Nineteenth Century Questions

It is sometimes said that animals do not reason, but man does. But animals are quite capable of at least two modes of reasoning, that of comparison and that of inference. They c...

In his first great work, the work which startled Europe, Rousseau recalled man to himself. He said, "The true philosophy is to commune with one's self,"--the greatest saying, th...

The passage of this measure showed the vast political advance of the slave power in the country, and how greatly it had corrupted the political conscience of the nation. It also...

The Henriade has often been considered the great epic poem of France. This merely means that France has never produced a great epic poem. The Henriade is artificial, prosaic, an...

Probably this apostasy from his better faith had begun, before this, to show itself in conversation. At least Margaret Fuller, in a letter dated 1846, finds herself in his prese...

We cannot say that Mr. Wilson's volumes do all this, nor had we any right to expect it. He proposes to himself nothing of the sort. What he gives us is, however, of very great v...

The doctrines of which Mr. Buckle is the ardent advocate seem to us, the more thoroughly we consider them, to be essentially theoretical, superficial, and narrow. They are desti...

It is important that this should be distinctly said, for when men eminent in science propound new theories, these theories themselves are apt to be regarded as science, and thos...

According to the principle of evolution, every growing and productive religion obeys the laws of heredity and of variation. It has an inherited common life, and a tendency to mo...

Carlyle's "Frederick the Great"[25] seems to us a badly written book. Let us consider the volume containing the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth chapters. Nothing in these...

So, said Mr. Adams, you first deny the right of petition to slaves, then to free people of color, and then you inquire into the moral character of a petitioner before you receiv...

Shortly before his death, Dr. Clarke selected the material for this book, and partly prepared it for publication. He wished thus to preserve some of his papers which had excited...

Are, then, these striking resemblances, and others which are still to be mentioned, only accidental analogies? This does not necessarily follow; for there is a third alternative...

From Spain Mr. Buckle passes to Scotland, where he finds a still more complicated problem. Superstition and loyalty ought to go together, he thinks,--and usually do; but in Scot...

But time will not allow me to carry out these parallels into details. The question is, are these mere coincidences, or do they belong to the homologons of history, where the sam...

According to the description of Cæsar[30] and Tacitus[31] the German tribes differed essentially from the Gauls or Kelts in the following particulars. The Germans loved freedom,...

Let us, then, be grateful for this best of God's gifts,--another soul sent to us filled with divine light. Thus we learn anew how full are nature and life of God:--

It is, I think, a historic fact, that while those authors whose primary quality is poetic genius have often been also, on a lower plane, eminent as philosophers, there is, perha...

In 1838, when thirty-six years old, she was taken with serious illness, which confined her to her room for six years. She attributes this illness to her anxiety about her aged a...

Yet it is not so much on particular cases of animal superiority that we rely, but on the difficulty of conceiving, in any sense, of the destruction of life. The principle of lif...

In his plays the principal characters are Byron undiluted--as Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Werner, Arnold. All the secondary characters are Byron more or less diluted,--Byron an...

One great moral must be drawn from this story before we close. It demonstrates, by a great historical proof, that no evil however mighty, no abuse however deeply rooted, can res...