"Darwinian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first remark that, 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... 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 ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... there was a new intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers" had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching than had ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to exhibit that fundamental 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 ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... pre-Darwinian writers, like Toussenel, Fee, and many others, several works containing many striking instances of mutual aid—chiefly, however, illustrating animal intelligence were issued previously to that date. I may mention those of Houzeau, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... as a sphere was generally set forth in what 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 ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... her long hair, thrown off her dress, and half wrapped herself in a shawl, out of which her bare arms stretched as she leaned on the deep window seat. She looked like the first woman—of the Darwinian, not the Biblical, Creation. There was a wild, half-hunted expression on her face that was like the set air of an animal brought suddenly to bay. She thought in little jerks, quick sentences that were almost like the barking growls with which ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... discussing the Darwinian hypothesis, and the Colonel had maintained a profound silence, which was sufficient evidence that he did not believe in the development of man from the lower animals. Some one, however, asked him plumply his opinion of Darwinianism, and he ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... support of the evolution hypothesis are multitudinous, and many of them of great cogency; the facts against it are few, and none of them absolute. It is simply argued that some questions remain unsolved, and that there are facts which seem inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of development, and which no supplementary hypotheses have explained. But no advocates of evolution hold that the Darwinian theory is final. Evolution is a growing doctrine. It has been expanding ever since it was first promulgated. Various seeming difficulties have been explained away, and ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... a population is due to the direct action of the environment; and finally that "the actual degree of fertility is decided by the direct action of the environment." [55] On that last rock Mr. Pell's barque sinks. The mistake here is analogous to the old Darwinian fallacy, abandoned by Huxley and by Romanes, that natural selection is a creative cause of new species. Even if the hypothesis of evolution—and it is merely a hypothesis—be accepted, the only view warranted by reason ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... either the origin, the energy, or the course of the sap; and which however subtle or successful, bear to the real natural history of plants only the relation that anatomy and organic chemistry bear to the history of men. In the meantime, our artists are so generally convinced of the truth of the Darwinian theory that they do not always think it necessary to show any difference between the foliage of an elm and an oak; and the gift-books of Christmas have every page surrounded with laboriously engraved garlands of rose, shamrock, thistle, and forget-me-not, without its ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... 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 precisely defined, hardly ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... made; and his erroneous views had been amplified and developed by James Montgomery, in his "Pelican Island," into the most fantastically incorrect description that ever versifier penned. Sad to relate, his lines were often quoted, as if correct, by scientific men in pre-Darwinian times. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... that she simply acted in conformity with a Frenchwoman's direct good sense, we do require to smell a sort of animation in the meats we consume. We are still perhaps traceably related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs, who betrayed at every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and relished a palpitating unwillingness in the thing refreshing him; only we young-oldsters cherish the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of the vanquished in it. And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast. The banquet to be fervently remembered, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and alack! 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 ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... theory regarding creation. They go back to the time when we were all monkeys. They insist that man was originally created with a kind of Darwinian tail, and that in the process of evolution this caudal appendage was removed and created into woman. This might better account for those Caudle lectures which woman is in the habit of delivering, and some color is given to this theory, from the fact that husbands even ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the peaceable variants of the several types. This conception of contemporary human evolution is not indispensable to the discussion. The general conclusions reached by the use of these concepts of selective adaptation would remain substantially true if the earlier, Darwinian and Spencerian, terms and concepts were substituted. Under the circumstances, some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The word "type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... 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 blown flat by ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... 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 that animal frame as to make it more amenable to the power of the Will. To defeat an army, you must ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... bought white ties, and he bought dress suits, He crammed his feet into bright tight boots, And to start his life on a brand-new plan, He christened himself Darwinian Man! But it would not do. The scheme fell through— For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved, Was a radiant Being, With a brain far-seeing— While a Man, however well-behaved, At best ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... acquisitions of mankind are a sacred sanctuary to take any longer a reserved and expectant position. Silence now would be looked upon only as an inglorious retreat; and thus nothing remains but openly to face the question: What position must religion and morality take in reference to the Darwinian theories? ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... observational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, in fact almost 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... 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 ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Darwinian, and don't prose,' said Blanche, impatiently. 'We are going to show Ida the Abbey. How do you like the outside, darling?' asked the too-affectionate girl, favouring Miss Palliser with the full weight of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... 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 remove it from all spheres in which we are interested and contemplate ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... seems to me that although Helmholtz's theory is true, that of Berg is erroneous, since he is quite unable to prove his assertion that the effect produced by music is a negative pleasure. Moreover, the Darwinian observations to which he traces the origin of the enjoyment of music, not only rely on an arbitrary hypothesis, but do not explain why males should derive any advantage from their voice, nor what pleasure and satisfaction females find in it. And this, as Reinach ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 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
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... every adventurous hour of that memorable voyage in Nicaragua, we children were more interested in our Darwinian friends, the monkeys. They were of all shades and shapes and sizes; they descended in troops among the trees by the river side; they called to us and beckoned us shoreward; they cried to us, they laughed at us; they reached out their bony arms, and stretched wide their ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a sort of a something, might all be offered with their divers wares; ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... you do but carry your difficulty with you into the vegetable world; for, how could there be seeds if there had been no plants to seed them? and if you carry up your thoughts through the vista of the Darwinian eternity up to the primaeval fungus, still the primaeval fungus must have had a humus, from which to draw into its venerable vessels the nourishment of its archetypal existence, and that humus must itself be a "false mark" of a ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... are not the results either of inherited instinct [15] or of supernatural gift.... Given a being with man's brain, man's hands, and erect stature, it is easy to see how ... rules of conduct ... must have been formed and fixed by successive generations, according to the Darwinian laws." [16] ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... was strongly 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
... Periodically we have had all the evils of the lack of a common aim and scientific 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 time-binding ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... going towards her, "marvellous as the miracle seems, I'm heretic enough to believe it possible that your ancestors even, millions of years ago, perhaps, may have been something like those; but then, of course, you know I'm a hopeless Darwinian." ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... convinced that no 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 ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... perpetration by political refugees and revolutionists. The Socialists had many branches in America, and the deceased had, no doubt, infringed their unwritten laws, and been tracked down by them. After alluding airily to the Vehmgericht, aqua tofana, Carbonari, the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the Darwinian theory, the principles of Malthus, and the Ratcliff Highway murders, the article concluded by admonishing the Government and advocating a closer ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pathologic importance. He claims that they may be productive of fistula in ano, superficial ulcerations, fecal concretions, fissure in ano, and that they may hypertrophy and set up tenesmus and other troubles. The presence of human tails has given rise to discussion between friends and opponents of the Darwinian theory. By some it is considered a reversion to the lower species, while others deny this and claim it to be ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and plants in their natural state. He then found that the agencies which we employ in the modification of forms by artificial selection are also at work in Nature. The chief of these agencies he held to be "the struggle for life." The gist of this peculiarly Darwinian idea is given in this formula: The struggle for existence produces new species without premeditated design in the life of Nature, in the same way that the will of man consciously selects new races in artificial conditions. The gardener or the farmer selects new forms as he wills for his own ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... 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 ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... to read Aristotle and the New Testament in the original. But Huxley loved things even more than books. He had little respect for mere bookish knowledge. "A rash clergyman once, without further equipment in natural science than desultory reading, attacked the Darwinian theory in some sundry magazine articles, in which he made himself uncommonly merry at Huxley's expense. This was intended to draw the great man's fire, and as the batteries remained silent the author proceeded to write to Huxley, calling his attention ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... 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
... 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 who figured in the earlier versions of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... with the 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 ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fundamental,—it was the idea of the correlation of organisms. This, again, was not novel; we find it in the works of naturalist like Christian Conrad Sprengel, Gilbert White, and Alexander von Humboldt, but the realisation of its full import was distinctively Darwinian. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... 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 men to get first ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... 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
... for the same thing—these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and "the truth that shall make you free, men's minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on. I speak, of course, somewhat sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the minds of men in certain ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy |
