if they do not originate and control) the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... which are more strongly evolutionary in the 2nd edition, but otherwise are similar to the corresponding passages in the 1st edition. Thus, in describing the blind Tuco-tuco (1st edition page 60; 2nd edition page 52), in the first edition he makes no allusion to what Lamarck might have thought, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... for science—laboratory work, evolutionary speculations. Of course I can't judge his progress in such matters; but Moxey, a clever man in the same line, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... prospectus of a philosophical system, in which the principles of evolution were applied to the subjects of life, mind, society, and morals, appeared in 1858, maturely elaborated in its scientific proofs and applications, thus preceding the works of other evolutionary writers, the most distinguished of whom, Charles Darwin (1809-1883), has been more identified in the popular mind with the theories of evolution than Spencer himself. The writings of Darwin have had a wider influence and have been the subject of more controversy than those of any other ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... IV, a Terra-type planet, with a slightly higher mean temperature, a lower mass and lower gravitational field, about one-quarter water and three-quarters land-surface, at a stage of evolutionary development approximately that of Terra during the late Pliocene. They also found supercow, a big mammal looking like the unsuccessful attempt of a hippopotamus to impersonate a dachshund and about the size of a nuclear-steam locomotive. On New Texas' plains, there were billions of them; their ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the evolutionary process virtually to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... being is One, yet on this account he exists undivided in each human soul. Each person is an Osiris, yet the One Osiris must be represented as a separate being. Man is in course of development; at the end of his evolutionary career, he becomes divine. In taking this view, we must speak of divinity, or becoming divine, rather than of a separate divine being, complete ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... masses as having "a promoted look". The French proletariat have not a promoted look, rather one of inherited, traditional stability and self-respect. One and all, moreover, are promoting themselves, rising by a slow evolutionary process from the condition of wage-earner to that of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... us, are the result of a long series of evolutionary development. They tell us that Nature started with a single cell of protoplasm, a single cell of living organism, and produced the present human species after the life and death of an illimitable number of forms through the stages of countless ages, ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... should be of some use so that all the time, money and thought which had been given to their construction should not be entirely wasted. But whatever the outcome of these motors, his belief in the possibility of motor traction for Polar work remained, though while it was in an untried and evolutionary state he was too cautious and wise a leader to place any definite reliance ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... In addition to its body of moral law, which is founded in the general conscience, or in the light of nature, Masonry has a body of symbolism, of which the source is not generally known, and by which it is identified with movements and modes of thought, and with evolutionary processes, having reference to regions already described as transcending the ethical world and concerned with the spiritual man. From every Masonic candidate, ignoring the schismatic and excommunicated sections, there is required a distinct attitude ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... soul has in a previous life outgrown or outworn that evolutionary phase of development, in which the mind seeks temporary pleasures, and has come to the place where he wants to distinguish the Real from the Illusory, his karma, in compliance with the law of desire, will bring him in relation to those conditions which ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... hermit-crab in all the respects previously pointed out. Next, there must have been the change back again from a hermit-crab to an ordinary crab, so far as living without the necessity of a mollusk-shell is concerned. From an evolutionary point of view, therefore, we appear to have in the existing structure of Birgus a morphological record of all these changes, and one which gives us a reasonable explanation of why the animal presents the extraordinary appearance which it does. But, on the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... sacrifice, that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being shaved and not being shaved. The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary and relative. Shavedness is immanent in man.... I have been profoundly interested in what you have told me about the New Shaving. Have you ever heard of a thing called the New Theology?' He smiled and said ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Man centuries of careful comparison and cross-checking to read the evolutionary history written in the depths of his own planet's crust—to try to date the city was impossible. It was like trying to guess the time by looking at a ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... forward in the evolutionary scale when the harebell welded its five once separate petals together; first at the base, then farther and farther up the sides, until a solid bell-shaped structure resulted. This arrangement which makes insect fertilization a more certain process ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by stage to the condition in which we know them now. Looking at this steady progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that, after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the race ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of races in South Africa has roused to activity instincts or subconscious states which lie dormant in members of a uniform population. National and racial frontiers, we shall see, are part of Nature's evolutionary machinery. Meantime we merely note that modern industrial ideals clash with the working of Nature's instinctive mechanisms, and in South Africa the ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... briefly: first, the bases of natural, easy growth of selected man qualities; second, the processes that take place in the development of desired man qualities, some of which may not have seemed to exist previous to the evolutionary training; third, the training methods that should be employed to make these processes most effective and to produce the particular results wanted and ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... venal and unscrupulous to a great degree, as will be shown—he was an astute organizer. He understood how to manipulate and use other men, and how to centralize business, and cut out the waste and junket of mercantile operations. In the evolutionary scheme of business he played his important part and a very necessary part it was, for which he must be given full credit. His methods, base as they were, were in no respect different from those of the rest of the commercial world, as a whole. The only difference was ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... [Greek: phronimos], by following the line of Goethe's precepts. In working out self-culture, he will derive assistance by the way from the commanding philosophical conception of our century. All things with which we are acquainted are in evolutionary process. Everything belonging to human nature is in a state of organic transition—passing through necessary phases of birth, growth, decline, and death. Art, in any one of its specific manifestations—Italian ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... advantages over a nigh one. What is Tennyson's service to his race, times, and especially to America? First, I should say—or at least not forget—his personal character. He is not to be mention'das a rugged, evolutionary, aboriginal force—but (and a great lesson is in it) he has been consistent throughout with the native, healthy, patriotic spinal element and promptings of himself. His moral line is local and conventional, but it is vital and genuine. He reflects the uppercrust of his time, its ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... scientific studies, and especially evolutionary teachings, increased your regard for humanity ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... researches language has always been the most useful instrument, and the study of the science of language may truly be said to have been the first science which was treated according to evolutionary or historical principles. Here, too, no doubt, intermediate links which must have existed, are sometimes lost beyond recovery, and when we arrive at the very roots of language, we feel that there may have been whole aeons before that radical period. Here ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... Artists' we have a sonorous panegyric of Art as the great teacher and refiner of mankind. The poem shows the influence of Herder's evolutionary speculations, being in reality nothing less than a condensed history of civilization. The old Rousseauite point of view is here completely abandoned. No more girding at the degeneracy of the 'ink-spattering century'! The opening lines glorify the modern man as the 'ripest ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Principles, brings out with much force the idea that, even if the Universe came to an end, nothing would allow us to conclude that, once at rest, it would remain so indefinitely. We may recognise that the state in which we are began at the end of a former evolutionary period, and that the end of the existing era will mark the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... fleshly mind and not holding fast the head, etc.' They have a splendid scorn for all opinions which do not agree with theirs. Under the spell of this sublime contempt they think they can ignore anything that does not square with their evolutionary hypothesis. The center of gravity of their thinking is in the theoretical, not in the religious; in reason, not in faith. Supremely satisfied with its self-constituted authority, the mind thinks itself competent to criticize the Bible, the thinking of all the centuries, and even ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... apostle of the Darwin-Wallace theory in Germany ... his enthusiastic and gallant advocacy [having] chiefly contributed to its success in that country.... A man of world-wide reputation, the leader on the Continent of the 'Old Guard' of evolutionary biologists, Prof. Haeckel was one whom the Linnean Society delighted to honour." Two more German scientists were honoured with the Medal, namely Prof. August Weismann (who was also absent), and Prof. Eduard Strasburger, the latter paying a special tribute to Wallace in saying: "When I ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Ghent. They are gigantic figures, nude, neither graceful nor attractive, but magnificently painted. These portraits (they don't look as if they had been finished in paradise) of our first parents rather favour the evolutionary theory of development. Eve is unlovely, her limbs lanky, her bust mediaeval, her flanks Flemish. In her right hand she holds the fatal apple. Adam's head is full of character; it is Christ-like; his torso ugly, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... horrible; and if you could hear their appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could never, have ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent." These words, occurring where they do, can only mean one thing,—namely that the facts suggested an evolutionary interpretation. And this being so it must be true that his thoughts began to flow in the direction of Descent at this ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... fruit of Vergil's studies in evolutionary science at Naples was the Aetna, if indeed the poem be his. The problem of the authorship has been patiently studied, and the arguments for authenticity concisely summarized by Vessereau[9] make a strong case. The evidence is briefly this. Servius attributed the poem to Vergil in his ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... stronger statement of the same truth. It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen. It does not yet appear what we shall be. But we have learned, in our evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected type before we can make up our minds about it. The eaglet just hatched does not give us the right idea of ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... in the past, but we are beginning to appreciate the reason for this evolutionary process. We have discovered that the cause depends upon certain active changes which take place in the sex organs. About this time the testicles begin to be active. For years these glands have been preparing themselves for this work, so they first grow rapidly, increasing ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... great powers believe themselves to be passing through an evolutionary period leading to civic and national perfection. America, or the United States, has already reached this state; it is complete and finished. I have this from the Americans themselves, so there can be no ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... larger and more organized shape, will render the work of conciliation more peremptory and more feasible, it must be admitted that all these conciliatory movements making for the direct fusion of capital and labour, are of an importance subordinate to the larger evolutionary force on which we have ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... polemical literature of the subject, already so voluminous that the German bibliographers and booksellers make a separate class of it. But two or three treatises before us, of a minor or incidental sort, suggest a remark or two upon the attitude of mind toward evolutionary theories taken by some of the ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... always trust that guide. The call of his destiny finds every man, and, when he hears it, he asks: How may I reach that goal? It is far away and the path is confused. Then a voice within makes answer, and, if he heeds that, he will make no mistake. That voice, I believe, is the result of no evolutionary process, but is the holy God immanent in every soul, making His will known. Evolution gradually gives to conscience a larger place, but there is no evidence that it is produced by any physical process. It may be ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... law of Moses, the line of patriarch, priest, and prophet, that linked the life of Jesus with that of primitive man, we find repictured in the working of those evolutionary forces that constitute each one of us an epitome of the past, a miniature of society. As children of earth we give due credit to each factor in heredity and environment that makes us what we are as we pass through planes of physical, intellectual, and moral development. But a still higher ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... atavistic type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive, form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic reversion to a savage and primitive type. These constitute the majority in the world of criminals and must be distinguished from the minority, who are evolutionary, or progressive, abnormals, that may also commit crime in a violent form, but must not be confounded with the others, because they do not act from egoistic motives, but rebel from altruistic motives against the injustice of the present ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It took a century and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and Goethe to Butler and Bergson, to convince us that we and our father are one; that as the kingdom of heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it and crying Lo here! and Lo there!; that God is not a picture of ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Today, more than 100 years later, where are we? Is it possible that man can thus lie to himself and hence to others? Robert Wright, in his book "The Moral Animal", describing "The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology", writes (page 280): "The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right—and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a human agent from detailing his involvement in the actions of the divines. It was allowed, he told me, because it would never make a mite of a difference, for even if it were able to survive the bitter ice ages and all the evolutionary periods in this TAB (Temporal Anomaly Box, which I will explain later, since I get ahead of myself and have not told of them yet), and even if it is found by humans, and even if they are capable of understanding the text contained within ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... lack is the spiritual illumination that will enable us to look far and wide, finding the hidden causes of human suffering and revealing the method by which they may be avoided; and if we can but reach illumination the evolutionary journey can be made both comfortably and swiftly. It is as though we must pass through a long, dark room filled with furniture promiscuously scattered about. In the darkness our progress would be slow and painful and our bruises many. But if we could press a button that would turn on the electric ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... of this view grows the clearer to us the more we realise the purposive character of the evolutionary process. The unmistakeable purpose of that process is the production of the higher from the lower; all through the ages the vast design works itself out in a ceaseless ascending movement, the theme expanding, its meaning becoming more apparent. Then, when a certain ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... did not propound a connected scheme of evolution or descent with modification, but scattered his theory in fragments up and down his work in the prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the animal more familiarly—and he generally begins a fresh ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE.—The title, "The Ethics of Evolution," seems to assume that the evolutionist, frankly accepting himself as such, must be prepared to join some school of the moralists different from other schools, and basing itself upon evolutionary doctrine. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Triad were pledged to one another in a blood compact to "depose the Tsing [Tartar] and restore the Ming [native Chinese] dynasty." But really the society wanted only gradual reform and was against any violent changes. It was at first evolutionary, but later a section became dissatisfied and started another society. The original brotherhood, however, kept on trying to educate its members. It wanted them to realize that the dignity of manhood is above that of ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... that the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent and eternal. He gradually condenses himself into material objects, such as ether, fire, water, earth and the elements. Last of all he manifests himself in man. ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... provocative of wonder and of hopeless questioning. One may gaze and think till the brain whirls—till the little blossom in one's hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the very sun in heaven. Nothing to be known? The flower simply a flower, and there an end on't? The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the natural mechanism of which he forms a part? I find it very hard to believe that this is the conviction of any human mind. Rather ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... lost to the German school of metaphysicians was occupied during the second half of the nineteenth century by the evolutionary and positivist metaphysicians, of whom Herbert Spencer is the most notable representative. The peculiarity of this school lies in repeating at second or third hand certain idealist views, deprived of the element ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... simplest forms—a testis anterior to a single or double ovary. Other gliding worms have a more complex arrangement of the sexual organs, but most of them are true hermaphrodites. Next in the chain of evolutionary development, and one step nearer man, we find the soft worms (scolecidae); from a branch of this family the parent group of vertebrates was developed. The immediate ancestor of the vertebrates was either the amphioxus (lancelet) ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... respect for theories which, when confronted with two similar cases, are unable to interpret the one without contradicting the other. They make me laugh when they become merely childish. For example: why has the tiger a coat streaked black and yellow? A matter of environment, replies one of our evolutionary masters. Ambushed in bamboo thickets where the golden radiance of the sun is intersected by stripes of shadow cast by the foliage, the animal, the better to conceal itself, assumed the colour of its environment. The rays of the sun produced the tawny yellow of the coat; the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... is sometimes called the "Outpouring" of the Divine Energy, just as the Evolutionary state is called the "Indrawing." The extreme pole of the Creative process is considered to be the furthest removed from THE ALL, while the beginning of the Evolutionary stage is regarded as the beginning of the return swing of the pendulum of Rhythm—a "coming ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... legitimate guide to truth. Admitting, then, that pure matter has done all that materialism claims it has done in the past, let us look by the light of analogy at other and graver possibilities it may have wrought in its reckless, unrestrained creations. Time is a mighty attribute of evolutionary divinities; its power seems next to infinite. In a few millions of years Alexanders, Bonapartes, Bismarks, Miltons, Edisons and Ingersols have been evolved from thoughtless chaos; now, if in limited time (for what are millions of years to eternity) ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... which an external modeler makes into the image of a bird. Well, the earth's history develops from within. It is like that of a wonderful egg which the sun's heat, like that of a mother-hen, has stimulated to its cycles of evolutionary change. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... design, regularity of movement and structure, and the various aspects of beauty which one may find in studying natural objects. This argument from design in nature has been overruled by a study of the evolutionary processes. Paley based his argument on the assertion of a mind behind phenomena, the workings of which could be seen in the forms of animal life. The theists no longer use Paley's original arguments, but a great deal of the theistic arguments are still based on his assumptions. From the humanistic ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... one side, then change to the other side for the same, and so on. The line made by the canoes is an endless zigzag. The idea of paddling on one side so dexterously that the canoe goes straight is yet on an evolutionary pinnacle beyond ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... artistically, this play shows a surprising maturity. It impresses me, for one, as the expression of a well-rounded and very profound philosophy of life—and this philosophy stands in logical and sympathetic relationship to what the western world to-day regards as its most advanced thought. The evolutionary conception of life is the foundation of that philosophy, which, however, has little or nothing in common with the materialistic and dogmatic evolutionism of the last century. The work sprung from that philosophy is full of the new sense of mystery, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... about the great facts of evolutionary philosophy which have shattered dogmatic Christianity to pieces, and have made it impossible for any sincere man to remain a Christian. To say that Mr. Laing is absolutely certain of the all-sufficiency of evolutionism to explain everything that is knowable to the human mind, that ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... biologists in regard to the origin of species and as to the most promising directions in which to seek for truth is illustrated by the different opinions of contributors. Whether Darwin's views on the modus operandi of evolutionary forces receive further confirmation in the future, or whether they are materially modified, in no way affects the truth of the statement that, by employing his life "in adding a little to Natural Science," he revolutionised ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... some two years of a wandering, will-o'-the-wisp life, Shelley and his wife were estranged and separated. The young poet then met a certain William Godwin, known at that time as a novelist and evolutionary philosopher, and showed his appreciation of Godwin's radical teaching by running away with his daughter Mary, aged seventeen. The first wife, tired of liberalism, drowned herself, and Shelley was plunged into remorse at the tragedy. The right to care ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... your old acquaintance, Professor Moxall, is very much 'down' on your book. You know he doesn't write reviews, except on matters connected with evolutionary phenomena, but I met him the other day, and he was quite upset about you. 'Too transcendental'! he said, dismally shaking his bald pate to and fro—'The whole poem is a vaporous tissue of absurd impossibilities! Ah dear, dear me! what a terrible falling-off in a young man ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... adoption of the theory of descent. As in the organic world we behold here and there prophetic types, anticipating, in their generalized synthetic nature, the incoming, ages after, of more specialized types, so Lamarck anticipated by more than half a century the principles underlying the present evolutionary theories. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... appreciate his real condition and to utilize, to the best advantage, the means and opportunities now afforded him. Error now will prove abortive and, perhaps, postpone indefinitely what might otherwise sooner come in the natural course of events. Such a transition must not be revolutionary, but evolutionary if come it must, and come it will. It were better to hope that all schools in the South were as they are in the North for the most part. That the Negro himself should so soon contemplate this as practical is an anomaly. That some evils exist I do not deny. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... in literature at all comparable to the attempt to frighten sober people by the suggestion that evolutionary speculations generate revolutionary schemes in Socialist brains. But then the authors of the "Rejected Addresses" were joking, while Professor Virchow is in grim earnest; and that makes a great difference in the moral ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel |
