"Darwinian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of Natural Selection, than in the course which the wind blows." There again Darwin fell into a mistake, because he confused an intermediate with a final cause. Even if Natural Selection were all that the most ultra-Darwinian could claim it to be, it could not, as Driesch and others have shown, exhaust the explanation of ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... charming; still, I gave it up for these reasons:—After a further consideration of the laws of dress I saw that a doublet is a far simpler and easier garment than a coat and waistcoat, and, if buttoned from the shoulder, far warmer also, and that tails have no place in costume, except on some Darwinian theory of heredity; from absolute experience in the matter I found that the excessive tightness of knee-breeches is not really comfortable if one wears them constantly; and, in fact, I satisfied myself that the dress is not one founded on any real principles. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... cheerful mind while a popular philosophy which he believed to be cheap took possession of men and translated itself into politics which he knew to be nasty. I may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the philosophy of the Superman, and succinctly describe it as an attempt to stretch a part of the Darwinian hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's life and conduct. I need not remind you how fatally its doctrine has flattered, in our time and in our country, the worst instincts of the half-educated: but let us ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 'survival of the fittest' have been applied in the field of philology, as well as in the other sciences which are concerned with animal and vegetable life. And a Darwinian school of philologists has sprung up, who are sometimes accused of putting words in the place of things. It seems to be true, that whether applied to language or to other branches of knowledge, the Darwinian theory, unless very ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... the first condition of continued existence in this world, is (a) the development of a Will so powerful as to overcome the hereditary (in a Darwinian sense) tendencies of the atoms composing the "gross" and palpable animal frame, to hurry on at a particular period in a certain course of Kosmic change; and (b) to so weaken the concrete action of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is ever born full fledged. The Darwinian theory was conceived simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, and both were anticipated by other writers. Nay, a German professor has written a treatise on the "Greek Predecessors ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Andrew Undershaft's views will not perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant sense that he is only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for purposes wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because you are walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity. All genuinely religious people have that consciousness. To them Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his perfect comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist and her lover the Euripidean republican natural and inevitable. ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... of human existence. I was left entirely vague as to what it was all about, and the relative values of things were never indicated. The same emphasis was placed on everything—whether it happened to be the Darwinian Theory, the Fall of Jerusalem or the character ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... in seeing the changes of this class from formation to formation, follow the progress of organization in one great division of the animal kingdom, through a complete series of the ages of the earth." This is not inconsistent with his position as the leading opponent of the development or Darwinian theories. To him, development meant development of plan as expressed in structure, not the change of one structure into another. To his apprehension the change was based upon intellectual, not upon material causes. He sums up his own conviction with reference to this ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... a delicate physiological problem has become as popular as theories on epigenesis, spontaneous generation, or Darwinian evolution, and for an analogous reason. As the latter are expected to decide in the doctrines of natural or revealed religion, so the former is supposed to have a casting vote in regard to the agitating claims ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... the views generally entertained." Another distinguished clergyman, vice-president of a Protestant institute to combat "dangerous" science, declared Darwinism "an attempt to dethrone God." Another critic spoke of persons accepting the Darwinian views as "under the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas," and of Darwin's argument as "a jungle of fanciful assumption." Another spoke of Darwin's views as suggesting that "God is dead," and declared that Darwin's work "does open violence to everything which the Creator himself ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of mechanical necessity. Indeed, the only fruitful method applicable to organic phenomena was that which explained them in terms of purposive adaptation. And it was its provision for a mechanical interpretation of this very principle that gave to the Darwinian law of natural selection, promulgated in 1859 in the "Origin of Species," so profound a significance for naturalism. It threatened to reduce the last stronghold of teleology, and completely to dispense with the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... easy to show that although Froebel was pre-Darwinian, he had been in close touch with scientists who were working at theories of development, and that he was largely influenced by Krause, who applied the idea of organic development to all departments of social science. It was because Froebel was himself, even in ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Darwin. He said, 'Oh, thats the fellow who wants to make out that we all have tails like monkeys.' I tried to explain that what Darwin had insisted on in this connection was that some monkeys have no tails. But my uncle was as impervious to what Darwin really said as any Neo-Darwinian nowadays. He died impenitent, and did not mention me in ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... one fatal day an evil-minded fellow got a lump of something solid in his jug, and instead of holding his peace he held a post-mortem examination and essayed to prove by some Darwinian process of reasoning that the opaque thing was more apish than orthodox! Prior to the date of this inquest, however, people had grown so habituated to the soup that they could not give it up if they would. They went on dutifully consuming it—just as everybody still does his beer, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... of the two hypotheses just described, the latter is the only one which is not equivocal. The Darwinian idea of adaptation by automatic elimination of the unadapted is a simple and clear idea. But, just because it attributes to the outer cause which controls evolution a merely negative influence, it has great difficulty in accounting for the progressive and, so to say, rectilinear development ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Episcopalian who, over his chop and a modest glass of claret, declared earnest war upon the whole Hegel-Darwinian-Wellhausen school. His method of attack was to state baldly the destructive conclusions of that school—that most of the books of the Old Testament are literary frauds, intentionally misrepresenting the development of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names, 'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious to him—as much ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... perfect as those of a crustacean or a bird, and while the action of the various processes was certain, their rapidity of increase and the shortness of their life history were such that they afforded a splendid opportunity of testing the correctness of the Darwinian law. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... the new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new edition of his "Principles," then the highest text-book of geology; but here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature. Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity. This was a vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one — except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... "thinke to be counted rare politicians and statesmen, by beeing solitarie: as who should say, I am a wise man,"[284]—"and when I ope my lips," would have added Shakespeare, "let no dog bark!" He has met inventors of sects, and has heard of pre-Darwinian "mathematicians" who doubt the fact that there were no men before Adam and are inclined to think there are no devils at all. Nash strongly condemns these inventors and mathematicians, drawing at the same time a curious picture of the state of ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their novelties: for instance, it ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth 'fit' results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Darwinian than Mr. Darwin himself. I do not mean that their beliefs in organic evolution are more decided; though I shall be supposed to mean this by the mass of readers, who identify Mr. Darwin's great contribution to the theory of organic ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... science of to-day are beginning to forget what their fathers told them of the fierce battle which had to be fought, before the upholders of the Darwinian theory of the origin of species were able to convince those for whom the older view, that species are, and always have been, absolutely distinct, had become a matter of supreme scientific, and even ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... said to have wrought a revolution in the study of nature as great as that accomplished by Newton in the seventeenth century. Though it excited heated and prolonged discussion, the Darwinian theory gradually made its way, and is now generall received, though sometimes in a modified form, by practically every eminent man of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from the one ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... there is more information, throughout his life pursued the plan of demonstrating all the resemblances he could discover between Plato and the Old Testament, much in the same way as in our time some have striven to point out the surprising agreement of the Darwinian theory with Genesis. He was called the Jewish Plato, and at Alexandria it was said: "Philo imitates Plato or ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... who professed to offer us an answer, Auguste Comte. He too was pre-Darwinian, but his philosophy accepted science, future as well as past. John Stuart Mill, whose word on his own subjects was then almost law, wrote of him with respectful admiration. His followers were known to number amongst them some of the ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... discoveries. His commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute observations regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of our modern school:—"What is the use of dew-claws in dogs?" He does not instantly answer, as a schoolboy in this Darwinian day would, "To carry out an analogy;" but the mere asking of the question sets him ahead of his age. See too his curious inquiries into the left-footedness of parrots and left-handedness of certain monkeys and squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician Harvey he quickly ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... disliked to see Meadows at the table. Not that the latter did not know the use of fork and napkin, but he assaulted his food with a ferocity that, as Millard once remarked, "lent too much support to the Darwinian hypothesis." ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... smiled, snickered, or grinned amazingly, during the long discourses that were delivered to him by his master, and indeed looked so wonderfully human in his knowingness, that it only required a speaking tongue and a shaved face to constitute him an unanswerable proof of the truth of the Darwinian theory of the ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... progress could be made towards a sounder view of the theory of descent until people came to understand what the late Mr. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection amounted to, and how it was that it ever came to be propounded. Until the mindless theory of Charles Darwinian natural selection was finally discredited, and a mindful theory of evolution was substituted in its place, neither Mr. Tylor's experiments nor my own theories could stand much chance of being attended to. I therefore devoted ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated in a very few words: all species have been produced by the development of varieties from common stocks; by the conversion of these, first into permanent races and then into ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... Helena, that all the animals form an ascending series, leading up to man. [Footnote: Dr. O'Meara's "A Voice from St. Helena."] The skeleton of a prehistoric man discovered in the Neanderthal cave, which was supposed to have proved the Darwinian theory, does not suggest a figure similar to the "Faun" of Praxiteles, but the followers of Darwin have frequently adverted to the Hellenic traditions of fauns and satyrs in support of their theory. Hawthorne, however, has made a long stride beyond ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Darwinian: the derivation of our bodies from the bodies of apes is a conception too grossly materialistic for him. Our souls, however, he is quite willing to derive from the souls of lower animals. Obviously ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... for equality makes a counterpoise for Darwinism, just as one wolf holds another wolf in check. Neither, indeed, acknowledges the claim of duty. The fanatic for equality affirms his right not to be eaten by his neighbor; the Darwinian states the fact that the big devour the little, and adds—so much the better. Neither the one nor the other has a word to say of love, of eternity, of kindness, of piety, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so I should fear that the tendencies of temperament are only temporarily imprisoned, and not radically cured; after all, it fits in with the Darwinian theory. The bird of paradise, condemned to live in a country of marshes, cannot hope to become a heron. The most he can hope is that, by meditating on the advantages which a heron would enjoy, and by pressing the same consideration on his offspring, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... extended, "documents" being found or made in or out of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But, as concerns the definitely "human" part of the matter, immense stress is laid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment, evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influence be taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the "medico-legal" notion of a "lesion"—of some flaw or vicious ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... because at that time bodily strength was almost the only ideal of the people. He understood the value of hardness but not that of work. The importance of selective elimination of the diseased and weak was apparent to his pre-Darwinian intuition, but in his time natural laws were not understood. However, in spite of their failings, the laws of Lycurgus succeeded up to a certain point in making the Spartans a ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the lines of the great secular processes of the Darwinian laws; which, by the way, could not operate at all if caprice formed any part of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... should this mental contribution to knowledge be conceived? In the last chapter of his Psychology James suggested that the mind's organization is essentially biological. It has evolved according to sound Darwinian principles, and in so doing the fittest of its 'variations' have survived. But were these variations quite fortuitous? May they not have been purposive responses to the stimulation of environment? Can logic have ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... Darwinian in the sense that it accepted, almost as a tenet of religious faith, the theory that human civilization is a progressive evolution, moving on the whole steadily toward perfection, from a lower to a higher intellectual ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... reading Hegel's "Aesthetics," the abstractions in which veritably alarmed him, and to which he very much preferred modern French Art Philosophy. In English Science, he had studied Darwin, and he was the first to give me a real insight into the Darwinian theory and a general summary of it, for in my younger days I had only heard it attacked, as erroneous, in lectures by ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... to son or sister to brother, and seem to be wanting in all social qualities;" they have no religion and no fetich rites; no burial ceremony and no mourning for the dead; in short, he adds, "they are to my thinking the closest link with the original Darwinian anthropoid ape extant."[336] The evidence of the African pygmy people everywhere confirms these views, and differences of detail do not ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... language of our Darwinian relatives has one considerable advantage over the articulate speech of a trained parrot: it has a definite meaning. Mumbling with protruded lips is an appeal for pity and affection; a coughing grunt denotes indignation; surprise is expressed by a very peculiar, sotto voce ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... general doctrine of evolution we cannot admit, if we are allowed to agree with Mr. Darwin's statement about the high mental faculties which first led man to sympathetic, and then to wild beliefs. We do not pretend to be more Darwinian than Mr. Darwin, who compares "these miserable and indirect results of our higher faculties" to "the occasional mistakes of the instincts of ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... eye and ear from long practice had grown to detect the exact degree of urgency in every call, with the agility of his Darwinian ancestry quickened by his native wit, dashed over to the desk under which the Rhode Island maps reposed. He swung the big gray-bound volume up onto the broad, flat counter with all the skill of a successful vaudeville artist, and none too soon, for he who had demanded ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I knew it all, before,—as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... indicate that the Negro is out of his environment. In tropical Africa, to which the Negro is adapted by many centuries of natural selection, his expectation of life might be much longer than that of the white man. In the United States he is much less "fit," in the Darwinian sense. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... with little reference to evolution, accept man's nature, or Nature in the wider sense, as marking out for man the round of his duties. A modern Darwinian might fall back upon much the same standard, while clearly conscious of the fact that man's nature is not something unchangeable, and while inclined to view Nature in general with different eyes from ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the Hepatica is all but white, and others where the May-flower is sumptuous in pink; yet it is not traceable to wet or dry, sun or shadow, and no agricultural chemistry can disclose the secret. Is it by some Darwinian law of selection that the white Hepatica has utterly overpowered the blue, in our Cascade Woods, for instance, while yet in the very midst of this pale plantation a single clump will sometimes bloom with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... chords! You can call spirits from the vasty deep; but will they come when you do call for them?—An angel-influence, tangible, visible, audible, which would make Jordan the easiest of all roads to travel by thy side. Peerless Jim! crowning triumph of Darwinian Evolution from the inert mineral, through countless hairy and uninviting types! how precious the inexplicable vital spark which, nevertheless, robs thy sculptured form of all cash Gallery-value; and how easy to read in that gentle personality ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... brought out and which, as its sub-title signifies, is devoted to the general theory of organic evolution as this was left by the stupendous labours of Darwin. As soon as the translations shall have been completed, the third portion will follow (probably in the Autumn season), under the sub-title, "Post-Darwinian Questions." ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... was not less fundamental,—it was the idea of the correlation of organisms. This, again, was not novel; we find it in the works of naturalists like Christian Conrad Sprengel, Gilbert White, and Alexander von Humboldt, but the realisation of its full import was distinctly Darwinian. ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... president of the Army War College, has a pet rib-nosed baboon, an animal of uncommon intelligence but imperfectly beautiful. Returning to his apartment one evening, the General was surprised and pained to find Adam (for so the creature is named, the general being a Darwinian) sitting up for him and wearing his master's best ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the latter be regarded in a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the opposite sex or as the expression of joyous excitement. This manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam and David indulged in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and which old Homer says is the sweetest and most perfect ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... live like one. Does this condition exist at the South? It could not be otherwise. Any one who has travelled there must have his faith in the evolution of some men from the lower animals immeasurably strengthened. Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New York, has said that he knows that the Darwinian theory cannot be true, because, if it were, "an Englishman's right arm would have developed into an umbrella long ago." But Dr. Taylor would find faces in the South which, from their resemblance to lower orders of life, might weaken his faith ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... and withdrawals of subscriptions, as he would have been sure to not a great many years ago. Why, you may go to a tea-party where the clergyman's wife shows her best cap and his daughters display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if it were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster's lapdog. You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his manifestations of reverence, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ways of error that a great flock will take in open country—minutely, individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or none—"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlying public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and uncertainty. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... may be easily imagined how pleasantly, to persons thus subdued in self-estimation, the hope presents itself which is involved in the Darwinian theory, that their pools themselves may be capable of indefinite extension, and their natures of indefinite development—the hope that our descendants may one day be ashamed of us, and debate the question of their ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Robbery," "Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost," the "Iron Law of Wages" and the "Facts is Facts" of the Gradgrinds were the phrases of the nineteenth century that assisted. Finally came the Darwinian revelation of man as the ape-parvenu, which completed the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... was able to return home with a moderate competence, most of which was afterwards lost in unlucky investments. The Rangitata district supplied the setting for his romance of Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), satirizing the Darwinian theory and conventional religion. Erewhon had a sequel thirty years later (1901) in Erewhon Revisited, in which the narrator of the earlier romance, who had escaped from Erewhon in a balloon, finds himself, on revisiting the country after a considerable interval, the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... professors tell about it. Oh. dear! (Wipes her eyes with handkerchief) The first time he explained about protoplasm there wasn't a dry eye in the room. We all named our hats after the professors. This is a Darwinian hat. You see the ribbon is drawn over the crown this way (takes hat and illustrates), and caught with a buckle and bunch of flowers. Then you turn up the side with a spray ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... did not hesitate to accept the Darwinian theory, on the word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience with which the matter ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... resemblance in this respect which betokens a community of origin, a common foundation on the general facts and the obvious suggestions of modern science. Indeed—to turn the point of a pungent simile directed against Darwin—the difference between the Darwinian and the Owenian hypotheses may, after all, be only that between homoeopathic and heroic doses of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... top. These trees yield twenty to fifty cocoanuts per month and live to a great age. No one can have any idea of the delicious milk until he has drunk it fresh from the recently gathered nuts. A young native will climb as nimbly and as swiftly as a monkey, and will be as unfettered by dress as his Darwinian brother. The fruit is severed from the tree by ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... begins to be evident that the Darwinian hypothesis is still essentially unverified.... It is not yet proven that a single species of the two or three million now inhabiting the earth had been established solely or mainly by the operation of ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... fashion. It is a mere sermon: 'Smith opens out'; but it is true, and I find it touching and beneficial, to me at least; and I think there is some fine writing in it, some very apt and pregnant phrases. PULVIS ET UMBRA, I call it; I might have called it a Darwinian Sermon, if I had wanted. Its sentiments, although parsonic, will not offend even you, I believe. The other three papers, I fear, bear many traces of effort, and the ungenuine inspiration of an income at so much per essay, and the honest desire of the incomer ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... might be called books of science, and even in some popular works like that of Sir John Maundeville, who died in 1372. Its acceptance by the public, however, may be said to have followed somewhat the course of the Darwinian theory in the nineteenth century. Long after evolution was admitted as a truth by scientific men there were schools and even colleges which refused to teach it, and in fact it was not accepted by the public until the generation which first heard of ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... "selection" and "variation," and a grave problem was presented by this last. How are we to account for the variations of living beings, together with the persistence of their type? Herein lies the problem of the origin of species. Three different solutions have been put forward. There is the "Neo-Darwinian" view which attributes variation to the differences inherent in the germ borne by the individual, and not to the experience or behaviour of the individual in the course of his existence. Then there is the theory known as "Orthogenesis" which maintains that there is a continual changing in a definite ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... still obscure, history of totemism supplies abundant evidence on this point; and not less so that modern sympathy with all living things, which is largely based on what may be termed the new totemism of the Darwinian theory. But while attention will thus be focussed on the sphere of the inorganic, seemingly so remote from human modes of experience, some attempt will nevertheless be made to suggest the inner harmonies which link together all modes of existence. A further limitation ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... nature, that they cannot see anything outside of it, or beyond it. To them God is law, and law only. Even creation is repugnant to them, because they see that creation is really a supernatural thing. Hence come the theories of development; the "Vestiges of Creation;" the nebular hypothesis; the Darwinian theory of formation of species by natural selection; the notion of man coming out of an ape; pantheistic notions of a God so immersed in nature as to be not its intelligent guide, but only its unconscious soul; the whole universe proceeding ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... rather nasty things, too," continued the bachelor bird. "I'm used to them, of course, and I've proved dozens of times that there's no such thing as hypnotism; but the effect of a snake's eye on very young and inexperienced birds is inconceivable, and not to be reconciled to the Darwinian theory or Mendel's law. What between snakes, hawks, and women's hats, ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... tide of opinion was turning strongly in this direction, an utterly unexpected obstacle appeared in the form of the theory of Professor August Weismann, put forward in 1883, which antagonized the Lamarckian conception (though not touching the Darwinian, of which Weismann is a firm upholder) by denying that individual variations, however acquired by the mature organism, are transmissible. The flurry which this denial created has not yet altogether subsided, but subsequent observations seem to show that it was quite disproportionate to the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue, and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish of genders; simplified immensely ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... derive from social meetings, from travels, from sight-seeings, etc., is nothing but change. Even intellectual pleasure consists mainly of change. A dead, unchanging abstract truth, 2 and 2 make 4, excites no interest; while a changeable, concrete truth, such as the Darwinian theory of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development and ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... guidance. Power has been held by the "God-given" or the "cleverest"; seldom has the power been given to the "fittest" in the sense of the most capable "to do." Those who speak of the "survival of the fittest," as in the Darwinian theory of animals, bark an animal language. This rule, being natural only in the life of plants and animals and appropriate only to the lower forms of physical life, cannot, except with profound change of meaning, be applied to the ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... meet, lack of cranial symmetry, depression at root of nose, defective development of calves, hypertrichosis and other anomalies of hair, adherent or absent lobule, prominent zigoma, prominent forehead or frontal bones, bad implantation of teeth, Darwinian tubercle of ear, thin vertical lips. These signs are separately of little or no importance, though together not without significance as an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... lowest third. Fairbairn, in his "Philosophy of Christianity," lays down a sound proposition when he says that it is not sufficient to explain man as an animal; that it is necessary to explain man in history—and the Darwinian theory does not do this. The ape, according to this theory, is older than man and yet the ape is still an ape while man is the author of the marvelous civilization which we see ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... in colour, with flat faces, they were hideous. Had Darwinian theories been in vogue in those days, no doubt Cook would have recognized in them that missing link between man and monkey, which is the despair ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... perhaps, of evading the problem which order presents to reason is the indication of the process by which the order has been realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there have been men who supposed they had completely explained away the evidences of design in nature when they had described the physical antecedents of the arrangements appealed to as evidences. Aristotle showed the absurdity of this supposition ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... upon all manner of subjects. It is astonishing to note what strange things men will talk about at night and in a solitude. That night we covered religion, of course, astronomy, love affairs, horses, travel, history, poker, photography, basket-making, and the Darwinian theory. But at last inevitably we came back to cattle and the pleasures and dangers of riding ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... tribes warfare was constant, but in the tribe itself there was cooeperation and not struggle. This fact is of tremendous importance in view of the criticisms which have been directed against the Socialist philosophy from the so-called Darwinian point of view, according to which competition and struggle is the law of life; that what Professor Huxley calls "the Hobbesial war of each against all" is the normal state ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... may be expected to follow. Those who allow them to be of one species must admit an actual diversification into strongly marked and persistent varieties, and so admit the basis of fact upon which the Darwinian hypothesis is built; while those, on the other hand, who recognize a diversity of human species, will hardly be able to maintain that such species were primordial and supernatural in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... must bear in mind that, according to the orthodox Darwinian theory, the resemblance must have come about gradually, and in its beginnings it cannot have profited the mimic ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Paris on the stage as one of the curiosities of the Centennial Exposition of 1889, it has made little progress as yet in Catholic France. Even at the theatres in Paris, I am glad to say, the popular instinct still regulates the queue on principles quite inconsistent with the Darwinian maxims of 'every man for himself,' and 'the devil take the hindmost.' It will be an evil day for invalids and cripples bitten with the drama when the 'struggle for life' comes to be logically developed into the right of the strongest ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... rebelled against the word of Darwin, accusing him of lowering the human life to the level of the dirt or of the brute. But a disciple of Darwin gave the right answer, while propagating the Darwinian theory at the university of Jena. It was Haeckel, who concluded: "For my part, and so far as my human consciousness is concerned, I prefer to be an immensely perfected ape rather than to be a degenerated ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... its logical foundation was insecure so long as experiments in selective breeding had not produced varieties which were more or less infertile; and that insecurity remains up to the present time. But, with any and every critical doubt which my sceptical ingenuity could suggest, the Darwinian hypothesis remained incomparably more probable than the creation hypothesis. And if we had none of us been able to discern the paramount significance of some of the most patent and notorious of natural facts, until they were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... constitute an exception, at all events in our Europe, to the general rules. It is not only to the curiosity and for the amusement of entomologists that he proposes these curious anatomical problems, but also, and chiefly, to the Darwinian ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... of barrel-organism that is present to our minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new, but a rechauffee of the old story that his namesake, Dr. Darwin, served up in the end of the last century ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... because it was the first description of nature's program to carry conviction to the scientific world, and because its major elements have stood the test of time as no other doctrine has done. Much has been added to our knowledge of natural processes during post-Darwinian times, and new discoveries have supplemented and strengthened the original doctrine in numerous ways, although they have corrected certain of the minor details on the basis ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... had he observed a fact than he must find a theory which would bring it into relation with the whole of his knowledge; and if the facts would not harmonise of themselves he invented a scheme of things by which they were forced into harmony. He was indeed a Darwinian before his time, an adept in the art of inventing causes to fit facts, and then proving that the facts sprang from the causes; but his origins were tangible, immovable things of rock and soil that could be seen and visited by other men, and their true relation to the terrestrial phenomena accurately ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... by a gradual modification and improvement of inadequate working hypotheses, by the slow substitution of correctness for error. Thus monotheism and the doctrine of the soul may be in no worse case than the Copernican theory, or the theory of the circulation of the blood, or the Darwinian theory; itself the successor of innumerable savage guesses, conjectures of Empedocles, ideas of Cuvier, of the elder Darwin, of ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... just this difference between the Darwinian school and the Yogi Teachings let us examine into what causes the Western Evolutionists give for the fact of Evolution itself. We shall do ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka |
