Subtraction

“ XXI. Yet this division does not proceed from ignorance; for the soul admits of a twofold division, one of which partakes of reason, the other is without it. When, therefore, we are ordered to give a law to ourselves, the meaning is, that reason should restrain our rashness. ”

“ The predominance or usurpation of either force would annihilate the universe. Each supplements the other, performs what the other could not do—-each complements the other, supplies that, without which neither would be complete. ”

“ Now let us suppose another being, possessing, in addition to the susceptibilities of the brute, certain other specific susceptibilities with their correlative objects, either in the sensible world, or in a future world, but that these are subjected, like the other, to the same binding and inalienable law of cause and effect. ”

“ And just as all particular things are evolved by the force of attraction and dissolved by the force of repulsion, a state of concentration or aggregation in the individual perpetually alternating with a state of diffusion or segregation, so it is also with the material universe as a whole. ”

“ Here is a boundless field in which caprice may riot. It is not strange if some look with distrust for the result of such an experiment. But the farther we advance, the more evident it becomes that this too is a realm subject to law. ”

“ The exercise is only force once more. Yet, on further examination even this relation will appear finite, and finite in virtue of this mediation: just as, conversely, the relation of whole and parts is obviously finite in virtue of its immediacy. The first and simplest evidence for the finitude of the mediated relation of force and its exercise is, that each and every force [Pg 249] is conditioned and requires something else than itself for its subsistence. ”

“ If it be admitted that this is true, is it nothing to us that a condition exists which necessitates the subversion of any law? Is it not an injury to our people that the occasion exists which places them in conflict with the law, and compels them to assert the existence of a higher duty? ”

“ Now I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems, printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the independent will of the “subcreative centre,” as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man. ”

“ As a final proof, we may make him lie down, in the manner described on page 153; when it will be easy to see whether he be actuated by a plucky spirit, or by a sullen disposition, which will, always, cause him to adopt a policy of passive resistance. ”

“ Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that the mere will to separate were in this case, or in any case, a sufficient ground for separation, I beg to be informed whose will? The will of any knot of men who, by fair means or foul, by usurpation, terrorism, or fraud, have got the reins of government into their hands? ”

“ No wall of division, no sea of separation, would have proved so effectual, so insurmountable, as his own firm resolve that his earthly path should never cross that of one whom God’s statutes had set apart until death annulled the decree. ”

“ Now, while fully accepting the logical definition of cause as the "antecedent or concurrence of antecedents on which the effect is invariably and unconditionally consequent," we can always single out one dynamical—antecedent the power which does the work—from the aggregate of material conditions under which that power may be distributed and applied. ”

“ Law of Attraction.—Where this affinity—or sameness—exists between the different things, there is what we term the law of attraction, or what may be termed the disposition to unite together. Where there is no affinity existing between the nature of the different particles of matter, there is what may be termed the law of repulsion, which has a tendency to destroy the harmony which would otherwise take place. ”

“ Spencer or any one else deny that, whatever sanction the human and relative conception of "power" draws from the inner certainties of our own sensations, that same, or a still higher, sanction can also be claimed for the conception of an infinite and eternal "Wisdom"? ”

“ If any one of those who have been railing against me, will come forward; if any person, male or female, will come forward and establish one act of seduction against me, even from the earliest period of my life, up to this hour ”

“ Now and then a man would rise shakily to his feet and thread his way unsteadily to the door, kicking up against recumbent forms as he went, and evoking language as murky as the atmosphere. The Subaltern felt a savage joy in the recriminations and expletives that filled the air. ”

“ Think of thy lover under torture, on the rack, burnt at the stake. Hast ever seen a man after he has been broken on the wheel? his limbs torn from their sockets, his chest sunken under the weights—and the stake? ”

“ We see that the parts are differently affected by the disruptive force, because they are differently related to it in their directions and attachments—that the effects being the joint products of the cause and the conditions, cannot be alike in parts which are differently conditioned. ”

“ Impulses which commonly interfere with one another and are conflicting, independent, and mutually distractive, in him combine into a stable poise. He selects, of course, but the range of suppression which is necessary for him is diminished, and for this very reason such suppressions as he makes are more rigorously carried out. ”

“ The rising circumflex begins with the falling, and ends with the rising inflection; the falling circumflex begins with the rising, and ends with the falling inflection.
Positive assertions of irony, raillery, etc., have the falling circumflex, and all negative assertions of doubled meaning will have the rising. Doubt, pity, contrast, grief, supposition, comparison, irony, implication, sneering, raillery, scorn, reproach, and contempt, are all expressed by the use of the wave of the circumflex. ”

“ Hence the proposition that the different parts of any whole must react differently on a uniform incident force, and must so reduce it to a group of multiform forces, is in essence a truism. A further step will reduce this truism to its lowest terms.
When, from unlikeness between the effects they produce on consciousness, we predicate unlikeness between two objects, what is our warrant? and what do we mean by the unlikeness, objectively considered? Our warrant is the persistence of force. Some kind or amount of change has been wrought in us by the one, which has not been wrought by the other. ”

“ He is constantly speaking in terms which imply the conquering of one law by another, a habit from which his successors have not freed themselves; and the theory of natural processes which appears to have satisfied him, was that when two forces come into operation there is a partial or complete suspension of one by the other. ”

“ We may, by parallel reasoning, reach the conclusion that, even apart from the action of any external force, the equilibrium of a homogeneous aggregate must be destroyed by the unequal actions of its parts on each other. ”

“ It is evident, therefore, that each force has had, during each instant, all the effect which belonged to it; and that the modifying influence which one of two concurrent causes is said to exercise with respect to the other may be considered as exerted not over the action of the cause itself, but over the effect after it is completed. ”

“ In this conception the identity of a supposed agent or force is evidently sustained in thought. Struck by the definite proportionality found to obtain between the changes occurring simultaneously in the substratum from which the force is thought to have been transferred, and the substratum to which it is thought to have been transferred, the mind is induced by means of a fictitious entity substantially to connect the changes as such, losing sight of the true substances, of which the changes are in reality mere affections. ”

“ When disposition, like a sail unfurled,
Shews all its rents and patches to the world.
Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters ”

“ Suppression is only one form of forgetting -- a form in which the forgetting is especially complete -- and light should be thrown upon the nature of suppression by a general study of the process by which we forget. ”

“ If we assume that, as order belongs to the essence of the State, so subordination too is founded in its nature, then we see that the subordinates, or those who have received preferment, disproportionately overcharge and overreach those who are put in the lower ranks. ”

“ III. If it be in the present life, and from the ordinary coursed of nature, not purposely modified by the interposition of these will of any human being, nor by any extraordinary interposition of any superior invisible being, that the pleasure or the pain takes place or is expected, it may be said to issue from or to belong to the physical sanction. ”

“ It is, that the effect was defeated, not in the absence, but in consequence of a counteracting cause, namely, a direct interposition of an act of the will of some being who has power over nature; and in particular of a Being, whose will being assumed to have endowed all the causes with the powers by which they produce their effects, may well be supposed able to counteract them. ”

“ We must not have recourse to cupping at the commencement of complaints, nor when the body is in a plethoric state, but when the general system has been evacuated, and when there is no defluxion any longer to the part, and especially when there is a necessity of removing, dislodging, and determining something outwardly. ”

“ He knows that the indifference of contempt, which is professed a hundred times in human society for once that it is really felt, may be better and more bitingly conveyed in a subordinate clause than in the main sentence. ”

“ In this process which is called sublimation, the energy arising out of conflict is diverted from some channel which leads in an asocial or antisocial direction, and turned into one leading to an end connected with the higher ideals of society. ”

“ One would think that if obliged to pronounce such a doom upon any, he would do it with tears—that he would retire into his closet, and throw ashes upon his head, and come forth in sackcloth, overwhelmed at the hard necessity which compelled the stern decree. ”

“ Current events in other unrelated fields indicate that more problems are created than solved by a softening of the basic concept of a firm and strict application of the doctrine of separation of powers. ”

“ In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of Sutherland is an argument at which proprietors may afford to smile. ”

“ Another man will deny the possibility of the transference — "X Y and Z," he will say, "are generated within the circle in obedience to its own laws. They form part and parcel of the sphere; and every endeavour to regard them as endowed with an extrinsic existence, must end in the discomfiture of him who makes the attempt." ”

“ For that reason, we urge the publication of these truths, that the struggle may no longer be waged in ignorance and doubt and confusion.”
“Does ‘massed forces of destructive purpose’ imply some combination, or co-operation, or co-ordination, among disintegrating forces?” Mary K. was asked, at another time.
[272]
“Yes, they combine every appealing force, as we do. One man may answer to doubt, fear, cupidity, and envy. Another to malice, doubt, and lust. Any forces that can reach him mass themselves in attack and call on their purposes in him to respond.” ”

“ They were to carry with them a double force—a force of coercion, visible and palpable; a force addressed to conscience, neither visible nor palpable, and in its nature only capable of being inwardly appreciated. ”

“ Such a tangible defence of what we hold, inadequate as it necessarily is, considered as an analysis of our ratiocination in its length and breadth, nevertheless is in such sense associated with our holdings, and so fortifies and illustrates them, that it acts as a vivid apprehension acts, giving them luminousness and force. Thus inference becomes a sort of symbol of assent, and even bears upon action. ”

“ One short extract will suffice:—
"The Master said, 'There are three thousand offences against which the five punishments are directed, and there is not one of them greater than being unfilial.
"'When constraint is put upon a ruler, that is the disowning of his superiority; when the authority of the sages is disallowed, that is the disowning of all law; when filial piety is put aside, that is the disowning of the principle of affection. ”

“ And yet it is in this very case that my opponent ventures openly to assert that I have made use of a 'miserable subterfuge' in drawing my proofs not from the contents of the bull, but from the title alone; the fact being that I did expressly refer to the contents, and only for the sake of brevity quoted the words of the title, which were identical with the contents, instead of the contents of the Bull, which I have just given to my readers. These are the sort of opponents with whom one has to deal. ”