The Popular Science Monthly, Volume 75

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McClure, Phillips and Company, 1909 - Science

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Page 579 - ... philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.
Page 539 - Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.
Page 579 - No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. ^The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, " categories," supposed necessities ; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
Page 579 - A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers.. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.
Page 81 - Existence] in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture.
Page 91 - ... gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state.
Page 75 - The first principle of the subject is, that man can only make progress in "co-operative groups"; I might say tribes and nations, but I use the less common word because few people would at once see that tribes and nations are co-operative groups, and that it is their being so which makes their value, — that unless you can make a strong co-operative bond, your society will be conquered and killed out by some other society which has such a bond. And the second principle is, that the members of such...
Page 307 - the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.
Page 88 - Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
Page 572 - To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.

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