text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/135

Rh hiding-place; if he could discover it he might know how to act,

Saul, heavily breathing, had sunk back onhisseat. Now and then he looked at his mother reverently. It seemed to him almost a miracle, that the mute centenarian should have roused herself in order to defend her great grand-child; perheps he felt grateful that she had stayed his hand from violence towards his orphaned grandson.

"Rafael!" he called out, after a while,

AX tall, graybaired man came into the room; he was the eldest, had already grandsons and was at the head of a large business. As soon as he heard his father’s voice, he left his occupation and interrupted the conference with his brother.

"Is Eli Witebeki at home?” asked Sanl.

"He came back from « long journey yesterday, and is resting at home,” answered the son.

"Let somebody go to him at once and tell him to come here, as I have some business to talk over with him."

"I will go myself," said Rafael; "I know what you Want from him, and it ought to he attended to at once. Meir will be in a bad way if he does not marry soon and 3@ up in business for himself."

Sanl looked at his son with troubled eyes.

"Do you think, Rafsel, that marriage will change him?"

Rafael nodded.

"No doubt it will, Remember Ber; he was going on in the same way so Meir, but when he married our sister Sara, and you, father, gave him a share in the husiness,


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/21

 another source. The conclusion that I draw is that sense-perception, for ail its practical importance, is very superficial in its disclosure of the nature of things. This conclusion is supported by the chatacter of delusiveness — that is, of illusion — which persistently clings to sense-perception. For example, our perception of stars which years ago may have vanished, our perceptions of images in mirrors or by refraction, our doubie vision, our visions under the influence of drugs. My quarrel with modern epistemology concerns its exclusive stress upor sense-perception for the provision of data respecting Nature. Sense-perception does not provide the data in terins of which we interpret it.

This conclusion that pute sense-perception does not provide the data for its own interpretation was the great discovery embodied in Hume’s philosophy. This discovery is the reason why Hume’s treatise

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/21


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/164


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/163


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/391

 soul to save his life, and there is in this a difference. I have never been able to get up any respectful enthusiasm for the so-called philanthropist, so that I have to speak of him with calm care; not as I have spoken of the missionary, feeling he was a person I could not really harm by criticising his methods.

It is, however, nowadays hopeless to attempt to separate these two species, distinct as I believe them to be; and they together undoubtedly constitute what is called the Mission party not only in England but in Germany. I believe this alliance has done immense harm to the true missionary, for to it I trace that tendency to harp upon horrors and general sensationalism which so sharply differentiates the modern from the classic missionary reports. Take up that noble story of Dennis de Carli and Michael Angelo of Gattina, and read it through, and then turn on to wise, clear-headed Merolla da Sorrento, and read him; you find there no sensationalism. Now and again, when deeply tried, they will say, "These people live after a beastly manner, and converse freely with the Devil," but you soon find them saying, "Among these people there are some excellent customs," and they give you full details of them, with evident satisfaction. You see it did not fundamentally matter to these early missionaries whether their prospective converts "had excellent customs" or "lived after a beastly manner," from a religious standpoint. Not one atom—they were the sort of men who would have gone for Plato, Socrates, and all the Classics gaily, holding that they were not Christians as they ought to be; but this never caused them to paint a distorted portrait of the African. This thing, I believe, the modern philanthropist has induced the modern missionary only too frequently to do, and the

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/391


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/22

 will rernain as the irrefutable basis for all subsequent philosophic thought.

Another item in the common-sense doctrine concerns empty space and locomotion. In the first place, the transmission of light and sound shows that space apparently empty is the theatre of activities which we do not directly perceive. This conclusion was explained by the supposition of types of subtle matter, namely, the ether, which we cannot directly perceive. In the second place, this conclusion, and the obvious behaviour of gross ordinary matter, show us that the motions of matter are in some way conditioned by the spatial relations of material bodies to each other. It was here that Newton supplied the great synthesis npon which science was based for more than two centuries. Newton’s laws of motion provided a skeleton framewotk within which more particular laws for the interconnection of bodily motions could be inserted. He also

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/22


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/23

 supplied one example of such a particular law in his great law of gravitation, which depended upon mutual distances.

Newton’s methodology for physics was an overwhelming success. But the forces which he introduced left Nature still without meaning or value. intheessence ofamaterial body — in its mass, motion, and shape — there was no reason for the law of gravitation, Even if the particular forces could be conceived as the accidents of a cosmic epoch, there was no reason in the Newtonian concepts of mass and motion why material bodies should be connected by any stress between therm. Yet the notion of stresses, as essential connections between bodies, was a fundamental factor in the Newtonian concept of Nature, What Newton ieft for empirical investigation was the determination of the particular stresses now existing, In this determination he made a magnificent beginning by isolating the stresses indicated

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/23


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/165

Rh prised at it. You are an educated man, with all the advantages of learning and I—I am only a common Jew, who knows the Bible and Talmud, but nothing else; but I have many thoughts; they are all dim and undefined; perhaps you will help me to clear them up."

Leopold listened to this humble youthful speech with an ironical smile.

"If I can help you in any way, Mr. Meir, I shall be glad.”

"Leopold! do not call me mister. It hurts me, because IT like you very much.”

Leopold looked with astonished eyes at the young man.

"I am much obliged," he said; "but we scarcely know each other."

"That is nothing," said Meir. "I have longed to meet an Israelite like you, that I might say, as Rabbi Eliezer said to the sage of Jerusalem, Let me be your disciple, and be you my teacher."

The young worldling looked with open-eyed astonishment and a sarcastic smile at Meir, who seemed to him as unintelligible as an untrained savage.

Meir, carried away by his enthusiasm, did not notice this.

"Leopold," he began, "how long did you study at the foreign schools?"

"What do you mean by foreign schools?” asked Leopold.

"Why! the schools where they teach things not Jewish."

Leopold understood. He half shut his eyes and looked supercilious.


text:
Page:JOSA-Vol 06-06.djvu/38

 wave radiations compared with the latter, which is responsible for the blue color of the sky. Direct sunlight, moreover, varies in the form of its distribution curve with the time of the day and year, and with latitude on the earth’s surface. Different again, is the distribution which accompanies an overcast sky. (', 37 39; ')

It is necessary therefore to adopt as a standard an average curve, representing the conditions most frequently encountered.

6. Spectral Energy Distributions of Natural and Artificial Sunlight

(The solid line represents the distribution of average noon sunlight, while the broken line is that of Priest's precision artificial sunlight.)

Such an average, for noon sunlight at Washington, D. C., is given in and the solid line in. It is the mean of forty determinations, half of which were made at the summer solstice (June 21) and the other half at the winter solstice (December 21), both high and low atmospheric transmissions being included. The authority is of the. Average noon sunlight, thus defined, corresponds roughly to a black body temperature of 5000°K. the distribution not being strictly Planckian.

title: Page:JOSA-Vol 06-06.djvu/38


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/24

 by his law of gravitation. But he left no hint why, in the nature of things, there should be any stresses at all. The arbitrary motions of the bodies were thus explained by the arbitrary stresses between material bodies, conjoined with their spatiality, their mass, and their initial states of motion. By introducing stresses — in particular the law of gravitation — instead of the welter of detailed transformations of motion, he greatly increased the systematic aspect of Nature. But he left all the factors of the system — more particularly, mass and stress — in the position of detached facts devoid of any season for their compresence. He thus illustrated a great philosophic truth, that a dead Nature can give no reasons. All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead Nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value.

Thus, for Newtonians, Nature yielded no

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/24


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/242

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/242


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/25

 reasons: it could yield no seasons. Combining Newton and Hume we obtain a barren concept, namely, a field of perception devoid of any date forits own interpretation, and a system of interpretation devoid of any reason for the concurrence of its factors. It is this situation that modern philosophy from Kant onward has in its vatiows ways sought to render intelligible. My own belief is that this situation is a reductio ad absurdum, and should not be accepted as the basis for philosophic speculation. Kant was the frst philosopher who in this way combined Newton and Hume. He accepted them both, and his three critiques were his endeavour to render intelligible this Hume-Newton situation. But the Hume-Newton situation is the primary presupposition for all modern philosophic thought. Any endeavour to go behind it is, in philosophic discussion, almost angrily rejected as unintelligible.

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/25


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/158


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/157


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/19

, many years after its original publication, Balzac reprinted Les Chouans as a part of the Comédie Humaine, he spoke of it in the dedication to his old friend M. Théodore Dablin as "perhaps better than its reputation." He probably referred to the long time which had passed without a fresh demand for it; for, as has been pointed out in the General Introduction to this Series of translations, it first made his fame, and with it he first emerged from the purgatory of anonymous hack-writing. It would therefore have argued a little ingratitude in him had he shown himself dissatisfied with the original reception. The book, however, has, it may be allowed, never ranked among the special favorites of Balzacians; and though it was considerably altered and improved from its first form, it has certain defects which are not likely to escape any reader. In it Balzac was still trying the adventure-novel, the novel of incident; and though he here substitutes a nobler model—Scott, for whom he always had a reverence as intelligent as it was generous—for the Radcliffian or Lewisian ideals of his nonage, he was still not quite at home. Some direct personal knowledge or experience of the matters he wrote about was always more or less necessary to him; and the enthusiasm with which he afterwards acknowledged, in a letter to Beyle, the presence of such knowledge in that writer's military passages, confesses his own sense of inferiority.

It is not, however, in the actual fighting scenes, though


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/243

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/243


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/55

 extension of observation waits upon some dim apprebension of reasonable connection. For example, the observation of insects on flowers dimly suggests some congruity between the natures of insects and of flowers, and thus leads to a wealth of observation from which whole branches of science have developed. But a consistent posittvist should be content with the observed facts — namely, insects visiting flowers. It is a fact of charming simplicity. There is nothing further to be said upon the matter, according to the doctrine of a positivist. At present the scientific world is suffering from a bad attack of muddle-headed positivism, which arbitrarily applies its doctrine and arbitrarily escapes from it. The whole doctrine of life in Nature has suffered from this positivist taint. We are told that there is the routine described in physical and chemical formulae, and that in the process of Nature there is nothing else.

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/55


text:
Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/74

Y, HOW I used to lie awake nights, staring into the darkness of the attic, wishing we hadn't done it!

By staring a long time with eyes stretched wide, I could see the rafters; and hanging to the rafters near the little partition that turned part of the attic into a room, were his pants—brown-striped they showed the day-light—and his white shirt.

There was quite a while before I would admit that we had done it. I kept my mind resolutely bent on believing we hadn't, until by reviewing the circumstantial evidence over and over again I could see no loophole. And when his brother-in-law was reported to have been in the neighborhood asking others about him, and never came near us, I knew it was no use to deny it if any one should accuse us. Yet it would be unfair to confess without the consent of the others involved in the killing.

So I held my peace. With the exception, of course, of the one night at the supper when I blurted out a dead and oppressive silence, "I wish we hadn't killed Thompson."

Every one stopped eating and looked wildly at me. They had not expected me to say this, evidently.

Mother asked harshly: "What do you mean?"

I got up and left the table hurriedly. I hadn't meant to say it. It was unfair to the others.

HOMPSON had come to our house to board. It was spring-time. He was a timber-looker for a spoke and rim company of Portsmouth. People sent him to our house because sometimes we took folks in. We were reputed to have good food, and our little frame home was one of the best in a poverty-ridden vicinity.

Not so much of a home it would appear now. There was a combination of kitchen-dining-room, with an old stove in one corner, the stairway to the attic in the corner nearest to the stove, the gun hanging over the doorway leading to the living room where the big fireplace was, and an out-of-doors door leading to the back porch where the morning wood was piled in the winter. Off from that back porch opened the little room where the boys of the family sometimes slept. Always one or two of us slept there. Then leading back form the living room was the parlor, and back of that the spare bedroom.

On the wall of the living room hung a chromo entitled "Rock of Ages." It consisted of a large lady draped in a single garment, reaching up with bare arms and clinging to a great stone cross on a wave-washed rock 73


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/159

Rh all ages followed in their wake; their low exclamations increasing gradually to shouts and noise undescribable.

Some grown-up people swelled their ranks, whilst the more respectable families looked at the show from their porches. At the school door, stood the melamed in his usual garment and etared with wide-open eyes at the unusual sight, Leopold in his fashionable dress and cigarette between his lips, and Mera in her showy dreas, bridling on his arm to show off her superior breeding were the cynosure of all eyes.

"See! see! the pretty young lady, the handsome gentleman," shouted the children.

“Who are they? Surely not Israelites," said some of the elder people, pointing st Leopold’s cigarette.

"Misnagdin!” (sinner) suddenly somebody yelled in the crowd, and a small stone whizzed past Leopold’s head. The young man changed color and threw the offensive cigarette away. Eli frowned. Mistress Hana drew her- self up and said aloud to her sister,—

"We must make allowances for them, they are only low people." Leopold did not look as if he were inclined to make any allowances; his eyes still looked frightened ant his lips were pressed close together when they entered into Exofovitoh’s sitting-room.

There, in place of honor, eat old Saul surrounded by his numerous family. Near one of the windows sat the great grandmother, Meir stood leaning against the other. When the visitors entered the room, be only glanced at Mera, she did not interest him in the least, but his longing eyes tested upon Leopold. Him he wished to see end sped


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/244

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/244


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/56

 The origin of this persuasion is the dualism which gradualiy developed in European thought in respect to mind and Nature. At the beginning of the modern period Descartes expresses this dualism with the utmost distinctness. For him, there are material substances with spatial relations, and mental substances. The mental substances are external to the material substances. Neither type requires the other type for the completion of its essence. Their unexplained interrelations are unnecessary for their respective existences. In truth, this formulation of the problem in terms of minds and matter is unfortunate. It omits the lower forms of life, such as vegetation and the lower animal types. These forms touch upon human mentality at their highest, and upon inorganic Nature at their lowest.

The effect of this share division between Nature and life has poisoned all subsequent philosophy. Even when the co-ordinate

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/56


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/245

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/245


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/57

 existence of the two types of actualities is abandoned, there is no proper fusion of the two in most modern schools of thought. For some, Nature is mere appearance and mind is the sole reality. For others, physical Nature is the sole reauty and mind is an epiphenomenon. Here the phrases “mere appearance” and “epiphenomenon” obviously carry the implication of slight importance for the understanding of the final nature of things.

The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical Nature nor life can be undesstood unless we fuse thern together as essential factoss in the comsposition of “really real” things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.

The first step in the argument must be to form some concept of what life can mean. Also, we require that the deficiencies in our concept of physical Nature should be supplied by its fusion with life. And we require

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/57


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/209


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/210


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/58

 that, on the other hand, the notion of life should involve the notion of physical Natute.

Now as a first approximation the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment. This must mean a certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of Nature. Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process of appropriation. I have, in my recent writings, used the word “prehension” to express this process of appropriation, Also, I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an “occasion of experience”. I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging into the creative advance.

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/58


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/59

 But these are forward references to the issue of the argument. As a first approximation we have conceived life as implying absolute, individual self-enjoyment of a process of appropriation. The data appropriated are provided by the antecedent functioning of the universe. Thus, the occasion of experience is absolute in respect to its immediate self-enjoyment. How it deals with its data is to be understood without reference to any other concurrent occasions. Thus, the occasion, in reference to its internal process, requires no contemporary process in order to exist. ln fact this mutual independence in the internal process of self-adjustment is the definition of contemporaneousness.

This concept of self-enjoyment does not exhaust that aspect of process here termed “life”. Process for its intelligibility involves the notion of a cteative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion. It is

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/59


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/211

Rh "But I want to know what Reb Jankiel and his inn- keepers are going to do with the casks," persisted Meir.

"It does not concern you," whispered Jochel, "let neither your eyes see, nor your ears hear what Reb Jankiel is doing. He is engaged in a big business, you will only hinder him. Why should you stand in his way? What do you gain by it? beside, what can you do against him?"

Meir remained silent, and turned into another direction.

"What can I do?" he whispered to himself, with quiver- ing lips.

Passing near Abel Karaim's hut he saw Golda still standing at the window. He nodded to her.

"Sleep in peace."

But she called out to him,—

"Meir, here is a child sitting on the floor asleep."

He came nearer, and saw, close to the bench where he had been sitting, the crouching figure of a child.

"Leibele!" he said, wonderingly. He had not seen the lad, who had quietly followed him, and sat down close to him."

"Leibele!" repeated Meir, and put his hand upon the child's head. He opened a pair of half -unconscious eyes and smiled.

"Why did you come here," asked Meir, smilingly.

The child seemed to collect his thoughts, then answered, —

"I followed you."

"Father and mother will not know what has become of you."

"Father sleeps, and mother sleeps," began Leibele rocking his head,—and the goats are sleeping," he added after


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/60

 the process of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealized potentialities. The process of self-creation is the transformation of the potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes the immediacy of self-enjoyment.

Thus, in conceiving the function of life in an occasion of experience, we must discriminate the actualized data presented by the antecedent world, the non-actualized potentialities which lie ready to promote their fusion into a new unity of experience, and the immediacy of self-enjoyment which belongs to the creative fusion of those data with those potentialities. This is the doctrine of the creative advance whereby it belongs to the essence of the universe, that it passes into a future. It is nonsense to conceive of Nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no Na-

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/60


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/26

 My aim in these lectures is briefly to point out how both Newton’s contribution and Hume’s contribution are, each in their way, gravely defective. They ate right as far as they go. But they omit these aspects of the universe as experienced, and of our modes of experiencing, which jointly lead to the more penetrating ways of understanding. In the recent situations at Washington, D.C., the Hume-Newton modes of thought can only discern a complex transition of sensa, and an entangled locomotion of molecules, while the deepest intuition of the whole world discerns the President of the United States inaugurating a new chapter in the history of mankind. In such ways the Hume-Newton interpretation omits our intuitive modes of understanding.

I now pass on to the influence of modern science in, discrediting the remaining items of the primary common-sense notion with which science in the sixteenth century started

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/26


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/246

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/246


text:
Module:Proofreadpage index template/config/sandbox

local c = {}

c["defaults"] = { Source = '_empty_', Progress = '_default', Transclusion = 'no' }

c["headings"] = { title = { txt = 'Title', },	progress = { txt = 'Progress', },	OCLC = { txt = 'OCLC', },   transclusion = { txt = 'Transclusion', },   validation_date = { txt = 'Validated in', },   source = { txt = 'Source' },   place = { txt = 'Location' },   year = { txt = 'Year' },   publisher = { txt = 'Publisher' },   author = { txt = 'Author' },   editor = { txt = 'Editor' },   translator = { txt = 'Translator' },   illustrator = { txt = 'Illustrator' },   DOI = { txt = 'DOI' },   volumes = { txt = 'Volumes' } }

c["status"] = { T = { cat = 'Index Validated', txt = 'Done—All pages of the work proper are validated', },	V = { cat = 'Index Proofread', txt = 'Proofread—All pages of the work proper are proofread, but not all are validated', },	C = { cat = 'Index Not-Proofread', txt = 'To be proofread', },	MS = { cat = 'Index - Ready for Match and Split', txt = 'Ready for Match and Split', },	OCR = { cat = 'Index - Text Layer Requested', txt = 'Source file needs an OCR text layer', },	L = { cat = 'Index - File to fix', txt = 'Source file must be fixed before proofreading', error = true, },	X = { cat = 'Index - File to check', txt = 'Create a pagelist for the source file before commencing proofreading (to verify file is correct)', error = true },	_default = { cat = 'Index - Unknown progress', txt = 'Unknown progress (template error)', error = true, } }

c["transclusion"] = { yes = { cat = 'Fully transcluded', txt = 'Fully transcluded', help = 'The work is fully transcluded, including front and end matter and images' },	notimg = { cat = 'Images not fully transcluded', txt = 'Images not fully transcluded', help = 'The work is fully transcluded, but that some images are still missing or need improvement', },	notadv = { cat = 'Advertising not transcluded', txt = 'Advertising not transcluded', help = 'The main body of the work is properly transcluded, though front- or end-matter advertising material is not' },	held = { cat = 'Transclusion on hold', txt = 'Transclusion on hold', help = 'There is a problem with transcluding the work (which should be explained on the talk page)' },	check = { cat = 'Transclusion check required', txt = 'Transclusion check required', help = ' The transclusion of the work is incomplete or needs checking' },	no = { cat = 'Index not transcluded', txt = 'Index not transcluded or unreviewed', help = ' This work is not transcluded or has not been reviewed for transclusion' } }

local lang_code = 'en' local pagenamee = mw.title.getCurrentTitle:partialUrl

c["indicators"] = { pagegame = { name = 'WS Page Game', image = 'File:OOjs UI icon page number.svg', link = mw.title.new('toolforge:ws-page-game'):fullUrl({wikisource = lang_code, lang = lang_code, index = pagenamee}), caption = 'Wikisource Page Game (step-by-step pagelist builder)' },	purge = { name = 'purge file', image = 'File:OOjs UI icon reload.svg', link = mw.title.new('commons:File:' .. mw.title.getCurrentTitle.text):fullUrl({action = 'purge'}), caption = 'Purge file' },	book2scroll = { name = 'book2scroll', image = 'File:Library-logo-blue-outline.png', link = mw.title.new('toolforge:book2scroll'):fullUrl({wikisource = lang_code, lang = lang_code, index = pagenamee}), caption = 'Open in Book2Scroll' },	bookreader = { name = 'bookreader', image = 'File:BookReader-favicon.svg', link = mw.title.new('toolforge:bookreader/' .. lang_code .. '/' .. pagenamee):fullUrl, caption = 'Open file in BookReader' } }

c["url_prefixes"] = { OCLC = 'https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/', ARK = 'https://n2t.net/', DOI = 'https://doi.org/' }

return c


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/27

 its career. But in the present-day reconstruction of physics fragments of the Newtonian concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modern physics to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe. This chant has the exact merits of the old magic ceremonies which flourished in ancient Mesopotamia and later in Europe. One of the earliest fragments of writing which has survived is a report from a Babylonian astrologer to the king, stating the favourable days to turn cattle into the fields, as deduced by his observations of the stars. This mystic relation of observation, theory, and practice is exactly the present position of science in modern life, according to the prevalent scientific philosophy.

The notion of empty space, the mere vehicle of spatial interconnections, has been eliminated from recent science. The whole spatial universe is a feld of force — or, in other words, a field of incessant activity.

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/27


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/247

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/247


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/28

 The mathematical formulae of physics express the mathematical relations realized in this activity.

The unexpected result has been the elimination of bits of matter as the self-identical supports for physical properties. At first, throughout the nineteenth century, the notion of matter was extended. The empty space was conceived as filled with ether. This ether was nothing else than the ordinary matter of the original common-sense notion. It had the properties of a jelly, with its continuity, its cohesion, its flexibility, and its inertia. The ordinary matter of common sense then merely represented certain exceptional entanglements in the ether — that is to say, knots in the ether. These entanglements, which are relatively infrequent throughout space, impose stresses and strains throughout the whole of the jelly-like ether. Also, the agitations of ordinary matter are transmitted through the ether as

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/28


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/392

 other regrettable element which has induced him to do it has been the apathy of the English public, a public which unless it were stirred up by horrors would not subscribe. Again the blame is with England at home, but the harm done is paid for in West Africa. The portrait painted of the African by the majority, not all, but the majority of West African mission reports, has been that of a child, naturally innocent, led away and cheated by white traders and grievously oppressed by his own rulers. I grant you, the African taken as a whole is the gentlest kind of real human being that is made. I do not however class him with races who carry gentleness to a morbid extent, and for governmental purposes you must not with any race rely on their main characteristic alone; for example, Englishmen are honest, yet still we require the police force.

The evil worked by what we must call the missionary party is almost incalculable; from it has arisen the estrangement of English interests, as represented by our reason for adding West Africa to our Empire at all—the trader—and the English Government as represented by the Crown Colony system; and it has also led to our present policy of destroying powerful native States and the power of the African ruling classes at large. Secondarily it is the cause of our wars in West Africa. That this has not been and is not the desire of the mission party it is needless to say; that the blame is directly due to the Crown Colony system it is as needless to remark; for any reasonable system of its age would long ere now have known the African at first hand, not as it knows him, and knows him only, at its head-quarters, London, from second-hand vitiated reports. It has, nowadays, at its service the common sense and humane opinions of the English trade lords as represented by the

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/392


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/223


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/248

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/248


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/224


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/29

 agitations of the stresses and strains. In this way an immense unification was effected of the various doctrines of light, heat, electricity, and energy, which now coalesced into the one science of the ether. The theory was gradualiy elaborated throughout the nineteenth century by a brilliant group of physicists and mathematicians, French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, British, Italian, American. The details of their work, and the relative contributions of various individuals, are not to the point here.

The final result is that the activities of the ether are very different from any of the modes of activity which the common-sense analysis ascribes to ordinary matter. If the doctrine of ether be correct, then our ordinary notions of matter are derived from observations of certain average results which cloak the real nature oftheactivities of ether. The more recent revolution which has culminated in the physics of the present day has

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/29


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/20

x they are not of the first class, that the drawbacks of Les Chouans lie. Though the present version is not my work, I translated the book some years ago, a process which brings out much more vividly than mere reading the want of art which distinguishes the management of the story. There are in it the materials of a really first-rate romance. The opening skirmish, the hairbreadth escape of Montauran at Alençon, the scenes at the Vivetière, not a few of the incidents of the attack on Fougères, and, above all, the finale, are, or at least might have been made, of the most thrilling interest. Nor are they by any means ill supported by the characters. Hulot is one of the best of Balzac's grognard heroes; Montauran may be admitted by the most faithful and jealous devotee of Scott to be a jeune premier who unites all the qualifications of his part with a freedom from the flatness which not unfrequently characterizes Sir Walter's own good young men, and which drew from Mr. Thackeray the equivocal encomium that he should like to be mother-in-law to several of them. Marche-à-Terre is very nearly a masterpiece; and many of the minor personages are excellent for their work. Only Corentin (who, by the way, appears frequently in other books later) is perhaps below what he ought to be. But the women make up for him. Mademoiselle de Verneuil has admirable piquancy and charm; Madame du Gua is a good bad heroine; and Francine is not a mere soubrette of the machine-made pattern by any means.

How is it, then, that the effect of the book is, as many readers unquestionably feel it to be, "heavy"? The answer is not very difficult; it is simply that Balzac had not yet learned his trade, and that this particular trade was not exactly his. He had a certain precedent in some—not in all, nor in the


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/393

 Chambers of Commerce of Liverpool and Manchester; but though just at present it listens to what they say—thanks to Mr. Chamberlain—yet it cannot act on their statements, but only querulously says, "Your information does not agree with our information." Allah forbid that the information of the party with whom I have had the honour to be classed should agree with that sort of information from other sources; and I would naturally desire the rulers of West Africa to recognise the benefit they now enjoy of having information of a brand that has not led to such a thing as the Sierre Leone outbreak for example, and to remember in this instance that six months before the hut tax there was put on, the Chambers had strongly advised the Government against it, and had received in reply the answer that "The Secretary of State sees no reason to suppose that the hut tax will be oppressive, or that it will be less easy to collect in Sierra Leone than in Gambia." Why, you could not get a prophetic almanac into a second issue if it were not based on truer knowledge than that which made it possible for such a thing to be said. Nevertheless, no doubt this remarkable sentence was written believing the same to be true, and confiding in the information in the hands of the Colonial Office from the official and philanthropic sources in which the Office believes.

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/393


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/225

Rh entered into the next, where Jochel stood near the stove staring absently at his bare toes.

Jankiel sent a malediction after the retreating figure. The two others were silent.

"Why did you bring us in such an unsafe place?" asked at last Kalman, in his even voice.

"Why did you not warn us that somebody might hear from the other side of the wall?" said Abram impetuously. Jankiel explained that it was his son's room who did not know anything about business and never paid the slightest attention to what was going on around him.

"How would I know that cursed lad was there; he must have entered like a thief, through the window. Well!" he said, after a while, "what does it matter if he heard? He is an Israelite, one of us, and dare not betray his own people."

"He may dare," repeated Kalman, "but we will keep an eye upon him, and if he as much as breathes a syllable of what he heard we will crush him."

Abram rose.

"You may do what you like," he said impulsively. "I wash my hands of the whole business."

Jankiel eyed him with a malicious expression."

"Very well," he said, "in that case, there will be all the more for us two. Those who risk will get the money." Abram sat down again. His nervous face betrayed the inward struggle. Jankiel, who had a piece of chalk in his hand, began writing on a black tablet,—

"Eight thousand gallons of spirit at four roubles the gallon makes thirty-two thousand roubles. These divided


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/249

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/249


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/30

 only carried one step farther this trend of nineteenth-century science. Its moral is the extreme superficiality of the broad generalizations which mankind acquires on the basis of sense-perception. The continuous effort to understand the world has carried us far away from all those obvious ideas. Matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer activity; the passive substratum composed of self-identical enduring bits of matter has been abandoned, so far as concerns any fundamentai description. Obviously this notion expresses an important derivative fact. But it has ceased to be the presupposed basis of theory. The modern point of view is expressed in terms of energy, activity, and the vibratory differentiations of space-time. Any local agitation shakes the whele universe. The distant effects are minute, but they are there. The concept of matter presupposed simple location. Each bit of matter was self-contained, localized in

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/30


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/232


text:
Page:Self-help with illustrations of conduct and perseverance (IA selfhelpwithillu00smiliala).pdf/404

 walk of industry, whether it be in tilling the ground, making tools, weaving fabrics, or selling the products behind a counter. A youth may handle a yard-stick, or measure a piece of ribbon; and there will be no discredit in doing so, unless he allows his mind to have no higher range than the stick and ribbon; to be as short as the one, and as narrow as the other. "Let not those blush who have," said Fuller, "but those who have not a lawful calling." And Bishop Hall said, "Sweet is the destiny of all trades, whether of the brow or of the mind." Men who have raised themselves from a humble calling need not be ashamed, but rather ought to be proud of the difficulties they have surmounted. An American President, when asked what was his coat-of-arms, remembering that he had been a hewer of wood in his youth, replied, "A pair of shirt sleeves." A French doctor once taunted Flechier, Bishop of Nismes, who had been a tallow-chandler in his youth, with the meanness of his origin, to which Flechier replied, "If you had been born in the same condition that I was, you would still have been but a maker of candles."

Nothing is more common than energy in money-making, quite independent of any higher object than its accumulation. A man who devotes himself to this pursuit, body and soul, can scarcely fail to become rich. Very little brains will do; spend less than you earn; add guinea to guinea; scrape and save; and the pile of gold will gradually rise. Osterwald, the Parisian banker, began life a poor man. He was accustomed every evening to drink a pint of beer for supper at a tavern which he visited, during which he collected and pocketed all the corks that he could lay his hands on. In


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/31

 a region with a passive, static network of spatial relations, entwined in a uniform relational system from infinity to infinity and from eternity to eternity. But in the modern concept the group of agitations which we term matter is fused into its environment. There is no possibility of a detached, self-contained local existence. The environment enters into the nature of each thing. Some elements in the nature of a complete set of agitations may remain stable as those agitations are propelled through a changing environment. But such stability is only the case in a general, average way. This average. fact is the reason why we find the same chair, the same rock, and the same planet, enduring for days, or for centuries, of for millions of years. In this average fact, the time-factor takes the aspect of endurance, and change is a detail. The fundamental fact, according to the physics of the present day, is that the environment with its peculiatities seeps into

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/31


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/250

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/250


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/231


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/394

attempted to explain the internal evils or what one might call the domestic rows of the Crown colony system, I will pass on to the external evils—which although in a measure consequent on the internal are not entirely so, and this point cannot be too clearly borne in mind. Tinker it up as you may, the system will remain one pre-eminently unsuited for the administration of West Africa.

You might arrange that officials working under it should be treated better than the official now is, and the West African service be brought into line in honour with the Indian, and afford a man a good sound career. You might arrange for the Chambers of Commerce, representing the commercial factor, to have a place in Colonial Office councils. But if you did these things the Crown colony system would still remain unsuited to West Africa, because it is a system intrinsically too expensive in men and money, so that the more you develop it the more expensive it becomes. Concerning this system as applied to the West Indies a West Indian authority the other day said it was putting an elephant to draw a goat chaise;

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/394


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/32

 the group-agitation which we term matter, and the group-agitations extend their character to the environment. In truth, the notion of the self-contained particle of matter, self-sufficient within its local habitation, is an abstraction. Now an abstraction is nothing else than the omission of part of the truth. The abstraction is well founded when the conclusions drawn from it are not vitiated by the omitted truth.

This general deduction from the modern doctrine of physics vitiates many conclusions drawn from the applications of physics to other sciences, such as physiology, or even such as physics itself. For example, when geneticists conceive genes as the determinants of heredity. The analogy of the old concept of matter sometimes leads them to ignore the influence of the particular animal body in which they are functioning. They presuppose that a pellet of matter remains in all respects self-identical whatever

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/32


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/251

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/251


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/21

Rh best—of Scott's books, and in many of his other models, for setting slowly to work; and he abused that precedent here in the most merciless manner. If two-thirds of the first chapter had been cut away, and the early part of the second had been not less courageously thinned, the book would probably have twice the hold that it at present has on the imagination. As it is, I have known some readers (and I have no doubt that they are fairly representative) who honestly avowed themselves to be "choked off" by the endless vacillations and conversations of Hulot at the "Pilgrim," by the superabundant talk at the inn, and generally by the very fault which, as I have elsewhere noticed, Balzac represents in a brother novelist, the fault of giving the reader no definite grasp of story. Balzac could not deny himself the luxury of long conversations; but he never had, and at this time had less than at any other, the art which Dumas possessed in perfection—the art of making the conversation tell the story. Until, therefore, the talk between the two lovers on the way to the Vivetière, the action is so obscure, so broken by description and chat, and so little relieved, except in the actual skirmish and wherever Marche-a-Terre appears, by real business, that it cannot but be felt as fatiguing. It can only be promised that if the reader will bear up or skip intelligently till this point he will not be likely to find any fault with the book afterwards. The jour sans lendemain is admirable almost throughout.

This unfortunate effect is considerably assisted by the working of one of Balzac's numerous and curious crochets. Those who have only a slight acquaintance with the Comédie Humaine must have noticed that chapter-divisions are for the most part wanting in it, or are so few and of such enor-


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/33

 be its changes of environment. So far as modern physics is concerned, such characteristics may, or may not, effect changes in the genes, changes which are important in certain respects, though not in others. Thus, no a priori argument as to the inheritance of characters can be drawn from the mere doctrine of genes. In fact, recently, physiologists have found that genes are modified in some respects by their environment. The presuppositions of the old common-sense view survive, even when the view itself has been abandoned as a fundamental description.

This survival of fragments of older doctrines is also exemplified in the modern use of the term space-time. The nation of space with its geometry is strictly co-ordinated to the notion of material bodies with simple location in space. A bit of matter is then conceived as self-sufficient with the simple location of the region which it occupies. It

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/33


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/233

Rh "How can you know all thia? Howean you understand these things? I do not believe you.”

"How do I know and understand it. Zeide, I have been brought up in your house, where many people come to see you; Jewa and Christians, merchants and lords, rich and poor. They talked with you and I listened. Why should I not understand?" Saul was silent, and his troubled countenance betrayed many conflicting thoughts. A sudden anger toward the grandson stirred his blood.

Your spirit is full of restlessness, and yon carry trouble with you wherever you go. I felt so happy to-day until my eye fell upon you and black care entered with yon into the room."
 * © You understand too much! you are too inquisitive.

Meir hung his head.

"Zeide," he said sadly, "why do you reproach me? It is not about my own affairs I came to you."

"And what right have you to meddle with affairs that are net your own?" said Saul, with hesitation in his voice.

"They are our own, zeide. Kemionker is an Israelite, and as such ought not to cast a slur on our race; besides, they are our own, still more because your eon, zeide, Abram belongs to it."

"My son Abram?"

Saul rose suddenly from the sofa and fell back again. Then he fixed his penetrating eyes upon Meir.

"Are you speaking the truth?” he asked, sternly.

"I have seen and heard it all myself," whispered Meir.

Saul remained thinking a long time.

"Well," he said, slowly, "you have the right to accuse


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/248


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/34

 is just there, in that region where it is; and it can be described without reference to the goings on in any other region of space. The empty space is the substratum for the passive geometrical relationships between material bodies. These relationships are bare, static facts and carry no consequences which are essentially necessary. For example, Newton’s law of gravitation expresses the changes of locomotion which are associated with the spatial relations of material bodies with each other. But this law of gravitation does not result from the Newtonian notion of mass combined with the notion of the occupancy of space, together with the Euclidean geometry. None of these notions either singly or in combination give the slightest warrant for the law of gravitation. Neither Archimedes, nor Galileo, by puzzling over theses notions, could have derived any suggestion for the gravitational law. According to the doctrine, space was the

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/34


text:
Page:Self-help with illustrations of conduct and perseverance (IA selfhelpwithillu00smiliala).pdf/405

 eight years he had collected as many corks as sold for eight louis d'ors. With that sum he laid the foundations of his fortune—gained mostly by stock-jobbing; leaving at his death some three millions of francs. John Foster has cited a striking illustration of what this kind of determination will do in money-making. A young man who ran through his patrimony, spending it in profligacy, was at length reduced to utter want and despair. He rushed out of his house intending to put an end to his life, and stopped on arriving at an eminence overlooking what were once his estates. He sat down, ruminated for a time, and rose with the determination that he would recover them. He returned to the streets, saw a load of coals which had been shot out of a cart on to the pavement before a house, offered to carry them in, and was employed. He thus earned a few pence, requested some meat and drink as a gratuity, which was given him, and the pennies were laid by. Pursuing this menial labour, he earned and saved more pennies; accumulated sufficient to enable him to purchase some cattle, the value of which he understood, and these he sold to advantage. He proceeded by degrees to undertake larger transactions, until at length he became rich. The result was, that he more than recovered his possessions, and died an inveterate miser. When he was buried, mere earth went to earth. With a nobler spirit, the same determination might have enabled such a man to be a benefactor to others as well as to himself. But the life and its end in this case were alike sordid.

To provide for others and for our own comfort and independence in old age, is honourable, and


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/247


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/395

 concerning the West African application of it, I should say it was trying to open a tin case with a tortoise-shell paper knife. Of course you will say I am no authority, and you must choose between those who will tell you that only a little patience is required and the result of the present governmental system in West Africa will blossom into philanthropic and financial successes, and me who say it cannot do so but must result in making West Africa a debt-ridden curse to England. All I can say for myself is that I am animated by no dislike to any set of men and without one farthing's financial interest in West Africa. It would not affect my income if you were to put 100 per cent. ad valorem duty on every trade article in use on the Coast and flood the Coast with officials, paid as men should be paid who have to go there, namely, at least three times more than they are at present. My dislike to the present state of affairs is solely a dislike to seeing my country, to my mind, make a fool of herself, wasting men's lives in the process and deluding herself with the idea that the performance will repay her.

Personally, I cannot avoid thinking that before you cast yourself in a whole-souled way into developing anything you should have a knowledge of the nature of the thing as it is on scientific lines. Education and development unless backed by this knowledge are liable to be thrown away, or to produce results you have no use for. I remember a distressing case that occurred in West Africa and supports my opinion. A valued friend of mine, a seaman of great knowledge and experience, yet lacking in that critical spirit which inquires into the nature of things before proceeding with them, confident alone in the rectitude of his own intentions, bought a canary bird at a Canary Island. He knew that the men

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/395


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/35

 substratum for the great all-pervading passive relationship of the natural world. It conditioned all the active relationships, but it did not necessitate them.

The new view is entirely different. The fundamental concepts are activity and process. Nature is divisible and thus extensive. But any division, including some activities ang excluding others, also severs the patterns of process which extend beyond all boundaries. The mathematical formulae indicate a logical completeness about such patterns, a completeness which boundaries destroy. For example, half a wave tells only half the story. The notion of self-sufficient isolation is not exemplified in modern physics. There are no essentially self-contained activities within limited regions. These passive geometrical relationships between substrata passively occupying regions have passed out of the picture, Nature is a theatre for the inteteelations of activities.

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/35


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/22

xii mous length, that they are rather parts than chapters. It must not, however, be supposed that this was an original peculiarity of the author's, or one founded on any principle. Usually, though not invariably, the original editions of his longer novels, and even of his shorter tales, are divided into chapters, with or without headings, like those of other and ordinary mortals. But when he came to codify and arrange the Comédie, he, for some reason which I do not remember to have seen explained anywhere in his letters, struck out these divisions, or most of them, and left the books solid, or merely broken up into a few parts. Thus Le Dernier Chouan (the original book) had thirty-two chapters, though it had no chapter-headings, while the remodeled work as here given has only three, the first containing nearly a fifth, the second nearly two-fifths, and the third not much less than a half of the whole work.

Now, everybody who has attended to the matter must see that this absence of chapters is a great addition of heaviness in the case where a book is exposed to the charge of being heavy. The named chapters of Dumas supply something like an argument of the whole book; and even the unnamed ones of Scott lighten, punctuate, and relieve the course of the story. It may well be that Balzac's sense that "the story" with him was not the first, or anything like the first consideration, had something to do with his innovation. But I do not think it improved his books at any time, and in the more romantic class of them it is a distinct disadvantage.

Le Dernier Chouan ou La Bretagne en 1800 first appeared in March 1829, published in four volumes by Canel, with a preface (afterwards suppressed) bearing date the 15th Janu-


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/249

Rh flitted to and fro bargaining with the peasants. In this hubbub of voices in midst of bargaining and quarrels mixed with the shrill voices of women and squalling children sounded the quavering voice of the old Abel unweariedly at his task of reciting. The surging elements around did not distract him, on the contrary they seemed to stimulate him as his voice sounded louder and more distinct.

"When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, a great light shone from his face and the people fell down on their faces and called out as in one voice: Moses repeat to us the words of the Eternal. And a great calm came upon the earth and the heavens. They grew silent, the lightning ceased, and the wind fell: And Moses called the seventy elders of Israel and when they surrounded him, as the stars surround the moon, he repeated to them the words of the Eternal."

At this moment, two grave men, poorly dressed, came from the crowd and passed close by him.

"He is reciting again," said one.

"He always does," said the other.

They smiled, but did not go further. An old woman and some younger people joined them. The woman stood listening and asked,—

"What is it he is telling?"

"The history and the covenant of the Israelites," plied Golda.

The young people opened their mouths, the woman drew nearer, the men smiled, but all stood still and listened.

"When the people heard the commandments of the Lord, they called out as in one voice, We will do all that


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/36

 All things change, the activities and their interrelations. To this new concept, the notion of space with its passive, systematic, geometric relationship is entirely inappropriate. The fashionable notion that the new physics has reduced all physical laws to the statement of geometrical relations is quite ridiculous. It has done the opposite. In the place of the Aristotelian notion of the procession of forms, it has substituted the notion of the forms of process. It has thus swept away space and matter, and has substituted the study of the internal relations within a complex state of activity. This complex state is in one sense a uhity. There is the whole universe of physical action extending to the remotest star cluster. In another sense, it is divisible into parts. We can trace interrelations within a selected group of activities, and ignore all other activities. By such an abstraction we shall fail to explain those intemal activities which are affected

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/36


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/260


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/396

 who sell canaries down there are up to the sample description of deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. So he brought to bear upon the transaction a deal of subtlety, but neglected fundamental facts, whereby his triumph at having, on the whole, done the canary seller brown by getting him to take in part value for the bird a box of German colonial-grown cigars, was vanity. For weeks that gallant seaman rubbed a wet cork up and down an empty whisky bottle within the hearing of the bird, which is the proper thing to do providing things are all right in themselves, and yet nothing beyond genial twitterings rewarded his exertions. So he rubbed on for another week with even greater feeling and persuasive power, and then, to drop a veil upon this tragedy of lost endeavour, that canary laid an egg. Now, if that man had only attended to the nature of things and seen whether it were a cock or hen bird, he would not have been subjected to this grievous disappointment. Similarly, it seems to me, we are, from the governmental point of view, like that sea captain-swimming about in the West African affair with a lot of subtle details, in an atmosphere of good intentions, but not in touch with important facts; we are acting logically from faulty premises.

Now, let us grant that the Crown Colony system is not fully developed in West Africa, for if it were, you may say, it would work all right; though this I consider a most dangerous idea. Let us see what it would be if it were fully developed.

Mr. St. Loe Strachey thus defines Crown Colonies:—"These are possessions which are for the most part peopled by non-European races of dark colour, and governed not by persons elected by themselves, but by a governor and

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/396


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/37

 by changes in the external system which have been ignored. Also, in any fundamental sense, we shall fail to understand the retained activities. For these activities will depend upon a comparatively unchanging systematic environment.

In all discussions of Nature we must remember the differences of scale, and in particular the differences of time-span. We are apt to take modes of observable functioning of the human body as setting an absolute scale. It is extremely rash to extend conclusions derived from observation far beyond the scale of magnitude to which observation was confined. For example, to exhibit apparent absence of change within a second of time tells nothing as to the change within a thousand years. Also, no apparent change within a thousand years tells anything as to a million years; and no apparent change within a million years tells anything about a million million years. We

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/37


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/259


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/38

 can, extend this progression indefinitely. There is no absolute standard of magnitude. Any term in this progression is large compared to its predecessor and is small compared to its successor.

Again, all special sciences presuppose certain fundamental types of things. Here I am using the word “thing” in its most general sense, which can include activities, colours and other sensa, and values. In this sense, a “thing” is whatever we can talk about. A science is concerned with a limited set of various types of things. There is thus, in the first place, this variety of types. In the second place, there is the determination as to what types are exhibited in any indicated situation. For example, there is the singular proposition — “This is green”; and there is the more general proposition — “All those things are green”. This type of enquiry is what the traditional Aristotelian logic takes care of. Undoubtedly such enquiries are

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/38


text:
Page:Self-help with illustrations of conduct and perseverance (IA selfhelpwithillu00smiliala).pdf/406

 greatly to be commended; but to hoard for mere wealth's sake is the characteristic of the narrow-souled and the miserly. It is against the growth of this habit of inordinate saving that the wise man needs most carefully to guard himself: else, what in youth was simple economy may in old age grow into avarice, and what was a duty in the one case may become a vice in the other. It is the love of money not money itself—which is "the root of evil,"—a love which narrows and contracts the soul, and closes it against generous life and action. Hence, Sir Walter Scott makes one of his characters declare that "the penny siller slew more souls than the naked sword slew bodies." It is one of the defects of business too exclusively followed, that it insensibly tends to a mechanism of character. The business man gets into a rut, and often does not look beyond it. If he lives for himself only, he becomes apt to regard other human beings only in so far as they minister to his ends. Take a leaf from such men's ledger and you have their life.

Worldly success, measured by the accumulation of money, is no doubt a very dazzling thing; and all men are naturally more or less the admirers of worldly success. But though men of persevering, sharp, dexterous, and unscrupulous habits, ever on the watch to push opportunities, may and do "get on" in the world, yet it is quite possible that they may not possess the slightest elevation of character, nor a particle of real goodness. He who recognizes no higher logic than that of the shilling, may become a very rich man, and yet remain all the while an exceedingly poor creature. For riches are no proof whatever of moral worth; and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/261

Rh asked what he was to do if the time for prayers arrived during 8 journey and he could not turn his face to the east, because the storm and dust would blind his eyes. A great many came crying and bewailing their miserable lives, and asked the sage to look into the future and tell them how long it would be till the Messiah arrived. The greater part of the people did not want anything, asked neither questions nor came for advice; they simply wanted to see the revered Master, breathe the same air with him, and fill their gonls with the words that dropped from his lips, and see the light of his countenance.

It was evident that Isaac Todros felt and appreciated his high position. He attended to all their wants with the greatest gravity, zeal and patience. He explained and put the people right in points of the law, inflicted panances upon sinners gave physic to the eick, advice to the ignorant without changing his position, only fixing his either stern or thoughtful eyes npon those that came to him. Several times wlien the people wailed and complained, entreating him to foretell the coming of the Messiah, his dark eyes grew misty. He loved those that came to him with their troubles and felt for them. Big beads of perspiration stood upon his forehead, and his breath came hard and fast, but he still went on with- his ministrations in the deep conviction that he was doing his duty, with a fervent faith and belief in all that he was doing and teaching, and the disinterestedness of a man who does not want anything for himself, except the little black hut, a scanty meal, and the tattered garments he hed worn for many years.


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/252

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/252


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/39

 essential in the initial stage of any science. But every science strives to get beyond it. Unfortunately, owing to the way in which for over two thousand years philosophic thought has been dominated by its background of Aristotelian logic, all attempts to combine the set of special sciences into a philosophic cosmology, giving some understanding of the universe — all these attempts are vitiated by an unconscious relapse into these Aristotelian forms as the sole mode of expression. The disease of philosophy is its itch to express itself in the forms, “Some S is P”, or “All S is P”.

Returning to the special sciences, the third step is the endeavour to obtain quantitative decisions. In this stage the typical questions are, “How much P is involved in S?” and “How many S’s are P?” In other words, number, quantity, and measurement have been introduced. A simple-minded handling of these quantitative notions can

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/39


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/276


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/253

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/253


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/275


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/397

 other officials sent out from England. The reason for this difference is a very simple one. Those colonies which are peopled by men of English and European races can provide themselves with a better government than we can provide them with from here. Hence they are given responsible governments.

"Those colonies in which the English or European element is very small can best be governed, it is found, by the Crown Colony system. The native, dark-skinned population are not fit to govern themselves—they are too ignorant and too uncivilised, and if the government is left entirely in the hands of the small number of whites who may happen to live in the colony, they are apt not to take enough care of the interests of the coloured inhabitants. The simplest form of the Crown Colony is that found in some of the smaller groups of islands in the West Indies. Here a governor is sent out from England, and he—helped by a secretary, a judge, and other officials—governs the island, reporting his actions to the Colonial Office, and consulting the able officials there before he takes important steps. In most cases, however, the governor has a council, either nominated from among the principal persons in the colony, or else elected by the inhabitants. In some cases—Jamaica or Barbadoes, for example—the council has very great power, and the type of government may be said to approach that of the self-governing colonies."

Now, in West Africa the system is the same as that "found in some of the smaller groups of the West Indian islands," although these West African colonies have each a nominated council of some kind. I should hesitate to say, however, "to assist the governor." Being nominated by him they can usually manage to agree with him; it is only

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/397


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/40

 be just as misleading as undue trust in the Aristotelian forms for propositions.

The fourth stage in the development of the science is the introduction of the notion of pattern. Apart from attention to this concept of pattern, our understanding of Nature is crude in the extreme. For example, given an aggregate of carbon atoms and oxygen atoms, and given that the number of oxygen atoms and the number of carbon atoms are known, the properties of the mixture are unknown until the question of pattern is settled. How much free oxygen is there? How much free carbon? How much carbon monoxide? How much carbon dioxide? The answers to some of these questions, with the total quantities of oxygen and of carbon presupposed, will determine the answer to the rest. But, even allowing for this mutual determination, there will be an enormous number of alternative patterns for a mixtute of any reasonable amount of car-

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/40


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/254

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/254


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/277

Rh me," said the nobleman gayly, and turning towards Meir, he asked,—

"Tell me what is the misfortune which threatens me; if you tell me the truth, you will be doing a good deed and I shall be grateful for it."

"You ask me a very difficult thing, Gracious Pan, I thought you would understand from a few words, it is hard for me to speak more clearly."

And he passed his hand over his brow which was moist with perspiration.

"Promise me, Gracious Pan, that if I speak out, my words will fall like a stone in the water. Promise me to make use of my information, but not to go with it to law.”

The nobleman looked amused yet curious.

"I give you my word of honor that your secret will be safe with me."

Meir’s burning eyes turned towards Jankiel, his whole frame shook, he opened his mouth, but the words refused tocome. Jankiel seeing this emotion, which momentarily deprived him of his tongue suddenly grasped him by the waist and dragging toward the door shouted,—

"Why do you enter my house and disturb my honored guest by your foolish talk. The Gracious Pan is my guest, has known me for years, there, off with you at once."

Meir tried to get out of Jankiel’s hands, and though he was taller and stronger, Jankiel was nimbler, and despair redoubled his energy. Struggling and panting both in a confused mass rolled towards the door, and the young gentleman looked at the struggle with an amused expression:


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/255

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/255


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/41

 bon and oxygen. And even when the purely chemical pattern is settled, and when the region containing the mixture is given, there are an indefinite number of regional patterns for the distribution of the chemical substances within the containing region. Thus, beyond all questions of quantity, there lie questions of pattern, which are essential for the understanding of Nature. Apart from a presupposed pattern, quantity determines nothing. Indeed, quantity itself is nothing other than analogy of functions within analogous patterns.

Also, this example, involving mere chemical mixture, and chemical combination, and the seclusion of different substances in different subregions of the container, shows us that the notion of pattern involves the concept of different modes of togetherness. This is obviously a fundamental concept which we ought to have thought of as soon as we started with the notion of various

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/41


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/256

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/256


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/42

 types of fundamental things. The danger of all these fundamental notions is that we are apt to assume them unconsciously. When we ask ourselves any question we will usually find that we are assuming certain types of entities involved, that we are assuming certain modes of togetherness of these entities, and that we are even assuming certain widely spread generalities of pattern. Our attention is concerned with details of pattern, and measurement, and proportionate magnitude. Thus, the laws of Nature are merely all-pervading patterns of behaviour, of which the shift and discontinuance lie beyond our ken. Again, the topic of every science is an abstraction from the full concrete happenings of natures. But every abstraction neglects the influx of the factors omitted into the factors retained. Thus, a single pattern discerned by vision limited to the abstractions within a special science differentiates itself into a subordinate factor in

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/42


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/284


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/23

Rh ary of the same year. Its subsequent form, with the actual title, threw the composition back to August 1827, and gave Fougères itself as the place of composition. This revised form, or second edition, appeared in 1834 in two volumes, published by Vimont. When, twelve years later, it took rank in the Comédie Humaine as part of the Scènes de la Vie Militaire, a second preface was inserted, which in its turn was cancelled by the author.G. S.

Une Passion dans le Désert is the only other Scene of Military Life. There is no satisfactory explanation why Balzac so limited this section of the Comédie. On a later consideration possibly he might have included a story like Le Colonel Chabert. Probably he contemplated writing at some future time new stories of adventure. But on the other hand, his own realized lack of success in the warlike scenes of his Œuvres de Jeunesse may have given him a perpetual distaste for this species of story. This distaste, however, if present, should have been outweighed by the fact that to Les Chouans—crude though it may be—is due his first success as an author.

Une Passion dans le Désert has the date of 1832, only five years after the appearance of Les Chouans, but it bears abundant testimony of a much firmer grasp of hand; it leaves one with the impression that had the maturer Balzac dealt with events of strife more extensively, he would perhaps have made a success of Military Life approaching more nearly that of Parisian Life or of Philosophical Studies. Still this is mere speculation, for the mature Balzac lent himself to the scrutiny and analysis of real life round about him, rather


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/283


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/43

 an indefinite number of wider patterns when we consider its possibilities of relatedness to the omitted universe. Even within the circle of the special science we may find diversities of functioning not to be explained in terms of that science, But these diversities can be explained when we consider the variety of wider reiationships of the pattern in question.

To-day the attitude among many leaders in natural science is a vehement denial of the considerations which have here been put forward. Their attitude seems to me to be a touching example of baseless faith. This judgment is strengthened when we reflect that their position of the autonomy of the natural sciences has its origin in a concept of the world of Nature, now discarded.

Finally, we are left with a fundamental question as yet undiscussed. What are those primary types of things in terms of which the process of the universe is to be under-

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/43


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/257

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/257


text:
Page:JOSA-Vol 06-06.djvu/39

 B. .—There are various methods for producing artificially an approximate reproduction of average noon sunlight, as above specified. The most accurate is that of Priest which consists in passing the radiation from a gas-filled tungsten lamp, operated at a color temperature of 2848°K, (about 15.6 l.p.w., for concentrated filament lamp), through a pair of crossed nicol prisms between which is inserted Fig. 7 a crystalline quartz plate 0.500 mm. thick with surfaces perpendicular to the optic axis of the crystal. The resulting energy distribution is shown, in comparison with that of actual sunlight, by the broken line in. The proper energy distribution for the radiation from the lamp, before passing through the nicol prisms and the quartz plate, is given in. Lamps yielding

title: Page:JOSA-Vol 06-06.djvu/39


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/44

 stood? Suppose we agree that Nature discloses to the scientific scrutiny merely activities and process. What does this mean? These activities fade into each other. They atise and ther pass away. What is being enacted? What is effected? It cannot be that these are merely the formulae of the multiplication table — in the words of a great philosopher, merely a bloodless dance of categoties. Nature is full-blooded. Real facts ate happening. Physical Nature, as studied in science, is to be looked upon as a complex of the more stable interrelations between the real facts of the real universe.

This lecture has been confined to Natute under an abstraction in which all reference to life was suppressed, The efect of this abstraction has been that dynamics, physics, and chemistry were the sciences which guided our gradual transition from the full common-sense notions of the sixteenth cen-

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/44


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/285

Rh clothes and piercing eyes could be the celebrated rabbi, whose fame spreading over the Jewish communities had sent a faint echo into the Christian world

He approached the man very politely.

“Could I see the Rabbi of Szybow for a few minutes ? ”

There was no answer.

The man sitting near the wall craned his long yellow neck, and opened his eyes and mouth wider. The sudden amazement, or perhaps other feelings gave him the appearance of stupidity almost idiotism. No wonder that Isaac Todros looked like one turned to stone at the sight of the nobleman standing before him. He was the first Edomite who had ever crossed his threshold, the first he had ever seen close to ; and the first time he had heard the sonorous language, which sounded strange and unintelligible to his ears. If the angel Matatron, the heavenly patron and defender of Israel; or even the foremost of the evil spirits had stood before him he would have been less appalled; with supernatural beings he was in constant though not direct communication. He studied them, their nature and their functions. But this tall, stately man in his abominable garment which reached barely to his knee with the white, effeminate forehead and unintelligible language. Who was he? What did he want? Was he a Philistine? a cruel Roman or perhaps a Spaniard, one of those that murdered the famous Abrabanel family and drove his ancestor Todros out of Spain?

The lord waited a few minutes and not getting an answer repeated the question.

"Could I speak with the Rabbi of Szybow?” At the sound


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/24

xiv than to the conjuring up of imaginary action on the field of adventure. With the former he felt and became familiar; with the latter he was never distinctly at ease.

While marred somewhat by a touch of ultra things, Une Passion dans le Désert is a vivid story, told with much terseness and effect. The description of the desert is unique in its way, showing strongly the author's power of visualization.


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/45

 tury to the concept of Nature suggested by the speculative physics of the present day. This change of view, occupying four centuries, may be characterized as the transition from space and matter as the fundamental notions to process conceived as a complex of activity with internal telations between its various factors. The older point of view enables us to abstract from change and to conceive of the full reality of Nature at an instant, in abstraction from any temporal duration and characterized as to its interrelations solely by the instantaneous distribution of matter in space. According to the Newtonian view, what had thus been omitted was the change of distribution at neighbouring instants. But such change was, on this view, plainly irrelevant to the essential reality of the material universe at the instant considered. Locomotion, and change of relative distribution, was accidental and not essential, Equaliy accidental was endurance.

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/45


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/258

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/258


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Their height in heaven comforts not


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/There is a shame of nobleness


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/317


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/46

 Nature at an instant is, in this view, equally real whether or no there be no Nature at any other instant — or, indeed, whether or no there be any other instant. Descartes, who with Galileo and Newton co-operated in the construction of the final Newtonian view, accepted this conclusion. For he explained endurance as perpetual re-creation at each instant. Thus, the matter of fact was, for him, to be seen in the instant and not in the endurance. For him, endurance was a mere succession of instantaneous facts. These were other sides to Descartes’ cosmology which might have led him to a greater emphasis on motion. For example, his doctrines of extension and vortices. But in fact, by anticipation, he drew the conclusion which fitted the Newtonian concepts.

There is a fatal contradiction inherent in the Newtonian cosmoiogy. Only one mode of the occupancy of space is allowed for — namely, this bit of matter occupying this

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/46


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/318


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Triumph


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/259

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/259


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Pompless no life can pass away


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/I noticed people disappeared


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/398

 another hindrance or superfluous affair. Before taking any important steps the West African governor is supposed to consult the officials at the Colonial Office; but as the Colonial Office is not so well informed as the governor himself is, this can be no help to him if he be a really able man, and no check on him if he be not an able man. For, be he what he may, he is the representative of the Colonial Office; he cannot, it is true, persuade the Colonial Office to go and involve itself in rows with European continental powers, because the Office knows about them; but if he is a strong-minded man with a fad he can persuade the Colonial Office to let him try that fad on the natives or the traders, because the Colonial Office does not know the natives nor the West African trade.

You see, therefore, you have in the Governor of a West African possession a man in a bad position. He is aided by no council worth having, no regular set of experts; he is held in by another council equally non-expert, except in the direction of continental politics. He may keep out of mischief; he could, if he were given either time or inducement to study the native languages, laws, and general ethnology of his colony, do much good; but how can he do these things, separated from the native population as he necessarily is, by his under officials, and with his time taken up, just as every official's time is taken up under the Crown Colony system, with a mass of red-tape clerkwork that is unnecessary and intrinsically valueless? I do not pretend to any personal acquaintance with English West African Governors. I only look on their affairs from outside, but I have seen some great men among them. One of them who is dead would, I believe, had the climate spared him, have become a man whom every one interested in West

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/398


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Following


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/48

 Newtonian notion of occupancy corresponds to the value of a function at a selected point. But the Newtonian physics requires solely the limit of the function at that point. And the Newtonian cosmology gives no hint why the bare fact which is the value should be replaced by the reference to other times and places which is the limit.

For the modern view process, activity, and change are the matter of fact. At an instant there is nothing. Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact. Thus, since there are no instants, conceived as simple primary entities, there is no Nature at an instant. Thus, all the interrelations of matters of fact must involve transition in their essence. All realization involves implication in the creative advance.

The discussion in this lecture is only the prolegomenon for the attempt to answer the fundamental question — How do we add content to the notion of bare activity?

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/48


text:
Page:Self-help with illustrations of conduct and perseverance (IA selfhelpwithillu00smiliala).pdf/407

 worthlessness of their possessor, as the light of the glow-worm reveals the grub.

The manner in which many allow themselves to be sacrificed to their love of wealth reminds one of the cupidity of the monkey—that caricature of our species. In Algiers, the Kabyle peasant attaches a gourd, well fixed, to a tree, and places within it some rice. The gourd has an opening merely sufficient to admit the monkey's paw. The creature comes to the tree by night, inserts his paw, and grasps his booty. He tries to draw it back, but it is clenched, and he has not the wisdom to unclench it. So there he stands till morning, when he is caught, looking as foolish as may be, though with the prize in his grasp. The moral of this little story is capable of a very extensive application in life.

The power of money is on the whole overestimated. The greatest things which have been done for the world have not been accomplished by rich men, nor by subscription lists, but by men generally of small pecuniary means. Christianity was propagated over half the world by men of the poorest class; and the greatest thinkers, discoverers, inventors, and artists have been men of moderate wealth, many of them little raised above the condition of manual labourers in point of worldly circumstances. And it will always be so. Riches are oftener an impediment than a stimulus to action; and in many cases they are quite as much a misfortune as a blessing. The youth who inherits wealth is apt to have life made too easy for him, and he soon grows sated with it, because he has nothing left to desire. Having no special object to struggle for, he finds time hang heavy on his


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/If anybody's friend be dead


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/260

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/260


text:
Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/319

Rh

the whole evening and the greater part of the night, the large window, near the pointed roof, flickered with an uncertain light and people were seen moving about constantly. At the early dawn some people came out of the house by a side door and went into different directions.

Soon afterwards, strange news began to circulate about the town. The news was undefined, vague, told and explained in different ways, but such as it was, excited the liveliest curiosity amongst the people. The everyday work seemed to go on as usual, but in midst of the dashing and rattling of implements of handiwork a continual hum of conversation was going on. Nobody could point out the source from which sprung all the rumors which excited the public mind, they seemed to be floating in the air and pervading all the streets and alleys.

"To-day after sunset, the elders of the Cahala and the judges, with Rabbi Isaac at their head, will sit in judgment upon Meir Ezofovitch."

"How will they judge him? What will they do to him?"

"No! there will be no judgment. The bold grandson of Rebe Saul will come to the Bet-ha-Midrash and confess his sins before the rabbi and the people and ask forgiveness!"


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/The Journey


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/47

 region at this durationless instant. This occupation of space is the final real fact, without reference to any other instant, or to any other piece of matter, or to any other region of space. Now, assuming this Newtonian doctrine, we ask — What becomes of velocity at an instant? Again we ask — What becomes of momentum at an instant? These notions are essential for Newtonian physics, and yet they are without any meaning for it. Velocity and momentum require the concept that the state of things at other times and other places enters into the essential character of the material occupancy of space at any selected instant. But the Newtonian concept allows for no such modification of the relation of occupancy. Thus, the cosmological scheme is inherently inconsistent. The mathematical subtleties of the differential calculus afford no help for the removal of this difficulty. We can, indeed, phrase the point at issue in mathematical terms. The

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/47


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/A Country Burial


text: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/261

title: Page:Poems Cook.djvu/261


text:
Page:JOSA-Vol 06-06.djvu/40

 this distribution at a specified voltage can be obtained from the Bureau of Standards, Washington.

Other methods of producing artificial daylight involve the use of blue glasses or gelatine filters before standard illuminants. The most available system of this sort at the present time consists of a No. 78 Wratten photometric filter manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company and a cylindrical acetylene flame  produced by a standard burner (also obtainable from the same

8. Spectral Transmission of Tungsten-to-Daylight Filter (Wratten No. 78)

(According to the Wratten Light Filter Booklet.)

company). This combination yields a white closely approximating average noon sunlight, and gives a very satisfactory standard white for practical purposes. Figure 8 shows the spectral transmission of the original No. 78 Wratten filter. It is planned to make the “78” and “86” series of filters in the future a quite accurate means of converting one color temperature to others, the original filters having been only approximate means to this end. The color temperature of the standard acetylene flame is 2360 degrees K., which corresponds with that of a vacuum tungsten filament burned

title: Page:JOSA-Vol 06-06.djvu/40


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Going

title: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Going


text: Poems: Second Series (Dickinson)/Essential oils are wrung


text:
Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/26

2 long matted locks mingled so habitually with the hairs of their goatskin cloaks, and so completely hid the faces that they bent upon the earth, that the goat's skin might have been readily taken for a natural growth, and at first sight the miserable wearers could hardly be distinguished from the animals whose hide now served them for a garment. But very shortly a pair of bright eyes peering through the hair, like drops of dew shining in thick grass, spoke of a human intelligence within, though the expression of the eyes certainly inspired more fear than pleasure. Their heads were covered with dirty red woolen bonnets, very like the Phrygian caps that the Republic in those days had adopted as a symbol of liberty. Each carried a long wallet made of sacking over his shoulder at the end of a thick knotty oak cudgel. There was not much in the wallets.

Others wore above their caps a great broad-brimmed felt hat, with a band of woolen chenille of various colors about the crown, and these were clad altogether in the same coarse linen cloth that furnished the wallets and breeches of the first group; there was scarcely a trace of the new civilization in their dress. Their long hair straggled over the collar of a round jacket which reached barely to the hips, a garment peculiar to the Western peasantry, with little square side pockets in it. Beneath this open-fronted jacket was a waistcoat, fastened with big buttons and made of the same cloth. Some wore sabots on the march, others thriftily carried them in their hands. Soiled with long wear, blackened with dust and sweat, this costume had one distinct merit of its own; for if it was less original than the one first described, it represented a period of historical transition, that ended in the almost magnificent apparel of a few men who shone out like flowers in the midst of the company.

Their red or yellow waistcoats, decorated with two parallel rows of copper buttons, like a sort of oblong cuirass, and their blue linen breeches, stood out in vivid contrast to the white clothing and skin cloaks of their comrades; they looked like poppies and cornflowers in a field of wheat.


text:
Page:West African Studies.djvu/399

 Africa would have respected and admired. He came from a totally different region, the Straits Settlements. He found his West African domain in a lethargic mess, and he hit out right and left, falling, like the rain, on the just and the unjust. I do not wish you to take his utterances or his actions as representing him; but from the spirit of them it is clear he would have become a great blessing to the Coast had he but lived long enough. I am aware he was unpopular from his attempts to enforce the ill-drafted Land Ordinance, but primarily responsible for this ill-judged thing he was not.

In addition to Sir William Maxwell there have been, and are still, other Governors representative of what is best in England; but, circumstanced as they are under this system, continually interrupted as their work is by death or furloughs home, neither England nor West Africa gets one-tenth part of the true value of these men.

In addition to the Governor, there are the other officials, medical, legal, secretarial, constabulary, and customs. The majority of these are engaged in looking after each other and clerking. Clerking is the breath of the Crown Colony system, and customs what it feeds on. Owing to the climate it is practically necessary to have a double staff in all these departments,—that is what the system would have if it were perfect; as it is, some official's work is always being done by a subordinate; it may be equally well done, but it is not equally well paid for, and there is no continuity of policy in any department, except those which are entirely clerk, and the expense of this is necessarily great. The main evil of this want of continuity is of course in the Governors—a Governor goes out, starts a new line of policy, goes home on furlough leaving in charge the Colonial

title: Page:West African Studies.djvu/399


text:
Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/61

 ture apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.

But even yet we have not exhausted the notion of creation which is essential to the understanding of Natute. We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is “aim”. By this term “aim” is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth. of alternative potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining those data in that process of unification. The aim is at that complex of feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way. “That way of enjoyment” is selected from the boundless weaith of alternatives. It has been aimed at for actualization in that process,

Thus, the characteristics of life are abso-

title: Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/61


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/332


text: Page:Meir Ezofovitch a novel, from the Polish of Eliza Orzeszko.djvu/331