Ritter

“ The two men squeezed in beside the Austrian horse-trainer, valet, or whatever Ritter's coachman was. The trotter went off at a swift gait, and again the wild, noisy phantasmagoria of the streets of the new Babylon went flashing by Frederick's eyes.
Ritter had introduced his coachman as Mr. Boabo. He wore a small round hat of brown felt, brown gloves, and a short brown jockey's overcoat. His chin was heavy, his nose finely chiselled, and his moustache dark and downy. He was a handsome man, or lad, since boyish naïveté still predominated in his expression. He was about the same age as Ritter. ”

“ Mrs. Ritter. You’ll find it just inside the breakfast-room. [Mrs. Pampinelli sails across the room towards the left door. Just as she is passing back of Ritter’s chair, he turns and looks at her, and the excessive grandeur of her manner causes him to burst out laughing. But she simply freezes him with a look and goes out through the left door. He continues to laugh; and Mrs. Ritter, not having seen the cause of his laughter, stops crying and turns and looks at him, very troubled.] Fred Ritter, you’re acting to me tonight—just like a man that’d be losing his mind! [He looks over at her.] ”

“ He is one of the most interesting men I have ever seen. It was my privilege to become acquainted with him on the first evening of his visit, and I have since enjoyed most precious hours in his society." At the same time Ritter was devoting himself to a diversity of studies, particularly to the pursuit of those branches, such as the classical languages and literatures, to which he had previously given a lesser share of attention. For this purpose he attended the gymnasium at Frankfort, and sat on the school-bench with his pupil Hallneg. ”

“ Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, vol. i. p. 346.
[317] A tournament of this three-fold description took place at St. Denys, in the year 1389.
[318] The love of our ancestors for tournaments is evident in a curious passage of an ancient satirical poem, which Strutt has thus rendered:
“If wealth, Sir Knight, perchance be thine,
In tournaments you’re bound to shine;
Refuse—and all the world will swear,
You die not worth a rotten pear.”
[319] Mr. Sharon Turner (History of England, vol. i. p. 144. 4to. edit.) ”

“ Es reitet ein Ritter durch Haber und Klee, I, 29. Es ritt ein Räuber wohl über den Rhein, V, 285. Es schlief ein Graf bei seiner Magd, V, 225. Es sitzt gut Ritter auf und ritt, I, 29. Es spielte ein Ritter mit einer Madam, V, 294. Es trieb ein Schäfer mit Lämmlein raus, II, 500 a. Es war ein Jäger wohlgemut, V, 294. Es wollt sich ein Markgraf ausreiten, I, 29. Das falsche Mutterherz, I, 219. Der falsche Sänger, I, 29. Frau von der Löwenburg, I, 144; V, 286. Die Frau zur (von) Weissenburg, I, 144; V, 286. Gemalte Rosen, I, 7. Die Gerettete, I, 29 f. ”

“ I don't believe either of you know what the real joys of riding are," she went on, pulling the glove from her right hand and sipping the chocolate which Bessie had handed her.
"Not until one has passed weeks and months in the saddle at a time does one thoroughly realize what riding means, or appreciate the worth and companionship of a horse." She paused, and a look of longing came into her large, lustrous eyes, as the memory of her early life came back to her, when she, with her people, roamed free through the land. ”

“ There seems to be no question about what experience alone can do since there is no such thing so far as we can see. Nor is there any question about what faith alone can do since there is no such thing. ”

“ There is, above all this thought of parts, of features, of phenomena, the conception of the Earth as a whole, existing in itself, and for itself, an organic thing, advancing by growth, and becoming more and more perfect and beautiful. Without trying to impose on you anything vague and transcendental, I wish to lead you to view the globe as almost a living thing,—not a crystal, assuming new grace by virtue of an external law,—but a world, taking on grandeur and worth, by virtue of an inward necessity. The individuality of the earth must be the watchword of re-created Geography. ”

“ That science aims at nothing less than to embrace the most complete and the most cosmical view of the Earth; to sum up and organize into a beautiful unity all that we know of the globe. The whole body of facts revealed by past and present discovery must be marshaled into harmony, before we gain the high pinnacle of Geographical Science. The Earth, in all its parts, must be known in all its relations, before we can speak of it as the scholars of our day ought to speak of the world they inhabit. ”

“ Looking at the earth as simply one among the innumerable hosts of heaven, it, like each one of them, becomes to the imagination a mere point of light, a “star among stars.” But, when we shift our point of view, and leaving the cosmical or universal for the special, for what pertains to the individual life, the mere point of light flames up into a great, busy world, full of phenomena demanding investigation and thought. ”

“ Or, to compare the continents to a still higher class of forms, Europe may be called the Face of the Old World, out of which the soul of humanity could look more clearly into the great and promising future. ”

“ And yet this world, so attractive in its multiplicity of details, is almost a chaos at the first sight; a confused and inextricable mass, so large, so high, so deep as to defy human effort to compass or master it. ”

“ The tinkle of a guitar attracted their attention to a group of peons and women squatted on their heels on one side of the court, in the shade of the arcades, smoking and chatting. A little beyond them, in the shadow of the doorway, stood the major-domo, Juan Ramon and the pretty housekeeper, Rosita. ”

“ There can be no true speculation, no philosophy of the unlimited and eternal, without inquiry into and knowledge of the limited and conditioned. He who knows not the earthly, cannot know the heavenly; he who knows not the finite, cannot know the infinite. ”

“ A good rider will keep the elbows close to the sides, just drawing the line finely between that pinioned look which is so disfiguring, and the detestable flapping, like the wings of an unquiet bird, in which so many riders, both male and female, so frequently indulge. ”

“ We turn away from these glances into the future to look upon the past, the long ages when men lived in rudeness and ignorance, having no art, and knowing nothing beyond the little tract where they were born, and to which they remained chained. ”

“ It is to use the whole circle of sciences to illustrate its own individuality, not to exhibit their peculiarities. It must make them all give a portion, not the whole, and yet must keep itself single and clear. ”

“ I can not restrain my interest from going where I believe reality, to be. Contrariwise, I can not send it where I believe reality is not. Interest and attention, like natural forces generally, take the direction of least resistance; and the places of greatest belief in reality are those of least resistance for attention. With this psychological basis to go on, illustration will carry us forward more surely and steadily than further argument. ”

“ Organisms have their own special qualities and so present their own problems, exactly as do oceans and stars. Biology depends upon, but at the same time transcends, chemistry and physics, in exactly the same way that astronomy rests upon but transcends chemistry and physics. ”

“ On the basis of experience science can-project itself far in advance of experience, but only on that basis can it thus project itself.
So much for the data, the starting places of biology. They are individual animals and plants, living in nature. It is wholesome for any domain of science to stop now and then and ask what its original data are. Such inquiry not only yields enlightenment, interesting and useful of itself, but it is further illuminating as to the way a science deals, and must deal, with its raw material—its "givens." ”

“ In a matter so vital, and one about which general intelligence is bound to be so widely astir for such information as can be had, it is of the greatest moment that information from the best sources should be readily available. ”

“ On the one hand science has a nature of its very own, an absolute nature. It is not anything else whatever. It is not religion, it is not philosophy, it is not art of any kind, it is not mathematics, it is not commerce. At the same time, equally true is it that science never has existed, nor can it be conceived as existing wholly apart from the world of other interests. For instance, science simply could not be without objects of nature to operate on, and appliances such as instruments and chemicals and literature to work with. ”

“ Plants and animals, as nature presents them, are for him real in a way. They are of course what our naked, crass senses come in contact with, but the real essence of them, the thing we want to get at, lies far away in the germ-cells, in the chromosomes, in protoplasm. There is reality. ”

“ We may enter with perfect freedom and wander through its streets and palaces as long as we live, even to the latest generations of those who follow us, always there to find that which is more interesting, more beautiful, more marvelous. ”

“ Since we know absolutely nothing about the relation of the atoms in living substance, would it not be a reasonable hypothesis to say that the nature of that marvelous process called metabolism is due to just the fact that the atoms of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, etc., are undergoing perpetual change of valence? ”

“ For my part, I am of opinion that biology has reached the point where the suggestions of such cosmically-minded men of science as Lord Kelvin and Professor Arrhenius, that life like matter and force is eternal, must be taken hold of seriously as the best working hypothesis that can be made on the basis of the biological data available. ”

“ Analyze the atomic theory of modern chemistry and you will find that all that makes it significant for chemical practise is expressible in this way: If any two substances unite with each other chemically, they do so in such a manner that there are no particles of them so small as not to follow the same law of combination that holds for the substances in bulk. ”

“ It is an exercise in which neither the horse nor the rider is seen to advantage; the heavy monotonous tramp of the beast, cramped by the narrow limits, becomes a stilty, wooden gallop. The rider, too, more careful of her balance than intent upon graceful action, restricts herself to a few, and by no means picturesque attitudes. With all this, the girl now before me seemed herself so intensely to enter into the enjoyment of the scene, that all her gestures sprang out of a sort of irrepressible delight. ”

“ At a few places in this discussion it has seemed as though the course we were on would drag our physical science back to the primal chaos of mere sensations and facts from which it seems to have come. In truth, though, now that we can look at the whole situation as from a hilltop, how thoroughly familiar, how reassuring, how in accord with the best, most fruitful endeavor of all the ages of human history it is seen to be. ”

“ Our eyes must be opened in some way to the fact that education, taken in the full sweep of its meaning, is too life-and-death a matter for us as a nation to be left to the formalities of the schoolroom, the university lecture hall and the laboratory, even though these be excellent beyond the possibility of improvement. ”

“ The conception of "the reign of law" in the organic world ought to be much more widely and concretely established than it is in the public mind. Under stress of the necessity of dethroning notions of supernaturalism from living nature, biologists have up to now been so occupied with explaining phenomena in terms of natural causation that the orderliness of organic phenomena has had to take a back seat both in research and in speculation. ”

“ Surely I am not, for full definition comes at the end and not at the beginning of experiential knowledge. But however incomplete my definition be, here I am. "The proof of the pudding is the eating."
Why do the elementalists pin their faith to the invisible constituents of things rather than to the things themselves? Can it be that they deliberately deceive themselves as to the place where reality is located? Surely this can not be so. Some misguiding agent or agents there must be, and they must be subtle, otherwise they could not succeed as well as they do with so many earnest people. ”

“ Most of us would agree that we have to use both our senses and our minds in science. Most would agree too that that workman is the most efficient who uses his instruments the most intelligently—who is not a mere rule-of-thumb workman. How then do our minds and our senses work while we do science? Are there general principles of operation, to know which would enable us to use them more smoothly, more surely, more productively? Let us watch them while they work at some problem of chemistry, say. To be as objective as possible we will use common table salt. ”

“ What we have to see is that all suck discussions are utterly futile for science; indeed, that they have no legitimate place in inductive science.
Has anybody ever seen an egg that was not produced by some organism; some function without structure, or vice versa; some life without organization, or organization independent of life? ”