Various

“ Confidence that we are right, he would say, is in itself no proof that we are right: when God asks assent to the truth of a proposition in religion, he either shows us its intrinsic rationality by ordinary means, or he offers miraculous proof of the reality of which we need reasonable evidence. But we must know what we mean by miracle. Reasonableness, in short, must always at last be our guide. His own faith in Christianity rested on its moral excellence when it is received in its primitive simplicity, combined with the miracles which accompanied its original promulgation. ”

“ When the national industries have grown strong enough no longer to dread this competition, then the highest stage of progress has been reached; free trade should again become the rule, and the nation be thus thoroughly incorporated with the universal industrial union. What a nation loses for a time in exchange values during the protective period she much more than gains in the long run in productive power—the temporary expenditure being strictly analogous, when we place ourselves at the point of view of the life of the nation, to the cost of the industrial education of the individual. ”

“ Their primitive beauty is not marred by any attempt to force them into an historical mould, or disguised beneath an accumulation of the insipid inventions of later times. At the same time they are not treated as mere tales for children, for Livy never forgets the dignity that belongs to them as the prelude to the great epic of Rome, and as consecrated by the faith of generations. Perhaps an even stronger proof of the skill which enabled Livy to avoid dangers which were fatal to weaker men is to be found in his speeches. ”

“ But it suited also the practical bent of the Roman mind, with its comparative indifference to abstract speculation or purely scientific research. It is in the highest degree natural that Livy should have sought for the secret of the rise of Rome, not in any large historical causes, but in the moral qualities of the people themselves, and that he should have looked upon the contemplation of these as the best remedy for the vices of his own degenerate days. He dwells with delight on the unselfish patriotism of the old heroes of the republic. ”

“ Locke was perhaps too little read in the literature of philosophy to do full justice to those more subtle thinkers who, from Plato downwards, have recognized the need for categories of the understanding and presuppositions of reason in the constitution of knowledge. “Innate,” Lord Shaftesbury says, “is a word Mr Locke poorly plays on.” For the real question is not about the time when ideas entered the mind, but “whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, the ideas of order and administration of a God will not infallibly and necessarily spring up in him.” ”

“ With Polybius the greatness of Rome is a phenomenon to be critically studied and scientifically explained; the rise of Rome forms an important chapter in universal history, and must be dealt with, not as an isolated fact, but in connexion with the general march of events in the civilized world. Still less has Livy anything in common with the naïve anxiety of Dionysius of Halicarnassus to make it clear to his fellow Greeks that the irresistible people who had mastered them was in origin, in race and in language Hellenic like themselves. ”

“ An expectation of renewal, in the absence of misconduct, has grown up by usage and been confirmed by the law, which recognizes the distinction between granting a new licence and renewing an old one, by the treasury which levies death duties on the assumption that a licence is an enduring property, by local authorities which assess upon the same assumption, and by the High Courts of Justice, whose decisions have repeatedly turned on this point. ”

“ All that man can imagine about the universe or about God is necessarily confined to them. For proof of this Locke would have any one try to fancy a taste which had never affected his palate, or to frame the idea of a scent he had never felt, or an operation of mind, divine or human, foreign to all human consciousness. ”

“ The perpetually renewed struggle between the advocates and opponents of prohibition is a constant cause of social and political strife; and the alternate shutting up and opening of public houses in many places makes continuity of administration impossible, prevents the executive from getting the traffic properly in hand, upsets the habits of the people, demoralizes the trade and stands in the way of steady improvement. ”

“ It was well enough for Greeks to busy themselves with the manners, institutions and deeds of the “peoples outside.” The Roman historians, from Fabius Pictor to Tacitus, cared for none of these things. This exclusive interest in Rome was doubtless encouraged by the peculiar characteristics of the history of the state. The Roman annalist had not, like the Greek, to deal with the varying fortunes and separate doings of a number of petty communities, but with the continuous life of a single city. ”

“ The uneducated mass of mankind, he complains, either “seldom reason at all,” or “put passion in the place of reason,” or “for want of large, sound, round-about sense” they direct their minds only to one part of the evidence, “converse with one sort of men, read but one sort of books, and will not come in the hearing of but one sort of notions, and so carve out to themselves a little Goshen in the intellectual world, where light shines, and, as they conclude, day blesses them; but the rest of the vast expansion they give up to night and darkness, and avoid coming near it.” ”

“ All that is strictly knowledge is reached in these two ways. But there is a third sort, namely sense-perception, which hardly deserves the name. For “our perceptions of the particular existence of finite beings without us” go beyond mere probability, yet they are not purely rational. There is nothing self-contradictory in the supposition that our perceptions of things external are illusions, although we are somehow unable to doubt them. We find ourselves inevitably “conscious of a different sort of perception,” when we actually see the sun by day and when we only imagine the sun at night. ”

“ At the distance of 1 m. are the garden and park where the manor house of Otes once stood.
Locke’s writings have made his intellectual and moral features familiar. The reasonableness of taking probability as our guide in life was in the essence of his philosophy. The desire to see for himself what is true in the light of reasonable evidence, and that others should do the same, was his ruling passion, if the term can be applied to one so calm and judicial. “I can no more know anything by another man’s understanding,” he would say, “than I can see by another man’s eyes.” ”

“ Like Spain, she lies outside the sphere of continental influence; like Spain, she has innumerable great names in every province of literature, and, in both cases, to Europe at large these long remained names and nothing more; like Spain, she is prone to reproduce borrowed materials in shapes so transformed and rigid as to be unrecognizable and unadaptable. Moreover, the Reformation isolated England from literary commerce with the Latin races, and till the 18th century Germany was little more than a geographical expression. ”

“ For church festivals and holidays the country-folk come to town, the women riding on pillions behind the men, adorned in shawls, aprons and handkerchiefs of scarlet or other vivid hues, and wearing the strings of coins and ornaments of exquisite gold and silver filigree which represent their savings or dowries. ”

“ There is in Canada the same oscillation of public opinion as in the United States, and the same toleration of evasion of the law. The writer has stayed in hotels in several prohibition towns, where there was not only a regular bar but a printed wine list from which anything could be ordered at meals without any concealment at all. The chief difference between the conduct of hotels under prohibition and under licensing is that under licensing the bar is closed at the legal hour, which is usually 11 o’clock, and under prohibition it remains open as long as there are any customers to serve. ”

“ His moral ideal is no abstract one, and the virtues he praises are those which in his view made up the truly Roman type of character. The prominence thus given to the moral aspects of the history tends to obscure in some degree the true relations and real importance of the events narrated, but it does so in Livy to a far less extent than in some other writers. He is much too skilful an artist either to resolve his history into a mere bundle of examples, or to overload it, as Tacitus is sometimes inclined to do, with reflections and axioms. ”

“ The British system has the great merit of combining adaptability to different circumstances and to changing customs with continuity and steadiness of administration. The advantages of abandoning it for some other are more than doubtful, the difficulties are real and serious. Over a very long period it has been repeatedly readjusted in conformity with the movement of public opinion and of national habits; while under it the executive have gradually got the traffic well in hand, and a great and progressive improvement in order and conduct has taken place. ”

“ The United States government only interferes with the traffic to tax it for revenue, and to regulate the sale of liquor to Indians, to soldiers, etc. The liquor traffic is subject—whether in the form of manufacture, wholesale or retail trade—to a uniform tax of 25 dollars (£5) per annum imposed on every one engaged in it. Congress, under the constitution, controls interstate commerce, and the Supreme Court has decided that without its consent no state can prevent a railway or other carrying agency from bringing liquor to any point within its borders from outside. ”

“ LIZARD POINT, or The Lizard, the southernmost point of Great Britain, in Cornwall, England, in 49° 57′ 30′′ N., 5° 12′ W. It is generally the first British land sighted by ships bound up the English Channel, and there are two lighthouses on it. The cliff scenery is magnificent, and attracts many visitors. The coast is fretted into several small bays, such as Housel and, most famous of all, Kynance Cove; caves pierce the cliffs at many points, and bold isolated rocks fringe the shore. The coloured veining of the serpentine rock is a remarkable feature. ”

“ The fractional distillation of liquid air is the method now universally adopted for the preparation of oxygen on a commercial scale, while the nitrogen simultaneously obtained is used for the production of cyanamide, by its action on carbide of calcium. An interesting though minor application of liquid oxygen, or liquid air from which most of the nitrogen has evaporated, depends on the fact that if it be mixed with powdered charcoal, or finely divided organic bodies, it can be made by the aid of a detonator to explode with a violence comparable to that of dynamite. ”

“ In 1830 a bold experiment was tried in exempting the sale of beer from the requirement of a justice’s licence. Any householder rated to the parish was entitled, under a bond with sureties, to take out an excise licence for the sale of beer for consumption on or off the premises. This measure, which applied to England and was commonly known as the Duke of Wellington’s Act, had two objects; one was to encourage the consumption of beer in the hope of weaning the people from spirits; the other was to counteract the practice of “tieing” public-houses to breweries by creating free ones. ”

“ It is not surprising, therefore, to find that he fails altogether to present a clear and coherent picture of the history and working of the Roman constitution, or that his handling of intricate questions of policy is weak and inadequate.
Sources.—If from the general aim and spirit of Livy’s history we pass to consider his method of workmanship, we are struck at once by the very different measure of success attained by him in the two great departments of an historian’s labour. He is a consummate artist, but an unskilled and often careless investigator and critic. ”

“ For Locke saw that the ultimate questions about our knowledge and its extent presuppose questions about ideas. Without ideas knowledge is impossible. “Idea” is thus a leading term in the Essay. It is used in a way peculiar to himself—“the term which, I think, stands best for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” or “whatever it is which the mind can be employed about.” But ideas themselves are, he reminds us, “neither true nor false, being nothing but bare appearances,” phenomena as we might call them. ”