Frases de Robert Chambers

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Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 26
Contexto: We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling-place or what his history! Man pauses breathless at the contemplation of a subject so much above his finite faculties, and only can wonder and adore!

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 231
Contexto: Now it is possible that wants and the exercise of faculties have entered in some manner into the production of the phenomena which we have been considering; but certainly not in the way suggested by Lamarck, whose whole notion is obviously so inadequate to account for the rise of the organic kingdoms, that we only can place it with pity among the follies of the wise.

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 156-157
Contexto: To a reasonable mind the Divine attributes must appear, not diminished or reduced in any way, by supposing a creation by law, but infinitely exalted. It is the narrowest of all views of the Deity, and characteristic of a humble class of intellects, to suppose him acting constantly in particular ways for particular occasions. It, for one thing, greatly detracts from his foresight, the most undeniable of all the attributes of Omnipotence. It lowers him towards the level of our own humble intellects. Much more worthy of him it surely is, to suppose that all things have been commissioned by him from the first, though neither is he absent from a particle of the current of natural affairs in one sense seeing that the whole system is continually supported by his providence.

Fonte: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 17
Contexto: Abstract perfection should always be the direction aimed at by human efforts, however imperfect they may be; and the success of sanitary legislation will be indicated by the nearness or the distance of its actual practice from this perfect idea.

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 192
Contexto: While the external forms of all these various animals are so different, it is very remarkable that the whole are, after all, variations of a fundamental plan, which can be traced as a basis throughout the whole, the variations being merely modifications of that plan to suit the particular conditions in which each particular animal has been designed to live. Starting from the primeval germ, which, as we have seen, is the representative of a particular order of full-grown animals, we find all others to be merely advances from that type, with the extension of endowments and modification of forms which are required in each particular case; each form, also, retaining a strong affinity to that which precedes it, and tending to impress its own features on that which succeeds.

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 56
Contexto: The appearance... of limestone beds in the early part of the stratified series, may be presumed to be connected with the fact of the commencement of organic life upon our planet, and, indeed, a consequent and a symptom of it.... My hypothesis may indeed be unsound; but, whether or not, it is clear, taking organic remains as upon the whole a faithful chronicle, that the deposition of these limestone beds was coeval with the existence of the earliest, or all but the earliest, living creatures upon earth.

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 278
Contexto: Of late years... it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin, for anything that can be inferred from external peculiarities.

Fonte: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 24
Contexto: The working-classes require leaders and wise heads from their own body—patriarchs, in the old acceptation of the term—to keep them right in moments of excitement. The causes of early death prevent the existence of such a class of men, sobered and wise from experience, in sufficient numbers to discipline the youthful and fiery spirits who, confident in their ignorance, plunge themselves and those depending on their exertions into ruin.

Fonte: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 14
Contexto: Meteoric stones have proved to be a verity, and not an impossibility. About the same time, the fact of so many Gloucestershire peasantry having attested the prevention of small-pox by a virus from the teats of a cow, would have been deemed a sufficient answer to the same pleading, by nine out of every ten of the best educated physicians in England. Jenner's statue in Trafalgar Square tells us how fallacious the objection would have been. It is to be observed regarding such objections, that they are almost invariably gratuitous and unproved. Were they always put to the test of experiment, how many might prove like meteorites and vaccination?

Fonte: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 10
Contexto: The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere... The accounts of the fall of meteoric stones were held to be incompatible with the laws of nature, and specimens which had been seen to fall by hundreds of people were preserved in cabinets of natural history as ordinary minerals, 'which the credulous and superstitious regarded as having fallen from the clouds.' A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, including the celebrated Lavoisier, unanimously rejected an account of three nearly contemporary descents of meteorites which reached them on the strongest evidence. After two thousand years of incredulity, the truth in this matter was forced upon the scientific world about the beginning of the present century. There would have been at any time, of course, an instant cessation of skepticism if any one could have shewn, a priori, from ascertained principles in connection with the atmosphere, how stones were to be expected to fall from the sky. But what is this but to say that facts by themselves, however well attested, are wholly useless in such circumstances to the cultivators of physical science, while any kind of vague hypothesis can be brought forward in opposition to them? What is it but to put conjecture or prejudice above fact, and indeed utterly to repudiate the Baconian method?

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 214

Fonte: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 1
Contexto: The progress of knowledge is very irregular, somewhat resembling the movements of an army, of which some battalions are in vigorous health, while others are sickly or overburdened with baggage. The experimental marches on at a good pace; the observational proceeds but slowly; the speculative is left far in the rear.

Fonte: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 29-30
Contexto: The rise of each generation gives new ties towards the future, which insensibly dissolves those which bind us to the past; and the natural old age of the human race seems to have adjusted itself to that period beyond which the human being would feel isolated and desolate in the midst of the new objects of attachment which the progress of time brings into existence.

Fonte: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 28-29
Contexto: It has been among the visions of some dreaming philosophers that human life is capable of almost indefinite extension. The great Condorcet was one of these. He thought that by the removal of the two causes of evil—poverty and superfluity—by destroying prejudices and superstitions, and by various other operations, which he considered the purification of mankind, but which other people would call their pollution, the approach of death would by degrees be farther and farther indefinitely protracted. It is desirable that the practical views entertained by sanitary reformers should be kept widely distinct from any such theories, the character of which has been well drawn by Malthus when he says—"... Though I may not be able in the present instance to mark the limit at which further improvement will stop I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive."

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 35
Contexto: It is remarkable of the simple substances that they are generally in some compound form. Thus oxygen and nitrogen, though in union they form the aerial envelope of the globe, are never found separate in nature. Carbon is pure only in the diamond. And the metallic bases of the earths, though the chemist can disengage them, may well be supposed unlikely to remain long uncombined, seeing that contact with moisture makes them burn. Combination and re-combination are principles largely pervading nature. There are few rocks, for example, that are not composed of at least two varieties of matter, each of which is again a compound of elementary substances. What is still more wonderful with respect to this principle of combination, all the elementary substances observe certain mathematical proportions in their unions. It is hence supposed that matter is composed of infinitely minute particles or atoms, each of which belonging to any one substance, can only (through the operation of some as yet hidden law) associate with a certain number of the atoms of any other.

Fonte: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 15
Contexto: The sick chamber is the place where the most angelic virtues of the human race have ever been called into action. The meek patience of the sufferer—the endurance and the active benevolence of those who would not barter that sick room, with its gloom and silence, for all the glitter and the grandeur that human ambition displays beyond its walls—are among the finest objects that the philosophic eye can look on. So in every well-regulated household, each deathbed, if it carry with it the memory of broken ties and deserted seats at the social board, calls up also the recollection of duties fulfilled, of charities administered, of overflowing affection, ashamed to speak its strength, showing itself in strong deeds of unwearied assiduity.

Fonte: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 18

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 203

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 210

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 389

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 388

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 211

see Natural theology & Natural law
Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 390

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 278

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 306

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 51-52

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 389-390

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 197

Fonte: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 388-389