Scientific Sophisms: A Review of Current Theories Concerning Atoms, Apes, and Men

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Funk & Wagnalls, 1883 - 302 pages

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Page 35 - There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.
Page 102 - ... electric discharges, if such there be ; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem. ' How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness ? ' The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.
Page 35 - It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth...
Page 36 - I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same great class or kingdom. I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Page 40 - A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has "gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.
Page 50 - But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man may recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter.
Page 199 - None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule.
Page 82 - At all events, no line has ever been drawn between the conscious and the unconscious ; for the vegetable shades into the animal by such fine gradations, that it is impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins.
Page 99 - By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.
Page 116 - Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all lifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under certain conditions, to give rise to carbonic acid ; hydrogen and oxygen produce water ; nitrogen and hydrogen give rise to ammonia. These new compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are lifeless. But when they are brought together, under certain conditions they give rise to the still more complex body, protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits...

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