Essays Speculative and Practical

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J. Fitzgerald, 1885 - Philosophy - 53 pages
 

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Page 25 - I conceive it to be the business of Moral Science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and •what kinds to produce unhappiness.
Page 13 - Yet this object is accomplished far better than it could be by any effort of human wisdom, through the agency of men who think each of nothing beyond his own immediate interest— who, with that object in view, perform their respective parts with cheerful zeal — and combine unconsciously to employ the wisest means for effecting an object, the vastness of which it would bewilder them even to contemplate.
Page 57 - FETICHISM : A Contribution to Anthropology and the History of Religion. By Fritz Schultze.
Page 25 - These good and bad results cannot be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution of things, and I conceive it to be the business of Moral Science to deduce from the laws of life and the conditions of existence what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness and what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recognized as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery.
Page 57 - Philadelphia. Bulletin. THE DAWN OF HISTORY. AN INTRODUCTION TO PRE-HISTORIC STUDY. Edited by CF KEARY, MA, OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. One Volume, 12mo., - $1.28. This work treats successively of the earliest traces of man in the remains discovered in caves or elsewhere in different parts of Europe; of language, its growth, and the story it tells of the...
Page 43 - Comte, not including in his philosophy the consciousness of a cause manifested to us in all phenomena, and yet holding that there must be a religion, which must have an. object, takes for his object —Humanity. "This Collective Life (of Society), is in Comte's system the Eire Supreme ; the only one we can know, therefore the only one we can worship.
Page 26 - ... consciousness produced by them, experienced. Then, however, the various minor groups of states, that have been in earlier days severally produced by trees, by fields, by streams, by cascades, by rocks, by precipices, by mountains, by clouds, are aroused together. Along with the sensations immediately received, there are partially excited the myriads of sensations that have been in times past received from objects such as those presented; further, there are partially excited the various incidental...
Page 38 - At first, and to the last, the conceived causal agencies of phenomena have a degree of generality corresponding to the width of the generalizations which experiences have determined ; and they change just as gradually as experiences accumulate. The integration of causal agencies, originally thought of as multitudinous and local, but finally believed to be one and universal, is a process which involves the passing through all intermediate steps between these extremes ; and any appearance of stages...
Page 9 - We may describe the office of the brain as that of averaging the interests of life, physical, intellectual, moral, social...
Page 9 - ... what it ought to be, and what it is tending to become, I cannot but think that the real force of the analogy is totally opposed to the negative view of State function. "Suppose that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction, except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other ; suppose every...

About the author (1885)

Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher-scientist, was---with the anthropologists Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan---one of the three great cultural evolutionists of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of Charles Darwin (see Vol. 5), he rejected special creation and espoused organic evolution at about the same time. He did not, however, discover, as did Darwin, that the mechanism for evolution is natural selection. He was immensely popular as a writer in England, and his The Study of Sociology (1873) became the first sociology textbook ever used in the United States. With the recent revival of interest in evolution, Spencer may receive more attention than he has had for many decades.

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