"Utilitarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... taste and as an influence in the formation of a philosophy of life. If his place has been less secure in latter days, it is due less to alteration of that conviction than to extension of the educational system to the utilitarian arts and sciences, and to the passing of educational control from the few to the ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... for walls, to collect dust. They used vases certainly of a moderate size to hold flowers, tea-pots and tea-cups for the purpose of making and drinking tea, water-bottles and various other articles for domestic use; everything in fact was, as I have said, designed not only from an artistic but a utilitarian standpoint, and hence it is, I think, that art, as I have already remarked, has permeated the whole people. Even in the poorest house in Japan it is possible to see, in the ordinary articles in domestic use, some attempt at art, and, I may add, some appreciation of it ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... of 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 be tinted, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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, ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... 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, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... From the foregoing it is little wonder that the education of the masses is surely and rapidly gravitating from the classical to the utilitarian, from the formal to the vocational. The world's work must be done, and as those whose stewardship is the soil are compelled to render a combined physical and mental service in order to discharge their social obligations, they are entitled to education ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... 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 and business ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Matius on cooking, pickling, and making preserves— so far as we know, the earliest Roman cookery-book, and, as the work of a man of rank, certainly a phenomenon deserving of notice. That mathematics and physics were stimulated by the increased Hellenistic and utilitarian tendencies of the monarchy, is apparent from their growing importance in the instruction of youth (41) and from various practical applications; under which, besides the reform of the calendar,(42) may perhaps be included the appearance of wall-maps at this period, the technical ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and leaves, that are therefore eagerly sought by agents for the leather merchants. The beautiful SMOKE or MIST TREE (R. cotinus), commonly imported from southern Europe to adorn our lawns (although a similar species grows wild in the Southwest), serves a more utilitarian purpose in supplying commerce with a rich orange-yellow dye-wood known as young fustic. All this tribe of shrubs and trees contain resinous, milky juice, drying dark like varnish, which in a Japanese ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... second place, 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 ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... utilitarian view of the subject, he observes that what we call moral progress and civilization owe their advancement more to material interest and cold, selfish calculation than to any development of the humanitarian sentiments, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable unto all things," says the author of the Epistle to Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:—"Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the services of the mind." But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this perfection, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... point of view. That of the psychologist would be quite different. While a society has no right to be tolerant, because its first duty is to live, the psychologist may remain indifferent. Considering things as a scientist, he no longer asks their utilitarian value, but seeks merely to ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... from the top of its dizzy tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line or one tint of beauty. This negative fact, however, would be nothing; it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like a factory or a prison; but it is not. It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it; and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is pretentious in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it was not built by children, or even by savages, but ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... subject, and it is of these I fain would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called temporary, and its stupid shambling operations are finally and decisively condemned by their consequences. That is a straightforward utilitarian argument, and has nothing whatever to do with inherent and divine rights, or any ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... the family mourning, had 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, and at the sight of the old Marquise's abject acquiescence; ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... of bringing immediate financial relief, as well as safeguarding the future. The arguments presented by him to Congress for the incorporation of a bank in which the National Government should be a stockholder were purely utilitarian. The bank would benefit the public by offering an opportunity for the investment of capital. It would benefit the Government by lending it money in an emergency and by collecting its revenues. Its notes would also form a circulating medium. The bill ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... 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 ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... then sailed to unknown lands, peopled by unknown barbarians, and their adventures in strange and mysterious countries were clothed in a romance which has been almost completely dispelled by the telegraph, the newspaper press, cheap books, and rapid transit, and by the utilitarian ideas which have swept ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... its most distinctive and charming quality—the quality which differentiates it from all other American cities. Originally these parks were used as market-places and rallying points in case of Indian attack; now they serve the equally utilitarian purposes of this age, having become charming public gardens and playgrounds. One of them—not the most important one—is named Oglethorpe Square; but the monument ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... to visit these countries or New Guinea, as my 'Eureka' had already been established, and that I would therefore set forth over the return hemisphere, searching China and Japan on the way. The rivers in Southern China brought down to Canton bamboos of many species, where this wondrously utilitarian reed enters very largely into the industrial life of that people, and not merely into the industrial life, but even into the culinary arts, for bamboo sprouts are a universal vegetable in China; but among all the bamboos of China I found none of superexcellence in carbonizing ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... appreciation and enjoyment of such stories. To inculcate the idea that these tales are merely descriptions of certain natural phenomena expressed in narrative and poetic form, is to deprive them of their highest charm; it is like turning precious gold into utilitarian iron: it is changing a delightful romance into a dull scientific treatise. The wise teacher will take heed not to be guilty of such ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... figures, and by them they try to show that they, and not the Dubliners, should be first considered. They are practical, and although not without sentiment, avoid all useless manifestation of mere feeling. They are mainly utilitarian, and prefer mathematical proof, on which they themselves propose to rely, in proving their case. Here is an instance. A Belfast accountant, who is also a public officer, has collected a number of comparative figures on which he bases the claims of Belfast to prior consideration. The figures are ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... It was by bringing to the support of doctrines previously regarded as irreligious a truly religious spirit that Mill acquired in part the influence and respect which have given him his eminence as a thinker. He thus redeemed the word "utility" and the utilitarian doctrine of morals from the ill repute they had, for "the greatest happiness principle" was with him a religious principle. An equally important part of his influence is doubtless due to the thoroughness of his early training—the education received from his father's instruction—which, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... 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 army or nation who does not ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... that poetry meant as its derivation implied—"the doing." What was rightly done was done forever, and that which was only a crude work for the time was not poetry; poetry was only that which would recreate or remake the human soul. In that sense poetical architecture was separated from all utilitarian work. He had said long ago men could not decorate their shops and counters; they could decorate only where they lived in peace and rest—where they existed to be happy. There ornament would find use, and there their "doing" would be permanent. In other cases they wasted their money if ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Roman mind was essentially utilitarian. Even Cicero, with all his varied accomplishments, will recognize but one end and object of all study, namely, those sciences which will render man useful to his country, and the law of literary ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... property and labor. But assuming a more rational ground, it believes in equal rights to all; is based upon a right proportion of motives rather than upon the equalization of property considerations. It is both humanitarian and utilitarian. It seeks its own principally, yet is generous in the ulterior aim. This is the ideal relation between the individual and the social order. The greatest duty confronting each one in the world, and the one which all should earnestly embrace, is the duty of making the most of one's ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... less utilitarian than those of an earlier era, Borrow must have been an interesting man of letters had he not written his four great books. Single-minded devotion to the less commercially remunerative languages has now become respectable ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... to-day, dear 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 ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... society given up to unrestrained licentiousness. Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian. Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of England was to him more important than any constitutional change, any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a Parliamentary ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... 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, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... poetry descended from its ideal elevation, and came nearer to common reality, both in the characters and in the tone of the dialogue, but more especially in its endeavour to convey practical instruction respecting the conduct of civil and domestic life in all their several requirements. This utilitarian turn in Euripides was the subject of Aristophanes' ironical commendation [Footnote: The Frogs, v. 971-991.]. Euripides was the precursor of the New Comedy; and all the poets of this species particularly admired him, and acknowledged ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Where it is above ground, trees and shrubbery screen it from view, so that it does not mar the landscape. We think much of this, and should regret exceedingly if it became necessary for any such utilitarian object to interfere with ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... to appear in the newspapers, but 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 ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... not in need of frocks, for before they left England their mother had stocked their boxes as though she was never to see a draper's shop again. But then, she had been in a severely utilitarian mood, and when she cut out the garments it had not occurred to her that Fashion would ever come across the fields of a ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... was disposed to take a utilitarian view of cathood. Even Cowper, who owed to the frolics of his kitten a few hours' respite from melancholy, had no conception that his adult cat could do better service than slay rats. "I have a kitten, my dear," he wrote to ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past. His appreciativeness was capable of exercising itself only on utilitarian matters, and recollection of Avice's good qualities alone had any effect on his mind; of ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... plan, which might be revealed in its entirety when all organisms on the face of the earth should have been examined. Those, on the other hand, who regarded the general principle of affinity as depending on some natural causes, for the most part concluded that these must have been utilitarian causes; or, in other words, that the fundamental affinities of structure must have depended upon fundamental requirements of function. According to this view, the natural classification would eventually be found to stand upon a basis of physiology. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... of the child's nature is either starved, or else left to find haphazard expression along more or less secret channels. When the school system, under plea of the practical (meaning by the practical the narrowly utilitarian), confines the child to the three R's and the formal studies connected with them, shuts him out from the vital in literature and history, and deprives him of his right to contact with what is best in architecture, music, sculpture, and picture, it is hopeless to expect definite results ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... land is treated in this utilitarian manner. The heroine has an "Elysium." This place is near the house, but separated from the rest of the grounds by a thick hedge. It is full of native plants forming a deep shade, yet the ground is covered with grass like velvet, and flowers spring up on all ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... 