"Natural law" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to acknowledge the deepest gratitude to my wife, formerly Mira Edgerly, who has found in this discovery of the natural law for the human class of life, the solution of her life long search, and who, because of her interest in my work, has given me incomparably inspiring help and valuable criticism. It is not an exaggeration to state that except for her steady and relentless work and her time, which saved my ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... students should pay no heed to their instructors? What health would there be for the sick, if those indisposed should not obey their physicians in all points, or what safety for the navigators if the sailors should turn a deaf ear to their pilots? It is by a natural law both necessary and salutary that the principle of ruling and again that of being ruled have been placed among men, and without them it is impossible for anything to continue to exist for ever so short a time. Now it belongs to him who is ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... stagnant—waters. But the advance of scientific discoveries and the scientific spirit sapped the defences of faith in more methodical fashion, and Tennyson's mind was only too open to all the evidence of natural law and the stern lessons of the struggle for life. To understand the influence of Tennyson on his age it is necessary to inquire how he reconciled religion with science; but this is too large a subject for a biographical sketch, and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Mirabeau died, worn out with labors and passions, and some say by poison. Even this Hercules could not resist the consequences of violated natural law. The Assembly decreed a magnificent public funeral, and buried him with great pomp. He was the first to be interred in the Pantheon. For nearly two years he was the leading man in France, and he retained his influence in the Assembly to the end. Nor did he lose his popularity with the people. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... she. "We believed in Natural Law but not in religion. Our most intellectual men decided that by no stretch of the imagination could they build a god for religious purposes as great as the Creator of the universe must naturally be, and knowing that it remains for man himself to reach his highest state of perfection ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... more powerful argument than that which establishes the conservation of a province in the strength, that is, the wealth of its inhabitants, and depends on the abundance of that for its conservation. Commerce is a natural law of nations, by which they make common to all provinces what each one produces, grows, or manufactures—now by selling, now by exchanging. Although commerce ought to be free, and was in the beginning, when kingdoms ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... it was, to posture and use grandiose words! Why did she shrink from the complete submission that her presence here implied? No amount of self-assertion would do away with the natural law of which he had contemptuously reminded her, the law which distinguishes man and woman, and denies to one what is ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... what do the lawyers and the publicists treat? Of JUSTICE, EQUITY, LIBERTY, NATURAL LAW, CIVIL LAWS, &c. But what is justice? What is its principle, its character, its formula? To this question our doctors evidently have no reply; for otherwise their science, starting with a principle clear and well defined, would quit the region ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... in a tolerable condition of security from wrong, and which, if they could be generally obeyed, would establish, and permanently maintain, the well-being of the universal commonwealth of the human race. It is therefore with justice that one part of this science has been called "the natural law of individuals," and the other "the natural law of states;" and it is too obvious to require observation,[4] that the application of both these laws, of the former as much as of the latter, is modified ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... climate and highly organized society, than in the American tropics and sub-tropics, where it is already well under way, if not a fait accompli. That it must come in the United States, sooner or later, seems to be a foregone conclusion, as the result of natural law—lex dura, sed tamen lex—a hard pill, but one which must be swallowed. There can manifestly be no such thing as a peaceful and progressive civilization in a nation divided by two warring races, and homogeneity of type, at least in externals, is a necessary ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... startled when I further recommend to you Blackstone's "Commentaries" and Burlamaqui's "Treatise on Natural Law." These are books which, besides affording admirable opportunities for the exercise of both concentrated and comprehensive thought, will fill your mind with valuable ideas, and furnish it with very important information. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... character of this alliance. I allude to Puffendorf. "It seems useless," says he, "to frame any pacts or leagues, barely for the defence and support of universal peace; for by such a league nothing is superadded to the obligation of natural law, and no agreement is made for the performance of any thing which the parties were not previously bound to perform; nor is the original obligation rendered firmer or stronger by such an addition. Men of any tolerable culture and civilization might well be ashamed of entering into ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... but dealing with natural objects; which are for him, in the first [146] place, and apart from the remote religious hints and intimations they carry with them, curiosities. He seems to have no true sense of natural law, as Bacon understood it; nor even of that immanent reason in the natural world, which the Platonic tradition supposes. "Things are really true," he says, "as they correspond unto God's conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity unto that intellect, in whose idea they had their ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up clouds of steam. Through the open door and windows this passed out with the rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor staring at the spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the name of natural law the place could have caught fire or smoked at all. And each was silent—myself from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the Colonel from the quiet pluck that faces all things yet speaks little, and John Silence from the intense ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... under the forms of the great doctrines of Morphology, of Development, of Distribution, and the like. He sees an enormous mass of facts and laws relating to organic beings, which stand on the same good sound foundation as every other natural law; and therefore, with this mass of facts and laws before us, therefore, seeing that, as far as organic matters have hitherto been accessible and studied, they have shown themselves capable of yielding ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... theistical speculations to the somewhat firmer ground of social thought. From the time of its publication, Winstanley leaves the former almost untouched, concentrates his mind almost exclusively on the latter, pleads eloquently for the recognition of natural law in the social, or political world, and steps boldly forward to a life of action, animated and inspired by the conclusions concerning the necessary foundations of a social state based upon righteousness that his previous reflections and meditations, or the Inward Light to which he ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... by these natives in their paganism, are observed by them since they have become Christians, in so far as they are not contrary to natural law, especially as to their slavery, successions, inheritances, adoptions, wills, and lawful trading. In their suits, they always allege and prove the custom, and are judged by it, according to royal decrees to that effect. ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... to Fergusson, about six times the width of the river, so that a river 1000 feet wide would oscillate once in 6000 feet. This is an important consideration, and much labour has been lost in trying to prevent rivers from following their natural law of oscillation. But rivers are very true to their own laws, and a change at any part is continued both upwards and downwards, so that a new oscillation in any place cuts its way through the whole plain of the river both ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... sky pilots pray for the government, you can't expect heathen individuals like me to do business on a Christian basis,—if there is such a thing. You can make rules for croquet, but not for a game that is based on the natural law of the survival of the fittest. The darned fools in the legislatures try it occasionally, but we all know it's a sop to the 'common people.' Ask Hughie here if there ever was a law put on the statute books that his friend Watling couldn't ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... quadruped as ever breathed, had contrived to impose thus upon his infatuated proprietors, I never could understand, but so it was; he even engrossed the chief part of the conversation, which after any lull seemed to veer round to him by a sort of natural law. ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... It is the manifestation of disobeyed natural law, and whether the mistakes are made knowingly or ignorantly matters but little so far as the results are concerned. It is generally considered a disgrace to be imprisoned for transgressing man-made law, which is faulty and complex. How about ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... what human eyes have seldom, if ever, beheld,—an American, pure blood, handling the pick, the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared that none of the trees grew with their roots in the air, in recognition of this great reversal of the natural law; all the French-roof houses stood right side up. The phenomenon may become more common in future, unless the American race accomplishes its destiny of dying out before the more populatory foreigner, but as yet it graced the veteran with an exquisite and signal distinction. He, however, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... may be lent at interest without one of these bad passions being brought in to play, and in these cases I confess my inability to see where, either in terms or in spirit, such use of money is condemned either by the Christian code of charity, or by that natural law of conscience which we are told (I) is written ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Socrates was pre-eminently himself. The systematic resolution of the whole theory of society into the elementary principle of natural law, was peculiar to him. Justice was the cardinal principle which must lie at the foundation of all good government. The word sophia—wisdom—included all excellency in personal morals, whether as manifested (reflectively) ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... business exploits such as these are, in a measure, things of the past, and cannot be repeated. Great industries can no longer hem in their rivals, or stifle and cripple them to the extent that fields, which by natural law are free to all, become the field of one. The people have at last risen against this, and consolidations will only be tolerated when confidence is established that the masses will be benefited. When the scheme of the Consolidated Companies first became known, it was ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... taking it; but the reason that here appeals to us is the fact that it would remove a second perversion of the economic system, accelerate the increase of capital, and help in securing a distribution of wealth which would be more nearly in accordance with natural law. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... to earth the theist attempts to find a justification for the existing order of things by finding a use for pain and suffering in their educational influence on human nature, and in the impossibility of altering for the better the consequences of natural law. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... his fluency. By the natural law which governs all effort, what he wrote reacted upon him. He began to feel those subtleties which he could find words to express. With every expression came increased conception. Those inmost breathings which there found words took hold upon him. He thought Carrie worthy ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... are bound in conscience to obey our temporal sovereign and magistrates and masters, and must submit to the laws of the country, so long as they do not conflict with higher and superior laws, such as the Natural Law and the Revealed Law, with still greater reason are we bound to obey our spiritual Sovereign and the laws and ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... a wolf, a fox, or even a lion, as resembling certain kinds of dogs; a howdah as a smaller sofa, and a palanquin, as a light crib. In all these cases, it is worthy of notice, that a mere difference of size never creates confusion;—simply because, by a natural law in optics, such differences are of constant occurrence in the experience both of children and adults. A water neut will convey a sufficiently correct idea of a crocodile; and the picture of an elephant, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... ages, too, men had been so guideless, so uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life. In the Middle Ages, in the old Catholic days, one went to a priest, and he said with all the finality of natural law, this you are and this you must do. I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I should have accepted that ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... only in the form of duties on the part of the state, not in the form of definite legal claims of the individual. The Declaration of the Rights of Man for the first time originated in all its vigor in positive law the conception, which until then had been known only to natural law, of the personal rights of the members of the state over against the state as a whole. This was next seen in the first French constitution of September 3, 1791, which set forth, upon the basis of a preceding ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... of improbability that the laws of nature were not intentionally prescribed, and that the wondrously complex and wondrously useful harmony that has been established between organic structure and natural law was not designedly established. In considering this point, it will be convenient to take ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... The natural law of exhaustion, which sooner or later affects all races of any distinction, may also not improbably have come into play, rendering the Parthians of the age of Verus very degenerate descendants of those who displayed such ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... Bible miracles as literal fact! The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old. If we are of the modern type of mind, that sees in natural law a majesty and grandeur far more impressive than any solitary infraction of it could possibly be, let us not forget that, after all, science has not explained everything. We have still to face the ultimate miracle,—the origin and principle of life! Here is the supreme mystery that is the ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... generation appears which lays eggs. Now it is indeed true that the change of generation forms a circle in which the form of the last generation always returns to that of the first, and therefore leaves the species, as species, wholly unchanged. But it is nevertheless a process which shows that the natural law of an identity between generator and product, observed in other relations, is not without exception; and if we once have reason to suppose that the generation of new species took place in past periods of the globe, but has ceased in the present, such ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... impotence of science to discover anything save her own impotence—a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon's own hopes of what science would do for the welfare of the human race. For what is all human invention, but the transcending and conquering one natural law by another? What is the practical answer which all mankind has been making to nature and her pretensions, whenever it has progressed one step since the foundation of the world: by which all discoverers have discovered, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the company had had an exciting and fatiguing day, the young people began immediately after supper, as if according to a natural law, to ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... questions left open, but numerical majorities are not necessarily physical majorities. The South, though numerically inferior, contend they can whip the Northern superiority of numbers, and therefore by natural law they contend that they are not bound to submit. This issue is the only real one, and in my judgment all else should be deferred to it. War alone can decide it, and it is the only question now left for us as a people to decide. Can we whip the South? If we can, our numerical majority ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... swore, and sitting down, dangled his legs angrily in the water. Natural law compelled his companion to occupy the other ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... natural world, which find their analogues in the laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a man's writing that 104th Psalm who had not the most deep, the most earnest sense of the permanence of natural law. But more: the fact is expressly asserted again and again. "They continue this day according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee." "Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever. Thou hast given them a law which shall ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... end of the summer, however, he seemed to lose confidence in the Virgin's tampering with natural law for his sake. One day we saw that the talons were sacrificed, and were told that the Mother of God had announced to our Brazilian in a dream that she would accept a vow never to cut his hair in place of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... especially makes a living creature differ from an inanimate object as given to us for our preservation and conservation (being as it were the receiver of what supplements and agrees with the nature of our body) is the argument of one who takes no account of natural law, especially when he would add that the characteristic proceeds from the great or small size of the pores. Besides, it is absurd to think that a body through the want of natural heat should be chilled, and should not in like manner hunger and thirst through the want of natural moisture and nourishment. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... so do the criticised by the natural law of national coherence. An English painter is apt to be primarily an embodied theory of one sort or another; which theory is more or less directly connected with his actual work as a painter. A German painting is apt to be scientifically composed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... groaning before any great manifestation of power will read into this passage just that touch of practical knowledge, which will convince him of its truth. The miracle, I may add, is none the less wonderful or beyond our human powers, because it was wrought by an extension of natural law, differing only in degree with that which we can ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forms of the great doctrines of morphology, of development, of distribution, and the like. He sees an enormous mass of facts and laws relating to organic beings, which stand on the same good sound foundation as every other natural law. With this mass of facts and laws before us, therefore, seeing that, as far as organic matters have hitherto been accessible and studied, they have shown themselves capable of yielding to scientific investigation, we may accept this as proof that order and law reign there ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... moments, simply, it seemed, by the natural law of gravitation, without any engineering whatever, Mrs. Upjohn's guests had resolved themselves into two distinct parties, the elders all in the drawing-room, the younger ones in the parlor across the hall, too far off from Mr. Webb for their gay whispering ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... revealed. In the following pages I am aware that two ideas, or principles, struggle in my mind for mastery. One is the idea of the super-mechanical and the super-chemical character of living things; the other is the idea of the supremacy and universality of what we call natural law. The first probably springs from my inborn idealism and literary habit of mind; the second from my love of nature and my scientific bent. It is hard for me to reduce the life impulse to a level with common material forces that ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... illustrate these two laws by a simple comparison. Look at my hand. By the law of gravitation it naturally falls upon the desk and lies there, attracted downward by that natural law which makes heavy bodies ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... matter about us; with our own origin in the low fishlike or apelike creature in the maternal womb; with the development of every plant, tree, and animal from a microscopic germ; with the unbroken sequence of natural law; with the waste, the delays, the pains, the failures on every hand; with the impersonal and the impartial character of all the physical forces; with the transformations and metamorphoses that marked the course of animal life; and, above all, with the thought that evolution is not self-caused ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Boar." What a series of banquets on blood and warm, almost living flesh is here presented! How cruel these creatures are to each other, is the thought that first comes to us, but a second, reminds that it is but their instinct and a necessity of natural law, and repulsion is lost in astonishment and delight at the marvellous fidelity with which the sculptor has rendered these links in the great chain of animal life. Their (as we call it) savage eagerness, their ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Caramuel, so I suppose I may do so too, for the very reason that his theological reputation does not place him on the side of strictness. Concina says, "Caramuel himself, who bore away the palm from all others in relaxing the evangelical and natural law, says: ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... be nothing more than the true, fitting, and natural law of man. Man considered solely as a spiritual machine? No. Considered as an animal that eats and drinks? Not that either. Man considered as a complete whole. Isn't ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... cruelty"[1130] which goaded him to send a heretic to the stake, he urged the condemnation of John Huss, regardless of the safe-conduct which the latter had received from the Emperor; for in common with all the fathers there assembled he held that according to natural law both divine and human, no promise should be kept if it were prejudicial to the Catholic Faith. With a like ardour he prosecuted in the Council the condemnation of the thesis of Jean Petit concerning the lawfulness of tyrannicide. In things temporal ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... which enter manifestly into the sequence of natural laws, and which are productive of most beneficial effects; but those which are disastrous and apparently abnormal. Gratitude is less vivid than fear, and the smallest infraction of a natural law produces a deeper impression than the most sublime of its ordinary operations. When, therefore, the most startling and terrible aspects of Nature are presented to his mind—when the more deadly forms ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... children were produced. Mr. Sedgwick,[59] in commenting on this remarkable and fortunate failure in the power of transmission in the direct line, remarks that it may possibly be owing to "excess having reversed the action of some natural law in development." But it is safer in the present state of our knowledge to look at the whole case as ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... forming and developing a child. Which is the stomach? Which is the womb? and what is the difference? Both receive and distribute nourishment to sustain animal life. Both get sick, both vomit when irritated and discharge their loading by the natural law of "throw up" and "throw down." Now note the difference and govern yourselves accordingly. One is mid-wifery, or treatment of the lower stomach during gestation and delivery. The other is the upper stomach that takes coarser material ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... how to create children in accord with natural law, how to mold their bodies and their characters into harmony and beauty before the new life sees the light of day, when they learn to rear their offspring in health of body and purity of mind in harmony with the laws of their ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... leisure. These conditions tend to equalize themselves throughout the world and in time the contest between humanitarian instincts and economic pressure will reach a world-wide equilibrium through the operation of natural law. What will happen then I do not know. Neither ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... one intelligent being could possibly be shocking to another. Upon this the doctor was very insistent. Conduct, he held, could never be sufficiently discreet, thought could never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat a law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a natural law. That the social well-being demands. But as a scientific man, in one's stated thoughts and in public discussion, the case was altogether different. There was no offence in any possible hypothesis or in the contemplation of any possibility. Just as when one played ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... case the determining principles must themselves be phenomena. Now, if no other determining principle can serve as a law for the will except that universal legislative form, such a will must be conceived as quite independent of the natural law of phenomena in their mutual relation, namely, the law of causality; such independence is called freedom in the strictest, that is, in the transcendental, sense; consequently, a will which can have its law in nothing but the mere legislative form of ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... sense of the realities of life and death gives the force of a natural law to the pathos of Old Mortality, that essay in which Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, who 'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... beautiful at least to the lover. And now to think that he does not know what I suffer and fear, to think that I may never see him again, to think that when he returns I may be a hideous mass of corruption that he cannot even approach. Out upon the phrases 'beneficent nature,' and 'natural law.' Laws which permit such things are must unnatural, and to endow one with such a love of life, such boundless capabilities of enjoying life, and then at the supreme moment when the loss will be most bitterly felt to snatch it away, looks to me more like the work of devilish ingenuity than of ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... are at peace, was incompatible with the sovereignty of the United States; that it made them instrumental to the annoyance of those nations, and thereby tended to commit their peace.' And this opinion is still conceived to be not contrary to the principles of natural law, the usage of nations, the engagements which unite the two people, nor the proclamation of the President, as you ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... believe it. I believe Peter's sinking followed naturally upon his loss of confidence. Thus he fell away from the life of the Master; was no longer, in that way I mean, connected with the Head, was instantly under the dominion of the natural law of gravitation, as we call it, and began to sink. Therefore the Lord must take other means to save him. He must draw nigh to him in a bodily manner. The pride of Peter had withdrawn him from the immediate spiritual influence of Christ, conquering his matter; and therefore the Lord must come ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... old Quebec!—of all the cities on the continent of America, the quaintest.... It is a populated cliff. It is a mighty rock, scarped and graded, and made to hold houses and castles which, by a proper natural law, ought to slide off from its back, like an ungirded load from a camel's back. But they stick. At the foot of the rocks, the space of several streets in width has been stolen from the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... captains of war, at your command, have shot down like dogs your employees in a score of bloody strikes. By such means you have endured. We do not grumble at the result, for we acknowledge and have our being in the same natural law. And now the question has arisen: UNDER THE PRESENT SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT, WHICH OF US SHALL SURVIVE? We believe we are the fittest. You believe you are the fittest. We leave the eventuality to time ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... appropriate nutriment, raiment and shelter. In a word, we should make proper provision for the development and maturity of the physical life of our children. This is the mission of the parent until the child is able to provide for itself. This, says Blackstone, "is a principle of natural law;" and, in the language of Puffendorf, is "an obligation laid on parents, not only by nature herself, but by their own proper act in bringing them into the world." The laws of the land also command it. The child has a legal claim upon the parent for ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... basis of broad knowledge and careful insight, those large lines of policy and higher ideals which may form our guiding lines and boundaries in the practical difficulties of every day. For it is certain that all human striving must recognize the hard limits of natural law, and that any striving, no matter how intense and earnest, which is against the constitution of the world, is vain. The question, then, which we must seriously consider is this: What is the real meaning of Race; what has, in the past, been the law of race development, ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois
... the basis of its poetry,—the Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis of its poetry, we are none the better for wanting the perception to discern a natural law, which is, after all, like every natural law, irresistible; we are none the better for trying to make ourselves Semitic, when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to shift the basis of our poetry. We may mean well; all manner of good may happen to us on the road we go; but we are not ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... was on a family or ethnic basis. Blood relationship was the central idea of cohesion, which was early aided by religious superstition and belief. Following this idea, all of the ancient monarchies and empires were based on the ethnic group or race. All of this indicates that society was based on natural law, and from that were gradually evolved the general and political elements which foreshadowed the enlarged functions of the more complex ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... his correspondence and occasional writings: but recently there was found among his papers a charge to the grand jury at Richmond, Virginia, in which are expressed the most authentic principles of international drawn from natural law, at a period and in a country where the former had not been codified or even vaguely understood; and so practical as to be of direct application to the exigencies of the present hour. At the root ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... upstairs. She had put Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" on my table and a couch was ready with pillows and a knitted slumber robe. Very gently she helped us out of our veils and dusters and closed the windows ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as the creator of 119:12 matter, is not only to make Him responsible for all disas- ters, physical and moral, but to announce Him as their source, thereby making Him guilty of maintaining perpet- 119:15 ual misrule in the form and under the name of natural law. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... case is perhaps possible; but, if possible, it can occur but rarely; because, although one jury may disagree, a succession of juries are not likely to disagree that is, on matters of natural law, or abstract justice. [2] If such a thing should occur, it would almost certainly be owing to the attempt of the court to mislead them. It is hardly possible that any other cause should be adequate to produce such an effect; ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... about the sun; and an even harder one when the same visitant came back in 1758, obedient to Halley's prediction, after its three-quarters of a century of voyaging but in the abyss of space. Proved thus to bow to natural law, the celestial messenger could no longer fully, sustain its role. But long-standing notoriety cannot be lived down in a day, and the comet, though proved a "natural" object, was still regarded as a very menacing one for another hundred years or ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to make government a technical science and politics a profession. He looked forward to a time when legislation, based on a scientific study of human nature, would assume the character of natural law. The earlier and more elementary sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, had given man control over external nature; the last science, sociology, was to give man ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... from foreign lands were surprised at his environment, possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian surroundings. Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual World, in a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... discard "Creation" and accept evolution; if you discard "revelation" and accept evolution; if you discard miracles and accept natural law, there is nothing left of the Christian Religion but the life and teachings ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... within and examine his own conscience, he would find those delights have but little power to affect his heart. He would find terrible and dreadful representations there, that his joys may well for a time darken them, but cannot drive them away. And then it is the very natural law and fatal necessity that grief follows those joys at the heels, yea, is perpetually attending them, to come in their place. God hath so conjoined them together, and so disposed them, that men's joy shall ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... wealth, whilst human labour, however highly developed it might be, could add nothing to what was drawn from the soil, because labour itself consumed what it produced. This may look like the first application of the subsequently discovered natural law of the conservation of force; and—notwithstanding its obvious absurdity—it was seriously believed in because it professed to explain what seemed otherwise inexplicable. Between the labourer's means of subsistence, the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... back," said Madame Sagittarius. "Such is the natural law as exemplified by the great Charles Darwin in his Vegetable Mould and Silkworms. No human creature can go back. Least of all this gentleman. He must go ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... having everything done for you, not from a man's mere politeness, but from his right (he, the one man) to serve the one woman. In all he did he was so intensely efficient and reliable; the most casual trivial detail, if entrusted to him, took place as by some immutable natural law. He would return in the shortest possible time, yet without hurry, with the tea-basket, while half that crowd of jostling, distracted passengers outside would have to go without. And it was not otherwise in things that were far from trivial. When he told her he loved her she knew that she stood ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... lie at the bottom of our thinking and give tone to our writing. The world is not the same to the Christian theist and to the agnostic. Human life has a deeper significance to the man who believes in the loving providence of God than to the man who believes only in the existence of matter and natural law. The man who believes in the presence and sovereignty of God in all things looks hopefully to the future. He is optimistic rather than pessimistic. The presence of an exuberant vitality reveals itself in a cheerful, buoyant tone. Scott's exuberant spirit forms a pleasing contrast ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... You can't help them by abstract thought or by graceful art, but only by that moral sense which will hold the scales of Justice even, and keep itself free from every taint of corruption. That is how we rule India. We came there by a kind of natural law, like air rushing into a vacuum. All over the world, against our direct interests and our deliberate intentions, we are drawn into the same thing. And it will happen to you also. The pressure of destiny will force you to administer the Whole of America ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tried to make this law work. Yet during this very time trusts grew greater in number and power than in the whole history of the world before; and their evils flourished unhindered and unchecked. These great business concerns grew because natural laws made them grow and artificial law at war with natural law could not stop their growth. But their evils grew faster than the trusts themselves because avarice nourished those evils and no law of any kind stopped ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... necessary for such development. Bless his name! Understand me, please, this desire is not a restless longing, an aching void, as is found in an unregenerate heart or in a soul in spiritual decline; but it is the delightful struggling of a soul bearing the likeness of God, to conform to the natural law of development ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... functions in these animal species are not limited to motherhood alone. Every organ and faculty is fully employed and perfected. Through the development of the individual mother, better and higher types of animals are produced and carried forward. In a word, natural law makes the female the expression and ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... together by the glue on the back, besides drying to an extreme the leather, till it cracks or crumbles under the heat. The upper shelves or galleries of any library are most seriously affected by over-heating, because the natural law causes the heat to rise toward the ceiling. If you put your hand on some books occupying the highest places in some library rooms, in mid-winter, when the fires are kept at their maximum, the heat of the volume will almost ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... virtuous old age. And on the other hand, an ungodly and profligate youth leads, by the same laws, toward an ungodly and profligate old age. That is the law. But there is another law which may stop that law—just as the stone falls to the ground by the natural law of weight, and yet you may stop that law by using the law of bodily strength, and holding it up in your hand. And what is the gracious law which will save you from the terrible law which will make you go ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... taken up and defended in it. It is its object to maintain the position that "Natural Selection" acts, and indeed must act, but that still, in order that we may be able to account for the production of known kinds of animals and plants, it requires to be supplemented by the action of some other natural law or laws as yet undiscovered.[1] Also, that the consequences which have been drawn from Evolution, whether exclusively Darwinian or not, to the prejudice of religion, by no means follow from it, and are in ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... existence. Note, therefore, that the fighting of man against man, with material care as the sharpest spur to the conflict, was not and is not the simple transference to human society of a law everywhere prevalent in nature, but an exceptional distortion of this great natural law under the influence of a certain phase of human development. We suffered want not because nature compelled us to do so, but because we robbed each other; and we robbed each other because with civilisation there arose a disproportion between our requirements ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... which travels sixty miles an hour must be five times as civilised as one which only travelled twelve. Thus the beneficent 'law of progress' was exemplified in that nation which had best deserved to be its exponent. The myth in question is that there is a natural law of improvement, manifested by greater complexity of structure, by increase of wants and the means to satisfy them. A nation advances in civilisation by increasing in wealth and population, and by multiplying the accessories and paraphernalia ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... aspirant finds his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way the several types of dramatic artist—each type being distinct and each being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry—are maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It is made up, like every other group, of the old, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Mahan, the vain struggles of the wily priest, to veil with sophistry the degrading slavery of woman, in order to reconcile her position as set forth in certain man-made texts of Scripture with eternal justice and natural law. Mr. Mahan would not have been willing himself, to accept even the mild form of subjection he so cunningly assigns to woman. The deadliest opponents to the recognition of the equal rights of woman, have ever been among the orthodox ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I prayed, why or wherefore I know not. It was not from fear. It could not have been in hope. The days of miracles are past, and there was no natural law by whose providential interposition I could be saved. I did not pray; it prayed of ...
— The Man In The Reservoir • Charles Fenno Hoffman
... the afternoon, ate her dinner with the family, and behaved like other people. Her mother telephoned that evening and when I told her what her daughter had been doing, she gasped in astonishment. She had difficulty in believing that the new order was not miracle but simply the working out of natural law. Since that time her daughter has ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... that we shall hear it in terms of them, just as to-day we hear the chord of the dominant seventh in terms of its resolution. But the basis will not be convention or custom, except in so far as custom is the unfolding of natural law. The course of music, like that of every other art, is away from arbitrary—though simple—convention, to a complexity which satisfies the natural demands of the organism. The "natural persuasion" of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... it has need no longer, until we find it to-day without color and its leaves degenerated into mere scaly bracts. Nature had manifold ways of illustrating the parable of the ten pieces of money. Spiritual law is natural law: "From him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away." Among plants as among souls, there are all degrees of backsliders. The foxglove, which is guilty of only sly, petty larceny, wears not the equivalent of the striped suit and the shaved head; nor does the mistletoe, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... female parent only, the fatherless chinkapin. It sounds sad. I followed up the experiment with other nut trees, and found that not infrequently we may develop fatherless nuts. The effect will be, according to natural law, to intensify the characteristics of one parent. The female which bears this fruit, this child, without a father, will give to that child an intensification of her own characteristics. That will be the effect of parthenogenesis. That may be continued through ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... of His giving of a law of belief and of His founding of a Church. It is beyond human comprehension that He should have come for naught, labored for naught and died for naught. And such must be the case, if the observance of the natural law is a sufficient worship of the Creator. What reasons Christ may have had for imposing this or that truth upon our belief, is beside the question; it is enough that He did reveal truths, the acceptance of which ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Grotius and Puffendorf assures us that Grotius took the hint of attempting a system of natural law from Lord Bacon's works; and certainly, he adds, none was more proper for such an undertaking. A clear head, an excellent judgment, profound meditation, universal learning, prodigious reading, continual application to study amidst ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny |
