United States or Montserrat ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
All minor considerations yield, in his system, to the stern sense of duty, as they do, in the ordinary and established ones, to the voice of necessity. Mr. Godwin's theory and that of more approved reasoners differ only in this, that what are with them the exceptions, the extreme cases, he makes the every-day rule.
Such reasoners ignore the fact of Plurality of Causes in the very case which affords the most signal example of it.
New ideas come beating into surf and surge against those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day, and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow.
Reasoners in general are undecided, wavering, and sceptical, or yield at last to the weakest motive as most congenial to their feeble habit of soul. Some men are mere machines. They are put in a go-cart of business, and are harnessed to a profession yoked to Fortune's wheels. They plod on, and succeed. Their affairs conduct them, not they their affairs.
Fee me well, my darling, by a kiss or a merry look, and bring Herbert up to judgment, and I will tell him home truths too." "Let me hear your argument for the other side, most subtile of reasoners, and I may, perhaps, be able to repeat them at second-hand, when occasion calls for them." "Don't think of it, my dear!
I add, "It is impossible to defend such a procedure, which seems to imply a want of faith in those who had recourse to it;" for "God has given us rules of right and wrong," ibid. Again, I say "The abuse of the Economy in the hands of unscrupulous reasoners, is obvious.
I cannot help thinking that this fallacy imposes upon some modern reasoners; that they assume that they have got the data because they have put together the formulæ which would be useful if they had the data; and, in short, that you can get more out of a mill than you put into it; or, in other words, that more conclusions than really follow can be got out of premisses, simply because you show what would follow if you had the required knowledge.
Van Helmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his many extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the disciplined reasoners of our day.
That arguments such as these, culminating in an absurdity like this, and starting with the assumption that it is possible to animate a manufacturer's office with the spirit of soldiers facing an enemy's guns, should actually emanate from sane men would be unbelievable, if the arguments were not being repeated from day to day by men who, in some respects, are far from being incompetent reasoners.
If it is insufficient for the operations of God, then we fall into a more absurd blasphemy, since we condemn God for not being able, on account of the want of matter, to finish His own works. The resourcelessness of human nature has deceived these reasoners. Each of our crafts is exercised upon some special matter the art of the smith upon iron, that of the carpenter on wood.
Word Of The Day