Natural Causation: An Essay in Four Parts

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Unwin, 1888 - Causation - 198 pages

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Page 110 - And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Page 98 - It were better for, him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
Page 77 - Examine your words well and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
Page 40 - Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots ? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.
Page 62 - But our deeds are like children that are born to us ; they live and act apart from our own will Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never : they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness ; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for the first time.
Page 61 - I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds— such as mate men infamous.
Page 14 - Matter' of which we have been discoursing, who or what divided it into molecules, who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running into organic forms, he has no answer. Science is mute in reply to these questions.
Page 38 - It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations ; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good...
Page 61 - Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly seems a reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of selfconquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.
Page 62 - There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason — that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right.

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