"Unscientific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and grass, kept down by heavy stones from being blown off by the wind; the broken panes in the windows were replaced by pieces of board or stout paper; and rough stakes filled up the spaces where the once neat palings had given way. Each foot of the small garden was cultivated, though clearly by an unscientific hand. Indeed, little Peter was the sole labourer, he devoting to it every moment he could spare from attendance on his sick parent after his return from his daily work, patching up many a rent in the cottage produced by weather ...
— The History of Little Peter, the Ship Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... golden opportunity for the Bourbon members of his own profession to assail his theories and, secretly and openly, certain of them charged that the result in Dr. Earl's case was but the natural one where "standard methods" of practice were set aside for the, as yet, "unscientific paths of suggestive therapeutics," as these reactionary medical men denominated Earl's system, for he had cured through suggestive methods a score of patients who had been condemned to the operating ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... of it, the whole theory seems absurd. It is unscientific. It is not even a case of mesmerism. If he had said that he hypnotised his victims, the matter would assume a totally different aspect. I admit that something is wrong somewhere, and that the home ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... much perturbed. It was not pleasing to have the greatness of his idol explained on unscientific principles. He did not like that idea of the jumps. Jumping sounded unscientific, and what could be worse than to say of a man that he was not scientific? Preposterous to say the greatest things of science were achieved by ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... With the demonstration of the naturalness of the supernatural, scepticism even may come to be regarded as unscientific. And those who have wrestled long for a few bare truths to ennoble life and rest their souls in thinking of the future will not be left in doubt. Natural Law, Introduction, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... 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 them for ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... 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
... except for oil and indigo seeds, which grow most luxuriantly wherever the forest land has been cleared. In the shallow valleys which lie between the ridges rice is chiefly cultivated, and gives large returns. The sal forests have been sadly thinned by unscientific and indiscriminate cutting, and very few fine trees now remain. The earth is teeming with insects, chief amongst which are the dreaded and destructive white ants. The high pointed nests of these destructive insects, formed of hardened mud, are the commonest ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... views which he knew to be misleading, because he thought that he was thereby serving the interest of the Church. What he said concerned fossils, then beginning to puzzle the scientific world of the day. Confronted with these objects and living, as he did, in an unscientific age, when the seven days of creation were interpreted as periods of twenty-four hours each and the universality of the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of the shark's ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... "Hakim": lit. one who orders; often confounded by the unscientific with Hakim, doctor, a philosopher. The latter re-appears in the Heb. Khakham applied in modern days to the Jewish scribe who takes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... early in the nineteenth century Sir Charles Lyell and others tried to disclaim this absurd and unscientific inheritance from Werner's onion-coats; but modern geology has never yet got rid of its essential and its chief characteristic idea, for all our text-books still speak of various successive ages when only certain types of life prevailed all over ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... fluctuating? Why have the discoveries that came forward with so imposing a prestige at the beginning of this century so entirely lost that prestige in the colleges in sixty years, that the writings of Gall and his disciples are generally neglected? Vague, unscientific speculations have taken their place; the colleges and literati are groping in darkness, and, like plants in a cellar which reach out to the dim windows, they look anxiously for the information that may come ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... rocked to sleep, though you are sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the present time sixty-five per cent.) of the pupils at the school came from outside of the village. That is, they come from the farms. As farmers' boys, many of them have been brought up to all of the unscientific crudities which have been handed down in American agriculture since the early settlers took the land from the Indians in grateful recognition of their instructions in fertilization. While many agricultural anachronisms may be laid to the door of the redskins, planting by the moon and ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... to test the candidate is before he is put in nomination, not dump him into Congress as we do now, utterly ignorant of whether his currents run from his heels to his head or from his head to his heels, uncertain, indeed, as to whether he has magnetism to run in at all. Nothing could be more unscientific than ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... unreal and negative character. The so-called "scientific" socialism had, therefore, a peculiarly unscientific spirit; for, in a modern sense, science implies a patient search for truth, not a sudden revelation; a constant testing of opinions by observation and experiment, not a dogmatic conviction that refuses the test of reality. "Scientific" socialists talked much (and still talk much) of the "evolution" ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... assuming "a remote migration of the Caucasic race to South-Eastern Asia, of which evidences are not lacking in Camboja and elsewhere, and a further onward movement, first to the Archipelago and then East to the Pacific." It is needless to say that the aborigines themselves have the haziest and most unscientific notion of their own origin, as the following account, gravely related to me by a ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... fighting hard, blow succeeding blow in the most unscientific way; but the end was not to be then, for Andrew cried in ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... statesmen who advised him, none has met with such scant mercy from posterity as Laud, who has been gibbeted as the