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Updated: July 10, 2025


This rapid, partial, superficial, perfunctory mode of dealing with what we see and hear constitutes the ordinary, constant, and absolutely indispensable act of recognising objects and actions, of spotting their qualities and twigging their meaning: an act necessarily tending to more and more abbreviation and rapidity and superficiality, to a sort of shorthand which reduces what has to be understood, and enables us to pass immediately to understanding something else; according to that law of necessarily saving time and energy.

But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable.

"The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace." "Quite so. Now, the English colony at Florence, Miss Honeychurch and it is of considerable size, though, of course, not all equally a few are here for trade, for example. But the greater part are students. Lady Helen Laverstock is at present busy over Fra Angelico.

His days were full of distaste at her predilections for the young clerks who eyed her on the sea-front, for cheap jewellery and casual friends picked up at the hotel, at the bland superficiality of her mind; and now and again this distaste was shot through with moments of acute fears when he realised, startled to it by some blunt display of the ugly things of life, that to this he must accustom himself for the rest of his days; and that he would grow only too deadly accustomed, to the stifling of other ideals, he foresaw.

We have spoken of Macaulay's interests and intuitions wearing a certain air of superficiality; there is a feeling of the same kind about his attempts to be genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandonment in it.

Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all of us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed. Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability.

Being what he was, this made him all the more careful to do all he could for her, but he never rejoiced in her really quick intellect as he did in the slow sensitive one of Ishmael, or even in the kittenish superficiality of Phoebe's.

They proceeded, also, to cultivate a state of mind which has kept them peculiarly liable to intellectual ineptitude and conformity. The mixture of optimism, conservatism, and superficiality, which has until recently characterized their political point of view, has made them almost blind to the true lessons of their own national experience.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, for example, may hide the profoundest and most wide-reaching aims beneath his superficial effect of utter superficiality.

We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from slavery neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and enforced social organization. We must not be deceived either by a vague and false idea of liberty or by the equally vicious ideal of militarism with its superficiality of social relations and its pedagogical simplicity.

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