"Unscientific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bitter blow to Mr. Burrowes. Had this lapse into the unscientific primitive happened in a regular fight, he might have mourned and poured reproof into Bug's ear when he got him back in his corner at the end of the round; but he would not have experienced this feeling of helpless ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... would have been, Mr. John, with an unscientific fisherman; but we experienced hands know better. Glory is to be measured by quality, and not by quantity, ladies and gentlemen; and I look on it as a greater feather in a man's cap, to see the sogdollager's ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... popular belief obtained in the mines, that luck particularly favored the foolish and unscientific. Consequently, when Hawkins struck a "pocket" in the hillside near his solitary cabin, there was but little surprise. "He will sink it all in the next hole" was the prevailing belief, predicated upon the usual manner in which the possessor of "nigger luck" disposed of his fortune. ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... forth the great religions, Christianity and Islam; and the great religious innovators and leaders, our Lord Himself, St. Francis, John Knox, Jeanne d'Arc, down to the founder of the new faith of the Sioux and Arapahoe. It cannot, then, be unscientific to compare the barbaric with the civilised beliefs and experiences about a region so dimly understood, and so fertile in potent influences. Here the topic will be examined rather by the method of anthropology than of psychology. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... player. The bouts seem too short, but probably this is unavoidable; that which is to be regretted and might be remedied, being that no points are given for "form:" the result is that, in many cases, the anxiety to score the necessary points as soon as possible results in very ugly and unscientific rushes, in which no guards are attempted and from which the most reckless and rapid hitter comes out the winner. This, of course, is the same for every one, and therefore perfectly fair, but it does not tend to elevate ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... the unscientific way of dealing with lies:—viz. that on a great or cruel occasion a man cannot help telling a lie, and he would not be a man, did he not tell it, but still it is very wrong, and he ought not to do it, and he must trust that the sin will be forgiven him, though he goes about to commit ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... been false. Perhaps just this personal element is necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexing and even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely in the face of spiritism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as the credulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything which ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... great distance from it; compare 1 Kings xviii. 43, 44. Of corporeal things it holds true, as it does of spiritual things, that opposites, placed beside each other, become thereby more distinct. A lower elevation, placed by the side of a depth, appears to the unscientific eye to be much higher than another which is really so. Moreover, the position of Carmel at the extreme western border of the kingdom of Israel must also be considered. He who hides himself there, must certainly be ignorant of any safer place in the whole ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... distinct creative acts for every species. What of it, if it were true? Have those who object to repeated acts of creation ever considered that no progress can be made in knowledge without repeated acts of thinking? And what are thoughts but specific acts of the mind? Why should it then be unscientific to infer that the facts of nature are the result of a similar process, since there is no evidence of any other cause? The world has arisen in some way or other. How it originated is the great question, ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... the history of the race as trivial, the natural sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... did not rise or fall. Why should the solid hill give way at this place, and swallow up a tree? and if the water had any connection with the lake, two hundred feet below and at some distance away, why didn't the water run out? Why should the unscientific traveler have a thing of this kind thrown in his way? ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fail to obey my summons, you will die. Candidly, I do not expect that you will obey. But your death for failure to obey will cause obedience on the part of those I subsequently summon. You will have served a purpose. And please remember that I have no unscientific sentimentality about the value of human life. I carry always in the background of my consciousness the innumerable billions of lives that are to laugh and be happy in future aeons on ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the mischievous idea of Government. 'There is such a thing,' says Chuang Tzu, 'as leaving mankind alone: there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.' All modes of government are wrong. They are unscientific, because they seek to alter the natural environment of man; they are immoral because, by interfering with the individual, they produce the most aggressive forms of egotism; they are ignorant, because ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... unscientific, and, by reaction, credulous. The philosophes, Hume, Voltaire, and others, were exposing, like an ingenious American gentleman, "the mistakes of Moses." The Earl of Marischal told Hume that life had been chemically produced in a laboratory, so what becomes of Creation? Prince ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... you are sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of the naturalness of the supernatural, scepticism even may come to be regarded as unscientific. And those who have wrestled long for a few bare truths to ennoble life and rest their souls in thinking of the future will not be left in doubt. Natural Law, Introduction, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Now, to the unscientific reader it is useless to say more than that the innumerable and varied positions of these glassy particles, some transparent, others semi-transparent or opaque, reflecting the sun's rays in different directions, with a complex ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Definition.—Under this unscientific, yet expressive term, is indicated a chronic diseased condition of the keratogenous membrane, commencing always at the frog, and slowly extending to the sole and wall, characterized by a loss of normal function of the horn ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... it is unscientific to charge dancing with being the direct cause of immorality, when it has been only one in a series of events. The facts warrant not condemnation of dancing as something utterly bad, but rather of allowing dancing to be associated with ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... truth—Paria was the mainland—and if he had not been so bemused by his dreams and theories he might have had some inkling of the real wonder and significance of his discovery. But no; in his profoundly unscientific mind there was little of that patience which holds men back from theorising and keeps them ready to receive the truth. He was patient enough in doing, but in thinking he was not patient at all. No sooner had he observed a fact than he must find a theory which would ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... of the individual must be completed before the procreative power can properly be exercised for the continuance of the race." And in the following extract from his "Principles of Human Physiology," he confirms my statement respecting the unscientific and libertine advice of too many physicians: "The author would say to those of his younger readers who urge the wants of nature as an excuse for the illicit gratification of the sexual passions, 'try the effects of close mental application to some of those ennobling pursuits to which your profession ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... duty from fear that he might not be discriminated from the charlatan. A well-conducted psychotherapeutic treatment as a scientific physician ought to carry it out, is entirely different in meaning and appearance, from the first step of diagnosis to the last treatment of after-effects, from every unscientific faith cure. It is also in no way necessary that the psychotherapist ever leave the path of complete sincerity. There is no reason at all for promising that the patient will be entirely cured if the physician believes that a real cure through suggestion is impossible. The more the true ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... M. Cheve and other advocates of reform in musical notation declare that the people are deprived of this grand source of culture because of the blind, inconsistent and wholly unscientific nature of the ordinary musical notation. At first this seems incredible, but one has only to compare this notation with that elaborated by Emile Cheve after Galin's theory to become convinced that the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... true that early in the nineteenth century Sir Charles Lyell and others tried to disclaim this absurd and unscientific inheritance from Werner's onion-coats; but modern geology has never yet got rid of its essential and its chief characteristic idea, for all our text-books still speak of various successive ages when only certain types of life prevailed ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... impression upon Bentham. "In order to love mankind," he writes, "we must expect little from them." This might, on the lips of a cynic, serve for a formula of that kind of misanthropy which is not more unamiable than it is unscientific. But in the mouth of Helvetius it was a plea for considerateness, for indulgence, and, above all, it was meant for an inducement to patience and sustained endeavour in all dealings with masses of men in society. "Every man," he says, "so long as his ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... general tendency of the profession has been to depreciate the importance of personal and municipal cleanliness, and to inculcate a reliance on drug medicines, vaccination, and other unscientific expedients." ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... Others were discovered near Huggeritgi, others on the hill of Yemmee Gooda, others again near Shapoor, Hyderabad, and other places. All these monuments in the South of India are no doubt extremely interesting; but to call them Celtic, Druidical, or Scythic, is unscientific, or, at all events, exceedingly premature. There is in all architectural monuments a natural or rational, and a conventional, or, it may be, irrational element. A striking agreement in purely conventional features may justify the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... was sprinkled throughout with the satirical wit for which Col. Ingersoll is famous, and concluded by the enumeration of a long list of "unscientific" facts and events ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... puzzled by the discrepancy between my statements and those in the text books. He showed me his note-book, in which I was reported as having in one portion of the lecture championed the most outrageous and unscientific heresies. Of course I denied it, and declared that he had misunderstood me, but on comparing his notes with those of his companions, it became clear that he was right, and that I really had made some most ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suddenly become active in us, we are practically new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. No doubt this is all very unscientific, but so far Science seems to have nothing to ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... servants, the difficulties, trials, and even dangers of whose duties it is impossible for the public at large really to appreciate". He acknowledges that "India is passing through a period of transition. Old pre-possessions and unscientific methods must be cast aside, and the value of the confession must be held at a discount." Bengal policemen fail as egregiously as their British colleagues in coping with professional crime. Burglary is a positive scourge, and the habit ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... tangible answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil's day to the new philosophy. Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as unscientific. ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... earliest beginnings of thought up to a period which is commonly said to have commenced with the publication of the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon. It was of course fruitless of Scientific results, as it was not a Scientific, but an absolutely Unscientific Method, since certainty is the basis of all Science, and since a Method which attempts to deduce Facts from Principles which are not ascertained to be Principles, or Principles from an insufficient accumulation of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to deal especially with the people of color and will, therefore, attract some attention. It is chiefly valuable for the discussion which it will arouse rather than for the information given. It is an unscientific compilation of facts collected from a few sources by a man who has devoted some time to the study of the Negro but just about enough to misunderstand the race. His chief shortcoming consists in his misinformation. For scientific purposes the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... and then we went along in a humdrum way on that level, or even sank back till another great man was vouchsafed to us. Possibly the finest flower of this school of thought is Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. Unscientific as this theory was, it had its beneficent effects, for those heroes or great men served as ideals, and the human mind requires an unattainable ideal. No man can be or do the best he is capable of unless he is ever reaching out toward an ideal that lies beyond his grasp. Tennyson put this truth ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the impression that Taddeo's teaching was unscientific, or merely empiric, or that he himself was a narrow-minded maker of money, intent only on his immediate influence, and hampered by exclusive devotion to practical medicine. Nothing could be farther from the truth than any such impression. Taddeo was not only the head of a great medical school, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... fighting hard, blow succeeding blow in the most unscientific way; but the end was not to be then, for Andrew cried in ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... other good authority—a deceiver of women, a skulk, a dog. I have met with many villains; and I am not hot. But my tendency is to take that fellow by the throat with both hands, and throttle him. Having thoroughly accomplished that, I should prepare to sift the evidence. Unscientific, illogical, brutal, are such desires, as you need not tell me. And yet, madam, they are manly. I hate slow justice; I like it quick—quick, or none at all, I say, so long as it is justice. Creeping justice is, to my mind, little better than slow ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... all the organs of the brain should be distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... it should be remarked that the Christian always tells us that he himself has not the power, that it comes from God, that he asks for it and God gives it. As for the easy explanation of all religious life by "auto-suggestion," we may note that it involves a loose and unscientific use of a more or less scientific theory—never a very safe way to knowledge. In any case, it has been pointed out, the word adds nothing to the number of our facts; nor is it quite clear yet that ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... Congress imposing a burden of 8 per cent. on business profits over and above 8 per cent. on the capital employed, regardless of whether such profits have any relation to war conditions or not, is unscientific ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... lines the story of America's making, as examples illustrating the several kinds of scenery, and what each kind means in terms of world building; in other words, to translate the practical findings of science into unscientific phrase for the reader's increased profit and pleasure, not only in his national parks but in all other scenic places great ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... physical side. They can ride and swim. They go out in all weathers and get wholesomely wet, dirty, and tired. Games are a difficulty, but I want them to be able, if necessary, to do without games. We botanise, we look for nests, we geologise, we study birds through glasses, we garden. It is all very unscientific, but they observe, they perceive, they love the country. Moreover, Maud has a passion for knowing all the village people, and takes the children with her, so that they really know the village-folk ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the battle in a very unscientific way. Of course he came out of the fray with a bleeding face and torn clothes. There was no one near to pity him, and he could only wash his face and hope that the rents would escape Aunt Annie's notice till ...
— A Little Hero • Mrs. H. Musgrave
... their doctrine contains the explanation of the traditional precept, "Support the tone." Their idea is that the throat, being "firmly set," furnishes a secure base for the tone to rest on. This explanation is of course utterly unscientific, and it cannot be said to throw any light on the meaning of the precept. "Singing on the breath" is also referred to this system of breath-control, but with no more coherence than ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... window-sill to the ground with a heavy thud, and did not move again. The ball had penetrated his brain, and he was the victim of his unscientific observations. But the lieutenant did not remove his gaze from the open window. It seemed very like slaughter to shoot down the enemy in this manner, and a twinge of conscience disturbed him. But he reasoned that he had ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... else. Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... to give up to it the necessary time and thought. As for Lydia, she got rid of her cards as fast as possible, as if with the deluded hope that when they were all played, she might find time for something else. On the afternoon in question her game was more unscientific than usual. Criticism was deterred from articulate expression by the common feeling in regard to her, assiduously fostered by Flora Burgess' continuous references to her in Society Notes as the coming social ruler of Endbury's ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... spring of memory, and conscience showed me what it thought of me. I was ashamed of my littleness and of my unscientific attitude of mind in wilfully ignoring the greatest facts of my experience, and I was also ashamed of my ingratitude. And so, in an unguarded moment, that is, in a moment when my will was off its guard and my judgment asserted its right to be heard, I gave my answer to the question and the answer ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... mining industries in the world! To think that the Government of Canada actually allows the refining of that ore to be done outside of its own country! Folly, folly, criminal folly! But it is all the same in this country, too. The mining work in America is unscientific, slovenly, unorganised, wasteful. I am sorry to say," he continued, turning suddenly upon Larry, "in your western coal fields you waste more in the smoke of your coke ovens than you make out of your coal ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... energies to the composition of such masterpieces as Shakspere's could possibly concern himself at the same time with weaving into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, the cipher systems are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, applied to any writings whatever can be made to 'prove' anything that one likes, and indeed have been discredited in the hands of their own inventors by being made to 'prove' far too much. Third, it has been demonstrated more than once that the verbal coincidences ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... disposing of household waste by piping it to a brook or letting it flow down a sandy side hill some distance from the house. Those were the methods of the ignorant and unscientific past. The means of disposal recommended by sanitary experts are those in which the wastes undergo a bacterial fermentation which finally renders the sewage odorless and harmless. It can be accomplished by a septic tank or a tight cesspool. The latter with its two chambers is really a variety ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... arrangements of fact, as must appeal to any naturally intelligent mind. But the history of scientific progress assures the efficiency of this method; and there is no strong reason for the supposition that, because the processes of the higher science remain above the mental reach of the unscientific classes, the conclusions of that science will not be generally accepted. The dimensions and weights of planets; the distances and the composition of stars; the law of gravitation; the signification of heat, light, and color; the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... that it is converted into a brake or drag with the inevitable result that the speed undergoes a severe diminution. A full-rigged airship such as the Parseval, for instance, may present a picturesque appearance, but it is severely unscientific, inasmuch as if it were possible to eliminateor to reduce the air-resistance offered by the ropes, the speed efficiency might be raised by some sixty per cent and that without any augmentation of the propelling effort. As a matter of fact Zeppelin solved this vexatious problem unconsciously. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... not fit them, and the world's work suffers proportionately from this misapplication of energy. The mischief is abundantly clear, but the remedy, if we do not shut our eyes to it, is tolerably clear also. Just as this condition of things is largely due to our unscientific neglect of variations in character and the wooden system of education which this neglect has produced, so we may expect to see its evils disappear by an abolition of the one and a reform of the other. If the world be indeed a stage, with all humanity for its corps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... while we would not be so unscientific as to deny for a moment that it would be better for every woman to get her advice and instruction concerning the use of contraceptive directly from a doctor, nevertheless it is impossible to overestimate ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... stand the ostriches, occupying the cases (107, 109). Some naturalists refuse to class ostriches with the order of wading birds, and elevate them to the dignity of a distinct order, Cursores, or runners; but in the museum, as the visitor will perceive, they are at the head of the wading order. Unscientific people know more about the ostrich than about most other birds of foreign climes. Few people have not heard that the egg of the ostrich weighs three pounds—that the sun is the bird's Cantelo—that he has only two toes to each ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... can rise again if the soil remains. Some examination will show that the most vital part of the whole conservation matter is the preservation of the soil, and that soil conservation is 99 per cent the prevention of erosion. Soil robbery by unscientific agriculture can go to its most extreme lengths and reduce the soil to the depths of non-productivity; but scientific agriculture can, by the addition of humus and some fertilizer, soon restore such soil to high fertility. In these conditions of exhaustion the loss to fertility by soil leaching ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... respect to this whole chapter, we must remember always that it is intended for the instruction of all mankind, not for the learned reader only; and that therefore the most simple and natural interpretation is the likeliest in general to be the true one. An unscientific reader knows little about the manner in which the volume of the atmosphere surrounds the earth; but I imagine that he could hardly glance at the sky when rain was falling in the distance, and see the level line of the bases of the clouds from which the shower descended, without being able ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... reasoning. He saw that it was necessary to prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible. But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given precisely the same conditions, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... not say much even to his wife about his discovery. He brooded upon it in a curious way. He found that these unscientific singing lessons stimulated him in his own study. After Miss Kronborg left him he often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his brain which he had sometimes lost for weeks together under the grind ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... little, but before I could follow it up he had recovered his guard. In a