Information age

“ They are possessed not merely by curiosity, but by a positive LUST TO KNOW. The desire to know what others don't is scarcely new. But the INTENSITY of this desire, as manifested by these young technophilic denizens of the Information Age, may in fact BE new, and may represent some basic shift in social values—a harbinger of what the world may come to, as society lays more and more value on the possession, assimilation and retailing of INFORMATION as a basic commodity of daily life. ”

“ Here let it suffice to say that with the young child we may begin by building carefully block by block the foundation we want to use later; with the older one we must needs work faster, seeking to anticipate or counteract any unfortunate information from outside sources. Thus the age of the child and his surroundings will to an extent determine the time or times of telling the facts. ”

“ At the age of 95 the student will have lost that wild, reckless and impulsive style so common among younger and less experienced journalists. He will emerge from the school with a light heart and a knowledge-box loaded up to the muzzle with the most useful information. ”

“ The reform in the leadership and command system is a significant measure in response to the call of a modern and specialized military capable of fighting and winning wars in the information age, aiming to improve the operational effectiveness and development efficiency of the military. ”

“ We move away because we have some doubt as to the security and trustworthiness of our present position, and we hope to gain by pushing beyond it rather than strengthening it. As a result of this attitude we find the thing most characteristic of the day and age is the rapid remolding of our stock of information. Revolutionary views are uttered from an inadequate basis of observational and experimental data. ”

“ Even amongst our most able discoverers, scarcely one who has not possessed private means has continued research beyond the middle age of life, because such labour enables no provision to be made for old age ”

“ To avoid the danger of large error it is absolutely essential that the adding of credits to secure mental age and the dividing of mental age by chronological age to secure the intelligence quotient be performed twice. ”

“ Age should give forth wisdom, and leave curiosity to youth, who must ever learn by experience. Strange that I should be curious at my age, but I wondered which code would prevail, your code or the code of self-preservation. ”

“ Minds stored with vast funds of professional knowledge, and the rich lore of past history; judgments ripened by long study and experience; with passions extinguished, or at least softened by the mellowing influence of age—these may be best suited for judges and statesmen, for here there is time for deliberation, for the slow and mature judgment of years. ”

“ In order to give you, in this place, a still more comprehensive glance of what you have now to expect, I add the following ground of distinction, to which I have not yet adverted. The maxim of the Age is to accept nothing but that which it can understand,—understand, that is to say, through the mere empirical conceptions of Experience;— and, therefore, wherever the Age can establish itself in sufficient power and consistency, it sets up this maxim as its scientific principle, and by it estimates and judges every acquisition of knowledge. ”

“ You young people of the present day, with your capital books and excellent teachers, need to be reminded of what education was, even for the upper classes, in the days of your immediate ancestors. For this reason I have given you this brief sketch of the early childhood of one who attained the very first ranks among the scientific investigators and benefactors of her age,—an age, be it remembered, eminent beyond all that have preceded it in scientific discoveries and advancement. There have been times when some were mental giants, simply because their compeers were pigmies. ”

“ Section XIX But there is a last factor in this progressive advance of the free Press towards success which I think the most important of all. It is the factor of time in the process of human generations.
It is an old tag that the paradox of one age is the commonplace of the next, and that tag is true. It is true, because young men are doubly formed. ”

“ Just now, however, we are confining ourselves to the use of books for information; and here there is less preservation than elsewhere. Especially in science, statements and facts quickly become out of date; here it is not the old but the new that we want—the new based on the accurate and enduring part of the old. ”

“ Gentlemen,—Such is the immensity of human affairs, that, so far from exhibiting superannuation and decay with the progress of time, they seem to gain new youth, and to gird themselves afresh at frequent intervals, in order to appear under aspects hitherto unknown. Not only does each age receive a vocation to devote itself especially to a particular region of inquiry; but the same studies are to each age as a mine but little explored, or as an unknown territory where objects for discovery present themselves at every step. ”

“ They should only be interested in such things that make errors impossible, such as mathematics, in things which are not very dangerous, such as languages, natural science, history, and so forth; in general, the branches of knowledge which are to be taken up at any age must be within reach of the intellect at that age and perfectly comprehensible to it. Childhood and youth are the time for collecting data and getting to know specially and thoroughly individual and particular things. ”

“ It is a knowledge of things themselves as they are, a knowledge of the signs and tendencies of the times, a profound and accurate knowledge of the character and wants of the age. And all this requires time, long and laborious study, close, honest and independent investigation—an investigation carried on irrespective of the fear, or favor, or dogmas of men. ”

“ Their harmonious action and reaction constitutes the most favorable condition for real progress. Age is far-sighted and synthetic, youth myopic and analytic; but public and private welfare need both, just as science needs both the microscope and the telescope.
All sciences, most of all those that deal with man, are liable to lack the perspective that only age can give to orient them to direct their researches toward problems of most value and hold them steadily to their true course. ”

“ And as we expect a greater knowledge of human affairs and more mature judgment from an old man, than from a youth, on account of his experience, and the variety and number of things he has seen, heard, and meditated upon; so we have reason to expect much greater things of our own age, (if it knew but its strength and would essay and exert it,) than from antiquity, since the world has grown older, and its stock has been increased and accumulated with an infinite number of experiments and observations. ”

“ Is it not right, therefore, that our youth should not be fed on nursery tales, prurient fancies, fiction, poetry, and high-flown sentiment, but be early imbued with the solid facts, the useful knowledge, the rules of science, and the power of calculation, which will fit it to play its part well and ably in the great battle of utility? And why should old age rest, sink into placid inaction? ”

“ Accordingly, all training in science should begin as well as end in research, and in getting hold of the subject-matter as it occurs in nature. The exact form of guidance suitable to this age and the exact limitations of experiment are matters depending on experience. But I plead that this period is the true age for the romance of science.
Concentration on Science
Towards the age of fifteen the age of precision in language and of romance in science draws to its close, to be succeeded by a period of generalization in language and of precision in science. ”

“ Have statistics been gathered as to the age at which those men who lived the longest began their studies? Who has ever known, does any one know now, the interior construction of brains which have been able to sustain a premature burden of human knowledge? ”

“ It would be pleasant to feel that we are living in such an age, but it is doubtful if the future historian of education will find this to be the case, or that biographers will rank the leaders of our generation relatively as high as many who have passed away, or that any great movements of the present will be found that measure up to certain ones that the world now recognizes as epoch-making. ”

“ This is an age of great research—of great research in science, great research in history—an age of research in all the branches of inquiry that throw light upon the former condition whether of our race, or of the [Pg 49] world which it inhabits; and it may be hoped that, even if the remaining years of the century be not so brilliant as some of its former periods, in the production of works great in themselves, and immortal,—still they may add largely to the knowledge of mankind ”

“ To these successive periods I shall give the titles of—1, the Age of Credulity; 2, the Age of Inquiry; 3, the Age of Faith; 4, the Age of Reason; 5, the Age of Decrepitude; and [20] shall use these designations in the division of my subject in its several chapters.
The world is ruled by law. From the possibility of thus regarding the progress of a continent in definite and successive stages, answering respectively to the periods of individual life—infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, old age—we may gather an instructive lesson. ”

“ This kind of historical information will be especially beneficial to the youthful mind, by inducing a habit of investigation and antiquarian research. In addition to this, a knowledge of the origin and progress of the various employments which are in active operation all around, will throw upon the busy world an aspect exceedingly interesting. ”

“ As I see it, recorded history is society’s memory. For society as a whole, as well as for an individual, memory can provide insights, wisdom, 44 and the recollection of past experiences which are in some way relevant to every new experience—no matter how unanticipated the manifestation of that new experience may be. And of course each new experience adds to the information stored in that amazing electronic computer—the human brain. ”

“ If one’s memory has not been trained by education it is a good thing to condense information and have it in a notebook in the vest pocket. Some wise man has said that all education after we are twenty-five years old consists in knowing where to look for things. ”

“ Such an Age is thus obliged to deny and deride all the knowledge which we possess a priori and independent of Experience, and the assertion that from knowledge itself, without intermixture of any sensuous element, new knowledge may originate and flow forth. ”

“ It is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with individual cases connected with his profession or business life. In this sense, his conceptions increase during a very long period; for his knowledge grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation between things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the mind at a comparatively youthful date. ”

“ Hence it is quite natural and necessary that an Age whose whole theory of the world is exhausted in the means of personal existence, should value Experience as the only possible source of Knowledge, since those very means, which are all that such an Age can or will recognise, are only to be recognised through Experience. ”

“ It has long been accepted that the former property may continue to increase until the natural faculties begin to abate, but that the latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life.... Intelligence, as opposed to knowledge, is fully developed before the age of schooling is over. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached. ”

“ The principle of the Third Age,—that Age which we have undertaken to describe,—is now sufficiently apparent:—this, namely,—to accept nothing whatever but that which it understands. The Comprehensible is its highest Idea;—it is thus Scientific in its form ”

“ The age in which we live affords a concrete illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade must be corrected by the judgment of the century. ”

“ It is better to have produced one solid monograph on the minutest point—better to have edited a single pipe-roll or annotated a single short chronicle—than to have accumulated for forty years unwritten learning that goes down to the grave and is lost. And I said to myself—Learn to be definite at all costs; be limited, if it is necessary, stick to a single century if it must be so, or to a single reign, but write something—knowledge not committed to paper is knowledge lost. ”

“ Again, we have made great progress along another line, namely, in distinguishing physiological and especially psychological from chronological age, but here we have little consensus of either method or result beyond the early teens. Yet no observer of life can fail to doubt that there is the same and perhaps even, on the whole, greater average diversity among individuals in mental age as they advance along the scale of years. ”

“ Some writers believe that age differences constitute one of the important bases, if not the chief one, in the primitive segmentation of society into layers. It is a common observation that the young tend to be progressive and radical, and the old, conservative, intent that no good thing of the past be lost. ”

“ For this purpose, by means of our press, we increase their blind faith in these laws. Intelligent Goys will boast of their knowledge, and verifying it logically they will put into practice all scientific information compiled by our agents for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction which we require. ”