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Updated: June 17, 2025
Those principles, instead of being of such a nature as to subserve the purposes of valid argument, are either insignificant truisms which prove nothing, or else they reach the point in dispute only by means of an ambiguity of words. Of the first description is the celebrated maxim of Edwards, that the essence of virtue and vice consists in their nature, and not in their cause.
We want to look at the question as a whole, to see exactly what we have to aim at, sometimes to reiterate what seem almost useless truisms. The obvious is too often overlooked.
In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book blazes with blasphemy.
Erwin asked, this not in a spirit of doubt or incredulity, but only to hear his friend reemphasize it. One likes at times to have welcome truisms reechoed over again. It is human nature I suppose. "Look here, Lex Brodno, you're a Pole " "Don't spring that on me again, even in joke I am an American, it my folks did come over from Warsaw." "Bully! We're all one over here. That's the way to talk!"
But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was impossible that any one in the court should not have known that it was but by an accident of birth and circumstances that he was not himself also in a consumption; and yet none thought that it disgraced them to hear the judge give vent to the most cruel truisms about him. The judge himself was a kind and thoughtful person.
Besides, the duties which had then been only vaguely and mystically expressed by a few prophets have now been so clearly formulated, have become such truisms, that they are repeated even by schoolboys and journalists. And so it would seem that men of to-day cannot pretend that they do not know these duties.
Proverbs are often mere statements of facts, barren truisms, too obvious to instruct our thought, affect our feeling, or in any way change our conduct, though the accuracy with which the arrow is shot fixes our attention.
And now, gentlemen, speed the glass, and I'll give you a sentiment by way of a spur to it, "'Much sweeter than honey Is other men's money!" Our hero's maxim was received with all the enthusiasm which agreeable truisms usually create. And old Mr. Bags rose to address the chair; unhappily for the edification of the audience, the veteran's foot slipped before he had proceeded further than "Mr.
But she talked no longer from thought, only from memory uttering mere truisms and common-places. She put on more animation, and affected a deeper interest; but I was not deceived. We were still in conversation, when Wallingford joined us. I saw him fix his eyes, as they met, searchingly upon her face, and saw her eyes droop away from his. He was fully self-possessed; she not at ease.
Indeed, there are, as Shakespeare's contented Duke says, "books in the running brooks, and good in every thing;" and so far from neglecting to turn the ill-wind to our account, we are disposed to venture a few seasonable truisms for the gratification of our readers, although a wag may say our subject is a dry one.
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