Various

“ Last comes an age of high literary culture which tolerates the trite morals and hackneyed tales for the sake of the exquisite setting, and is amused at the wit which introduces topics and characters of the day under the transparent veil of animal life. Such an artificial product can be nothing more than the fashion of a day, and must, like pastoral poetry, die a natural death. ”

“ Abuserois-je de la liberté de conjectures si je disois, que les Plantes et les Animaux qui existent aujourd’hui sont parvenus par une sorte d’évolution naturelle des Êtres organisés qui peuplaient ce premier Monde, sorti immédiatement des Mains du Créateur?...
“Ne supposons que trois révolutions. La Terre vient de sortir des Mains du Créateur. Des causes préparées par sa Sagesse font développer de toutes parts les Germes. Les Êtres organisés commencent à jouir de l’existence. ”

“ A single fact will not make a fable, but is only an emblem. We thus arrive at the following definition:—“A fable is a relation of a series of changes which together form a whole. The unity of the fable consists herein, that all the parts lead up to an end, the end for which the fable was invented being the moral precept.”
We may notice in passing a problem in connexion with the fable which had long been debated, but never satisfactorily resolved till Lessing took it in hand—Why should animals have been almost universally chosen as the chief dramatis personae? ”

“ The whole world is represented by the figure of a tree, of which the seeds and roots are the first indeterminate matter, the leaves the accidents, the twigs and branches corruptible creatures, the blossoms the rational soul, and the fruit pure spirits or angels. It is also described as a bifurcation of two twigs, mental and bodily creation out of a common root. One might almost say that Duns Scotus recognizes the principle of a gradual physical evolution, only that he chooses to represent the mechanism by which the process is brought about by means of quaint scholastic fictions. ”

“ Yet while, in its application to history, Hegel’s theory of evolution has points of resemblance with those doctrines which seek to explain the world-process as one unbroken progress occurring in time, it constitutes on the whole a theory apart and sui generis. It does not conceive of the organic as succeeding on the inorganic, or of conscious life 29 as conditioned in time by lower forms. In this respect it resembles Leibnitz’s idea of the world as a development; the idea of evolution is in each case a metaphysical as distinguished from a scientific one. ”

“ Of true legal presumptions, the majority may be dealt with most appropriately under different branches of the substantive law, such as the law of crime, of property, or of contract, and accordingly Stephen has included in his Digest of the Law of Evidence only some which are common to more than one branch of the law. The effect of a presumption is to impute to certain facts or groups of facts a prima facie significance or operation, and thus, in legal proceedings, to throw upon the party against whom it works the duty of bringing forward evidence to meet it. ”

“ A closer scrutiny of the writers of all ages who preceded Charles Darwin, and, in particular, the light thrown back from Darwin on the earlier writings of Herbert Spencer, have made plain that without Darwin the world by this time might have come to a general acceptance of evolution; but it seems established as a historical fact that the world has come to accept evolution, first, because of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and second, because of Darwin’s exposition of the evidence for the actual occurrence of organic evolution. ”

“ On the other hand, nearly all systems of philosophy have discussed the underlying problems. Such questions as the origin of the cosmos as a whole, the production of organic beings and of conscious minds, and the meaning of the observable grades of creation, have from the dawn of speculation occupied men’s minds; and the answers to these questions often imply a vague recognition of the idea of a gradual evolution of things. Accordingly, in tracing the antecedents of the modern philosophic doctrine we shall have to glance at most of the principal systems of cosmology, ancient and modern. ”

“ If the cross-examiner intends to adduce evidence contrary to the evidence given by the witness, he ought to put to the witness in cross-examination the substance of the evidence which he proposes to adduce, in order to give the witness an opportunity of retracting or explaining. Where a witness has answered a question which only tends to affect his credibility by injuring his character, it is only in a limited number of cases that evidence can be given to contradict his answer. ”

“ The whole society of the 17th century, its greatness and its foibles, its luxury and its squalor, from Le grand monarque to the poor manant, from his majesty the lion to the courtier of an ape, is painted to the life. ”

“ The greatest complication in exchange questions arises when we have to deal with a country employing a silver standard, and, fortunately for the development of trade, this problem has disappeared of late years in the case of India, Ceylon, Japan, Mexico and the Straits Settlements, and now the only important country using silver as a standard is China. When the monetary standard in one country is only a commodity in another country we are as far removed from the ideal of an international currency as can be imagined. ”

“ In the then state of knowledge, it appeared that all the species of animals and plants could be arranged in one series, in such a manner that, by insensible gradations, the mineral passed into the plant, the plant into the polype, the polype into the worm, and so, through gradually higher forms of life, to man, at the summit of the animated world. ”

“ He is the first to express clearly the conception of a sacred nation, isolated by its religion from all others, the guardian of divine law and the abode of divine majesty. This kingdom of God he conceives of as moral: Yahweh is to put his own spirit into the people,4 creating in them a disposition to obey his commandments, which are moral as well as ritual (xxxvi. 26, 27) . The conception of a sacred nation controlled the whole succeeding Jewish development; if it was narrow in its exclusive regard for Israel, its intensity saved the Jewish religion to the world. ”

“ Tous les individus de cette nature, qui existent, proviennent d’individus semblables qui tous ensemble constituent l’espèce entière. Or, je crois qu’il est aussi impossible à l’homme de connoître la cause physique du premier individu de chaque espèce, que d’assigner aussi physiquement la cause de l’existence de la matière ou de l’univers entier. ”

“ The detailed exhibition of the organizing activity of nature in the several processes of the organic and inorganic world rests on a number of fanciful and unscientific ideas. Schelling’s theory is a bold attempt to revitalize nature in the light of growing physical and physiological science, and by so doing to comprehend the unity of the world under the idea of one principle of organic development. His highly figurative language might leave us in doubt how far he conceived the higher stages of this evolution of nature as following the lower in time. ”

“ There is not in America the huge accumulation of savings and investment money which the Old World has collected, so that whereas Europe helps to finance the United States, the latter country has so many home enterprises that she can spare none of her funds to assist Europe. It would not be possible for London to draw on New York such bills as we have described as finance bills, for they could never be discounted there except on the most onerous terms, and there is nothing in America which corresponds to the London money market. ”

“ The rule of exclusion extends only to a lawful wife. There is no ground for supposing that the wife of a prosecutor is an incompetent witness. A witness is incompetent if, in the opinion of the court, he is prevented by extreme youth, disease affecting his mind, or any other cause of the same kind, from recollecting the matter on which he is to testify, from understanding the questions put to him, from giving rational answers to those questions, or from knowing that he ought to speak the truth. ”

“ With the fable, as we know it, the moral is indispensable. As La Fontaine puts it, an apologue is composed of two parts, body and soul. The body is the story, the soul the morality. But if we revert to the earliest type we shall find that this is no longer the case. In the primitive beast-fable, which is the direct progenitor of the Aesopian fable, the story is told simply for its own sake, and is as innocent of any moral as the fairy tales of Little Red Riding-Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. ”

“ The discovery of Phylogeny. a single fossil creature in a geological stratum of a wrong period, the detection of a single anatomical or physiological fact irreconcilable with origin by descent with modification, would have been destructive of the theory and would have made the reputation of the observer. But in the prodigious number of supporting discoveries that have been made no single negative factor has appeared, and the evolution from their predecessors of the forms of life existing now or at any other period must be taken as proved. ”

“ The Wolf and the Lamb comes home to every one whether learned or simple. But, besides this, human sympathies obscure the moral judgment; hence it follows that the fable, unlike the drama and the epos, should abstain from all that is likely to arouse our prejudices or our passions. In this respect the Wolf and the Lamb of Aesop is a more perfect fable than the Rich Man and the Poor Man’s Ewe Lamb of Nathan.
Lessing’s analysis and definition of the fable, though he seems himself unconscious of the scope of his argument, is in truth its death-warrant. ”

“ Here the divine will is viewed as an efflux from the divine wisdom, as the intermediate link between God, the first substance, and all things, and as the fountain out of which all forms emanate. At the same time all forms, including the higher intelligible ones, are said to have their existence only in matter. Matter is the one universal substance, body and mind being merely specifications of this. Thus Avicebron approaches, as Salomon Munk observes,6 a pantheistic conception of the world, though he distinctly denies both matter and form to God. ”

“ Judicial Notice.—It may be doubted whether the subject of judicial notice belongs properly to the law of evidence, and whether it does not belong rather to the general topic of legal or judicial reasoning. Matters which are the subject of judicial notice are part of the equipment of the judicial mind. It would be absurd to require evidence of every fact; many facts must be assumed to be known. ”

“ There are in London a great number of wealthy banks and banking houses whose reputation and solidity allow any one of them to accept bills for amounts varying from one to ten millions sterling, whereby large commissions are earned.
These four advantages, namely, a free gold market, a huge trade, an enormous accumulation of wealth, and a discount market such as exists nowhere else, have made London an unrivalled financial centre, and consequently bills on London are an international money and the best medium of exchange. ”

“ His Geschichte des Volkes Israël, the result of thirty years’ labour, was epoch-making in that branch of research. While in every line it bears the marks of intense individuality, it is at the same time a product highly characteristic of the age, and even of the decade, in which it appeared. If it is obviously the outcome of immense learning on the part of its author, it is no less manifestly the result of the speculations and researches of many laborious predecessors in all departments of history, theology and philosophy. ”

“ Much speculation has been expended on the probable sources of the tales which the trouvères told. The Aryan theory, which saw in them the direct influence of India upon Europe, has now been generally abandoned. It does not seem probable that any ancient or exotic influences were brought to bear upon the French jongleurs, who simply invented or adapted stories of that universal kind which springs unsown from every untilled field of human society. More remarkable than the narratives themselves is the spirit in which they are told. ”