Scientific Addresses

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C.C. Chatfield & Company, 1870 - 74 pages

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Page 17 - Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain ; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings...
Page 16 - A man, for example, can say, I feel, I think, I love ; but how does consciousness infuse itself into the problem? The human brain is said to be the organ of thought and feeling ; when we are hurt, the brain feels it, when we ponder...
Page 14 - ... and by the application of purely mechanical principles demonstrate that the cycle must end, as it is seen to end, in the reproduction of forms like that with which it began. A similar necessity rules here to that which rules the planets in their circuits round the sun.
Page 36 - We are gifted with the power of imagination, and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses. There are tories, even in science, who regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed.
Page 7 - Nature's ways are not at all times their ways, and that the brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.
Page 11 - ... and in certain definite directions; and that the pyramidal form is the result of this play of attraction and repulsion. While, then, the blocks of Egypt were laid down by a power external to themselves, these molecular blocks of salt are self-posited, being fixed in their places by the forces with which they act upon each other.
Page 12 - ... with increased intensity behind. And now let us pass from what we are accustomed to regard as a dead mineral to a living grain of corn. When it is examined by polarized light, chromatic phenomena similar to those noticed in crystals are observed.
Page 15 - Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature ? All that has been said, then, regarding the plant may be restated with regard to the animal. Every particle that enters into the composition of a muscle, a nerve, or a bone, has been placed in its position by molecular force. And unless the existence of law in these matters be denied...
Page 8 - If you look at the face of a watch, you see the hour and minute hands, and possibly also a second-hand, moving over the graduated dial. Why do these hands move ? and why are their relative motions such as they are observed to be ? These questions cannot be answered without opening the watch, mastering its various parts, and ascertaining their relationship...
Page 70 - Many who hold it would probably assent to the position that, at the present moment, all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art — Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael — are potential in the fires of the sun.

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