"Law of nature" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... justified God. He has confessed that God is not a mere force or law of nature; nor a mere tyrant and tormentor: but a reasonable being, who will hear reason, and a just being, who will do justice by the ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... indication of the truth. Let us not be deceived: the opinion of all nations may serve to authenticate the perception of a fact, the vague sentiment of a law; it can teach us nothing about either fact or law. The consent of mankind is an indication of Nature; not, as Cicero says, a law of Nature. Under the indication is hidden the truth, which faith can believe, but only thought can know. Such has been the constant progress of the human mind in regard to physical phenomena and the creations of genius: how can it be otherwise ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... at a glance that this is the central and vital question in the Theistic argument. If the order and arrangement of the universe is eternal, then that order is an inherent law of nature, and, as eternal, does not imply a cause ab extra: if it is not eternal, then the ultimate cause of that order must be a power above and beyond nature. In the former case the minor premise of the Theistic syllogism is utterly ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he continues, "certainly resemble their parents; it is a universal law of nature that all offspring should differ but little from its immediate progenitors, but this does not justify the ordinary belief that species never vary. Indeed, naturalists themselves are in continual difficulty as regards distinguishing species ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... also; and they, too, were exemplifying a law of nature, that is to say, a law of male nature in every clime and every age. They did not love Washing Day. They felt no joy in the possibility of its observance, they felt no need of its processes. And yet again more humano, they did not ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigour and fertility to the offspring; and on the other hand, that CLOSE interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility; that these facts alone incline me to believe that it is a general law of nature that no organic being fertilises itself for a perpetuity of generations; but that a cross with another individual is occasionally—perhaps at long intervals ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... that you must, though. You'll see it in a little while. Self-preservation, dear Radie, is the first law of nature.' ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... hitherto unbroken which are now broken for the first time. What science does, in fact, is to select the simplest formula that will fit the facts. But this, quite obviously, is merely a methodological precept, not a law of Nature. If the simplest formula ceases, after a time, to be applicable, the simplest formula that remains applicable is selected, and science has no sense that an axiom has been falsified. We are thus left with the brute fact that, in many departments of science, quite ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... impossible for them not to come, in their proper environing conditions, as it is for the earth, in its present cosmical relations, not to respond to its axial rotation. "Let the earth bring forth" is just as much an outspoken law of nature, and one as inexorably obeyed, as that unerring force of gravity which led Leverrier, in the faith of his inductions, to indicate the precise point in the heavens where the far-off planet, now bearing his name, might be seen by the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... It is a law of nature that however much one may grieve over the death of a dear one, at the end of a year consolation finds its way to the heart of the mourner. But the disappearance of a living man can never be wiped out of one's memory. Therefore ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless, intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid expression, upon telling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criticism. They never flattered, seldom praised; free from vanity, they were not intolerant of it; but they were objectiveness itself; their attitude was a law of nature; their judgment beyond appeal, not an act either of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... this stage, further investigation will show him that the great truth of his liberty rests upon a firmer foundation than the conventional interpretation of traditional dogmas, and that it has its roots in the great law of Nature, which are never doubtful, and which can never be overturned. And it is precisely because their whole action has its root in the unchangeable laws of Mind that there exists a perpetual necessity for presenting to men something which they can lay hold of as a sufficient ground for ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... the Commonwealth of Virginia men like Jefferson, Henry, Mason, and even the more conservative Bland and Pendleton had produced a truly radical doctrine of popular sovereignty, an appeal to a higher law—the law of nature and Nature's God, the replacement of virtual representation with direct representation, and the substitution of a balance of interests within the Virginia society for the old English theory of a balanced government comprising ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... moon of a weird foe. By a strange law of nature, not wholly without parallel among mankind, all partridges go crazy in the November moon of their first year. They become possessed of a mad hankering to get away somewhere,' it does not matter much where. And the wisest of them do all sorts of foolish things at this period. They go drifting, ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... If the law of Nature is "struggle," it is better to look the matter in the face and adapt yourself to the conditions of your existence. Nature will not bow to you, neither will you mend matters by patting her on the back and telling her that she is not so black as she ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... neighbour: But, as the copy doth not equal the original, so my neighbour cannot think it hard, if I prefer myself, who am the original, before him, who is only the copy. Thus, if any matter equally concern the life, the reputation, the profit of my neighbour, and my own; the law of nature, which is the law of God, obligeth me to take care of myself first, and afterwards of him. And this I need not be at much pains in persuading you to; for the want of self-love, with regard to things of this world, is not among ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... similar pairs of different classes in the community. As time goes on, and the State advances with it, these forces will gain in strength; the cohesion of classes will become greater; association will grow as naturally as the bubbles form on the surface of our evening beverage. It is a law of nature, and therefore cannot be resisted. But the repulsive forces will be no less strong, and to calculate the resultant of these contending interests will be the problem for ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... true, therefore, that slavery, never a right, but always a wrong, under the Constitution, as under the law of nature and revelation, is now to be no longer recognized even as a fact. To abolish it by this amendment is to abolish it entirely throughout the Union, irrespective of apparent State rights. The repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law remits the question of restoring 'persons ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... be constructive, on the supposed harmony of the natural order. Government claimed supernatural sanction and divine ordinance. Liberal theory replied in effect that the rights of man rested on the law of Nature, and those of government on human institution. The oldest "institution" in this view was the individual, and the primordial society the natural grouping of human beings under the influence of family affection, and ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... the bottom a pretty level-headed creature, had become wonderfully patient in the past month. Patient with a determination fixed as a star, as a law of Nature; a determination which was stronger far than herself; which was outside herself; which she could feel, almost, a huge pressure behind her, as of great reservoirs filled through trickling aeons; and which astonished her. She had written of ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... must act as stimuli, and whatever rouses the heart and nerves must be proportioned to the degree of power existing in the patient, or it can not be safe; it is spurring the jaded horse that kills him. Moderation is the course prescribed in the law of nature and of God, and it needs no exquisite discernment to distinguish right from wrong in a general way, or to see when the system needs rest, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... truth. And the truth she found was that she had never allowed Blair to meet the negations of life—to meet those No's, which teach the eternal affirmations of character. He had had everything; he had done nothing. The result was as inevitable as the action of a law of nature! In the illuminating misery of this terrible night, she saw that she had given her son, as Robert Ferguson had said to her once, "fullness of bread and abundance of idleness." And now she was learning what bread and idleness together must ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... by Providence, we should be satisfied with intercourse with women, and our lives would be undefiled by shameful practices. Consider the animals, which cannot corrupt by innate viciousness, how they observe the law of Nature in all its purity. He-lions do not lust after he-lions, but, in due season, passion excites them towards the females of their species: the bull that rules the herd mounts cows, and the ram fills the whole flock of ewes with ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature. If he had been, perhaps he would have been prepared for this. Not being prepared, however, it alarmed him the more; so away he went like the wind, with the old gentleman and the two boys roaring ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... resolved to trust ourselves to a raft, rather than to these burning planks; and that, if we wait till daylight, so many will be attempting to get on it, that we shall be all lost together. I don't ask you to desert your shipmates, Peter; but self-preservation, you know, is the first law of nature." ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... Waterford was not proof against the law of nature. It followed the rule deduced by practical men from the phenomena of every-day experience, and the formula laid down by those learned in physics. When I twitched the rope, I suddenly and violently overcame the inertia of the tender. Though without any malice on ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... would say, they are pleased to call their minds, they appear to have arrived at the conviction that Paris never will be taken, because they are unable to realise the possibility of an event which they seem to consider is contrary to that law of nature, which, has made her the capital and the mistress of the world. A victorious army is at their gates; they do not dare even to make a formidable sortie; there is no regular army in the field outside; their provisions have a limit; ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... educate the maid well, if I live upon bread to do it.' Of her possible marriage I could not bear to think, for it seemed like a death that she should cleave to another man, and grow to think his house her home rather than mine. But I saw it was the law of nature that this should be, and that it was for the maid's happiness that she should have a home when I was gone; and I made up my mind without a murmur to help it on for her sake. In my youth I had wronged my dead friend, and to make ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... no law of nature I know of that requires the channel to reach through to deep water. But there is one circumstance which leads me to fear it is 'no thoroughfare' to the ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... mean; he bit, he stole. Does he ever bite now? No. Does he ever steal? No. Why? I have awakened in that cat the dormant conscience, and that done, the conscience regulates his actions; once made aware of the difference between wrong and right, the cat maintains it unswervingly, as if it were a law of nature. But if, with prodigious labour, one does awaken conscience in a human sinner, it has no steady effect on his conduct,—he continues to sin all the same. Mankind at Paris, Monsieur le Marquis, is divided between two classes,-one bites ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the government at Constantinople, and Germany and Austria were very angry at Italy, their ally, for attacking Turkey, with which the Austrians and Germans were trying to establish a firm friendship. However, "self-preservation is the first law of nature," and the Italian king and nobles valued their leadership in the nation much more than they dreaded the dislike ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... on board her namesake of the Vineyard. They made their comparisons, and formed their conclusions, with the same deference to self-esteem, and the same submission to hope, as had been apparent among their competitors. It would seem to be a law of nature that men should thus flatter themselves, and perceive the mote in the eye of their neighbour, while the beam in their ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'Lex talionis' — the law of retaliation — is the law of nature and of right; to abstain from avenging the death of a relative would be considered, by the tribe of the deceased, an act of unpardonable neglect. Their own customs, which are to them as laws, point out the mode of vengeance. The ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and has been implanted in the heart of man by his Creator for the wisest purpose; and no political union, however fraught with blessings and benefits in all other respects, can long continue if the necessary consequence ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... cause and effect is the fundamental law of nature. There is no recorded instance of an effect appearing without a previous cause, or of a cause acting without producing its full effect. Every change in nature is the effect of some previous change ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... of puppies, which is never the case,—for in all time we find repeated in the offspring the structure, the instincts and all the general characteristics of the parents, and never those of another species. Such is the law of nature and hence the axiom that "like produces like." But while experience teaches the constancy of hereditary transmission, it teaches just as plainly that the constancy is not absolute and perfect, and this introduces us to another law, viz: that of variation, ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... to my moral, one cannot find under heaven any animal, any being, any creature who has not his opponent. This appears to be a law of nature. It would be time wasted to seek for a reason. God does well whatever he does. Beyond that I know nothing; but I do know that people come to high words over nothing three times out of four. Ah, ye human folk! even at the age of sixty you ought to be ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... a kaleidoscopic character about the events of the ten days or so preceding the opening performance of most musical comedies which would make a sober chronicle of them seem fantastically incredible; and this law of Nature made no exception in the case of The Girl Up-stairs. There were rehearsals which ran so smoothly and swiftly that they'd have done for performances; there were others so abominably bad that the bare idea of presenting the mess resulting from six weeks' toil, before people who had paid money ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the spectrum of the sun. Another step: if when metals are volatilized in the arc, rays of light from the sun are passed through the vapor and allowed to enter the spectroscope, a great change is wrought; a reversal takes place, and the original black bands reappear. A new law of nature was discovered, thus: "Vapors of all elements absorb the same rays of light which they emit when incandescent." Every element makes a different spectrum with lines in different places and of different ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... Jove, you're right! An inspiration, my dear! People like to be thought what they are not. They want to be praised for virtues foreign to themselves. The ass wants to masquerade as the lion. 'Tis the law of nature. Now Monsieur Tortier is a Jew; a scrimp; a usurer! Very well, we will celebrate the virtues he hath not in verse and publish the stanza in the Straws' column. After all, we are only following the example of the historians, and they're an eminently respectable lot of people. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... spoken of late—but every true woman kens well that her right sphere is a home of her own, and that her mission is to find her happiness in the happiness of her husband and children. There are exceptional cases, no doubt, but that is the law of nature. Though why I should be saying all this to you, Miss Graeme, my dear, is mair ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... I should give of this progress of the scientific mind is somewhat different. After a general law of nature has been ascertained, men's minds do not at first acquire a complete facility of familiarly representing to themselves the phenomena of nature in the character which that law assigns to them. The habit which constitutes the scientific cast of mind, that of conceiving ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Despite the fact that the Constitution uses the term "discovery" rather than "invention," a patent may not issue for the discovery of a hitherto unknown phenomenon of nature; "if there is to be invention from such a discovery, it must come from the application of the law of nature to a new and useful end."[1165] Conversely, the mental processes which are thus applied must display "more ingenuity * * * than the work of a mechanic skilled in the art";[1166] and while combination patents have been at times sustained,[1167] the accumulation of old devices is patentable ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... your ambition to become a great actor? Then remember that if you make it the object of your life to play to influence the hearts, the lives, and so the destinies of men, this same great law of nature that operates in the case of the orator will come to your assistance, will aid you in your growth and development, and will enable you to attain to heights you could never attain to or even dream of, in case you play for the little ego ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... departments of minor consequence, but all are carried on so noiselessly, and quietly that the evidence of a government seems to vanish altogether, and social order to be as regular and unobtrusive as if it were a law of nature. Machinery is employed to an inconceivable extent in all the operations of labour within and without doors, and it is the unceasing object of the department charged with its administration to extend its efficiency. There is no class of labourers ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... just like that before; reared in the family tradition, it had seemed a law of nature that he should have subjects to work for him and suffer for him and die for him, if need be; he had been taught that it was God himself who had given place and power to his house; and that, if other less-favoured ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... not value virtue highly enough to [256] believe that to have none is punishment enough in itself, is shocked that a wicked man should become rich and enjoy vigorous health? Can one form any falser notions of a universal providence? Everyone agrees that this law of nature, the strong prevails over the weak, has been very wisely laid down, and that it would be absurd to maintain that when a stone falls on a fragile vase which is the delight of its owner, God should depart from this law in order ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... say income not dependent on personal merit or exertion of any kind, is the breath of life to the kept classes; and as a corollary of the "First Law of Nature," therefore, the invested wealth which gives a legally equitable claim to such income has in their eyes all the sanctity that can be given by Natural Right. Investment—often spoken of euphemistically ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey the law of nature—and nature so abhors variety that, whenever a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and, that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type. When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous effort to suppress him or her fails, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... nature, by geographical position, by commercial occupations, and the free spirit of the natives, these islands were marked out to be members of the northern confederacy of progressive and emancipated Europe. The foreign policy of Elisabeth had been steady adhesion to this law of nature. The two first Stuarts, coquetting with semi-Catholicism at home, had leaned with all the weight of the crown and of government towards catholic connexions. The country had always offered a vain resistance; the Parliament of 1621 had ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... bank, contrived their hues to accord and rejoice with the laughing water, and the birds swelled out its song. In the rapture of spring and of morning there was no echo of grief; for the unswerving law of nature, moving through the years, had set each thing in its right home. It is only the perplexed soul that is forced to choose its own way and suffer from the choice, and the song of our life is but set to the accompaniment of a sad creed if we ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... of union among the nations of Europe appears impossible if it is meant to include Russia. Russia represents eastern mentality, which implies an unadmissible spirit of aggression and of conquest. It seems to be a law of nature on the old Continent that eastern nations should wish to expand to the west as long as they are powerful. Not to mention the great migration of nations which gave birth to mediaeval organizations, you may follow this law in the history of the Tartars, of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... these animals have an origin, the descriptions given of them bear the most unequivocal marks; as in almost all of them we see merely the different parts of known animals united by an unbridled imagination, and in contradiction to every established law of nature."(2) ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the dead which fondly we imagine to be unchangeable. For the rest passion, however exalted, passes or at least becomes dull with years; the most cherished children grow up, and in so doing, by the law of Nature, grow away; friends are estranged and lost ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... on vegetation the plagues that infest garden plants usually acquire increased power in proportion to the degree of debility to which vegetation is reduced. This circumstance perfectly accords with the general law of Nature, and is full of instruction as to the means of saving plants from serious injury by vermin. The keen, dry east wind that so often jeopardises fruit crops is usually followed by visitations of fly and maggot, and in ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... Answer—'The American Indians.' Question—'Why are they the first city we come to in the spirit-land, on the plane, and most accessible?' Answer—'Because the Indians lived more in accordance with the law of nature in their earth life, according to their knowledge, and were the most abused class by the whites except the slaves, and many of them now are in advance of the whites in 'spirituality,' and are the most powerful ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... "that the moral law of nature justified self-murder." Lord Bolingbroke claimed that it enjoined polygamy; and neither Blount nor Bolingbroke prohibited fornication, or adultery, or incest, except between parents ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... are the duties towards others which justice imposes upon us? in other words, What must I render? The Law of Nature asks: What need I not submit to from others? that is, What must I suffer? The question is put, not that I may do no injustice, but that I may not do more than every man must do if he is to safeguard his existence, and than every man will approve being ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... annexation would be indispensable. "There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation," he said; and "Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom." If Cuba is incapable of self-support, and could not therefore be left, in the cheerful language of Congress, to her own people, how much less could ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... answered Logotheti vaguely, 'and their husbands disappear, by some law of nature we do not understand—absorbed into the elements, evaporated, drawn up into the clouds like moisture. One might write an interesting essay on the husbands of prima donnas and great actresses. What becomes of them? We know whence they come, for they are often impecunious gentlemen, ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... world has its own special sins, and special simplicities; and among our own most particular humors in both kinds must be reckoned the tendency to parade our discoveries of the laws of Nature, as if nobody had ever heard of a law of Nature before. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... "You were not treating me with due respect and 'self-preservation is the first law of nature,' you know. I am so little accustomed to being—snubbed, that I don't take ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... the nine or more States ratifying the Constitution, and the remaining few who do not become parties to it? The first question is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed. PERHAPS, also, an answer ...
— The Federalist Papers
... of scientific inquiry. When certain series of phenomena have been classified together as obviously occurring under the domination of the same or similar causes, we speak of having determined a law of nature. For example, the fact that any body in motion tends to go on at the same rate of speed in a direct line forever, expresses such a law. The fact that the gravitation pull is directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance of the bodies it involves, expresses another such law. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... censura; and the privileges and charters granted by popes, emperors and kings are nothing more than the acts of recognition of this prerogative of science that comes to it ex jure divino, or, as an alternative expression has it, ex jure naturali, by the law of nature. And in this, Petrus Alliacensis is substantially borne out by all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... eloquent, he had violated the unwritten laws of our country as great and small know them to be. Chiefest he broke them in being happy. That was outrageous. But he was now, it seemed, confronted with a Law of Nature when he found that, having broken with a way of life, you cannot resume it, not because it isn't there (for there it is), but rather because you are not there yourself. You are elsewhere, and the ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... over her shoulder, and laughed; she was writing his name. He pointed to the copper-plate copy on the top line, presenting an undeniable moral maxim, in characters beyond the reach of criticism:—Change Is A Law Of Nature. "There, my dear, you are to copy that till you're tired of it," said the easy master; "and then we'll try overleaf, another copy beginning ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... whole bearing toward her, and speaking as one who felt that he was master of the situation, "it has come to this: I shall have to break up and leave the city, or there will be a new trial in which you and I will be the accused. Now, self-preservation is the first law of nature. I don't mean to go to the State's prison if I can help it. What I am now debating are the chances in my favor if Granger gets a pardon, and then makes an effort to drive us to the wall, which he most surely will. I ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... the Sun's fault. If anything is to be blamed for it, it is our Projectile which, instead of rigidly following its allotted course, has awkwardly contrived to deviate from it. However, strict justice must acquit even the Projectile. It only obeyed a great law of nature in shifting its course as soon as it came within the sphere of that ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... from step to step. The A, B, C of morals must be first learned. The whole analogy of providence shows this to be God's method of procedure. The kingdom of God is like the growing seed; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Gradual, and even slow, progress is the law of nature. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... nearly all our misery and crime result from this one misapprehension. The law of nature is, that a certain quantity of work is necessary to produce a certain quantity of good, of any kind whatever. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it: if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it. But men do not acknowledge ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... peoples had proven belligerent in the extreme. In common with the rest of the fauna of Caprona the first law of nature as they seemed to understand it was to kill—kill—kill. And so it was that Bradley had no desire to follow up the little stream toward the pool near which were sure to be the caves of some savage tribe, but fortune played him an ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which those who rely on it are as yet able to assimilate, and it acts accurately in accordance with their belief that in a large number of cases medicine will do good, but also in many instances it fails. Therefore, for those who have not yet reached a more interior perception of the law of Nature, the healing agency of medicine is a most valuable aid to the alleviation of physical maladies. The error to be combated is not the belief that, in its own way, medicine is capable of doing good, but the belief that there is no higher or ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... self-realisation as the true end of man. This idea they expressed in the formula, 'Life according to nature.' The wise man is he who seeks to live in all the circumstances of life in agreement with his rational nature. The law of nature is to avoid what is hurtful and strive for what is appropriate. Pleasure, though not the immediate object of man, arises as an accompaniment of a well-ordered life. Pleasure and pain are, however, really accidents, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... chapter of Adamnan's work, the miracle is again alluded to as follows:—"He took a white stone (lapidem candidum) from the river's bed, and blessed it for the cure of certain diseases; and that stone, contrary to the law of nature, floats like an apple when placed ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... subject. Knowledge depends upon the free intercourse of mind with mind, and man advances with the increase and better direction of his knowledge. But when we consider the implications of any generalization which we can call 'a law of nature' the social co-operation involved becomes still more apparent. Geometry and astronomy—the measurement of the earth and the measurement of the heavens—dispute the honour of the first place in the historical order. Both, of course, involved the still more ...
— Progress and History • Various
... disengaged mind. America is here and now—here, or nowhere: as Wilhelm Meister finds out one day, just not too late, after so long looking vaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the development of his capacities. It was as if, recognising in perpetual motion the law of nature, Marius identified his own way of life cordially with it, "throwing himself into the stream," so to speak. He too must maintain a harmony with that soul of motion in things, by ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... and its inhabitants are warned to submit without delay to their King; to set that Prince at entire liberty, and to show to him and to all the Royal Family the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties will hold all the members of the National Assembly, of the Municipality, and of the National Guard of Paris responsible for all events with their heads, before military tribunals, without ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... frippery shops will become the haunts of men alone, and "browches, pearls and owches be consecrate to the nobler sex?" There are signs already, in the dress of our young gentlemen, of such a return to the law of nature from the present absurd state of things, in which the human peahens carry about the gaudy trains which ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... never be able to get used to your part? Must you always be jealous? You know all wives leave their mothers to follow their husbands. It is the law of nature. You, in your day, remember, followed your husband, and your ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... choice, abandoning their ancient ways for the novel paths of civilization. With this association of the higher forms of the earth under the leadership of man, there began an entirely new and unprecedented condition of the world's affairs. In place of the ancient law of nature there came the control of our species which had been, in a way, chosen to be the ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... technical level, there is just one law of nature which seems infallibly true, since its latest modification to allow for nuclear energy. It is the law of the conservation of mass and energy. The total of energy and matter taken together in the universe as a whole, cannot change. Matter can be converted to energy and doubtless ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... the first impulses of my soul were for you. Until now, you alone had penetrated it and sounded, and knew its melancholy, weakness, and tenderness. If I separate from you, it is only in obedience to a law of nature which impels us all to found a family. I have nobody in the world but my mother, who may soon leave me alone. You ought not to mind my wishing to make a home, and have an heir to my name and estates. Besides, my ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... birth a simple country gentleman, owed his white staff, his garter, and his dukedom. The encroachment of the power of the Parliament on the power of the Crown resembled a fatality, or the operation of some great law of nature. The will of the individual on the throne, or of the individuals in the two Houses, seemed to go for nothing. The King might be eager to encroach; yet something constantly drove him back. The Parliament might be loyal, even servile; yet something constantly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was meant by "an Angel standing in the sun!" [Footnote: Revelation, chap, xix., 17.] Moreover, he also knew that what Humanity calls "miracles" ARE possible, and DO happen,— and that instead of being violations of the Law of Nature as we understand it, they are but confirmations of that Law in its DEEPER DEPTHS,—depths which, controlled by Spiritual Force alone, have not as yet been sounded by the most searching scientists. And what is Material Force but the visible manifestation of the Spiritual behind it? ... He who ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... expression, she continued: "You dear virtuous people are a little narrow in your ideas; you can't understand that there's room for the greatest difference of opinion even in a harmonious family, and that it's very silly to drive the nonconformer into rebellion. Variety's a law of nature and tends to life." ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... away from their master shall be punished, though the masters they run away from may have been wicked masters to them. And shall we endeavor to run away from God, who is the best of all masters, and not guilty of impeity? Do not you know that those who depart out of this life according to the law of nature, and pay that debt which was received from God, when he that lent it us is pleased to require it back again, enjoy eternal fame; that their houses and their posterity are sure, that their souls are pure and obedient, and obtain a most holy ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... put it somewhat differently: Baius and Jansenius hold that fallen man can perform no morally good works because of physical or moral impotence on the part of the will. This assumption is false. Man is physically able to perform good works because they are enjoined by the moral law of nature under pain of sin; he is morally able because, in spite of numerous evil tendencies, not a few gentiles and unbelievers have led upright lives and thereby proved that man can perform good works without the aid of grace.(168) This is also the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... faith; and this, perhaps, sustained him when, twelve years later, as Jefferson's secretary of state, he learned from his chief that, as "Federalists seldom died and never resigned," party necessities must find a way of supplementing the law of nature. Jefferson was a little timid in applying the remedy, but Madison lived long enough to see Jackson boldly remove, in the course of his administration, about two thousand office-holders, whose places he wanted as rewards ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... unphilosophically. No doubt suicide, under many circumstances, is a crime, a very heinous one. When the father of a family, for example, to escape from certain difficulties, commits suicide, he commits a crime; there are those around him who look to him for support, by the law of nature, and he has no right to withdraw himself from those who have a claim upon his exertions; he is a person who decamps with other people's goods as well as his own. Indeed, there can be no crime which is not founded upon ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... innocent prisoner, an officer unjustly broken; unjustly, because I had never been brought to trial; that consequently I was released from all my engagements; nor could it be thought extraordinary that I should avail myself of that law of nature which gives every man a right to defend his honour defamed, and seek by every possible means to regain his liberty: that such had been my sole purpose in every enterprise I had formed, and such should still continue to be, for I was determined to persist, till ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... so terrible to man! And a fair troop of ladies gather'd there, Still of this earth, with grace and honour crown'd, To mark if ever Death remorseful were. This gentle company thus throng'd around, In her contemplating the awful end All once must make, by law of nature bound; Each was a neighbour, each a sorrowing friend. Then Death stretch'd forth his hand, in that dread hour, From her bright head a golden hair to rend, Thus culling of this earth the fairest flower; Nor hate impell'd the deed, but pride, to dare Assert o'er highest excellence ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... of the Stoic philosophy, we find for the chief end of life this definition, 'A life consistent with itself,' or, as it was otherwise expressed, 'A life consistent with Nature.' The two definitions are really identical; for the law of nature is the law of our nature, and the reason in our being the reason which also is in God, the supreme Ruler of the universe. This is substantially in accordance with the celebrated law of right action laid down by Kant, "Act so that the maxim ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... of nature" is the right of self-preservation. "Liberty" is the absence of impediments to the exercise of power. A "law of nature" is a precept of reason forbidding a man to do what is destructive of his own life. In the state of nature every man has a "right" to everything. Thus security comes only of the first fundamental law: "To seek peace and follow it," and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... allow that there is a certain divine nature and energy. Nor does this proceed from the conversation of men, or the agreement of philosophers; it is not an opinion established by institutions or by laws; but, no doubt, in every case the consent of all nations is to be looked on as a law of nature. Who is there, then, that does not lament the loss of his friends, principally from imagining them deprived of the conveniences of life? Take away this opinion, and you remove with it all grief; for no one ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... is partly this: You employ your mind and your body and they need more nourishment. Then—well, I think it is the restraining law of nature, else we should all be giants. In very hot countries and very cold countries they do not ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... go together to a savage wilderness, or a desert island, beyond the reach of the laws of any society. The obligation of the contract still subsists, and is as perfect as ever, and is now to be enforced by another law, that is, the law of nature; and the party to whom the promise was made has a right to take by force the animal, the utensil, or the weapon that was promised him. The right is as perfect here as it was in Pennsylvania, or even in New York; but this could not be so if the obligation were created by the law of New ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... this world. Thou shalt not, O lady, by any means, be guilty of any sin by complying with my request. And how can I, who am desirous of the welfare of all creatures, commit an unrighteous act? That all men and women should be bound by no restraints, is the law of nature. The opposite condition is the perversion of the natural state. Thou shalt remain a virgin after having gratified me. And thy son shall also be mighty-armed and illustrious.' Thereupon Kunti said, 'If, O dispeller of darkness, I obtain a son from thee, may he be furnished with a coat of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... no more than the most ignorant and foolish of peasants. He talks, indeed, of the laws of Nature, but the expression, convenient as it is in some respects, and true as it is in a sense—and that the highest—is extremely likely to mislead, as he uses it ordinarily. What he calls a law of Nature is only an induction from observed phenomena, a formula which serves compendiously to express them. As Dr. Mozley has well observed in his Bampton Lectures, "we only know of law in Nature, in the sense of recurrences in Nature, classes of ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... been enforced by the first and second Lateran Councils, the marriage of the secular clergy was frequently connived at by their superiors, who even tolerated a system of concubinage which they were unable to prevent—propter duritiem cordis—by which a law of nature was provided for, in defiance of the law ecclesiastical. The question was finally settled by the Council of Trent in 1563, since when the celibate rule has generally been strictly observed in the Roman Church. The absence of such a rule in the Church of England is, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... have put a single obstacle in her way; but she was going from him, and the very, very dear relations they had so long sustained would never be exactly the same again. It was the destiny of a woman to cleave to her husband. He found no fault with the law of nature, but he had clung to Daisy so devotedly that he could not welcome very sincerely the hour that was to take ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... a law of Nature—hinted at in the quotations made from Herbert Spencer and Laing—that she supplies in quantity what she loses in quality. The animals of highest grade and strength—lions, elephants, camels, etc., our domestic animals such as mares, asses, cows,—bring few young ones into the world; while animals ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... loves you and you love him, you have a right to him. Among all the shams and fictions that we call laws, there is only one true— the law of Nature, by virtue of which ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... like a law of nature in my blood, America, I feel thy sovereignty, And woven through my soul thy vital sign. My life is but a wave and thou the flood; I am a leaf and thou the mother-tree; Nor should I be at ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... our reach. You see that huge engine? We made it. It is a fine piece of mechanism. We know what it was made to do. We turn on the motive power, and it moves at the rate of a mile a minute if we desire it. Why should it move? Why might it not stand still? You say because of a law of nature that under the circumstances compels it to move. Our brain is like that engine—a wonderful piece of mechanism, and when the blood drives it, it displays the effects of force which we call Thought. We can see the engine move and we know ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... a sense that is so," said Father Payne; "it is only a word to express a phenomenon. But I believe that morality is a real thing, for all that; and that our conceptions of it get clearer, as the world goes on. It is something outside of us—a law of nature if you like—which we are learning; not merely a thing which we invent for our convenience. But that is too big a ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the good people of Manchester, and of other northern towns, have done it, and have saved many a human life thereby already. But it must be done, some day, all over England and Wales, and great part of Scotland. For the mountain tops and moors, my boy, by a beautiful law of nature, compensate for their own poverty by yielding a wealth which the rich lowlands cannot yield. You do not understand? Then see. Yon moor above can grow neither corn nor grass. But one thing it can grow, and does grow, without which we should have no corn nor grass, and that is—water. Not only does ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... leave it to her whether she should continue to hope for the fulfillment of her longing, or like him, however young in years, passively give up all hope. She told him what wrong he was directly committing against himself and her, by renouncing what after all, as he well knew, the law of nature would not force her to forego for a long time to come. She left him no room for doubt, that she was going by all means within her power to avoid being cheated out of happiness by his attitude. A large, extensive organization was no compensation for the absence of a single ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the unhappy revolutionist as he had been shot and then bayonetted to death. That query was most easily answered. His crime was that he was not strong enough or big enough to compete against more sanguinary men, his disappearance being consequently in obedience to an universal law of nature. Yuan Shih-kai was determined to assert his mastery by any and every means; and as this man had ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely from ours. For, since the conjunction of male and female is founded upon the great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the Lilliputians will needs have it, that men and women are joined together, like other animals, by the motives of concupiscence; and that their tenderness towards their young proceeds from the like natural principle: ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... Crowheart, and Andy P. Symes, who was attracted to Capital by an instinct as sure as a law of Nature, flew to him and clung like a bit of ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... was still a sick man, weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature—the law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the cellar to ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... a law of Nature common to all mankind, which no time shall annul or destroy, that those who have more strength and excellence shall bear rule over those who ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... so. And assuredly we must expect, even at best, and with all our efforts, perhaps backslidings, and certainly much continual imperfection all through our lives, in all we do. But this should create in us a horror of disobedience, not a despair at overcoming ourselves. We are not under the law of nature, but under grace; we are not bid do a thing above our strength, because, though our hearts are naturally weak, we are not left to ourselves. According to the command, so is the gift. God's grace is sufficient ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... particular; as when stones, or heavy things, forsake their ordinary wont or centre, and fly upward, as if they heard themselves commanded to let go the good they privately wish, and to relieve the present distress of nature in common." There is a common right, law of nature, or interest of the whole, which is more excellent, and so acknowledged to be by the agents themselves, than the right or interest of the parts only. "Wherefore, though it may be truly said that the creatures are naturally carried ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... asked how two plants are united to procure a third. The act is based on the procreative law of nature. Plant-breeding is simply accomplished by sifting the pollen of one plant upon the stigma of another, this act—pollenation—resulting in fertilization, Nature in her own mysterious ways ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... referring it to the command or will of God. He indicates the distinction, developed more fully by Thomasius and Kant, between the legal and the moral qualities of action. The principles of international law he reduces to those of the law of nature, and combats, in so doing, many of the positions taken up by Grotius. He rejects the notion that sovereignty in any way resembles property, and makes even marriage a matter of civil contract. Barbeyrac also translated Grotius's De Jure Belli et Pacis, Cumberland's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... yellow-birds, snow-birds, and swallows, round the doors or windows of one's house, I admire. There is nothing inhuman in this practice. It rather calls forth some of the better feelings of the heart—gives pleasure to us and the birds, yet violates no law of nature. ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... faith is past. You will get miracles back when that sort of faith returns. God has bound Himself over to the faith of His real people, and He would sooner break all the laws of nature, than He would break the laws of grace. He can easily set aside a law of nature; but He will never set aside a law of grace. He has bound Himself to faith—the only power in the universe to which He has bound Himself—and nobody ever rose up in this world yet, and said, "I trusted God, and He deceived me." Faith means TRUST—faith means ABANDONMENT—as ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... far wilder than it is now; and just on that point where the Henley and the Reading roads unite was a spot (communicating then with the waste land we have described), than which, perhaps, few places could be more adapted to the purposes of such true men as have recourse to the primary law of nature. Certain it was that at this part of the road Mauleverer looked more anxiously from his window than he had hitherto done, and apparently the increased earnestness of his survey was not altogether without ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... physical impossibility for them to have anything but easterly winds where they were. But, he asserted, there was a good time coming; they had had easterly winds ever since they had started; this, by an unalterable law of nature, had been gradually creating a vacuum away there in the easterly quarter, which vacuum must now necessarily soon become so perfect that, by another unalterable law of nature, the wind would come careering back from the westward with a force sufficient to more than enable them ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... formed for society; and whoever refuses social intercourse with his fellow-beings, and lives to himself, violates an established law of nature. But the operation of this general principle creates the necessity of particular laws for the regulation of that intercourse. Hence, a numerous train of duties arise out of our social relations. And those duties enter more or less into the common concerns of life, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... Berlin and elsewhere show."[166] The "Iron Law of Wages" is irrefutable and irresistible. "Economists have come to talk about the 'Iron Law of Wages' with as much assurance as if it were an irreversible law of Nature."[167] ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... semitones in the third position by removing the finger stopping the lower note while putting down the higher one. If he retained the second finger on E on the A string, third position, the third finger would fall too sharp for F natural. This seemed to him such an unalterable law of nature that he made the lad do the same, notwithstanding that the boy could have stopped quarter tones with ease ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... that matrimony is founded upon an original contract, whereby the wife makes over the right she has by the law of Nature in favour of the husband, by which he acquires the property of all her posterity. But, then, the obligation is mutual; and where the contract is broken on one side it ceases to bind on the other. Where there is a right there must be a power to maintain it and to ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... the Kohen Gadol so much as the manner in which I received his confidences. He half expected to startle me by his boldness, but was himself confounded by my words. I told him that in my country self was the chief consideration, self-preservation the law of nature; death the King of Terrors; wealth the object of universal search, poverty the worst of evils; unrequited love nothing less than anguish and despair; to command others the highest glory; victory, honor; defeat, intolerable ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... principle. The end of government, as the end of all conduct, must be the increase of human happiness. The province of government is limited by another consideration. It has to deal with one class of happiness, that is, with the pains and pleasures 'which men derive from one another.' By a 'law of nature' labour is requisite for procuring the means of happiness. Now, if 'nature' produced all that any man desired, there would be no need of government, for there would be no conflict of interest. But, as the material produced is finite, and can ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... refer to one other statement of the law of parallelism—by K. G. Carus in his Lehrbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie (Leipzig, 1834). The standpoint is again that of Naturphilosophie. It is a general law of Nature, Carus thinks, that the higher formations include the lower; thus the animal includes the vegetable, for it possesses the "vegetative" as well as the "animal" organs. So it is, too, by a rational necessity that the development of a perfect animal repeats ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... Protestant Kingdom from a Popish King. The Law of Nations, is so undoubtedly, against him, that I am sure he dares not stick to that Plea: but will be forc'd to reply, that the Civil Law was made in favour of Monarchy: why then did he appeal to it? And for the Law of Nature, I know not what it has to do with Protestants or Papists, except he can prove that the English Nation is naturally Protestant; and then I would enquire of him what Countrymen our Fore-fathers were? But if he means by the Law of Nature, self-preservation and ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... first, he supposed it was merely the remains of some small portion of the ocean that had penetrated to a cavity within, and which was now trickling back through the crevices of the rocks, to find its level, under the great law of nature. But it looked so pleasant to see once more water of any sort coming upwards from the earth, that the young man jumped down upon the sands, and hastened to the spot for further inquiry. Scooping up a little of the water in the hollow of his hand, he found it sweet, soft, and ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... affairs of this sort, the wide diffusion of a tale of miracle is easily explained. The fancy craves for miracles, and the universal mode of inventing a miracle is to deny the working, on a given occasion, of a law of Nature. Gravitation was suspended, men floated in air, inanimate bodies became agile, or fire did not burn. No less natural than the invention of the myth is the attempt to feign it by conjuring or by the use of some natural secret. But in the following ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... failing, I should employ stronger measures; precisely as a nation would do in a similar conflict with another nation. One must not suffer himself to be destroyed or driven into exile. This is the first law of nature—this of self-preservation. In maintaining this law, a man must do any or all things which in his deliberate judgment, will be effectual for the end proposed. Were I fighting with savages, for example, and knew that they regarded their scalps with more ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of those general passions by which all minds are agitated," whose "drama is the mirror of life," in which his readers may find "human sentiments in human language," whose practices are to be judged not by appeal to the rules of criticism, but by reference to the author's design and the great law of nature ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... perpetual power within a State.' However, even Bodin was far from considering sovereignty to give absolutely unfettered freedom of action, for he conceded that sovereignty was restricted by the commandments of God and by the rules of the Law of Nature. Be that as it may, this conception of sovereignty once introduced was universally accepted; but at the same time the meaning of the term became immediately a bone of contention between the schools of publicists. And it ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim
... present-day history. Here in this city of New York, where a system of competitive examination ensures the required degree of learning and promotion follows on proved efficiency (or is supposed to); some women teachers, following "that inexorable law of nature" which so many others successfully evade, have presumed to marry. Surely now the stock objection ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... He shared their games and their bed without allowing any suspicion to arise that he was not a young virgin like them. Chiron, who taught him such good morals, is, with the Emperor Trajan, the only righteous man who obtained celestial glory by following the law of nature. And yet he was ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... not be lost sight of when we criticise the institutions of a young nation which has only just achieved its independence, and whose first step was to abolish the vindictive capital sentence of 'a life for a life.' The first law of nature is self-preservation, and Roumania is still obliged to economise in all departments of the State in order to place her national police—her army—on a sound footing. It is wonderful how she is able to conduct her department of ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... last the art is brought into correlation with man's other powers and becomes a living reflex of the tendencies and activities of the period. Notwithstanding the prodigious vitality of Bach's work, we feel that his musical sense operated abstractly like a law of Nature and that he was an unconscious embodiment, as it were, of the deep religious sentiment of his time and of the sturdy independence of his race. At any period and in any place Bach would have been Bach. Beethoven's ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... law of nature that progress, as well as time, should be marked by periods of alternate light ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... No good advice; not a word about government; not a word about the rights of man or woman, or children; not a word about any law of nature; not a word about any ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... somewhere show how much better a treatise Butler might have written had he known about evolution as the general law of nature. ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... replied to her request that her widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... get eighteen of them a week, and they madden me. They keep my brain in a frenzied whirl. Grady, this man must die. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. I have a wife and children; I conduct a great paper; I educate the public mind. My life is valuable to my country. Destroy this poet, and future generations will praise your name. He must be wiped out, exterminated, obliterated from the face of the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... not be reproached then with inutility; I believed that by suicide I should violate a divine law of nature, and I thought that I sufficiently fulfilled my part in submitting to the hard task of enduring the crawling hours & minutes[50]—in bearing the load of time that weighed miserably upon me and that in abstaining from what I in my calm moments ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... the moral precepts of the law come of the law of nature. But the precept of loving God more than self is a moral precept of the law. Therefore, it is of the law of nature. Consequently from natural love the angel loves God more ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... mysterious current on its edges. Several theories have been advanced to account for its influence in so remote a region. I give you one which appears to me reasonable. It is supposed, that in obedience to that great law of Nature which seeks to establish equilibrium in the temperature of fluids,—a vast body of gelid water is continually mounting from the Antarctic, to displace and regenerate the over-heated oceans of the torrid zone. Bounding ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... pilgrim and strange, and the sense is more domesticated and at home. I am forced by you, my thoughts, to remain at home in charge of the house, while others may wander wherever they will. This is a law of Nature, and therefore a law of the author and originator of Nature. Sin on then, now that all of you, seduced by the charm of the intellect, leave the other part of me to the peril of death. How have you gotten this ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... their mutual inclinations during the operation, to encroach the one upon the other, and a natural tendency on the part of the stronger to destroy the weaker in an incessant conflict for survivorship, which would persist with the certainty and constancy of a law of nature, compromise acts by Congress to the contrary notwithstanding. And so the struggle for existence between the two industrial forces went on beneath the surface of things. Meanwhile modern industrialism was gaining steadily over its slave competitor in ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... usurped the Prerogative of God, over his Creatures, that of depriving them of Life, which was a Privilege no one had over his own; for as he did not come into the World by his own Election, he ought to stay the determined Time of his Creator: That indeed, Death given in War, was by the Law of Nature allowable, because it is for the Preservation of our own Lives; but no Crime ought to be thus punished, nor indeed any War undertaken, but in Defence of our natural Right, which is such a Share of Earth as ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... not to ask tribute from them, and should exercise no force in this regard. He was merely to tell them of his Majesty's heavy expenses in this land, and the many hardships endured by the Spaniards in going to civilize them, and to teach them how to live in accordance with the law of nature, so that they might understand the chief requirements—namely, to become Christians and recognize the true God, who created and redeemed them; and in order that they might cease to do evil to their neighbors, and to commit other cruelties and robberies. ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... irresistibly, and as if by the force of a law of nature, there would gravitate around your person the very elements which the Supreme Council, in its indefatigable zeal for the state, is most eager to render harmless and to punish in an exemplary manner. For your part, my dear Casanova, you would give us an acceptable proof of your patriotic zeal, ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... ignorant and untrustworthy to instruct them authoritatively; that the jurors must therefore necessarily have judged for themselves of the whole case; and that, as a general rule, they could judge of it by no law but the law of nature, or the. principles of justice as they ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... broken in upon by the stopping of the car—they were at their destination. Tarzan's mind returned to the affairs of the moment. He knew that he was about to die, but there was no fear of death in him. To a denizen of the cruel jungle death is a commonplace. The first law of nature compels them to cling tenaciously to life—to fight for it; but it does not teach them ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said. "Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and if she doesn't marry Jimmy she will very ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... an inexorable law of Nature that no man shall shine at both ends. If he has a high forehead and a thirst for wisdom, his fox-trotting (if any) shall be as the staggerings of the drunken; while, if he is a good dancer, he is nearly always ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... it expedient and of the highest importance to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose—a purpose, which we deem it almost superfluous to say, is justified as well by the law of nature, as by the law ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... man was not actuated by any abstract love of knowledge, and when he had observed what appeared to him to be a law of nature, he proceeded to turn it to advantage in his efforts for the preservation of his life. Since events had the characteristic of recurrence, all he had to do in order to produce the recurrence of any particular event which he desired, was to cause it to happen in the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Will, a healthy and normal young man, with no bad habits, was in danger of being driven to them by the emptiness and exasperation of his mind. The worst of it all was that both of the young people were, in accordance with a well-known law of nature, growing older with what seemed to them a frightful and unreasonable rapidity. The years crawled like snails. But the sum of them rose by leaps and bounds to an appalling total. Alice found two grey ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... up some trivial with a greater number of worthy productions, and had shown an impatience of criticism by which, however excusable, he was sure to be himself the chief sufferer. His higher gifts, too, were of the quality which, by the changeless law of nature, cannot ripen fast; and there was, accordingly, some portion both of obscurity and of crudity in the results of his youthful labours. Men of slighter materials would have come more quickly to their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... descend with accelerated weight on the meaner and more indigent classes of society. An ingenious philosopher has calculated the universal measure of the public impositions by the degrees of freedom and servitude; and ventures to assert, that, according to an invariable law of nature, it must always increase with the former, and diminish in a just proportion to the latter. But this reflection, which would tend to alleviate the miseries of despotism, is contradicted at least by the history of the Roman empire; which accuses the same princes of despoiling the senate of its authority, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... example, in Christianity, the contrast between body and soul, the unlimited importance of the earth as the "world," the marvellous occurrences in nature. If once the opposite views gain the mastery—for instance, a strict law of nature, the helplessness and superfluousness of all gods, the strict conception of the soul as a bodily process—all is over. But all Greek culture ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche |
