United States or Bolivia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Or do you administer comfort in affliction the motive is at hand; I have had it preached to me in nineteen out of twenty of your consolatory discourses the comparative littleness of our own misfortunes. "With vanity your best virtues are grossly tainted: your benevolence, which ye deduce immediately from the natural impulse of the heart, squints to it for its reward.
If we can found morality on a basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis. "Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts.
Nicolai then proceeds to criticise the pseudo-scientific notions from which our modern intellectuals deduce justifications for war. Above all he disposes of fallacious Darwinism and of the misuse of the idea of the struggle for existence. These notions, imperfectly understood and speciously interpreted, are by many regarded as furnishing a sanction for war.
Now, the only mode in which we can conceive it possible to deduce a theory of government from the principles of human nature is this. We must find out what are the motives which, in a particular form of government, impel rulers to bad measures, and what are those which impel them to good measures.
The use of an object, however, in order to deduce spiritual truth therefrom for children with reasoning powers undeveloped, is a mistake. Instead of making the thought clearer to their minds it obscures it. Close examination reveals the reason for this. A child is both imaginative and literal.
He was bronzed and bearded, his manner of speech was more rapid, and, with a slightly smiling, slightly anxious expression, he regarded me fixedly, as if to ascertain what the years had done for me, and to deduce from that what my future was to be.
"How in the world did you deduce that?" I asked. "Deduce what?" said he, petulantly. "Why, that he was a retired sergeant of Marines." "I have no time for trifles," he answered, brusquely; then with a smile, "Excuse my rudeness. You broke the thread of my thoughts; but perhaps it is as well. So you actually were not able to see that that man was a sergeant of Marines?" "No, indeed."
In this case, therefore, we have an instance of the way in which a set of perfectly true propositions may, so to speak, be imbedded in a larger theory, and may be of the highest importance, though they are not by themselves sufficient to solve any concrete problem. We cannot, that is, deduce the physiological principles from the mechanical principles, although they are throughout implied.
In every science, therefore, which has reached the stage at which it becomes a science of causes, it will be usual as well as desirable first to obtain the highest generalizations, and then deduce the more special ones from them.
After this orientation and location of position, one can deduce from the map everything there is to know in regard to directions. In this respect, study of the ground itself will show no more than will study of the map. After "What direction?" comes "How far?"
Word Of The Day