"Evolutionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... problem of heredity. So far from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists, especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... then men jump up with the new something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being shaved and not being shaved. The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary and relative. Shavedness is immanent in man.... I have been profoundly interested in what you have told me about the New Shaving. Have you ever heard of a thing called the New Theology?' He smiled and ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... views called The American Scene, he describes the heterogeneous masses as having "a promoted look". The French proletariat have not a promoted look, rather one of inherited, traditional stability and self-respect. One and all, moreover, are promoting themselves, rising by a slow evolutionary process from the condition of wage-earner to that of metayer, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the reasons why it seems likely that the future American ethnic type will be formed by a fusion of all the various races now peopling this continent, and to show that this process has been under way, slowly but surely, like all evolutionary movements, for several hundred years. I wish now to consider some of the conditions which will retard this fusion, as well as certain other facts which tend ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... a thing apart. Marx had discovered a panacea for the ills of society: the old was to be cleared away and all things were to become new. In Marx's own thought evolution and revolution were tangled and alternated. The evolutionary side was essential to it; the idea of revolutionary catastrophe is almost an excrescence. But to the Marxians (of whom Marx once observed that he was not one) this excrescence became the whole thing. People were divided into those who ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... in the remote ancestors of our race, when the young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of the race, far older than hereditary traits of body and mind which develop later and which may be compared to a new and higher story built upon our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more stable and more secure. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... easily blown by the wind, is often fertilized through that agent also, just as grasses, plantains, sedges, birches, oaks, pines, and all cone-bearing trees are. As might be expected, a plant which has not yet ascended the evolutionary scale high enough to economize its pollen by making insects carry it invariably overtops surrounding vegetation to take advantage of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... in his article "On Humor in Literature" gives a hint of the evolutionary process of its ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Smolenskin's opposition to the religious dogmatism of Mendelssohn, who had wished to confine Judaism inside of the circle of Rabbinic law without recognizing its essentially evolutionary character. Maimonides himself is not spared by Smolenskin, for it was Maimonides who had set the seal of consecration upon logical dogmatism. The less does he spare the modern school of reformers. Religious reforms, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... else—what does it matter? As regards the thing, however, there can be no compromise. We anthropologists are out to secure this: that there shall not be one kind of history for savages and another kind for ourselves, but the same kind of history, with the same evolutionary principle running right through it, for all men, civilized and savage, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... assimilated to men at every doubtful point. The Aristotelian attitude, on the other hand, insists upon specialisation. The men are to rule and fight and toil; the women are to support motherhood in a state of natural inferiority. The trend of evolutionary forces through long centuries of human development has been on the whole in this second direction, has been towards differentiation. [Footnote: See Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman.] An adult white woman differs far more from a white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the world to come seized hold of him. The medieval sinner who outraged the moral sentiment of his time, as William did, was sustained by no philosophical doubt of the existence of God or belief in the evolutionary origin of ethics. His life was a reckless defiance or a careless disregard of an almighty power, whose determination and ability to punish him, if not bought off, he did not question. The torments of a physical hell were vividly portrayed on all occasions, and accepted by the highest ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... understanding of the whole. Capital, for instance, is his analysis of the three orders: the order of nature, the order of mind, and the order of charity. These three are discontinuous; the higher is not implicit in the lower as in an evolutionary doctrine it would be.[D] In this distinction Pascal offers much about which the modern world would do well to think. And indeed, because of his unique combination and balance of qualities, I know of no religious ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... commonly lies beneath the flash and colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical training, which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent him directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged political philosophy of his day—the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put in action by the French Revolution. He disliked ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... correspondence between Calvin's creed and the theory of evolution, which emphasizes the desperate struggle resulting from the survival of the fittest. The "fittest" are the "elect"; those who perish in the contest, the "damned." In the evolutionary struggle, only the few survive, while untold numbers of the unfit, no matter whether seeds of plants, eggs of fish, human beings, or any other form of life, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Liberalism.—As a rule, the inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures is denied in the interest of the theory of evolution, a doctrine absolutely incompatible with, and, consistently developed, destructive of, the very fundamentals of Lutheranism. The evolutionary doctrine, however, this antipode of Christian thought, which, wherever digested, has proved to be the beginning of the end of Christianity, was adopted also and publicly defended within the General Council. Rev. Brenner says: "I have heard General Council ministers say that they did not believe ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... but a stronger statement of the same truth. It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen. It does not yet appear what we shall be. But we have learned, in our evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected type before we can make up our minds about it. The eaglet just hatched does not give us the right idea of the eagle, nor does the ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... personal friend of that admirable lady, Miss Jane Porter, who may now be in pecuniary distress, let that descendant call upon me privately with perfect confidence. There are obligations that a glacial evolutionary period can not lessen. I make no conditions but the simple proof of proper identity. I am not rich but ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... communion with discarnate spirits are fraudulent, is not troubled by his ignorance, and the evidence of psychic research is not acceptable in his court. He typifies the perpetual official, ever ready to suppress new and evolutionary thought. After all, psychic science fares no worse than the physical sciences in the judgment of respectable mediocrity. The progress of science in the nineteenth century was one long conquest of territory in the land of the impossible. Inventors and inventions ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... this view grows the clearer to us the more we realise the purposive character of the evolutionary process. The unmistakeable purpose of that process is the production of the higher from the lower; all through the ages the vast design works itself out in a ceaseless ascending movement, the theme expanding, its meaning ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... long ago realised, any theory of evolution must be based upon the facts of heredity and variation. Evolution only comes about through the survival of certain variations and the elimination of others. But to be of any moment in evolutionary change a variation must be inherited. And to be inherited it must be represented in the gametes. This, as we have seen, is the case for those variations which we have termed mutations. For the inheritance of fluctuations, on the other ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... is an evolutionary, ongoing process and is prerequisite to all other emergency readiness activities. It is a comprehensive process that identifies the potential hazardous events, and the vulnerability to such hazards, estimates expected losses, and assesses impacts of such events. ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various
... regret it, for they are merely practitioners of black magic. Their efforts are of the same nature as sorcery. All such methods build up a heavy debt of future suffering, and seriously hinder the soul in its evolutionary journey. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing, onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely "being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted Coleridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am." [Footnote: Biographia ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... years to a stupendous vista of ages, but, in addition to its expanded dimensions, it has experienced a change in character. That wonderful and continually more elaborate and penetrating analysis of the evolutionary process by Darwin and his followers and successors and antagonists, the entire subordination of the individual lot to the specific destiny that these criticisms and researches have emphasized, has warped and altered the aspect of a thousand human affairs. It has made reasonable and in ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... wonder and of hopeless questioning. One may gaze and think till the brain whirls—till the little blossom in one's hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the very sun in heaven. Nothing to be known? The flower simply a flower, and there an end on't? The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the natural mechanism of which he forms a part? I find it very hard to believe that this is the conviction of any human mind. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... on whom, like Romanes, he might have reasonably counted for understanding and for support. But he kept alive Hering's work when it bade fair to sink into the limbo of obsolete hypotheses. To use Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, he "depolarised" evolutionary thought. We quote the words of a young biologist, who, when an ardent and dogmatic Weismannist of the most pronounced type, was induced to read "Life and Habit": "The book was to me a transformation and an inspiration." Such learned writings as Semon's or Hering's could never ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... of evolution were applied to the subjects of life, mind, society, and morals, appeared in 1858, maturely elaborated in its scientific proofs and applications, thus preceding the works of other evolutionary writers, the most distinguished of whom, Charles Darwin (1809-1883), has been more identified in the popular mind with the theories of evolution than Spencer himself. The writings of Darwin have had a wider influence and have been the subject of more controversy than those of any ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... may argue, not for specific distinction, but for specific identity. The remarkable variation in the species may be attributed partly to this adaptability, partly to a participation, more or less pronounced, in the evolutionary processes that culminate in the ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... dim conjecture, it was established in biology, and then it spread its influence out into every area of human thought until all history was conceived in genetic terms and all the sciences were founded upon the evolutionary idea. Growth became recognized as the fundamental law of life. Nothing in the universe without, or in man's life within, could longer be conceived as having sprung full-statured, like Minerva from the head of Jove. All things achieved maturity by gradual processes. The world ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... midst of this flood were high grounds of thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena and Duns Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, had caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to their successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolutionary process in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... first, the bases of natural, easy growth of selected man qualities; second, the processes that take place in the development of desired man qualities, some of which may not have seemed to exist previous to the evolutionary training; third, the training methods that should be employed to make these processes most effective and to produce the particular results wanted ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... fleshly mind and not holding fast the head, etc.' They have a splendid scorn for all opinions which do not agree with theirs. Under the spell of this sublime contempt they think they can ignore anything that does not square with their evolutionary hypothesis. The center of gravity of their thinking is in the theoretical, not in the religious; in reason, not in faith. Supremely satisfied with its self-constituted authority, the mind thinks itself competent to criticize ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... as Schrader observes, the evolutionary system of the Pancaratra is practically concerned with only one force, the Sakti, which under the name Bhuti is manifested as the Universe and as Kriya vitalizes and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... to distinguish Mr. Spencer's theory is the extension of this evolutionary process to mind and spirit in the development of thought and feeling. He does not say that mind resides in the molecules, but that their movements attend (if they do not originate and control) the operation of the mind. Professor Leconte seems to go farther when ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... doctrine. It is not a scientific doctrine, for it rests on wholly unproved assumptions. It is a play of the speculative fancy, and has its source in the author's strong desire to fit mental phenomena into some general evolutionary scheme. As he is a parallelist, and cannot make of physical phenomena and of mental one single series of causes and effects, he must attain his end by making the mental series complete and independent in itself. To do this, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It took a century and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and Goethe to Butler and Bergson, to convince us that we and our father are one; that as the kingdom of heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it and crying Lo here! and Lo there!; that God is not a picture of a pompous person in white robes ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... of realizing the Divinity within him. As the earnest soul gradually arouses himself he finds his proper place in the universe, for within him are all the attributes of deity, and when he reaches the end of the long evolutionary journey that is ahead of him he will find himself and know what he is ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... believe in the good old days. We, knowing more of the past than our forefathers did, can find in it no golden age. But our eyes do not rest even upon the present. In the nineteenth century men thought they were at the end of a process, and their evolutionary creed was often only a polite method of saying what fine fellows they were. Now we look forward. The future seems to us longer than the past and more important than the present; and we ourselves seem to be at the beginning rather than at the end of time. ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... at this time by Mr. Gladstone were the Employers' Liability, and the Parish Councils Bills. The latter was as evolutionary and as revolutionary as the Home Rule Bill. Its object was to take the control of 10,000 rural English parishes out of the hands of the squire and the parson and put it into the hands of the people. With its amendments regarding woman suffrage, to ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... under what conditions does the creative imagination make its appearance? It is impossible to answer this question, which, moreover, has no justification. For the creative imagination develops little by little out of pure reproduction by an evolutionary process, not by sudden eruption. Nevertheless, its evolution is very slow on account of causes ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... that the range was doomed, and instead of being swallowed with the open range he very wisely changed his business; he became allied with Progress, and he was in the front rank. While we are being 'broken' on the wheel of evolutionary change, he will ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... by conscious volition, is the basic mental operation upon which is reared that complex psychical structure which is to be found in the higher animals, and especially in man—the highest product of evolutionary development. ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... cosmic being is One, yet on this account he exists undivided in each human soul. Each person is an Osiris, yet the One Osiris must be represented as a separate being. Man is in course of development; at the end of his evolutionary career, he becomes divine. In taking this view, we must speak of divinity, or becoming divine, rather than of a separate divine being, ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... point, for I have as yet studied the evidence with so little critical care that Myers was always surprised at my negligence. I can therefore speak with detachment from this question and, as a mere empirical psychologist, of Myers' general evolutionary conception. As such a psychologist I feel sure that the latter is a hypothesis of first-rate philosophic importance. It is based, of course, on his conviction of the extent of the Subliminal, and will stand or fall as that is verified or not; but whether it stand or fall, it looks to me like one ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... is here little scope yet for the presentation of definite scientific results. However it may be in the physical universe, in the cosmos of science our knowledge must be nebulous before it constellates into definitely measurable shapes, and nothing is gained by attempting to anticipate the evolutionary process. Thus it is that here, for the most part, we have to content ourselves at present with the task of mapping out the field in broad and general outlines, bringing together the facts and considerations which indicate ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sufficient to be its equivalent. The emphatic words I am are the only possible statement of the One-Power which