The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler: Life and habit

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J. Cape, 1923
 

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Seite 179 - ... nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive.
Seite 33 - ... sufficient for thee." Whereon, failing of the thing itself, he stole the word and strove to crush its meaning to the measure of his own limitations. But the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and wine — the true grace he drove out into the wilderness — high up, it may be, into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her in her ill report.
Seite 155 - Actions, sensations, and states of feeling, occurring together or in close succession, tend to grow together or cohere in such a way that when any one of them is afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be brought up in idea.
Seite 238 - As physicians have always their instruments and knives ready for cases which suddenly require . their skill, so do thou have principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the smallest, with a recollection of the bond which unites the divine and human to one another. For neither wilt thou do anything well which pertains to man without at the same time having a reference to things divine ; nor the contrary.
Seite 109 - It has, I believe, been often remarked, that a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Seite 55 - Yet this is exactly what these little "jelly-specks" do on a most minute scale; the "tests "they construct, when highly magnified, bearing comparison with the most skilful masonry of Man. From the same sandy bottom, one species picks up the coarser quartz-grains, cements them together with phosphate of iron secreted from its own substance, and thus constructs a flask-shaped "test" having a short neck and a single large orifice.
Seite 155 - The possibility of all education (of which military drill is only one particular form) is based upon the existence of this power which the nervous system possesses, of organizing conscious actions into more or less unconscious, or reflex, operations. It may be laid down as a rule, that if any two mental states be called up together, or in succession, with due frequency and vividness, the subsequent production of the one of them will suffice to call up the other, and that whether we desire it or not.
Seite 224 - ... species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which justly excites our admiration.
Seite 43 - His past selves are living in him at this moment with the accumulated life of centuries. 'Do this, this, this, which we too have done, and found our profit in it,' cry the souls of his forefathers within him. Faint are the far ones, coming and going as the sound of bells wafted on to a high mountain ; loud a'nd clear are the near ones, urgent as an alarm of fire.
Seite 42 - That we are most conscious of, and have most control over , such habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences, which are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely human. II. That we are less conscious of, and have less control over , eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing, which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves...

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