"State of nature" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fact that an animal or plant cannot be naturalized is no proof that it is not acclimatized. It has been shown by C. Darwin that, in the case of most animals and plants in a state of nature, the competition of other organisms is a far more efficient agency in limiting their distribution than the mere influence of climate. We have a proof of this in the fact that so few, comparatively, of our perfectly hardy garden plants ever run wild; and even the most persevering attempts to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... weigh 106.8 grams (1611 grains), and the water secreted during the 48 hours weighed 11.9 grams (183 grains),—that is, one-ninth of the whole weight of the plant, excluding the flower-stems. We should remember that plants in a state of nature would probably secrete in 48 hours much more than the above large amount, for their roots would continue all the time absorbing sap from the plant on which ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... of life. To plants we owe timber, bread, beer, honey, wine, oil, linen, cotton, etc., what not only strengthens our hearts, and exhilarates our spirits, but what secures from inclemencies of weather and adorns our persons. Man, in his true state of nature, seems to be subsisted by spontaneous vegetation: in middle climes, where grasses prevail, he mixes some animal food with the produce of the field and garden: and it is towards the polar extremes only that, like his kindred ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... inhabitants have become somewhat corrupted, owing to their recent commerce with Europeans, but so far as regards their peculiar customs and general mode of life, they retain their original primitive character, remaining very nearly in the same state of nature in which they were first beheld by white men. The hostile clans, residing in the more remote sections of the island, and very seldom holding any communication with foreigners, are in every respect unchanged from their earliest ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always under examination, and by committees little suspected,—a police in citizen's clothes,—but are awarding or denying you very high prizes when you ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... cover of the bottle. Inside it, he discovered, represented on western enamel, a fair-haired young girl, in a state of nature, on whose two sides figured wings of flesh. This bottle contained some really first-rate ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... looked like the New Jerusalem, Gray and I made a break for the glorious water that rippled on the beach. What a swim we had! We were the only humans visible. All other unfeathered bipeds were asleep, and we varied our bath by wandering around the beach in a state of nature, viewing things generally, but a turtle pond held us fascinated. Stakes had been driven down inclosing a space, and upward of twenty great turtles were prisoners, waiting apparently with the greatest of patience to be devoured—that being, so far as I can see, the ultimate destination ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... which Rousseau was to be the great exponent. Goldsmith is beginning to denounce luxury—a characteristic mark of the sentimentalist—and his regret for the period when 'every rood of earth maintained its man' is one side of the aspiration for a return to the state of nature and simplicity of manners. The inimitable Vicar recalls Sir Roger de Coverley and the gentle and delicate touch of Addison. But the Vicar is beginning to take an interest in philanthropy. He is impressed by the evils of the old prison system which had already roused Oglethorpe (who like Goldsmith—as ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... nations and individuals in a state of war. These, he observed, must depend on the previous rights and duties of mankind, in a state of peace: this led him to the preliminary inquiry into their rights and duties in a state of nature. ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... were pleased with the putrid effluvia of animal food; and so were the Hottentots in Africa, and the Savages in Greenland; and that the Negroes on the coast of Senegal would not touch fish till it was rotten; strong presumptions in favour of what is generally called stink, as those nations are in a state of nature, undebauched by luxury, unseduced by whim and caprice: that he had reason to believe the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... only ones available during the "state of nature" and the savage state. Before all else, man created weapons: the most circumscribed primitive races have invented engines for attack and defense—of wood, bone, stone, as they were able. Then the weapon became a tool by special ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the right of self-preservation. "Liberty" is the absence of impediments to the exercise of power. A "law of nature" is a precept of reason forbidding a man to do what is destructive of his own life. In the state of nature every man has a "right" to everything. Thus security comes only of the first fundamental law: "To seek peace and follow it," and "by all means we can to ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Lumawig legend the debt of life is the primary cause of warfare in the minds of the people of Bontoc, and it is to-day a persistent cause. Moreover, since interpueblo warfare exists and head taking is its form, head-hunting is a necessity with an individual group of people in a state of nature. Without it a people could have no peace, and would be annihilated by some group which believed it a coward ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... much reliance can be placed upon human integrity, the principle that it is more essential to arouse fear than to invite confidence would not, perhaps, be a false one, if we were living in a state of nature, where every man would have to protect himself and directly maintain his own rights. But in civilized life, where the State undertakes the protection of our person and property, the principle is no longer applicable: it stands, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... we have derived it from the parental government and from our ancestors. I wish every slave in the United States was in the country of his ancestors. But here they are, and the question is, How can they be best dealt with? If a state of nature existed, and we were about to lay the foundations of society, no man would be more strongly opposed than I should be to incorporate the institution of slavery amongst ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the occasion, that she should be forced to be so much of a fool; but there was no way to keep them from being trampled upon but this, and now that they are a la mode de Paris, they are much respected. To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... found seven hundred thousand slaves among them. Our fathers had to accept the conditions and frame governments to cover it. They incorporated no Utopian theories in their system. They did not so much concern themselves about what rights man might possibly have in a state of nature, as what rights he ought to have in a state of society. The lecturer maintained that under this system, the African in the slaveholding States is found in a better position than he has ever attained in any other age or country, whether in bondage ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... distinct and separate methods of preparing the tobacco ground: the one is applicable to the preparation of new and uncultivated lands, such as are in a state of nature, and require to be cleared of the heavy timber and other productions with which Providence has stocked them; and the other method is designed to meliorate and revive lands of good foundation, which have been ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... varieties, and their mongrel offspring, are very generally, but not quite universally, fertile. Nor is this nearly general and perfect fertility surprising, when we remember how liable we are to argue in a circle with respect to varieties in a state of Nature; and when we remember that the greater number of varieties have been produced under domestication by the selection of mere external differences, and not of differences in the reproductive system. In all other respects, excluding fertility, there is a close general ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... consider yellow ochre and peacocks' feathers the climax of barbarism—marabouts and kalydor the acme of refinement. A ring through the nose calls forth their deepest pity—a diamond drop to the ear commands their highest respect. To them, nothing can show a more degraded state of nature than a New Zealand chief, with his distinctive coat of arms emblazoned on the skin of his face; nor anything of greater social elevation than an English peer, with the glittering label of his "nobility" tacked to his breast. To a rational mind, the one is not a whit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... mischief wrought by luxurious habits, urge us to go back to nature, to eat natural food. This is ambiguous. To speak of animals as being in a state of nature, conveys the distinct idea of their living according to their own instinct and reason, uninterfered with, in any way, by man. The phrase, applied to man, is either meaningless, or has a meaning varying with the views of each speaker. If it has any definite meaning, ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... domestication are important for us. The main result is that organic beings thus treated have varied largely, and the variations have been inherited. This has apparently been one chief cause of the belief long held by some few naturalists that species in a state of nature undergo change. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... excepting your mother; and she is now just put to bed of another son, and she is as well as can be expected. And now as it respects what I have got in America: I have got 12-1/2 acres of land, about half improved, and the rest in the state of nature, and two cows of my own. We can buy good land for 18s. per acre; but buying of land is not one quarter part, for the land is as full of trees as your woods are of stubs; and they are from four to ten rods long, and from one to five feet through them. You may buy land here from 18s. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... like men, turn grey with age, and Watch when fifteen was relatively as old as a man at sixty-five or seventy. But grey hairs do not invariably come with age, even in our domestic animals, which are more subject to this change than those in a state of nature. But we are never so well able to judge of this in the case of wild animals, as in most cases their lives ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... of swamps. There is probably no section of our country which, in a state of nature, would be more difficult for the passage of an army. About nine miles from the village, directly on their line of march, extending far away to the east and the west, there was a vast bog three miles wide. It was a chaotic region of mud and water, with gigantic trees and entangling roots. ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... dwell in the older districts of America, where art and labor have united for generations to clear the earth of its inequalities, and to remove the vestiges of a state of nature, can form but little idea of the thousand objects that may exist in a clearing, to startle the imagination of one who has admitted alarm, when seen in the doubtful light of even a cloudless moon. Still less can they who have never quitted the old world, and who, having only seen, can only ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... GOLDEN AGE, is in some respects, of a piece with the PHILOSOPHICAL fiction of the STATE OF NATURE; only that the former is represented as the most charming and most peaceable condition, which can possibly be imagined; whereas the latter is painted out as a state of mutual war and violence, attended with the most extreme necessity. On the first origin of mankind, we are told, their ignorance ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... of instances from faulty conformation of the limb, crooked feet may also be brought about by bad shoeing, or by unequal paring of the foot, and, in a few cases, from unequal wear of the foot in a state of nature. ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... Transactions, I am surprized at my industry. I soon perceived that selection was the keystone of man's success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature, remained for some time a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... remains in a state of nature uncultivated and uninclosed, is known among the inhabitants of the Australian colonies by the expressive name of the Bush.[3] It includes land and scenery of every description, and, likewise, no small variety of climate, as may ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... orifices of bladders which are still young, or which have been [page 417] long kept in moderately pure water, are colourless; and their primordial utricles are only slightly or hardly at all granular. But in the greater number of plants in a state of nature—and we must remember that they generally grow in very foul water—and with plants kept in an aquarium in foul water, most of the glands were of a pale brownish tint; their primordial utricles were more or less shrunk, sometimes ruptured, with their contents often ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... the ancient Germans were little removed from the original state of nature: the social confederacy among them was more martial than civil: they had chiefly in view the means of attack or defence against public enemies, not those of protection against their fellow-citizens: their possessions were so slender and so equal, that they were not ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... of confinement, and therefore even liberty would be a barbarous gift to them now. Punctuality in supplying them with everything necessary was the only kindness that can be shown to them, since they have forgotten the habits of their state of Nature. She has been very exact since this conversation in feeding and cleaning them, and does everything in her power to make amends for their loss ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... observed that, as just indicated, the facts may be due either to a passive cessation of selection, or to an active reversal of it. Or, more correctly, these facts are probably always due to the cessation of selection, although in most cases where species in a state of nature are concerned, the process of degeneration has been both hastened and intensified by the super-added influence of the reversal of selection. In the next volume I shall have occasion to recur to this distinction, when it will be seen that it is one of no small importance to the general ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... fixity of species. This field, rich with various but unsystematized stores of knowledge accumulated by cultivators and breeders, has been generally neglected by naturalists, because these races are not in a state of nature; whereas they deserve particular attention on this very account, as experiments, or the materials for experiments, ready to our hand. In domestication we vary some of the natural conditions of a species, and thus learn experimentally what changes are within the reach of varying conditions ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... This process is analogous to that by which man has managed to breed so many varieties of domesticated animals and plants, some of the varieties presenting so marked a difference from the original type that if found in a state of nature they would often be classed as a distinct species. Man selects the variation that pleases him, eliminates or segregates the type that does not, and by following up the process eventually produces a distinct and fixed ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... fabric heaven-high, in which truths, errors, and paradoxes are piled up together until we have a new Tower of Babel. Then we may see this man of genius denouncing all science and commending what he calls "faith"; urging a return to a state of nature, which is simply Rousseau modified by misreadings of the New Testament; repudiating marriage, yet himself most happily married and the father of sixteen children; holding that Aeschylus and Dante and Shakspere were not great in literature, and making Adin Ballou ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a state of nature, you find any two groups of living beings, which are separated one from the other by some constantly-recurring characteristic, I don't care how slight and trivial, so long as it is defined and constant, and ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Kidney-bean, cut off and placed in water, were similarly retarded, but in a less degree. I have repeatedly observed that carrying a plant from the greenhouse to my room, or from one part to another of the greenhouse, always stopped the movement for a time; hence I conclude that plants in a state of nature and growing in exposed situations, would not make their revolutions during very stormy weather. A decrease in temperature always caused a considerable retardation in the rate of revolution; but Dutrochet (tom. xvii. ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... course of action, one reason being that this would not {117} necessarily forward the best interests of the game birds it is desired to serve. So important and yet so unexpected is the ultimate effect of the activities of predatory creatures that in a state of nature I am convinced the supply of game birds is increased rather than decreased by being preyed upon. Like all other creatures, birds are subject to sickness and disease, but by the laws of nature it appears that they are not designed to suffer ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... compound nests when their galleries are merely contiguous or actually interpenetrate and open into one another, although the colonies which inhabit them bring up their respective offspring in different apartments. In mixed colonies, on the other hand, which, in a state of nature, can be formed only by species of ants of close taxonomic affinities, the insects live together in a single nest and bring up their young in common. Although each of these categories comprises a number of dissimilar types of social symbiosis, and although it is possible, under certain circumstances, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... supernatural belong the salutary acts which man performs by the aid of grace? Undoubtedly there are actual graces which are entitatively natural, e.g. the purely mediate grace of illumination,(287) the natural graces conferred in the pure state of nature, the actual graces of the sensitive sphere,(288) and the so-called cogitatio congrua of Vasquez.(289) The problem therefore narrows itself down to the immediate graces of intellect and will. Before the Tridentine Council theologians contented themselves with acknowledging ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... vermin with which their nests often swarm, and which kill the young before they are fledged. In a state of nature this probably never happens; at least I have never seen or heard of it happening to nests placed in trees or under rocks. It is the curse of civilization falling upon the birds which come too near man. The vermin, or the germ of the vermin, is probably conveyed to the ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... which necessarily generates this aristocracy is a state of Nature,—and much more truly so than a savage and incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated and most predominates. Art is man's nature. We are as much, at least, in a state ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... he is to consider not as his own, but the Almighty's workmanship." A very likely consideration for the Ideas of the state of nature. A very wrong deduction of paternal government; but that is ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... for man in the state of nature. As he depends only upon himself, it is necessary that he be sufficient for everything. All creation is his property; but he finds in it as many hindrances as helps. He must surmount these obstacles with the single strength that God has given him; he cannot ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... I will trust no man's honour in affairs of barter. I will tell you why: a state of bargain is Hobbes's 'state of nature—a state of war.' It is so with all men. If I come to a friend, and say, 'Friend, lend me five hundred pounds,'—he either does it, or says that he can't or won't; but if I come to Ditto, and say, 'Ditto, I have an excellent ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... those animals with variations adapted to their environment survive; those without, perish. In consequence when any individual in a species happens to be born with a variation specially adapted to its environment, in the sharp "struggle for existence" that characterizes animal life in a state of nature, it alone will be able to survive and reproduce its kind. All the variations of species current are, therefore, examples of this continuous process of descent with adaptive modifications. The origin of the human species ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... evening, and on the pretext of cooling ourselves, we undressed so as to be almost in a state of nature. What an orgy we had! I am sorry I am obliged to draw a veil over the most exciting details. In the midst of our licentious gaiety, whilst we were heated by love, champagne, and a discourse of an exciting nature, I proposed to recite Grecourt's 'Y Gyec'. When ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that we see this country in the pure state of nature; the Industry of Man has had nothing to do with any part of it, and yet we find all such things as Nature hath bestowed upon it, in a flourishing state. In this Extensive Country, it can never be doubted, but what most sorts of grain, Fruit, roots, ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... devil his due) are superior to the hills. The naturalist usually experiences little difficulty in observing birds in the sparsely-wooded flat country, but in the tree-covered mountains the feathered folk often require to be stalked. If you would see the Pekin-robin in a state of nature, go to some clearing in the Himalayan forest, where the cool breezes blow upon you direct from the snows, whence you can see the most beautiful sight in the world, that of snow-capped mountains standing forth against an azure sky. Tear your eyes away from the white peaks and direct them ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Masses of men who are on a substantial equality with each other never can be anything but hopeless savages. The eighteenth-century notion that men in a state of nature were all equal is wrong-side up. Men who were equal would be in a state of nature such as was imagined. They could not form a society. They would be forced to scatter and wander, at most two or three together. They never could advance in the arts of civilization. The popular ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... upon the subject, and their familiarity was renewed; but great caution was used, to be fully prepared for a similar attack, by keeping the men well-armed on all occasions. Of the animals left at this island in the former voyages, many were thriving; and the gardens, though left in a state of nature, were found to contain cabbages, onions, leeks, radishes, mustard, and a few potatoes. The captain was enabled to add to both. At the solicitation of Omai, he received two New Zealand lads on board the Resolution, and by the 27th was clear of ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... and beautiful, strange and even mysterious," so that he could "hardly recall them without a thrill of admiration and wonder." But "the most unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature—with absolute uncontaminated savages!... and the surprise of it was that I did not expect to be at all so surprised.... These true wild Indians of the Uaupes ... had nothing that we call clothes; they had peculiar ornaments, tribal ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... 'how large a portion of the life of a rich Englishman of rank is passed in duels and elopements. Lord Byron himself says, that his father carried off three ladies. And let any man be a steady son after that. Properly speaking, he lived perpetually in a state of nature, and with his mode of existence the necessity for self-defence floated daily before his eyes. Hence his constant pistol-shooting. Every moment he expected to be called out. He could not live alone. Hence, with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... we care about his power of learning artificial music? Even if he could be taught to perform like a maestro, this would not enhance his value as a minstrel of the woods. We are concerned with the birds only as they are in a state of nature. It is the simplicity of the songs of birds, as I have before remarked, that constitutes their principal charm; and were the Robins so changed in their nature as to relinquish their native notes, and sing only tunes hereafter, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... a point about a pistol-shot distant from the Buck-stane. As the principal access to Mr. Mowbray's mansion was by a carriage-way, which passed in a different direction, the present path was left almost in a state of nature, full of large stones, and broken by gullies, delightful, from the varied character of its banks, to the picturesque traveller, and most inconvenient, nay dangerous, to him ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... life's work, and that I confess made me a little low; but I could have borne it, for I have the conviction that I have honestly done my best. The discussion comes in at the end of the long chapter on variation in a state of nature, so that I have discussed, as far as I am able, what to call varieties. I will try to leave out all allusion to genera coming in and out in this part, till when I discuss the "Principle of Divergence," which, with "Natural Selection," is the keystone of my book; ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the rights of man and citizen, the sole metaphysical act of the Revolution to this time, had given it a social and universal signification. This declaration had been much jeered; it certainly contained some errors, and confused in terms the state of nature and the state of society; but it was, notwithstanding, the very essence of the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... said that no animal uses any tool, but this can be so easily refuted on reflection, that it is hardly worth while considering; for illustration, though, the chimpanzee in a state of nature cracks nuts with a stone; Darwin saw a young orang put a stick in a crevice, slip his hand to the other end, and use it in a proper manner as a lever. The baboons in Abyssinia descend in troops from the mountains ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes— of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive simplicity and state of nature, as he was for bringing society back to the savage state: so that the only thing remarkable left in the world by this change, would be the persons who had produced it. A thorough adept in this school of poetry and philanthropy is jealous of all excellence but his own. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteemed social. This, however, hinders not, but that philosophers may, if they please, extend their reasoning to the supposed state of nature; provided they allow it to be a mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never coued have any reality. Human nature being composed of two principal parts, which are requisite in all its actions, the affections and understanding; ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... was reduced to a mere state of nature, found this to be my daily discouragement, and was made more and more sensible of it every hour, even after I got the first handful of seed corn, which, as I have said, came up unexpectedly, and indeed to a surprise. First, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... restrained from ruining their talents by the means of infibulation. In an old Amsterdam edition of Locke's "Essay on the Extent of the Human Understanding," there is a quotation from the voyages of Baumgarten, wherein he states having seen in Egypt a devout dervish seated in a perfect state of nature among the sand-hillocks, who was regarded as a most holy and chaste man for the reason that he did not associate with his own kind, but only with the animals. As this was by no means an uncommon case, it led the Greek monks, in Greece and Asia Minor, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... have thought that the advantages of the state of nature ought to have been more fully displayed. This had undoubtedly been a very ample subject for declamation; but they do not consider the character of the piece. The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that I have heard travellers say, who have been in foreign countries, that the shire of Ayr, for its bonny round green plantings on the tops of the hills, is above comparison either with Italy or Switzerland, where the hills are, as it were, in a state of nature. ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... exemptions, to recall the cultivator to his deserted fields. Nothing could do so. The desert extended daily. At the commencement of the fifth century there was, in the happy Campania, the most fertile province of the empire, 520,000 jugera in a state of nature."—MICHELET, Histoire ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... distance was about nine miles and through an intervale from half a mile to two miles in width. This valley was studded with huge trees at such a distance from each other that it might well be called a park, and when in a state of nature it must have been not only beautiful, but magnificent. The curse of civilization was upon it, however. For lumbering purposes a dam had then been built across the outlet of Indian Lake, and the intervale had been overflowed ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... had been formed at Motuara, they were found almost in a state of nature, having been wholly neglected by the inhabitants. Many, however, of the articles were in a flourishing condition and shewed how well they liked the soil in which they were planted. It was several days before any of the natives made their appearance; but when they did so, and recognised ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... muscular force applied to it, and a small goldeye, about three or four inches long, flashed like an electric spark from the water, and fell with bursting force on the rocks behind, at the very feet of a small Indian boy, who sat, nearly in a state of nature, watching our movements from among the bushes. The little captive was of a bright silvery colour, with a golden eye, and is an excellent fish for breakfast. The truth of the proverb, "It never rains but it ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... perpetually committing the blunder of supposing that every advance towards perfection only withdraws man further from his primitive and proper condition, Popanilla triumphantly demonstrated that no such order as that which they associated with the phrase "state of nature" ever existed. "Man", said he, "is called the masterpiece of nature; and man is also, as we all know, the most curious of machines. Now, a machine is a work of art; consequently the masterpiece of nature is the masterpiece of art. The object of all mechanism is the attainment of utility; ...
— English Satires • Various
... convulsed, literally from want, if this important interest were left to the sole management of dealers. A theory will not feed a starving multitude, and hunger plays the deuce with argument. In short, free-trade, as its warmest votaries now carry out their doctrines, approaches suspiciously near a state of nature: a condition which might do well enough, if trade were a principal, instead of a mere incident of life. With some men, however, it is a principal—an all in all—and this is the reason we frequently find those who are notoriously the advocates of exclusion and privileges ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... him and laid his nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and conventions. The savage in a state of nature is one of the most conventional of creatures. So is a child. Only through fine delicate knowledge can we recognize and release our impulses. Now our whole aim has been to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, and mental consciousness. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... softest slopes at Windsor, and try what pace you can get out of him. Then starve him, harness him anyhow to a truck with a flat tray on it, and see him bowl from Whitechapel to Bayswater. There appears to be no particular private understanding between birds and donkeys, in a state of nature; but in the shy neighbourhood state you shall see them always in the same hands and always developing their very best energies for the very worst company. I have known a donkey—by sight; we were not on speaking terms—who ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... is certainly not natural. It is an artifice, blunderingly and unwittingly introduced by man into the natural order. Is this audacious? Let us see. In a state of nature the love which obtains is merely the passion for perpetuation devoid of all imagination. The male possesses the prehensile organs and the superior strength. Beyond the ardour of pursuit the female has no charms for him. But he is driven irresistibly to pursuit. And by ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... feel that my decision is for his benefit. We must not here put the value upon a finished education which we used to do. Let us give him every advantage which the peculiarity of his position will allow us to do; but we are now in the woods, to a certain degree returned to a state of nature, and the first and most important knowledge is to learn to gain ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... only in Europe but on the larger stage of the world the international rivalry is pursued. But it is the same rivalry and it proceeds from the same cause: the mutual aggression and defence of beings living in a "state of nature." ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... with the cats. Famine comes and tests them, so to speak; the weaker, the less active, the less cunning, and the less enduring cats get killed off, and only the strongest and smartest cats survive; there will be no favouritism shown to animals in a state of Nature; they will be weighed in the balance, and the weight of a hair will sometimes decide whether they shall be found wanting or no. This being the case, the cats having been thus naturally culled and the stronger having been preserved, there will be a gradual tendency to improve ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast between the far-off age of innocence ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... some degree the deficiency. I could not have been at that time above fourteen years of age. The description of the swans, that follows, was taken from the daily opportunities I had of observing their habits, not as confined to the gentleman's park, but in a state of nature. There were two pairs of them that divided the lake of Esthwaite, and its in-and-out flowing streams, between them, never trespassing a single yard upon each other's separate domain. They were of the old magnificent ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... roxburghiana to be their proper food plant. I do not know the proper food-plant of the Mylitta (Tusser), but I have succeeded very well with it, as it is a more hardy species than the Atlas. Though a Bombyx be polyphagous in a state of nature, yet I think most species have a tree proper to themselves, on which they are more at home than on any other plant. I should like, if you could find out from some your correspondents in India, on what species of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... against the universal law of society, a pirate being according to Sir Edward Coke, stis humani generis. As, therefore, he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him; so that every community has a right by the rule of self-defense, to inflict that punishment upon him which every individual would in a state of nature otherwise have been entitled to do, for any ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... persons, the observations of a late navigator, Captain Krusenstern, will be admitted as decisive of the question of fact, without further enquiry. They may have another effect too, viz. to destroy that delusion which many persons labour under as to the innocence and amiableness of mankind in a state of nature. "Notwithstanding," says he, "the favourable account in Captain Cook's voyages of the Friendly, the Society, and the Sandwich islands, and the enthusiasm with which Forster undertakes their defence against all those who should make use of any harsh expression with regard to them, I ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Bluff, on the west bank, where we debarked. Our trip from Helena was slow and uneventful. The country along White river from its mouth to Devall's Bluff was wild, very thinly settled, and practically in a state of nature. We passed only two towns on the stream—St. Charles and Clarendon, both small places. On different occasions I saw several bears and deer on the river bank, they having come there for water. Of course they ran back into the woods when the boat got near them. All of Steele's infantry ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... of Petrarch and Rousseau—"Both were impelled by an equal enthusiasm, though directed towards different objects: Petrarch's towards the glory of the Roman name, Rousseau's towards his idol of a state of nature; the one religious, the other un esprit fort; but may not Petrarch's spite to Babylon be considered, in his time, as a species of free-thinking"—and concludes, that "both were mad, but of a different nature." Unquestionably there ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land, or houses, or ships, or real or personal, fixed or floating, property in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the colonies, as British subjects, and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature no man can take any property from me without my consent. If he does, he deprives me of my liberty and makes me a slave. The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to deprive them of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... toiling in the hot cane fields or climbing the coffee mountains. But they who urge this, lose sight of the fact that the negroes are considerably civilized, and that, like other civilized people, they will seek for more than supply for the necessities of the rudest state of nature. Their wants are already many, even in the degraded condition of slaves; is it probable that they will be satisfied with fewer of the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, when they are elevated to the sphere, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not yet driven the primitive tenants of the forest from their favorite retreats. Most of the country was still in a state of nature—unsettled and unappropriated. Few fences or inclosures impeded the free range of the hunter, and very few buts and bounds warned him of his being about to trespass upon the private property of some neighbor. Herds of buffaloes and deer still ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... this district is one of the best in Ceylon for deer-shooting, which is a proof of its want of inhabitants. This has always been the case, even in the prosperous days of the pearl fishery. So utterly worthless is the soil, that it remains in a state of nature, and its distance from Colombo (one hundred and fifty miles) keeps it in ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... not only several sorts of true dogs, that in different parts of the world are found living in a wild state; but also Wolves, Foxes, Jackals, Hyenas, and Fennecs—for all these are but dogs in a state of nature. ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... railroad, and to depend for twenty days on the contents of our wagons; and as the country was very obscure, mostly in a state of nature, densely wooded, and with few roads, our movements were necessarily slow. We crossed the Etowah by several bridges and fords, and took as many roads as possible, keeping up communication by cross-roads, or by couriers ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... to fall into the water. By way of quieting my uneasiness about him, he at once exclaimed that this was a very good way of carrying out the water cure. He made no fuss about the drying of his clothes, but simply spread them out in the sun, and in the meanwhile calmly promenaded about in a state of nature in the open air, protesting that this novel form of exercise would do him good. We occupied the interval in discussing the important problem of Beethoven's theme construction, until, by way of a joke, I told him that I could see Councillor Carns of ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... latter having been cut as were pests of the sort which scatter their seeds to the winds. Trim and workmanlike as was the clearing up of the ground just beyond the lane, on either side the lane itself was very nearly in a state of nature. It was, therefore, a picturesque roadway enough, and Sally walking along it bareheaded, clad still in the pink gingham of the morning, found it so to an unusual degree. Yet it must be admitted that it would have been an object ugly indeed which would have seemed devoid of all beauty to ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... the crossing with individuals of the original form of their species; and hence we can not see how individual characteristics, even if favorable to the individual, will not be lost again by the crossing which is inevitable in a state of nature, with such individuals as do not possess those characteristics. Besides, it is an established fact, confirmed by all our observations stretching over thousands of years, that the characteristics of species are preserved in spite of all individual modifications, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... of those having charge of mules, should be to see that their feet are kept in as near a natural state as possible. Then, if all the laws of nature be observed, and strictly obeyed, the animal's feet will last as long, and be as sound in his domestic state as he would be in a state of nature. ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... me," Charley Loughran, the xeno-naturalist, said. "I want a chance to study the life-forms in a state of nature." ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... Misson's ship, the Victoire, and in the colony of Libertalia is partially an idealization of the pirate's creed. But two other elements which must be considered are, first, the concept of government in the state of nature, and secondly, the ideal of the socialist utopia. Most political theorists of Defoe's time postulated a state of nature in which man lived either entirely free from government or under loose patriarchal ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... dexterously to hook the poor savage's backside, would have had very little difficulty in bringing himself to act the sportsman as a hunter or shooter as well as a fisher. Indeed there seems much stronger evidence than mere imagination can supply, for the opinion of Hobbes, that war is the state of nature to mankind. It is certain at least, that the love of mischief is very congenial to that part of it, which, on the whole, receives the least modification of what is natural, from the restraints of education. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... favourite topics of the sentimentalists of the day was the denunciation of "luxury," and of civilized life in general. There was a disposition to find in the South Sea savages or American Indians an embodiment of the fancied state of nature. Johnson heartily despised the affectation. He was told of an American woman who had to be bound in order to keep her from savage life. "She must have been an animal, a beast," said Boswell. "Sir," said Johnson, "she was a speaking cat." ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... asked why, in a state of nature, trees are so scarce on the prairies—in Iowa, for instance—although they thrive when planted. In answer we are often told that up to the middle of the nineteenth century such vast herds of buffaloes roamed the prairies that seedling trees could never get a chance ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... had frequent intercourse with these islands and a Port of the smaller of the two still bears a Punic name,[559] they had done little to civilise the native inhabitants. Perhaps the value attached to the military gifts of the islanders contributed to preserve them in a state of nature; for culture might have diminished that marvellous skill with the sling,[560] which was once at the service of the Carthaginian, and afterwards of the Roman, armies. But, in spite of their prowess, the Baliares were not a fierce people. They would allow no gold or silver to enter ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... yet almost every acre was capable of yielding all the various rich productions of a tropical land. Considering the enormous area of Brazil, the proportion of cultivated ground can scarcely be considered as anything compared to that which is left in the state of nature: at some future age, how vast a population it will support! During the second day's journey we found the road so shut up that it was necessary that a man should go ahead with a sword to cut away the creepers. The forest abounded with beautiful objects; ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... records that both matrons and unmarried girls among the Britons in the first century of the Christian era were in the habit of staining themselves all over with the juice of the woad; and he adds that, thus rivalling the swarthy hue of the AEthiopians, they go on these occasions in a state of nature. We are sometimes taught that when the English invaded Britain, the natives whom they found here were all driven out or massacred. There are, however, many reasons for doubting that this wholesale destruction ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... importance, but it is not the kind of work which, by itself, enables one to form a sound judgment on the questions involved in the action of the law of natural selection. These rest mainly on the external and vital relations of species to species in a state of nature—on what has been well termed by Semper the "physiology of organisms," rather than on the anatomy or ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of your friends to this time—that you should step forth into his place, and make it manifest that you are a friend to Heaven, and that you have a taste for its glory. But this, you are sensible, can never be the case if you remain in a state of nature. Therefore, improve the present and future moments to the best of purposes, as knowing the time will soon be upon you when you will wish that in living you had lived right, and acted rationally and like ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... usually planted in Ceylon, and the expense attendant on clearing and reclaiming them from a state of nature, and converting them into plantations, is estimated to average L8 per acre. The lowest upset price of crown lands in the colony ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... modesty natural?' JOHNSON. 'I cannot say, Sir, as we find no people quite in a state of nature; but I think the more they are taught, the more modest they are. The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people; a lady there will spit on the floor and rub it with her foot. What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country. Time may be employed to ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... they were to me, they were not nearly so unpleasant in a state of nature as they had been in their clothing, for when considered as sentient beings they left much to be desired; as healthy human animals, I had to admit that they were a success, and having conceded the fact that they were animals and Horsham Manor was for the present ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... presented to the public; they do not, indeed, often happen. It is not, perhaps, once in a century that colonies are established in the most remote parts of the habitable globe; and it is seldom that men are found existing perfectly in a state of nature. When such circumstances do occur, curiosity, and still more laudable sentiments, must be excited. The gratification even of curiosity alone might have formed a sufficient apology for the author; but he has seen too much of virtue even among the vicious to be indifferent ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... Wortley Montague writes in 1717, of the Turkish ladies at the baths at Sophia: "The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies, and on the second, their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank in their dress, all being in a state of Nature; that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture among them. They walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes of our general mother. I am here convinced of the truth of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the only white man who has ever assisted at a whale dance, which took place in a hut, dimly lit by seal oil lamps and crowded with both sexes in a state of nature, with the exception of their sealskin boots. The performance commenced with music in the shape of singing accompanied by walrus-hide drums, after which a long plank was brought in and suspended on the shoulders of four men. Upon this three women were hoisted astride, and ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... hawks, serpents, and the fish-eating fishes, all live by destroying life; but they kill only what they think they can consume. If something is by chance left over, it goes to satisfy the hunger of the humbler creatures of prey. In a state of nature, where wild creatures prey upon wild creatures, such a thing as wanton, wholesale and utterly wasteful slaughter is ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... condition as we conceive of savage uncivilised life; they put themselves beyond the law as well of God as of man, and are, with respect to principle and reciprocal conduct, like so many individuals in a state of nature. The inhabitants of every country, under the civilisation of laws, easily civilise together, but governments being yet in an uncivilised state, and almost continually at war, they pervert the abundance which civilised ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... soon as we realise that war is a conflict between two or more isolated moral systems, each of which only regards violence as a crime to be suppressed within the limits of its own validity. International warfare in its crudest form is only a manifestation of the original wolfish state of man, the "state of nature" which exists between two moral agents who have no moral obligation to each other (but only to themselves). The fact that the primitive savage was an individual moral agent having no moral obligation to anyone but himself, while the modern fighting nation is a moral ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... hard, and misanthropic in the state of nature, softened wonderfully as he sat in the gloom of the tablecover, in silent possession of those two ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... come out to the country with one mighty purpose in her soul. "Under-nourishment", the doctor had said; and he had laid out a regular schedule. Six times daily the unhappy infant was to be fed; and each time some elaborate concoction had to be got ready—practically nothing could be eaten in a state of nature. The first meal would consist of, say a poached egg on a piece of toast, and the juice of an orange, with the seeds carefully excluded; the next of some chicken broth with a cracker or two, and the pulp of prunes with the skins removed; ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... enter my room in her chemise and a light petticoat. She locked my door softly, and when I cried, "Well; what do you want with me?" she let her chemise and petticoat drop, and lay down beside me in a state of nature. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... which did not before pay rent, was guaranteed its possession by law for ten years after the first crop, at a nominal rent of one shilling the acre, it might be an inducement to the tenant to labour: it could be no loss to the landlord, as, if still left in a state of nature it would be useless to him, and after the expiration of the time guaranteed the tenant as remuneration for his trouble, the benefit would be his exclusively. In the case of a tenant-at-will, an arrangement could easily be effected, by which the tenant, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... a mere state of nature, found this to my daily discouragement; and was made more sensible of it every hour, even after I had got the first handful of seed-corn, which, as I have said, came up unexpectedly, and ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... very Charming.—The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies; and on the second, their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them. They walked and moved with the same majestic grace, which Milton describes our general mother with. There were many amongst them, as exactly ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... I even had a hint here and there as to the geology of the group, but ruthlessly blue-pencilled out such bits of useful information, and while it may not be at all utilitarian, rejoice that I have been privileged to see these islands in a state of nature, before the engineer has honeycombed the virgin forest with iron rails; before the great heart of the hills is torn open for the gold, or coal, or iron to be found there; before the primitive plough, buffalo, and half-dressed native give way to the latest type of steam or electric apparatus for ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... country rightly dependent and inferior where law and custom were most in accord with the philosopher's ideal society? In that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature. In contrast with Europe, so "artificial," so oppressed with defenseless tyrannies and useless inequalities, so encumbered with decayed superstitions and the debris of worn-out institutions, how superior was this new land of promise where the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... red or crimson in the plumage—more in the cock than in the hen, and most in both sexes at the breeding season. The remainder of the plumage is brown, but is everywhere heavily spotted with white. In a state of nature these birds affect long grass, for they feed largely, if not entirely, on grass seed. The cock has a sweet voice, which, although feeble, is sufficiently loud to be heard at some distance ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... of Teutonic or Saracenic conquerors—has become his own master, and his own landlord; and an impulse has been given to industry, which is shown by trim cottages, gay gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed up into glens which in a state of nature ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... ass!" said Thurnall to himself. "If we were in the blessed state of nature now, wouldn't I give you ten minutes' double thonging, and then set you to work, as the runaway nigger did his master, Bird o' freedom Sawin, till you'd learnt a thing or two." But ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... be no natural desire of artificial good. No man, therefore, can be born, in the strict acceptation, a lover of money, for he may be born where money does not exist; nor can he be born in a moral sense a lover of his country, for society politically regulated is a state contradistinguished from a state of nature, and any attention to that coalition of interests which makes the happiness of a country is possible only to those whom inquiry and reflection have enabled to comprehend it. This doctrine is in itself pernicious as well as false; its tendency is to produce ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... flea-bitten packs, whose physical and moral constitutions plainly showed the debilitating effects of unnumbered generations of fish-eating, purposeless life. Physical and moral decency usually go hand in hand, even in a state of nature. The Columbia tribes had no conception of either; they were in the same condition then as now, mean-spirited, and strangers to all those little delicacies of behavior that ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... usually come down after having watched us for a few days. Nor does this conduct seem to be unnatural; for what, in such case, would be the conduct of any people, ourselves for instance, were we living in a state of nature, frequently at war with our neighbours, and ignorant of the existence of any other nation? On the arrival of strangers so different in complexion and appearance to ourselves, having power to transplant themselves over, and even living upon, an element which ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Eachard and Sir Roger L'Estrange may offer a slight clue. Echard was closely related to Dr. Eachard (1636?-1697), Master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, and author of the lively dialogue, Mr. Hobbs's State of Nature Consider'd (1672).[5] With a family connection such as this, Echard might well have hoped for a successful career centered on his stay at Cambridge. The dedication of his A Most Complete Compendium in 1691 to the Master of his own college, Dr. John Covel, suggests that he was ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society, under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger: and as in the latter state even the stronger individuals are prompted by the uncertainty of their condition to submit to a government which may protect ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... all these flattering expectations I found myself completely disappointed, and felt inclined to say to America, as Horace says to his mistress, "intentata nites." Brissot, in the preface to his travels, observes, that "freedom in that country is carried to so high a degree as to border upon a state of nature;" and there certainly is a close approximation to savage life not only in the liberty which they enjoy, but in the violence of party spirit and of private animosity which results from it. This illiberal zeal imbitters all social ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... towards the common antitype, the analogy which existed between the two groups becomes an affinity. We are also made aware of the difficulty of arriving at a true classification, even in a small and perfect group;—in the actual state of nature it is almost impossible, the species being so numerous and the modifications of form and structure so varied, arising probably from the immense number of species which have served as antitypes for the existing species, and thus produced a complicated branching ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... oleracea? Yet from that they have been derived by cultivation. They have, however, a tendency like animals to revert to the original type, or, in the gardener's phrase, to degenerate, which it requires the utmost care on his part to counteract. When left to a state of nature, they speedily lose their acquired forms, properties and character, and regain ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... majestic power of some falling stream; or the awful solitude of some deep forest. It was mainly a timbered country through which they passed. The regions traversed by the Alleghany mountain proper were in that day still in a state of nature; and the scattered inhabitants very nearly in the same state. Many of them live very remote from any railroad or ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... "I would premise that I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself. We are concerned only with the diversities of instinct and of other mental qualities within the same class." (p. 255) He shows that even in a state of nature the instincts of animals of the same species do in some degree vary, and that they are transmitted by inheritance. A mastiff has imparted courage to a greyhound, and a greyhound has transmitted to a shepherd-dog a disposition to hunt hares. Among sporting ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... ornament and an honor to human nature. It may perhaps, not be unpleasing to see the efforts of a great mind wholly uncultivated, enfeebled and depressed by slavery, and struggling under every disadvantage. The reader may here see a Franklin and a Washington, in a state of nature, or rather, in a state of slavery. Destitute as he is of all education, he still exhibits striking traces of ...
— A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of • Venture Smith
... called cygnets, and are at first quite grey or light brown; they do not become perfectly white until the beginning of the third year. The swan is not a native of our island, but comes originally from the East, and is, when in a state of nature, migratory in its habits. One species of wild swan, called the Hooper, or Whistling Swan, spends the winter in warm climates, sometimes flying as far south as Africa, and returns in spring to Iceland, Norway, Lapland, and Siberia. This bird is hunted eagerly by the Icelanders for its soft ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... words; and the reason is, they are civilized beings, long accustomed to the ways of a regular community, interested from father to son in keeping the law, disconcerted at the thought of consequences, upset by multifaceted ideas, unable to comprehend that, in the state of nature to which France has reverted, but one idea is of any account, that of the man who, in accepting a declared war, meets the offensive with the offensive, loads his gun, descends into the street and contends with the savage destroyers of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... detail of this theory let us note whether the evidence from the lowest peoples confirms it. The lowest peoples in point of culture are not the North American Indians nor the African Negroes, but certain isolated groups that live almost in a state of nature, without any attempt to cultivate the soil or to control nature in other respects. Such are the Bushmen of South Africa, the Australian Aborigines, the Negritos of the Philippine Islands and of the Andaman Islands, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and the Fuegians of South America. ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... the lower animals misery can result from two causes only—restraint and disease; consequently, that animals in a state of nature are not miserable. They are not hindered nor held back. Whether the animal is migrating, or burying himself in his hibernating nest or den; or flying from some rapacious enemy, which he may, or may not, be able to ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... the Patriarchs themselves. For when the various Necessities of Society required a Subordination, together with some stated Maxims to go by, to avoid the confused and promiscuous Intercourse in a State of Nature; then did the People elect the most Virtuous and Wise, to lead and conduct them in Times of War and Trouble; to govern, inform, and protect them, in milder and more auspicious Seasons. Then was the Motto of the Crown, or of the chief Ensign of Pre-eminence, Digniori detur, and ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... assigned to the tame species, strayed from the dominion of their masters. This, however, still remains a question, and there is reason to believe that the wild dog is just as much a native of the wilderness as the lion or tiger. If there be these doubts about an animal left for centuries in a state of nature, how can we expect to unravel the difficulties accumulated by ages of domestication? Who knows for a certainty the true prototype of the goat, the sheep, or the ox? To the unscientific reader such questions might appear idle, as having been settled from time ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... so powerful in his own element, on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have before remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on a desert shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... me into the cell to complete the preliminaries which comprised the final search. This involved my transition to a state of nature. My frock coat was removed and all pockets further examined. The seams and lining were closely investigated while even the buttons were probed to make certain they concealed nothing of a dangerous nature. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... the nitrogen from the lower soil-layers and concentrate it in the surface portion. In a state of nature, where the soil is constantly covered with vegetation, the process going on, therefore, will be one of steady accumulation of nitrogen in the surface-soil. To what extent this accumulation goes on, and how far it is limited ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... Sir Humphrey; "it must seem strange to you to sail on for hundreds of miles through wild land and find it quite in a state of nature. How much farther do you think we shall be able to ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... people; they are not natural to them. They are given to them; they are given originally by God. They are the fruit of his revelations. Neither in the wilderness nor in the crowded city are they naturally produced. A perfect state of nature, without light from Heaven, is extreme rudeness, poverty, ignorance, and superstition, where brutal passions are dominant and triumphant. The vices of savages are as fatal as the vices of cities. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.' The General said, that in a state of nature a man and woman uniting together, would form a strong and constant affection, by the mutual pleasure each would receive; and that the same causes of dissention would not arise between them, as occur between husband and wife in a civilized state. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of a State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit this part ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... I am surprised at my industry. I soon perceived that selection was the keystone of man's success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... inhabited by two negro nations, called Barbasini and Serreri, which are not subject to the king of Senegal, neither have they any king or lord of their own; but one person is more honoured than another, according to his condition or quality. They are great idolaters, without laws, and living in almost a state of nature, and extremely cruel, and refuse to become subjected to any lord. That their wives and children may not be taken from them and sold as slaves, as is the custom among all the negro nations which are under subjection to kings or lords, they use bows and poisoned arrows, the wounds from which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... and functions when wild in its native woods. Opportunities for observing the latter, and for collecting facts in connection with them, are abundant in Ceylon, and from the moment of my arrival, I profited by every occasion afforded to me for studying the elephant in a state of nature, and obtaining from hunters and natives correct information as to its oeconomy and disposition. Anecdotes in connection with this subject, I received from some of the most experienced residents In the island; amongst others, Major SKINNER, Captain ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... real obstacles to the cultivation of alpine plants, of which cold and the excessive climate are perhaps the most formidable. Plants that grow in localities marked by sudden extremes of heat and cold, are always very variable in stature, habit, and foliage. In a state of nature we say the plants "accommodate themselves" to these changes, and so they do within certain limits; but for one that survives of all the seeds that germinate in these inhospitable localities, thousands die. In our gardens we can neither imitate ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... is a hypothesis which, whether true or false, is not capable of verification by any evidence. For, in order to obtain either circumstantial or testimonial evidence sufficient to prove the eternity of duration of the present state of nature, you must have an eternity of witnesses or an infinity of circumstances, and neither of these is attainable. It is utterly impossible that such evidence should be carried beyond a certain point of time; ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... disciple and adversary of Hobbes, as often occurs, and dealt out to the public the doctrines of Hobbes in an inverted form, making the state of nature angelic instead of infernal, and putting the government of all by all in the place of government by one, invariably reaching the same point with a simple difference of form; for if Hobbes argued for despotism exercised by one over all, Rousseau argued ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment leaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowments as marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an admiration for the still higher culture they have ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... the Revolution, is as far from the truth as the zenith is from the nadir." Yet Patrick Henry declared as early as September, 1774. that "Government is dissolved. Fleets and armies and the present state of things show that government is dissolved. We are in a state of nature, sir.... All America is thrown ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... daylight" of truth. He is selfish, sensual, cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces of character, the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,—which make up the novelist's stock in trade,—are not and cannot be the growth of a so-called state of Nature, which is an essentially unnatural state. We no more believe that Logan ever made the speech reported by Jefferson, in so many words, than we believe that Chatham ever made the speech in reply to Walpole which begins with, "The atrocious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... that man is a fighting animal and that war is natural, I reply,—Natural for savages rejoicing in the tattoo, natural for barbarians rejoicing in violence, but not natural for man in a true civilization, which I insist is the natural state to which he tends by a sure progression. The true state of Nature is not war, but peace. Not only every war, but every recognition of war as the mode of determining international differences, is evidence that we are yet barbarians,—and so also is every ambition for empire founded on force, and not on the consent of the people. A ghastly, bleeding, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... think not improbable, as I cannot state that I ever saw one wild, or unless in the vicinity of natives; in company with whom they were generally observed in a domesticated state. On the other hand the Canis australiensis was common in some parts in a state of nature: of these I saw several myself and, from the descriptions given by other individuals of the party of dogs they had observed, I recognised their identity with the same species. We heard them also repeatedly howling during the night and, although ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... where she was for a tiny instant until he could descend and admit her, implored her with expansive gestures not on any account to go away and blight his life. As the sweep of the arm and the shrug of the shoulders betrayed only too plainly the fact that the hospitable gentleman was very much in a state of nature, except for the lather on his face, Esther took fright and bolted out of the gate, inwardly execrating the Gallic race and their amorous propensities. One more chance gone, she thought in a panic of dread, five minutes more wasted. Oh! to think a simple matter like finding a telephone should present ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... weak, have always survived. This law of development has operated down all the past upon all life; it so operates today, and it is not rash to say that it will continue to operate in the future—at least upon all life existing in a state of nature. ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... ancient times and in very unenlightened conditions, before mythology had grown, a monotheism prevailed, which afterwards at various times was revived by reformers, is a belief that should have passed away when the delights of savage life and the praises of a state of nature ceased to be the themes of philosophers. We are speaking of a people little capable of abstraction. The exhibitions of force in nature seemed to them the manifestations of that mysterious power felt by their self-consciousness; to combine these various ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... itself badly in the foot by a large needle. The offending instrument had been carefully greased, wrapped in woolen, and placed in a certain charmed nook of the chimney; while the foot, from a fear of weakening the incantation, was left in a state of nature. The arrival of the peddler had altered the whole of this admirable treatment; and the consequences were expressed by Katy, as she ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper |