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 ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... refraction. The object of British khaki, French blue and German green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed that will not be visible under certain conditions. A motley such as the "tanks" were painted would be best, but the most utilitarian of generals has not yet dared to suggest motley as a uniform for an army. It occurred to me how distinct the action would have been if the participants had worn the blue coats and red trousers in which the French fought their early ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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 ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... any thing to do with being a gentleman, then, whether you take education in the highest sense, as the best discipline and expansion of the mind by classical and scientific study; or in the utilitarian sense, as the acquisition of useful knowledge, and a practical acquaintance with men and things; or in the fine lady sense, as the mastery of airs, and graces, and drawing-room accomplishments; or in the moralist's sense, as the curbing of our mischievous propensities, and the energizing of our ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... church. At present the greater number have been fortified by the 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 glossy ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... and musician and theologist, that ever lived on earth, except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an Infant under her guardianship. Her taste was infallible; her sentence eternally final. This church was built for her in this spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian faith,—in this singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a doll-house for her favourite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to your dolls, you are out of place here. If you can go back to them, and get rid for one small hour of the weight of custom, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... limitations, else all poetry would have gone from the world, and great and glorious as might have been our physical perfections our bodies would be but the empty habitations whence souls had long since fled. The utilitarian would have stolen from us the bliss of the deep draft from the ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... enlisting negroes as soldiers received early consideration. Black troops had fought in the Revolution; why, then, should not black men now fight in a war of which they themselves were the ultimate provocation? The idea pleased the utilitarian side of the Northern mind and shocked no Northern prejudice. In fact, as early as the spring of 1862 General Hunter, in the Department of the South, organized a negro regiment. In July, 1862, pending consideration of a bill concerning calling forth the militia, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... position of the highest official of the Empire. A cautious and versatile diplomatist like Bernhard von Buelow appears to be best adapted to the personal and political necessities of the present situation." Count Buelow, indeed, though, like Bismarck, a "realist," utilitarian and opportunist in his policy, made no effort to emulate the masterful independence of the great chancellor. He was accused, indeed, of being little more than the complacent executor of the emperor's will, and defended himself in the Reichstag against the charge. The substance ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 1848, but the story, though important, is not exciting, and is therefore little known. The records of these years afford a fair suggestion of what a navy may do when actual fighting is not necessary, and when its vessels, with the trained sailors and scientists who man them, may be utilized in utilitarian work. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... is 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 ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... destruction and obliteration of our antiquarian earth and stone works. At no period has this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its utilitarian course, swept away—sometimes inevitably, often most needlessly—the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... 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 inherited ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... 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, ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... claim that a place so beautiful as it is, justifies itself by simply existing, and the perfection of its buildings and the beauty of its music must appeal, even to our own utilitarian age. But it has many other justifications besides its beauty; its great wealth is being continually applied to assist the University by the endowment of new professorships, especially for the Natural Sciences, and ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... a very young pig—an incident which afforded us as much amusement as a lady's lap-dog, with one end of a ribbon round its neck and the other attached to a wasp-waisted damsel, would have caused among these utilitarian savages. ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... irrevocable decree, he would reply that a narrow induction is the bane of philosophy, that the ways of Providence are not inscribed on the surface of things, that religion, socialism, militarism, and revolution possibly reserve a store of cogent surprises for the economist, utilitarian, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic plains. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it a utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down, and crowns are offered like a fairy tale; and the most powerful people in the world, male and female, a few years ago ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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 ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... Rhetoric and lexicography were hobbies with me for a time, but before a great while I thought I needed "mental drill"; so I turned my attention to mathematics. The subject became dry and uninteresting in the usual length of time; besides, I began seriously to question mathematics as being in the utilitarian class of studies. Certainly very little of it was necessary as a business qualification. I recalled the fact that one of the best business men, in a mediocre station of life, whom I had ever known, could not write his ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... 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 of the forgotten family life. She stepped in and sank ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the shooting of porcupines, on 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
... in us, or in whom we need take an interest; and, then, whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... contempt. He read the "Riddle of the Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella's mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her mother's poetry books and so Tennyson, Shelley and Keats shone into her life and, reading an ancient ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... 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
... History of British India (1817-18), and in 1819 received the appointment of Assistant Examiner to the India Office, and in 1834 became head of the department. M. had meanwhile become the intimate friend of Jeremy Bentham, was perhaps the chief exponent of the utilitarian philosophy, and was also one of the founders of the London Univ. His philosophical writings include Elements of Political Economy (1821), and Analysis of the Human Mind (1824). M.'s intellect was powerful, though rigid and somewhat narrow; his style was clear and precise, and his conversational ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... absence of an ideal that prevents our feeling satisfied with Utilitarianism. The Utilitarian definition of morality has been so much enlarged, and made to coincide so completely with ordinary definitions in point of mere extent, that the difference between Utilitarianism and ordinary Moral Philosophy seems to have become almost verbal. Yet we feel that there is something wanting. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... utilitarian point of view is by no means confined to the lowest forms of religion; in the Old Testament, for example, the appeal to Yahveh is generally based on his assumed power to bestow temporal blessings,[5] and this is a widespread attitude at the present day in religious ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... 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, of great forces still visibly incarnate, and in ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... employs marble, stone, wood, bronze or gold, and the result is that element of the symphony which responds to sensation. The third and only remaining element of the trinity is sentiment. In order that, rising above its utilitarian purpose, appropriateness and mathematical rules of stability, the architect may fulfil the requisition of aesthetics and arrive at the "Grand Art," the remaining element as well as the other two must be perfected in result. The perfection of this element of sentiment is ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... been a horrid little prig in those days," said Evadne, smiling. "But, auntie, there can be no peace without plenty. And I think I would rather be a sensible realist than a foolish idealist. You mean that you think me too much of a utilitarian, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... gentleman be a Radical, he is usually a very profound person indeed, having great store of theoretical questions to put to you, with an infinite variety of possible cases and logical deductions therefrom. If he be of the utilitarian school, too, which is more than probable, he is particularly pleasant company, having many ingenious remarks to offer upon the voluntary principle and various cheerful disquisitions connected with the population of the country, the position of Great ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the Campta,' thus enforcing at once the value of ceremonial courtesy, and the power conferred by union. We observe more ceremony in family life than others in the most formal public relations. Their theory of life being utterly utilitarian, no form is observed that serves no distinct practical purpose. We wish to make life graceful and elegant, as well as easy. Principles originally inculcated upon us by the necessity of self-protection have been enforced and graven on our very nature, by the reaction of our experience against ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... 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 by the mere sensation of the enormous life which created them, life ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... about throwing himself into any forlorn-hope, provided that he was satisfied of the justice of the cause. He had dabbled a little in philosophy, and not only believed that the ordinary altruistic instincts of mankind could be traced to a purely utilitarian origin, but also that, on the same theory, the highest form of personal gratification might be found in the severest form, of self-sacrifice. He did not pity a martyr; he envied him. But before the martyr's joy must come the martyr's faith. Without that ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... speculative completeness. [Footnote: This was to be well explained by Fontenelle, Preface sur l'utilite des mathematiques, in Oeuvres (ed. 1729), iii, I sqq.] But this does not invalidate Bacon's pragmatic principle, or diminish the importance of the fact that in laying down the utilitarian view of knowledge he contributed to the creation of a new mental atmosphere in which the theory of Progress was ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Boulogne to 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... thirsts for eternal happiness. Can it be doubted that such dim, vague, unsatisfied longings are the source of much immorality? Mechanical operations, business speculations, commercial transactions, important as they may appear to the utilitarian, are far from responding to the requirements of the intellect, the imperious exactions of the heart. Such men pine unconsciously for a draught of higher life, they grow weary of existence. Literature and the arts may come to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... organizations may be interested, but 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 ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... contribute to the physical beauty of this historic town. We have not given the time and the attention and the thought that we should have given to things of that kind in Massachusetts. We have been too utilitarian. We have thought that if a building was located in some place where we could have access to it, where it could be used, where it could transact the business of the town, that was enough. We are coming to see in these modern days that that is ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... 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. Cyrus believes in ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... 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 ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... of the virtues, as it seemed at home. Yet she remarked that though every object was more or less ornamental, nothing had been placed in the rooms for the sake of ornament alone. Miss Carew, judged by her domestic arrangements, was a utilitarian before everything. There was a very handsome chimney piece; but as there was nothing on the mantel board, Alice made a faint effort to believe that it was inferior in point of taste to that in her own bedroom, which was covered with blue cloth, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... narrowly 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
... indirectly to their own convenience and interest in so doing. This may be indulged in, poetically too—for almost any thinking man has a spice of poetry in his composition—vagabondism, a strict, economizing utilitarian would call it. The name matters not. One may as well indulge his taste in this cheap sort of charitable expenditure, as another may indulge, in his dogs, and guns, his horses and equipages—and the first is far the cheapest. They, at the west and south, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... validity as a standard of right and wrong action is just as tenable by one who believes the moral sense to be innate, as by one who holds that it is acquired. He says distinctly that the social feelings of mankind form 'the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality.' So far from holding the Greatest Happiness principle to be the foundation of morality, he would describe it as the forming principle of the superstructure of which the social feelings of mankind are the foundation. Between Mr. Darwin and utilitarians, as utilitarians, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... commingled apprehension and satisfaction at the fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping, hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most utilitarian and idealistic public in the world ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... from his chair and walked to the window. Below spread the roaring inferno of New York, greatest city in the Solar System, a strange place of queer beauty and weighty materialism, dreamlike in its super-skyscraper construction, but utilitarian in its purpose, for it was a ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... nature embodied humanity without sentimentalism, firmness without obstinacy, individuality without selfishness; his activity was boundless, his devotion to his system so real as to admit no utilitarian sophistries into his scheme of personal benevolence. Before I had been with him a week, I respected him as I had ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... and coloring of a rock are its esthetic rather than its utilitarian features. They are particularly important in the construction of buildings and monuments for ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... 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. ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... himself in the puzzling calculation he attempted. As for Pierre, it was in silence that he gazed upon this mass of wax, destined to be burnt in open daylight to the glory of God; and although he was by no means a rigid utilitarian, and could well understand that some apparent acts of extravagance yield an illusive enjoyment and satisfaction which provide humanity with as much sustenance as bread, he could not, on the other hand, refrain from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... become almost exclusively utilitarian, and in which the exercise of the imagination, in its real forms, was sedulously discountenanced, Charlotte Bronte introduced passion in the sphere of prose fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty years earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... no doubt have been evident that the spirit which animates these pages is not utilitarian. It would be an error to suppose that the simplicity we seek has anything in common with that which misers impose upon themselves through cupidity, or narrow-minded people through false austerity. To the former the simple life is the one ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... maxims of her childhood—You should be so and so; you should do so and so; you should say so and so. Sometimes she makes a mistake—but what then? she has plenty of other businesses to attend to, and the average is sure to come up well. In philosophy, she is a decided utilitarian; bearing with perfect never-mindingness the misfortunes of individuals, and holding by the greatest happiness of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... she had critically surveyed her finished work and found it good, "Now, Sophy Smith, you are no longer efficient and utilitarian; you are effective ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... of primal man, Grim utilitarian, Loving woods for hunt and prowl, Lake and hill for fish and fowl, As the brown bear blind and dull ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... about the strangely sad impression that has followed, that "this also is vanity." I know it is our duty to improve our minds, and I wish much that mine had been better cultivated than it has been, and yet some utilitarian infirmity of mind has so often suggested, "What use is it?" while I have been reading, that my zest for the book has been almost destroyed, and the very thought of the volume has been saddened by remembering ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... monitors, craft of ugly but utilitarian design, low-lying, and mounting two 14-inch guns, had assembled for the purpose of making it hot for the Hun on the morrow. Only light-draughted craft were to be employed in the attack, since they could approach within very effective range ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... 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
... was planned for sons of gentlemen, Locke urged the establishment of "working schools" for children of the laboring classes. This was in line with his utilitarian ideas, as the intent was not so much intellectual training, as the formation of steady habits and the preparation for success in industrial pursuits. Locke's plan was for a sort of manual training school, the first appearance of such ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... 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
... 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 of those she ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... and even the substance of Dante occur again and again. But Dante's inspiration was spiritual: Machiavelli's frankly pagan, and with the latter Fortune takes the place of God. Dante did not love the Papacy, but Machiavelli, pointing out how even in ancient Rome religion was politic or utilitarian, leads up to his famous attack upon the Roman Church, to which he attributes all the shame and losses, political, social, moral, national, that Italy has suffered at her hands. And now for the first time the necessity for Italian Unity is laid plainly ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... collection of books; or else he improves slowly but surely, growing daily shrewder in his purchases. So that at length, having completely recovered his composure, he finds himself the possessor of a collection of books valuable alike from commercial and utilitarian standpoints. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... palaces—when you can come here. The alternations one gets, too; after the Illinois and Kansas prairies of a thousand miles—smooth and easy areas of the corn and wheat of ten million democratic farms in the future——here start up in every conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian piles, coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the New World, before being finally assimilated, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... bring into application purely mundane utilitarian standards, and may account conduct as immoral or moral according as it seeks only the happiness of the agent, or the happiness of the narrow circle of humanity which includes along with him also his relatives and intimate friends, or again, the welfare of the wider circle which includes ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... 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 in right conduct ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... articulate; or the miserables initiated into the elements of the linear, the curve, and the perspective in drawing, whose eyeballs are glaring in quest of the perspective of a loaf. Oh! genius profound, and forecasting of privy council philanthropy and utilitarian wisdom; more exquisite of refinement than Nero, who only fiddled when Rome was blazing and wretches roasting, thou, with the wizen wand of Cockney Hullah charmed with Wilhem's incantations, canst teach ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... far off and away from the beaten turnpike-road of life, through forests of enchantment, to rescue beauty which you never saw, from knight-begirt and dragon-guarded castles; and little thankful have you been when you have opened your eyes awake in peace to the cold light of our misnamed utilitarian day, and found all your enchantment broken, the knights discomfited, the dragon killed, the drawbridge broken down, and the ladies free—all without your help; and then, when you have gone forth, and in lieu of some rescued paragon of her sex, you have met but the squire's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... furnished by great works built at the State's expense; good sanitation, resulting in a degree of healthfulness unusually high for India; a noble pleasure garden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction of native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a new and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and value. Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences could not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and large generosities, and all such matters find hospitality ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the splendid panorama of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament lay before them. The most stately of ancient English buildings was contrasted with the most beautiful of modern ones. How anything so graceful came to be built by this tasteless and utilitarian nation must remain a marvel to the traveller. The sun was shining upon the gold-work of the roof, and the grand towers sprang up amid the light London haze, like some gorgeous palace in a dream. It was a fit centre for the rule to whose mild sway one-fifth of the human ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... and India, are within the range of his sympathies, this most outspoken of all philosophers, this prophet and poet-philosopher, cannot find words enough to express his disgust at the illogical, plebeian, shallow, utilitarian Englishman. It must certainly be disagreeable to be treated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion of one's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? Did Nietzsche, perchance, spare ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 which ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... some degree be remembered. Before we come to the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has indeed been celebrated ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... by which this worthy man was influenced was a mere sensible practical respect for good workmanship. The aspirations of the collectors, however, in this matter, go out of the boundaries of the sphere of the utilitarian into that of the aesthetic. Their priests and prophets, by the way, do not seem to be aware how far back this veneration for the coverings of books may be traced, or to know how strongly their votaries have been influenced in the direction of their taste by the traditions of the middle ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... securing justice between man and man. These objects may be badly carried out, they may be accompanied with much oppression of the governed by the governing body, but they are always aimed at, and occasionally secured. Of the Ten Commandments, four pertain to Religious Worship; six are Utilitarian, that is, have no end except to ward off evils, and to further ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... with its front entrance, for the doorway is the dominant feature of the facade, the keynote so to speak. Truly utilitarian in purpose, and so lending itself more logically to elaboration for the sake of decorative effect, the doorway became the principal single feature of a Colonial exterior. When designed in complete accord with the house ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... four mutilations already 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 ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... 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 to be influenced was Endymion, and the host, acting up to his ideal ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... social graces of Mr. Austin the painter with those of Mr. Tillott the curate, very much to the advantage of the former—blushed to find herself so much interested in any conversation that was not strictly utilitarian or evangelical in its drift. Once or twice Austin spoke of his travels, his Australian experiences; and at each mention, Clarissa looked up eagerly, anxious to hear more. The history of her brother's past was a blank to her, and she was keenly interested by the slightest ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the epithet wiser too literally. Perhaps the poet speaks ironically, or means by some other wiser man, one allied in character and temperament to a modern utilitarian Philosopher. Wordsworth seems to have had the lines of George Wither in his mind ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... seventeenth and eighteenth century life that has enchained us as we read the pages of the past, and in its richness and variety at least the eighteenth century would be difficult to rival. Prosaic London, with her borough councils, her Strand improvements, and her immense utilitarian flats, still retains the glamour of her bygone days, and if her present buildings are without much attraction, they are glorified by the halo of their association with ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... doing War Work. If one could achieve something like leggings in addition to a masculine cut of coat, one could swagger about most alluringly. There were numbers of things to be done which did not involve frumpish utilitarian costumes, all caps and aprons. Very short skirts were the most utilitarian of garments because they were easy to get about in. Smart military little hats were utilitarian also—and could be worn at any inspiring angle ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bidder; so may we have cheap victories, and divinity. On the other hand, if we have so much suspicion of our science that we dare not trust it on military or spiritual business, would it not be but reasonable to try whether some authoritative handling may not prosper in matters utilitarian? If we were to set our governments to do useful things instead of mischievous, possibly even the apparatus itself might in time come to be less costly. The machine, applied to the building of the house, might ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... turned-up eaves like many of those in Chinatown and that its windows had displayed the choice embroideries and carved ivories of some of its neighbors, but as we peered through the glass, we saw only utilitarian ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... sublimely tragic in Tasso's suffering. The sentiment inspired by it is that at best of pathos. An almost childish self-engrossment restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing prosaic or utilitarian objects—the favor of princes, place at Courts, the recovery of his inheritance—in a romantic and unpractical spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... respective centers), and gradually convert it into walks, drives, arbors, &c., for the recreation and solace of their citizens through all succeeding time. Should a portion be needed for cemetery or other utilitarian purposes, it may be set off when wanted; and ultimately a railroad will afford the poor the means of going thither and returning at a small expense. If something of this sort is ever to be done, it cannot be done too soon; for the forests are annually disappearing and the price of wood ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... times, come to see that truthfulness was useful, "the habit of approving truth-speaking and fidelity to engagements, which was first based on this ground of utility, became so rooted, that the utilitarian ground of it was forgotten, and we find ourselves springing to the belief in truth-speaking and fidelity to engagements from an inherited tendency." Similarly throughout, Mr. Hutton has so used the word "utility," and so interpreted it on my behalf, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... is well worthy of the author whom many regard as the greatest thinker of his time. In 1751 he published his "Inquiry Into the Principles of Morals," which is one of the clearest expositions of the leading principles of what is termed the utilitarian system. Hume died ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This gibe is the plain statement of a ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Christians now, they were sometimes built to serve at need as fortresses; their towers were used for beacons, their naves for meetings on secular affairs. But as a rule, and especially in the great periods of church architecture, their builders were untrammelled by any utilitarian considerations; they built for the glory of God, for their own glory perhaps, in honour of the saints; and their work, where it survives, is (as it were) a petrification of their beliefs and ideals. This is, of course, more true of the middle ages than of the times ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... plainly an apostasy from the Gospel—and this they do not scruple to avow; and their tenets are only a recrudescence or reassertion of the barbarism which we hoped we had grown out of; it is all merely damnable. But it seems to me that, judged only as utilitarian policy, it is stupid; and that they blundered in neglecting the moral force (for that is also a force) of the antagonism that they were bound to arouse in all gentle minds, whether simple or cultured. It was stupid of them not to perceive that ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... battues. These gatherings have, during the past five years, become an annual function in parts of Devonshire and the neighbouring counties, and if the bag is somewhat small in proportion to the guns engaged, a wholesome spirit of sport informs those who take part, and there is a curiously utilitarian atmosphere about the proceedings. Everyone seems conscious that, in place of the usual idle pleasure of the covert-side or among the turnips, he is out for a purpose, not merely killing birds that have been reared to make ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... which education is regarded are:—(a) the utilitarian, (b) the disciplinarian, and (c) a compromise ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... rather than among questions where Burke's writings might have been brought to bear. On the political side the most active minds, both in practice and theory, worked out the principles of liberalism, and they did so on a plan and by methods from which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historic conservatism were equally remote. There are many signs around us that this epoch is for the moment at an end. The historic method, fitting in with certain dominant conceptions in ...
— Burke • John Morley
... 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 by ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... threaded the maze of low-growing brushwood and whispering reeds, and round us extended the half-submerged patches of soil which form the celebrated "floating gardens" of the lake. From any point of view except the utilitarian, these gardens are a fraud. A combination of matted and decaying water-plants, mud, and young cabbages kept in place by rows and thickets of willow scrub, is curious, but not lovely; and our eyes turned away to where Hari Parbat raised ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Education. Here Milton and Comenius are very much at one; here Milton and the modern advocates of the Real or Physical Sciences in Education are very much at one. Given a lofty and varied idea of utility, no man has ever been more strenuously utilitarian than Milton was in this tract. The very novelty of the scheme it proposed consisted in the proclamation of utility as the test of the studies to be pursued and as ruling the order in which they should ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... west of Leather Lane, Baldwin's Buildings and Portpool Lane open out. The former consists largely of workmen's model dwellings, comfortable and convenient within, but with the peculiarly depressing exteriors of the utilitarian style. Further north these give way to warehouses, breweries, and manufactories. East of its southern end in Holborn were two old inns, the Old Bell and Black Bull. The former was a coaching inn of great celebrity in its ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Her standards were birth and fashion, and poor Franklin could not be said to embody either of these claims. His mitigating qualities could hardly shine for Miss Robinson, who, accustomed to continually seeing and frequently evading the drab, dry, utilitarian species of her country-people, could not be expected to find in him the flavour of oddity and significance that his English acquaintance prized. Franklin didn't make any effort to place himself more favourably. He was ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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, ...
— 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
... the utilitarian side,—the fitting of the child for the struggle of life,—from its main purpose,—the development of moral character. The moral aspect alone gives to human life its true character, its real value. As there is no morality without religion, the system ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... obligation, or of actions that have a moral character, expediency denoting immediate advantage on a contracted view, and especially with reference to avoiding danger, difficulty, or loss, while utility may be so broadened as to cover all existence through all time, as in the utilitarian theory of morals. Policy is often used in a kindred sense, more positive than expediency but narrower than utility, as in the proverb, "Honesty is the best policy." ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... another—in what Margaret and I called our lessons. Never were lessons of literature so like lessons of love We read oftenest the lighter Italian poets—we studied the poetry of love, written in the language of love. But, as for the steady, utilitarian purpose I had proposed to myself of practically improving Margaret's intellect, that was a purpose which insensibly and deceitfully abandoned me as completely as if it had never existed. The little serious teaching I tried with her at first, led to very poor results. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... brief examination of the geographic control considered by itself it would be interesting, if space allowed, to append a study of the distribution of the arts and crafts of a more obviously economic and utilitarian type. If the physical environment were all in all, we ought to find the same conditions evoking the same industrial appliances everywhere, without the aid of suggestions from other quarters. Indeed, so little ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... a range of deal tables, three or four young draughtsmen were busily engaged in elaborating his architectural projects. The outer door of the office bore the sign: Peyton and Gill, Architects; but Gill was an utilitarian person, as unobtrusive as his name, who contented himself with a desk in the workroom, and left Dick to lord it alone in the small apartment to which clients were introduced, and where the social part of the business was ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... adventure I choose the Long Walk; it 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 ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... grandson of attorneys, was born in London on February 15, 1748. He was called to the Bar, but did not practise. His fame rests on his work in the fields of jurisprudence, political science, and ethics. He is accounted the founder of the "utilitarian" school of philosophy, of which the theory is that the production of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" is the criterion of morals and the aim of politics. Dying on June 6, 1832, his body, in accordance with his own wishes, was dissected, and his skeleton dressed ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... welfare must prove, if not a menace, at least a burden 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 ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... good people hereabouts live in. The furniture is simple, but solid; it was made to last, and most of it has long outlasted the first owners. In every room, the kitchen excepted, there is a bed, according to the very general custom of the country. The character of the people is distinctly utilitarian, notwithstanding the blood of the troubadours. There is even a bed in the salle a manger. A piece of furniture, however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... what he talked about. He had no English, and our Ojibway was of the strictly utilitarian. But for an hour he would hold forth. We called him Talk-in-the-Face, the Great Indian Chief. Then he would drop a mild hint for saymon, which means tobacco, and depart. By ten o'clock the next morning ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... investigators, whose forceful intellects opened the way to secrets previously hidden from men. Let it be an honor and not a reproach to these men that they were not actuated by the love of gain, and did not keep utilitarian ends in view in the pursuit of their researches. If it seems that in neglecting such ends they were leaving undone the most important part of their work, let us remember that Nature turns a forbidding face to those who pay her court with the hope of gain, and is responsive only ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... ready reply will be,—"Oh, we can't give time here in America to go into niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people. Nowhere is economy a more careful study, and their market is artistically arranged to this end. The rule is so to cut their meats that no portion designed to be cooked in a certain manner shall have wasteful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... them, it is true, but with a discretion which does not seem to dominate. Second-class passengers wear a more practical aspect, and youth among them is rarer and more grave. People who must travel second and third class make voyages for utilitarian reasons. Their object is usually to better themselves in one way or another. When they are going from Liverpool to New York, it is usually to enter upon new efforts and new labours. When they are returning from New York to Liverpool, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... anatomy may include the study of the structure of different animals, when it is called comparative anatomy or animal morphology, or it may be limited to one animal only, in which case it is spoken of as special anatomy. From a utilitarian point of view the study of Man is the most important division of special anatomy, and this human anatomy may be approached from different points of view. From that of the medical man it consists of a knowledge of the exact form, position, size and relationship of the various structures ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... variety of these utilities as he has; but he reiterates that, whereas such utilities are secondary, we insist on treating them as primary, and that the connaissance objective from which they draw all their being is something which we neglect, exclude, and destroy. The utilitarian value and the strictly cognitive value of our ideas may perfectly well harmonize, he says—and in the main he allows that they do harmonize—but they are not logically identical for that. He admits that subjective interests, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... nothing was left. Men had lost all vital sense of God in the world; and because of this, they had taken up a fatally wrong attitude to life. They looked at it wholly from the mechanical point of view, and judged it by merely utilitarian standards. The "body-politic" was no longer inspired by any "soul-politic." Men, individually and in the mass, cared only for material prosperity, sought only outward success, made the pursuit of happiness the end and aim of their being. The ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... keen air. One felt moved to adventure and a longing for something new. Men with brain and muscle were needed in the wide, silent land that would soon waken to busy life; but one must not give way to romantic impulses. Stern experience had taught Festing caution, his views were utilitarian, and he distrusted sentiment. Still, looking back on years of strenuous effort that aimed at practical objects, he felt that there was something he had missed. One must work to live, but perhaps life had more to offer than the money one ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... by catering for the amusements of the world. How did that man regard such gifts as his, he wondered?—Sylvanus Power, of whom he had seen it written that he was one of the conquerors of nature, a hard but splendid utilitarian, the builder of railways in China and bridges for the transit of his metals amid the clouds of the mountain tops. In the man's absence, his harshness, almost uncouthness, seemed modified. He was a rival, without a doubt, and to-night a favoured one. ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 from 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 broad-brimmed hat. Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... with an old book of arithmetic called The Tutor's Assistant." The ground of objection is not very formidable; but the Parent's Assistant is certainly an infelicitous name. From some other of the author's letters we are able to trace the gradual growth of the work. Mr. Edgeworth, her father, an utilitarian of much restless energy, and many projects, was greatly interested in education,—or, as he would have termed it, practical education,—and long before this date, as early, indeed, as May 1780, he had desired his daughter, while she was still a girl at a London ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... common, and that is much—the people, the scenery of Galicia, and the suspicions and absurdities of Spanish Jacks-in-office, who yield not in ignorance or insolence to any kind of red-tapists, hatched in the hot-beds of jobbery and utilitarian mares-nests ... Borrow spares none of them. I see he hits right and left, and floors his man wherever he meets him. I am pleased with his honest sincerity of purpose and his graphic abrupt style. It is like an old Spanish ballad, leaping in res ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles |
