THREE:For loading and unloading carts and waggons, the convenience of the old outside sling is well known; it is also a well-attested fact that accidents rarely happen with sling hoists, although they appear to be less safe than running platforms or lifts. As a general rule, the most dangerous machinery for handling or raising material is that which pretends to dispense with the care and vigilance of attendants, and the safest machinery that which enforces such attention. The condition which leads to danger in hoisting machinery is, that the power employed is opposed to the force of gravity, and as the force of gravity is acting continually, it is always ready to take advantage of the least cessation in the opposing force employed, and thus drag away the weight for which the two forces are contending; as a weight when under the influence of gravity is moved [65] at an accelerated velocity, if gravity becomes the master, the result is generally a serious accident. Lifting may be considered a case wherein the contrivances of man are brought to bear in overcoming or opposing a natural force; the imperfect force of the machinery is liable to accident or interruption, but gravity never fails to act. Acting on every piece of matter in proportion to its weight must be some force opposing and equal to that of gravity; for example, a piece of iron lying on a bench is opposed by the bench and held in resistance to gravity, and to move this piece of iron we have to substitute some opposing force, like that of the hands or lifting mechanism, to overcome gravity.
THREE:Some soldiers were rather friendly when I revealed myself as a Netherland reporter; they informed me with serious faces that in Germany two million volunteers were drilling; that in each garrison-town the majority of the men were left behind as reserves; that by and by they were going to level Antwerp to the ground, if these Belgians would not keep quiet; that after all Belgium proved a bigger job than they had bargained for; that Amsterdam and Rotterdam had been shelled and Flushing taken by the British; that Germany had now sent a great number of troops into The Netherlands to protect her against Britain, because The Netherlands herself had no army at all; and so on and so on.What seems to us the reactionary attitude of the spiritu357alist school was dictated by the circumstances of its origin. A product of the great classical revival, its cause was necessarily linked with the civilisation of ancient Greece, and of that civilisation the worship of the old gods seemed to form an integral element. One need only think of the Italian Renaissance, with its predilection for the old mythology, to understand how much stronger and more passionate this feeling must have been among those to whom Greek literature still spoke in a living language, whose eyes, wherever they turned, still rested on the monuments, unrivalled, undesecrated, unfallen, unfaded, of Greek religious art. Nor was polytheism what some have imagined it to have been at this period, merely a tradition, an association, a dream, drawing shadowy sustenance from the human works and human thoughts which it had once inspired. To Plotinus and Proclus, as formerly to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the luminaries of day and night blazed down from heaven as animated and immortal witnesses of its truth. It was not simply that the heavens declared the glory of God; to the pious beholder, they were visibly inhabited by glorious gods, and their constellated fires were, as Plotinus said, a scripture in which the secrets of destiny might be read. The same philosopher scornfully asks the Gnostics, who, in this respect, were indistinguishable from the Christians, whether they were so infatuated as to call the worst men their brothers, while refusing that title to the sun; and at a much later period, notwithstanding the heavy penalties attached to it, the worship of the heavenly bodies continued to be practised by the profoundest thinkers and scholars of the Neo-Platonic school.529 Moreover, polytheism, by the very weakness and unfixity of its dogmas, gave a much wider scope to independent speculation than could be permitted within the limits of the358 Catholic Church, just because Catholicism itself constituted a philosophical system in which all the great problems of existence were provided with definite and authoritative solutions.
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