Editors From Scotland

"Now as there are, according to Humboldt, one hundred and seventy words in common between the languages of the new and old continents, and many of these are expressive of the most primitive ideas, there is, by Dr Young's calculation, overpowering proof of the original connection of the American and other human families."

"The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock which was at first in a state of simplicity if not barbarism."

"Phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish's, a reptile's, and a mammifer's brain, and finally becomes human."

"Pause and reflect; take time into consideration: the past history of mankind may be, to what is to come, but as a day."

"Now, as the inferior animals were all in being before man, there was language upon earth long ere the history of our race commenced. The only additional fact in the history of language, which was produced by our creation, was the rise of a new mode of expression—namely that by sound-signs produced by the vocal organs. In other words, speech was the only novelty in this respect attending the creation of the human race."

"The monkeys themselves, without instruction from any quarter, learn to use sticks in fighting, and some build houses—an act which cannot in their case be considered as one of instinct, but of intelligence."

"Let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. See a Pascal, reproducing the Alexandrian's problems at fifteen; a Ferguson, making clocks from the suggestions of his own brain, while tending cattle on a Morayshire heath; a boy Lawrence, in an inn on the Bath road, producing, without a master, drawings which the educated could not but admire; or look at Solon and Confucius, devising sage laws, and breathing the accents of all but divine wisdom for their barbarous fellow-countrymen, three thousand years ago—and the whole mystery is solved at once. ...Nations, improved by these means, become in turn foci for the diffusion of light over the adjacent regions of barbarism—their very passions helping to this end, for nothing can be more clear than that ambitious aggression has led to the civilization of many countries. Such is the process which seems to form the destined means for bringing mankind from the darkness of barbarism to the day of knowledge and mechanical and social improvement."

"The book, as far as I am aware, is the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation."

"I believe my doctrines to be in the main true; I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing."

"My sincere desire in the composition of the book was to give the true view of the history of nature, with as little disturbance as possible to existing beliefs, whether philosophical or religious."

"Let the reconciliation of whatever is true in my views with whatever is true in other systems come about in the fulness of calm and careful inquiry."

"I cannot but here remind the reader of what Dr. Wiseman has shewn so strikingly in his lectures, how different new philosophic doctrines are apt to appear after we have become somewhat familiar with them."

"Geology at first seems inconsistent with the authority of the Mosaic record. A storm of unreasoning indignation rises against its teachers. In time, its truths, being found quite irresistible, are admitted, and mankind continue to regard the Scriptures with the same respect as before. So also with several other sciences."

"May not the sacred text, on a liberal interpretation, or with the benefit of new light reflected from nature, or derived from learning, be shewn to be as much in harmony with the novelties of this volume as it has been with geology and natural philosophy? What is there in the laws of organic creation more startling to the candid theologian than in the Copernican system or the natural formation of strata?"

"Is it not a wiser course, since reconciliation has come in so many instances, still to hope for it, still to go on with our new truths, trusting that they also will in time be found harmonious with all others? Thus we avoid the damage which the very appearance of an opposition to natural truth is calculated to inflict on any system presumed to require such support."

"Thus we give, as is meet, a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter."

"A parish where life is precarious pays more poor-rates than its neighbors."

"The great men of antiquity—Cato, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and Otho—forgot that they had obligations to their race as well as to themselves, when, in the selfish spirit of a pagan philosophy, they considered themselves entitled to put an end to their existence, and remove themselves from the world."

"The whole history of lamentation, and mourning, and woe, from the beginning of the world—the funeral ceremonies in which the living symbolize the intensity of their grief—the monuments they rear to tell the world for centuries to come of the calamity they have suffered from the stroke of death—are enduring attestations that it is not so much in the removal of one sentient and living being off the earth, as in the change—the calamitous change to the survivors—that death is truly the King of Terrors."

"The sick chamber is the place where the most angelic virtues of the human race have ever been called into action. The meek patience of the sufferer—the endurance and the active benevolence of those who would not barter that sick room, with its gloom and silence, for all the glitter and the grandeur that human ambition displays beyond its walls—are among the finest objects that the philosophic eye can look on. So in every well-regulated household, each deathbed, if it carry with it the memory of broken ties and deserted seats at the social board, calls up also the recollection of duties fulfilled, of charities administered, of overflowing affection, ashamed to speak its strength, showing itself in strong deeds of unwearied assiduity."

"Indifference to life and indifference to the purity and amenity that sweeten existence must necessarily go together."

"Abstract perfection should always be the direction aimed at by human efforts, however imperfect they may be; and the success of sanitary legislation will be indicated by the nearness or the distance of its actual practice from this perfect idea."

"The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims."

"The working-classes require leaders and wise heads from their own body—patriarchs, in the old acceptation of the term—to keep them right in moments of excitement. The causes of early death prevent the existence of such a class of men, sobered and wise from experience, in sufficient numbers to discipline the youthful and fiery spirits who, confident in their ignorance, plunge themselves and those depending on their exertions into ruin."

"It has been among the visions of some dreaming philosophers that human life is capable of almost indefinite extension. The great Condorcet was one of these. He thought that by the removal of the two causes of evil—poverty and superfluity—by destroying prejudices and superstitions, and by various other operations, which he considered the purification of mankind, but which other people would call their pollution, the approach of death would by degrees be farther and farther indefinitely protracted. It is desirable that the practical views entertained by sanitary reformers should be kept widely distinct from any such theories, the character of which has been well drawn by Malthus when he says—"...Though I may not be able in the present instance to mark the limit at which further improvement will stop I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive.""

"In most instances, affectionate relatives and kind friends would wish to prolong the existence of the individual who has reached that age; but if we look at the happiness of mankind in general, we shall find reason to believe that, like all the other general principles of nature, this one carries the impress of an all-wise and beneficent Creator; and that if man had it in his power to alter the arrangement, it may be questioned if he could improve it. At this age the great desires of life are generally accomplished, and the tired laborer in the hardest fields of exertion, which are those of the intellect, has had some years of quiet meditation on the long battle of life to which his days of energy and hope were devoted. The world has, in general, little more use for him; and should he—however meritorious his services, however honored his gray hairs—too long remain an actual living man, seeming to fill a part of the arena in which younger and abler combatants are looking for places, the consciousness of being honored and beloved may give way before the suspicion that he has become an encumbrance to the circle he once adorned."

"The rise of each generation gives new ties towards the future, which insensibly dissolves those which bind us to the past; and the natural old age of the human race seems to have adjusted itself to that period beyond which the human being would feel isolated and desolate in the midst of the new objects of attachment which the progress of time brings into existence."

"The progress of knowledge is very irregular, somewhat resembling the movements of an army, of which some battalions are in vigorous health, while others are sickly or overburdened with baggage. The experimental marches on at a good pace; the observational proceeds but slowly; the speculative is left far in the rear."

"The scientific skepticism of our age professes to spring from a sense of the extreme fallaciousness of the human senses, and the liability besetting us all to deceive ourselves into a belief which gratifies the faculty of wonder. It is held as a rare and valuable gift to be able to observe a fact correctly. We are pathetically told that what a man thinks he saw, is often a mere hypothesis of his imagination as to what he saw, and may be wholly wrong."

"There is of course no extraordinary fact resting on testimony only, of which it is not possible to presume some error in the observation or reporting, if we be set upon finding one."

"Just suppose for a moment that every fact reported to us by others were viewed in the light of the skeptical system, as to the fallaciousness of the senses and the tendency to self-deception. Should we not from that moment be at a stand-still in all the principal movements of our lives?"

"The skeptical view appears to me out of harmony with the inductive philosophy. Bacon gives us many warnings against preconceived opinions and prejudices; but he does not bid us despair of ascertaining facts from our own senses and from testimony. ...we do not find in Bacon any dogma like that of Mr. Faraday that the 'laws of nature are the foundation of our knowledge in natural things,' and that these form our only safe test for any new fact presented to our observation. Bacon's method is rather the contrary, namely, that facts are to serve as the foundation of the laws of nature."

"This skeptical method consists very much in vicious circles. You cannot know whether a fact be a fact till you have ascertained the laws of nature in the case, and you cannot know the laws of nature till you have ascertained facts."

"The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere... The accounts of the fall of meteoric stones were held to be incompatible with the laws of nature, and specimens which had been seen to fall by hundreds of people were preserved in cabinets of natural history as ordinary minerals, 'which the credulous and superstitious regarded as having fallen from the clouds.' A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, including the celebrated Lavoisier, unanimously rejected an account of three nearly contemporary descents of meteorites which reached them on the strongest evidence. After two thousand years of incredulity, the truth in this matter was forced upon the scientific world about the beginning of the present century. There would have been at any time, of course, an instant cessation of skepticism if any one could have shewn, a priori, from ascertained principles in connection with the atmosphere, how stones were to be expected to fall from the sky. But what is this but to say that facts by themselves, however well attested, are wholly useless in such circumstances to the cultivators of physical science, while any kind of vague hypothesis can be brought forward in opposition to them? What is it but to put conjecture or prejudice above fact, and indeed utterly to repudiate the Baconian method?"

"Meteoric stones have proved to be a verity, and not an impossibility. About the same time, the fact of so many Gloucestershire peasantry having attested the prevention of small-pox by a virus from the teats of a cow, would have been deemed a sufficient answer to the same pleading, by nine out of every ten of the best educated physicians in England. Jenner's statue in Trafalgar Square tells us how fallacious the objection would have been. It is to be observed regarding such objections, that they are almost invariably gratuitous and unproved. Were they always put to the test of experiment, how many might prove like meteorites and vaccination?"

"We may, indeed, set it down as an absolute certainty, that many things are erroneously deemed impossible; for, till we know all the possible—and how far we are from that need not be insisted on—how can we know what is impossible?"

"The treatise which we have to examine and analyze is most engaging and interesting. We willingly accord to it all the attractions of novelty and ingenuity, the fascinations of beauty, the delights of theory. We readily attribute to it all the graces of the accomplished harlot. Her song is like the siren for its melody and attractive sweetness; she is clothed in scarlet, and every kind of fancy work of dress and ornament; her step is grace, and lightness and life; her laughter light, her very motion musical. But she is a foul and filthy thing, whose touch is taint; whose breath is contamination; whose look, and words, and thoughts, will turn the spring of purity to a pest, of truth to lies, of life to death, of love to loathing. Such is philosophy without the maiden gem of truth and singleness of purpose; divorced from the sacred and ennobling rule and discipline of faith. Without this, philosophy is a wanton and deformed adulteress."

"It is a feature in this professedly "natural history of creation," of which we have perhaps no right to complain, that it leaves out all notice of a spiritual world. The Divine volition, and the natural laws by which It operated, are the only primary activities presented to our view by the author. He has thus presented only one half of the history of creation. The other half, and that the most important, is, through the Divine mercy, presented to us by Swedenborg..."

"Vestiges is highly readable, but not always easy to understand."

"We thought it impossible any publication could raise Sir Walter Scott's talents or character in public opinion or in our private opinion more especially. And yet you certainly have raised high as ever biographer raised his hero — And you have done it without one word of puff or exaggeration or even full-faced eulogy. Sir Walter Scott himself would say — “Well done — my good son.”"

"It is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of The Cockney School."

"It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," &c. But, for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry."

"A male Horace Walpole."

"It is an old belief That on some solemn shore Beyond the sphere of grief Dear friends shall meet once more."

"Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin – Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn."

"Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter, Who broke the laws of God and man, and metre."

"A singular relation...grew up between Carlyle and Lockhart. They lived in different circles; they did not meet often, or correspond often; but Carlyle ever after spoke of Lockhart as he seldom spoke of any man; and such letters of Lockhart's to Carlyle as survive show a trusting confidence extremely remarkable in a man who was so chary of his esteem."

"Lockhart's Life of Walter Scott may be said to be the most admirable biography in the English language, after Boswell's Samuel Johnson."

"The end of Government has been described in a great variety of expressions. By Locke it was said to be "the public good;" by others it has been described as being " the greatest happiness of the greatest number." These, and equivalent expressions, are just ; they are only defective, inasmuch as the particular ideas which they embrace are indistinctly announced; and different combinations are by means of them raised indifferent minds, and even in the same mind on different occasions. It is immediately obvious, that a wide and difficult field is opened, and that the whole science of human nature must be explored to lay a foundation for the science of Government. To understand what is included in the happiness of the greatest number, we must understand what is included in the happiness of the individuals of whom it ii composed. That dissection of human nature which would be necessary to show, on proper evidence, the primary elements into which human happiness may be resolved, it is not compatible with the present design to undertake. We must content ourselves with assuming certain results. We may allow, for example, in general terms, that the lot of every human being is determined by his pains and pleasures; and that his happiness corresponds with the degree in which his pleasures are great, and his pains are small. Human pains and pleasures are derived from two sources :—They are produced, either by our fellow-men, or by causes independent of other men. We may assume it as another principle, that the concern of Government is with the former of these two sources; and that its business is to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains which men derive from one another."

"Whenever the powers of government are placed in any hands other than those of the community, whether those of one man, of a few, or of several, those principles of human nature which imply that government is at all necessary, imply that those persons will make use of them to defeat the very end for which government exists."