"Unscientific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made fortunes in a few years and learned to imitate the life of the old southern manor houses. Forests were cleared away in winter by the sturdy hands of slaves, and new fields were opened to cotton culture each spring to supply the places of those that had been rapidly worn down by unscientific methods of agriculture. The cabins which made the homes of well-to-do men in the Jeffersonian epoch gave way to substantial frame houses with massive columns and wide verandas, with great hallways and broad banquet-rooms, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... under 70 are sometimes labeled "feeble-minded", and the others, in order, "borderline", "low normal", "average" (from 90 to 110), "superior", "very superior", "exceedingly superior"; but this is arbitrary and really unscientific, for what the facts show is not a separation into classes, but a continuous gradation from one extreme to the other. The lower extreme is near zero, and the upper extreme thus far ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... prescribed bleeding for every ailment, and of keepers of asylums whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a strait waistcoat. Modern science laughs to scorn these simple "remedies" of an unscientific age, and declares that they were, in most cases, the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure. But in social maladies we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the strait ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... concerning God and man are to be unhesitatingly accepted as statements made upon the authority of God. They turn to its pages, and they find historical errors, arithmetical mistakes, scientific blunders (or, rather, blunders most unscientific), inconsistencies, and manifold contradictions; and, what is far worse, they find that the most horrible crimes are committed by men who calmly plead in justification of their terrible misdeeds the imperturbable "God said." The heart and conscience of man indignantly ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... they often have to pay a heavy price, but which always instil an element of romance into their lives. This, of course, is the merest sketch, for no real study of the people can be attempted in a work written on such unscientific lines as the present, and the reader—supposing such a problematical person to exist—must form his own picture of my Malay friends from the stories which I shall have to tell in future pages. It is only too probable that I shall fail to give any real idea of the people of whom I write, to ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... teachers is that their doctrine contains the explanation of the traditional precept, "Support the tone." Their idea is that the throat, being "firmly set," furnishes a secure base for the tone to rest on. This explanation is of course utterly unscientific, and it cannot be said to throw any light on the meaning of the precept. "Singing on the breath" is also referred to this system of breath-control, but with no more coherence than the ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... Chipmunk's head been very firmly secured to his shoulders, he would have succeeded. Chipmunk went down as if he had been bombed. It was his unguarded and unscientific rush that did it. Doggie regarded his prostrate figure ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... friable, and not very fertile, except for oil and indigo seeds, which grow most luxuriantly wherever the forest land has been cleared. In the shallow valleys which lie between the ridges rice is chiefly cultivated, and gives large returns. The sal forests have been sadly thinned by unscientific and indiscriminate cutting, and very few fine trees now remain. The earth is teeming with insects, chief amongst which are the dreaded and destructive white ants. The high pointed nests of these destructive insects, formed of hardened mud, are ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the continual cackling in the treetops as "a very social sound;" and upon my saying something about a sewing circle, he answered, quite seriously, "No, it is rather like a gentleman's club." But it would have been unscientific, as well as unchristian, to entertain an hypothesis like this without putting its soundness to some kind of test. I adopted the only plan that occurred to me,—short of rising at half past two o'clock in the morning to see the birds disperse. ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... the philosophy of history according to Carlyle, "that only succeeds which is based on divine truth, and permanent success therefore proves the right, as the effect proves the cause." Darwin, having met Carlyle, notes that "in his eyes might was right," and adds that he had a narrow and unscientific mind; but Mr. Goldwin Smith discovers the same lesson: "History, of itself, if observed as science observes the facts of the physical world, can scarcely give man any principle or any object of allegiance, unless it be success." Dr. Martineau attributes this doctrine to Mill: "Do we ask ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and whether their preservation will result in a distinct racial culture, is precisely what a successful consummation of the Zionist object will prove or disprove with finality; and until such consummation, even scientific theorizing on the subject will expose itself to the unscientific process of working without the check of laboratory experiment. To the scientist, Zionism offers Palestine as such a laboratory. The religious opposition offered by Reform Judaism has been previously discussed; however, it may be summed up in three statements. An appeal to the implied meaning of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... that I am absolutely certain How and When to Be Your Own Doctor will be recognized as Truth by some of my readers and rejected as unscientific, unsubstantiated, or anecdotal information by others. I accept this limitation on my ability to teach. If what you read in the following pages seems True for you, great! If it doesn't, there is little or nothing I ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... Some time had passed since he became aware that the Colonel had somehow insinuated himself into that list of friends which had halted so long at Tim and Murphy Queed. Besides, he had a genuine, unscientific desire to see what a real club looked like inside. So far, his knowledge of clubs was absolutely confined to the Mercury Athletic Association, B. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... not sufficient for establishing the present theory, to refute that most unscientific hypothesis, adopted by some eminent philosophers, of mountains and valleys being the effect of currents in the ocean; it is necessary to see what is their proper cause, and to show that by no other cause known could the general effect, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... into the subject. And the cause of the distinctions in the qualities of different teas, as of black and green, are still matters of uncertainty and controversy among many dealers of teas, as well as among unscientific travelers and some untraveled scientists. The enthusiastic collector of writings upon tea by self qualified experts, will find himself involved in a maze of contradictory assertions and opinions from which there is no escape save by the exercise of judicial ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... composition of such masterpieces as Shakspere's could possibly concern himself at the same time with weaving into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, the cipher systems are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, applied to any writings whatever can be made to 'prove' anything that one likes, and indeed have been discredited in the hands of their own inventors by being made to 'prove' far too much. Third, it has been demonstrated more than once that the verbal coincidences on which ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... laugh Mr. Washington handed the old man the dollar and drove on. He never could be made to feel that by these spontaneous generosities he was encouraging thriftlessness and mendicancy. He was incorrigible in his unscientific open-handedness with the poor, begging older members ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal. This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning and preserving that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get the seal's skull, and with two of my cousins promptly ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... may be introduced into the stream of inheritance. So far, this difficulty has not been overcome, and the present verdict of science is that the transmission of characters acquired as the result of other than congenital factors is not proved. It would be unscientific to say that it cannot be proved in the future, but there are good a priori grounds for disbelief in the principle, while furthermore the results of experiments that have been undertaken to test its truth have been entirely negative. Rats and mice have had their tails cut off ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... here is the Celtic, the essential part of the poem: it is here that the 'formative pressure' has been really in operation; and here surely is paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian priest of the thirteenth century can have had nothing to do with. It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr. Nash does. Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known without this part; and the true critic is he ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... the general tendency of the profession has been to depreciate the importance of personal and municipal cleanliness, and to inculcate a reliance on drug medicines, vaccination, and other unscientific expedients." ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... are passages where it means rain. There are passages where Parganya takes the place which elsewhere is filled by Dyaus, the sky, or by Indra, the active god of the atmosphere. This may seem very wrong and very unscientific to the scientific mythologist. But it cannot be helped. It is the nature of ancient thought and ancient language to be unscientific, and we must learn to master it as well as we can, instead of finding fault with it, and complaining that ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... sister's bed-clothes flew off, and settled down in a remote corner. At Jennie's screams, the family rushed in, and found Esther "fearfully swollen". Mrs. Teed replaced the bed-clothes, which flew off again, the pillow striking John Teed in the face. Mr. Teed then left the room, observing, in a somewhat unscientific spirit, that "he had had enough of it". The others, with a kindness which did them credit, sat on the edges of the bed, and repressed the desire of the sheets and blankets to fly away. The bed, however, sent ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... glorious morning; one of those mild, mellow days of the late autumn, when unscientific people wag their heads and proclaim that the climate is changing. There was scarcely a breath of wind, and the landscape toward which our steady nag trotted sturdily wore a faint atmosphere of saffron haze, as though the sunlight had ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... sceptical age, of making ethics and religion so reasonable as to command the continued allegiance of reasonable minds. Unphilosophized science conceives the universe as nothing but a Machine-World; and in this conception there is no room for any Ethical Ideal. Unscientific philosophy conceives the universe as nothing but a Thought-World; and in this conception there is no room for any Mechanical Real. On the possibility of developing a scientific philosophy out of the scientific method itself must depend at last the only possibility, ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be — as it has always been — either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and is either life or ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... especial property of true love is a certain harmony, which brings it about that the more one