"Unscientific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nelson's improvement on this unscientific method of attack that is the conspicuous feature of his Memorandum, 1803, but it must be remembered that Howe had not yet devised the manoeuvre of breaking the line in all parts on ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... fighting hard, blow succeeding blow in the most unscientific way; but the end was not to be then, for Andrew ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... characteristics of both, Burn and Gunsberg have each a style of their own, and Mackenzie was particularly grand and irresistible in his attacks, Bird is sometimes called the best player of bad games and he often makes a capital middle and splendid end game from an unscientific and erratic beginning. One enthusiast observed that there were only three parts of the game he could not play, viz., the beginning, the middle ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... the spring of memory, and conscience showed me what it thought of me. I was ashamed of my littleness and of my unscientific attitude of mind in wilfully ignoring the greatest facts of my experience, and I was also ashamed of my ingratitude. And so, in an unguarded moment, that is, in a moment when my will was off its guard and my judgment asserted its right to be heard, I gave my answer to the question ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... Originally on the banks of the Tigris, this platform now stands some distance E. of the river. Here Layard conducted excavations from 1845 to 1847, and again from 1849 to 1851. The means at his disposal were inadequate, his excavations were incomplete and also unscientific in that his prime object was the discovery of inscriptions and museum objects; but he was wonderfully successful in achieving the results at which he aimed, and the numerous statues, monuments, inscribed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... phenomena known as solar and lunar eclipses have been occasions of mental disquietude and superstitious alarm. Though now regarded as perfectly natural and regular, they have seemed so preternatural and irregular to the unscientific eye that we cannot wonder at the consternation which they have caused. And it must be confessed that a total obscuration of the sun in the middle of the day casts such a gloom over the earth that men not usually timid are still excusable if during the parenthesis they feel a temporary ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... difference between the sentiments to which they appeal. But I apprehend that (however admissible for purposes of popular discourse) the distinction between Order, or Permanence and Progress, employed to define the qualities necessary in a government, is unscientific and incorrect. ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... course, it exists in virtue of its own nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion, the proof falls to pieces, unless we fall back on the facts of experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves, are a real substantial something. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, he winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... droop. Is it the vitality in the air which forces even the plants to eccentricities? Or can it be that they have not yet been subdued into uniformity like ours? Are they unconventional—nearer to wild Nature? So queries an unscientific lover of ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... the mind of the layman pernicious and antiquated ideas to which he has been long and persistently educated, or to protect those who have ceased to believe in them from the pitfalls to which, as an alternative, they may be exposed amongst the numberless unscientific, quasi-miraculous, healing cults, or the equally pernicious nostrums of the spectacular advertising medicine vendor, both of whom reap golden harvests among the ranks of the so justly disappointed and ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... said the doctor. "Unfortunately, More is not at all close or accurate in his descriptions; he has a decidedly unscientific mind, and so one cannot feel sure; yet from his general statements I think I can decide pretty nearly upon the nature and the scientific name of each one of his birds and animals. It is quite evident to me that most of these animals belong to races that no longer exist among ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... true. Under these circumstances, my surprise may be imagined, when I found, that the mere statement of facts and of views, long familiar to me as part of the common scientific property of Continental workers, raised a sort of storm in this country, not only by exciting the wrath of unscientific persons whose pet prejudices they seemed to touch, but by giving rise to quite superfluous explosions on the part of some who should have been ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... laboratory immediately after the lecture, and complained of being puzzled by the discrepancy between my statements and those in the text books. He showed me his note-book, in which I was reported as having in one portion of the lecture championed the most outrageous and unscientific heresies. Of course I denied it, and declared that he had misunderstood me, but on comparing his notes with those of his companions, it became clear that he was right, and that I really had made some most ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... these taxes will show their excessive, arbitrary, and unscientific character, and how they operated to discourage Cubans from owning property or engaging in many industrial pursuits tending to benefit them and to promote the material improvement ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... from bad to worse. More and more oppressive grew the government; more and more stupidly brutal and reactionary in its dealings with the wide-spread popular unrest. Heavier and heavier grew the burden of unscientific and unjustly distributed taxation. Worse and worse became the condition of the soldiers at the front; ever more scandalous the neglect of the sick and wounded. Incompetence, corruption, and treason combined to hurry the nation ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... anarchical, unscientific—call them by what names you will—yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland—a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live then in itself a delight, ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... and had not Chipmunk's head been very firmly secured to his shoulders, he would have succeeded. Chipmunk went down as if he had been bombed. It was his unguarded and unscientific rush that did it. Doggie regarded his prostrate figure ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... Newton, Botta, Rassam, Schliemann, Birch, G. Smith, and a crowd of archaeologists, and even unscientific explorers, are collecting the materials from which the history of mankind ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will be as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves and sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growth that really gave Mr. ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... sceptical, unscientific, and, by reaction, credulous. The philosophes, Hume, Voltaire, and others, were exposing, like an ingenious American gentleman, 'the mistakes of Moses.' The Earl Marischal told Hume that life had been chemically produced in a laboratory, so what becomes of Creation? Prince Charles, hidden in a ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... particular duty of the psychologist from time to time to leave his laboratory and with his little contribution to serve the outside interests of the community. Our practical life is filled with psychological problems which have to be solved somehow, and if everything is left to commonsense and to unscientific fancies about the mind, confusion must result, and the psychologist who stands aloof will be ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... but both are permeated by a Divine force and led on to a Divine end. All things are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's; this is the established order of subordination. Most certainly it cannot be unscientific in the Author of nature to make the same His messenger for good or evil. It is not unscientific to throw a line from the shore to a ship in distress, even though thrown from the mouth of a cannon, nor is it counted unscientific to use that same ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... pretentious effort that had placed him in the horrifying predicament in which he now found himself—with the corpse of what was apparently a human being in his workshop and no available explanation that could possibly be acceptable to a matter-of-fact and unscientific police. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... itself are sometimes such as to produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the firm idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended from heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological intelligence as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like gigantic ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... unhappily were indifferent to natural science, and did not even follow the best light that was to be had in physical knowledge. In the Dark Ages, when the link with Greece was broken, the separation became absolute. The luxuriant mythology of the early Greeks was not unscientific. In the absence of knowledge gaps were filled up by the imagination, and the 'method of trial and error'. The dramatic fancy which creates myths is the raw material of both poetry and science. Of course religious myths may come to be a bar to progress in science; ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... is apt to perceive very quickly that many of the statements and assumptions made in the name of any particular religion are unscientific and inaccurate and not much more reasonable than Aladdin and his wonderful lamp, or Jack and the Beanstalk. They pre-suppose an amount of childlike credulity and ignorance on the part of the worshipper, which can only be explained to his mind by ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... upon love and loyalty to God as superstition. Is it any wonder that such persons have a warm side toward Buddhism? Again, this system has certain points in common with our modern evolution theories. It is unscientific enough certainly in its speculations, but it gets on without creatorship or divine superintendence, and believes in the inflexible reign of law, though without a law-giver. It assigns long ages to the process of creation, if we may call it creation, and in development through cycles it ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... to the opposite extreme, especially since some of them, anxious to prove the animal origin of man, but not conversant with the social aspects of animal life, began to charge the savage with all imaginable "bestial" features. It is evident, however, that this exaggeration is even more unscientific than Rousseau's idealization. The savage is not an ideal of virtue, nor is he an ideal of "savagery." But the primitive man has one quality, elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle for life—he ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... agreeable, in description vivid, and in its scientific parts clear. Indeed, we do not know whether we have enjoyed the narrative or the science the most. Professor Tyndall has the uncommon gift of being able to write science so that the unscientific can understand it, without descending to the low level of science made easy. The Royal Institution may well congratulate itself on having in him a man every way qualified to succeed Faraday, whenever (and may it be long first!) his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... profit and success to the purchaser. The promoter may get rich—he has nothing at stake. In most instances he has the price of the land in his pocket before there is a lick of work done on it, and the payments come in regularly and promptly to take care of his salary and the meager and unscientific development. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... are all busy in determining the constant laws under which the struggle takes place; these indefinite humors of the elements are of no interest to them. And unscientific people rarely give themselves the trouble of thinking at all, when they look at stones. Not that it is of much use to think; the more one thinks, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... of this kind does not appear at first sight, to unscientific men. But those who have paid even a little attention to the methods and processes by which grand discoveries have been made, and useful inventions have been perfected, can scarcely have failed to come to the conclusion that the search after TRUTH, pure and simple, of any ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... science, who protest so much against science being corrupted by metaphysics, should commit themselves to an assertion like that? Surely that is stark, staring metaphysics. It seems as if they thought that the 'metaphysics' which said that there was anything behind the physical universe was unscientific; but that the metaphysics which said that there was nothing behind physics was quite legitimate, and ought to be allowed to pass muster. What have the votaries of pure physical science, who hold the barren word- contests of theology and the proud ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... chance have I against Mr. Per— against a lawyer? Judicious lying is what the world needs. I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hitherto spoken of a central chain and its ramifications in a loose manner; but it would be desirable to convey more precise ideas of the structure of this mountain island; and, as the system happens to be very simple and intelligible, it affords an example, on a small scale, which may give the unscientific reader a general idea of the nature of grander operations. Having traversed the island from north to south, and from east to west, not without an eye to its general structure and composition, though making no pretensions ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... breath of life.' This is the only tradition from the primitive ages which we can regard as really scientific. There are later documents which specify the minerals with great precision, even to their atomic weights; but they are utterly unscientific, because they overlook the element of life which makes all the difference between a mere mixture of salts and gases and a living organism. These mixtures were made over and over again in the crude ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... of the New Testament. It was a vigorous protest against the arbitrary, and indeed monstrous licence of interpretation which prevailed in commentaries on Holy Scripture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It met with at first the fate of all assaults on prevailing unscientific procedures, but its value and its truth were soon recognized. The volume passed through several successively improved editions, until in 1855 the sixth edition was reached, and issued with a new and interesting preface by the then distinguished and veteran writer. This edition formed the ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... not," said the other. "I have there completely demonstrated that disease is an unit, and that it is the extreme of folly to divide diseases into classes, which tend but to produce confusion of ideas, and an unscientific practice. Sir," continued he, in a more animated tone, "there is a beautiful simplicity in this theory, which gives us assurance of its conformity to nature and truth. It needs but to be seen to be understood—but to be understood, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... spite of warnings against, and years of lamentable experience of, a vicious system of voting, the members of the Convention went calmly on their way, accepting as a matter of course the crude and haphazard methods known to them, the unscientific system of voting so dear to the heart of the "middling" politician and the party intriguer. I believe Mr. Glynn alone raised his voice in favour of proportional representation, in the Convention, as he has done consistently in every representative assembly of which he ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are a part of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or the cloud. Each of us is a fraction of the universal Eternal Intelligence. Is it unscientific to believe that our own minds have their counterpart or their origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is our own intelligence all there is of mind-manifestation in the universe? Where did we get ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... is no place for discussions of taste, and I am very ready to own that mine may be corrupted. The work of Grotius is liable to a more serious objection, though I do not recollect that it has ever been made. His method is inconvenient and unscientific. He has inverted the natural order. That natural order undoubtedly dictates, that we should first search for the original principles of the science in human nature; then apply them to the regulation of the conduct of individuals, and lastly, employ ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... capital punishment. Not only is it a dirty game, degrading to the hang- dogs who personally perpetrate it for a wage, but it is degrading to the commonwealth that tolerates it, votes for it, and pays the taxes for its maintenance. Capital punishment is so silly, so stupid, so horribly unscientific. "To be hanged by the neck until dead" is society's quaint phraseology ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... natural classification was, no doubt, that according to the color of the skin. This gave us a black, a brown, a yellow, a red, and a white race, with several subdivisions. This classification had often been despised as unscientific; but might still turn out far more valuable than at present supposed. The next classification was that by the color of the eyes, as black, brown, hazel, gray, and blue. This subject had also attracted much attention of late, and, within certain limits, the results have proved very valuable. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... conceived the nucleus of the world to be a hollow sphere, filled with an assumed "imponderable matter, having an enormous force of expansion." These venturesome and arbitrary conjectures have given rise, in wholly unscientific circles, to still more fantastic notions. The hollow sphere has by degrees been peopled with plants and animals, and two small subterranean revolving planets — Pluto and Proserpine — were imaginatively supposed to shed over it their mild light; as, however, it was further imagined that ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to admit air, the wound is to be kept open, how is this to be done? It used to be advised that an elliptical portion of the wall of the trachea be removed; this, though succeeding well enough for a time, was unscientific, as the wound always tended to cicatrise, and ended of course in permanent narrowing of the canal of the trachea. It may be necessary thus to excise a portion of the trachea, in cases where it is very intolerant of the presence of a tube. Such a case is recorded by Sir J. Fayrer of ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... unscientific! It is the grandfather of hills,—a fossil bone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England was. And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his "Continental ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... osteology or anatomy of our beloved earth, though my heart is thrillingly alive to the faintest shade of color and the infinite variety of styles in which she delights to robe her ever-changeful and ever-beautiful surface. In my unscientific mind, the formations are without form, and void; and you might as well talk Chinese to me, as to embroider your conversation with the terms "hornblende," "mica," "limestone," "slate," "granite," and "quartz" in a hopeless attempt to enlighten me as to their merits. The dutiful diligence with ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... you, in this typical work of Gainsborough's, that his subject as well as his picture is 'artless' in a lovely sense;—nay, not only artless, but ignorant, and unscientific, in a beautiful way? You would be afterwards remorseful, I think, and angry with yourself—seeing the effect produced on her face—if you were to ask this little lady to spell a very long word? Also, if you wished to know how many times the sevens go in forty-nine, you ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... foretell events by means of the stars; and though there were always a certain number who kept within the legitimate bounds of science, and repudiated the astrological pretensions of their brethren, yet on the whole it must be allowed that their astronomy was fatally tinged with a mystic and unscientific element. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people—about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... nineteenth century, so strongly marked. But its place was taken by a parallel political motive. The belief that they were diffusing the free institutions in which they took so much pride certainly formed an element in the colonial activities of the English. It is both foolish and unscientific to disregard this element of propaganda in the imperialist movement, still more to treat the assertion of it by the colonising powers as mere hypocrisy. The motives of imperial expansion, as of other human activities, are mixed, and the loftier elements ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... those who go on more intellectual and less intuitional lines will say that these ideas are really contrary to human nature and to nature generally. Yet I think that those people who say this in the name of Science are extremely unscientific, because a very superficial glance at nature reveals that the very same thing is taking place throughout nature. Consider the madrepores, corallines, or sponges. You find, for instance, that constantly the little self of the coralline or sponge is functioning at the end of a stem and casting forth ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... repeat it; there is scarcely such a thing to be found as a single individual man; a few classes compose the whole frame of society, and when you know one of a class you know the whole of it. Give me the wild man of the woods; the original, unthinking, unscientific, unlogical savage: in him there is at least some good; but, in a civilised, sophisticated, cold-blooded, mechanical, calculating slave of Mammon and the world, there is none—absolutely none. Sir, if ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... Socratics. The philosophers were the most civil as well as the most unfortunate people in the world. One or other of them was always in want of money, either to perfect some great scheme, or to save him from the unscientific 'handling' of a bailiff. It was enough to move a mile-stone, to think how the progress of improvement, or 'march of mind,' as it is called, might be delayed by being too cold-hearted; and it did move my purse to such a degree, that at length I had ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... 109). Some naturalists refuse to class ostriches with the order of wading birds, and elevate them to the dignity of a distinct order, Cursores, or runners; but in the museum, as the visitor will perceive, they are at the head of the wading order. Unscientific people know more about the ostrich than about most other birds of foreign climes. Few people have not heard that the egg of the ostrich weighs three pounds—that the sun is the bird's Cantelo—that he has only two toes to each foot—that he ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... history of scientific progress assures the efficiency of this method; and there is no strong reason for the supposition that, because the processes of the higher science remain above the mental reach of the unscientific classes, the conclusions of that science will not be generally accepted. The dimensions and weights of planets; the distances and the composition of stars; the law of gravitation; the signification of heat, light, and color; the nature of sound, and ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... contemporary with, and conservative of, property,—although their criticism, based solely on reason, deals frequent blows at their own prejudices,—the second reject authority and faith, and appeal exclusively to science,— although a certain religiosity, utterly illiberal, and an unscientific disdain for facts, are always the most obvious characteristics ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Tennessee by an expedition through West Virginia. So he was now to proceed there, but was kept for the present in the mountains near the Shenandoah valley. The way in which the forces under McDowell, Banks and Fremont were scattered on various errands was unscientific; what could be done by Jackson, in correspondence with Lee, was certainly unforeseen. At the beginning of May, Jackson, who earlier in the spring had achieved some minor successes in the Shenandoah valley and had raided West Virginia, began a series of movements of which the brilliant ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... concerned, no action should be taken by publishers without holding an unfettered plebiscite of all children under twelve. Also that the polychromatic series of Fairy Stories edited by the late Mr. ANDREW LANG should be at once withdrawn from circulation, not only because of the reckless and unscientific colour scheme adopted, but to check the wholesale dissemination of futile fables concocted and invented by irresponsible adults ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... Prince Albert, who had been unfortunately induced to visit the meeting, and fairly turned the heads of the good people of Ipswich. On Saturday a very pleasant excursion on scientific pretences, but in fact a most jolly and unscientific picnic, took place. Several hundred people went down the Orwell in a steamer. The majority returned, but I and two others, considering Sunday in Ipswich an impossibility, stopped at a little seaside ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... is the outcome of many causes, among which are the over-population of the world, the spread of education and of equal opportunity, the anonymity of industrial enterprises, scientific and unscientific theories, the specialization of labor and its depressing influence.[45] These factors produced a labor organization which the railways, newspapers, and telegraph contributed to perfect and transform into a proletarian league, and now all progressive humanity is tending ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... that their doctrine contains the explanation of the traditional precept, "Support the tone." Their idea is that the throat, being "firmly set," furnishes a secure base for the tone to rest on. This explanation is of course utterly unscientific, and it cannot be said to throw any light on the meaning of the precept. "Singing on the breath" is also referred to this system of breath-control, but with no more coherence than the ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... that my rampant individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing it, withal, an unscientific one. I had been reborn, but not renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was. I ran back to California and opened the books. I do not remember which ones I opened first. It is an unimportant ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... inclined to reject maternal impressions, the scientific eminence of those who accept them makes a decisive opinion difficult. The arguments against such influence are perfectly sound: (1) it is a primitive belief of unscientific origin; (2) it is impossible to conceive how such influence can operate since there is no nervous connection between mother and child; (3) comparatively few cases have been submitted to severe critical investigation; (4) it ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that we can use precisely the same kind of thinking in dealing with the quandaries of mankind that we use in problems of chemical reaction and mechanical adjustment. Exact scientific results, such as might be formulated in mechanics, are, of course, out of the question. It would be unscientific to expect to apply them. I am not advocating any particular method of treating human affairs, but rather such a general frame of mind, such a critical open-minded attitude, as has hitherto been but sparsely developed among those who aspire to be men's guides, whether religious, political, ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... does something to the butter-fat—joggles it all up or something—I'll lend you the book. I found the chapter on Proper Treatment of Dairy Stock, and I watched those men with the book in my hands. Why, it was terribly unscientific, the ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... the world. I have read these books—many of them several times, pondered over the obscurities in some, smiled at the absurdities in others and benefited by the truths in a few. Yet, with all their profound explanations of theories and their verbose defense of hopelessly unscientific methods, the stammerer would be disappointed indeed, should he attempt to find in the entire collection a practical and ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... is fair to add that Professor Miller's researches have shown that some of the "unscientific" qualities of the mediaeval mappoe mundi were ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... pupil M. Cheve and other advocates of reform in musical notation declare that the people are deprived of this grand source of culture because of the blind, inconsistent and wholly unscientific nature of the ordinary musical notation. At first this seems incredible, but one has only to compare this notation with that elaborated by Emile Cheve after Galin's theory to become convinced that the statement is true. People are apt to say, "Why, it cannot be that our system ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... It tells us that, during the present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter. Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... some time slowly but steadily and surely accumulating from the investigations and discoveries of geological science, which has forced back the origin of the earth to a vast and undated antiquity. But nothing could have been farther from the imagination of the great majority of evangelical, unscientific clergymen of his day. They held that the writings of Moses fixed the antiquity of the globe as surely as they fixed anything else. And it required no little boldness in the lecturer to announce a doctrine which was likely to raise ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... intoxicated by Denis Malster's worship. It would perhaps be unscientific here, and therefore untrue, to overlook the fact that the conquest of her sister's beau, had been in itself a triumphant achievement, apart from any particular claims he might have to attraction. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... made special researches into the subject. And the cause of the distinctions in the qualities of different teas, as of black and green, are still matters of uncertainty and controversy among many dealers of teas, as well as among unscientific travelers and some untraveled scientists. The enthusiastic collector of writings upon tea by self qualified experts, will find himself involved in a maze of contradictory assertions and opinions from which there is no escape save by the exercise of judicial powers, by ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... the great majority of the members of the anthropological societies took up an attitude of hostility to him from the very beginning of the controversy in 1860. "The Descent of Man" was not merely rejected, but even the discussion of it was forbidden on the ground that it was "unscientific." ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... stories serve to call the attention of unscientific people to scientific facts, and teach them to observe the wonders of the universe, it really seems a shame that such marvels should be used as bogies to scare ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 60, December 30, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... were unaware, suddenly become active in us, we are practically new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. No doubt this is all very unscientific, but so far Science seems to have nothing ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... the Church never admitted free will, or used the word when it could be avoided. In Latin, the term used was "liberum arbitrium,"—free choice,—and in French to this day it remains in strictness "libre arbitre" still. From Saint Augustine downwards the Church was never so unscientific as to admit of liberty beyond the faculty of choosing between paths, some leading through the Church and some not, but all leading to the next world; as a criminal might be allowed the liberty of choosing between the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... that the sound was heard 2,000 miles, and that 36,380 persons were killed. Seems just a little unscientific, or impositive, to me: marvel to me we're not told 2,163 miles and 36,387 persons. The volume of smoke that went up must have been visible to other planets—or, tormented with our crawlings and scurryings, the earth complained to Mars; swore a vast black ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... people of doctors who prescribed bleeding for every ailment, and of keepers of asylums whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a strait waistcoat. Modern science laughs to scorn these simple "remedies" of an unscientific age, and declares that they were, in most cases, the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure. But in social maladies we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the strait waistcoat. The Gaol is our specific for Despair. When all else fails Society ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... is always suspicious; and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote those documents, or precisely when and how they originated: besides that, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterly uncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation which satisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in any severe court of reason." And in reply, although we may claim that there is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the little librarian had meant by an authority restored. The impartial method of modern science had become so firmly established in the mind of mankind by education and reading that the ancient unscientific science of the Roman Empire, in which orthodox Christianity was clothed, no longer carried authority. In so far as modern science had discovered truth, religion had no quarrel with it. And if theology pretended to be the science of religion, surely it must submit to the test ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... methods of slave labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of profitable slave labor were present, namely, possibilities for concentration of labor, its absolute ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... infallible finger-print system, has gone to pieces. We've just imported this new 'portrait parle' fresh from Paris and London, invented by Bertillon and all that sort of thing - it has gone to pieces, too. It's a fine case, this is, with nothing left of either scientific or unscientific criminal-catching to rely on. There - what ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the close connection there is between the facts ascertained by scientific investigations, and the discussions now carried on respecting the origin of organized beings. And though I know those who hold it to be very unscientific to believe that thinking is not something inherent in matter, and that there is an essential difference between inorganic and living and thinking beings, I shall not be prevented by any such pretensions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... between the making of the first practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate with a high-pressure ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... deceiver of women, a skulk, a dog. I have met with many villains; and I am not hot. But my tendency is to take that fellow by the throat with both hands, and throttle him. Having thoroughly accomplished that, I should prepare to sift the evidence. Unscientific, illogical, brutal, are such desires, as you need not tell me. And yet, madam, they are manly. I hate slow justice; I like it quick—quick, or none at all, I say, so long as it is justice. Creeping ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... are reptiles. You see he does class by type, and not by definition. But how does this classification differ from that of the scientific Zoologist? How does the meaning of the scientific class-name of "Mammalia" differ from the unscientific of "Beasts"? ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... of Goethe's soul is a different one from that of the savage soul. The soul has grown as well as the body. The daimon in Goethe has more progenitors than the one in a savage. Let us take the doctrine of reincarnation in this sense, and we shall no longer find it unscientific. We shall be able to explain in the right way what we find in our souls, and we shall not take what we find as if created by a miracle. If I can write, it is owing to the fact that I learned to write. No one who has a pen in his hand for ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... statements show. In his time, however, the collection was being gradually enlarged; his third class. i.e., the mixed, approaching reception into the first. But amid all the fluctuations of opinion to which certain portions of the New Testament were subject, and the unscientific procedure both of fathers and churches in the matter, though councils had not met to discuss it, and vague tradition had strengthened with time, a certain spiritual consciousness manifested itself throughout the East and West in the matter of the canon. ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... sinking shafts and tunnelling in violation of expert theory and finding "pay" in every case. Without knowing it, he allowed himself to work his ranch much as if he was still working his mine. The old-time spirit of '49, hap-hazard, unscientific, persisted in his mind. Everything was a gamble—who took the greatest chances was most apt to be the greatest winner. The idea of manuring Los Muertos, of husbanding his great resources, he would have scouted ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... his touch? A marvelous power—the human spirit—has gained a vast control over the blind, stubborn substances and forces that created it, and by its immaterial, invisible will, can in a limited degree overrule the most imperious law of nature by throwing a stone into the air. Is it unscientific, then, or derogatory to the vaunted potency of matter to affirm that the eternal ages may have developed an intelligent will that can project a planet or sun, as the human will and muscle project the pebble? Scoff not, exalted sages, at the weak terrors ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... not expect that you will obey. But your death for failure to obey will cause obedience on the part of those I subsequently summon. You will have served a purpose. And please remember that I have no unscientific sentimentality about the value of human life. I carry always in the background of my consciousness the innumerable billions of lives that are to laugh and be happy in future ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... What of it, if it were true? Have those who object to repeated acts of creation ever considered that no progress can be made in knowledge without repeated acts of thinking? And what are thoughts but specific acts of the mind? Why should it then be unscientific to infer that the facts of nature are the result of a similar process, since there is no evidence of any other cause? The world has arisen in some way or other. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... say much even to his wife about his discovery. He brooded upon it in a curious way. He found that these unscientific singing lessons stimulated him in his own study. After Miss Kronborg left him he often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his brain which he had sometimes lost for weeks together ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... he said, "religion has frequently led to the stake, and I never heard the Spanish Inquisition called healthy for anybody taking part in it. Still, religion flourishes. But your old-fashioned, unscientific, gilt, gingerbread idea of heaven blew up ten years ago—went out. My heaven's just coming in. It's new. Dr. Funk and a lot of clergymen are in already. You'd better get used to it, Batholommey, and join in ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... That was the truth—Paria was the mainland—and if he had not been so bemused by his dreams and theories he might have had some inkling of the real wonder and significance of his discovery. But no; in his profoundly unscientific mind there was little of that patience which holds men back from theorising and keeps them ready to receive the truth. He was patient enough in doing, but in thinking he was not patient at all. No sooner had he observed a fact than he must find a theory which would bring it into relation ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... far-reaching sentence, which made a strong impression upon Bentham. "In order to love mankind," he writes, "we must expect little from them." This might, on the lips of a cynic, serve for a formula of that kind of misanthropy which is not more unamiable than it is unscientific. But in the mouth of Helvetius it was a plea for considerateness, for indulgence, and, above all, it was meant for an inducement to patience and sustained endeavour in all dealings with masses of men in society. "Every man," he says, "so long as his passions ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... a terrible enemy to those outside the pale of his kinship, is a home-lover at heart, and even in war will not separate himself from his wife and children. This makes his impact slow, his campaigns unscientific. It prepares for him frequent defeats, such as that of the Candavian mountains, which a celibate army would have avoided. But it makes his conquests, when he does conquer, more enduring, while it explains those perpetual demands ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... happened in your office, you'd have to hush it up, now so many bishops are atheists." The Doctor is a less typical figure. He is the inconsistencies of science, kindly but with little joy of life, and extremely Chestertonian, which is to say unscientific. Morris is the younger generation, obsessed with business and getting on, and intellectually incapable of facing a religious fact. Patricia is the Chestertonian good woman, too essentially domestic to be ever fundamentally disturbed. The Conjuror, if not the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... productions, is the result of unscientific enquiry only; but unquestionably, industrious and professional research, would discover infinitely more to philosophic and commercial contemplation, and develope the arcana of nature, dormant ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... theory of the Origin of Species, has, perhaps, aroused more attention, excited more dispute, and won more converts in a shorter time among scientific and unscientific men, than any other of equal importance promulgated in the 19th century. It seems to be the rule either to swallow the theory whole, or reject it as unworthy of belief, and as conflicting with orthodoxy. The author of the work before us has, however, taken a middle ground, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... the masses of men ever since, was as yet a novel invention, when all the learning of the world was still the learning of the cell and the cloister, when the practice of the world was still in all departments, unscientific,—any one at least who will stop to consider the nature of the 'preconceptions' which a science that is none other than the universal science of practice, must needs encounter in its principal and nobler fields, will hardly need to be ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... meanest system of natural and moral philosophy!' Even disagreeable artifices of composition may be forgiven, when they serve to vivify truth, to quicken or to widen the moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy and habitual recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentally unscientific and untrue. There is no more instructive example in our literature than he, of the saying that the adjective is the enemy of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... is not that vessel a part of them as much as their poor bodies, and do not their souls live in it as much as in their flesh and blood? We speak of the resurrection of the Body, and superior people smile at an idea so out-of-date and unscientific. To me the body is not mere flesh and blood, it is the whole complex of all that a man has thought and lived and done, and when it arises there will arise with it all that he has toiled for on earth, all that ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the industry, the energy, the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... however, of distinguishing Oriental characteristics, is not confined to popular writers and unscientific persons. Even professed and eminent sociologists advocate it. Prof. Le Bon, in his sophistic volume on the "Psychology of Peoples," advocates it strenuously. A few quotations from this interesting work may ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... parried the small child's valiant but unscientific thrusts, while Dorry looked on in great satisfaction, sure that she now could "catch ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... could only carry a part of the elands. After waiting awhile, I rode back to where I had killed the last. Already several birds of prey were hovering about. I scared them off, however, by my shouts; and then passing the bridle of my horse round my arm, I began in a very unscientific way to dismember the noble beast I had killed. I did not like the employment; at the same time, it was necessary to secure the meat. I had been for some time thus employed, when I heard the sound of wings close above me, and looking up, saw, with a feeling ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston |
