Process

“ Instead of giving his time and thought to the whole process, each worker concentrates his attention upon one single step of the process, and by repeating a simple set of motions over and over again acquires wonderful dexterity. ”

“ We get a picture not of any definite standard but of such a process as we have described in our analysis, namely, a process into which the existing social tradition, the mutual adjustments of a changing society and the intelligent consideration of all facts, enter. ”

“ A right understanding of the mental process itself, of the conditions it depends on, and the steps of which it consists, is the only basis on which a system of rules, fitted for the direction of the process, can possibly be founded. ”

“ After we have reached the conclusion, a reconsideration of the steps of the process to see what is helpful, what is harmful, what is merely useless, will assist in dealing more promptly and efficaciously with analogous problems in the future. ”

“ And while so much hangs upon the development of these methods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparatively independent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movements affected by it. ”

“ I have now passed in rapid review what may perhaps without exaggeration be referred to as an array of conditions and theories, ideals and policies. It remains to refer to the actual results which have come about during these sixty years as respects them, or because of them; and, finally, to reach if possible conclusions as to the causes which have affected what may not inaptly be termed a process of general evolution. ”

“ A second process, to which the name of generalisation is often given, consists in passing from a fact or partial law to a multitude of unexamined cases, which we believe to be subject to the same conditions. ”

“ But the moment we apply our laws to the calculation of the actual course of an individual process, we have to recognise that the condition for their rigid exactness is absent; in the individual process there are always aspects not comprised in the conditions for which the law was enunciated, and nothing but actual experience can inform us whether the presence of these aspects will perceptibly affect the result in which we are interested. ”

“ Now, if there is only one important truth which must be, and can only be, proved indirectly, we may say that the process is a necessary and sufficient one, and the question of its comparative excellence or usefulness is not worth discussion. ”

“ If the process is conceived to meet with obstacles or varying conditions, it adapts itself to the circumstances in any given case, and it then goes on along the line of its own logical bent until it eventuates in the consummation given by its own nature. ”

“ Such is our reflective account of the process that, in some form, must come to every one under the proper conditions. In this process we see the beginning of the real knowledge of duty to others. The process is one that any child can and does, under proper guidance, occasionally accomplish. ”

“ Processes differing but little, apparently, give vastly different results, and the trained habits of observation quickly analyze and determine wherein the one process is more efficient than the other. ”

“ Each object is related to something else, and changes when that changes. Each object is a part of a process that is going on. The process produced it, and the process will destroy it—nay, it is destroying it now, while we look at it. ”

“ There is a body of knowledge, a group of actions, which ought to be available automatically at any time. If we are to succeed in fixing this body of habits, if they are to be made permanently available, we must recognize the fact that when we have first secured the result desired we have only begun the process. ”

“ But the discovery of the process by which the presently existing living forms have been evolved, and the perception that this process is governed by laws which have always been operating, do not make intelligence and design at all less necessary, but rather more so. ”

“ This general concept, of an event as a process whose outcome is a unit of experience, points to the analysis of an event into (i) substantial activity, (ii) conditioned potentialities which are there for synthesis, and (iii) the achieved outcome of the synthesis. The unity of all actual occasions forbids the analysis of substantial activities into independent entities. Each individual activity is nothing but the mode in which the general activity is individualised by the imposed conditions. ”

“ His inquiry characteristically confines itself to the process of cumulative change. His results, as well as his specific determination of the factors at work in this process of cumulative change, have been questioned; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms levelled against them as well as to a few more not yet thought of; ”

“ The formations and configurations left by the successive phases of action are to be studied primarily as the vestiges of the processes that gave them birth, and hence as their historic credentials. They are to be looked upon less as the vital things in themselves, than as the record of the events of the time and as the forerunners of the subsequent events that may be potential in them. ”

“ We judge others according to results; how else?—not knowing the process by which results are arrived at. ”

“ Nature must have provided some other principle, of more ready, and more general use and application; nor can an operation of such immense consequence in life, as that of inferring effects from causes, be trusted to the uncertain process of reasoning and argumentation. ”

“ since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. ”

“ So in one department of human thought—the investigation of natural processes—majestic progress has been made since the opening of the seventeenth century, with every promise of continued and startling advance. ”

“ There are certain broad and general principles which describe very crudely and roughly and inadequately certain phases of certain processes that mind undergoes in organizing experience—perception, apperception, conception, induction, deduction, inference, generalization, and the like. ”

“ The process remains full not only of perplexities, but of surprises; men's activities lead to goals far other than those which appear at the start. These goals, however, never deny the method by which the start is made. ”

“ There is no painting of the process, no delineation of slow and gradual operations of material forces. Not once is there any mention of secondary causes, nor the faintest suggestion of intermediate agencies. The Creator wills ”

“ If the classification of the statute makes a distinction between the different kinds of inventions-between a process and an apparatus-and requires or permits a separate application for each, it would seem to follow irresistibly that an application and patent for one would not preclude an application and patent for the other, and the order of the application could not affect the right which the law confers. ”

“ Neither attenuated analysis nor scholastic logic is necessary to understand the scope and coordination of the modern productive pattern and the integral part played by those who manage and direct the physical processes of production. ”

“ Adaptation of means to an end may be produced in two ways that we at present know of; by processes of natural selection, and by the agency of an intelligence in which an image or idea of the end preceded the use of the means. ”

“ A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress—though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known. ”

“ Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding, some processes in vogue already for producing better lives. These processes are far from wrong; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures to disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect possible work. ”

“ In all your operations diligently observe the processes which you read, and vary not a little from them, for sometimes a small mistake or neglect spoils the whole operation, and frustrates your expectations. ”

“ In the follower's honest, slow brain, the processes which complicate decision in subtler minds are clotted into one--the sense of order, continuity, routine, everything that is implied in a regulation. ”

“ It is not only that agriculture, manufactures, commerce, legislation, the acts of the ruler, the judge, and the physician, have, since ancient times, grown immeasurably multiform, both in their processes and in their appliances ”

“ We have learned that in its inmost essence and to its utmost bounds Reality—what lies outside and around us—is not fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not and cannot be as the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled, something beyond the reach of time and change—static or stationary—but is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. ”

“ A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march. ”

“ But is it not true that oftentimes the logic of events—the movements of history—reveal to us our fundamental principles, outline for us our policy of action, and even write out for us our program of procedure as correctly and even more irrevocably than philosophical formulation could do? ”

“ The idea of a correct procedure is what we designate as an "ought": when I think of an "ought," I think of what has to be done in order to realize either the final purpose of all human procedure or some accidental personal purpose. ”

“ But in each and every case the power at work is the activity of reason, and the end ever in view in the selection and in the formation of the system is the satisfaction of some end or interest desired either for its own sake or as a means to some further and remoter end. ”

“ To such a degree has this spirit permeated all our modes of thinking, that with respect to every branch of knowledge, no less than with respect to every institution and every form of human activity, we almost instinctively ask, not merely what is its existing condition, but what were its earliest discoverable germs, and what has been the course of its development.—Ingram, History of Political Economy, 2. ”

“ Sometimes the superior quality of these products is contemplated: and sometimes the new or improved appliances by which they are produced. When, again, we speak of moral or intellectual progress, we refer to the state of the individual or people exhibiting it; while, when the progress of Knowledge, of Science, of Art, is commented upon, we have in view certain abstract results of human thought and action. Not only, however, is the current conception of Progress more or less vague, but it is in great measure erroneous. ”

“ The more complete elucidation and final confirmation of the laws which we have laid down, and the deduction of their most important consequences, must be preceded by an explanation of the nature and working of that machinery—a subject so extensive and complicated as to require a separate Book. ”

“ We must imitate the cases in which science, issuing in practice, has proved to be precise and certain, and these cases are the industries. We must, as in the industries, observe, essay, grope about, verify, keep our mind fixed on sensible and particular things, advance to general rules only step by step ”

“ Throughout it was essentially one phase of human organization. When one comes to examine the final result, it is astonishing to remark the small amount of essential change, of positively final and irreparable alteration, in the conditions of the common life. ”

“ We shall next advert to a rather more intricate operation of the same principle, namely, when the cause does not merely continue in action, but undergoes, during the same time, a progressive change in those of its circumstances which contribute to determine the effect. ”

“ Method has a few comprehensive laws according to which details shape themselves, as one naturally shapes one’s behaviour to the acknowledged law that fire burns. System, on the contrary, has an infinity of rules and instructions as to what you are to do and how you are to do it. ”

“ Construction and organization—the same in principle in all departments of creation—can only be the work of mind, conscious of its operations, planning with forethought; analyzing, comparing and combining; adapting means to ends and calculating the relations of cause and effect. ”

“ And this theory falls at once into the necessary categories of human thought. Life, as generally defined, is a state of organized being wherein there is functional activity; while a state, or status, is an incidence determined by environing conditions. But back of each of these--life and its status--there must lie some efficient cause, producing, in the first instance, the environing conditions, and then the functional activity dependent on organization. ”