FORE:CHAPTER IX JEFF ENCOUNTERS A JINX
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FORE:Dimension lines should be in blue, but may be in red. Where to put them is a great point in draughting. To know where dimensions are required involves a knowledge of fitting and pattern-making, and cannot well be explained; it must be learned in practice. The lines should be fine and clear, leaving a space in their centre for figures when there is room. The distribution of centre lines and dimensions over a drawing must be carefully studied, for the double purpose of giving it a good appearance and to avoid confusion. Figures should be made like printed numerals; they are much better understood by the workman, look more artistic, and when once learned require but little if any more time than written figures. If the scale employed is feet and inches, dimensions to three feet should be in inches, and above this in feet and inches; this corresponds to shop custom, and is more comprehensive to the workman, however wrong it may be according to other standards.I was informed further that there had been no fighting for the possession of Huy. The citadel on which the German flag flew had not been put in a state of defence on account of its great age. The old bridge over the Meuse at Huy had been wrecked by the Belgians, but the Germans had simply driven stout piles into the river, to support a floor which they put over the wrecked part, and so restored the traffic.
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FORE:Hello, boys!
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FORE:291
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FORE:After eliminating all the sources of misery due to folly and vice, Epicurus had still to deal with what, in his opinion, were the most formidable obstacles to human happiness, dread of the divine anger and dread of death, either in itself, or as the entrance on another life. To meet these, he compiled, for we can hardly say constructed, an elaborate system of physical philosophy, having for its object to show that Nature is entirely governed by mechanical causes, and that the soul perishes with the body. We have already mentioned that for science as such and apart from its ethical applications he neither cared nor pretended to care in the least. It seems, therefore, rather surprising that he could not manage, like the Sceptics before him, to get rid of supernaturalism by a somewhat more expeditious method. The explanation seems to be that to give some account of natural phenomena had become, in his time, a necessity for every one aspiring to found a philosophical system. A brilliant example had been set by Plato and Aristotle, of whom the former, too, had apparently yielded to the popular demand rather than followed the bent of his own genius, in turning aside from ethics to physics; and Zeno had similarly included the whole of knowledge in his teaching. The old Greek curiosity respecting the causes of things was still alive; and a similar curiosity was doubtless awakening among those populations to whom Greek civilisation had been carried by colonisation, commerce, and conquest. Now, those scientific speculations are always the76 most popular which can be shown to have some bearing on religious belief, either in the way of confirmation or of opposition, according as faith or doubt happens to be most in the ascendent. Fifty years ago, among ourselves, no work on natural philosophy could hope for a large circulation unless it was filled with teleological applications. At present, liberal opinions are gaining ground; and those treatises are most eagerly studied which tend to prove that everything in Nature can be best explained through the agency of mechanical causation. At neither period is it the facts themselves which have excited most attention, but their possible bearing on our own interests. Among the contemporaries of Epicurus, the two currents of thought that in more recent times have enjoyed an alternate triumph, seem to have co-existed as forces of about equal strength. The old superstitions were rejected by all thinking men; and the only question was by what new faith they should be replaced. Poets and philosophers had alike laboured to bring about a religious reformation by exhibiting the popular mythology in its grotesque deformity, and by constructing systems in which pure monotheism was more or less distinctly proclaimed. But it suited the purpose, perhaps it gratified the vanity of Epicurus to talk as if the work of deliverance still remained to be done, as if men were still groaning under the incubus of superstitions which he alone could teach them to shake off. He seems, indeed, to have confounded the old and the new faiths under a common opprobrium, and to have assumed that the popular religion was mainly supported by Stoic arguments, or that the Stoic optimism was not less productive of superstitious terrors than the gloomy polytheism which it was designed to supersede.152The car flashed round the corner of Lytton Avenue on two wheels. There was a jolt and a crash as the flying machine went over a balk of wood laid across the road, and the next instant the occupants were rolling across the path. Just for the moment there was nobody in sight.
FORE:These are some of the things I could tell about my trips in the West of Belgium. By the end of November I was no longer allowed to move freely behind the front, although from time to time I visited small Belgian frontier-places.Here I also saw in action one of the 30?5 cm. Austrian howitzers mentioned before. The clumsy204 monster was constantly being shunted on a rail forward and backward, and at long intervals sent a gigantic projectile to the threatened quarters. The sound was terrific, and the pressure of the air made people at a great distance tremble on the ground. The Austrian artillerists were still equipped as if they had to fight in a rough, mountainous country; the soles of their shoes were all over covered with hobnails.
FORE:
FORE:It was natural that one who united a great intellect to a glowing temperament should turn his thoughts to poetry. Plato wrote a quantity of versesverse-making had become fashionable just thenbut wisely committed them to the flames on making the acquaintance of Socrates. It may well be doubted whether the author of the Phaedrus and the Symposium would ever have attained eminence in metrical composition, even had he lived in an age far more favourable to poetic inspiration than that which came after the flowering time of Attic art. It seems as if Plato, with all his fervour, fancy, and dramatic skill, lacked the most essential quality of a singer; his finest passages are on a level with the highest poetry, and yet they are separated from it by a chasm more easily felt than described. Aristotle, whom we think of as hard and dry and cold, sometimes comes much nearer to the true lyric cry. And, as if to mark out Platos style still more distinctly from every other, it is also deficient in oratorical power. The philosopher evidently thought that he could beat the rhetoricians on their own ground; if the Menexenus be genuine, he tried to do so and failed; and even without its191 testimony we are entitled to say as much on the strength of shorter attempts. We must even take leave to doubt whether dialogue, properly so called, was Platos forte. Where one speaker is placed at such a height above the others as Socrates, or the Eleatic Stranger, or the Athenian in the Laws, there cannot be any real conversation. The other interlocutors are good listeners, and serve to break the monotony of a continuous exposition by their expressions of assent or even by their occasional inability to follow the argument, but give no real help or stimulus. And when allowed to offer an opinion of their own, they, too, lapse into a monologue, addressed, as our silent trains of thought habitually are, to an imaginary auditor whose sympathy and support are necessary but are also secure. Yet if Platos style is neither exactly poetical, nor oratorical, nor conversational, it has affinities with each of these three varieties; it represents the common root from which they spring, and brings us, better than any other species of composition, into immediate contact with the mind of the writer. The Platonic Socrates has eyes like those of a portrait which follow us wherever we turn, and through which we can read his inmost soul, which is no other than the universal reason of humanity in the delighted surprise of its first awakening to self-conscious activity. The poet thinks and feels for us; the orator makes our thoughts and feelings his own, and then restores them to us in a concentrated form, receiving in vapour what he gives back in a flood. Plato removes every obstacle to the free development of our faculties; he teaches us by his own example how to think and to feel for ourselves. If Socrates personified philosophy, Plato has reproduced the personification in artistic form with such masterly effect that its influence has been extended through all ages and over the whole civilised world. This portrait stands as an intermediary between its original and the far-reaching effects indirectly due to his dialectic inspiration, like that universal soul which Plato himself has placed between192 the supreme artificer and the material world, that it might bring the fleeting contents of space and time into harmony with uncreated and everlasting ideas.
FORE:The book has been prepared with a full knowledge of the fact, that what an apprentice may learn, as well as the time that is consumed in learning, are both measured by the personal interest felt in the subject studied, and that such a personal interest on the part of an apprentice is essential to permanent success as an engineer. A general dryness and want of interest must in this, as in all cases, be a characteristic of any writing devoted to mechanical subjects: some of the sections will be open to this charge, no doubt, especially in the first part of the book; but it is trusted that the good sense of the reader will prevent him from passing hurriedly over the first part, to see what is said, at the end, of casting, forging, and fitting, and will cause him to read it as it comes, which will in the end be best for the reader, and certainly but fair to the writer.This state of improvement which has been reached in machine-tool manufacture, is not only the result of the skill expended on such tools, but because as a notable exception they are the agents of their own production; that is, machine tools produce machine tools, and a maker should certainly become skilled in the construction of implements which he employs continually in his own business. This peculiarity of machine-tool manufactures is often overlooked by engineers, and unfair comparisons made between machines of this class and those directed to wood conversion and other manufacturing processes, which machinists, as a rule, do not understand.
