"Utilitarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... every now and then with a kind of tawny crimson. His breast glittered with medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and star of some foreign order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing hilt, trailed and clattered along the pavement. At this time the pacific and utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such customs to the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but well-organised police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner. But even those who remembered the last Life Guards and Lancers who disappeared in ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... passage. Dulness, commerce, and eld mingling with them, it is true, but with a discretion which does not seem to dominate. Second-class passengers wear a more practical aspect, and youth among them is rarer and more grave. People who must travel second and third class make voyages for utilitarian reasons. Their object is usually to better themselves in one way or another. When they are going from Liverpool to New York, it is usually to enter upon new efforts and new labours. When they are returning from New York to Liverpool, it is often because ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... he waited,—the tall, long limbed, supple-waisted creature—whose skin was pink and gold like the peaches and apricots in the garden, and with soft, little rings of hair that would have made such an excellent lining to a nest. From this strictly utilitarian point of view he had often admired her hair, (had this Black-bird fellow), as she passed to and fro among her flowers, or paused to look up at him and listen to his song, or even sometimes to speak to him ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... tolerant towards the boy who wrote this than the man who criticised it in 1865; but he was quite right.' The critic of 1865, I may note, is specially hard upon the lad of 1850 for his ignorance of sound utilitarian authorities. He writes against an allusion to Hobbes, 'Ignorant blasphemy of the greatest of English philosophers!' The lad has misstated an argument from ignorance of Bentham and Austin. 'I had looked at Bentham ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... colleagues. But Jackson found no pleasure in rod or gun; and although fond of riding and a good horseman, he never appears to have joined in any of those equestrian sports to which the Virginians were much addicted. He neither followed the hunt nor tilted at the ring. His exercise was taken after more utilitarian fashion, in the garden ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... she had critically surveyed her finished work and found it good, "Now, Sophy Smith, you are no longer efficient and utilitarian; you are effective and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... that the proceedings were interrupted. A new party came into the open, their utilitarian Trade tunics made a drab blot as they threaded their way in a compact group through the throng of Salariki. I-S men! So they had not ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... now, they were sometimes built to serve at need as fortresses; their towers were used for beacons, their naves for meetings on secular affairs. But as a rule, and especially in the great periods of church architecture, their builders were untrammelled by any utilitarian considerations; they built for the glory of God, for their own glory perhaps, in honour of the saints; and their work, where it survives, is (as it were) a petrification of their beliefs and ideals. This is, of course, more true of the middle ages than ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... It is a dazzling adventure for the House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic plains. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it a utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down, and crowns are offered like a fairy tale; and the most powerful people in the world, male and female, a few years ago were ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... aristocratic circles, where his refined manners made him personally liked. As he refused to take any but talented pupils, teaching was not so irksome to him as it might have been. Nevertheless one cannot but marvel at the obtuseness of the Parisians who put into the utilitarian harness an artist who might have enchanted them every evening with a concert, had their taste been more cultivated. He did play once, when he first arrived, but the receipts did not even meet the expenses, and the audience received his work so coldly that his artistic sensibilities ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Hubert, permitted by his anxious relatives to anticipate the term of the family mourning, had been showily and expensively united to his heiress; the Hotel de Chelles had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance with the bride's requirements; and the young couple, not content with these utilitarian changes had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions, and given over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room to a decorative painter with a new theory of the human anatomy. Undine had silently assisted at this spectacle, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... carefully pushed its workers, together with the gasworks, market gardens, and other utilitarian features round the screen of Splash Point. The boulevards going west and north are full of fine houses and brilliant shops and are lined with well grown trees. The continuation of Terminus Road will take ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... successfully taught in every village school, and provides the popular support for nationalism. The nationalistic aims of Japan are not merely economic; they are also dynastic and territorial in a mediaeval way. The morality of the Japanese is not utilitarian, but intensely idealistic. Filial piety is the basis, and includes patriotism, because the Mikado is the father of his people. The Japanese outlook has the same kind of superstitious absence of realism that one finds in thirteenth-century theories as to the relations of the Emperor ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... inspired by this building. One feels that here democracy has at last found utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... utilities as he has; but he reiterates that, whereas such utilities are secondary, we insist on treating them as primary, and that the connaissance objective from which they draw all their being is something which we neglect, exclude, and destroy. The utilitarian value and the strictly cognitive value of our ideas may perfectly well harmonize, he says—and in the main he allows that they do harmonize—but they are not logically identical for that. He admits that subjective interests, desires, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... having, in past times, come to see that truthfulness was useful, "the habit of approving truth-speaking and fidelity to engagements, which was first based on this ground of utility, became so rooted, that the utilitarian ground of it was forgotten, and we find ourselves springing to the belief in truth-speaking and fidelity to engagements from an inherited tendency." Similarly throughout, Mr. Hutton has so used the word "utility," and so interpreted it ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... morals to happiness.—The Utilitarian justification of virtue insufficient 30 Power of man to aim at something different from and higher than happiness 32 General coincidence of duty and happiness 33 The creation of unselfish interests one of the chief elements of happiness 34 Burke on a well-ordered life 35 ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors—the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already—very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... and Red were not in need of frocks, for before they left England their mother had stocked their boxes as though she was never to see a draper's shop again. But then, she had been in a severely utilitarian mood, and when she cut out the garments it had not occurred to her that Fashion would ever come across the fields of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... longer desired anything of it. Again like a monk, he was depressed and in the grip of an obsessing lassitude, seized with the need of self-communion and with a desire to have nothing in common with the profane who were, for him, the utilitarian and the imbecile. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... common utilitarian pig, but the honoured guest of the old couple, and it knew it. A year before, their youngest and only surviving child, then a man of five-and-twenty, had brought his mother the result of his savings in the shape of a fine young pig: a week later he lay dead of the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... of one of the sternest of the virtues, as it seemed at home. Yet she remarked that though every object was more or less ornamental, nothing had been placed in the rooms for the sake of ornament alone. Miss Carew, judged by her domestic arrangements, was a utilitarian before everything. There was a very handsome chimney piece; but as there was nothing on the mantel board, Alice made a faint effort to believe that it was inferior in point of taste to that in her own bedroom, which was covered with ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... this naively utilitarian point of view is by no means confined to the lowest forms of religion; in the Old Testament, for example, the appeal to Yahveh is generally based on his assumed power to bestow temporal blessings,[5] and this is a widespread attitude at the present day in religious communities, where salvation ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... more about him, which I doubt, all you've got to do is to say so. But perhaps it's just as well to let the old gentleman drop, for his adventures were rather strange; but the narration of them is not very profitable, not that I go in for the utilitarian theory of conversation; but I think, on the whole, that, in story-telling, fiction should be preferred to dull facts like these, and so the next time I tell a story I will make ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... natural disinterestedness of man, and to indicate for the imagination and the emotions their proper place beside the calculating faculty. Few were those who did not come under one or other clause of this sweeping denunciation. He assailed Shelley, who was neither Whig, Tory, nor Utilitarian, so cuttingly as to provoke a dispute with Leigh Hunt, and had some of his sharp criticisms for his friend Godwin. His general moral, indeed, is the old congenial one. The reformer is as unfit for this world ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... this worthy man was influenced was a mere sensible practical respect for good workmanship. The aspirations of the collectors, however, in this matter, go out of the boundaries of the sphere of the utilitarian into that of the aesthetic. Their priests and prophets, by the way, do not seem to be aware how far back this veneration for the coverings of books may be traced, or to know how strongly their votaries have been influenced in the direction of their taste by the traditions of the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Cecily, Cecily! Surely such a utilitarian occupation as the watering of flowers is rather Moulton's duty than yours? Especially at a moment when intellectual pleasures await you. Your German grammar is on the table. Pray open it at page fifteen. ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... ornament with the same exuberance as a volume of lyrical poems, or a standard classic, or such like. A work on Art, I think, bears less of ornament than any other kind of book ("non bis in idem" is a good motto); again, a book that must have illustrations, more or less utilitarian, should, I think, have no actual ornament at all, because the ornament and the illustration must ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... over to a utilitarian Scotchman with red hair. Later the immortal shanty was a useful granary. Thoreau went back to the village to live in a garret and work at odd jobs of boat-building ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Radicals, they hated the aristocracy, whose very existence they ignored; shunned the professional class, which they scorned, on account of its scientific and utilitarian tendency; and loathed the middle class, from which they had sprung, because it was Philistine; and although they professed to deeply honour the working man, they very wisely managed to see as little of ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... he cares nothing for Katherine save that the rumor of her fire and spirit has pleased his wild fancy. And never is there the faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly be taking all this trouble about the woman were she not the makings of a royal mate, fit even for his sky-wide vision and ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... character, and he illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... young gentleman be a Radical, he is usually a very profound person indeed, having great store of theoretical questions to put to you, with an infinite variety of possible cases and logical deductions therefrom. If he be of the utilitarian school, too, which is more than probable, he is particularly pleasant company, having many ingenious remarks to offer upon the voluntary principle and various cheerful disquisitions connected with ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... together and united them into a club. An opportunity may perhaps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian efficiency of this arrangement—on the blank in the order of terrestrial things which the Book Club was required to fill, and the manner in which it has accomplished ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... that the main function of food is to repair the tissues of the body. Other effects are present, such as pleasure and sociability, but its chief benefit is reparative, so we may well regard the subject from a strictly utilitarian standpoint and inquire how we may produce the highest efficiency from our eating. Some of the important questions about eating are, how much to eat, what kind of food to eat, when to eat, what are the most favorable conditions ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... views upon nearly all conceivable practical and spiritual subjects. With the general historical aspects of that reign we cannot deal here. The culture which Peter I. introduced into Russia was purely utilitarian; and moreover, in precisely that degree which would further the attainment of his ends. But however imperatively his attention was engaged with other matters, he never neglected to maintain and add ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... a horrid little prig in those days," said Evadne, smiling. "But, auntie, there can be no peace without plenty. And I think I would rather be a sensible realist than a foolish idealist. You mean that you think me too much of a utilitarian, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause against the utilitarian economy of Prose. They both stand for lavish luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of thought. It is their boast to make two words bloom where one grew before. Both garb themselves in Metaphor, and the only complaint of the captious ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... our conception of the outer appearance of that little house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends—for very many years, at any rate. It will almost ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... outshining the glories of the first The first civilization had subordinated the people to the monarch, and had aimed especially at eternizing the memory and setting forth the power and greatness of king after king. The second had the benefit and advantage of the people for its primary object; it was utilitarian, beneficent, appealing less to the eye than to the mind, far-sighted in its aims, and most successful in the results which it effected. The wise rulers of the time devoted their energies and their resources, not, as ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... explained, "when you do not try to exploit her. Compare wild strawberries and wild asparagus with the truck the farmers give you. Is wisteria useful? What equals the color of the judas-tree in bloom? Do fruit blossoms, utilitarian embryo, compare for a minute with real flowers? Just look at all these flowers, born for the sole purpose of expressing themselves!" All the while we were sniffing orange-blossoms. I tried in vain to get his honest opinion on horse-chestnut blossoms as compared ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... of three names. To the flower-lover it is the yucca; to the cultivator, or whosoever meddles with its leaves, it is the Spanish-bayonet; to the utilitarian, who values a thing only as it is of use to him, it is the soap-weed—ignoble name, referring to certain qualities pertaining to its roots. When we remember that this flower is not the careful product of the garden, but of spontaneous ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... describe, should in the first place teach us how noble a thing it is to construct works of beauty and utility, not only for our own gratification, but for the benefit of posterity also. The selfish and unreflecting, even the modern utilitarian, will perhaps laugh at the thought, and say: 'What folly to undertake such labors for the benefit of posterity! We will labor for ourselves.' I would ask such persons, what would have been our state if the ancients had entertained such grovelling notions? Do they not know that most of ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... What a dreadful utilitarian Laura was, I thought. Now, the whole world and Boston were full of beautiful things,—full of things that had no special usefulness, but were absolutely and of themselves beautiful. And such a thing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... is only of late years that the conservative spirit of the old borough has so far accommodated itself to modern requirements as to provide foot-paths in front of the shops and houses. But there that same spirit has stopped; the utilitarian of to-day would sweep away, as being serious hindrances to wheeled traffic, the two picturesque fifteenth-century erections which stand in this market-place; these, High Cross and Low Cross, one at the east end, in front of the Moot Hall, the other at the west, facing the chancel of the ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... embodied humanity without sentimentalism, firmness without obstinacy, individuality without selfishness; his activity was boundless, his devotion to his system so real as to admit no utilitarian sophistries into his scheme of personal benevolence. Before I had been with him a week, I respected him as I had never respected ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... but godliness is profitable unto all things," says the author of the Epistle to Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:—"Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the services of the mind." But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... as befits their grave and sober mood. They are great at figures, and by them they try to show that they, and not the Dubliners, should be first considered. They are practical, and although not without sentiment, avoid all useless manifestation of mere feeling. They are mainly utilitarian, and prefer mathematical proof, on which they themselves propose to rely, in proving their case. Here is an instance. A Belfast accountant, who is also a public officer, has collected a number of comparative figures on which he bases the claims of Belfast to prior consideration. The ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... hat shows no change either, except that if anything it is slightly woollier in the Alps than among us. As transplanted, the dinky little bow at the back is an affectation purely—but in these parts it is logical and serves a practical and a utilitarian purpose, because the mountain byways twist and turn and double, and the local beverages are potent brews; and the weary mountaineer, homeward-bound afoot at the close of a market day, may by the simple expedient of reaching up and fingering his bow tell ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... in Scotland, and inherited a considerable property. She had been highly educated, and was a woman of rare original powers, and extensive and varied information. She was brought up in the utilitarian principles of Jeremy Bentham. She visited this country in 1824. Returning to England in 1825, she wrote a book in a strain of almost unbounded eulogy of the American people and their institutions. She saw only one stain upon the American character, one thing ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... already described, circumcision is not for ornamental purposes. According to the Manbo's way of thinking it serves a more utilitarian purpose, for it is supposed to be essential to the procreation of children. How such a belief first originated I have been unable to learn, but nevertheless the belief is universal, strong, and abiding. To be called uncircumcised is one of the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... to-day, dear M., to be as disagreeably statistical and as praiseworthily matter-of-factish as the most dogged utilitarian could desire. I shall give you a full, true, and particular account of the discovery, rise, and progress of this place, with a religious adherence to dates which will rather astonish your unmathematical mind. But let me first describe the spot as it looked to my wondering and unaccustomed ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... utilitarian statement of aim that asserts that the purpose of education is to enable people to make a living neglects to take account of the necessity for social cooeperation. The difficulty with this statement of aim is that it is too ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... superfluous members of his equations are eliminated by the algebraist. Fun is not practical enough for the American, and subserves none of his profitable projects; it provokes to idle laughter, and militates against the unresting career of industry which he has prescribed, and his utilitarian spirit thinks it were as well abolished. His recreations are akin to his toil. If he give to study such hours as business spares, fates first claim his attention, and then philosophy or ethics: he cannot resign himself to lighter topics. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... effaced, and with a newness which would never make them worse. The process began beautifully, even to my uninformed eyes, in the likeness of herring-bone masonry, crimson on white, but it seemed to me marvelous that anything should yet be discoverable in needle process, and that of so utilitarian character. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements, then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he was born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out in his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of first principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of moral sciences, and entering the social union with ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... was, in one sense, as the previous step had been, the assertion of the national interest over the special privilege; in another sense it was merely one step more in those numerous secularizations of Church property which the utilitarian and unreligious 18th century had carried out. It was proposed to take over for the use of the State all the property of the Church and in return to pay salaries to its priests. This represented the acquisition of real property valued at the capital sum of 2,100,000,000 ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... a figure in war and peace, peace of the practical sort, the kind of peace that went with plenty. He was no dreamer, but a utilitarian. Perhaps, after all, the world most ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... met in London to frame the bill they found themselves in an atmosphere tending to chill their enthusiasm. Lord Palmerston had died the year before, and with him had disappeared an adventurous foreign policy and the militant view of empire. The strictly utilitarian school of thought was dominant. Canada was unpleasantly associated in the minds of British statesmen with the hostile attitude of the United States which seemed to threaten a most unwelcome war. John Bright approved of ceding Canada to the Republic as the price of peace. Gladstone also wrote ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... destroyed, and are still destroying, other ancient slums, setting up white buildings of uniform ugliness in place of the picturesque but insanitary dwellings of the past. It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, tho' one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to stand in an age which studies the science and practises the art of hygiene. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the Normans, from whose New Castle, built some eight hundred years since, the town derived its present name. The keep of this venerable structure, black with age and smoke, still stands entire at the northern end of the noble high-level bridge—the utilitarian work of modern times thus confronting the warlike ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... childhood—You should be so and so; you should do so and so; you should say so and so. Sometimes she makes a mistake—but what then? she has plenty of other businesses to attend to, and the average is sure to come up well. In philosophy, she is a decided utilitarian; bearing with perfect never-mindingness the misfortunes of individuals, and holding by the greatest ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... Carl, "is a real lively project. Solar energy into power on a utilitarian level. The man is fanatic, of course, but with his plans he could actually be producing in another five years." He lit a cigarette, drew on it as though it ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... she was the greatest philosopher and musician and theologist, that ever lived on earth, except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an Infant under her guardianship. Her taste was infallible; her sentence eternally final. This church was built for her in this spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian faith,—in this singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a doll-house for her favourite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to your dolls, you are out of place here. If you can go back to them, and get rid for one small hour of the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... jolting on the roads is so great as to make it wise for a traveller to hold on fast, and when a lady and gentleman ride side by side, it is usual for the gentleman to protect the lady by throwing his arm round his companion's waist. This delicate attention is so much of a utilitarian necessity as in no way to imply ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... commencement of the present century, England was rich in orators, and poets, and men of letters; the times were favorable to such—events called them forth—and there was still a lingering chivalric feeling in our island which the utilitarian principles or tastes of the present period would now treat with ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... is sometimes called 'common sense.' A good example of its application to politics may be found in a sentence from Macaulay's celebrated attack on the Utilitarian followers of Bentham in the Edinburgh Review of March 1829. This extreme instance of the foundation of politics upon dogmatic psychology is, curiously enough, part of an argument intended to show that ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... dictatorship. In that there is nothing at variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called temporary, and its stupid shambling operations are finally and decisively condemned by their consequences. That is a straightforward utilitarian argument, and has nothing whatever to do with inherent and divine rights, or any other form of ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... disposed to take a utilitarian view of cathood. Even Cowper, who owed to the frolics of his kitten a few hours' respite from melancholy, had no conception that his adult cat could do better service than slay rats. "I have a kitten, my dear," he wrote to Lady Hesketh, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... all, who by rights should be the teachers and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last—might I not finally teach them—a wiser and more generous-hearted way ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... gr'et house," as the darkies called it, and away further to the stables, carriage house, granaries and other buildings of the estate, with the servants' cabins behind these. All upon the north side of Woodbine was devoted to the practical, utilitarian needs of the place, all upon its southern to its pleasures and luxuries, for in the buildings circling away from the south end were the spacious kitchens, dairy, smoke house, laundry and other buildings necessary ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... then, whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful—it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... attention, except what led to some practical object in life. Education was considered by their founders as merely a step to making money. Science became a trade—a mere handmaid to art. Mammon was all in all. Their instruction was entirely utilitarian. Mechanics and Medicine, Hydraulics and Chemistry, Pneumatics and Hydrostatics, Anatomy and Physiology, constituted the grand staples of their education. What they taught was adapted only for professional students. One would suppose, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... became clearly aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past. His appreciativeness was capable of exercising itself only on utilitarian matters, and recollection of Avice's good qualities alone had any effect on his mind; of ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... with a herculean effort. He spoke with great power, his penetrating eyes flashing with patriotism as he plead the cause of the emancipated, or flashing with anger as with withering denunciation and sarcasm he denounced their oppressors. His mind was especially utilitarian and his speeches were more remarkable for common sense than for the flowers of rhetoric or the brilliancy or oratory. With indomitable perseverance and pluck he possessed a large heart, and his ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... himself an intuitive moralist of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of ceaseless toil for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be accounted for either by enlightened selfishness, or by any other sort of utilitarian motives; since these bees begin to work, without experience or reflection, as they emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, an eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, can alone account for the phenomena. On the other hand, the biologist, who traces ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... his bandage, and give him a chronometer regulated to Greenwich or Washington time, a transit instrument with the proper appliances, and the necessary books and tables, and in a single clear night he can tell his position within a hundred yards by observations of the stars. This, from a utilitarian point of view, is one of the most important operations ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... father an elder in the house of God—astray in the paths of condemned worldly frivolities! Then he recalled a little bush of vivid red roses his mother carefully protected and cultivated; he saw their bright fragrant patch on the rocky gray expanse of the utilitarian acres; and suddenly a light of new understanding enveloped his mother's gaunt drearily-clad figure. He