gives, the more the other receives, and vice-versa, as in certain cases in mathematics, where things are multiplied by themselves without end. This problem can only be explained to unscientific people, by asking them to look into their Venetian glasses, in which are to be seen thousands of faces produced by one alone. Thus, in the heart of two lovers, the roses of pleasure multiply within them in a manner which causes them to be astonished ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... have combined to reduce its accessibility from the ocean. The effect of such isolation is ignorance, superstition, and the early crystallization of thought and custom. Ignorance involves the lack of material for comparison, hence a restriction of the higher reasoning processes, and an unscientific attitude of mind which gives imagination free play. In contrast, the accessibility of Greece and its focal location in the ancient world made it an intellectual clearing-house for the eastern Mediterranean. The general information gathered there afforded material for wide comparison. It fed ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... radical in cutting out everything that in any way recalled the misleading notions. In the end, we had to go through a stage of psychology without a "soul," and lately even a psychology without "consciousness," so that we might be safe from unscientific pretensions. All the gyrations no doubt tended to retard the wholesome practical attack upon the problems in the form in which we find them in our ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... and expressions, peculiar pitches of the voice, styles of address, forms of salutations, and special ways of performing certain kinds of work, tell their tale with an emphasis that makes itself understood even to the unscientific observer. The expression of the face and the very ring of the laugh often impressed me with the truth that it was that of a cousin's brother or sister. I often expressed my surprise at these things to those around me, and ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... nation than an army, were swept out of existence. The Teutons were destroyed on the 20th of July, 102. In the year following, the same fate overtook their comrades. The Cimbri had forced the passes through the mountains. They had beaten the unscientific patrician Catulus, and had driven him back on the Po. But Marius came to his rescue. The Cimbri were cut to pieces near Mantua, in the summer of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... you will get the thought into your mind that our present penal system is Silurian and unscientific—the same to-day as it was 10,000 years ago—you will see my stand-point. Our penitentiaries develop criminals, they make criminals out of men who are not criminals to begin with—boys, for instance. They debase and ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 'Not so, unscientific! It is the grandfather of hills,—a fossil bone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England was. And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his "Continental Sketches," found ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... fewer examples. I repeat it; there is scarcely such a thing to be found as a single individual man; a few classes compose the whole frame of society, and when you know one of a class you know the whole of it. Give me the wild man of the woods; the original, unthinking, unscientific, unlogical savage: in him there is at least some good; but, in a civilised, sophisticated, cold-blooded, mechanical, calculating slave of Mammon and the world, there is none—absolutely none. Sir, if I fall into a river, an unsophisticated man will jump ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... much even to his wife about his discovery. He brooded upon it in a curious way. He found that these unscientific singing lessons stimulated him in his own study. After Miss Kronborg left him he often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his brain which he had ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became, by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had arrived at nearly the same point by such a very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... scheme for the renovation of the social order so silly that educated men will not invest their money in it. There is no medical fraud so shameless that educated men will not give it their certificate. There is no nonsense so unscientific that men called educated will not accept it ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... unscientific—call them by what names you will—yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland—a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... would not be so unscientific as to deny for a moment that it would be better for every woman to get her advice and instruction concerning the use of contraceptive directly from a doctor, nevertheless it is impossible to overestimate the help men and women could give each other were the free exchange of ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of the sentence, thereby, according to Roman ecclesiastical law, making Galileo's compulsory denial of the earth's motion binding on all Christians as a theological doctrine. Infidels have a vast deal to say about such an abominable manifestation of ecclesiastic tyranny and unscientific and unscriptural nonsense. All intelligent Roman Catholics of to-day reject the judgment of Popes Paul IV. and Urban VIII. as absurd, and scientifically and scripturally false. There is not so much as a hint at papal authority found in the three old creeds known as the Apostles', the Nicene and ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... not make us any more content with his method. To turn from Rashi to a more general consideration of the Midrashic exegesis, we also understand its long continuance, though we do not deprecate it less, because it is unscientific and irrational. ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they arrived at by this process, by means ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... to arrange laws and adjust life on the assumption that business men will be bad if they can, it seems to some of us, are inefficient and unscientific. It seems to us that they are off on the main and controlling facts in American human nature. It is not true that American business men will be bad if they can. They will be good ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... chamois leather bag, which he emptied on the table before them. It contained a small fragment of native rock crystal, half-fused upon a petrified bit of pine. It was so glaringly truthful, so really what it purported to be, that the most unscientific woodman or pioneer would have understood it at a glance. Lance raised ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... obliquity of the ecliptic, probably learned in Egypt, and the identity of the morning and evening stars. It is supposed that he maintained that the sun was the centre of the universe, and that the earth revolved around it. But this he did not demonstrate, and his whole system was unscientific, assuming certain arbitrary principles, from which he reasoned deductively. "He assumed that fire is more worthy than earth; that the more worthy place must be given to the more worthy; that the extremity is more worthy than the intermediate parts; and hence, as the centre is an extremity, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... embittered hostility of capitalist States; it is not worth while to adopt Bolshevik methods unless they can lead to good in spite of this hostility. To say that capitalists are wicked and we have no responsibility for their acts is unscientific; it is, in particular, contrary to the Marxian doctrine of economic determinism. The evils produced in Russia by the enmity of the Entente are therefore to be reckoned as essential in the Bolshevik method of transition to Communism, not as specially ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... reasoning. He saw that it was necessary to prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible. But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given precisely the same conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... sake of convenience an attempt is made to classify the authorities used in writing this volume under different heads; the plan adopted is unscientific, and books noted under one head belong partly to others, but it has, perhaps, the one merit of clearness. The editions quoted here are those which have ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... reasons, scientific and unscientific, much had been made of the hiatus between man and the rest of the higher mammalia, and it is no wonder that issue was first joined on this part of the controversy. I have no wish to revive past and happily forgotten controversies; ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... week I suffered as already described, though of course with gradually decreasing intensity as my racked body became accustomed to the unnatural positions it was forced to take. This first experience occurred on the night of October 18th, 1902. I was subjected to the same unfair, unnecessary, and unscientific ordeal for twenty-one consecutive nights and parts of each of the corresponding twenty-one days. On more than one occasion, indeed, the attendant placed me in the strait-jacket during the day for refusing to obey some trivial command. ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... we went along in a humdrum way on that level, or even sank back till another great man was vouchsafed to us. Possibly the finest flower of this school of thought is Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. Unscientific as this theory was, it had its beneficent effects, for those heroes or great men served as ideals, and the human mind requires an unattainable ideal. No man can be or do the best he is capable of unless he is ever ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... troops, which, so far as can be ascertained, were made by the direct orders of Colonel Durnford, must be attributed the terrible disaster that followed. There are two ways of fighting a savage or undisciplined enemy; the scientific way, such as is taught in staff colleges, and the unscientific way that is to be learned in the sterner school of experience. We English were not the first white men who had to deal with the rush of the Zulu impis. The Boers had encountered them before, at the battle of the Blood River, and armed only with muzzle-loading 'roers,' or elephant guns, despite ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... diagrams, to an audience of about twenty people! The rest were all away after Prince Albert, who had been unfortunately induced to visit the meeting, and fairly turned the heads of the good people of Ipswich. On Saturday a very pleasant excursion on scientific pretences, but in fact a most jolly and unscientific picnic, took place. Several hundred people went down the Orwell in a steamer. The majority returned, but I and two others, considering Sunday in Ipswich an impossibility, stopped at a little seaside village, Felixstowe, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... eccentricities of opinion quite distinct from the general temper of the English nation, such as that of the ultra-scientific school, which thinks it unscientific philanthropy to ascribe the attributes of humanity to the negro,—a school some of the more rampant absurdities of which had, just before I left England, called down the rebuke of real science in the person of Mr. Huxley. And I might note, if the time would allow, many fluctuations and oscillations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Faraday at the Royal Institution; wrote on electricity, sound, light, and heat, as well as on the "Structure and Motion of the Glaciers," in opposition to Forbes, whose theory was defended in strong terms by Ruskin; wrote also "Lectures on Science for Unscientific People," much praised ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... if you and I can ever stay on the same side of the Atlantic long enough, we will join hands and do the work. In fact, I have begun already with Paul's Epistles, and am fascinated with the work. The untenable and unscientific positions he takes in regard to women are very amusing. Although the first chapter of Genesis teaches the simultaneous creation of man and woman, Paul bases woman's subjection on the priority of man, and because woman was of the man. As the historical ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to attract the attention of heathen writers; it became an object of literary attack. The principal literary opponent of Christianity was Celsus, who subjected the Christian traditions and customs to a searching criticism to prove that they were absurd, unscientific, and false. Lucian of Samosata, does not seem to have attacked Christianity from any philosophical or religious interest, but treated it as an object of derision, making sport of it. There were also in circulation innumerable ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... much for me as for any one else. Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Socialists is based—the doctrines which are constantly asserted and which are the fundamental dogmas of the Socialist faith—will enable us to obtain a clear view of the foundations upon which the theoretic fabric of Socialism is built, and to judge whether that foundation is scientific and sound, or unscientific and unsound. ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist," Martin said with a smile. "Because I question Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I who am its ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... converted into a brake or drag with the inevitable result that the speed undergoes a severe diminution. A full-rigged airship such as the Parseval, for instance, may present a picturesque appearance, but it is severely unscientific, inasmuch as if it were possible to eliminateor to reduce the air-resistance offered by the ropes, the speed efficiency might be raised by some sixty per cent and that without any augmentation of the propelling effort. As a matter of fact Zeppelin solved ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... truth much perturbed. It was not pleasing to have the greatness of his idol explained on unscientific principles. He did not like that idea of the jumps. Jumping sounded unscientific, and what could be worse than to say of a man that he was not scientific? Preposterous to say the greatest things of science were achieved by ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... especially, the great majority of the members of the anthropological societies took up an attitude of hostility to him from the very beginning of the controversy in 1860. The Descent of Man was not merely rejected, but even the discussion of it was forbidden on the ground that it was "unscientific." ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... waters is thus rendered valueless. Now with respect to this whole chapter, we must remember always that it is intended for the instruction of all mankind, not for the learned reader only; and that therefore the most simple and natural interpretation is the likeliest in general to be the true one. An unscientific reader knows little about the manner in which the volume of the atmosphere surrounds the earth; but I imagine that he could hardly glance at the sky when rain was falling in the distance, and see the level line of the bases of the clouds from which the shower descended, without being ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... this is no piece for discussions of taste, and I am very ready to own, that mine may be corrupted. The work of Grotius is liable to a more serious objection, though I do not recollect that it has ever been made. His method is inconvenient and unscientific. He has inverted the natural order. That natural order undoubtedly dictates, that we should first search for the original principles of the science, in human nature; then apply them to the regulation of the conduct of individuals; ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... especially to be considered the habit of personification implied in our English rhymes. Of late, the doctrine which perceives in myth a symbolic expression of the forces of nature has fallen into comparative discredit, a contempt explicable in view of the unscientific manner in which "sun-myths" have been exploited; our English sayings, therefore, are to be received as a welcome demonstration that one must not proceed too far in his attitude of doubt. If the popular mind, to-day, and ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... the exercise of the organs. The development of the individual must be completed before the procreative power can properly be exercised for the continuance of the race." And in the following extract from his "Principles of Human Physiology," he confirms my statement respecting the unscientific and libertine advice of too many physicians: "The author would say to those of his younger readers who urge the wants of nature as an excuse for the illicit gratification of the sexual passions, 'try the effects ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... had placed him in the horrifying predicament in which he now found himself—with the corpse of what was apparently a human being in his workshop and no available explanation that could possibly be acceptable to a matter-of-fact and unscientific police. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... circumstances, my surprise may be imagined, when I found, that the mere statement of facts and of views, long familiar to me as part of the common scientific property of continental workers, raised a sort of storm in this country, not only by exciting the wrath of unscientific persons whose pet prejudices they seemed to touch, but by giving rise to quite superfluous explosions on the part of some who ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... or fantastic in trying to ascertain the tendencies of economic development; nothing unscientific in trying to read out of the pages of social evolution such lessons as may be contained therein. So long as we bear in mind that our forecasts must not take the form of plans for the arbitrary shaping of ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... creation joined in their first choral symphony. We have seen how the mechanism of the artificial organ takes on the likeness of life; we shall attempt to describe the living organ in common language by the aid of such images as our ordinary dwellings furnish us. The unscientific reader need not take notice of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... mainland also—another part of the same continent. That was the truth—Paria was the mainland—and if he had not been so bemused by his dreams and theories he might have had some inkling of the real wonder and significance of his discovery. But no; in his profoundly unscientific mind there was little of that patience which holds men back from theorising and keeps them ready to receive the truth. He was patient enough in doing, but in thinking he was not patient at all. No sooner had he observed a fact than he must find ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... they were fighting hard, blow succeeding blow in the most unscientific way; but the end was not to be then, for Andrew ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... may get rich—he has nothing at stake. In most instances he has the price of the land in his pocket before there is a lick of work done on it, and the payments come in regularly and promptly to take care of his salary and the meager and unscientific development. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... necessities of the Empire. And this was but one instance of many which have shown that, while industrial development in the Allied countries is still largely a squabbling confusion of little short-sighted, unscientific, private profit-seeking owners, in Germany it has been for some years increasingly run on far-seeing collectivist lines. Against the comparatively little and mutually jealous British or American capitalists and millionaires Germany pits itself as a single ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... to human nature, no matter how fantastic or unscientific, have exerted, nevertheless, a far-reaching influence upon group action. Periods of social revolution are ushered in by theorists who perceive only the evil in institutions and the good in human nature. On the other hand, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... unscientific Vigorsian and other systems, founded on external characteristics—being decided on, the style of mounting of the specimens had to be settled. The "peg" system was to be discarded; but here occurred the most serious hitch ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the race as trivial, the natural sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... serve to call the attention of unscientific people to scientific facts, and teach them to observe the wonders of the universe, it really seems a shame that such marvels should be used as bogies to ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 60, December 30, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Huggeritgi, others on the hill of Yemmee Gooda, others again near Shapoor, Hyderabad, and other places. All these monuments in the South of India are no doubt extremely interesting; but to call them Celtic, Druidical, or Scythic, is unscientific, or, at all events, exceedingly premature. There is in all architectural monuments a natural or rational, and a conventional, or, it may be, irrational element. A striking agreement in purely conventional features may justify the assumption that monuments so far distant from each ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people—about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Cheve and other advocates of reform in musical notation declare that the people are deprived of this grand source of culture because of the blind, inconsistent and wholly unscientific nature of the ordinary musical notation. At first this seems incredible, but one has only to compare this notation with that elaborated by Emile Cheve after Galin's theory to become convinced that the statement is true. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... children by making them perform uninteresting, quantitative experiments in an effort to get a result that will tally with that given in the textbook is so palpably unfounded that it is scarcely necessary to prove its failure by pointing to the very unscientific product of most of ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... they gave me a distinct thrill. I could hardly believe my eyes and thought of mirages; for those pointed, isolated peaks rise precipitously from the floor of the Sacramento valley; in fact, their bases are only a mile or two from the river. They have every indication, even to the unscientific eye, of having been upheaved by volcanic action. Perhaps that accounts for the ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... believe it is printed in New York. The reverend gentleman who began the discussion to-night started into this subject very much like a coon, and as we listened, as he went on, we perceived he came out a porcupine. He was scientific in everything he said in favor of the press; unscientific in everything against it. He spoke to you in favor of the suppression of news, which means, I take it, the dissemination of crime. He spoke to you in favor of the suppression of sewer-gas. Chicago to-day owes its good health to the fact that we do discuss sewer-gas. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... critics have no greater rights or privileges of criticism than any member of the public. It is therefore very important to all of us to know how the matter stands, and since the judgment of the Master of the Rolls is rather technical, it seems worth while briefly to state the law in unscientific phrases. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... collective, and other perplexing instances are tortured into cases of thought-transfer with an ingenuity which we should smile at in a mediaeval scholastic explaining the universe by the four elements and the four temperaments. But is not thought-transference itself lamentably unscientific? No; because we see that unconnected magnets affect one another sympathetically; and the brain being a sort of magnet may well affect distant brains. Thought is a kind of electricity, and electricity, if not exactly a fluid, yet may some day be liquefied and bottled. At all events, science has ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... and antiquated ideas to which he has been long and persistently educated, or to protect those who have ceased to believe in them from the pitfalls to which, as an alternative, they may be exposed amongst the numberless unscientific, quasi-miraculous, healing cults, or the equally pernicious nostrums of the spectacular advertising medicine vendor, both of whom reap golden harvests among the ranks of the so justly disappointed ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... insolvency. Indeed a general liquidation is already impossible. He is no alarmist who counsels a timely and rational remedy as not only demanded by justice, but as anticipatory of violent readjustment. Under such disquieting conditions is it not as criminal as it is unscientific for men to go about prating of the system that has occasioned these things as "honest money," and "sound money," and denouncing its opponents ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... Such unscientific and unwarranted teaching has been handed down from mother to daughter through the ages, while the poor, misguided souls of expectant women have suffered untold remorse, heaped blame upon themselves, lived lives literally cursed with fear and dread—veritable ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... means for the purposes mentioned, gas is comparatively untried. This assertion may sound somewhat astounding; but I think it is a true one. More than that, even in the crude and unscientific way in which it has most frequently been used up to the present, it has been far from unsuccessful in comparison with electricity or other means of lighting; and in the future it will prove the best and cheapest practical means, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... the battle in a very unscientific way. Of course he came out of the fray with a bleeding face and torn clothes. There was no one near to pity him, and he could only wash his face and hope that the rents would escape Aunt Annie's notice ...
— A Little Hero • Mrs. H. Musgrave
... introducing any reference to God into scientific works. Science consists in tracing known effects to their true causes. If there were no God, He could not be a true cause and it would be unscientific to introduce His agency. But if there is a God and He acts in the world which He has made, we must take His actions into account when we study His works. Some say, "I do not believe in a God." That may be, but that does not prove that there is ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... viperous? . . . The Catholic Church, at least, so teaches. . . . She believes in the corruption of human nature. She believes in the literal meaning of Scripture. She has no wish to paraphrase away St. Paul's awful words, that "in his flesh dwelleth no good thing," by the unscientific euphemisms of "fallen nature" or "corrupt humanity." The boasted discovery of phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and passion reside in this material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been anticipated by her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... the technical facts of natural history. It was necessary to disregard most of the problematical elements of the doctrine so as to bring out only the basic and thoroughly substantiated principles of evolution. The course was, in a word, a simple message to the unscientific; and while it may seem at first that the discussions of the latter chapters lead to somewhat insecure positions, it should be remembered that their purpose was to bring forward the proof that even the so-called ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... beholding one's image reflected in a liquid mirror whose geographical position is not yet stereotyped on the charts of man. Alas for these maps and charts! Despite the wishes of scientific geographers and the ignorance of unscientific explorers, we think them far too complete already; and we can conceive few things more dreadful or crushing to the enterprising and romantic spirits of the world than the arrival of that time (if it ever shall arrive) when it shall be said that terra incognita ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... implies a perfectly tenable proposition, a proposition which has been maintained by nearly all religious bodies in the world's history in their non-latitudinarian stages. To distinguish the self-regarding from the other parts of conduct, strikes them not only as unscientific, but as morally and socially mischievous. They insist that there is a social as well as a personal element in every human act, though in very different proportions. There is no gain, they contend, and there may be much ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... this new 'portrait parle' fresh from Paris and London, invented by Bertillon and all that sort of thing - it has gone to pieces, too. It's a fine case, this is, with nothing left of either scientific or unscientific criminal-catching to rely on. There - what ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... that such a system of chronology is cumbrous, uncertain, and utterly unscientific, I can only say that I entirely agree with him, and that the system is worthy of the perverted ingenuity which produced the Nones and Ides of ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... out maps," said Morgan, "and my dowser went over them—not with a hazel twig, but something equally unscientific—his instinct—and he assured me that the cruiser was under water five miles north-north-east magnetic from Cape Farnell. The map said the depth there was fifty fathoms. Then my paranoid Talent observed that there'd be spies on shore ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... up to twenty-five years ago, most of us never had any license, really, to be born at all. Yet look how many of us are now here. In this age of research I hesitate to attempt to account for it, except on the entirely unscientific theory that what you don't know doesn't hurt you. Doubtless a physician could give you a better explanation, but his would cost you more ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... in his excellent dictionary (note 103) which modern priggism finds "unscientific " wonderfully derives this word from Arab. "Khattaf," a snatcher (i.e. of women), a ravisher. It is an evident corruption of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... seized upon every distinct idea that the ardent and somewhat dogmatic old man left exposed to his mental grasp, with the vain hope of inducing a logical discussion, in which he might bring his battery of syllogisms to annihilate the unscientific defences of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that the end of the State is to protect the personal liberty of the individual and his property. This is the doctrine put forth by the scientific spokesmen of the bourgeoisie. This is the doctrine of its political leaders, of liberalism. But this theory is in a high degree inadequate, unscientific, and at variance with the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will be as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves and sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growth that really gave Mr. ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... another biologist, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, equally opposed to war, cannot feel certain that the total effect of even a great modern war is to deteriorate the stock, while in Germany, as we know, it is the generally current opinion, scientific and unscientific, equally among philosophers, militarists, and journalists, that not only is war "a biological necessity," but that it is peace, and not war, which effeminates and degenerates a nation. In Germany, indeed, this doctrine is so generally accepted that ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... believed, for instance, in a certain specific psychology of the animal mind, and had proven to his own satisfaction that animals treated and conversed with in a matter-of-fact human way frequently developed an understanding which he, in his unscientific way, ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... turnip-fields, house-parties, and a whole system of British commonplace. Yet, when, the next day at luncheon, I again had him before me in the flesh, my interest revived. Its lapse had been due to an association of ideas which I now recognised as unscientific. A baronet with twenty places in Hampshire would remain at the end of them all a human being; and no human being could be finished off in a formula of half a dozen words. Sir Richard Maistre, anyhow, couldn't be. He was enigmatic, and his effect upon me ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... etheric or vital body, he reaches the point at which he is bound to encounter the opposition of many contemporary opinions. The development of the human mind has been such that the mention of such a principle of human nature is necessarily looked upon as unscientific. The materialistic way of thinking has arrived at the conclusion that there is nothing to be seen in a living body but a combination of physical substances and forces such as are also found in the so-called inanimate body of the mineral, the only difference being that they are more complicated in ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... and German was accepted as expressive of the "highest," whatever departed from it was frowned upon as a shortcoming or was at best an interesting aberration.[93] Now any classification that starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific. A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zooelogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow. Language in its ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... step in the scientific solution of the problem of life, and the progressive and continuous evolution of the human soul. To use the term "Science" (as applied to the study of psychology) in any other way, is pure empiricism, is wholly unscientific, and has never yet resulted in anything but confusion and in laying a foundation for belief, conjecture, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... the banks of the Tigris, this platform now stands some distance E. of the river. Here Layard conducted excavations from 1845 to 1847, and again from 1849 to 1851. The means at his disposal were inadequate, his excavations were incomplete and also unscientific in that his prime object was the discovery of inscriptions and museum objects; but he was wonderfully successful in achieving the results at which he aimed, and the numerous statues, monuments, inscribed stones, bronze objects and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of today "whenever he is tempted to be selfish half remembers Smith and self-interest. Whenever he would harden his heart against a beggar, he half remembers Malthus and a book about population; whenever he has scruples about crushing a rival he half remembers Darwin and his scruples become unscientific." Because none of these theories were in their own day seen as heresies and denounced as heresies they have lived on vaguely to poison the atmosphere and the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... said, "religion has frequently led to the stake, and I never heard the Spanish Inquisition called healthy for anybody taking part in it. Still, religion flourishes. But your old-fashioned, unscientific, gilt, gingerbread idea of heaven blew up ten years ago—went out. My heaven's just coming in. It's new. Dr. Funk and a lot of clergymen are in already. You'd better get used to it, Batholommey, and join in ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... and negative character. The so-called "scientific" socialism had, therefore, a peculiarly unscientific spirit; for, in a modern sense, science implies a patient search for truth, not a sudden revelation; a constant testing of opinions by observation and experiment, not a dogmatic conviction that refuses the test of reality. "Scientific" ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter |
