Demonstration

“ We therefore urge teachers to return, in their demonstrations, to the simplest ideas, which are also the most general; to consider a demonstration as finished and complete when it has evidently caused the truth to enter into the mind of the pupil, and to add nothing merely for the sake of silencing sophists. ”

“ The best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other's shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows. ”

“ As for making a demonstration—where is the means? Who are the leaders? Whom can ye trust? There's no danger in keeping still; the least motion may get one into trouble. Next day comes news—such a town has opened its gates. ”

“ It is a very common idea that a demonstration must rest on some ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. These, according to one school, are first principles of a general nature; according to another, are first sensations. ”

“ How is the imagination of crowds to be impressed? We shall soon see. Let us confine ourselves for the moment to saying that the feat is never to be achieved by attempting to work upon the intelligence or reasoning faculty, that is to say, by way of demonstration. ”

“ Nevertheless, we would leave to the syllogism, and such celebrated and applauded demonstrations, their jurisdiction over popular and speculative acts; while, in everything relating to the nature of things, we make use of induction for both our major and minor propositions ; for we consider induction as that form of demonstration which closes in upon nature and presses on, and, as it were, mixes itself with action. ”

“ The idea was taken from your demonstration in the Bureau, either by an eye-witness or by someone who heard about it afterward, probably the former. Even though it failed, one man saw the possibilities. ”

“ Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. ”

“ This inability on my part puzzled the Demonstrator and his assistants—the senior students, who moved about from [Pg 198] table to table, listening to our recitations whenever we would get a group of muscles exposed for demonstration. One dignified senior who was usually on hand to hear me recite, was painstaking in trying to make me understand their action: “Why, can’t you see?” he would ask ”

“ Few facts could better illustrate the vast and wonderful change which has taken place in our condition as a people, than the fact of our assembling here for the purpose we have to-day. Harmless, beautiful, proper, and praiseworthy as this demonstration is, I cannot forget that no such demonstration would have been tolerated here twenty years ago. ”

“ It is not in demonstrations as in probabilities, that difficulties can take place, and one argument counter-ballance another, and diminish its authority. A demonstration, if just, admits of no opposite difficulty ”

“ Tacitly or avowedly, they regard the demonstrations as being for the benefit of mankind. But if so, to what purpose were the millions of these demonstrations which took place on the Earth when there were no intelligent beings to contemplate them? ”

“ She makes her demonstration, like the rest, when she finds that the best seats are already filled and that no one 202 offers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she is ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as she does sometimes, your devotions are rendered uncomfortable by the unmistakable protest conveyed in her own. ”

“ The responsibility for the course rests naturally upon the individual instructors of these small sections. These men also share in the demonstration work, since each is usually an enthusiast in some particular field and will make a great effort in his own specialty to give a successful popular presentation of the important ideas involved. ”

“ So whatever brings risk of tumult and disorder, multitudinous processions in the streets of our crowded towns, multitudinous meetings in their public places and parks,— demonstrations perfectly unnecessary in the present course of our affairs,—our best self, or right reason, plainly enjoins us to set our faces against. ”

“ During a political campaign the streets of our cities are filled with public demonstrations of every kind, and it is not considered unladylike to mingle with the crowd, not only as spectators but as participants. ”

“ Great demonstrations are being held all over the country, to insist on the popular will being carried into effect, and there is a growing cry of "Down with the Lords." A spectator from another planet might wonder at all the fuss. He might marvel how forty millions of people needed to stamp and gesticulate against a handful of obstructives. ”

“ A knowledge sustained and supported by practical demonstrations, through the action of natural law, whose manifestations and demonstrations should be so direct and indisputable as to appeal convincingly to the hard headed thinkers, who as a [Pg 134] class, seemed to represent a materialistic element that threatened to overthrow all belief in immortality. ”

“ Its very seriousness, simplicity, and impressive monotony made it all the more striking. Not a soldier to be seen, no triumphal cars, no break in the stream of respectability mechanically moving throughout the day. In England, on public demonstrations, one goes to look at the crowd, but here the crowd was the procession. ”

“ The manifestations, instead of being content with mere knocking on the floor, have commenced the ringing of bells (some large enough to tire the arms of even professors) , pounding under the table, so as to leave visible manifestations, sufficient to satisfy a dozen universities of its physical ability, moving furniture, playing on musical instruments, and various other demonstrations equally wonderful and satisfactory to all who see them. ”

“ In this way the abstract demonstrations should form but a small part of the instruction, and should be given when, by familiarity with concrete illustrations, they have come to be felt as the natural embodiment of visible fact. ”

“ On the lecture slate
The circle rounded under female hands
With flawless demonstration: ”

“ Americans are such habitual organisers of huge demonstrations, and are so generally accustomed to say, publicly, without reserve, what they think, that the expression of what to them may appear perfectly natural runs the risk of creating elsewhere an air of exaggeration and unreality. ”

“ The very sight of one of his demonstrations will give common men, like ourselves, headaches, and you will remember that having successfully got through one of the toughest of them, he felicitated himself that there was but one other man living who could comprehend it, now it was made. ”

“ You always want to please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as you did it before to please your father and mother. ”

“ The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilisation which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand. English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. ”

“ You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. ”

“ Going from student to student, the Demonstrator instructed and encouraged each in turn. Soon the room, thinned of its spectators, took on a different aspect: the novices bent over their work with interest and absorption. [Pg 197] The painful emotion I had felt at seeing those bodies, stripped and at the mercy of our little knives and forceps, soon gave place to genuine enthusiasm. I dreaded the feel of the cold skin, but once that was removed, I was all interest; one then lost sight of the human side, and saw only the beautiful mechanism. ”

“ They are like the cold, hard, dishevelled, damp, and uncomfortable body under the knife of the demonstrator, not the bright and bounding boy, clothed in graceful garments and filled to every tingling capillary with a soul. ”

“ How brightly their faces are beaming,
These people who make up the crowd!
How they bow, how they bend, how they flutter,
How they look at each other and smile,
How they glow, and what bon mots they utter! ”

“ One could only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch the crowd—thousands of headlong human beings lunging their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. ”

“ An act is performed, we witness it, we see or know how it is done, we conceive the effort that would lead to the performance of it, and forthwith this conception becomes the performance. We imitate the gesture of the actor or of the story-teller before us, and we feel an inner imitation of many acts, even though we suppress the outward signs. In general, for us to realize an act means that we shall do it, either in outward fact, or through a nascent performance that is not outwardly visible. ”

“ I protest, says a Gentleman who sat next but one to the President, and who, it seems, was the Parson of the Parish, a Member not only of the Political, but also of a Musical Club in the next Street;—I protest, says he, if this Explanation is right, which I think it is,—That the whole makes a very fine Symbol.—You have always some Musical Instrument or other in your Head, I think, says the Al­derman.—Musical Instrument! ”

“ If older and wiser heads suggested the possibility of danger, we produced our plans on paper, and asked them from whence could trouble come? To-day we understand the depth of the kindly smile which our protests always evoked. ”

“ Let the crowd yell itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns made out of adjectives, the humanist will know that these are but words and that the realities which they point to, if they have any meaning at all, are what "they are known as." ”

“ Public opinion is called to pressing objects by a dance, at which addresses are made, and in fact, moral instructions and advice are given to the young, in the course of their being assembled at social feasts and dances. ”

“ Go into an assembly well excited, some angry political meeting on the eve of a crisis. Then it appears that eloquence is as natural as swimming,—an art which all men might learn, though so few do. It only needs that they should be once well pushed off into the water, overhead, without corks, and, after a mad struggle or two, they find their poise and the use of their arms, and henceforward they possess this new and wonderful element. ”

“ And why need I add any remarks of delivery itself, which is to be ordered by action of body, by gesture, by look, and by modulation and variation of the voice, the great power of which, alone and in itself, the comparatively trivial art of actors and the stage proves; on which though all bestow their utmost labor to form their look, voice, and gesture, who knows not how few there are, and have ever been, to whom we can attend with patience? ”

“ Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds, crowds into a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the inevitable detail of every scene. Only here and there, where some particularly brutal or grotesque incident caught the attention, did the mind come back with a sudden shock to the personal and human meaning of it all. ”

“ To a spectator watching from a distance some suggestion of rhythm and unity might have been apparent in the movement of the dance; from our advanced position, as to a man in the thick of a battle, the general action was lost sight of in the wealth of local interest. ”

“ The stage has, therefore, been justly styled ‘a discipline of humanity’; for there is no place where the social principle is called forth with such strength and harmony, by a powerful interest in a common object. ”

“ I may speak with less restraint of those gentlemen who have aided me in the most laborious part of my daily duties, the Demonstrators, to whom the successive classes have owed so much of their instruction. ”

“ Let us pass behind the scenes, and discover, if we can, what sort of piece is being rehearsed—what mode of action the performers affect. If we lose some illusions, we may gain a profitable glimpse of decorously veiled truths. ”

“ We are told of a speech delivered with flashing eye, with gestures that seemed almost to threaten physical violence. We read the report of the speech and we find something more than the ordinary transition from warm humanity, to cold print. ”

“ Groups gather, thrust hands and fingers upward, shout and counter-shout, as though bent on working up a fracas; then when they seem to have succeeded they make notes in small books and walk quietly away. ”

“ Place one of these half-informed, imperfectly organised spectators before a tall canvas with groups on groups of figures, of the size of life, and engaged in a complicated action, of which they know the name and all the particulars, and there are no bounds to their burst of involuntary enthusiasm. ”

“ A special development of this aptitude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity, not metaphorically but literally: the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving masses of people in balconies, hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged glowering strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in the marketplace. ”