employed in this connection the surprising word "starved." ... Rosemary ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... colonnades, was used, Master said, chiefly during the annual festivities of DURGAPUJA. {FN12-1} A narrow stairway led to Sri Yukteswar's sitting room, whose small balcony overlooked the street. The ashram was plainly furnished; everything was simple, clean, and utilitarian. Several Western styled chairs, benches, and tables were ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... popular opinion. It seeks to explain from the experience of the individual what can only be learned from the history of the world. It has no conception of obligation, duty, conscience—these are to the Epicurean or Utilitarian philosopher only names which interfere with our natural perceptions of ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... note the fact, that this sentiment is strong in the rising generation of Canadians, and nowhere more so than in McGill. It is indeed not merely a sentiment, though, even in a time which boasts of being practical and utilitarian, the feelings of the heart count for something: it is based also on the rational appreciation of the benefits of a rule, which, while allowing the greatest freedom of individual action, secures equal rights and protection ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... to them; subjects suggested by books that might most be attracting attention; and poetry in every number if possible, but in any case something of romantic fancy. This was to be a cardinal point. There was to be no mere utilitarian spirit; with all familiar things, but especially those repellent on the surface, something was to be connected that should be fanciful or kindly; and the hardest workers were to be taught that their ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... us note the skilful and utilitarian adaptation not only of natural materials for domestic and farm use, but also natural forms. The farmer and his wife both turned to Nature for implements and utensils, or for parts adapted to shape readily into ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... primal man, Grim utilitarian, Loving woods for hunt and prowl, Lake and hill for fish and fowl, As the brown bear blind and dull To ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the C. P. & D. Railway were crowded into a half-dozen utilitarian rooms on the second floor of the company's freight station building in the Chicago yards. In two of these rooms, with a window outlook upon a tangle of switching tracks with their shifting panorama of cars and locomotives, ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... parted at school, if 'collect' is not too sacred a word: beginning to buy more truly expresses that first glutting of the bookish hunger, which, like the natural appetite, never passes in some beyond the primary utilitarian stage of 'eating to live,' otherwise 'buying to read.' Three years, however, works miracles of refinement in any hunger that is at all capable of culture; and it was evident, when Narcissus did open his 'Gladstone,' that it had taken him by no means so long ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... an unpleasant row. So he sat at table, perturbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed by all that went on about him. For the first time he realized that eating was something more than a utilitarian function. He was unaware of what he ate. It was merely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this table where eating was an aesthetic function. It was an intellectual function, too. His mind was stirred. He heard words spoken ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the boatmen stop their song and suddenly give voice to the new cry that has been taught them for the benefit of the tourists: "Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" Coming at this moment, when, with heart oppressed by all the utilitarian vandalism that surrounds us, we were entering the sanctuary, what an effect of gross and imbecile profanation this bellowing of English joy produces! The boatmen know, moreover, that they have been displaced, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... One felt moved to adventure and a longing for something new. Men with brain and muscle were needed in the wide, silent land that would soon waken to busy life; but one must not give way to romantic impulses. Stern experience had taught Festing caution, his views were utilitarian, and he distrusted sentiment. Still, looking back on years of strenuous effort that aimed at practical objects, he felt that there was something he had missed. One must work to live, but perhaps life had more to offer than the money one earned ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... my 'Eureka' had already been established, and that I would therefore set forth over the return hemisphere, searching China and Japan on the way. The rivers in Southern China brought down to Canton bamboos of many species, where this wondrously utilitarian reed enters very largely into the industrial life of that people, and not merely into the industrial life, but even into the culinary arts, for bamboo sprouts are a universal vegetable in China; but among all the bamboos of China I found none of superexcellence ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... to the town, is one for which no search needs to be made; its blackened and time worn walls are seen from the train windows by every traveller who enters the city from the south. So near is it to the railway, that in the ultra-utilitarian days of sixty or seventy years ago, it narrowly escaped the ignoble fate of being used as a signal-cabin. It was rescued, however, by the Society of Antiquaries, and carefully preserved by them—more fortunate in this respect than the castle ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... prior to the educating influences of the Revolution was mostly utilitarian. That he had a peach orchard as early as 1760 is proven by an entry in his diary for February 22: "Laid in part, the Worm of a fence round the Peach orchard." Just where this orchard stood I am not quite certain, but it was probably ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... had little sympathy with the teaching of dead languages, attaching much more importance to the knowledge of French and Spanish than of Latin and Greek. We see in all his public improvements the utilitarian spirit which has marked the genius of this country, but a spirit directed into philanthropic channels. Hence he secured funds to build a hospital, which has grown into one of the largest in the United States. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... mendicant, who would soon return thither literally laden down with provisions from his well-stored larder. His wife was no less hospitable, not less charitable and kind to the poor, but more cautious. She was of the utilitarian school, and could not bear to see anything go to waste, or anything unworthily bestowed. Not so easily touched with the appearance of sorrow as her husband was, but always ready to relieve the wants of those she knew to be destitute, she would ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... hanging from the roof!" George gazed on them with wonder and admiration. Harry, on the other hand, with the utilitarian idea in his mind, inquired: "Why couldn't all that chalk be utilized ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the case) might save money on negatives, after he had a stock of a little variety, by snapping babies with an unloaded camera and printing from old plates, without anybody's being the wiser. (Here, indeed, would be a utilitarian motive behind the baby's being naked of articles of identification.) It is, alas! undermining to the pride of race to reflect that that photograph of one's cousin's fine new baby Edward, which reminded every one so much of the infant's mother, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics of debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and their controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethical opinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known as Utilitarian and Intuitionist. ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... hand produced more vigorous children, and tended to perpetuate themselves. Whereas originally there was no tendency either one way or the other, some families developed from unknown causes, which, whatever they were, were neither moral nor utilitarian, the practice of brother and sister marriage. This diathesis followed the ordinary laws of descent, and eventually those families which were fortunate enough to be affected in that way ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists, against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety. This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... instance of the way in which the utilitarian essentials of a high state of civilisation are diffused throughout Canada, I may mention that when we arrived at Cornwall I was able to telegraph to Kingston for my lost watch, and received a satisfactory answer ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... him food or shelter; the roaring torrent was nothing to him except as it obstructed his journey; the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens filled him with portentous awe, and the spirits in the invisible world worked for his good or for his evil. Beyond his utilitarian senses no art emotion stirred in these signs of creation. Perhaps the first art emotion was aroused in contemplation of the human body. Through vanity, fear, or love he began to decorate it. He scarifies or tattoos his naked body with figures upon his back, arms, legs, and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... The utilitarian habits of New England, originating in necessity, and far outliving the circumstances in which they had their birth, have tended more than any other cause to make New England character unlovable. The ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... are, as has been often remarked, no less vain than women. This may be called the ornamental view and may account for some of the fashions that arise in the wearing of charms. But there is also the utilitarian view, and a new form of charm will sometimes become popular, just as a new sanctuary becomes popular, because it is reported to have been effective in some particular case. Probably no change of ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Aristotle, and after him many others,—in the field of English literature, Sidney, Shelley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,—have made most eloquent defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but here ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of the cruise of the Norfolk were of great importance. From the purely utilitarian point of view, the discovery of Bass Strait shortened the voyage to Sydney from Europe by quite a week. It opened a new highway for commerce. Turnbull, in his Voyage Round the World (1814) discussing ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... leaves, that are therefore eagerly sought by agents for the leather merchants. The beautiful SMOKE or MIST TREE (R. cotinus), commonly imported from southern Europe to adorn our lawns (although a similar species grows wild in the Southwest), serves a more utilitarian purpose in supplying commerce with a rich orange-yellow dye-wood known as young fustic. All this tribe of shrubs and trees contain resinous, milky juice, drying dark like varnish, which in a Japanese species is transformed by the clever native artisans into their famous lacquer. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... then, determine the limits of this field? Half of the dispute of modern aesthetics is over the right to include in the material for this induction various kinds of enjoyment which are vivid, not directly utilitarian, but traditionally excluded from the field. Guyan, for instance, in a charming passage of his "Problemes de l'Esthetique Contemporaine," argues for the aesthetic quality of the moment when, exhausted ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... splendour and liveliness of the colours, the bright golden, and blue, and crimson tints, than the paintings which they imitated. Many were sent to Spain, and to different museums both in Europe and Mexico; but the art is now nearly lost, nor does it belong to the present utilitarian age. Our forefathers had more leisure than we, and probably we have more than our descendants will have, who, for aught we know, may, by extra high-pressure, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... a thrill of commingled apprehension and satisfaction at the fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping, hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most utilitarian and idealistic public in the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... may bring into application purely mundane utilitarian standards, and may account conduct as immoral or moral according as it seeks only the happiness of the agent, or the happiness of the narrow circle of humanity which includes along with him also his relatives and intimate friends, or again, ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... Candage exchanged looks and refrained from comment. It was evident that Captain Candage reflected the utilitarian view of Maquoit. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... with the offer of having them collected in book form afterward. It more than encouraged him: it gave him a feeling of certainty that he had struck the right vein, that here was a fair and appreciative field for his talent, his fine taste, and high culture. A little utilitarian, perhaps; and he smiled, thinking of some past dreams. And was true art so ethereal that it must exist only in the exalted states of the mind? Was it not to embellish and beautify all lives, rather than crowd out the thousands that the few might feast on some exquisite ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... a very short time. Obviously, grammatical work and translations into the mother tongue will now be minimized, and those devices which give the eye the power to find thought in new symbols will be emphasized. There is no standard for determining the relative importance of this informational or utilitarian aim when compared to other aims. The significant thing is, not so much to discover its relative importance, but, having adopted it, to devise methods which clearly tend to bring the students to an effective ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... his piano factory where he manufactures "The Gibson Upright." A very plain interior; pleasant to the eye, yet distinctly an office in a factory, and without luxuries; altogether utilitarian. ...
— The Gibson Upright • Booth Tarkington
... hugely on their mental vision, that there was small space left for things of this earth. They, good, simple souls, were made for and ought to have lived in the Golden Age, when all men were brave and all women true, where neighborly eyes reflected the love and faith within; but in our utilitarian days they were sadly out of place, and little wonder if they had lost ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... street bagpiper? When his harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brain bread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprised that ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... were naturally not confided to any one, not even Julia; she heard seldom from Marbridge; the family feelings were of a somewhat utilitarian order, based largely on mutual benefit. She wrote now and then; she happened to do so on the day after the one on which she did not take the blue daffodil; and she mentioned in this letter that it was possible she should be home again soon. Seeing ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... it gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of lands from the sea, and built protecting dams and piers. The terrible mortality of the large cities has considerably decreased. We have given them laws assuring personal security and guaranteeing new outlets for trade and commerce. But the aspirations of our English Government have been purely utilitarian, and as regards the deeper-lying current of development no progress is ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... of knowledge and experience so as to succeed in a livelier sort of business competition. A university professor would lay out a liberal course of training for his son so as to prepare him for intellectual pursuits among scholars and people of culture. This utilitarian view, which points to success in life in the ordinary sense, is the prevailing one. We could probably sum up the wishes of a great majority of the common people by saying, "They desire to give their children, through education, a better chance in life than they themselves have had." Yet even these ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... that was made by man was adorned by man, just as everything made by Nature is adorned by her. The craftsman, as he fashioned the thing he had under his hand, ornamented it so naturally and so entirely without conscious effort, that it is often difficult to distinguish where the mere utilitarian part of his work ended and the ornamental began. Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... approves of the utilitarian aspect of overalls. He had been afraid that I had come from the family of a minister or professor or writer, a lot of high thinking and no common sense. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... man's personal convenience; to appreciate a fair landscape—with a shrewd worldly sense of its potential uses. "The garden that I love," said an Italian once to me, "contains good vegetables." This utilitarian flavour of the south has become very intelligible to me during the last few days. I, too, am thinking less of calceolarias ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... architecture is a record of man's efforts to build beautifully. The erection of structures devoid of beauty is mere building, atrade and not an art. Edifices in which strength and stability alone are sought, and in designing which only utilitarian considerations have been followed, are properly works of engineering. Only when the idea of beauty is added to that of use does a structure take its place among works of architecture. We may, then, define architecture as the art which seeks to harmonize in a building the requirements ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... when the commodious "cotton-float" had not quite yet come into use, and Poydras and other streets did not so vie with Tchoupitoulas in importance as they do now, will recall a scene of commercial hurly-burly that inspired much pardonable vanity in the breast of the utilitarian citizen. Drays, drays, drays! Not the light New York things; but big, heavy, solid affairs, many of them drawn by two tall mules harnessed tandem. Drays by threes and by dozens, drays in opposing phalanxes, drays in long ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... owes a great debt to Japan, for a certain outlook in decorative art has been adopted from Japan by the best artists of the world. Oriental art is so truly an art of the people, devoting itself most closely to the artistic development of the utilitarian things of life, that to see them at their best one has to look at their furniture, including folding screens, pottery, jewelry, rugs, and practically everything else that is needed in the daily life of the people. The art of China and Japan is so old that its real origin is ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... steam, its own great epic thought, to find leisure to listen to any thing longer than a single bugle-blast encouraging its advancement. We cannot but believe, however, if we may be allowed an analogical inference, that the age is fast approaching the climax of its utilitarian inventions, and that man, instead of chasing through unknown regions every will-o-wisp of his brain, in the hope of bringing it a captive to the Patent-office, will sit modestly down to apply to their various uses the discoveries already ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... gave them first to those who wanted them most. And as humorist and satirist he had a natural tendency to attack power,—to play Pasquin against the world's Pope. In fact, his radicalism was that of a humorist. He never adopted the utilitarian, or, as it was called, "philosophical," radicalism which was so fashionable in his younger days;—not, indeed, the Continental radicalism held by a party in England;—but was an independent kind of warrior, fighting under his own banner, and always rather ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... cooler and calmer atmosphere, where men are accustomed to give a reason for the faith that is in them, and hence it is necessary, in opening any discussion such as he had provoked, that he should assign some ground of opposition or support—Christian, Pagan, utilitarian, constitutional, optimist, or pessimist. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... seem likely that there could be much traffic other than that of pleasure-seekers thus along the margin of the sea. The configuration of this part of the County Antrim, however, explains the position of the road, and justifies the engineer who was so happily enabled to combine the utilitarian with the romantic. A series of deep cut gorges, locally known as "The Glens," intersect the country, running at right angles to the coast-line and thus forming a succession of gigantic ridges, over which it would be impossible to drive ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... and utilitarian view of the subject, he observes that what we call moral progress and civilization owe their advancement more to material interest and cold, selfish calculation than to any development of the humanitarian sentiments, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... difficulty is avoided. The origin of a new variation is independent of natural {143} selection, and provided that it is not directly harmful there is no reason why it should not persist. In this way we are released from the burden of discovering a utilitarian motive behind all the multitudinous characters of living organisms. For we now recognise that the function of natural selection is selection and not creation. It has nothing to do with the formation of the new variation. It merely decides ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... Rosenlaube; "it will be easy enough. But I don't agree with Phipps-Herrick about the reason or method. We are going to have a new era after the war. But it will not be a utilitarian age. It will be a return to beauty and form and culture—not with a 'k.' First of all, we are going to kill a great many Germans. Then we are going to Berlin to knock down all the ugly statues in the Sieges-Allee and smash the parvenu German Empire. Then we shall have ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... ordinary plural forms. Place-names—such as Bejar (p. 58) and Cordoba (p. 184)—are accentuated; so are trisyllables and polysyllables such as Gongora (p. 209) and Zuniga (p. 57 and elsewhere). It will be seen that, in this matter, I have been guided by strictly utilitarian principles. Inconsistencies are perhaps unavoidable under any system. The plan followed here, while it tends to diminish the total number of accents, probably involves no more inconsistencies than any other. It is based on rational grounds, and is, it may ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... remembered. Before we come to the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... day, less utilitarian than those of an earlier era, Borrow must have been an interesting man of letters had he not written his four great books. Single-minded devotion to the less commercially remunerative languages ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... the throne occupied by the Supreme Being under monotheistic systems made all the rest of Comte's construction easy enough. Utility remains the test of every institution, impulse, act; his fabric becomes substantially an arch of utilitarian propositions, with an artificial Great Being inserted at the top to keep them in their place. The Comtist system is utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic decoration. Translated into the plainest English, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... precisely that sort of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading should run to social and economic ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... century life that has enchained us as we read the pages of the past, and in its richness and variety at least the eighteenth century would be difficult to rival. Prosaic London, with her borough councils, her Strand improvements, and her immense utilitarian flats, still retains the glamour of her bygone days, and if her present buildings are without much attraction, they are glorified by the halo of their association ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... that Scotch fellow had no taste about his place, eh? He just thought of the vulgar utilitarian facts of the farm as it were; but for the cultivation of the eye, the glorious influence of landscape, he had no thought. Daisy Burn might as well be in the bottom of a pit; all one can see is the sky and the walls of forest ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... legitimate object of scientific research, beware of prescribing conditions to the investigator. Let him beware of attempting to substitute for that simple love with which the votary of science pursues his task, the calculations of what he is pleased to call utility. The professed utilitarian is unfortunately, in most cases, the very last man to see the occult sources from which useful results are derived. He admires the flower, but is ignorant of the conditions of its growth. The scientific man must approach Nature in his own way; for if you invade his ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... that not to be called practical which answers to these wants? And if some of them are of that peculiar nature that they can only be satisfied by knowledge, or by theoretical contemplation, is this knowledge, is this theoretical contemplation, not useful,—useful even in the eyes of the most decided Utilitarian? Might it not happen that what he calls theoretical philosophy seems useless and barren to the Utilitarian, because his ideas of men are too narrow? It is dangerous, and not quite becoming, to lay down the law, and say from the very first, 'You must not have more than certain wants, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... well as necessary toil, and to their grandmothers it gave solace during long vigils in pioneer cabins. The work of the old-time quilters possesses artistic merit to a very high degree. While much of it was designed strictly for utilitarian purposes—in fact, more for rugged service than display, yet the number of beautiful old quilts which these industrious ancestors have bequeathed to us is very large. Every now and then there comes to light one of these old quilts of the most exquisite ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... historically, but also in the worst modern sense this is rhetoric. It is not unreasonable to conclude that such a preoccupation with rhetoric, such a sustained search for all possible means of persuasion, should have strengthened rather than weakened the utilitarian theory of poetry. The school-master endeavored to mould the characters of his students by examples from heroic poetry; the teacher of rhetoric, in turn, taught them that to persuade an audience they must prove, please, and move, and that ficticious examples were about as persuasive as historical ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... the digesting of voluminous directions, the fundamental principles of food and household economy as published by the government departments, are here presented, with the permission of the respective authorities, together with many other suggestions of utilitarian character which may assist the mother and housewife to a greater fulfillment of her office in the ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... sufficiently liberal concession; Nageli, however, went much further when he said: "I do not know among plants a morphological modification which can be explained on utilitarian principles." (See "More Letters", Vol. II. page 375 (footnote).) If this were true the field of Natural Selection would be so seriously restricted, as to leave the theory only a very ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... hardly nearer than from Greeley; one only realizes their vicinity by the loss of their higher peaks. This house is freer from bugs than the one at Greeley, but full of flies. These new settlements are altogether revolting, entirely utilitarian, given up to talk of dollars as well as to making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything, nothing wherewith to satisfy the higher cravings if they exist, nothing on which the eye can rest with pleasure. The lower floor of this inn swarms with locusts in addition to thousands ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Happiness, not the fulfilment of Duty. (2) Every human practical activity derives its value from its efficiency as a means to that end, it is good or bad, right or wrong, as it conduces or fails to conduce to Happiness Thus his Moral Philosophy is essentially utilitarian or prudential Right action presupposes Thought or Thinking, partly on the development of a clearer and distincter conception of the end of desire, partly as the deduction from that of rules which state the normally effective conditions of its ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies of the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln—the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp—with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour— they were the signs and symbols of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... destruction and obliteration of our antiquarian earth and stone works. At no period has this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its utilitarian course, swept away—sometimes inevitably, often most needlessly—the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian remains of this description ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... aside to allow her to go first into the large, finely-proportioned building, which was so charming a survival of eighteenth-century taste. The orangery was cool, fragrant, deserted; remote indeed from all that Lacville stands for in this ugly, utilitarian world. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the utilitarian side,—the fitting of the child for the struggle of life,—from its main purpose,—the development of moral character. The moral aspect alone gives to human life its true character, its real value. As there is no morality without religion, the system of education that would ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... painter with disproportionately short legs, who, in all his pictures of human figures—from Moses down to the Mayor, done in heroic style—substituted his own legs. Your thorough utilitarian, deficient in imagination, his idea of mental symmetry being his own mental proportions, thinks no mind well balanced that has not a similar deficiency. He is a believer in nothing but the real and the useful—all else is stuff and nonsense; to him a mountain is a high elevation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... smaller matters of taste and accomplishment, to the general view of life, Sydney Smith would seem, at first sight, to have been a Utilitarian: and yet he declared himself in vigorous terms an opponent of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... and execution than ever. The use of Christmas cards has also obtained surprising proportions. A marked feature of this year's Christmas is the variety and elegance of offerings after the Paris fashion, which are of a purely ornamental and but slight utilitarian character. There are bonbonnieres in a variety of forms, some of them very magnificent and expensive; while the Christmas cards range in prices from a cent to ten dollars each. These bonbonnieres, decked with expensive ribbon or hand-painted with designs of the season, attain ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson |
