United States or Saint Kitts and Nevis ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Three hundred years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the world was a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet thus in the greatest of all formulas. Everything in human life is predestined, so it is also with the existence of the planet. The least event, the most futile phenomena, are all subordinate parts of a scheme.
These images do not always lie ready to hand, but it is possible to evoke them by the judicious employment of words and formulas. Handled with art, they possess in sober truth the mysterious power formerly attributed to them by the adepts of magic. They cause the birth in the minds of crowds of the most formidable tempests, which in turn they are capable of stilling.
It ended whatever of reality there was in the old system of King, Lords, and Commons, and by the time of Sir Robert Walpole the system of cabinet government had become fairly established; but men still continued to use the phrases and formulas bequeathed from former ages, so that the meaning of the changes going on under their very eyes was obscured.
Repeating certain formulas with each fresh knot, the witch would in this way symbolically strangle the victim, seal his mouth, wrack his limbs, tear his entrails, and the like.
He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no outlet for invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; even reasoning from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute and final as it is flat and sterile.
Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel. As if public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public.
He persisted most strenuously in freeing himself from the servile formulas of conventional style, while he earnestly repudiated the charlatanism which sought to replace the old abuses only by the introduction of new ones.
Like many another distinguished convert, he immediately began to remodel the whole theory and to create what he supposed were new and original doctrines of his own. But no sooner were they put in print than they were found to be a restatement of the old and choicest formulas of Proudhon and Bakounin.
Rankin and, subsequently, Recknagel, and then Hirn, formerly proposed formulas of that kind; but the most famous, the one which first appeared to contain in a satisfactory manner all the facts which experiments brought to light and led to the production of many others, was the celebrated equation of Van der Waals.
And as everything loves its symbol, so the German loves the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is "deep". The German himself does not EXIST, he is BECOMING, he is "developing himself". "Development" is therefore the essentially German discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical formulas, a ruling idea, which, together with German beer and German music, is labouring to Germanise all Europe.
Word Of The Day