External influence

“ This, then, is the external basis of our synthesis, which includes the moral and practical faculties, as well as the speculative. It rests at every point upon the unchangeable Order of the world. The right understanding of this order is the principal subject of our thoughts; its preponderating influence determines the general course of our feelings; its gradual improvement is the constant object of our actions. ”

“ We may sometimes be led to assign much of the development of man's peculiar powers, to the influence of external circumstances. And that the development of those powers is so influenced, we cannot doubt ”

“ Every phenomenon in social and national life (as in Nature) is an effect, and all these effects are embodied by a cause which is not remote and detached, but which is the immediate soul and life of the effect itself. ”

“ The causes of every social phenomenon which we are particularly interested about, security, wealth, freedom, good government, public virtue, general intelligence, or their opposites, are infinitely numerous, especially the external or remote causes, which alone are, for the most part, accessible to direct observation. ”

“ Now so far, I say, the actual dependence of the individual upon society for the content of his beliefs about the external world is so obvious as to need here no further comment. But while all admit this prevalence of the social element in the formation of the substance, the stuff, of our current beliefs about the outer world, probably not all of you are prepared to follow me in the thesis to which I shall next be led. For my thesis will now refer, not merely to the material of which our external world is composed, but to the very conception of externality itself. ”

“ Let the same power and influence be exerted upon different individuals, no matter how nearly they may resemble each other, different results will flow from each, the character of which will be absolutely determined by the status of the development of, and the relations between the material, and spiritual elements represented in the individuals acted upon. ”

“ To suppose that during countless ages, from the sea-weed up to man, the progress of life was achieved through adjustments to external realities, but that then the method was all at once changed, and throughout a vast province of evolution the end was secured through adjustments to external non-realities, is to do sheer violence to logic and common sense. ”

“ Although sufficiently ample grounds are not afforded in the field of politics, for a satisfactory induction by a comparison of the effects, the causes may, in all cases, be made the subject of specific experiment. These causes are, laws of human nature, and external circumstances capable of exciting the human will to action. The desires of man, and the nature of the conduct to which they prompt him, are within the reach of our observation. ”

“ It is possible that recent events will modify in certain important ways, external contemplation of us as a nation, that, in spite of certain new effects which we may be accused of producing, a consciousness and a recognition of our definite maturity may have some responsive effect in ourselves. ”

“ In our present inquiry, we shall restrict ourselves to the consideration of the great change which the question regarding man's intercourse with the external world has undergone, in consequence of this discovery ”

“ They are, for the same purpose, enabled to profit by experience in powers of association, of reasoning by analogy, and of willing according to their judgments; and they are governed by an habitual desire to associate in species, accompanied by moral feelings, resulting from obligations of mutual deference and convenience. Here again, humanly speaking, we have a series of natural miracles—a permanent connexion between external objects and the sensations, reasoning, and conduct of the organized being. ”

“ Thus, every act we do or word we utter, as well as every act we witness or word we hear, carries with it an influence which extends over, and gives a colour, not only to the whole of our future life, but makes itself felt upon the whole frame of society. We may not, and indeed cannot, possibly, trace the influence working itself into action in its various ramifications amongst our children, our friends, or associates ”

“ If, therefore, the productions of the externals of life differ so profoundly in a complete society, we must expect and allow equally great differences in all the feelings, instincts, and requirements. ”

“ The ties by which our various diverging tendencies are held together would be quite inadequate for their purpose, without a basis of support in the external world, which is unaffected by the spontaneous variations of our nature. ”

“ For, as I must repeat, our so-called external experience, that is, our experience taken as other than our meanings, and viewed as what confirms or refutes them here or there, never does more, in any question concerning the truth, than to decide our ideal issues, and to decide them in particular instances, whose character and meaning for us are determined solely by what ideas of our own are in question. ”

“ Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychologic motives and needs upon existing institutions. ”

“ The changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called mechanical) are external; they are just shifting thmgs about. No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and display. ”

“ Such are the most efficacious among the observable causes which mold the primitive man; they are to nations what education, pursuit, condition, and abode are to individuals, and seem to comprise all, since the external forces which fashion human matter, and by which the outward acts on the inward, are comprehended in them. ”

“ And similarly during education, the change is towards the establishment of internal relations more perfectly corresponding to external ones—to exactness in calculations, to a better representation of objects drawn, to a more correct spelling, to a completer conformity to the rules of speech, to clearer ideas respecting the affairs of life. ”

“ And this, the conditio sine qua non of our social communications regarding the objects of our common sense perceptions, may itself be expressed as a principle determining a priori the nature of whatever experiences you and I are to learn to regard as standing for external things.
Every external thing must occupy, at any moment, one exactly definable portion of space; this is a simple axiom, but it is by no means self-evident. ”

“ We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be calculated) of his inner virtue and his outer place,—neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They must be significant elements of the world as well. ”

“ And it is the social consciousness that defines a most important attribute of externality. None of the qualities of external things, upon which the psychologists who consider the isolated consciousness have insisted, neither the persistence, nor the involuntary intrusiveness, nor the vividness of our perceptions of the external, nor the feeling of resistance which our muscles give us when we touch objects, nor the regularities of our experience of the physical world, seem to me characters sufficient to explain our present consciousness of external reality. ”

“ When actions of ours, therefore, can influence the state of our country, we associate the idea of those acts as causes, with the pleasurable results as effects, and hence the MOTIVE exists.
To individuals of the great body of the people, wholly in most countries deprived of power, their country can seldom present itself in the light of a motive, because with few acts of theirs as cause, can they associate a benefit to their country as the Effect. ”

“ That an analogous course of events, or chain of causes and effects, takes place in morals as in physics: that is to say, in examining those qualities, of the matter composing our own bodies, which we call mind, we can only trace a train of occurrences, in like manner as we do in the external world; that our sensations, thoughts, and emotions, are simply effects following causes, a series of consecutive phenomena, mutually producing and produced. ”

“ Experience is continually spreading over new fields, and bringing about a more wide and exact recognition of the persistent relations of the external world. The scientific laws thus recognized then gradually take the shape of principles or laws of conduct, according to which actions are determined in those cases where experience has shown that they apply. ”

“ All of these material improvements have their civilizing influence, their moral significance; as Edmond Kelly put it, "By constructing our environment with intelligence we can determine the direction of our own development." ”

“ But to return to things external and sensible from things internal and intellectual...You well know our external state, the character of our men, the sort of food for which they long, and for which they offer themselves to the absyss of death... ”

“ Physical influences thus following one another, and bearing to each other the inter-relation of cause and effect, stand in their totality to the whole organic world as causes, it representing the effect, and the order of succession existing among them is perpetuated or embodied in it. ”

“ The one fuses or crystallizes external objects and circumstances in the medium of human feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification of these relations. ”

“ For just as the farmer can plough and sow and harrow, and thus subordinate the spontaneity of nature, and direct that power into the useful channel of producing food, instead of the useless channel of producing briers and thorns, so you can modify, control, and regulate the spontaneity of the mind. Experience teaches you that you can break the threads of the web of thought, arrest the procession of the grand and beautiful, and throw discord into harmony: and where power exists, there exists responsibility. ”

“ Where general and enduring moral changes do accompany an external revolution it is because appropriate habits of thought have previously been insensibly matured. The external change merely registers the removal of an external superficial barrier to the operation of existing intellectual tendencies. ”

“ The more we study the inward workings of society and the progress of civilization, the more clearly shall we perceive how both are governed by the influence of thoughts which, springing up at first we know not how or whence in a few superior minds, gradually spread till they have leavened the whole inert lump of a community or of mankind. ”

“ This influence develops the moral forces as rapidly as the intellectual and material; it has brought all parts of the world into daily contact with each other, and each part feels the influence of all the rest. ”

“ The influence that goes out from an individual or mass of individuals, we mean—that subtle, invisible power that acts from one upon another, and which when aggregated is almost irresistible? You have felt it in a company moved by a single impulse which carried you for a time with the rest, though all your calmer convictions were in opposition to the movement. ”

“ The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? ”

“ As it is experience only that discovers these connections between natural causes and their effects; without inquiring further, we attribute to the cause some vague and indistinct notion of power or virtue to produce the effect. ”

“ Then might I exemplify how an influence, beyond our control, lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. ”

“ There is no formal taking of one’s “place” or [64] “position,” no ceremonious “assigning” of “duty” or “work,” but in groups and larger companies, as well as in personal ministrations, a mutual understanding of purpose, according to adaptation. If a united or concerted action upon earth-minds for any given purpose is needed it is readily perceived and entered upon by all who are in accord, and is performed by such methods as enlightened spirits readily understand. ”

“ When nations have reached a certain growth and pitch of culture, certain sentiments, affectations, ways of thinking, modes of self-expression, habits of life, fashions, and the like, appear as the outcome of complex and long-established social conditions. ”

“ When, therefore, we find that like results are produced through the instrumentality of totally dissimilar causes, we must attribute the analogy to some prior and more potent cause, influencing the whole alike. ”

“ I do believe and assert that a new attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new moral atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into human affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past hundred years. ”

“ Many agents of influence contribute to the change from one pragmatic framework to another: climactic conditions, natural selection, the environment, religions, communal rules, distribution of resources, and the experience of the market. ”

“ It receives the influences that stream in upon us from the reality around us, it apprehends and interprets them, and works out the lines of our possible action in regard to them. The influences that flow in upon us from the outside world are already selected before our intellect apprehends them, for they flow in by the avenues of our senses, and the senses are natural instruments of selection. ”