Three Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217901970
Paperback|9780217901970
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. IN a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed more to the eighteenth century, than to any century since the Christian era. It may seem a bold assertion, to those who value duly the century which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider, that the eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof. But I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with my description of the very same era as one of decay and death. For side by side with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side by side with the decay there was active growth;?side by side with them, fostered by them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or unconscious. We must beware, however, of trying to find beBIRTH IN DEC A Y. 87 tween that decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really none. The general decay may have determined the course of many men's thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I have heard said) the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new Re-- gime?a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. That would be to confess man? what I shall never confess him to be?the creature of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that bees were bred from the carcase of a dead ox. In the first place, the bees were no bees, but flies?unless when some true swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each sprung from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it was fostered by th...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217901970 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217901972 |
| Weight | 0.21 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.13 In |
| List Price | $14.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 56 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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