Set

“ There are several sets and castes in the social life--the official set, the military set, the professional people, the mercantile set, and so on--and it is not often that the lines that divide them are broken. ”

“ But a person may set a hen; that is, place her in position on eggs. One sits up in a chair, but he sets up a post. One sits down on the ground, but he sets down figures. Set is also an intransitive verb and has special meanings attached to it as such, but they may be readily understood [Pg 42] by a little study of the dictionary, and no confusion need arise. The sun sets. Plaster of Paris sets. A setter dog sets. One sets out on a journey. Sit may also be used in two senses as a transitive verb, as: "The general sits his horse well," and "The woman sat herself down."
Sew—sō, not sū. ”

“ On the other hand, we perceive a new compactness—still loose, but much in advance of what existed before—whereby the central figure is always before us, urged along from one act and one set of surroundings to another, towards a goal which is never lost sight of. ”

“ But if they get smaller and smaller, while of any two of the set there is always one that encloses the other, then we begin to have the kind of conditions which would enable us to treat them as having a point for their limit. ”

“ Set in the old Egyptian mythology was recognized as "the patron of foreigners, the power which swept the children of the desert like a sand-storm over the fertile land." He was a representative of physical, but not of moral, evil; a strong and powerful deity, worthy of reverence and worship, but less an object of love than of fear. ”

“ There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness. When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. ”

“ To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. ”

“ As mine were to thee;
The free life of thy living,
Be the gift of it free;
Not as servant to lord, nor as master to slave, shalt thou give thee
to me.
O children of banishment,
Souls overcast,
Were the lights ye see vanish meant
Alway to last,
Ye would know not the sun overshining the shadows and stars overpast.
I that saw where ye trod
The dim paths of the night
Set the shadow call'd God
In your skies to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in
sight. ”

“ Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? ”

“ When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. ”

“ I here assume, what is agreed on by most writers, that beauty of form—so far as it is independent of sensuous pleasure on the one hand, and pleasures of association and suggestion on the other, is resolvable into the presence of a certain order among manifold details, which order is commonly spoken of as unity in variety. With respect, first of all, to the way in which the element of variety and contrast presents itself in visible form, a word or two will suffice. ”

“ Our Conceptions often Complex.—If we examine attentively the various notions or conceptions of the mind, we find that a large part of them are in a sense complex—comprising, in a word, a certain aggregate of properties, which, taken together, constitute our conception of the object. Thus, my notion of table, or chair, or desk, is made up of several conceptions, of form, size, material, color, hardness, weight, use, etc., etc., all which, taken together, constitute my notion of the object thus designated. ”

“ My notion of a table, for example, is that of an object possessing certain qualities, as form, size, weight, color, hardness, each of which qualities is known to me by a distinct act of perception, if not by a distinct sense, and each of which is capable, accordingly, of being distinctly, and by itself, an object of thought or conception. ”

“ The table before you, good reader, is only a part of the object of your cognition. You yourself are the other part. The true and total object of your mind is the table, or whatever else it may be,—and yourself. ”

“ Mass demands that the chief parts of every composition should readily catch the eye. It maintains a harmonious proportion of all the parts. Coherence demands of any composition that the relation of each part to its neighbors should be unmistakable, and that the order, forms, and connections of the parts preserve this relation. ”

“ Granted that we are certain of our own sense-data, have we any reason for regarding them as signs of the existence of something else, which we can call the physical object? When we have enumerated all the sensations which we should naturally regard as connected with the table, have we said all there is to say about the table, or is there still something else—something not a sensation, something which persists when we go out of the room? Common sense unhesitatingly answers that there is. ”

“ In every system, whether of nature or of art, there must be a variety and subordination of parts. Hence, to object that each part is not perfect in itself, without considering its relations and adaptation to the whole, is little short of madness. ”

“ And the true Series is that of the Self, and of its expression in life. The true variety is that of various individual Selves, who together constitute, in their unity, the Individual of Individuals, the absolute. Beyond our own circle of concretely known facts, there are not merely series of data to be discriminated, but volitional processes to be estimated, appreciated, and conceived in their true serial order, as the stages of the world’s life. ”

“ It may perhaps be said that continuity, abstracted from the sensible representation, and considered only in the transcendental order, is, in its reality and as it appears to a pure spirit, nothing more than the constant relation of many beings, which are of a nature to produce in a sensitive being the phenomenon of representation, and to be perceived in the intuition which we call the representation of space. ”

“ Nothing so starts and prolongs the shock felt by the thinker as those mysterious exfoliations of abstraction into realities in the double region, the one positive, the other infinite, of human thought. A region double, and nevertheless one; the infinite is a precision. The profound word number is at the base of man's thought. ”

“ If you had a child—your own flesh and blood—part of your life—a child that had been to you what my sweet Moll hath been to me, you would comprehend better how I feel. To pretend indifference when you're longing to hug her to your heart, to talk of fair weather and foul when you're thinking of old times, and then to bow and scrape and go away without a single desire of your aching heart satisfied,—'tis more than a man with a spark of warmth in his soul can bear. ”

“ The discrete degrees constituting any one thing are always in a series, a lower one of the series being derived from the higher, like end, cause, and effect. End, cause, and effect follow in order, like prior, middle, and ultimate, the end or prior producing the cause or middle, and the cause or middle producing the effect or ultimate. Affection, thought, and act are related as end, cause, and effect. Take the example of speech for illustration. ”

“ When you have systematised your thoughts, and think your written arrangement is complete, ponder it clause by clause with the paper at hand for constant reference. No matter if your thoughts seem to wander, and the subject appears to grow vague; your mind is dwelling on it, and ideas will fructify in your mind unconsciously as seeds sprout in the dark. ”

“ Structure is offered to the intellect--it clears and vivifies understanding; it is not felt, it is perceived. Anything which is made up of parts--beginning, middle, and end, climax and resolution--possesses structure. But form in the intimate sense is the intrinsic, inevitable relation of cause and effect ”

“ Order and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, or stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and what is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in love all things exist and have their being. ”

“ The thoughts of size, shape, hardness, and so on, which we group together and call material chairs, trees, mountains, and other objects, are but ‘relative realities,’ pointing to the absolute reality, infinite mind and its eternal ideas and thoughts. ”

“ In judgment we divide the object of a perception into a subject, from which we as yet exclude a predicate; then into such predicate; and, finally, into the third mental representation, that of the copula by which the predicate is united again with the subject. ”

“ When arranged in systematic order, they form a series, progressing from those that consist of one central thought, of one single germ, to others that exhibit various degrees or modes of development by means of an accompanying narrative. And in order to show the universality of these threads of thought or categories, as we may now call them, they have been illustrated, whenever I could do so, by examples drawn from the origin-stories and myths of other peoples in different parts of the world. ”

“ I saw, on that mystic scroll, the simulacræ of every person I had ever known, and found that there, in the Soul-world, people and things passed at their true, and by no means at a fictitious value, like men and money do on the earth. All mankind are divisible into seven great Orders, to each of which there are three sub-orders or classes. ”

“ Sometimes focus and margin change places. Sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. There can seldom be a sharp description. All we know is that, for the most part, each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like. ”

“ In our Supplementary Essay we showed at length that a Self, as a real being, has a certain form of expression, which inevitably involves a serial structure, but that this serial structure, in its main outline, is most truly represented by the form of the series of whole numbers, rather than by the form of a series between any two of whose terms, further terms without end are interpolated. ”

“ To illustrate empirically of what wide application the concept of Series is, and how it is present wherever the concept of Law is present, and vice versa, is useful in beginning a discussion of this category, although anything like present completeness in such illustrations is hopeless. You find serial order wherever you look in the world of definitely conceived or of exactly describable fact. Space and Time illustrate our principle in their every detail. ”

“ Now obviously this point in which the philosophers are agreed—the view that there is a real table, whatever its nature may be—is vitally important, and it will be worth while to consider what reasons there are for accepting this view before we go on to the further question as to the nature of the real table. ”

“ If therefore you find some tales in one collection bearing a close resemblance with those you have read in another, you should make it a matter of interest to observe what is individual in the character of each, and to trace the points both of diversity and analogy in the mode of expression in which they are clothed, and which will be found just as marked as the difference in costume of the respective peoples who have told them each after their own fashion. ”

“ We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? ”

“ With this explanation, therefore, of the famous categories, I shall close my slight sketch of the system. Has the reader ever considered the meaning of the term Category—a term so ancient and so venerable from its connexion with the most domineering philosophy that has yet appeared amongst men? The doctrine of the Categories (or, in its Roman appellation, of the Predicaments) is one of the few wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still survives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most ancient academic institutions of Europe. ”

“ Mass, the second principle of structure, demands that those parts of a composition, paragraph, or sentence which are of most importance shall be so placed that they will arrest the attention. By coherence is meant that principle of structure which, in sentences, paragraphs, and whole compositions, places those parts related in thought near together, and keeps separate those parts which are separated in thought. ”

“ But we shall have to follow here the guidance of the categories,—only, as in the present case a thing, "I," as thinking being, is at first given, we shall—not indeed change the order of the categories as it stands in the table,—but begin at the category of substance, by which at the a thing a thing is represented and proceeds backwards through the series. ”