"Utilitarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prominent and at present important use of mushrooms from the standpoint of the utilitarian is as an article of food. We have now learned that their food value as a nutrient substance is not so great as has been fondly supposed, but, as Mr. Clark points out in Chapter XXII, in addition to the value they certainly do possess as food, they have ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... man not physical, or apparently explained and limited by the transient conditions and necessities of his present state, anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarian morality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But is there not an aspiration to character which points to something more spiritual and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroism and self-sacrifice ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... connection, let us note the skilful and utilitarian adaptation not only of natural materials for domestic and farm use, but also natural forms. The farmer and his wife both turned to Nature for implements and utensils, or for parts adapted to shape readily into the implements and ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... then shipped to centers where they were transformed into completed machines. The result was that the United States, despite the high wages paid here, led the world in bicycle making and flooded all countries with this utilitarian article. Our great locomotive factories had developed on similar lines. Europeans had always marveled that Americans could build these costly articles so cheaply that they could undersell European makers. When they obtained a glimpse of an ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... of a painter with disproportionately short legs, who, in all his pictures of human figures—from Moses down to the Mayor, done in heroic style—substituted his own legs. Your thorough utilitarian, deficient in imagination, his idea of mental symmetry being his own mental proportions, thinks no mind well balanced that has not a similar deficiency. He is a believer in nothing but the real and the useful—all else is stuff and nonsense; to him a mountain is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... channel. Nothing was deemed worthy of serious attention, except what led to some practical object in life. Education was considered by their founders as merely a step to making money. Science became a trade—a mere handmaid to art. Mammon was all in all. Their instruction was entirely utilitarian. Mechanics and Medicine, Hydraulics and Chemistry, Pneumatics and Hydrostatics, Anatomy and Physiology, constituted the grand staples of their education. What they taught was adapted only for professional students. One would suppose, from examining their course of study, that all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... principles to become independent powers and acquire intrinsic value is sometimes mischievous. It is the foundation of the conflicts between sentiment and justice, between intuitive and utilitarian morals. Every human reform is the reassertion of the primary interests of man against the authority of general principles which have ceased to represent those interests fairly, but which still obtain the idolatrous veneration ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... all the while is, we read little else than the writing of the hacks—living hacks, that is, men and women who write for pay. We may hug the notion that our life and thought are not really affected by current literature, that we read the living writers only for utilitarian reasons, and that our real intellectual life is fed by the great dead writers. But hugging this delusion does not change the fact that the intellectual life even of most educated persons, and certainly of the mass of the population, is fed chiefly by ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... upon him, that not merely while his vow lasted was that hair to be recognised as GOD'S possession, but when his vow was fulfilled the whole of it was to be shaved off, and was to be burnt upon the altar. Like the burnt-offering, it was to be recognised as for GOD'S use alone, whether or not any utilitarian purpose were accomplished ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... the captain to see his son. He was sad yet at the same time proud of this romantic adventure blossoming out so unexpectedly in the utilitarian and monotonous existence of the family. A boy that had such a great future in his father's factory!... And then he had related to Ulysses with shaking voice and moist eyes the achievements of his son,—wounded in Champagne, two citations ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... we live in a utilitarian age. Honour is a mediaeval conception. Besides England is not ready. It is an inconceivable thing, but even our special war tax of fifty million, which one would think made our purpose as clear as if we had advertised it on the front page of the Times, has not roused these people from their slumbers. ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... iron and pounded it out into a sword. But when man found that the red ocher he had hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced him as a utilitarian and deplored the decadence ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... than total abstinence, and that asceticism is but a one-sided training. He makes the sagacious remark, that 'those who are able to resist pleasure may often be among the worst of mankind.' He is as much aware as any modern utilitarian that the love of pleasure is the great motive of human action. This cannot be eradicated, and must therefore be regulated,—the pleasure must be of the right sort. Such reflections seem to be the real, though imperfectly expressed, groundwork ...
— Laws • Plato
... people whose noble works I have endeavored to describe, should in the first place teach us how noble a thing it is to construct works of beauty and utility, not only for our own gratification, but for the benefit of posterity also. The selfish and unreflecting, even the modern utilitarian, will perhaps laugh at the thought, and say: 'What folly to undertake such labors for the benefit of posterity! We will labor for ourselves.' I would ask such persons, what would have been our state if the ancients had ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... younger; of Cicero's son and nephew; Varro and Cicero on education; the old Roman education of the body and character; causes of its breakdown; the new education under Greek influence; schools, elementary; the sententiae in use in schools; arithmetic; utilitarian character of teaching; advanced schools; teaching too entirely linguistic and literary; assumption of toga virilis; study of rhetoric and law; oratory the main object; results of this; Cicero's son at the University of ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the outer appearance of that little house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends—for very many years, at any rate. It will almost certainly ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... supported by colonnades, was used, Master said, chiefly during the annual festivities of DURGAPUJA. {FN12-1} A narrow stairway led to Sri Yukteswar's sitting room, whose small balcony overlooked the street. The ashram was plainly furnished; everything was simple, clean, and utilitarian. Several Western styled chairs, benches, and tables were ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... growth of knowledge beyond imaginable utilitarian ends, which is the condition precedent of its practical utility, began to produce some effect upon practical life; and the operation of that part of nature we call human upon the rest began to create, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... "cotton-float" had not quite yet come into use, and Poydras and other streets did not so vie with Tchoupitoulas in importance as they do now, will recall a scene of commercial hurly-burly that inspired much pardonable vanity in the breast of the utilitarian citizen. Drays, drays, drays! Not the light New York things; but big, heavy, solid affairs, many of them drawn by two tall mules harnessed tandem. Drays by threes and by dozens, drays in opposing phalanxes, drays in long processions, drays with ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the C. P. & D. Railway were crowded into a half-dozen utilitarian rooms on the second floor of the company's freight station building in the Chicago yards. In two of these rooms, with a window outlook upon a tangle of switching tracks with their shifting panorama of cars and locomotives, Ford set up his standard as chief executive ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... and apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, interpose no barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers; you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no means a handbook to serious reading they will be no ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... city, the air of lightness given to it by the water, which traverses it in every direction, and the life and movement of the port, that form its chief recommendations. In their architectural ideas the Swedes appear to be entirely utilitarian, disdainful of ornament; and if a house of more modern and tasteful build, with windows of a handsome size, cornices, and entablatures, is here and there to be met with, it is almost certain to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the two qualities most often denied to Browning, passion and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful—it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... impoverishment of our spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which follows from an unbridled individualism. Without the inner life of prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... intuitive moralist of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of ceaseless toil for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be accounted for either by enlightened selfishness, or by any other sort of utilitarian motives; since these bees begin to work, without experience or reflection, as they emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, an eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, can alone account for the phenomena. On the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... with medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and star of some foreign order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing hilt, trailed and clattered along the pavement. At this time the pacific and utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such customs to the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but well-organised police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner. But even those who remembered the last Life Guards ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... this modern barbarism destroys the true appreciation of the qualities of glass. It denies, and endeavors as far as possible to conceal, the transparency, which is not only its great virtue in a merely utilitarian point of view, but its great spiritual character; the character by which in church architecture it becomes most touchingly impressive, as typical of the entrances of the Holy Spirit into the heart of man; a typical expression rendered specific and intense ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... but hoops and wigs; and forget that they had a fair allowance of human passions. And consequently we are very apt to make a false estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly entitles us to call Pope's age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... sir," he said; "and I will give first, not the most important, but the most utilitarian. We came here because this is the only place within twenty miles in ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... own sire, Sir Thomas—a gentleman of the "fine old school"—who, exasperated by the, to him, incomprehensible and insupportable turn of mind developed by his heir (whom he loved well enough, notwithstanding, in his own way), had hoped, in good utilitarian fashion, that a prolonged period of contact with the world, lubricated by a plentiful supply of money, might shake his "big sawney of a son" out of his sickly-sentimental views; that it would show him that gentlemen's society—and, "by gad, ladies' ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... traffic other than that of pleasure-seekers thus along the margin of the sea. The configuration of this part of the County Antrim, however, explains the position of the road, and justifies the engineer who was so happily enabled to combine the utilitarian with the romantic. A series of deep cut gorges, locally known as "The Glens," intersect the country, running at right angles to the coast-line and thus forming a succession of gigantic ridges, over which it would be impossible to drive a road. For ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... did long ago to Marcus Aurelius. Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, 'Utilitarianism,' (1864, pp. 45, 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality." Again he says, "Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural out-growth from it; capable, like them, in a certain small degree of springing up spontaneously." But in opposition to all this, he also remarks, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... is not practical enough for the American, and subserves none of his profitable projects; it provokes to idle laughter, and militates against the unresting career of industry which he has prescribed, and his utilitarian spirit thinks it were as well abolished. His recreations are akin to his toil. If he give to study such hours as business spares, fates first claim his attention, and then philosophy or ethics: he cannot resign himself to lighter topics. When he reads in his Horace, "Dulce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... The Fairbanks features were evidently picked out by a utilitarian mother who preferred use to ornament; and as for his acting, critics of the drama, imbued with the traditions of Booth and Barrett, have been known to sob like children after ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... penetrating peace. The white birches now almost shut the house from view; the barn had wholly disappeared. From the finely proportioned old doorway of the house protruded a long, grayed, weather-beaten tuft of hay. The last utilitarian dishonor had befallen it. It had not even its old dignity of vacant desolation. She went closer and peered inside. Yes, hay, the scant cutting from the adjacent old meadows, had been piled high in the room which had been the gathering-place ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... always lost (Kenny when the mood was upon him evolved weird music from them all), an Italian dulcimer, a Welsh crwth that was unpronounceably interesting (some of the strings you twanged with your thumb and some you played with a bow); Chinese, Japanese, Indian vases, some alas! sufficiently small for utilitarian purposes, Salviati glass, feather embroidery, carved chairs ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... are "hoboes" and "hoboes," as in any other profession, but so far as my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road has eased him of his burden and made ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors—the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already—very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were talking ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... education is purely utilitarian, and is expressed more clearly by the word power than by any other. Its object is to give the man power to meet the problems of life, and to develop all his faculties to the greatest degree. The word "utilitarian," however, is to be interpreted ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... the parentage of offspring may seem to be such a utilitarian underlying principle, but, on the other hand, it does not sufficiently explain the varied forms of the law of inheritance, for in some tribes the eldest or most influential son does succeed to his father's wealth; in other places ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... just, of the good and of the true, and you will not find any savage (provided he is not deficient in the ordinary mental ability of his tribe) who does not indicate an appreciation of every one of these in his own way. It is the idea of the useful which teaches him his utilitarian arts; which teaches him to build his house; to chip the flint for his weapon; to sharpen the stick to dig the place to drop the seed; and all those we call the arts of utility, the useful arts; and yet you will not find a savage tribe to-day but what goes somewhat above this; because among them ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... jolting on the roads is so great as to make it wise for a traveller to hold on fast, and when a lady and gentleman ride side by side, it is usual for the gentleman to protect the lady by throwing his arm round his companion's waist. This delicate attention is so much of a utilitarian necessity as in no way to imply ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... honor and the principles on which it rests, a little more attention and analysis are necessary; and what I shall say will support my contention that all honor really rests upon a utilitarian basis. There are two natural divisions of the subject—the honor of women and the honor of men, in either side issuing in a well-understood esprit de corps. The former is by far the more important of the two, because the most essential feature ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... ever hear about the learned Herr Professor who regarded unnecessary adornment with contempt and favoured sensible, utilitarian clothes for women? His wife, who was an obliging creature, adopted 'dress reform.' And what do you think he did? He eloped ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... to have carefully pushed its workers, together with the gasworks, market gardens, and other utilitarian features round the screen of Splash Point. The boulevards going west and north are full of fine houses and brilliant shops and are lined with well grown trees. The continuation of Terminus Road will take us in a little over a mile to the old town; here is the parish church, mostly ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... He who made the world is no utilitarian, no despiser of the fine arts, and no condemner of ornament; and those religionists, who seek to restrain every thing within the limits of cold, bare utility, do not ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... opportunity for physical activity on the Ertak; she was primarily a fighting ship, small and fast, with every inch of space devoted to some utilitarian use. I knew just how Correy felt, because I'd felt the same way a great many times. I was young, then, one of the youngest commanders the Special Patrol Service had ever had, and I recognized Correy's symptoms ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... the sea receded three times and returned with singular force, at one period leaving part of the shore suddenly bare, with fish struggling in the mud. The utilitarian tendency of mankind was at once made manifest by some fishermen who, seizing the opportunity, dashed into the struggling mass and began to reap the accidental harvest, when—alas for the poor fishermen!—the sea rushed in again and ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... approves of the utilitarian aspect of overalls. He had been afraid that I had come from the family of a minister or professor or writer, a lot of high thinking and no common sense. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... is no longer a "yacht," for her purpose is strictly utilitarian. She performs the multifarious duties of a depot ship, and as such attends to the ailments, aches and pains of, caters for the needs of, and generally acts as a well-conducted mother to a large number of destroyers. You have only to ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... Often have we seen him entering his gateway, followed by the mendicant, who would soon return thither literally laden down with provisions from his well-stored larder. His wife was no less hospitable, not less charitable and kind to the poor, but more cautious. She was of the utilitarian school, and could not bear to see anything go to waste, or anything unworthily bestowed. Not so easily touched with the appearance of sorrow as her husband was, but always ready to relieve the wants ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... deserves very serious consideration, not merely from the utilitarian, but from the scientific and humane point of view. But the answer is not a foregone conclusion. There is a case for studying the civilization of Ancient Greece which can be summed up in four ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the surprising number of new business buildings, the amazing growth of the city toward Seventh Street, the lamentable intrusion of apartment houses and utilitarian edifices on beautiful old Figueroa. Honor looked and listened and commented intelligently, but—where ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... mostly without the illustrations. Later newspaper developments were to introduce more of the picture element, decorative border, and design. The ideas of European artists were freely drawn upon, but put to so utilitarian uses that their originators would scarce have ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Naples and back, with the utmost satisfaction to himself, and with substantial profit to the people of these barbarous climes. The following is a specimen of the way in which Il Signor has accomplished his undertaking. It will be seen at a glance how well he has united the classical with the utilitarian principle, clothing both in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... the Land Where the Day Begins. Indeed, the entrance of Chinese philosophical and abstract ideas seemed to paralyze the Japanese imagination. Not only did myth-making, on its purely aesthetic and non-utilitarian side cease almost at once, but such myths as were formed were for direct business purposes and with a transparent tendency. Henceforth, in the domain of imagination the Japanese intellect busied itself with assimilating or re-working the abundant ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... historically probable that the habit of avoiding ugliness and seeking beauty of shape may have been originally established by utilitarian attention to the non-imitative ("geometrical") shapes of weaving, pottery and implement-making, and transferred from these crafts to the shapes intended to represent or imitate natural objects, yet the distinction between Beautiful and Ugly does not belong either ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... near to the lips of all who thirst for understanding—when so many of the secrets of nature have been revealed—when the impalpable and all-pervading electricity, and the infinite elasticity of steam, have been made subservient to purposes of human utility,—the advantages of knowledge, in an utilitarian point of view, the utter hopelessness of a successful attempt on the part either of individuals or classes to maintain their position in society if they neglect the means of self-improvement, are truths too obvious to call for elucidation. I must say that it seems to me that there is less ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... much greater proportion of my work to biography and to consideration of political and social conditions than would be appropriate to the history of a philosophy. The reasons for such a course are very obvious in this case, inasmuch as the Utilitarian doctrines were worked out with a constant reference to practical applications. I think, indeed, that such a reference is often equally present, though not equally conspicuous, in other philosophical schools. But in any case I wish to show ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... amusement; in fact, during the carnival, parties, balls, and concerts succeed one another without cessation. The Hungarians dance as though it were an exercise of patriotism; with them it is no languid movement half deprecated by the utilitarian soul—it is a passion whirling them into ecstasy. But dancing was not the only diversion. The winter I was at Buda-Pest a long spell of enduring frost gave us some capital skating. The fashionable society meet for this amusement in the park, where ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... glass case, flowers shaped by Miss Asenath's gentle fingers a great many years ago; one or two shells wearing landscapes in oils—of colors and tints never yet seen in an actual landscape—also reminiscent of Miss Asenath's artistic girlhood; and several other non-utilitarian objects of varying degrees of beauty, according to the personal taste of the beholder. A much larger shell than those on the what-not, with a landscape containing a cow and other objects no doubt intended as human, propped open the door into the hall. A white marble clock, with a large ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... described, circumcision is not for ornamental purposes. According to the Manbo's way of thinking it serves a more utilitarian purpose, for it is supposed to be essential to the procreation of children. How such a belief first originated I have been unable to learn, but nevertheless the belief is universal, strong, and abiding. To be called uncircumcised is one of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the curious ground that he is the only wild animal that can easily be caught and killed without a gun; so that a man lost in the woods need not starve to death but may feed on porcupine, as the Indians sometimes do. This is the only suggestion thus far, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, that Unk Wunk is no mistake, ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... his thought." Neoplatonism recognised that a religious ethic can be built neither on sense-perception nor on knowledge gained by the understanding, and that it cannot be justified by these; it therefore broke both with intellectual ethics and with utilitarian morality. But for that very reason, having as it were parted with perception and understanding in relation to the ascertaining of the highest truth, it was compelled to seek for a new world and a new function ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... in these soft, melodious imaginations of his, there is embodied the Wisdom which is proper to this time; the beautiful, the religious Wisdom, which may still, with something of its old impressiveness, speak to the whole soul; still, in these hard, unbelieving utilitarian days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may again meet together, and clear Knowledge be again wedded to Religion, in the life ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... a survey it is usual to give a place to early walls of fortification, although these, to be sure, were almost purely utilitarian in their character. The classic example of these constructions is the citadel wall of Tiryns in Argolis. Fig. 22 shows a portion of this fortification on the east side, with the principal approach. Huge blocks of roughly dressed limestone—some of ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... But utilitarian or natural ethics need not stop with the statement of vague generalities like the foregoing. In human society, as in the life of low animals, the worth and value of any form of conduct and of every single act can be estimated by definite biological criteria. The institution of marriage and the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of "Old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago," has grown now to be hackneyed. Yet, are not they those "old, unhappy, far-off things" that lure us back from a very commonplace and utilitarian present, and cause us to cling to the romance of stories that ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... except as it obstructed his journey; the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens filled him with portentous awe, and the spirits in the invisible world worked for his good or for his evil. Beyond his utilitarian senses no art emotion stirred in these signs of creation. Perhaps the first art emotion was aroused in contemplation of the human body. Through vanity, fear, or love he began to decorate it. He scarifies or tattoos his ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... this enormity is hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and durability. These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business structures, of buildings describable and indescribable, are not beautiful, but sinister. One feels depressed ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... educational problems out of the field of useless and wasteful controversy, and it does promise to get men of conflicting views together,—for, in the case that I have just cited, if we prove that the right admixture of methods may enable us to realize both a cultural and a utilitarian value, there is no reason why the culturists and the utilitarians should not get together, cease their quarreling, take off their coats, and go to work. Few people will deny that bread and butter is a rather essential ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... an amazing man," Virginia mused, her fiancee in mind. "It would be interesting to discover what he can't do—along utilitarian lines, I mean. Is he as good a miner underground as he is in the courts?" she ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... instructive amusements,—at least a half-dozen telescopes, and as many galvanic batteries, with numerous patented inventions; and I fancied that most of the peddlers and charlatans addressed themselves to a utilitarian spirit supposed to exist in us. A man that sold whistles capable of reproducing exactly the notes of the mocking-bird and the guinea-pig set forth the durability of the invention. "Now, you see this whistle, gentlemen. It is rubber, all rubber; ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... many useful suggestions, and the digesting of voluminous directions, the fundamental principles of food and household economy as published by the government departments, are here presented, with the permission of the respective authorities, together with many other suggestions of utilitarian character which may assist the mother and housewife to a greater fulfillment of her office in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... manifestations. Whether the pupil travels, or embarks upon a professional life, or associates, in any relation, with cultivated people, he will find a knowledge of history not only a convenience but a real necessity, if he is to escape the feeling of thralldom. The utilitarian value of school studies has been much exploited, and that phase is not to be neglected; but we need to go further in estimating the influence of any study. We need to inquire not only how a knowledge of the study will aid ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... to society. If, however, it is implied that the educated man is to be placed in a position to advance his own interests irrespective of, or in direct opposition to, the rights and comforts of others, then the utilitarian view of the end of education must appear one-sided. To emphasize the good of the individual irrespective of the rights of others, and to educate all of its members with such an end in view, society would tend to destroy the unity of its ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... wreath of orange blossoms, manifestly wax, covered the metallic gold of her hair. Her countenance was unperturbed, statuesque, and pink. As the sentimental clamour of the organ died the steam pipes took up, with renewed vigour, their utilitarian noise. "Why don't they turn them off?" Mariana exclaimed in his ear. Personally he enjoyed such an accompaniment to what he ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... narrow, and the vaginal orifice practically obliterated. The menses had never appeared, and there seemed to be no sexual desire. Micklucho-Maclay found that one of the most primitive of all existing races—the New Hollanders—practiced ovariotomy for the utilitarian purpose of creating a supply of prostitutes, without the danger of burdening the population by unnecessary increase. MacGillibray found a native ovariotomized female at Cape York who had been subjected to the operation because, having been born dumb, she would be prevented from bearing ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... that the main function of food is to repair the tissues of the body. Other effects are present, such as pleasure and sociability, but its chief benefit is reparative, so we may well regard the subject from a strictly utilitarian standpoint and inquire how we may produce the highest efficiency from our eating. Some of the important questions about eating are, how much to eat, what kind of food to eat, when to eat, what are the most ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... relations to man; for by almost all nations he is regarded with hatred, and every man's hand is against him. He is protected neither by custom nor superstition; the sentimentalist cares nothing for him as an object of poetical regard, and the utilitarian is blind to his services as a scavenger. The farmer considers him as the very ringleader of mischief, and uses all means he can invent for his destruction; the friend of the singing-birds bears him a grudge as the destroyer of their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... misery around; but they produced also their vindicators of the oppressed; their Bayards and Lancelots, chevalliers sans peur et sans reproche,—of whose spirit of candour, and fair and open and honourable dealing, it might be well if this our intellectual and utilitarian age had ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... "rights" are not primitive and transcendent; their existence rests upon purely utilitarian grounds. The right to liberty and life is limited by the community's welfare. So is the right to property. But in estimating advantage we must beware of a superficial calculation. The concept of justice, and the enthusiasm for ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Talladega to give still more industrial training than she does. But her chief mission will perhaps always be to train leaders, to stand for higher education and to uphold the supremacy of the ideal and spiritual over that which is merely utilitarian ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... utilitarian and even foolish to expect that one's learning shall necessarily function in practical life? And should the student rather rest content to acquire knowledge for its own sake, not bothering—for the present, at any rate—about actually bringing it to ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... trust for three-fourths of the actions of its own life. That was the reign of stewards and bailiffs, wily fellows, into whose hands the interests of the great families passed, and who fed and grew fat on the parings of the great fortunes they managed. But now-a-days, utilitarian theories, as they call them, have come to the fore,—'We are never so well served as by ourselves,' 'There's no shame in attending to one's own business,' and many other bourgeois maxims which have suppressed the role of intermediaries. Why shouldn't Mademoiselle Brigitte ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... life, Keller threw aside all conventional beliefs, and his religion henceforth was a deep love of and a joyous faith in all life. Although Keller was in many respects decidedly matter-of-fact, a calm objective observer with a strong leaning toward utilitarian ideals—he had all the homely virtues of his ancestry—he nevertheless delighted in a myth-creating fancy. Thus Keller is very much akin to his countryman Arnold Boecklin, whom the German world honors as its greatest ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... obligation of justice and the rights of property are by no means diminished by this exposure of the purely utilitarian ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... had critically surveyed her finished work and found it good, "Now, Sophy Smith, you are no longer efficient and utilitarian; you are effective and decorative, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... far our art has been strictly utilitarian, having respect to conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of color which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye. Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... a figure in war and peace, peace of the practical sort, the kind of peace that went with plenty. He was no dreamer, but a utilitarian. Perhaps, after all, the world most needed such men ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... harassed him and he no longer desired anything of it. Again like a monk, he was depressed and in the grip of an obsessing lassitude, seized with the need of self-communion and with a desire to have nothing in common with the profane who were, for him, the utilitarian and the imbecile. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... that his want of personal knowledge of India was rather an advantage. It made him impartial. A later editor[19] has shown that it led to some serious misconceptions. It is characteristic of the Utilitarian attitude to assume that a sufficient knowledge of fact can always be obtained from blue-books and statistics. Some facts require imagination and sympathy to be appreciated, and there Mill was deficient. He could not give an adequate picture of Hindoo beliefs and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... tried to express themselves in Germany's capital: one is modern commerce, and the other, and more characteristic, is military glory. The commercial houses are naturally much the same as in the rest of Europe, gloomily utilitarian. The military in stone, however, is neither ornamental nor useful. Strange that the Kaiser, who was reputed to have quick intelligence, should not have felt how excruciatingly unspiritual and truly uninspiring the glory-statuary ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... together, betrayed the same general impression which prevails throughout the Continent (Germany in particular), that we are a thoroughly material people, having little taste for or appreciation of anything which is not practical and distinctly utilitarian. Nothing can be further from the truth; yet I have the greatest difficulty in making people comprehend that a true feeling for science, art, and literature can co-exist with our great practical genius. There ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... slaves were everywhere regarded as mere beasts of burden rather than as human beings. When, however, they had the question put to them, as Gervaise had done, they were ready to give a hearty agreement, although it was the utilitarian rather than the humanitarian side of the question that recommended it to them. After three hours' rest the journey was renewed, and just at nightfall the galley anchored off an islet lying to ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... for morality—we shall be ready to teach that, as far as the prudential and paying virtues are concerned, as boldly and on the very same grounds as the merest Utilitarian. For we shall teach honesty, courtesy, decency, self-restraint, patience, foresight, on the warrant of the Bible; which is, that Christ has made the world so well, that sooner or later every wise and just act rewards ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... which might contribute to the success of his work, and applied himself to its principles with the same thoroughness which distinguished his handling of the Utilitarian Standard. One of his sons had emigrated to the United States and become, in course of time, the manager of a large boot factory in Brockton, Mass. From him Hankin received patterns and lasts and occasional consignments ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... Austrians, whose sentinel paces the once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp "Halt! Wer da!" and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands have been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to keep their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing, empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the world with us,—with us, whose forefathers have married and intermarried with one another until the stock is worthless, and impotent for any further achievement. For here, you know, we have the best blood in America, and —for utilitarian purposes—that means the worst blood. Ah, we may prate of our superiority to the rest of the world,—and God knows, we do!—but, at bottom, we are worthless. We are worn out, I tell you! we are effete and ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... and even luxury, and the bare necessaries of life do not answer every purpose. And, to say nothing of the employment which these accessories of refinement afford for thousands—for I have spoken of this in the previous series—the most sturdy utilitarian is not consistent with his theory. He defers to the social condition around him to such an extent that he sleeps on a bed instead of a bench, and wears broadcloth instead of untanned sheepskin. And, therefore, others might say, and say truly, that a good deal that is actually ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... research, beware of prescribing conditions to the investigator. Let him beware of attempting to substitute for that simple love with which the votary of science pursues his task, the calculations of what he is pleased to call utility. The professed utilitarian is unfortunately, in most cases, the very last man to see the occult sources from which useful results are derived. He admires the flower, but is ignorant of the conditions of its growth. The scientific man must approach Nature in his ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the sphere of prose. Modern France is perhaps the best example of this. The same is so far true of ancient Rome that she was unquestionably more productive of great prose writers than of poets. Her utilitarian and matter-of-fact genius inclined her to approach the problems of thought and life from a prosaic point of view. Her perceptions of beauty were defective; her sense of sympathy between man and nature (the deepest root of poetry) slumbered until roused by a voice from ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... charitableness, found assent in the disciples. Three hundred pence worth of good ointment wasted which might have helped so many poor! Yes, and how much poorer the world would have been if it had not had this story! Mary was more utilitarian than her censors. She served the highest good of all generations by her uncalculating profusion, by which the poor have gained more than some few of them might ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Courthouse followed the Virginia tradition that the seats of civil government should be designed with dignity as well as adequacy for their function.[139] Consequently, the courthouse building, which in other respects was a plain rectangular two-story brick structure, departed from strict utilitarian design with its open arcade on the ground floor front, and its cupola in the center of the roof, serving as a base for the flag pole and housing the bell which was used to announce the convening ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... understand—at least as an expedient as utilitarian as it is highly hypocritical—the argument of those who, atheists so far as they themselves are concerned, still wish to preserve religious beliefs for the people, because they exercise a depressing influence and prevent all energetic ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... be minimized, and those devices which give the eye the power to find thought in new symbols will be emphasized. There is no standard for determining the relative importance of this informational or utilitarian aim when compared to other aims. The significant thing is, not so much to discover its relative importance, but, having adopted it, to devise methods which clearly tend to bring the students to an ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... have hastily alluded to the phenomenon known as the key to electricity as a utilitarian science; a means of material usefulness. These uses are all made possible under the laws of what we term INDUCTION. To comprehend this remarkable feature of electric action, it must first be understood that all electrical phenomena occur in what has been termed ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... them most. And as humorist and satirist he had a natural tendency to attack power,—to play Pasquin against the world's Pope. In fact, his radicalism was that of a humorist. He never adopted the utilitarian, or, as it was called, "philosophical," radicalism which was so fashionable in his younger days;—not, indeed, the Continental radicalism held by a party in England;—but was an independent kind of warrior, fighting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... of the fifteenth century, but the destroying hand of later builders has removed part of the timber and filled up the gaps with brick and weather-tiling, so that its full character has been taken away. The great hall, with its glorious beams, was too much for the utilitarian. The waste of space distressed him. He therefore cut it in two by running a floor across the length of it halfway up, and subdivided his floor into bedrooms to accommodate the resident farmer's numerous family. It would be difficult to ruin a fine ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... conduct in all ages and countries, for a standard of morality, it would seem to be in favor of slavery. The will of God, as determined by utility, would be an infallible standard, if we had an unerring measure of utility. The utilitarian philosophy, as it is commonly understood, referring only to the animal wants and employments, and physical condition of man, is utterly false and degrading. If a sufficiently extended definition be given to utility, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... been showily and expensively united to his heiress; the Hotel de Chelles had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance with the bride's requirements; and the young couple, not content with these utilitarian changes had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions, and given over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room to a decorative painter with a new theory of the human anatomy. Undine had silently assisted at this spectacle, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Well, the second thing is to reform this town. It's going to the dogs—to little, silly Pekes and Poms. I can save it, and correct its ways and put it on a sound utilitarian basis." ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... his song of love, as he sat on the top branches of the cedar and admired the grey hen scratching in the fallen leaves below. It was very easy to approach this full-feathered Caruso and with a shot to bring him down from his more poetic to his more utilitarian duties. His going out was an euthanasia, for he was in love and heard nothing. Out in the clearing the blackcocks with their wide-spread spotted tails were fighting, while the hens strutting near, craning and chattering, probably some gossip about their fighting swains, watched ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... more useful in ornament than one might expect a stitch with such a very utilitarian name to be. It is, as its common use would lead one to suppose, pre-eminently a one-edged stitch, a stitch with which to mark emphatically the outside edge of a form. There is, however, a two-edged variety known as ladder-stitch, shown in the ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... "The system?" "Yes. What I call Anglicanism. It's a form of idealism. It consists in doing the proper thing." "But why should the proper thing be done?" "That question ought not to be asked. Anglicanism is an idealistic creed. It is anti-utilitarian and anti-rational. It does not ask questions; it has faith. The proper thing is the proper thing, and because it is the proper thing it is done." "At least," he said, "you do not pretend that this is religion?" "No. It has nothing to do with religion. But neither is it, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... their efforts have apparently not been to conserve moral standards, even in business. The school is interested, but its emphasis has been placed more on mental development without regard to moral implications, or on utilitarian objectives. The church has been preaching right living, and other objectives have been incidental. Since this is true the thesis is advanced as the basis for this chapter that it is the business of the church to provide building, equipment, ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... essay, announced that it is intended to be partly controversial, I can scarcely begin better than by furnishing the reader with the means of judging whether I myself correctly apprehend the doctrine which I am about to criticise. If, then, I were myself an Utilitarian, and, for the sake either of vindicating my own belief, or of making converts of other people, had undertaken to explain what Utilitarianism is, I should set about the task somewhat ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... them are of that peculiar nature that they can only be satisfied by knowledge, or by theoretical contemplation, is this knowledge, is this theoretical contemplation, not useful,—useful even in the eyes of the most decided Utilitarian? Might it not happen that what he calls theoretical philosophy seems useless and barren to the Utilitarian, because his ideas of men are too narrow? It is dangerous, and not quite becoming, to lay down the law, and say from the very first, 'You ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... tall, long limbed, supple-waisted creature—whose skin was pink and gold like the peaches and apricots in the garden, and with soft, little rings of hair that would have made such an excellent lining to a nest. From this strictly utilitarian point of view he had often admired her hair, (had this Black-bird fellow), as she passed to and fro among her flowers, or paused to look up at him and listen to his song, or even sometimes to speak to him in her ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... replied that ventilation in our case, cannot be had, without considerable expense. Can it be had for nothing, by the industrious bees? Those busy insects, which are so indefatigably plying their wings, are not engaged in idle amusement; nor might they, as some would-be utilitarian may imagine, be better employed in gathering honey, or in superintending some other department in the economy of the hive. They are at great expense of time and labor, supplying the rest of the colony with pure air, so conducive ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... days there was no wavering and rescinding, and if the chief counsel told you, with brevity, to do a thing, you went and did it straightway, with the knowledge that it was the best thing to do. Hilary Vane had aged suddenly, and it occurred for the first time to many that, in this utilitarian world, old blood must be superseded ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... another aspect of this "brute" matter doctrine which leads to the same conclusions. If matter be held to possess no other properties than those known to the physicist, it might be possible to account for what may be termed the utilitarian side of human development, social and individualistic. Nature makes demands upon man's energies and capacities before she will yield him food and shelter, and his material requirements generally. The enormously important and far-reaching ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... was born in a cooler and calmer atmosphere, where men are accustomed to give a reason for the faith that is in them, and hence it is necessary, in opening any discussion such as he had provoked, that he should assign some ground of opposition or support—Christian, Pagan, utilitarian, constitutional, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... a household familiar—that upholstered, deceptive, utilitarian hassock kind of thing which, when opened, revealed an iron foot-rest, a box of blacking,—I will not say how some moistened that blacking, but you and I, gentle reader, brought water in a crystal glass from the kitchen,—and an ingenious tool which combined ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... thou shalt lift thyself to Me.' We have as much need of the life of the soul as of the life of the body,—hence, there are two utilities. It is true we cannot be shod by books or clothed by poems. An epic song is not, if you take the utilitarian view, as useful as the broth of a charity kitchen. The noblest ideas will not sail a vessel in place of canvas. It is quite true that the cotton-gin gives us calicoes for thirty sous a yard less than we ever paid before; ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... forms of it were in verse. This is in accordance with a principle which is stated by Herbert Spencer on a different but related theme, that "Ornament was before dress," the artistic instincts underlying and preceding the utilitarian preoccupations. History indeed was first poetry, as we had Homer before Thucydides, and as in all countries the traditions of the past take the form of metrical, and generally musical, recitation. An excellent and polished school of prose writers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Sterling had, at that stage, adopted the then prevalent Utilitarian theory of human things. But neither, apparently, had he rejected it; still less did he yet at all denounce it with the damnatory vehemence we were used to in him at a later period. Probably he, so much occupied with the negative side of things, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the better the morale, the more profound its mystery from the utilitarian angle of judgment. There is something miraculous in the power of a bald and unhesitating announcement of reverse to steel the temper of men attuned to making sacrifices and to meeting emergencies. No one can touch the deepest moral resources of an ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... left its influence on the thought of the nineteenth century. When he was a young man, he went to Germany and studied philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound philosophy of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), the weightiest of his metaphysical productions, to consider those works which possess a more vital interest ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? But out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered that Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the force which produces weight is co-extensive ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... home, never any Christmas presents, except those that came from the school. While the other girls were clamoring for mail, Harriet stood in the background silent and unexpectant. Miss Sallie picked out her clothes, and Miss Sallie's standards were utilitarian rather than aesthetic. Harriet, with no exception, was the worst dressed girl in the school. Even her school uniform, which was an exact twin of sixty-three other uniforms, hung upon her with the grace of a meal-bag. Miss Sallie, with provident foresight, always ordered them a size ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... Suggestions about an ancient Egyptian influence are made, but popular Egyptian religion was not monotheistic, and priestly thought could scarcely influence the ancestors of the Dinkas. M. Lejean says these peoples are so practical and utilitarian that missionary religion takes no hold on them. Mr. Spencer does not give the ideas of the Dinkas, but it is not easy to see how the too beneficent Dendid could be evolved out of ghost-propitiation, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... terrible mortality of the large cities has considerably decreased. We have given them laws assuring personal security and guaranteeing new outlets for trade and commerce. But the aspirations of our English Government have been purely utilitarian, and as regards the deeper-lying current of development ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... remarks lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists, against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety. This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory. Yet I fully admit that ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... M., to be as disagreeably statistical and as praiseworthily matter-of-factish as the most dogged utilitarian could desire. I shall give you a full, true, and particular account of the discovery, rise, and progress of this place, with a religious adherence to dates which will rather astonish your unmathematical mind. But let me first describe the spot as it looked to my wondering ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... soothed by her presence; he was dependent on her to a degree which amazed and almost provoked the doctor, who could not bear to have her continually harassed and disturbed, and yet was much affected by witnessing so much tenderness, especially in Flora, always the cold utilitarian member of his family. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... treatment of this subject, an inquiry into its utilitarian relations would be superfluous—even wearisome. But on an occasion like the present, you will not, perhaps, think it out of place if I briefly answer the question, What is the use of an observatory, and what benefit may be expected from the operations of such an establishment in a community ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... rooted, despoiled, trampled, and utterly devoured, and all over the ground you shall find but the rejected cuds of flowers and leaves, and forms that have been champed for their juices and then rejected. Such to me is the Bible, when the pragmatic prophecy-monger and the swinish utilitarian have toothed its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... is just. In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... fulfilment of Duty. (2) Every human practical activity derives its value from its efficiency as a means to that end, it is good or bad, right or wrong, as it conduces or fails to conduce to Happiness Thus his Moral Philosophy is essentially utilitarian or prudential Right action presupposes Thought or Thinking, partly on the development of a clearer and distincter conception of the end of desire, partly as the deduction from that of rules which state the normally effective conditions of its realisation. The thinking involved ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... educational opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the leaders of the nation's thought and practice.... Difficult as it is to measure the forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power exercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or for worse, passed into the hands of the idealists.... "The Rhine has flowed into the Thames" is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse. Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... form afterward. It more than encouraged him: it gave him a feeling of certainty that he had struck the right vein, that here was a fair and appreciative field for his talent, his fine taste, and high culture. A little utilitarian, perhaps; and he smiled, thinking of some past dreams. And was true art so ethereal that it must exist only in the exalted states of the mind? Was it not to embellish and beautify all lives, rather than crowd out the thousands that the few might feast on some exquisite vision? Was any ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... no common utilitarian pig, but the honoured guest of the old couple, and it knew it. A year before, their youngest and only surviving child, then a man of five-and-twenty, had brought his mother the result of his savings in the shape of a fine young pig: a week later he lay dead of the typhoid that scourged Maidstone. ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Cecily, Cecily! Surely such a utilitarian occupation as the watering of flowers is rather Moulton's duty than yours? Especially at a moment when intellectual pleasures await you. Your German grammar is on the table. Pray open it at page fifteen. We will ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... merchant desires that his boy get a wider reach of knowledge and experience so as to succeed in a livelier sort of business competition. A university professor would lay out a liberal course of training for his son so as to prepare him for intellectual pursuits among scholars and people of culture. This utilitarian view, which points to success in life in the ordinary sense, is the prevailing one. We could probably sum up the wishes of a great majority of the common people by saying, "They desire to give their children, through education, a better ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... his description of the logomachies of the schoolmen. And of the Utilitarian philosophy. His mode of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Emmanuel Movement stand well above such error, but their national congregations do not. Certainly the longing for pleasure and a well feeling and the abhorrence of pain and illness pervades our practical life and keeps in motion all our utilitarian efforts. But if there is one power in our life which ought to develop in us a conviction that pleasure is not the highest goal and that pain is not the worst evil, then it ought to be philosophy and religion. It is only the surface appearance if it ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... extravagant race. There was hardly a gown worn last season which was not of the most delicate texture, garnished with chiffon and illusion and tulle—the most crushable, airy, inflammable, unserviceable material one can think of. Now, I am a utilitarian. When I see a white gown I always wonder if it will wash. If I see lace on the foot ruffle of a dress I think how it will sound when the wearer steps on it going up-stairs. But anything would be serviceable to wear driving in a victoria in the Bois between five ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... had no taste about his place, eh? He just thought of the vulgar utilitarian facts of the farm as it were; but for the cultivation of the eye, the glorious influence of landscape, he had no thought. Daisy Burn might as well be in the bottom of a pit; all one can see is the sky and the walls of forest outside the clearing. Now ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... old Sherwood Forest: it had fallen into the possession of a noble agriculturist; a modern utilitarian, who had no feeling for poetry or forest scenery. In a little while and this glorious woodland will be laid low; its green glades be turned into sheep-walks; its legendary bowers supplanted by turnip-fields; and "Merrie Sherwood" will exist but ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... was refined, for Mr. Bertie Tremaine combined the Sybarite with the Utilitarian sage, and it secretly delighted him to astonish or embarrass an austere brother republican by the splendour of his family plate or the polished appointments of his household. To-day the individual ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... acknowledge it as the fundamental principle of morality, and the source of moral obligation. I might go much further, and say that to all those a priori moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable. It is not my present purpose to criticise these thinkers; but I cannot help referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics, by Kant. This remarkable man, ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell substituted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost—shy, ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... to have dreamed that his principle of utility was a new invention of his own. It would, as Mill has said, imply ignorance of the history of philosophy and of general literature not to be aware that in all ages of philosophy one of its schools has been utilitarian, not only from the time of Epicurus, but long before. But what is certain, and what would of itself be enough to entitle Helvetius to consideration, is that from Helvetius the idea of general utility ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... years can never, I think, feel toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies of the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln—the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp—with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour— they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sense this is rhetoric. It is not unreasonable to conclude that such a preoccupation with rhetoric, such a sustained search for all possible means of persuasion, should have strengthened rather than weakened the utilitarian theory of poetry. The school-master endeavored to mould the characters of his students by examples from heroic poetry; the teacher of rhetoric, in turn, taught them that to persuade an audience they ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... to appear en Francaise, my true character," smiled Berthe. "I never could sacrifice my Gaelic taste to the hideous color mixtures and utilitarian ugliness of the English machine-made toilette. An Englishwoman can only be trusted with a blue serge, a plain gray traveling dress, or in the easy safety of black or white. They are not the 'glass of fashion and the mold of form.' Now, Sir, let me see how you have profited by your wandering ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... instil [Greek: tupto] and Phaedrus into the five-and-thirty little wiseacres who constituted the lowest form. Over the heads of these sages his political and metaphysical utterances rolled like harmless thunder, for he was at once a transcendentalist in philosophy and a utilitarian Radical of the purest dye. All of which mattered singularly little to his five-and-thirty disciples, but caused infinite commotion and annoyance to the Rhomboids and Rhadamanthuses. Vivian Grey at Oxford had belonged to that school which has ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Of wire coiled into spirals. Made of one, two, or three wires crossing with two, four, or six spirals respectively. Boss at centre. Spectacle type (two spirals) common. In 'spectacle' type (sometimes very large) spiral purely utilitarian, giving spring to the pin. With four or more spirals the additions are ornament, noteworthy in view of absence of spirals on pottery. 2. Bow type. (a) High arched bow solid. (b) Arched bow hollowed like boat inverted. This type often ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... they are and their hidden causes are what they are, quite apart from whether they produce a pleasant or unpleasant effect upon individual lives. The sordid and utilitarian system of judging the value of thoughts and ideas in proportion to their efficiency in the world of practical exigencies does not appeal to ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys |
