ONE:Lawrence complied with resignation. It was all about a beautiful bad woman who guarded a precious treasure locked away in a box covered with paintings of exquisite flowers. Mamie clapped her hands with delight.
TWO:The keynote of the whole poem is struck in its opening lines. When Venus is addressed as Natures sole guide and ruler, this, from the poets own point of view, is not true of Nature as a whole, but it is eminently true of life, whether we identify Venus with the passion through which living things are continually regenerated, or with the pleasure which is their perpetual motive and their only good. And it is equally appropriate, equally characteristic of a consummate artist, that the interest of the work should culminate in a description of107 this same passion, no longer as the source of life, but as its last outcome and full flower, yet also, when pushed to excess, the illusion by which it is most utterly disappointed and undone; and that the whole should conclude with a description of death, not as exemplified in any individual tragedy, but in such havoc as was wrought by the famous plague at Athens on man and beast alike. Again, it is by the orderly sequence of vital phenomena that Lucretius proves his first great principle, the everlasting duration and changelessness of matter. If something can come out of nothing, he asks us, why is the production of all living things attached to certain conditions of place and season and parentage, according to their several kinds? Or if a decrease in the total sum of existence be possible, whence comes the inexhaustible supply of materials needed for the continual regeneration, growth, and nourishment of animal life? It is because our senses cannot detect the particles of matter by whose withdrawal visible objects gradually waste away that the existence of extremely minute atoms is assumed; and, so far, there is also a reference to inorganic bodies; but the porosity of matter is proved by the interstitial absorption of food and the searching penetration of cold; while the necessity of a vacuum is established by the ability of fish to move through the opposing stream. The generic differences supposed to exist among the atoms are inferred from the distinctions separating not only one animal species from another, but each individual from all others of the same species. The deflection of the atoms from the line of perpendicular descent is established by the existence of human free-will. So also, the analysis which distinguishes three determinate elements in the composition of the soul finds its justification in the diverse characters of animalsthe fierceness of the lion, the placidity of the ox, and the timorousness of the deerqualities arising from the preponderance of a fiery, an a?rial, and a windy ingredient in the animating principle of each respectively. Finally, by another organic108 illustration, the atoms in general are spoken of as semina rerumseeds of things.
ONE:"And yet it is so. Are you perhaps a Netherlander?"
TWO:A new design should be based upon one of two suppositionseither that existing mechanism is imperfect in its construction, or that it lacks functions which a new design may supply; and if those who spend their time in making plans for novel machinery would stop to consider this from the beginning, it would save no little of the time wasted in what may be called scheming without a purpose.With these conclusions in his mind, but little progress will be made, and hence the reason for introducing the subject here.
ONE:The German proclamations in Brussels were nearly as numerous as the Max pins. They showered them during the last days on the town, the one203 more insolent than the other. After reading those things, a proclamation by Burgomaster Max affected me beneficially, whenever I could find one amongst the mass of other bills posted on the walls. Such a document testified to a grand soul and a firm character, which vindicated courageously the rights of the oppressed people."Strange they should be the same name as myself," the Countess said.
TWO:That mad fury was also intensified considerably by the accusations about gruesome mutilations committed on German soldiers by Belgians, who were said to have cut off the noses, ears, genitals, and so on of their enemies. These rumours were so persistent that in the end it was generally believed in neutral countries that these things had happened frequently.The next step was to create a method for determining the particular configuration on which any given property of matter depends. If such a problem could be solved at all, it would be by some new system of practical analysis. Bacon did not see this because he was a Schoolman, emancipated, indeed,377 from ecclesiastical authority, but retaining a blind faith in the power of logic. Aristotles Organon had been the great storehouse of aids to verbal disputation; it should now be turned into an instrument for the more successful prosecution of physical researches. What definitions were to the one, that Forms should be to the other; and both were to be determined by much the same process. Now Aristotle himself had emphatically declared that the concepts out of which propositions are constructed were discoverable by induction and by induction alone. With him, induction meant comparing a number of instances, and abstracting the one circumstance, if any, in which they agreed. When the object is to establish a proposition inductively, he has recourse to a method of elimination, and bids us search for instances which, differing in everything else, agree in the association of two particular marks.541 In the Topics he goes still further and supplies us with a variety of tests for ascertaining the relation between a given predicate and a given subject. Among these, Mills Methods of Difference, Residues, and Concomitant Variations are very clearly stated.542 But he does not call such modes of reasoning Induction. So far as he has any general name for them at all, it is Dialectic, that is, Syllogism of which the premises are not absolutely certain; and, as a matter of nomenclature, he seems to be right. There is, undoubtedly, a process by which we arrive at general conclusions from the comparison of particular instances; but this process in its purity is nothing more nor less than induction by simple enumeration. All other reasoning requires the aid of universal propositions, and is therefore, to that extent, deductive. The methods of elimination or, as they are now called, of experiment, involve at every step the assumption of378 general principles duly specified in the chapter of Mills Logic where they are analysed. And wherever we can rise immediately from, a single instance to a general law, it is because the examination of that single instance has been preceded by a chain of deductive reasoning.