moment I was at him again, and as we were neither of us great masters of the noble art of self-defence, we kept hewing and slashing away at each other in a most unscientific manner for several minutes, till we were both of us covered with gashes from head to foot, and the blood was flowing copiously down into our very shoes. At last, from very weariness and loss of blood, we dropped the points of our swords as if by mutual ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... relics of old Ritual treatises, hymns, imprecations, and similar religious texts, with works of art, altars, and statues, and with popular traditions and folklore. The results, again, are examined in the light of the Vedas, the Egyptian monuments, and generally of everything that, to the unscientific eye, seems most turbidly obscure in itself, and most hopelessly remote from the subject in hand. The aid of Philology will not be rejected because Longus, or Longinus, has {285b} meanly argued that her services must be accepted with cautious diffidence. On the contrary, Philology ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... people eatin' the flesh of the cow, roasted in an unscientific manner," he says. "One slab of that is shy just forty-eight calories and they's more proteins in a filetted bean!" He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a little package. "If I can draw up a chair here," he says, "I'll have dinner ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... viperous? . . . The Catholic Church, at least, so teaches. . . . She believes in the corruption of human nature. She believes in the literal meaning of Scripture. She has no wish to paraphrase away St. Paul's awful words, that "in his flesh dwelleth no good thing," by the unscientific euphemisms of "fallen nature" or "corrupt humanity." The boasted discovery of phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and passion reside in this material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been anticipated by her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which puts to shame the irreverent ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... so," said the doctor. "Unfortunately, More is not at all close or accurate in his descriptions; he has a decidedly unscientific mind, and so one cannot feel sure; yet from his general statements I think I can decide pretty nearly upon the nature and the scientific name of each one of his birds and animals. It is quite evident to me ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... are to be unhesitatingly accepted as statements made upon the authority of God. They turn to its pages, and they find historical errors, arithmetical mistakes, scientific blunders (or, rather, blunders most unscientific), inconsistencies, and manifold contradictions; and, what is far worse, they find that the most horrible crimes are committed by men who calmly plead in justification of their terrible misdeeds the imperturbable "God said." The heart and conscience of man indignantly ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... of the Society of Chemical Industry the unscientific character of British methods was again emphasised. So, too, at the Edinburgh meeting ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... happened in your office, you'd have to hush it up, now so many bishops are atheists." The Doctor is a less typical figure. He is the inconsistencies of science, kindly but with little joy of life, and extremely Chestertonian, which is to say unscientific. Morris is the younger generation, obsessed with business and getting on, and intellectually incapable of facing a religious fact. Patricia is the Chestertonian good woman, too essentially domestic to be ever fundamentally disturbed. The ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... existence of the soul after death seems to be an innate belief. It has been ascribed to the influence of the superstition about ghosts; but that superstition is only an unscientific form of the larger faith in the persistence of being. Where did this conviction originate? We think only of such things as have been experienced. No thought is ever entirely original. Even imagination ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... against this theory. We can only glance at some of the considerations which Darwin adduces, or will be sure to adduce in the future and fuller exposition which is promised. To display them in such wise as to indoctrinate the unscientific reader would require a volume. Merely to refer to them in the most general terms would suffice for those familiar with scientific matters, but would scarcely enlighten those who are not. Wherefore let these trust the impartial Pictet, who freely admits, that, "in the absence of sufficient ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... exercises, especially at first, and not too frequent nor prolonged Turkish baths. Epsom salts baths have little effect. If salts are used habitually internally, they are harmful. All of these are unscientific and unsuccessful, and the things they bring on are ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... himself in another and more beautiful world. Looking around him with a childlike wonder, he rose and made his way back to the cabin. He listened at the door, but heard no sound. He entered, found the room empty, and gave himself up to rude and unscientific speculation as to the nature of this mysterious adventure. Nothing helped to solve the problem, until at last he discovered the Bible, which the Quaker had hurled at the snake, lying upon the hearthstone. It did not explain ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... of a nation than an army, were swept out of existence. The Teutons were destroyed on the 20th of July, 102. In the year following, the same fate overtook their comrades. The Cimbri had forced the passes through the mountains. They had beaten the unscientific patrician Catulus, and had driven him back on the Po. But Marius came to his rescue. The Cimbri were cut to pieces near Mantua, in the summer of 101, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... intimately connected with the questions as to its rise, the system of American slavery, and the whole colonial policy of the eighteenth century, that it is difficult to isolate it, and at the same time to avoid superficiality on the one hand, and unscientific narrowness of view on the other. While I could not hope entirely to overcome such a difficulty, I nevertheless trust that I have succeeded in rendering this monograph a small contribution to the scientific study of slavery ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... men have risen as yet. Moreover, the priests in the later books have given us some mystic hymns containing vigorous and pregnant speculations on the deepest questions of existence, speculations which are indeed fanciful and unscientific, but which nevertheless have in them the germs of the powerful idealism that is destined to arise in centuries to come. On the other hand, the priests have cast their system in the mould of ritualism. Ritual, ceremony, sacrifice, professional benefit—these are their predominant interests. ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are going ahead at once. This kind of boating is calculated to drive an impatient man mad in a week. The boatmen are the awkwardest, the stupidest, and the most unscientific on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... or fantastic in trying to ascertain the tendencies of economic development; nothing unscientific in trying to read out of the pages of social evolution such lessons as may be contained therein. So long as we bear in mind that our forecasts must not take the form of plans for the arbitrary shaping of the future, specifications of the Cooeperative Commonwealth, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... the house into a fresh scrape. He now went to the doctor, and asked for a powerful drastic. Bailey gave him two pills, or rather boluses, containing croton oil—inter alia; for Bailey was one of the farraginous fools of the unscientific science. Armed with this weapon of destruction, Cooper entered Alfred's bedroom at night, and ordered him to take them: he refused. Cooper whistled, and four attendants came. Alfred knew he should soon be powerless. He lost no time, sprang at Cooper, and with his long arm landed a blow that ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... New York on the 1st of October, 1830. The monotony of a sea voyage, with unscientific people, is tiresome beyond description. The journal of a single day is the history of a month. You rise in the morning, and having performed the necessary ablutions, mount on deck,—"Well Captain, how does she head?"—"South-east by east"—(our course is east by south).—"Bad, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... saw what the little librarian had meant by an authority restored. The impartial method of modern science had become so firmly established in the mind of mankind by education and reading that the ancient unscientific science of the Roman Empire, in which orthodox Christianity was clothed, no longer carried authority. In so far as modern science had discovered truth, religion had no quarrel with it. And if theology ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... little vague. The theft of a skeleton scarcely appeared to his unscientific mind to be a realisable thing. The Professor ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... scientific and unscientific, much had been made of the hiatus between man and the rest of the higher mammalia, and it is no wonder that issue was first joined on this part of the controversy. I have no wish to revive past and happily forgotten controversies; but I must state the simple fact that the distinctions ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... human sympathy for the poor unfortunates of our race is in these words expressed,—a statement simply of the inevitable consequences of unscientific and anti-social methods of dealing with ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... several times, pondered over the obscurities in some, smiled at the absurdities in others and benefited by the truths in a few. Yet, with all their profound explanations of theories and their verbose defense of hopelessly unscientific methods, the stammerer would be disappointed indeed, should he attempt to find in the entire collection a practical and understandable discussion ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... "dream interpretation" were and still are indeed fraught with unpleasant, unscientific associations. They remind one of all sorts of childish, superstitious notions, which make up the thread and woof of dream books, read by none but the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... facetious Mr C—-. There were ten or twelve authors, or gentlemen suspected of authorship, fourteen or fifteen chemists, all scientific of course, one colonel, half-a-dozen captains, and, to crown all, a city knight and his lady, besides their general acquaintance, unscientific and unprofessional. For a beginning this was very well; and the company departed very hungry, but highly delighted with ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... investigations of this kind does not appear at first sight, to unscientific men. But those who have paid even a little attention to the methods and processes by which grand discoveries have been made, and useful inventions have been perfected, can scarcely have failed to come to the conclusion that the search ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... may be imagined, when I found, that the mere statement of facts and of views, long familiar to me as part of the common scientific property of continental workers, raised a sort of storm in this country, not only by exciting the wrath of unscientific persons whose pet prejudices they seemed to touch, but by giving rise to quite superfluous explosions on the part of some who should have been ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... harmony, which brings it about that the more one gives, the more the other receives, and vice-versa, as in certain cases in mathematics, where things are multiplied by themselves without end. This problem can only be explained to unscientific people, by asking them to look into their Venetian glasses, in which are to be seen thousands of faces produced by one alone. Thus, in the heart of two lovers, the roses of pleasure multiply within them in a manner which causes ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... houses, enriching by a thousand accidents of light the loveliest prospect which the human eye could behold." Rousseau is the spiritual ancestor of John Burroughs, Thompson-Seton, and all our scientific, unscientific and sentimental friends who flood us with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... of the devices for control. With this machine, in the autumn of 1903, we made a number of flights in which we remained in the air for over a minute, often soaring for a considerable time in one spot, without any descent at all. Little wonder that our unscientific assistant should think the only thing needed to keep it indefinitely in the air would be a coat of feathers to ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... India, etc., in which I did not find some one who had gone out from that meeting with the power of God upon them. For me to doubt that God fills men with the Holy Spirit in answer to prayer would be thoroughly unscientific and irrational. I know He does. And in a matter like this, I would rather have one ounce of believing experience than ten tons ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... to think of it, the whole theory seems absurd. It is unscientific. It is not even a case of mesmerism. If he had said that he hypnotised his victims, the matter would assume a totally different aspect. I admit that something is wrong somewhere, and that the home of Reginald Clarke is no healthful abode for me. But you must also remember ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... true that one becomes much coarser. One acquires a habit of talking with scandalous freedom about vital matters which among the unscientific educated are kept hid in the dark—and go fusty there. But I do not think there is much vulgarity to be infected with here. Coarseness and vulgarity are incompatibles. It was well said in a book written not long ago, that "Coarseness reveals but vulgarity hides." Vulgarity is chiefly ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... will, or used the word when it could be avoided. In Latin, the term used was "liberum arbitrium,"—free choice,—and in French to this day it remains in strictness "libre arbitre" still. From Saint Augustine downwards the Church was never so unscientific as to admit of liberty beyond the faculty of choosing between paths, some leading through the Church and some not, but all leading to the next world; as a criminal might be allowed the liberty of choosing between ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... he said good-night to those near, let his head sink down, gazed for a few minutes at a brilliant star in the zenith which his father had told him was Aldebaran—one which he recollected well from its unscientific name—the Bull's-eye, he closed his own and began dreaming at once, but not pleasantly. The fact was that he had eaten a very hearty supper and lain down to sleep very soon afterwards, two rather foolish things to do if a calm and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... washing up. And moreover they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a glass of lime-water ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... meaning to those who have not made special researches into the subject. And the cause of the distinctions in the qualities of different teas, as of black and green, are still matters of uncertainty and controversy among many dealers of teas, as well as among unscientific travelers and some untraveled scientists. The enthusiastic collector of writings upon tea by self qualified experts, will find himself involved in a maze of contradictory assertions and opinions from which there is no ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... a century passed between the making of the first practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... them in such a way that the reader may be able to interpret their meaning. He has endeavored not to write a history but to summarize what other persons are now publishing as selected topics in this field. In other words, he has added to the unscientific history of the Negro, which has hitherto appeared in the so-called text books on Negro history, facts culled from various sources but so improperly used as not to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... in their cheap materials; it's in their unscientific construction, in the fact that they usually do more harm ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... be crowned. Engineers of less military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the engineers. Sentries warn you off ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... need not be urged, reflects an unscientific state of mind. The real cause of the rejection of the ideas probably is the shrinking of over-busy men, in middle life, and absorbed in teaching and in special problems, from the intellectual task of restudying ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... exception to the term and especially to the idea while the polygenist, unless he be a corporealist, may not. As to the other class of scientists, they would take objection to the idea even of a human monad, and call it "unscientific." What relation does the monad bear to the atom? None whatever to the atom or molecule as in the scientific conception at present. It can neither be compared with the microscopic organism classed once among polygastric infusoria, and now ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... something very surprising and mysterious; and on seeing how much it resembles the methods which common sense employs in ordinary life, they heave a sigh of disappointment and say, "Is that all?" Binet reminds us that the difference between the scientific and unscientific way of doing a thing is not necessarily a difference in the nature of the method; it is often merely a difference in exactness. Science does the thing better, because it does it ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... and should have skillful handling to get the best results. Yet the farming is very unscientific. The first plowing is shallow and subsequent cultivation is done almost entirely with hoes. When a Hampton graduate began some new methods last year the people came for miles to see his big plow. It is said that there was ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... in truth much perturbed. It was not pleasing to have the greatness of his idol explained on unscientific principles. He did not like that idea of the jumps. Jumping sounded unscientific, and what could be worse than to say of a man that he was not scientific? Preposterous to say the greatest things of science ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... quarrel with Protestants, Catholics, or any other sect. They need to be understood as following the divine Principle God, Love and not imagined to be unscientific worshippers ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... man during the human stage of evolution; he is the nearest correspondence, in fact, to the ordinary unscientific conception of the soul. He lives unchanged (except for his growth) from the moment of individualization until humanity is transcended and merged into divinity. He is in no way affected by what we call birth and death; what we commonly consider ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... foods (bread, fruits, &c.). Were this attempted, poisoning would result from the large quantity of alkaloid. The food value of half a spoonful or thereabouts of cocoa is insignificant. Certain much advertised cocoa mixtures are ridiculous in their pretentions, unscientific in preparation, and ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... Immoral, licentious, anarchical, unscientific—call them by what names you will—yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland—a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live was then ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member—the alpha and the omega: but then it is to be recollected that I speak from the ground of a large and profound personal experience: whereas most of the unscientific {13} authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of those who have written expressly on the materia medica, make it evident, from the horror they express of it, that their experimental knowledge ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... outset I gave all employees clearly to understand that such an unscientific and ungenerous spirit would not be tolerated in the Bureau of Government Laboratories. The field which opened before us was enormous. There was work enough and more than enough for all, and we should at the outset adopt a spirit of friendliness ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... is repeated at appreciable intervals has to occur very often before the unscientific mind will perceive the law of its repetition. There was a little red-haired Englishman, John Gilby by name, who travelled frequently that way. It was a good while before the loungers at the station remarked ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... immediately upon the employee, who is almost invariably unable to bear it, and ultimately upon the community, which is taxed for the support of the indigent; and that our present system is uncertain, unscientific, and wasteful, and fosters a spirit of antagonism between employer and employee which it is for the interest of the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... ancient life of the globe, beginning twenty-five million and ending ten million years ago. The first of the three sections into which this period of life is divided is known as the Silurian age, the age of invertebrates. The word invertebrate is an unscientific but convenient term under which we embrace all the animals below those having backbones. This period is called the age of invertebrates because, although there is an enormous wealth of animal and plant life in the Silurian, there are no backboned animals except the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... characteristics of the enemy are among the principal factors which a man of genius considers, and it was to this as much as to any other one trait that Nelson owed his dazzling successes. On the other hand, the French admiral attacked in a wholly unscientific manner, ship against ship, without an attempt to concentrate on a part of the enemy, or even trying to keep him in play until the French squadron of eight ships-of-the-line in Messina, near by, could join. ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... unscientific spelling of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that is to say, in the system of every one except Lhuyd, and occasionally of Gwavas and Tonkin when they followed Lhuyd, the English values of the ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... me therefor that it is not unscientific to inquire whether the similarities of the various Dakotan languages to various European languages, modern and ancient, so often remarked are or are not accidental. It is very easy to see that the Dakota resembles the English in vocabulary much more than it ...
— The Dakotan Languages, and Their Relations to Other Languages • Andrew Woods Williamson
... tribes, nearly all of whom practice elaborate systems of therapeutics. We shall have occasion to see that even within historic times the particular therapeutic measures employed were often crude, and, as we are accustomed to say, unscientific; but even the crudest of them are really based upon scientific principles, inasmuch as their application implies the deduction of principles of action from previous observations. Certain drugs are applied to appease certain symptoms of disease because in the belief of the medicine-man ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science opposes ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... had not the peculiarity of the variety, the progeny has. Between the two is the dim or obscure region of the formation of a new individual, in some unknown part of which, and in some wholly unknown way, the difference is intercalated. To introduce necessity here is gratuitous and unscientific; but here you must have it ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... are the great prominent features of the gallery, that involuntarily, on the part of the visitor, force themselves on his attention. They at once pressed themselves on the attention of the intelligent though unscientific mechanics, and, I doubt not, still dwell vividly in their recollections; and I now ask you, when you again visit the national museum, and verify the fact of the great prominence of these classes of objects, to bear in mind, that the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... making Galileo's compulsory denial of the earth's motion binding on all Christians as a theological doctrine. Infidels have a vast deal to say about such an abominable manifestation of ecclesiastic tyranny and unscientific and unscriptural nonsense. All intelligent Roman Catholics of to-day reject the judgment of Popes Paul IV. and Urban VIII. as absurd, and scientifically and scripturally false. There is not so much as a hint at papal ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880 |
