"Darwinian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of course, within 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... of modern science. He always persists in looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite joke in the sick room was to say, "Shut the door or the germs will be getting in." As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the crowning joke of the century. "The children in the nursery and the ancestors in the stable," he would cry, and laugh the tears out of ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... This is true 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
... 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... merely symmetry, observe, but extreme flatness. Feathers are smoothed down, as a field of corn by wind with rain; only the swathes laid in beautiful order. They are fur, so structurally placed as to imply, and submit to, the perpetually swift forward motion. In fact, I have no doubt the Darwinian theory on the subject is that the feathers of birds once stuck up all erect, like the bristles of a brush, and have only been ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... disparage him unduly, for he was the one specimen in my collection, up to that time, who presented the orthodox 'stigmata of degeneration.' His hair was bushy, his face strikingly asymmetrical, and his ears were like a pair of Lombroso's selected examples; outstanding, with enormous Darwinian tubercles and ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... 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 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... pessimistic view of humanity's lot; and insists on the apparently independent existence of a principle of discord or strife in the Universe. It would be a forced interpretation to suppose him to have set forth precociously the Darwinian theory of the struggle for life. For his notion seems much more akin to the Zoroastrian imagination of Ahriman. Again, he sings melodiously, but most unphilosophically, of a former golden age, in which the lion ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... observation of the young men who disport themselves there would lead an uninitiated observer to form the opinion that the normal condition of humanity was upside down. The way one youthful workman hung by his legs on the trapeze was positively Darwinian to behold. Swings attracted the attention of the ladies; and I regret to say that the particular young lady I escorted—who was of the mature age of twelve—passed most of the afternoon in a state of oscillation, and was continually adjuring ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... and Essays, 1876, were preceded by two treatises on the philosophy of nature, Truth and Error in Darwinism, 1875, and The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent, published anonymously in 1872, in the latter of which, disguised as a Darwinian, he criticises his own philosophy. Of his more recent publications we may mention the Philosophical Questions of the Day, 1885; Modern Problems, 1886; and the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... "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 ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... there quietly and frankly to discuss the problems 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
... between the Lamarckians, supported by Mr. Spencer and a growing band of those who have risen in rebellion against the Charles-Darwinian system on the one hand, and Messrs. Darwin and Wallace with the greater number of our more prominent biologists on the other, involves the very existence of evolution as a workable theory. For it is plain that what Nature can be supposed able ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... gathered posies of bog-bean bloom and walked round the big boulders with which this sterile region is thickly strewn. The natives know nothing of Home or any other Rule, and you might as well speak to them of the Darwinian theory, or the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, or the Homeric studies of the Grand Old Man, or the origin of the Sanskrit language. The only opinion I could glean was the leading idea of simple Irish agriculturists everywhere. A young fellow who appeared ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 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 1826, the Biologist Educator desiring ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... socially arranged. Between the different 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 ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... whole ovum, about 1/150 in diameter, were all gemmules, the number would be sufficient to last, at this rate, one per second for 5,600 years! This, however, is not probable; but Mr. Sorby's remarks has completely removed all doubt as to its physical possibility from the Darwinian theory; "and they prompt us," says Slack, "to a wonderful conception of the powers residing in minute quantities ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... that 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, what force remained in the dilemma—creation ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... over the stories as we sat at breakfast with my coachman in the kitchen. T'yonni said that the deacon of the Protestant church expressed a belief that the Paumotuans or even the French might have followed the Darwinian course of descent, but that Tahitians could not swallow a doctrine that linked them in relationship with Uritaata. The Tongans, Polynesians like themselves, had a tradition that God made the Tongan first, then the pig, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the strife of Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal, and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... rejected the Bible account of Creation and, during the last half century, the Darwinian doctrine has been the means of shaking the faith of millions. It is important that man should have a correct understanding of his line of descent. Huxley calls it the "question of questions" for mankind. He says: "The problem ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... mode, 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 ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... never say nay, But calm all your maidenly fears; We'll note, love, in one summer's day The record of millions of years; And though the Darwinian plan Your sensitive feelings may shock, We'll find the beginning of man, Our fossil ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... infinitely 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 and cancerous element—a sort ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... it is said that the drovers originated it. Their dogs, kept for working purposes, were immune from taxation, and they adopted this method of distinguishing the animals thus exempted. It has been argued, by disciples of the Darwinian theory of inherited effects from continued mutilations, that a long process of breeding from tailless animals has resulted in producing puppies naturally bob-tailed, and it is difficult, on any other hypothesis, to account for the fact ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... 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 myself mainly, as I had done in "Evolution Old and New," ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, as though it were upon an ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... province of Canterbury, and in less than five years 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, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of the clan Macdonald, for some time minister at Applecross, deserves a cordial vote of thanks for a savoury book he has written on the social and religious condition of the Highlands. He is not a bit scared by the Darwinian theory of evolution. "We have a good deal in common," he says, "with the brute creation, and have no cause to feel ourselves degraded on that account. The lower animals, not excluding the much-despised monkey, are specimens of divine workmanship which reflect ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... 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 is a novelty to call Justification by Faith "Wille," ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw |
