"Utilitarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... power, his penetrating eyes flashing with patriotism as he plead the cause of the emancipated, or flashing with anger as with withering denunciation and sarcasm he denounced their oppressors. His mind was especially utilitarian and his speeches were more remarkable for common sense than for the flowers of rhetoric or the brilliancy or oratory. With indomitable perseverance and pluck he possessed a large heart, and his ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... concession; Nageli, however, went much further when he said: "I do not know among plants a morphological modification which can be explained on utilitarian principles." (See "More Letters", Vol. II. page 375 (footnote).) If this were true the field of Natural Selection would be so seriously restricted, as to leave the theory only a very ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly utilitarian civilization demands that a man of forty should be rearing a family, should go to an office five times a week, and pretend an interest in the World's Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should be men of mature years who do not know ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... that a place so beautiful as it is, justifies itself by simply existing, and the perfection of its buildings and the beauty of its music must appeal, even to our own utilitarian age. But it has many other justifications besides its beauty; its great wealth is being continually applied to assist the University by the endowment of new professorships, especially for the Natural Sciences, and to aid real students, whether those who have made, or those who are ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modern life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery—the thing we do our living with—is inevitably connected with ideas practical and utilitarian—at best intellectual—that "it will always be practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal to the imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the real spirit we know ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in an atmosphere tending to chill their enthusiasm. Lord Palmerston had died the year before, and with him had disappeared an adventurous foreign policy and the militant view of empire. The strictly utilitarian school of thought was dominant. Canada was unpleasantly associated in the minds of British statesmen with the hostile attitude of the United States which seemed to threaten a most unwelcome war. John Bright approved of ceding Canada to the Republic ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... impression which prevails throughout the Continent (Germany in particular), that we are a thoroughly material people, having little taste for or appreciation of anything which is not practical and distinctly utilitarian. Nothing can be further from the truth; yet I have the greatest difficulty in making people comprehend that a true feeling for science, art, and literature can co-exist with our great practical genius. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... liberal water-supply furnished by great works built at the State's expense; good sanitation, resulting in a degree of healthfulness unusually high for India; a noble pleasure garden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction of native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a new and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and value. Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences could not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and large generosities, and all such ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? Yet out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered that Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the force which produces weight ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... It serves a more utilitarian purpose, however, than bracing faint-hearted spirits. "There is no bird that compares with it in destroying the female canker-worm moths and their eggs," writes a well-known entomologist. He calculates that as a chickadee destroys about ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... sake of which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people) is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality. . . . This being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... homophones are of two kinds, either scientific and utilitarian, or aesthetic. The utilitarian objections are manifest, and since confusion of words is not confined to homophones, the practical inconvenience that is sometimes occasioned by slight similarities may properly be alleged to illustrate ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an Infant under her guardianship. Her taste was infallible; her sentence eternally final. This church was built for her in this spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian faith,—in this singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a doll-house for her favourite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to your dolls, you are out of place here. If you can go back to them, and get rid for one small hour of the weight ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... practical which answers to these wants? And if some of them are of that peculiar nature that they can only be satisfied by knowledge, or by theoretical contemplation, is this knowledge, is this theoretical contemplation, not useful,—useful even in the eyes of the most decided Utilitarian? Might it not happen that what he calls theoretical philosophy seems useless and barren to the Utilitarian, because his ideas of men are too narrow? It is dangerous, and not quite becoming, to lay down the law, and say from the very first, 'You must not have more than certain ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... estrangement, but rather to the instigation of his own sire, Sir Thomas—a gentleman of the "fine old school"—who, exasperated by the, to him, incomprehensible and insupportable turn of mind developed by his heir (whom he loved well enough, notwithstanding, in his own way), had hoped, in good utilitarian fashion, that a prolonged period of contact with the world, lubricated by a plentiful supply of money, might shake his "big sawney of a son" out of his sickly-sentimental views; that it would show him that gentlemen's society—and, "by gad, ladies' ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... for understanding—when so many of the secrets of nature have been revealed—when the impalpable and all-pervading electricity, and the infinite elasticity of steam, have been made subservient to purposes of human utility,—the advantages of knowledge, in an utilitarian point of view, the utter hopelessness of a successful attempt on the part either of individuals or classes to maintain their position in society if they neglect the means of self-improvement, are truths too obvious to call for elucidation. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... unknown barbarians, and their adventures in strange and mysterious countries were clothed in a romance which has been almost completely dispelled by the telegraph, the newspaper press, cheap books, and rapid transit, and by the utilitarian ideas which have swept over ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... Lambeth, on the southern bank of the Thames—with its Bishop's Walk and Garden, and its terrace fronting the river—is an architectural relic of the London of former times, precious to all lovers of the picturesque, in the utilitarian London of the present day. Southward of this venerable structure lies the street labyrinth of Lambeth; and nearly midway, in that part of the maze of houses which is placed nearest to the river, runs the dingy double row of buildings ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of the wayfarer to the bar beneath. This cheerful room which sprouted, like some grotesque wing, from the right side of the chapel, marked not only a utilitarian triumph in architecture, but served, on market days to attract a larger congregation of the righteous than had ever stood up to sing the doxology in the adjoining place of worship. Good and bad prospects were weighed here, weddings ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the casual traveller can see Victoria Falls from the train is due entirely to the foresight and the imagination of Cecil Rhodes. He knew the publicity value that the cataract would have for Rhodesia and he combined the utilitarian with his love of the romantic. In planning the Rhodesian railroad, therefore, he insisted that the bridge across the gorge of the Zambesi into which the mighty waters flow after their fall, must be sufficiently near to enable the spray ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... ossified natures contain some soft palpitating spot that will throb against the hand that is sufficiently dexterous to find it. In every man and woman there lurks a vein of sentiment, which, no matter how heavily crushed by the super-incumbent mass of utilitarian, practical commonplaceisms, will one day trickle through the dusty debris, and creep like a silver thread over the dun waste of selfishness; or, Arethusa-like, burst forth ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... in this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake, with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle to horse and ride off Somewhere seeking Something—just as occasional trilobites, lonely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of the outer appearance of that little house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends—for very many years, at any rate. It ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... is a paved road with a tram-line, whilst a wide pavement runs along the houses. There are many such boulevards in Antwerp, and they give to the city an air of spaciousness and opulence in striking contrast to the more utilitarian plan of London or of most of our large towns. We talk a great deal about fresh air, but we are not always ready ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... minute's peace unless soothed by her presence; he was dependent on her to a degree which amazed and almost provoked the doctor, who could not bear to have her continually harassed and disturbed, and yet was much affected by witnessing so much tenderness, especially in Flora, always the cold utilitarian member ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... said Bearwarden, "to exchange my active utilitarian life for a rustic poetical existence, it would be this place, for it is far more beautiful than anything I have seen on earth. It needs but a Maud Muller and a few cows to complete the picture, since Nature gives us a vision ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... the epithet wiser too literally. Perhaps the poet speaks ironically, or means by some other wiser man, one allied in character and temperament to a modern utilitarian Philosopher. Wordsworth seems to have had the lines of George Wither in his ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... unlike the other arts, lacks any model in the realm of nature, it has had to work out its own laws, and its spontaneity and directness are the result. It has not become imitative, utilitarian or bound by arbitrary conventions. As Berlioz says in the Grotesques de la Musique: "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if every human language were to perish, it would be none the less the most poetic, the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... volume of lyrical poems, or a standard classic, or such like. A work on Art, I think, bears less of ornament than any other kind of book ("non bis in idem" is a good motto); again, a book that must have illustrations, more or less utilitarian, should, I think, have no actual ornament at all, because the ornament and the illustration ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... the other "Olympians." No instinct is more insistent in the early days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This gibe is the plain ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the better the morale, the more profound its mystery from the utilitarian angle of judgment. There is something miraculous in the power of a bald and unhesitating announcement of reverse to steel the temper of men attuned to making sacrifices and to meeting emergencies. No one can touch the deepest moral ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Would it be narrowly utilitarian and even foolish to expect that one's learning shall necessarily function in practical life? And should the student rather rest content to acquire knowledge for its own sake, not bothering—for the present, at any rate—about actually bringing it to ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... him, that not merely while his vow lasted was that hair to be recognised as GOD'S possession, but when his vow was fulfilled the whole of it was to be shaved off, and was to be burnt upon the altar. Like the burnt-offering, it was to be recognised as for GOD'S use alone, whether or not any utilitarian purpose were ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... from Algiers, suggested that Moussa Isa, a slave, was certainly not fitting food for gentlemen who fight, hunt, travel, poach elephants, deal in "black ivory," run guns, and generally lead a life too picturesque for an over-"educated," utilitarian and depressing age—but what would you? "One eats—but yes, one eats, or one ceases to live, and one does not wish to cease to live—and therefore one eats" and he cocked a yellow and appraising eye at Moussa Isa. The sense of the meeting ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... lounging and waste of time, together with even graver vices, were imputed to its influence. Some said it favored polysarkia, or obesity, and unfitted for military or other active life. The Romans were too utilitarian to see its higher aims. Though there was some justice, it must be confessed, in these accusations, yet they applied with more force to the palaestra than to the gymnasium,—to the trained fighters, who devoted their lives to exercise, than to the mass of the Greeks, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... communism, Fourierism|!, phalansterianism[obs3], Saint Simonianism[obs3]. patriotism, civism[obs3], nationality, love of country, amor patriae[Lat], public spirit. chivalry, knight errantry[obs3]; generosity &c. 942. philanthropist, endaemonist[obs3], utilitarian, Benthamite, socialist, communist, cosmopolite, citizen of the world, amicus humani generis[Lat]; knight errant; patriot. Adj. philanthropic, humanitarian, utilitarian, cosmopolitan; public- spirited, patriotic; humane, large-hearted &c. (benevolent) 906; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... blushed to find herself comparing the social graces of Mr. Austin the painter with those of Mr. Tillott the curate, very much to the advantage of the former—blushed to find herself so much interested in any conversation that was not strictly utilitarian or evangelical in its drift. Once or twice Austin spoke of his travels, his Australian experiences; and at each mention, Clarissa looked up eagerly, anxious to hear more. The history of her brother's past was a blank to her, and she was keenly interested by the ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... was ever realized. And in a few exceptional individuals who are raised above the ordinary level of humanity, the ideal of happiness may be realized in death and misery. This may be the state which the reason deliberately approves, and which the utilitarian as well as every other moralist may be bound in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Observatory is employed, and it continues thus: "Viewing the close dependence of Nautical Astronomy upon accurate knowledge of time, there is perhaps no department of the Observatory which answers more completely to the original utilitarian intentions of the Founder of the Royal Observatory."—"With regard to the proposal of time-signals at the Start Point, it appears that communications referring to this proposal had passed between the Board of Admiralty and the Board of Trade, of which the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... These opinions, certain utilitarian views of like eccentricity, and still stranger experiments which he openly carried on before the whole world, had led people more than once to doubt the soundness of his mind. The most charitable said, "He is an oddity." This eccentric ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... From the foregoing it is little wonder that the education of the masses is surely and rapidly gravitating from the classical to the utilitarian, from the formal to the vocational. The world's work must be done, and as those whose stewardship is the soil are compelled to render a combined physical and mental service in order to discharge their social obligations, they are entitled to education in harmony with the tasks ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... hardened by cold, of retaining the shape and form given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would probably be included" in the layman's definition. But the chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters into combination with oxygen so as ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... to-day, dear M., to be as disagreeably statistical and as praiseworthily matter-of-factish as the most dogged utilitarian could desire. I shall give you a full, true, and particular account of the discovery, rise, and progress of this place, with a religious adherence to dates which will rather astonish your unmathematical mind. But ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... sheep question, which is a purely economic or utilitarian one, and will settle itself, if we do not settle it by legislation based on scientific observation, the preservation of the Sequoia and of our large wild animals is one of pure sentiment, of appreciation of the ideal side of life; we can live and make money without either. We cannot ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... constantly to the moral, physical, and social amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes,—in other words, the greatest happiness in this life of the greatest number, the principle of Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarian school. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... in the formula that primitive Christianity might have been corrupted into Popery, but that Protestantism never could.[107] For a moment he hung in the wind. He might have been one of the earliest of Broad Churchmen. He might have been a Utilitarian and Necessitarian follower of Mr. J.S. Mill. But moral influences of a higher kind prevailed. And he became, in the most thoroughgoing yet independent fashion, a disciple of Mr. Newman. He brought to his new ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... to express themselves in Germany's capital: one is modern commerce, and the other, and more characteristic, is military glory. The commercial houses are naturally much the same as in the rest of Europe, gloomily utilitarian. The military in stone, however, is neither ornamental nor useful. Strange that the Kaiser, who was reputed to have quick intelligence, should not have felt how excruciatingly unspiritual and truly uninspiring the glory-statuary and ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... nor of the culture and apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, interpose no barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers; you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no means a handbook to serious reading they will ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... us note the skilful and utilitarian adaptation not only of natural materials for domestic and farm use, but also natural forms. The farmer and his wife both turned to Nature for implements and utensils, or for parts adapted to shape readily into the implements and utensils of every-day life. When we read of the first Boston ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... hypothetical time of this narrative by one designed by the famous architect, Philo. It was extremely elegant as well as commodious, with handsome columns, tiled roofs, etc. In 360 B.C., however, the arsenal seems to have been a strictly utilitarian structure. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... priestesses of Venus, more or less loosely attached to her temples, and so long as that was the case they enjoyed a considerable degree of esteem. At this stage, however, we realize that religious prostitution was developing a utilitarian side. These temples flourished chiefly in sea-coast towns, in islands, in large cities to which many strangers and sailors came. The priestesses of Cyprus burnt incense on her altars and invoked her sacred aid, but at the same time Pindar addresses them as "young girls who welcome all strangers ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... or embarks upon a professional life, or associates, in any relation, with cultivated people, he will find a knowledge of history not only a convenience but a real necessity, if he is to escape the feeling of thralldom. The utilitarian value of school studies has been much exploited, and that phase is not to be neglected; but we need to go further in estimating the influence of any study. We need to inquire not only how a knowledge of the study will aid the pupil in his work, but also ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... always present in the coal, and which are, to a certain extent, retained in coke made at the gas-works, themselves have a value, which in these utilitarian days is not long likely to escape the attention of capitalists. In coal, bands of bright shining iron pyrites are constantly seen, even in the homely scuttle, and when coal is washed, as it is in some places, the removal of the pyrites increases the value of ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... importance—of far more importance than the mere rules-of-thumb beyond which so-called practical minds never advance. The classic example of the utility of seemingly useless knowledge is afforded by Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON'S discovery, or, rather, invention of Quarternions, but no better example of the utilitarian triumph of the theoretical over the so-called practical mind can be adduced than that afforded by PYTHAGORAS. Given this rule for constructing a right angle, about whose reason the Egyptian who used it never bothered himself, and the mind of PYTHAGORAS, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... dinosaur lorded it in his day over lesser animals. And in the one case, as in the other, a change in the environment brought about their doom. Natural selection determines the survival of religions as of animal forms, and a religion to survive must become increasingly utilitarian in character, certainly there is a point beyond which the ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... a very short time. Obviously, grammatical work and translations into the mother tongue will now be minimized, and those devices which give the eye the power to find thought in new symbols will be emphasized. There is no standard for determining the relative importance of this informational or utilitarian aim when compared to other aims. The significant thing is, not so much to discover its relative importance, but, having adopted it, to devise methods which clearly tend to bring the students to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... is an office which bears the inscription, "Lost Articles." In the midst of the busy traffic it stands as a perpetual denial of the utilitarian theory that all men are governed by enlightened self-interest. A very considerable proportion of the traveling public can be trusted regularly ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of Happiness, not the fulfilment of Duty. (2) Every human practical activity derives its value from its efficiency as a means to that end, it is good or bad, right or wrong, as it conduces or fails to conduce to Happiness Thus his Moral Philosophy is essentially utilitarian or prudential Right action presupposes Thought or Thinking, partly on the development of a clearer and distincter conception of the end of desire, partly as the deduction from that of rules which state the normally effective conditions of its realisation. The ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... always gave them first to those who wanted them most. And as humorist and satirist he had a natural tendency to attack power,—to play Pasquin against the world's Pope. In fact, his radicalism was that of a humorist. He never adopted the utilitarian, or, as it was called, "philosophical," radicalism which was so fashionable in his younger days;—not, indeed, the Continental radicalism held by a party in England;—but was an independent kind of warrior, fighting under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... in fact, during the carnival, parties, balls, and concerts succeed one another without cessation. The Hungarians dance as though it were an exercise of patriotism; with them it is no languid movement half deprecated by the utilitarian soul—it is a passion whirling them into ecstasy. But dancing was not the only diversion. The winter I was at Buda-Pest a long spell of enduring frost gave us some capital skating. The fashionable society meet for this amusement in the park, where there is a piece ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... the present and the future instead of in forming rhymes and metres. To do this I must command unlimited resources; but what does money mean except the opportunity to gratify ideals? With this I can force my imagination to produce utilitarian results." ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... was a younger brother of Elsie, and had early become a member of the San Marco, enthusiastic not less in religion than in Art. His intercourse with his sister had few points of sympathy, Elsie being as decided a utilitarian as any old Yankee female born in the granite hills of New Hampshire, and pursuing with a hard and sharp energy her narrow plan of life for Agnes. She regarded her brother as a very properly religious person, considering his calling, but was a little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... increased by the strongly practical turn of his mind, which is conspicuous in all his works. He was the reverse of a dreamer and had little patience with theorists. In his professional study he always aimed at bringing into the strongest light the utilitarian aspect of medicine, its ameliorating power on humanity, its real efficacy in preserving or restoring health and limiting human misery. On this his theory of therapeutics was based, and, inspired by the same opinions, he was one of the most earnest advocates ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... a great while I thought I needed "mental drill"; so I turned my attention to mathematics. The subject became dry and uninteresting in the usual length of time; besides, I began seriously to question mathematics as being in the utilitarian class of studies. Certainly very little of it was necessary as a business qualification. I recalled the fact that one of the best business men, in a mediocre station of life, whom I had ever known, could not write his ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... increase shown in the American census has been entirely due to immigration. Malthus safely declined to take any notice of a production which in fact shows that Godwin had lost his early vigour. The sound Utilitarian, Francis Place, took up the challenge, and exploded some of Godwin's statistics. He shows his Radicalism by admitting that Malthus, to whose general benevolence he does justice, had not spoken of the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... a utilitarian point of view the most perfect—rag rug is made from worn ingrain carpet, especially if it is of the honest all-wool kind, and not the modern mixture of cotton and wool. There are places in the textile world where ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... Another maxim says, 'Who kisses a brother's hand may kick the Campta,' thus enforcing at once the value of ceremonial courtesy, and the power conferred by union. We observe more ceremony in family life than others in the most formal public relations. Their theory of life being utterly utilitarian, no form is observed that serves no distinct practical purpose. We wish to make life graceful and elegant, as well as easy. Principles originally inculcated upon us by the necessity of self-protection have been enforced ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... in Scotland, and inherited a considerable property. She had been highly educated, and was a woman of rare original powers, and extensive and varied information. She was brought up in the utilitarian principles of Jeremy Bentham. She visited this country in 1824. Returning to England in 1825, she wrote a book in a strain of almost unbounded eulogy of the American people and their institutions. She saw only one stain upon the American character, one thing in the condition ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... and she never saw the whimsical gleam in his eyes, because for the moment having gained her end her faculties had resumed their normal condition, which was not one of superlative sensitiveness. Like everything else in her utilitarian equipment, fine perceptions were only assumed when the magnitude of the goal in view demanded their presence. And even then they merely went as far as sentinels to warn or encourage her in the progress of her aims, never ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... that Sterling had, at that stage, adopted the then prevalent Utilitarian theory of human things. But neither, apparently, had he rejected it; still less did he yet at all denounce it with the damnatory vehemence we were used to in him at a later period. Probably he, so much occupied with the negative ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... purposes, as soon as he has a few words of ours. These words serve the ends of business, and rarely does he ever learn enough for any other purpose. The other parts of the man remain concealed from our view. He is to us a pure utilitarian of the grossest school. His pipe suspended from his mouth, his whole time given to his shop, his farm, or his garden, and to certain amusements unknown to us, he is deemed to vegetate much like the plants he grows, or to live a life ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... day, less utilitarian than those of an earlier era, Borrow must have been an interesting man of letters had he not written his four great books. Single-minded devotion to the less commercially remunerative languages has now become respectable and even estimable. Students of the Scandinavian languages, and ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... thee about the strangely sad impression that has followed, that "this also is vanity." I know it is our duty to improve our minds, and I wish much that mine had been better cultivated than it has been, and yet some utilitarian infirmity of mind has so often suggested, "What use is it?" while I have been reading, that my zest for the book has been almost destroyed, and the very thought of the volume has been saddened by remembering what I felt while reading it. So that what E. Barrett says of light reading is true to ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready reply will be, "Oh! we can't give time here in America to go into niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people. Nowhere is economy a more careful study, and their market is artistically arranged to this end. The rule is so to cut their meats that no portion designed to be cooked in a certain manner shall have wasteful ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... adorned by her. The craftsman, as he fashioned the thing he had under his hand, ornamented it so naturally and so entirely without conscious effort, that it is often difficult to distinguish where the mere utilitarian part of his work ended and the ornamental began. Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and pleasure ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... the cracking of rifle-shots betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living things among his possessions—a practice already in its decadence among the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects to be buried with him, for his future use. To this custom, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... bric-a-brac never thought of such things as an artistic lamp shade or a well-coloured sofa cushion. Decorative art is well defined by Mr. Russell Sturgis: "Fine art applied to the making beautiful or interesting that which is made for utilitarian purposes." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness. Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian. Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of England was to him more important than any constitutional change, any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... is not very formidable; but the Parent's Assistant is certainly an infelicitous name. From some other of the author's letters we are able to trace the gradual growth of the work. Mr. Edgeworth, her father, an utilitarian of much restless energy, and many projects, was greatly interested in education,—or, as he would have termed it, practical education,—and long before this date, as early, indeed, as May 1780, he had desired his daughter, while she was still a girl at a London school, to write him a tale ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... in war and peace, peace of the practical sort, the kind of peace that went with plenty. He was no dreamer, but a utilitarian. Perhaps, after all, the world most needed such ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... fallow as before man's reason was made. Macaulay seemed sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had families of little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The other view he held was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; that we should get the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or a Muggletonian, and the best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or an Irvingite. The compromise worked well enough in an England ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Lane, Baldwin's Buildings and Portpool Lane open out. The former consists largely of workmen's model dwellings, comfortable and convenient within, but with the peculiarly depressing exteriors of the utilitarian style. Further north these give way to warehouses, breweries, and manufactories. East of its southern end in Holborn were two old inns, the Old Bell and Black Bull. The former was a coaching inn of great celebrity in its day, and picturesque ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... remember that the first place is that of the great investigators, whose forceful intellects opened the way to secrets previously hidden from men. Let it be an honor and not a reproach to these men that they were not actuated by the love of gain, and did not keep utilitarian ends in view in the pursuit of their researches. If it seems that in neglecting such ends they were leaving undone the most important part of their work, let us remember that Nature turns a forbidding face to those who pay her court with the hope of gain, and is responsive only to those suitors ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... greater or lesser amount of riot, rude debauchery, and vice; and then, voila tout—the fair is over for a year. One can easily imagine the result of the transition when, from the quiet country, the fair removes to the city or suburb. In such places every utilitarian element is wanting, and the gilt ginger-bread and gewgaws are only a speciously innocent attraction towards the drinking and dancing booth where the mischief is done. Well-wishers to society are unromantic enough not ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... to it, called the Chace of Chaldicotes. A portion of this forest comes up close behind the mansion, and of itself gives a character and celebrity to the place. The Chace of Chaldicotes—the greater part of it, at least—is, as all the world knows, Crown property, and now, in these utilitarian days, is to be disforested. In former times it was a great forest, stretching half across the country, almost as far as Silverbridge; and there are bits of it, here and there, still to be seen at intervals throughout ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading should run to social and economic ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... old Sherwood Forest: it had fallen into the possession of a noble agriculturist; a modern utilitarian, who had no feeling for poetry or forest scenery. In a little while and this glorious woodland will be laid low; its green glades be turned into sheep-walks; its legendary bowers supplanted by turnip-fields; and "Merrie Sherwood" will exist but in ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... has any thing to do with being a gentleman, then, whether you take education in the highest sense, as the best discipline and expansion of the mind by classical and scientific study; or in the utilitarian sense, as the acquisition of useful knowledge, and a practical acquaintance with men and things; or in the fine lady sense, as the mastery of airs, and graces, and drawing-room accomplishments; or in the moralist's sense, as the curbing of our mischievous propensities, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the main function of food is to repair the tissues of the body. Other effects are present, such as pleasure and sociability, but its chief benefit is reparative, so we may well regard the subject from a strictly utilitarian standpoint and inquire how we may produce the highest efficiency from our eating. Some of the important questions about eating are, how much to eat, what kind of food to eat, when to eat, what are the most favorable ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... been largely planted about the roofs of small houses throughout the country, particularly in Scotland, because supposed to guard against lightning and thunderstorms; likewise as protective against the enchantments of sorcerers; and, in a more utilitarian spirit, as preservative against decay. Hence the House Leek is known as Thunderbeard, and in Germany Donnersbart or Donderbloem, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... whom it had to trust for three-fourths of the actions of its own life. That was the reign of stewards and bailiffs, wily fellows, into whose hands the interests of the great families passed, and who fed and grew fat on the parings of the great fortunes they managed. But now-a-days, utilitarian theories, as they call them, have come to the fore,—'We are never so well served as by ourselves,' 'There's no shame in attending to one's own business,' and many other bourgeois maxims which have suppressed the role of intermediaries. Why shouldn't Mademoiselle Brigitte Thuillier manage ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... the trees, and the encamping of the troops in the groves; that the withering trees were those to which the beef had been tied was of course taken for granted. [W. H. S.] The Hindoo veneration for the cow amounts to a passion, and its intensity is very inadequately explained by the current utilitarian explanations. The best analysis of the motives underlying the passionate Hindoo feeling on the subject is to be found in Mr. William Crooke's article 'The Veneration of the Cow in India' (Folklore, Sept. 1912, pp. 275- 306). In modern times an active, though absolutely hopeless, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the agency on time, were real advertising men. No, the trusting old pirate believed it was also necessary to have an ordained advertising-manager like Mr. Ross, a real initiate, who could pull a long face and talk about "the psychology of the utilitarian appeal" and "pulling power" and all the rest of the theology. So he, who paid packing-girls as little as four dollars a week, paid Mr. Ross fifteen thousand dollars a year, and let him have competent ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... nature rebelled against change. The reason it gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... her book, Kelly wandered back to the cab and took Clay's vacant control seat. The snow had started falling again and in the mid-morning light it tended to soften the harsh, utilitarian landscape of the broad thruway stretching ahead to infinity and spreading out in a mile of speeding traffic on ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... prevented: by the voluntary absence of the active, or by the resistance of the passive agent. Whence two systems of morals arise, not antagonistic but concurrent; religious or philosophical morality, and the morality to which I permit myself to apply the name economical (utilitarian). ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... Mrs Fanshawe said, laughing. "It was the rage a year or two ago; girls had a craze for joining Settlements, and running about in the slums, but it's quite out of date. Hobble skirts killed it. It's impossible to be utilitarian in a hobble skirt... And how do you propose to show ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... aren't they?" said Zaidie; "and really you can't tell which are men and which are women. I suppose they've civilised themselves out of everything that's nice, and are just scientific and utilitarian and everything ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... one direction for the revival of languages which were dead or dying. We see before our eyes Welsh and Irish in process of being saved from extinction, with the hope perhaps of restoring their ancient glories in poetry and prose. Such movements show that our time is not so utilitarian and materialistic as is often supposed. A similar revivifying process is affecting Hebrew. For centuries it has been preserved as a ritual language, sheltered within the walls of the Synagogue; often ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... neck of water under the bridge was fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into shapes like quips; ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... exclusive club, for he was a man acquainted with the smoother side of life. He had various gifts which were apparently of no account in British Columbia, and he had enjoyed an education that had, it seemed, unfitted him for anything strictly utilitarian. There are a great many men of his description chopping trees and driving cattle in Western Canada. Indeed, his story was one which, with slight variations, may be heard frequently in that country. Financial ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... not feel very shocked, for it really seemed to me natural and right. What particularly surprised me was that on this planet, with its low, utilitarian, humanitarian ideals, selfish and coercive of all true freedom, any one should venture on a similar enterprise, worthy of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... sexual honor and the principles on which it rests, a little more attention and analysis are necessary; and what I shall say will support my contention that all honor really rests upon a utilitarian basis. There are two natural divisions of the subject—the honor of women and the honor of men, in either side issuing in a well-understood esprit de corps. The former is by far the more important of the two, because the ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to a stop in front of the old white-frame house with its graceful utilitarian lines of roof and gable, he found himself wondering whether this were the dream or the other—the twenty years that had found him an orphan. That had given him enough inherited money to strike out for himself in New York. That had seen him win success as ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... these professions are usually quite satisfied with their own monopolies, are opposed to change, and are always ready with a stock of plausible arguments to show the folly and danger of innovation. If the Utilitarian appeals to facts, common sense, and experience, so also does the Conservative; and until public opinion is decidedly for progress the dead weight prevails. Not for a day did Bentham relax his strenuous exertions, but he changed his ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... or one of her rivals. She touched Marjorie's face with a little perfume to flush it, and draped her picturesquely against the back of the long chair, with a silk shawl over her instead of the steamer rug which Mrs. O'Mara, less artistic than utilitarian, had provided. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... turned over to a utilitarian Scotchman with red hair. Later the immortal shanty was a useful granary. Thoreau went back to the village to live in a garret and work at odd jobs ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... showed, Chesterton thinks, the two qualities most often denied to Browning, passion and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful—it is on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... refined, for Mr. Bertie Tremaine combined the Sybarite with the Utilitarian sage, and it secretly delighted him to astonish or embarrass an austere brother republican by the splendour of his family plate or the polished appointments of his household. To-day the individual to be influenced was ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... and all the fine arts passed before Janina's mind. She could not separate their utilitarian aspect from their purely artistic one. She saw that all artists played, sang, and created only to amuse that vast, brutal, mob. For it they sacrificed their lives, their strength, and their dreams; for it they struggled and suffered, lived ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... this modern barbarism destroys the true appreciation of the qualities of glass. It denies, and endeavors as far as possible to conceal, the transparency, which is not only its great virtue in a merely utilitarian point of view, but its great spiritual character; the character by which in church architecture it becomes most touchingly impressive, as typical of the entrances of the Holy Spirit into the heart of man; a typical expression rendered specific and intense ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... succeed in a livelier sort of business competition. A university professor would lay out a liberal course of training for his son so as to prepare him for intellectual pursuits among scholars and people of culture. This utilitarian view, which points to success in life in the ordinary sense, is the prevailing one. We could probably sum up the wishes of a great majority of the common people by saying, "They desire to give their children, through education, a better chance in life than they themselves have had." Yet even these ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... became clearly aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past. His appreciativeness was capable of exercising itself only on utilitarian matters, and recollection of Avice's good qualities alone had any effect on his mind; of her appearance none ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... Hartlib, but his tract is nevertheless imbued with the Moravian's principles. His aim, like Comenius's, is to provide for the instruction of all, "before the years of puberty, in all things belonging to the present and future life." His view is as strictly utilitarian as Comenius's. "Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." Of the study of language as intellectual discipline he says nothing, and his whole course of instruction is governed by the desire of imparting useful knowledge. Whatever ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... was a young man, he went to Germany and studied philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound philosophy of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), the weightiest of his metaphysical productions, to consider those works which possess a more vital interest for the student ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... valleys to the sea. Much of the natural wildness and grandeur of the pass has been destroyed by laying the line of the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad, which has been graded through the ravine. Railroads serve a great utilitarian purpose, but they have their defects; it seems out of place to ride across Egypt or the Holy Land behind a locomotive; a prancing steed or a camel with tinkling bells seems the most fitting motive power. There is nothing sentimental about a railroad, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... as old-time boys in school went up and down; but, withal, the main characteristic abode, and has become more and more the dominant prepossession of the statesmen who reached their prime at or soon after the times when the century itself culminated. The maintenance of a status quo, for purely utilitarian reasons of an economical character, has gradually become an ideal—the quieta non movere of Sir Robert Walpole. The ideal is respectable, certainly; in view of the concert of the powers, in the interest of their own repose, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... family, standing for music and song as well as for muscle. He had the finely chiselled profile and the straight nose that characterises the faces on Attic coins. Richard, though without the Roman features, was more of the ancient Roman type of character: severe, doggedly brave, utilitarian; and he was of considerably larger mould than his brother. In July 1832, the family stayed at Siena and later at Perugia, where they visited the tomb of Pietro Aretino. At Florence, the boys, having induced their sister to lend them her pocket money, laid it out in a case of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... booksellers' shops; they have destroyed, and are still destroying, other ancient slums, setting up white buildings of uniform ugliness in place of the picturesque but insanitary dwellings of the past. It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, tho' one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... ranter May upbraid me, dark and sour, Many a bland Utilitarian Or excited Millenarian, —"Pereunt et imputantur You must speak to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... humanity's, ends. At the first he cares nothing for Katherine save that the rumor of her fire and spirit has pleased his wild fancy. And never is there the faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly be taking all this trouble about the woman were she not the makings of a royal mate, fit even for his sky-wide ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... feet, how could I be but angry that modern Italy—ah, so small a thing!—has chased out the great and ancient order that had dwelt here so long in quietness, and has established after our pattern a utilitarian school, and thus what was once a guest-house is now a pension of tourists. But in the abbey itself I forgot my anger, I was ashamed of my contempt of those who could do so small a thing. This place was founded because a young man refused ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... seventies of the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln—the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp—with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour— they were ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... never. Woodhouse was there to eternity. And the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe was blowing like a rag of old paper into Limbo. Nothingness! Poor Madame! Poor gallant histrionic Madame! The frowsy Miss Pinnegar could crumple her up and throw her down the utilitarian drain, and have done with her. Whilst Miss Pinnegar ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... after midnight, with the Wyllyses; but the next morning she rose with the chickens, and before the October sun, to pursue, as usual, her daily labours. It was truly surprising how much Patsey Hubbard found time to do in a single day, and that without being one of your fussy, utilitarian busy-bodies, whose activity is all physical, and who look upon half an hour passed in quiet thought, or innocent recreation, as so much time thrown away. Our friend Patsey's career, from childhood, had been one of humble industry, self-forgetfulness, and active charity; her time in the gay hours ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... is an amazing man," Virginia mused, her fiancee in mind. "It would be interesting to discover what he can't do—along utilitarian lines, I mean. Is he as good a miner underground as he is in the courts?" ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... will—essential Calvinist or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism—he is consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an expert in mathematics, the mental science ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... curious ground that he is the only wild animal that can easily be caught and killed without a gun; so that a man lost in the woods need not starve to death but may feed on porcupine, as the Indians sometimes do. This is the only suggestion thus far, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, that Unk Wunk is no mistake, ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... so utilitarian?" I asked, laughingly. "Must you always have some reason for everything you do? I do so many things just for the mere pleasure of doing them, I'm afraid you will have a very poor ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... several monasteries and churches in this section also. The third estate, the closely living masses, the people, has its outstanding buildings, but these are of comparatively local and small importance. Although the city and guild halls stand out utilitarian yet beautiful above the dwelling-houses, yet they are not at all so prominent as the great erections of the Church ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... many years ago; one or two shells wearing landscapes in oils—of colors and tints never yet seen in an actual landscape—also reminiscent of Miss Asenath's artistic girlhood; and several other non-utilitarian objects of varying degrees of beauty, according to the personal taste of the beholder. A much larger shell than those on the what-not, with a landscape containing a cow and other objects no doubt intended as human, propped open the door into the ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... relieved. He approves of the utilitarian aspect of overalls. He had been afraid that I had come from the family of a minister or professor or writer, a lot of high thinking and no common sense. Cyrus ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... out the Catechism; it ran thus—"You promise to teach divine truth as it is contained in the books of the Old and New Testaments, of which we have an abridgment in the Apostles' Creed". In 1810, after long deliberation, there was published a revision in the latitudinarian and utilitarian sense of the Larger Catechism. In the same year, the Apostles' Creed was thrown out of the pledge of the ministers, which now read thus: "You promise ... to preach, in its purity, the gospel of our Lord Jesus ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... am of antiquarian matters, this sounds very curious; and I send it you in case you may find it worthy of insertion, as provocative of discussion, and with the utilitarian idea that I may gain some information ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... all those who were present.... When, in 1921, the Italians were leaving [vS]ibenik they destroyed a large number of young trees in the park and elsewhere. The Venetians, in the Middle Ages, had cut down millions of Dalmatian trees, but always with a utilitarian purpose.] ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... north light and on a range of deal tables, three or four young draughtsmen were busily engaged in elaborating his architectural projects. The outer door of the office bore the sign: Peyton and Gill, Architects; but Gill was an utilitarian person, as unobtrusive as his name, who contented himself with a desk in the workroom, and left Dick to lord it alone in the small apartment to which clients were introduced, and where the social part of the ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... furnished him food or shelter; the roaring torrent was nothing to him except as it obstructed his journey; the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens filled him with portentous awe, and the spirits in the invisible world worked for his good or for his evil. Beyond his utilitarian senses no art emotion stirred in these signs of creation. Perhaps the first art emotion was aroused in contemplation of the human body. Through vanity, fear, or love he began to decorate it. He scarifies or tattoos his naked body with figures upon his back, arms, legs, and face to represent ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... in the keen air. One felt moved to adventure and a longing for something new. Men with brain and muscle were needed in the wide, silent land that would soon waken to busy life; but one must not give way to romantic impulses. Stern experience had taught Festing caution, his views were utilitarian, and he distrusted sentiment. Still, looking back on years of strenuous effort that aimed at practical objects, he felt that there was something he had missed. One must work to live, but perhaps life had more to offer than the ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... no common utilitarian pig, but the honoured guest of the old couple, and it knew it. A year before, their youngest and only surviving child, then a man of five-and-twenty, had brought his mother the result of his savings in ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that many structures have been created for the sake of beauty, to delight man or the Creator (but ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... way in which the utilitarian essentials of a high state of civilisation are diffused throughout Canada, I may mention that when we arrived at Cornwall I was able to telegraph to Kingston for my lost watch, and received a satisfactory ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... and stone works. At no period has this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its utilitarian course, swept away—sometimes inevitably, often most needlessly—the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian interest. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... tries to seem something better and wiser than he is, let us be equally severe in condemning every building that puts on airs and boldly bids us admire what is only fit to be despised. The pendulum seems to have swung away from the plain, utilitarian mode of building that was forced upon our ancestors by a stern necessity,—possibly chosen from a sense of duty,—to the other extreme; giving us, instead of the old-time simplicity, many a fantastic design that claims admiration for its originality or its modern style. The notion that ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... in their bark and leaves, that are therefore eagerly sought by agents for the leather merchants. The beautiful SMOKE or MIST TREE (R. cotinus), commonly imported from southern Europe to adorn our lawns (although a similar species grows wild in the Southwest), serves a more utilitarian purpose in supplying commerce with a rich orange-yellow dye-wood known as young fustic. All this tribe of shrubs and trees contain resinous, milky juice, drying dark like varnish, which in a Japanese ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... take an interest; and, then, whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... monument, a landscape, an occurrence, is, most often, only partial. It depends on various conditions that revive the essential part and drop the minor details, and this "essential" which survives dissociation depends on subjective causes, the principal ones of which are at first practical, utilitarian reasons. It is the tendency already mentioned to ignore what is of no value, to exclude that from consciousness. Helmholtz has shown that in the act of seeing, various details remain unnoticed because they are immaterial in the concerns of life; and there are many other like instances. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... excluded, as the superfluous members of his equations are eliminated by the algebraist. Fun is not practical enough for the American, and subserves none of his profitable projects; it provokes to idle laughter, and militates against the unresting career of industry which he has prescribed, and his utilitarian spirit thinks it were as well abolished. His recreations are akin to his toil. If he give to study such hours as business spares, fates first claim his attention, and then philosophy or ethics: he cannot resign himself to lighter topics. When he reads in his Horace, "Dulce est desipere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... are books which contain a great deal of sound knowledge and urgent opinion for which I have no use. Moreover, I deny Mr. Shaw's right to interfere with my enjoyment if I turn to literature which teaches nothing and serves no utilitarian or reforming purpose. It is only when I am in the scientific frame of mind that I desire accurate natural history, or when I am in the reforming frame of mind that I desire earnest exhortations to improve society. In ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... had parted at school, if 'collect' is not too sacred a word: beginning to buy more truly expresses that first glutting of the bookish hunger, which, like the natural appetite, never passes in some beyond the primary utilitarian stage of 'eating to live,' otherwise 'buying to read.' Three years, however, works miracles of refinement in any hunger that is at all capable of culture; and it was evident, when Narcissus did open his 'Gladstone,' that ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... sequel to the Owen and Fourier colonies. It antedated Brisbane's revival of Fourierism, was encouraged by Owenism, survived both, and formed a living link between the utopianism of the early nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the twentieth. Etienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events. Though educated ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... by the Utilitarian that morality had developed out of the social side of human beings; that men, as social animals, desired to live in permanent relations with each other, and that this resulted in the formation of families; men could not be happy in solitude; the persistence of these groups, amid the conflicting ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... out into a sword. But when man found that the red ocher he had hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced him as a utilitarian and deplored the decadence of ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... little subdivision of the grand Utilitarian Armament come to light even in insulated England? A living nucleus, that will attract and grow, does at length appear there also; and under curious phasis; properly as the inconsiderable fag-end, and so far in the rear of the others as to fancy itself the van. Our European ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Bosh! The Fairbanks features were evidently picked out by a utilitarian mother who preferred use to ornament; and as for his acting, critics of the drama, imbued with the traditions of Booth and Barrett, have been known to sob like children after witnessing ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... protest when Dundee, with a word of embarrassed apology, went rapidly through the heavy suitcase she had brought up from the basement with her. And when he had finished his fruitless search, she knelt and silently smoothed the coarse, utilitarian garments he had disarranged. ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... pagodas; thrones, emblems of mythology; and, in short, there is hardly a purpose in the useful and ornamental arts to which ivory is, or has not been in some way extensively employed. At present, the ivory carvings of Dieppe are the finest in Europe; but the genius of the present age is utilitarian, and so are its applications of ivory. If we desire high art in the fabrication of this material, we must go back a few centuries, or be satisfied with the beautiful productions of China or Hindostan. We could scarcely give a more apt illustration ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... the only legitimate object of scientific research, beware of prescribing conditions to the investigator. Let him beware of attempting to substitute for that simple love with which the votary of science pursues his task, the calculations of what he is pleased to call utility. The professed utilitarian is unfortunately, in most cases, the very last man to see the occult sources from which useful results are derived. He admires the flower, but is ignorant of the conditions of its growth. The scientific man must approach Nature in his own way; for if you invade his freedom by your ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... originality inspired by this building. One feels that here democracy has at last found utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... naively utilitarian point of view is by no means confined to the lowest forms of religion; in the Old Testament, for example, the appeal to Yahveh is generally based on his assumed power to bestow temporal blessings,[5] and this is a widespread attitude at the present day in religious communities, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... checked by natural and good strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree. He has a preeminently practical, even an utilitarian mind." ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... home. Yet she remarked that though every object was more or less ornamental, nothing had been placed in the rooms for the sake of ornament alone. Miss Carew, judged by her domestic arrangements, was a utilitarian before everything. There was a very handsome chimney piece; but as there was nothing on the mantel board, Alice made a faint effort to believe that it was inferior in point of taste to that in her own bedroom, which was ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Dean, and gave, I was afterwards told, great offence to some of the congregation, especially to Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who declared that she would have left the chapel had not the speaker been a woman. The ground of complaint was that the suggested "basis" was Utilitarian and human instead of Intuitional and Theistic. Published as a pamphlet, the lecture has reached ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... endeavored to show all the benefits provided by prohibition. But he did it with figures. There was a column showing the increase of accounts in savings banks and another devoted to the decrease of inmates in hospitals, jails and almshouses. From a utilitarian point of view the figures, if correct, could hardly fail to be impressive, but little has been said by either side about the spiritual aspects of rum. Unfortunately there are no statistics on that, and yet it is the one phase of the question which interests us. Some weeks ago we ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... possible for all capacities. It was a general form of fine needlework, happily available to women of the farmhouse, as well as of the mansion, and its exceeding precision and beauty gave a character to the purely utilitarian stitchery of the day which has made a high standard for succeeding generations. The hemstitched ruffles of shirts, the stitched plaits of simpler ones, the buttonholed triangles at the intersection of seams—all ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler |
