"State of nature" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Britons.[292] Regarding the Germans Tacitus wrote a whole book in which he idealises that nation as a contrast to the lax morality of civilised Rome, much as Rousseau in the eighteenth century extolled the virtues of savages in a state of nature. What Tacitus says in regard to lofty morals we shall do well to take with a pinch of salt; but we may with more safety trust his accuracy when he depicts national customs. From Tacitus we learn that the Germans believed ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... the primitive tenants of the forest from their favorite retreats. Most of the country was still in a state of nature—unsettled and unappropriated. Few fences or inclosures impeded the free range of the hunter, and very few buts and bounds warned him of his being about to trespass upon the private property of some neighbor. ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... If, in a state of nature, you find any two groups of living beings, which are separated one from the other by some constantly-recurring characteristic, I don't care how slight and trivial, so long as it is defined and constant, and does not depend on sexual peculiarities, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... themselves and to the crossing with individuals of the original form of their species; and hence we can not see how individual characteristics, even if favorable to the individual, will not be lost again by the crossing which is inevitable in a state of nature, with such individuals as do not possess those characteristics. Besides, it is an established fact, confirmed by all our observations stretching over thousands of years, that the characteristics of species are preserved in spite of all individual modifications, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... it is only thirty miles from London, is as completely out of the world as the most remote mountains of Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland, and the inhabitants were quite as uninformed and in as perfect a state of nature as the natives in the wilds of America. I had no idea that any portion of the people of England could be so completely buried in ignorance, and display such a total absence of all knowledge, with ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... category of the supernatural belong the salutary acts which man performs by the aid of grace? Undoubtedly there are actual graces which are entitatively natural, e.g. the purely mediate grace of illumination,(287) the natural graces conferred in the pure state of nature, the actual graces of the sensitive sphere,(288) and the so-called cogitatio congrua of Vasquez.(289) The problem therefore narrows itself down to the immediate graces of intellect and will. Before the Tridentine Council theologians contented themselves with acknowledging the divinely ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... my humble roof? Do I wonder that she requires it? No! This morning, within an hour, I beheld this agonising sight. I beheld my son - Augustus George - in Mrs. Prodgit's hands, and on Mrs. Prodgit's knee, being dressed. He was at the moment, comparatively speaking, in a state of nature; having nothing on, but an extremely short shirt, remarkably disproportionate to the length of his usual outer garments. Trailing from Mrs. Prodgit's lap, on the floor, was a long narrow roller or bandage - I should say of several yards in extent. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... may be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself. We are concerned only with the diversities of instinct and of other mental qualities within the same class." (p. 255) He shows that even in a state of nature the instincts of animals of the same species do in some degree vary, and that they are transmitted by inheritance. A mastiff has imparted courage to a greyhound, and a greyhound has transmitted to a shepherd-dog a disposition to hunt hares. Among sporting dogs, the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... most part in a state of nature, presents a fair blank sheet for any geographical arrangement whether of county divisions, lines of communication, or sites of towns etc. etc. The growth of a colony there might be trained according to one general system with a view to various combinations of soil and climate ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... custom were most in accord with the philosopher's ideal society? In that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature. In contrast with Europe, so "artificial," so oppressed with defenseless tyrannies and useless inequalities, so encumbered with decayed superstitions and the debris of worn-out institutions, how superior was this new land of promise where the citizen was a free man, where the necessities of life ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... he, "when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be so far disposed of by the Legislature as the good of society shall require; yet it being only with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... have gone by himself, but unacquainted with that part of the forest, he would scarcely alone have found his way in the dark. A couple of hours' hard riding, sometimes across cultivated ground, and at others over what remained in a state of nature, brought him to the neighbourhood of the Grange. Leaving the horses with Burdale, who promised to remain concealed with them under a thick clump of trees, he went towards the house on foot. Jack found the Squire waiting for him in a sheltered walk at a short distance from the house, and having delivered ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... we look on the people of mode in the country, we find in them the manners of the last age. They have no sooner fetched themselves up to the fashion of the polite world, but the town has dropped them, and are nearer to the first state of nature than to those refinements which formerly reigned in the court, and still prevail in the country. One may now know a man that never conversed in the world, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... rather absurd, the free and easy way in which an instinct is often assumed, simply to fit behavior which needs to be explained—a money getting instinct, for example, or a teacher-hating instinct. Since money and teachers do not exist in a state of nature, there can be no instincts specifically related to them; and it is incumbent on the psychologist to show how such acquired tendencies are derived ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... detail of this theory let us note whether the evidence from the lowest peoples confirms it. The lowest peoples in point of culture are not the North American Indians nor the African Negroes, but certain isolated groups that live almost in a state of nature, without any attempt to cultivate the soil or to control nature in other respects. Such are the Bushmen of South Africa, the Australian Aborigines, the Negritos of the Philippine Islands and of the Andaman Islands, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... centuries after, the slave of Teutonic or Saracenic conquerors—has become his own master, and his own landlord; and an impulse has been given to industry, which is shown by trim cottages, gay gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed up into glens which in a state of nature would ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... that I should do so, for Ned, having put a ball through the head of the dam, was now manfully battling with her two cubs; the poor fellow was sore pressed, streaming with blood from numberless scratches, and almost in a state of nature, for the sharp claws of the cubs had literally undressed him by piecemeal. His savage assailants also, bore upon their bloody hides numerous tokens of his prowess ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... impurities. Spring waters are not entirely above suspicion, as oftentimes the soil through which they flow is highly polluted. All water of doubtful purity should be boiled, and there are but few natural waters of undoubted purity. There is no such thing as absolutely pure water in a state of nature. The mountain streams perhaps approach nearest to it where there are no humans to pollute the banks; but then there are always the beasts and birds, and they, too, are subject to disease. There are very few waters ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... the experimental animals should be carefully examined, to avoid the risk of employing such as are already diseased: since it must be remembered that in a state of nature, as well as in captivity, the animals employed for laboratory inoculations are subject to infection by various animal and vegetable parasites, and in some instances such infection presents no symptoms which are obvious to the casual examination; the sex should be noted, the weight ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... ruining their talents by the means of infibulation. In an old Amsterdam edition of Locke's "Essay on the Extent of the Human Understanding," there is a quotation from the voyages of Baumgarten, wherein he states having seen in Egypt a devout dervish seated in a perfect state of nature among the sand-hillocks, who was regarded as a most holy and chaste man for the reason that he did not associate with his own kind, but only with the animals. As this was by no means an uncommon case, it led the Greek monks, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... this we look on the People of Mode in the Country, we find in them the Manners of the last Age. They have no sooner fetched themselves up to the Fashion of the polite World, but the Town has dropped them, and are nearer to the first State of Nature than to those Refinements which formerly reign'd in the Court, and still prevail in the Country. One may now know a Man that never conversed in the World, by his Excess of Good Breeding. A polite Country 'Squire shall make you ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... he, 'is dissolved. Fleets and armies and the present state of things show that government is dissolved. Where are your landmarks, your boundaries of colonies? We are in a state of nature, sir. I did propose that a scale should be laid down; that part of North America which was once Massachusetts Bay, and that part which was once Virginia, ought to be considered as having a weight. Will not people complain,—"Ten thousand ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... best—society being revolting in its falseness and shallow varnish: all men are naturally equal and free; society is nothing but an artificial contract, an arrangement by which, in the end, the strong domineer over the weak; the state of nature is divine: there is a Garden of Eden for those who will cast society behind them. Sciences and arts, civilization and literature, Encyclopaedists included, are hateful as corrupters of mankind; all progress has been backward, if one may venture ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... wear and tear of the war. Military operations always tend to disjoint and break up, within their scope, all the relations of society. They inevitably remit, to a greater or less extent, the social man to a state of nature. Inter arma leges silent. This is felt in every social connection, even the closest and strongest; for they all are, more or less, dependent on civil law. But it must be felt particularly in that connection, which of all others is the most forced and arbitrary—the connection between ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... were of a very low order,—very jackals of humanity; dirty, flea-bitten packs, whose physical and moral constitutions plainly showed the debilitating effects of unnumbered generations of fish-eating, purposeless life. Physical and moral decency usually go hand in hand, even in a state of nature. The Columbia tribes had no conception of either; they were in the same condition then as now, mean-spirited, and strangers to all those little delicacies of behavior that had ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... and schemes of modern philosophy; with Southey, Godwin, and the whole class, he was continually dreaming about the perfectibility of human nature, and believed that innocence was alone to be found in that portion of humanity, which approached the nearest to the state of nature. With these notions, which he succeeded, in some measure, in imparting to his young and interesting partner, he declined establishing himself in any of our Atlantic cities, then the only places in the Union offering attractions ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... diminished pressure are the real obstacles to the cultivation of alpine plants, of which cold and the excessive climate are perhaps the most formidable. Plants that grow in localities marked by sudden extremes of heat and cold, are always very variable in stature, habit, and foliage. In a state of nature we say the plants "accommodate themselves" to these changes, and so they do within certain limits; but for one that survives of all the seeds that germinate in these inhospitable localities, thousands die. In our gardens we can neither imitate the conditions of an alpine ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Misson's ship, the Victoire, and in the colony of Libertalia is partially an idealization of the pirate's creed. But two other elements which must be considered are, first, the concept of government in the state of nature, and secondly, the ideal of the socialist utopia. Most political theorists of Defoe's time postulated a state of nature in which man lived either entirely free from government or under loose patriarchal control, from which ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... when their galleries are merely contiguous or actually interpenetrate and open into one another, although the colonies which inhabit them bring up their respective offspring in different apartments. In mixed colonies, on the other hand, which, in a state of nature, can be formed only by species of ants of close taxonomic affinities, the insects live together in a single nest and bring up their young in common. Although each of these categories comprises a number of dissimilar types of social symbiosis, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... than a wilderness. There were exceptions at particular points, but these were few and far asunder. The whole coast of Ohio—for Ohio has its coast as well as Bohemia [Footnote: See Shakespeare—Winter's Tale.]—was mostly in a state of nature, as was much of those of Pennsylvania and New York, on the side of the fresh water. The port which the bee-hunter had in view was Presque Isle, now known as Erie, a harbor in Pennsylvania, that has since become somewhat celebrated ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... also with the buttercup and many of its kin, the geraniums, mallows, and various others. Most of our fruit trees and bushes are near relatives of the rose. Five petals and five sepals, then, we always find on roses in a state of nature; and although the progressive gardener of today has nowhere shown his skill more than in the development of a multitude of petals from stamens in the magnificent roses of fashionable society, the most highly cultivated darling of the greenhouses quickly reverts to the original wild type, setting ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Indian Lake from Louis Lake. The distance was about nine miles and through an intervale from half a mile to two miles in width. This valley was studded with huge trees at such a distance from each other that it might well be called a park, and when in a state of nature it must have been not only beautiful, but magnificent. The curse of civilization was upon it, however. For lumbering purposes a dam had then been built across the outlet of Indian Lake, and the intervale had been overflowed until all the trees ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... day I called at his lodgings early in the afternoon. I knocked at the door of his room. He shouted, "Come in"; but as I opened the door I heard him retreating into his adjacent bedroom. He thrust his head out, and, seeing who it was, came back into the parlor, absolutely in a state of nature. He had not even his spectacles on. In his hand he held a pair of drawers, which he had apparently been about to assume when I arrived. Shaking this garment vehemently with one hand, while with the other he gave me a cigar, he broke ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... and has been for many years past, in general practice. In new lands, indeed, the hoe is still unavoidably used during the first year of their cultivation, on account of the numerous roots and other impediments to the plough, with which lands in a state of nature invariably abound; but excepting these occasions, and the instances of settlers who are unable to purchase horses or oxen, and consequently adhere to the original mode of cultivation from necessity, the hoe-husbandry is completely exploded. Until the year 1803, eighteen years ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... in a state of nature uncultivated and uninclosed, is known among the inhabitants of the Australian colonies by the expressive name of the Bush.[3] It includes land and scenery of every description, and, likewise, no small variety ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... I read and abstracted, including whole series of journals and transactions, I am surprised at my industry. I soon perceived that selection was the keystone of man's success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... continued, "are a lot of fish that have a kind of malign growth. It comes very frequently among the trout and salmon that are artificially raised, and sometimes we find it among fish that have been reared in a state of nature, and I have been working for some time on this and I hope this year—or at all events by next season—to be able to show the cause of the disease. That is really my problem, Colin, but the details of it are ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... be varieties of the wild brassica oleracea? Yet from that they have been derived by cultivation. They have, however, a tendency like animals to revert to the original type, or, in the gardener's phrase, to degenerate, which it requires the utmost care on his part to counteract. When left to a state of nature, they speedily lose their acquired forms, properties and character, and regain those of the ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Goldsmith is beginning to denounce luxury—a characteristic mark of the sentimentalist—and his regret for the period when 'every rood of earth maintained its man' is one side of the aspiration for a return to the state of nature and simplicity of manners. The inimitable Vicar recalls Sir Roger de Coverley and the gentle and delicate touch of Addison. But the Vicar is beginning to take an interest in philanthropy. He is impressed by the evils of the old prison system which had already roused ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... come out to the country with one mighty purpose in her soul. "Under-nourishment", the doctor had said; and he had laid out a regular schedule. Six times daily the unhappy infant was to be fed; and each time some elaborate concoction had to be got ready—practically nothing could be eaten in a state of nature. The first meal would consist of, say a poached egg on a piece of toast, and the juice of an orange, with the seeds carefully excluded; the next of some chicken broth with a cracker or two, and the pulp ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Shaws-Castle, at a point about a pistol-shot distant from the Buck-stane. As the principal access to Mr. Mowbray's mansion was by a carriage-way, which passed in a different direction, the present path was left almost in a state of nature, full of large stones, and broken by gullies, delightful, from the varied character of its banks, to the picturesque traveller, and most inconvenient, nay dangerous, to him ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, but from animals in a state of nature. A college professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... such of the latter having been cut as were pests of the sort which scatter their seeds to the winds. Trim and workmanlike as was the clearing up of the ground just beyond the lane, on either side the lane itself was very nearly in a state of nature. It was, therefore, a picturesque roadway enough, and Sally walking along it bareheaded, clad still in the pink gingham of the morning, found it so to an unusual degree. Yet it must be admitted that it would have been an object ugly indeed which would have ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... or politician, so powerful in his own element, on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have before remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed on a desert shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages, and to combat nature for food, the primitive ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... took to my heels and ran as far as M. le cure's. He lent me a skirt belonging to his servant, for I was almost in a state of nature, and he went to fetch Maitre Chicot, the country watchman who went to Criquetot to fetch the police who came to my ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant |
