Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays

[39] This does not, of course, preclude the action of external conditions, or imply that organisation is determined by desire _alone_. In fact organisation may be regarded as th...

A criminal is literally a person accused--accused, and in the modern sense of the word convicted, of being harmful to Society. But is he there in the dock, the patch-coated braw...

Such modification as this is very different from the "survival of the fittest" of the Darwinian evolution theory. We may fairly suppose that both kinds of modification take plac...

Or to take an instance from Astronomy. We are accustomed to say that the path of the moon is an ellipse. But this is a very loose statement. On enquiry we find that, owing to pe...

Again, let us take the science of Physiology. At present this is mainly carried on by means of Dissection or Vivisection. But both these methods are unsatisfactory. Dissection,...

Plato in his allegory of the soul, in the Phædrus, though he apparently divides the passions which draw the human chariot into two classes, the heavenward and the earthward--fig...

Do we not want to feel _more_, not less, in the presence of phenomena--to enter into a living relation with the blue sky, and the incense-laden air, and the plants and the anima...

Similarly when we come to consider the social life of the wilder races--however rudimentary and undeveloped it may be--the almost universal testimony of students and travelers i...

But before proceeding to that, I want to go a little more in detail into the fallacy of the absolute intellectual view of Science. I say, first, that a complete summary of any o...

In the search for exactness, then, Science has been continually led on to discard the human and personal elements in phenomena, in the hope of finding some residuum as it were b...

"The men are strong and very agile; the agility being most in evidence when they have to catch their infuriated buffaloes at the funeral ceremonies. They stand fatigue well, and...

"Every one in Dinka-land carries a long spear, or pointed fish-spear, and a club made of a heavy purple wood, while the more important gentlemen wear enormous ivory bracelets ro...

The result then of our digression is to show that Health--in body or mind--means unity, integration as opposed to disintegration. In the animals we find this physical unity exis...

The effort to make a distinction between acting for self and acting for one's neighbor is the basis of "morals." As long as a man feels an ultimate antagonism between himself an...

The method of the New Morality, then, will be to minimise formulæ, and (except as illustrations) to use them sparely; and to bring children up--and so indirectly all citizens--i...

And when the Civilisation-period has passed away, the old Nature-religion--perhaps greatly grown--will come back. This immense stream of religious life which, beginning far beyo...

To proceed with a few more words about the general method of Science. Science passes from phenomena to laws, from individual details which can be seen and felt to large generali...

First Edition, _June 1889_; Second Edition, _December 1890_; Third Edition, _November 1893_; Fourth Edition, _July 1895_; Fifth Edition, _September 1897_; Sixth Edition, _Octobe...

Thus we have briefly sketched the progress of the symptoms of the "disease," which, as said before, runs much (though not quite) the same course in the various nations which it...

The "Social Heritage" discussed in this book is the whole body of knowledge and habit which is handed down from one human generation to another by teaching and learning. Men hav...