Category: History - American
I wrote this little volume more than thirty years ago, since when I have hardly opened it. Therefore I now read it almost as if it were written by another man, and I find to my relief that, on the whole, I think rather better of it than I did when I published it. Indeed, as a...
The interval during which Moses led the exodus falls, naturally, into three parts of unequal length. The first consists of the months which elapsed between the departure from Ra...
1. Chapter 1I wrote this little volume more than thirty years ago, since when I have hardly opened it. Therefore I now read it almost as if it were written by another man, and I find to my...
14. Chapter 14Status appears to be that stage of civilisation whence advancing communities emerge into the era of individual liberty. In its most perfect development it takes the form of cast...
8. Chapter 8The lower the organism, the less would seem to be the capacity for physical adaptation to changed conditions of life; the jelly-fish dies in the aquarium, the dog has wandered t...
4. Chapter 4The mysteries of the Holy Catholic Church had been venerated for ages when Europe burst from her mediæval torpor into the splendor of the Renaissance. Political schemes and papa...
3. Chapter 3Now the courts may say what they will in support of the vested interests, for to support vested interests is what lawyers are paid for and what courts are made for. Only, unhapp...
9. Chapter 9Had the Puritan Commonwealth been in reality the thing which its historians have described; had it been a society guided by men devoted to civil liberty, and as liberal in relig...
5. Chapter 5Habit may be defined with enough accuracy for ordinary purposes as the result of reflex action, or the immediate response of the nerves to a stimulus, without the intervention o...
12. Chapter 12For more than two centuries one ceaseless anthem of adulation has been chanted in Massachusetts in honor of the ecclesiastics who founded Harvard University, and this act has no...
13. Chapter 13In the age of sacred caste the priest is likewise the law-maker and the judge, and as succeeding generations of ecclesiastics slowly spin the intricate web of their ceremonial c...
6. Chapter 6With the ruin of the Antinomians, opposition to the clergy ceased within the church itself, but many causes combined to prevent the bulk of the people from participating in the...
7. Chapter 7The Rev. Thomas Shepard, pastor of Charlestown, was such an example, “in word, in conversation, in civility, in spirit, in faith, in purity, that he did let no man despise his y...
10. Chapter 10The history of the years between the dissolution of the Company of Massachusetts Bay and the reorganization of the country by William III. in 1692 has little bearing upon the de...
11. Chapter 11If the working of the human mind is mechanical, the quality of its action must largely depend upon the training it receives. Viewed as civilizing agents, therefore, systems of e...