The Groundwork of Science: A Study of Epistemology

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G.P. Putnam's sons, 1898 - Knowledge, Theory of - 328 pages

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Page 195 - The wishes and emotions of very young children are conveyed in a small number of sounds, but in a great variety of gestures and facial expressions. A child's gestures are intelligent long in advance of speech; although very early and persistent attempts are made to give it instruction in the latter but none in the former, from the time when it begins risu cognoscere matrem.
Page 183 - ... having a short neck and a single large orifice. Another picks up the finest grains and puts them together with the same cement into perfectly spherical ' tests ' of the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores, disposed at pretty regular intervals. Another 'selects the minutest sand-grains and the terminal portions of sponge-spicules, and works them up together, apparently with no cement at all, by the mere
Page 57 - How we know them is a mystery indeed, but one about which it is, I think, perfectly idle to speculate. It is precisely parallel to the mystery of sensation. We feel things savoury or odorous, or brilliant, or melodious, as the case may be ; and with the aid of the scalpel and the microscope we may investigate the material conditions of such sensations.
Page 192 - ... seemed to beg for the dead body. It was given him ; he took it sorrowfully in his arms and bore it away to his expecting companions.
Page 99 - The recognition of it as true is not only an essential part, but the essential element of it as a judgment: leave that out, and there remains a mere play of thought, in which no judgment is passed. It is impossible to separate the idea of Judgment from the idea of the truth of a judgment; for every judgment consists in judging something to be true. The element Belief, instead of being an accident which can be passed in silence, and admitted only by implication, constitutes the very difference...
Page 183 - Yet this is exactly what these little 'jelly specks' do on a most minute scale; the 'tests' they construct, when highly magnified, bearing comparison with the most skilful masonry of man. From the same sandy bottom one species picks up the coarser quartz grains, cements them together with phosphate of iron secreted from its own substance" (should not this rather be, "which it has contrived in some way or other to manufacture"?) and thus constructs a flask-shaped 'test,' having a short neck and a...
Page 198 - Money by and by gone all. Country everywhere food little : son hungry very. Go seek man any, me hire. Gentleman meet. Gentleman son send field swine feed. Son swine husks eat, see — self husks eat want — cannot — husks him give nobody. Son thinks, say, father my, servants many, bread enough, part give away can — I none — starve, die. I decide: Father I go to, say I bad, God disobey, you disobey — name my hereafter son, no — I unworthy.
Page 103 - ... truths implicitly contained in them. In the first place, science makes use not only of observations and experiments, but also of reasoning as to the results of such experiments. It needs that we should draw valid inferences ; but this implies that we may, and must, place confidence in the principle of deduction — in that perception of the mind which we express by the word

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