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No one doubts the reality of those great internal revolutions of which religion is well aware, which arise purely from the mind, and are able to rid us of all natural bonds and burdens. This mysterious region of the influence of the mind in modifying bodily states or producing new ones is in these days being more and more opened up.
Embryology has, it is true, been of the utmost service in showing relationships of forms to each other, and in thus revealing past history. But while this record is a valuable one, it is a record which has unfortunately been subject to such modifying conditions that in many cases its original meaning has been entirely obliterated and it has become worthless as a historical record.
If they are rejected and yet stand, or seem to stand, in sacred books, then either the statements of the books are interpreted in accordance with the moral standards, or the ethical authority of the books is set aside. +1165+. The influence of religion on ethics has been in the way not of modifying codes but of enforcing existing ideas and customs and giving an impulse to moral life.
Whatever his theory or conviction about the origin of instincts may happen to be, or even if he has no convictions on the subject, it must nevertheless seem plain to him that intelligence is, after all, in most cases, the guiding principle of life, supplementing and modifying habits to bring them into closer harmony with the environment, and enlivening every day with countless little acts which result from judgment and experience, and form no part of the inherited complex instincts.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts.
And suddenly making a gesture of apology he withdrew yet farther into the embrasure in which he stood, pulled a note-book out of his pocket, and tore from it a leaf on which, without modifying his handwriting otherwise than by slightly enlarging it, he pencilled these four lines: "A legend avers that the fig tree of Judas now grows at Frascati, and that its fruit is deadly for him who may desire to become Pope.
Just as the movements of the human lips have much to do with the modifications of the human voice, so the opening and closing of the bird's mandibles exercise a modifying influence upon avicular tones. If it were not so, the feathered minstrel would not keep his mandibles in such constant motion during his lyrical recitals.
What was anciently and very wisely called the "natural appetite" of living creatures is in this view nothing else but their response to the modifying attraction exerted upon them by the objective Reality which presses upon them on every side, and tends to draw them into conformity with itself so far as they have latent capacity for such a correspondence.
I knew it must be a dream," murmured Lawrence, as if to himself, "I was never called a fool before. No gentleman would have done it least of all an English gentleman." This shot, although not aimed, hit the mark fairly. "Forgive me, senhor," said the colonel, modifying his tone, though evidently still much annoyed, "but your manners and language are so strange that, really "
If there had been no such memory, the amoeba of one generation would have exactly resembled time amoeba of the preceding, and a perfect cycle would have been established; the modifying effects of an additional memory in each generation have made the cycle into a spiral, and into a spiral whose eccentricity, in the outset hardly perceptible, is becoming greater and greater with increasing longevity and more complex social and mechanical inventions.
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