exhibits itself as all worlds and all living beings. It is the Great I am which forever unfolds itself in all the infinite evolutionary forces of the cosmic scheme, and which, in marvellous onward march, develops itself into higher and higher conscious intelligence in the successive races of mankind, unrolling the scroll of history as it moves on from age to age, working out with unerring precision the steady forward movement ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new all day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William James is an advocate ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... occupy; the next age and the next make more of them. In my opinion, the next age and the next will make more of Whitman, and the next still more, because he is in the great world-current, in the line of the evolutionary movement of our time. Is it at all probable that Tennyson can ever be to any other age what he has been to this? Tennyson marks an expiring age, the sunset of the feudal world. He did not share the spirit ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... reaches self-recognition, self-comprehension. The Self sees itself in this mirror, and thus becomes not only conscious, but self-conscious. This is, from one point of view, the purpose of the whole evolutionary process. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... their houses! By this thoughtful act, he secured for himself the one and only specimen of the kind; and to this day nobody has ever been able to copy it, though the attempt has often been made. The marvellous part is the startlingly high relief of the mouldings, and the quaintness of the evolutionary ideas, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... in the Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent. They are gigantic figures, nude, neither graceful nor attractive, but magnificently painted. These portraits (they don't look as if they had been finished in paradise) of our first parents rather favour the evolutionary theory of development. Eve is unlovely, her limbs lanky, her bust mediaeval, her flanks Flemish. In her right hand she holds the fatal apple. Adam's head is full of character; it is Christ-like; his torso ugly, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... that man is not only a part of the evolutionary process. His highest attributes must serve to show its purpose. They reveal the nature and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... evolutionary origin of man has been by no means neglected by recent authors, yet it has been dealt with chiefly as a side issue in works of a more extended purpose, and largely in technical language, simple to the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Sepulchres) in which he anticipated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed a national scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory. Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the noblest character among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematic evolutionary interpretation of history. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... middle and make 2 or perhaps 3 strokes on one side, then change to the other side for the same, and so on. The line made by the canoes is an endless zigzag. The idea of paddling on one side so dexterously that the canoe goes straight is yet on an evolutionary pinnacle beyond their ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... bias, is not a reactionary out and out has already been stated. He stands for evolutionary, not revolutionary, social reform; in his opinion the social-economic order can be bettered by means of the gradual self-improvement of society, and in no other way. Unless, moreover, the improvement be effected without ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... all that materialism claims it has done in the past, let us look by the light of analogy at other and graver possibilities it may have wrought in its reckless, unrestrained creations. Time is a mighty attribute of evolutionary divinities; its power seems next to infinite. In a few millions of years Alexanders, Bonapartes, Bismarks, Miltons, Edisons and Ingersols have been evolved from thoughtless chaos; now, if in limited time (for what are millions of years ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... acquaintance. Advance from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous is Spencerian Philosophy—like everything else, so-called: not that it was really Spencer's discovery, but was taken from von Baer, who, in turn, was continuous with preceding evolutionary speculation. Our own expression is that all things are acting to advance to the homogeneous, or are trying to localize Homogeneousness. Homogeneousness is an aspect of the Universal, wherein it is a state that does not merge away into something else. We regard homogeneousness as an aspect ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... story, was brought to lecture to his House. This eminent man lectured extremely well. He showed how beyond a doubt the globe we inhabit, one speck of matter, floating in the sea of space, had existed for millions upon millions of years, and how by the evolutionary changes of countless ages it had at length become fitted to be the habitation of men, who probably themselves had lived and moved and had their being there for at least a million of years, perhaps ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... of another attendant at the meetings of the club has from time to time excited interest because of its connection with a fundamental principle of evolutionary astronomy. This principle, which looks paradoxical enough, is that up to a certain stage, as a star loses heat by radiation into space, its temperature becomes higher. It is now known as Lane's Law. Some curiosity as to its origin, as well as the personality of its author, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... than 100 years later, where are we? Is it possible that man can thus lie to himself and hence to others? Robert Wright, in his book "The Moral Animal", describing "The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology", writes (page 280): "The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right—and thus a machine for ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I am perfectly satisfied that, being part of the history of primitive people, it would be foolish to ignore them from an evolutionary point of view, which constitutes their chief importance; and it is only from the point of view of expediency that I mention the potential ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock |
