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We have the force of invention insistent upon a progress of the peace organization, which tends on the one hand to throw out great useless masses of people, the People of the Abyss, and on the other hand to develop a sort of adiposity of functionless wealthy, a speculative elephantiasis, and to promote the development of a new social order of efficients, only very painfully and slowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses.
In comparison with free verbal expressions, verse forms are, indeed, artifices; yet they are not artificial, in the bad sense of functionless, for they possess irreplaceable values.
It is most probable that any thin-walled vegetable structure which secretes may also be capable of absorbing under favorable conditions. The myriads of exquisitely-constructed glands of the Chinese primrose are not likely to be functionless. Mr. Darwin ascertained by direct experiment that they promptly absorb carbonate of ammonia, both in watery solution and in vapor.
The appearance of these two strange functionless elements, although the most striking symptom of the new phase of progressive mechanical civilization now beginning, is by no means the most essential change in progress. These appearances involve also certain disappearances.
The moments snatched for art have been generally interludes in life and its products parasites in nature, the body of them being materially functionless and the soul merely represented.
Instinct is extremely conservative, and survives the circumstances that produced it. For instance, the wolf, wishing to cover up its tracks, buries its excrement; the dog, a town dweller, stupidly scrapes the pavement. In the latter case instinct has become senseless, purposeless. Man has retained many rudimentary and functionless instincts.
For music is essentially subjective, an expression of pure mood unaffixed to objects. As rhythmical, poetry shares the inwardness of music; wherefore, unless its rhythm is to be a mere functionless, ornamental dress, whatever it expresses should have its source in the inner man.
As the smaller concretions increase in size, they come into contact and unite, thus enclosing the now functionless lamellae; and by such steps the formation of the largest concretions could be followed. Why the process regularly takes place in the two anterior glands, and only rarely in the four posterior glands, is quite unknown.
There is no reason why a teacher of political economy should not describe the actual workings of the profit system of industry with its restraints on production and its dependence on the engineer, and suggest the possibility of gathering together capital from functionless absentee stockholders on the basis of the current rate of interest rather than speculative dividends.
The lowest Vertebrata are perfectly limbless, and if, as most Darwinians would probably assume, the primeval vertebrate creature was also apodal, how are the preservation and development of the first rudiments of limbs to be accounted for such rudiments being, on the hypothesis in question, infinitesimal and functionless?
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