Occurrence

“ That the circumstances under which the phenomena occur are variable, the most prominent fact being that the presence of certain persons seem necessary to their occurrence, and that of others generally adverse. ”

“ In the life of any individual, association, or nation, there will probably be one or more occurrences which may be considered as success or failure according to the dramatic features of the event and the ultimate results. ”

“ So vastly do the circumstances of our daily and hourly lives, the atmosphere of the society which we meet, the tone of the books and newspapers which we read, mould every thought which we think and modify every view which we take of the occurrences which surround us, that it is all but an impossibility to judge how those best known to us, or how even we ourselves, would think or speak or act in a set of circumstances widely different from those in which our actual experience has been cast. ”

“ When we have certain things given, then certain other things are given too; or we know that certain other occurrences will or may take place. There is hence nothing but events, appearances which happen, and the ways which these appearances have of happening. And how, in the name of science, can any one want any more? ”

“ Clearly only the contact, or immediate proximity of the two occurrences. If any sequence could in fact be more wonderful than another, it should rather seem to be for the consequent to impart grandeur to the precedent—the effect to the cause,—than for the cause to impart grandeur to the effect. ”

“ And how many of those slighter details, occurrences, projects, or intrigues, that link small matters with great—how many points of manner, conduct, temper, or peculiarity that make up the sum of human character, are thus lost, of which we would gladly be informed! ”

“ For all that happens, happens necessarily, because it happens from causes; but these themselves have again causes, so that the whole of the events of the world, great and small, are a strict concatenation of necessary occurrences. ”

“ Outward signs in ordinary occurrences which, so far as human initiative is concerned, are accidental may be called, for convenience, "omens." Uncommon occurrences may be called, if they appear in the forms of men and animals, "prodigies," and if they are seen in the physical world, "portents." ”

“ It is also used, in the plural, more loosely, to denote occurrences or things which we observe to happen; as when, speaking of physical occurrences, we mean physical facts the happening of which we observe. ”

“ In the development of time into causation, persistence becomes state and change becomes event. In the development of judgment into conception, consciousness becomes recollection and choice becomes inference. ”

“ From this, it necessarily follows, that between none of our ideas is the association more intimate and intense, than between antecedent and consequent, in the order of events. Whenever we perceive an event, the mind instantly flies to its antecedent. I hear words in the street; event: some one, of course, is making them; antecedent. My house is broken, and my goods are gone; event: a thief has taken them; antecedent. This is that remarkable case of association, in which the combination is inseparable; a case of so much importance in explaining some of the more mysterious phenomena of thought. ”

“ This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself—on its knowledge as well as on its object—in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely what is termed Experience. ”

“ The expression "human events" I submit to the taste of the cultivated reader. Affairs, may be human or inhuman; divine or diabolical. An "event" may be great or small, &c. But can humanity or inhumanity be predicated of "events?" To be sure, human beings are actors frequently, in the scenes which when completed we call "events." Does that fact however, make them human? A pestilence—famine—the rise and fall of empires and wars are events. ”

“ But now every event has a meaning; they have their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are mindful of times and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and the world, no longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a various and complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful moral. ”

“ Will you say, that when one event precedes another, the one which comes first is the effect, and the one which follows afterwards is the cause? This is not the way in which men reason on the ordinary affairs of life ”

“ It has seemed to me that there are three phases,—the event itself, the feeling that brought it forth, and the feeling to which it gave birth; for no event is historically important unless it has transformed in some way the ideals and standards of the people,—unless it has shifted, in some way, their point of view, and made them act differently from the way in which they would have acted had the event never occurred. ”

“ But I should think something at least, even in this latter state, is an actual and real event of your life; for tell me, do you not in the meanwhile continue to live—does not your life pass away in the meanwhile—is it not filled up with something? ”

“ Remember what I have so often told you, that it is not the events of life—its outward circumstances that are important, but the effect they have on our characters. The cloudy and the bright day alike soon pass away. ”

“ The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence or regular progression—nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape. ”

“ The accidents and events of life are, as is obvious, one special way in which the calls I speak of come to us; and they, as we all know, are in their very nature, and as the word accident implies, sudden and unexpected. ”

“ Particular accounts have to do with those small happenings that seem to come by chance, those events that form, as it were, complete and detachable bits of life. That is to say, each relation is of something that has taken place or been witnessed in a comparatively short time—an incident of a trip downtown, a characteristic action of a great man, an important political event, an adventure, a brief series of pleasures. ”

“ Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the seeming confusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules. ”

“ The single event may thus live on in its influence along the line of all the ages, assuming new shapes, or if clothing itself in the drapery of new events, ever marching onward and upward in the continually growing affairs of time. ”

“ The actions of man, in other words, must be capable of being viewed, not only as events,—which, in a certain aspect,—they undoubtedly are, but as events which issue from a being who is not an event or series of events. ”

“ The switch which thus sets active the play of forces I shall call circumstance. If it has been long delayed, I have the precedent of all the story of human life as my excuse. For we are the children of circumstance. We move each in our little circle by a stout hedge encompassed. ”

“ The variety of events which succeed each other here below, and divide our life, fix our attention only on the present, and do not permit us to recollect it in the whole, or fully to see what we really are. ”

“ By farther degrees we learn such a use of the words cause and effect as to call nothing a cause, whose cause, or preceding circumstance, we can see, denominating all such things mere effects, all others causes. ”

“ The process I allude to is that of making, as it were, a summary of all the acts and events, which have occurred within a certain period of the past, trying them by the test of reason and of conscience, and endeavoring to clear away all the mists of passion, prejudice, and error which crowd round man and obscure his sight in the moment of exertion or pursuit. ”

“ The universal observation of man, ages ago, simmered down and crystallized into the adage, "Misfortunes never come singly;" and it is here respectfully submitted—that startling episodes, unexpected incidents quite as rarely travel alone. ”

“ It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. ”

“ When we read of events in their ordinary train, we pitch ourselves with difficulty into the scenes of action—sometimes wholly omit to do so; and there is a want of life and presence in them accordingly. ”

“ On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. ”

“ A. Hence, each reality, each true and actually occurring event in life is that wherein you forget yourself. This is the beginning and real focus of life, whatever further subordinated determinations this focus may involve, because it happens to be such a particular focus. ”

“ Every act is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the life, the destiny,—a most significant, a most tremendous truth: thought on the one hand, life, destiny, on the other. ”

“ Whether the incidents, or the characters, are copied from life, is of little importance—The only question is, if the circumstances, and situations, are altogether improbable? If not—whether the consequences might not have followed from the circumstances?—This is a grand question, applicable to all the purposes of education, morals, and legislation—and on this I rest my moral—'Do men gather figs of thorns, or grapes of thistles?' asked a moralist and a reformer. ”

“ Circumstances mould our lives so strangely and capriciously, that we are ever doing things, which in after moments surprise ourselves those unplanned, unplotted, spontaneous deeds of ours that spring from the natural source of action, directly as it is influenced by some passing circumstance of moment! ”

“ Here are multitudes of phenomena which every observer sees and owns; and every one who observes them owns likewise, that "the most unthinking, as well as the most prejudiced, must be struck with the fact, that the period in which we live is extraordinary and momentous;" ”

“ This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation, not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in every direction. ”

“ It presents in every branch a regularly developed series of causes and consequences, and abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realization of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. ”

“ Something peculiar is imparted to it, from the very circumstance of its being an action of our own. In anticipating an action of our own, we necessarily anticipate the mental processes, which are its antecedents. ”

“ But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. ”

“ What better opportunity of studying this phase of life can there be, than in the faces of those whose existence is passed amid associations of suffering, want and crime; who not only witness, but experience all these in their different shades and degrees. ”

“ The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active life. ”

“ Imaginative forethought of the probable consequences of a proposed act keeps that act from sinking below consciousness into routine habit or whimsical brutality. It preserves the meaning of that act alive, and keeps it growing in depth and refinement of meaning. ”

“ A recent able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an agent necessary for an action? ”

“ In this sense human will may be thought of as the cause of human activities or conscious omissions; for activities and conscious omissions are, from a psychological point of view, nothing but successions of ideas. ”