impersonification of narrowness, of bigotry, and of cruelty. The judgment is unscientific, for whatever may be thought of the humanity or wisdom of his policy, he only did what all have done who have attempted to impose a ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... Such unscientific and unwarranted teaching has been handed down from mother to daughter through the ages, while the poor, misguided souls of expectant women have suffered untold remorse, heaped blame upon themselves, lived lives literally cursed with ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... one of those mild, mellow days of the late autumn, when unscientific people wag their heads and proclaim that the climate is changing. There was scarcely a breath of wind, and the landscape toward which our steady nag trotted sturdily wore a faint atmosphere of saffron haze, as though the sunlight ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... the ordinary man in dealing with ghosts is supremely unscientific, but it is less objectionable than that of the pseudo-scientist. The Inquisitor who forbade free inquiry into matters of religion because of human depravity, was the natural precursor of the Scientist who forbids ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... and should have skillful handling to get the best results. Yet the farming is very unscientific. The first plowing is shallow and subsequent cultivation is done almost entirely with hoes. When a Hampton graduate began some new methods last year the people came for miles to see his big plow. It is said that there was more plowing than usual as a result. The daily life of the ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... northland. He believed, for instance, in a certain specific psychology of the animal mind, and had proven to his own satisfaction that animals treated and conversed with in a matter-of-fact human way frequently developed an understanding which he, in his unscientific way, called reason. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the composition of such masterpieces as Shakspere's could possibly concern himself at the same time with weaving into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, the cipher systems are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, applied to any writings whatever can be made to 'prove' anything that one likes, and indeed have been discredited in the hands of their own inventors by being made to 'prove' far too much. Third, it has been demonstrated more than once that the verbal coincidences on which the cipher systems ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of lightning 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 ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... people who lend a dignity to everything they touch. Under his auspices the most unpromising ventures became somehow enveloped in an atmosphere of measured stateliness. On the present occasion, what would have been, without his guiding hand, a mere unscientific scramble, took on something of the impressive formality of the ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... appearance, and brought with him the mischievous idea of Government. 'There is such a thing,' says Chuang Tzu, 'as leaving mankind alone: there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.' All modes of government are wrong. They are unscientific, because they seek to alter the natural environment of man; they are immoral because, by interfering with the individual, they produce the most aggressive forms of egotism; they are ignorant, because they try to spread education; they are self-destructive, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of rest is reached, there is a crisis to pass which is ever the subject of anxious solicitude. Unscientific people, in their vivid language, call it the change of life; physicians know it as the menopause—the period of the cessation of the monthly flow. It is the epoch when the ovaries cease producing any more ova, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... replacing a serious symptom with a minor one, while others just remove the symptom. The latter is what a doctor does when he recommends aspirin for arthritis. He knows the aspirin will not cure the arthritis, but he wants to alleviate the symptom. To say that another symptom will replace the pain is unscientific—and untrue. The same is true ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... Either they explode when you don't want them to, or they don't explode when you do want them to, or they're liable to explode spontaneously, or something else. It's all due, as I have invariably contended, to impure nitro-glycerine or unscientific ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged Damon ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... have considered the taxonomy of riddles. Friedreich offers a loose and unscientific classification ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... folding the letter and placing it beyond reach, "I forgive you all your deception and treason. What Father Letheby has got in store for you I cannot say. But I'll never forgive you, you most unscientific and unmathematical artist, for having given me so many shocking misfits lately, until I have looked like a scarecrow in a cornfield; even now you are smelling like a distillery. And tell me, you ruffian, what right had you to say at Mrs. Haley's public house that I was ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... might not be discriminated from the charlatan. A well-conducted psychotherapeutic treatment as a scientific physician ought to carry it out, is entirely different in meaning and appearance, from the first step of diagnosis to the last treatment of after-effects, from every unscientific faith cure. It is also in no way necessary that the psychotherapist ever leave the path of complete sincerity. There is no reason at all for promising that the patient will be entirely cured if the physician ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... ruthless, rude, and bitter to be anything but solitary. His harshness is his fault, his one real fault; and his harshness also marks the point where his attitude towards his environment becomes unscientific. The savagery of his description of the family of Frapp, the little Nonconformist baker, and of the tea-drinkers in the housekeeper's room at Bladesover, somewhat impairs even the astounding force of this, George's ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... universe with tangible answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new philosophy. Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as unscientific. ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... able to settle, no mind, however strong, is entitled to build wholly upon itself. In many things he shocked the religious sense—especially as it exists in unphilosophic minds; he held a sort of rude and unscientific Spinosism; and he expressed it coarsely and in the way most likely to give offence. And indeed there can be no stronger proof of the utter obscurity in which his works have slumbered than that they should ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... arranging all words according to their actual spelling has been to a considerable extent abandoned. It was admittedly an unscientific one, and opened the door to a good many errors and inconsistencies. The head form in this edition may be either a normalised form or one ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... meditations on popular government in the abstract, to the inspection of the governing people in the concrete, he would be the first to see that to dispatch an audience of skilled artisans as an assembly of roughs is as unscientific, to use the mildest word, as the habit in a certain religious world of lumping all the unconverted races of the earth in every clime and age in the summary phrase, the heathen. A great meeting of artisans listening to Mr. Arthur Balfour or ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... peculiarity of the variety, the progeny has. Between the two is the dim or obscure region of the formation of a new individual, in some unknown part of which, and in some wholly unknown way, the difference is intercalated. To introduce necessity here is gratuitous and unscientific; but here you must have it to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... isn't in their cheap materials; it's in their unscientific construction, in the fact that they usually do ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... whose writing is art, and whose art is unworthy his writing. To him and his example do we owe the outrage of proffered assistance from the unscientific—the meddling of the immodest—the intrusion of the garrulous. Art, that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and wait ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... tendency to make its leaders or great men superhuman. Whether we turn to the legends of the East, the folk-lore of Europe, or the traditions of the native races of America, we find a mythology based upon the acts of man gifted with superhuman powers. In the unscientific, primeval periods in which these beliefs were born and elaborated into oral and written form, their origin is not surprising. But to all who have studied the creation of a mythology, no phase is a more curious one than that ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... stationary over the house of Joseph and Mary. Alas! that these vulgar traditions of the ignorant multitude should have served so long to obscure a beautiful mystic occurrence, and which by their utter improbability and unscientific nature should have caused thousands to sneer at the very true legend of the "Star of Bethlehem." It remains for the Mystic traditions to clear away the clouds of ignorance from this beautiful story, and to re-establish it in the minds of men as ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... intelligent mind. But the 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
... that of the unscientific folk, that the springs are fed directly by the sea, or that the earth is full of veins or arteries that connect with the great reservoir of waters. But when science turns the conception over and makes the connection in the air,—disclosing the great water-main ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal. This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning and preserving that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get the seal's skull, and with two of my cousins ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of fertile lands which lent themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting 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 control ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... weakness is to be found, it is, of course, in the etymological part. Even here we can but pay tribute to Mistral. If he can be accused, now and then, of suggesting an etymology that is impossible or unscientific, let it be gratefully conceded that his desire is to offer the etymologist all possible help by placing at his disposal all the material that can be found. The pains Mistral has taken to look up all possibly related words in Greek, Arabic, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... occupying the cases (107, 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 sometimes exceeds six feet in height—and that it would ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... positively must not hurry cattle. It—oh, it 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 way ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... merely late specimens of the "ancient figures" appearing long after the latter had made way for a new and more conventionalized form of writing. This new writing is called in Chinese [Ch] chuan, which is commonly rendered by the word Seal, for the somewhat unscientific reason that many ages afterwards it was generally adopted for use on seals. Under the Chou dynasty, however, as well as the two succeeding it, the meaning of the word was not "seal," but "sinuous curves," as made in writing. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... insight. I shall not pretend that as Milton I can justify God's ways before mankind, nor yet that as Dante I can say everything there in to be said concerning God and the Universe, nor even that as Spinoza, Hegel or Schopenhauer I can build up a complete system. That is unscientific, all true science is assuming and computing. Of the highest Power we know next to nothing: but nevertheless enough for our life. We know that his laws obtain everywhere as far as our perception reaches, and we know ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... science can investigate, except the conduct and utterances of the hysterical, the epileptic, the hypnotised and other subjects who are occasionally said to display an abnormal extension of the perceptive faculties, for example, by way of clairvoyance. To the unscientific intelligence it seems conceivable that if Home, for example, could have been kept in some such establishment as the Salpetriere for a year, and could have been scrutinised and made the subject of experiment, like the other hysterical ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the railroads, and acquiesced in by President Taft with ill-advised and opportunist complacency, established, for the first time in America, paternalistic control over the railroads. It was an unscientific and ill-devised statute, gravely defective in important respects and bearing evidence of having been shaped in heat, hurry and anger. Mr. Taft himself, it seems, has since recognized its faultiness, for he has repeatedly and publicly protested against ...
— Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation • Otto H. Kahn
... musical expression; and they also sin against science by using musical phrases that have no natural relations to the ideas expressed: even where these are emotional. They are bad because they are untrue. And to say they are untrue, is to say they are unscientific. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... much for me as for any one else. Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... the Society of Chemical Industry the unscientific character of British methods was again emphasised. So, too, at the Edinburgh meeting ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... an attempt is made to classify the authorities used in writing this volume under different heads; the plan adopted is unscientific, and books noted under one head belong partly to others, but it has, perhaps, the one merit of clearness. The editions quoted here are those ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Utopian or fantastic in trying to ascertain the tendencies of economic development; nothing unscientific in trying to read out of the pages of social evolution such lessons as may be contained therein. So long as we bear in mind that our forecasts must not take the form of plans for the arbitrary shaping of the future, specifications of the Cooeperative Commonwealth, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... disregard here 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 of a false philosophy from expressing my conviction, that, as long as it cannot be shown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... enumeration of natural 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
... can only glance at some of the considerations which Darwin adduces, or will be sure to adduce in the future and fuller exposition which is promised. To display them in such wise as to indoctrinate the unscientific reader would require a volume. Merely to refer to them in the most general terms would suffice for those familiar with scientific matters, but would scarcely enlighten those who are not. Wherefore let these trust the impartial Pictet, who freely admits, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... no violent exercises, especially at first, and not too frequent nor prolonged Turkish baths. Epsom salts baths have little effect. If salts are used habitually internally, they are harmful. All of these are unscientific and unsuccessful, and the things they bring on are worse ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... 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 ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... protect the personal liberty of the individual and his property. This is the doctrine put forth by the scientific spokesmen of the bourgeoisie. This is the doctrine of its political leaders, of liberalism. But this theory is in a high degree inadequate, unscientific, and at variance with the essential ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... had directed the town authorities to lay out a new cemetery at a strategic point on the slopes lying towards Schafs-Kleider; and though it had little actual effect upon the chemical properties of this new breach in his patent it created a prejudice in unscientific minds, and the Schafs-Kleider variant of the Bad-as-Bad waters failed to "catch on." And thus it came about that on returning from his three years' exile Berlin had not restored him to favor, and he, one of the richest and least ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... such a sense. In fact, 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 guillotine and the gallows, without infringing ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... history of the race as trivial, the natural sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious theory of the Universe and man. She has ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... expressive of the "highest," whatever departed from it was frowned upon as a shortcoming or was at best an interesting aberration.[93] Now any classification that starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific. A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zooelogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... has superseded. In this connection is especially to be considered the habit of personification implied in our English rhymes. Of late, the doctrine which perceives in myth a symbolic expression of the forces of nature has fallen into comparative discredit, a contempt explicable in view of the unscientific manner in which "sun-myths" have been exploited; our English sayings, therefore, are to be received as a welcome demonstration that one must not proceed too far in his attitude of doubt. If the popular mind, to-day, and in a country particularly ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... require the patient study of years even partially to classify and know, these are the great prominent features of the gallery, that involuntarily, on the part of the visitor, force themselves on his attention. They at once pressed themselves on the attention of the intelligent though unscientific mechanics, and, I doubt not, still dwell vividly in their recollections; and I now ask you, when you again visit the national museum, and verify the fact of the great prominence of these classes of objects, to bear in mind, that the gallery in which they occur represents, both in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... 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
... not fight should not work. The men workers drove the women from industry, hoping thereby each to possess a mistress. As a result the great number of unproductive women was a drain upon the state. All sorts of schemes were proposed to reduce the number of female births but most of these were unscientific. In studying the records it was found that the offspring of certain men were predominantly males. By applying this principle of selection we have, with successive generations, been able to reduce the proportion of female births to less ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible. But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given precisely the same conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur. Fontenelle therefore was bound ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... justly be acclaimed as the first populariser of natural history. He was, however, unscientific in his opposition to systems, which, in point of fact, essentially elucidated the important doctrine that a continuous succession of forms runs throughout the animal kingdom. His recognition of this principle was, indeed, one of his greatest ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... reports of the courts have some of the faults of officialism. They often do not appear until long after the decisions which they chronicle have been made and their general make-up is sometimes unworkmanlike and unscientific. It requires rare gifts to make a good reporter of judicial opinions. He must have the art of clear and concise statement; the power to select what is material and drop the rest; and the faculty of close analysis of abstract reasoning.[Footnote: Four of the reporters of the Supreme ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... 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 ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... 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 Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... inhabiting the Himalayas; for there is the 'tahir,' a stronger and larger animal than it; and it is believed that when these great mountains have been thoroughly ransacked [Karl here smiled at the very unscientific word he had made use of], there will turn up one or ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Well, Batholommey, religion has frequently led to the stake, and I never heard of the Spanish Inquisition being called healthy for anybody taking part in it. Still, religion flourishes. But your old-fashioned, unscientific, gilt, ginger-bread Heaven blew up ten years ago—went out. My Heaven's just coming in. It's new. Dr. Funk and a lot of the clergymen are in already. You'd better get used to it, Batholommey, and get in ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... mechanical idea that all the organs of the brain should be distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... interesting work, which, whatever deductions people might choose to draw, in fact committed me to nothing. But to become one of the ragged little regiment of medical dissenters, to swallow all the unscientific follies of the anti-vaccination agitators, to make myself responsible for and to promulgate their distorted figures and wild statements—ah! that was another thing. Must I appear upon platforms ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... the line of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became, by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had arrived at nearly the same point by ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... 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
... the champion, who met him—somewhat after the fashion that Goliath met David—with contempt. But the first grasp of the stranger, as he seized his arms above the elbows, instead of throwing them round his waist (as was, and is the unscientific practice of the Borders), informed Robin that he had no common customer to deal with. Robin, as a wrestler, in a great measure trusted to mere strength and tripping. He knew nothing of turning an antagonist from his centre ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... interesting. The possibility of mixing with them on any terms of intimacy doesn't occur. I am aware, my dear," he wound up graciously, "that you women seldom understand this mental detachment, being by nature unscientific, and all the more charming ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... exception to the term and especially to the idea while the polygenist, unless he be a corporealist, may not. As to the other class of scientists, they would take objection to the idea even of a human monad, and call it "unscientific." What relation does the monad bear to the atom? None whatever to the atom or molecule as in the scientific conception at present. It can neither be compared with the microscopic organism classed once among polygastric infusoria, and now regarded as vegetable and ranked among algae; nor is it ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... years, I believe less in fightin'. 'Tis a turr'ble thing to see th' aged an' infirm swingin' away at each other. 'Tis so unscientific. I hate to think iv a man with one leg in th' grave usin' th' other to thrip th' free foot iv a fellow aged. I'm glad Bailey an' Biv'ridge ar-re young men. What a scandal if Sinitor Cullom an' Sinitor Morgan shud mix it up! Wan iv th' things a ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... and still are indeed fraught with unpleasant, unscientific associations. They remind one of all sorts of childish, superstitious notions, which make up the thread and woof of dream books, read by none but the ignorant ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... to the allegation, that infinite space is full of ether, air, gas, nebulae, or any other kind of matter. It is an assertion incapable of proof; and therefore thoroughly unscientific; as all Infidel theories are. But if it could be proven that every part of space accessible to our telescopes is full of an ether whose undulations transmit light, as we believe it can, that would be only a proof of the finitude of matter. That ether consists of parts whose ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... establishing the present theory, to refute that most unscientific hypothesis, adopted by some eminent philosophers, of mountains and valleys being the effect of currents in the ocean; it is necessary to see what is their proper cause, and to show that by no other cause known could the general effect, which is of such importance in the system of this world, be ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... one corpse to life himself, was heard to say, after having attended her professionally, that her waking bliss and peace, although unfortunately unattributable even to autocatalepsy, much less to somnambulist exaltation, was on the whole, however unscientific, almost ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... or they agree to forgive him. 'But should all kinds of theft incur the same penalty?' You remind me of what I know—that legislation is never perfect. The men for whom laws are now made may be compared to the slave who is being doctored, according to our old image, by the unscientific doctor. For the empirical practitioner, if he chance to meet the educated physician talking to his patient, and entering into the philosophy of his disease, would burst out laughing and say, as doctors delight in doing, 'Foolish fellow, instead of curing ...
— Laws • Plato
... at appreciable intervals has to occur very often before the unscientific mind will perceive the law of its repetition. There was a little red-haired Englishman, John Gilby by name, who travelled frequently that way. It was a good while before the loungers at the station remarked that ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... most perfect outline of materialism in general. "They believed in a supreme force, but denied the existence of a Supreme Being. They rejected inquiry into first causes as unscientific," maintaining that facts alone were to be dealt with in ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... more beautiful world. Looking around him with a childlike wonder, he rose and made his way back to the cabin. He listened at the door, but heard no sound. He entered, found the room empty, and gave himself up to rude and unscientific speculation as to the nature of this mysterious adventure. Nothing helped to solve the problem, until at last he discovered the Bible, which the Quaker had hurled at the snake, lying upon the hearthstone. It did not explain everything, but it served to connect the inexplicable ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... neighbourhood of what one doubts not he would have described as aliens. The healthy Palaeolithic man would have had a contempt for Cobden rivalling that of Mr. Chamberlain himself. He did not take the incursion of the foreigner "lying down." One pictures him in the mind's eye: unscientific, perhaps, but active to a degree difficult to conceive in these degenerate days. Now up a tree hurling cocoa-nuts, the next moment on the ground flinging roots and rocks. Both having tolerably hard heads, the argument would of ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... are given by E. Chatelain in Paleographie des classiques latins, parts 2, 3 and 7. Information regarding various MSS. will be found in Halm, Zur Handschriftenkunde der ciceronischen Schriften (Munich, 1850); Deschamps, Essai bibliographique sur Ciceron (Paris, 1863) (an unscientific work); Lehmann, De Ciceronis ad Atticum epistulis recensendis (Berlin, 1892); Anecdota Oxoniensia, classical series, parts vii., ix., x. (3) Literary.—M. Schanz, Geschichte der roemischen Litteratur, i, 194-274 (Muenchen, 1890). (4) Linguistic.—Merguet, Lexicon ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... unscientific statement is this: that [10] matter and Spirit are one and eternal; or, that the phe- nomenon of Spirit is the antipode of Spirit, namely, mat- ter. Nature declares, throughout the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, that the specific nature ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... of these lines of argument, without going over the evidence in greater detail, it seems reasonable to conclude with Westermarck "that the hypothesis of a primitive state of promiscuity has no foundation in fact and is essentially unscientific." The facts put forth in support of the theory do not justify the conclusion, Westermarck says, that promiscuity has ever been a general practice among a single people and much less that it was the primitive state. Promiscuity is ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Vedic Varuna, while Wackernagel prefers to derive it from [Greek], urine, and this from [Greek]Sk. Varshayami, to rain (ii. 416, 417), and so it goes on for years with a glorious uncertainty. If Mr. Max Muller's equations are scientifically correct, the scholars who accept them not must all be unscientific. Or else, this is ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... the churchman's immoral view of "original sin" is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a destructiveness ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... them in such a way that the reader may be able to interpret their meaning. He has endeavored not to write a history but to summarize what other persons are now publishing as selected topics in this field. In other words, he has added to the unscientific history of the Negro, which has hitherto appeared in the so-called text books on Negro history, facts culled from various sources but so improperly used as not to develop ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... 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 ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... the possession of the present writer it is not his intention to disclose; but inasmuch as they seemed to his unscientific mind to contain some important discoveries which might be useful to the world, he determined to investigate thoroughly the contents of the mysterious desk, and make the public acquainted with its profound treasures. He found some documents ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be — as it has always been — either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Grafenberg, instigated by the cowardly but malicious Rudesheimer, was about to seize him by the neck. Vivian took the dwarf and hurled him at the chandelier, in whose brazen chains the little being got entangled, and there remained. An unexpected cross-buttocker floored the incautious and unscientific Grafenberg; and following up these advantages, Vivian laid open the skull of his prime enemy, the retreating Margrave of Rudesheimer, with the assistance of the horn of Oberon; which flew from his hand to the other end of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... which, so far as can be ascertained, were made by the direct orders of Colonel Durnford, must be attributed the terrible disaster that followed. There are two ways of fighting a savage or undisciplined enemy; the scientific way, such as is taught in staff colleges, and the unscientific way that is to be learned in the sterner school of experience. We English were not the first white men who had to deal with the rush of the Zulu impis. The Boers had encountered them before, at the battle of the Blood River, and armed only with muzzle-loading ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang |
