Morpheus

“ Morphology then is not only a study of material things and of the forms of material things, but has its dynamical aspect, under which we deal with the interpretation, in terms of force, of the operations of Energy. And here it is well worth while to remark that, in dealing with the facts of embryology or the phenomena of inheritance, the common language of the books seems to deal too much with the material elements concerned, as the causes of development, of variation or of hereditary transmission. ”

“ A glance, as the sheet which covers him is withdrawn from his body, sends a thrill of horror through us, and we turn away sickened at the sight; and the man—is he a man?—draws his cloth over his tattered body, and tries to woo sleep again. This last sight is enough to send us headlong into the fresh air and sunlight. If these are the results of morphia, then God have mercy upon its votaries, for they stand sorely in need of it! ”

“ In Morphology we should not speak of Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require an artist to interpret them. ”

“ The truth is, man was not made for the world alone; and speculations concerning the next will be found, at last, the most interesting to all of us.”
Folly of Atheism.
Morphology, in natural science, teaches us that the whole animal and vegetable creation is formed upon certain fundamental types and patterns, which can be traced under various modifications and transformations through all the rich variety of things apparently of most dissimilar build. ”

“ While the number of factors involved in a morphological problem is vastly greater than that of those which bear upon any problem into which life does not enter, and while the relations between these factors vary, in closely allied cases, in a way which has no parallel outside life-science, the problems of general morphology are still vastly simpler than those of society or of morality, or of almost any other department of human conduct, although they are like them in kind, and supply the same sort of evidence. ”

“ Morphology seeks to study objects as a whole rather than in detail, and to study these as they are in nature, before they suffer from changes wrought by the hands of men. The morphologist wants to know things as they are, and why they are. He recognizes the differences in the forms which substance assumes and in the structure of bodies. ”

“ You’re like a bit out of those coloured marble mosaics in the hall, you have to fit in your own set, fit into your own pattern, because you’re put there from the first. But you don’t want to be like a fixed bit of a mosaic—you want to fuse into life, and melt and mix with the rest of folk, to have some things burned out of you——’ She was downright serious. ”

“ The accidental differences of sex and age, training, accomplishments, and education had not affected—and could not affect—a sympathy in temperament which depended—not on the similarity of opinions—but on a similarity of moral fibre. Many forms can be cut, by the same hand, from the same piece of marble, and although one may be a grotesque and the other a cross, one a pursuing goddess and the other an angel for a tomb, the same substance, light, touch, and colour will be characteristic of all four. ”

“ The morphology of speech is the reverse side of its physiology, dealing with the spirit and inner life of the sentence just as the physiology of speech deals with the outward frame. If words are posterior to the sentence, if they are in fact [440] but so many crystallized and abbreviated sentences, that part of the science of language which treats of their meanings ought strictly to follow a chapter on morphology. That which is most scientific, however, is not always the most practically convenient, and such is the case with our present subject. ”

“ And so, night after night, with intervals of long separations, he fondled the file, and beneath his caressing and firm sculpturing gradually it grew into the shape he loved—pointed, razor-edged, well-poised. The feel of its well-balanced weight in his hand was a constant joy. It could split a skull or carve out a rib. ”

“ The web of each human existence may be compared to a woven fabric, in which one material predominates in weft and warp, but blended threads of many hues wind in and out, checkering the prevailing uniform tint, and giving variety to the general aspect. ”

“ Do we not all recognize that all terms applied to the supreme God are "morphisms" of various kinds? And the question is not how we can avoid a "morphism"—for we cannot avoid it—but how or where we can find the noblest and most spiritually helpful "morphism." ”

“ Morbec, Morbec, it is thy Judgment Night!
Admission, admission, Aristocrats!
Red turns the night, the servants all rush in.
Sieur! Sieur! the lackeys moan and wring their hands.
Give, give! the terrace croaks. Burn, Morbec, burn!
The great bell swings in the windy tower
Till the wolves in the forest pause to hear.
Fall, Morbec, fall! France has no need of thee! ”

“ The noble body, poor blasphemed perfection, worshipped in the dead husks of statue and painting and yet so feared in its reality. He had to remind himself that it was irrelevant. How could any man with a full quota of biology help dream of mastering that cool, unroused detachment? ”

“ In his philosophy, form plays the most important part. Form is the significant feature of both objective existence and subjective thought. Matter and energy only denote reality, but form characterizes quality. Science traces form, and the nature of all things, the human character included, is constituted by form. ”

“ Thus, God creating man of clay, animated with the vital principle of respiration, was the story of Prometheus, who formed a man of similar materials, to which he communicated life by fire stolen from heaven. ”

“ All men, after the example of the inspired writings, make frequent use of the figure called anthropomorphism, attributing to the Deity a human body, human members, human passions, etc., and that is done, not to imply that God is possessed of form, limbs, etc., but simply to make spiritual things or certain truths more intelligible to man. ”

“ A morsel of flesh, or a splinter of bone, bears an immeasurably larger proportion to our frame than our existing globe to the existing universe, which is itself but a link in the eternal chain, and yet a person ignorant of the human structure would in vain attempt to explain the purpose and fitness of some diminutive fragment of man. ”

“ Importance of the Study of Morphology.—The study of morphology is of high importance in biology, and even more so in anthropology. And since the organism is a harmonic whole, in which the parts and their functions are closely interrelated, any external anomaly leads us to assume that there are corresponding anomalies of the internal organs, and hence, functional anomalies; hence also, in man, psychic anomalies. ”

“ The fable says, therefore, that Prometheus adorning the human race, and providentially attending to our rational life, that it may not perish by being merged in the furies of earth, and the necessities of nature, as some one of the Gods says, bound nature to the arts, extended these which are imitations of intellect, as it were to sportive souls, and through these excited our gnostic and dianoëtic power to the contemplation of forms. For every artificial production is effective of form, and adorns the matter which is the subject of it. ”

“ Thus every Thing which is generated out of the internal has its Signature; the superior Form, which is chief in the Spirit of the Working in the Power, does most especially sign the Body, and the other Forms hang to it; as it is to be seen in all living Creatures, in the Shape and Form of the Body, and in the Behaviour and Deportment, also in the Sound, Voice, and Speech; and likewise in Trees and Herbs, in Stones and Metals ”

“ The deep-seated rhythms of growth which, as I venture to think, are the chief basis of morphological heredity, bring about similarities of form, which endure in the absence of conflicting forces; but a new system of forces, introduced by altered environment and habits, impinging on those particular parts of the fabric which lie within this particular field of force, will assuredly not be long of manifesting itself in notable and inevitable modifications of form. ”

“ Morphy, immortality itself shall not restore—three things: a fresh delight in the whimsical personality of the various chessmen; the recklessness of uncertainty and of unforeseen adventure; the unprecedented thrill of checkmating my opponent by accident. ”

“ To revert to our parable, the modeller, in treating the face of his provisional image, must be careful to lay on clay enough, or he may find himself barred at the last moment from giving the features just that finishing touch which is to make them ready for the marble. All the skill in the world will not enable him to secure for the face precisely the expression he would have it wear, if the materia be insufficient. ”

“ Goethe continues, “even scientific men have at all times had an impulse to recognise living things as such, to grasp connectedly their external visible and tangible parts, and take these as indications of the inner life, and thus in a sense to compass the whole in one glance.” “Hence we find at the threshold of art and knowledge and science a number of attempts to establish and elaborate a science that we may call morphology.” ”

“ Other causes of the unwillingness of morphologists to admit the new formation of organs are to be sought in the main principle of pure morphology itself, that the unity of plan imposes an iron limit upon adaptation, and in the 308powerful influence exercised at the time by materialistic habits of thought. ”

“ I saw also their sculpture, from the rude god with four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one little, contemptible, brainless head, up to the figures of to-day—to the marbles that genius has clad in such a personality that it seems almost impudent to touch them without an introduction. ”

“ Every visible thing has a shape. A rock, a pyramid, a scaffolding round a house has a shape; but you cannot say that they are alive. Now this thing was alive. This thing bore perhaps no closer relation to the shape of a live being than to the shape of a rock, a pyramid or a scaffolding. ”

“ This correlation between the morphological and the psychic personality must be sought throughout the entire scale of human variations, from the genius to the most degraded of imbeciles, from the strongest and most upright character to that which is most profoundly perturbed. Hence morphology constitutes a fundamental part in the study of human personality. ”

“ If the Power floods down into our minds with sufficient strength for actual form, to note the outline of such form, and from your drawing model it later in permanent substance. Then we should have means of evoking it at will, for we should have its natural Body—the form it built itself, its signature, image, pattern. ”

“ The Latins called them nodi, knots or links; and every philologist knows that articles, whether grammatical, conventional, or of faith, are so denominated as being the joints of language, covenants and creeds.
Now reader, the chapters of this book are the bones wherewith its body is compacted; the knots or links whereby its thread or chain of thoughts is connected; the articulations, without which it would be stiff, lame and disjointed. Every chapter has a natural dependence upon that which precedes, and in like manner a relation to that which follows it. Each grows out of the other. ”

“ Here we have the material form provided by means of which the ideals of the succeeding period were to find their artistic expression—such a typical or normal human form is, in fact, the logical expression of anthropomorphism in its most literal sense—the making of gods after man's image. ”

“ It appears to me probable that more insight will be gained into the real nature of life and organisation by concentrating on the active response of the animal, as manifested both in behaviour and in morphogenesis, particularly in the post-embryonic stages, than by giving attention exclusively to the historical aspect of structure, as is the custom of "pure morphology." ”

“ The close affinity of transcendentalists and evolutionists is shown very clearly in their common contrast in habits of 305thought with the Cuvierian school. It is the cardinal principle of pure morphology that function must be excluded from consideration. This is a necessary and unavoidable simplification which must be carried out if there is to be a science of pure form at all. But this limitation of outlook, if carried over from morphology to general biology becomes harmful, since it wilfully ignores one whole side of life—and that the most important. ”

“ Well, then, suppose that a modeller seated within is fashioning many statues; imagine, again, that the substance of clay is incessantly brought to him from without, through the holes, by many men who do not any of them see the artist himself. ”

“ Commentary.—If it be a good work to clothe with shape and form, according to our standard, that which is formless, shapeless, and without consistency, how shall we not make images to ourselves in the same way of things perceived through form and shape, so that we may bear them in mind, and be moved to imitate what they represent. ”

“ Accordingly, form is one of the least important elements to be considered in determining a homology. "Nature," he wrote in one of his early papers, "tends to repeat the same organs in the same number and in the same relations, and varies to infinity only their form. In accordance with this principle I shall have to draw my conclusions, in the determining the bones of the fish's skull, not from a consideration of their form, but from a consideration of their connections." ”