Quotes4study

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

Next, let us consider another generally accepted observation concerning the nature of the fine arts, and one, this time, relating to the disposition and state of mind of the practising artist himself. While for success in other arts it is only necessary to learn their rules and to apply them until practice gives facility, in the fine arts, it is commonly and justly said, rules and their application will carry but a little way towards success. All that can depend on rules, on knowledge, and on the application of knowledge by practice, the artist must indeed acquire, and the acquisition is often very complicated and laborious. But outside of and beyond such acquisitions he must trust to what is called genius or imagination, that is, to the spontaneous working together of an incalculably complex group of faculties, reminiscences, preferences, emotions, instincts in his constitution. This characteristic of the activities of the artist is a direct consequence or corollary of the fundamental fact that the art he practices is independent of utility. A utilitarian end is necessarily a determinate and prescribed end, and to every end which is determinate and prescribed there must be one road which is the best. Skill in any useful art means knowing practically, by rules and the application of rules, the best road to the particular ends of that art. Thus the farmer, the engineer, the carpenter, the builder so far as he is not concerned with the look of his buildings, the weaver so far as he is not concerned with the designing of the patterns which he weaves, possesses each his peculiar skill, but a skill to which fixed problems are set, and which, if it indulges in new inventions and combinations at all, can indulge them only for the sake of an improved solution of those particular problems. The solution once found, the invention once made, its rules can be written down, or at any rate its practice can be imparted to others who will apply it in their turn. Whereas no man can write down, in a way that others can act upon, how Beethoven conquered unknown kingdoms in the world of harmony, or how Rembrandt turned the aspects of gloom, squalor and affliction into pictures as worthy of contemplation as those into which the Italians before him had turned the aspects of spiritual exaltation and shadowless day. The reason why the operations of the artist thus differ from the operations of the ordinary craftsman or artificer is that his ends, being ends other than useful, are not determinate nor fixed as theirs are. He has large liberty to choose his own problems, and may solve each of them in a thousand different ways according to the prompting of his own ordering or creating instincts. The musical composer has the largest liberty of all. Having learned what is learnable in his art, having mastered the complicated and laborious rules of musical form, having next determined the particular class of the work which he is about to compose, he has then before him the whole inexhaustible world of appropriate successions and combinations of emotional sound. He is merely directed and not fettered, in the case of song, cantata, oratorio or opera, by the sense of the words which he has to set. The value of the result depends absolutely on his possessing or failing to possess powers which can neither be trained in nor communicated to any man. And this double freedom, alike from practical service and from the representation of definite objects, is what makes music in a certain sense the typical fine art, or art of arts. Architecture shares one-half of this freedom. It has not to copy or represent natural objects; for this service it calls in sculpture to its aid; but architecture is without the other half of freedom altogether. The architect has a sphere of liberty in the disposition of his masses, lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and ornamented surface, and the rest; but upon this sphere he can only enter on condition that he at the same time fulfils the strict practical task of supplying the required accommodation, and obeys the strict mechanical necessities imposed by the laws of weight, thrust, support, resistance and other properties of solid matter. The sculptor again, the painter, the poet, has each in like manner his sphere of necessary facts, rules and conditions corresponding to the nature of his task. The sculptor must be intimately versed both in the surface aspects and the inner mechanism of the human frame alike in rest and motion, and in the rules and conditions for its representation in solid form; the painter in a much more extended range of natural facts and appearances, and the rules and conditions for representing them on a plane surface; the poet's art of words has its own not inconsiderable basis of positive and disciplined acquisition. So far as rules, precepts, formulas and other communicable laws or secrets can carry the artist, so far also the spectator can account for, analyse, and, so to speak, tabulate the effects of his art. But the essential character of the artist's operation, its very bloom and virtue, lies in those parts of it which fall outside this range of regulation on the one hand and analysis on the other. His merit varies according to the felicity with which he is able, in that region, to exercise his free choice and frame his individual ideal, and according to the tenacity with which he strives to grasp and realize his choice, or to attain perfection according to that ideal. Entry: I

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 3 "Fenton, Edward" to "Finistere"     1910-1911

CYTOLOGY (from [Greek: kytos], a hollow vessel, and [Greek: logos], science), the scientific study of the "cells" or living units of protoplasm (q.v.), of which plants and animals are composed. All the higher, and the great majority of the lower, plants and animals are composed of a vast number of these vital units or "cells." In the case of many microscopic forms, however, the entire organism, plant or animal, consists throughout life of a single cell. Familiar examples of these "unicellular" forms are Bacteria and Diatoms among the plants, and Foraminifera and Infusoria among the animals. In all cases, however, whether the cell-unit lives freely as a unicellular organism or forms an integral part of a multicellular individual, it exhibits in itself all the phenomena characteristic of living things. Each cell assimilates food material, whether this is obtained by its own activity, as in the majority of the protozoa, or is brought, as it were, to its own door by the blood stream, as in the higher Metazoa, and builds this food material into its own substance, a process accompanied by respiration and excretion and resulting in growth. Each cell exhibits in greater or less degree "irritability," or the power of responding to stimuli; and finally each cell, at some time in its life, is capable of reproduction. It is evident therefore that in the multicellular forms all the complex manifestations of life are but the outcome of the co-ordinated activities of the constituent cells. The latter are indeed, as Virchow has termed them, "vital units." It is therefore in these vital units that the explanation of vital phenomena must be sought (see PHYSIOLOGY). As Verworn[1] said, "It is to the cell that the study of every bodily function sooner or later drives us. In the muscle cell lies the problem of the heart beat and that of muscular contraction; in the gland cell reside the causes of secretion; in the epithelial cell, in the white blood corpuscle, lies the problem of the absorption of food, and the secrets of the mind are hidden in the ganglion cell." So also the problems of development and inheritance have shown themselves to be cell problems, while the study of disease has produced a "cellular pathology." The most important problems awaiting solution in biology are cell problems. Entry: CYTOLOGY

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 8 "Cube" to "Daguerre, Louis"     1910-1911

Of Shakespeare's other plays the several groups exercised a more direct influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same fidelity as that of the English _histories_, even more effectively taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes, and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his predecessors, as well as with his successors, "_is_ that nature which they paint and draw." He threw open to modern tragedy a range of hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never again restrict itself without a consciousness of having renounced its enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive. The comedies of Shakespeare accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference to any method of classification deserving to be called precise; and several of them are comedies only according to a purely technical use of the term. In those in which the instinct of reader or spectator recognizes the comic interest to be supreme, it is still of its nature incidental to the progress of the action; for the criticism seems just, as well as in agreement with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare's process of construction, that among all his comedies not more than a single one[185] is in both design and effect a comedy of character proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled wealth of his invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, he left much to be done by his successors; while the truest secrets of his comic art, which interweaves fancy with observation, draws wisdom from the lips of fools, and imbues with character what all other hands would have left shadowy, monstrous or trivial, are among the things inimitable belonging to the individuality of his poetic genius. Entry: P

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 7 "Drama" to "Dublin"     1910-1911

The great puzzle connected with the name Geber lies in the character of the writings attributed to him, their style and matter differentiating them strongly from those of even the best authors of the later alchemical period, and making it difficult to account for their existence at all. The researches of M.P.E. Berthelot threw a great deal of light on this question. Taking the six treatises enumerated above he concluded, after critical examination, that the two last may be disregarded as of later date than the others, and that the _De investigatione perfectionis_, the _De inventione_ and the _Liber fornacum_ are merely extracts from or summaries of the _Summa perfectionis_ with later additions. The _Summa_ he therefore regarded as representative of the work of the Latin Geber, and study of it convinced him that it contains no indication of an Arabic origin, either in its method, which is conspicuous for clearness of reasoning and logical co-ordination of material, or in its facts, or in the words and persons quoted. Without going so far as to deny that some words and phrases may be taken from the writings of the Arabian Jaber, he was disposed to hold that it is the original work of some unknown Latin author, who wrote it in the second half of the 13th century and put it under the patronage of the venerated name of Geber. The MS. of this work in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris dates from about the year 1300. Berthelot further investigated Arabic MSS. existing in the Paris library and in the university of Leiden, and containing works attributed to Jaber, and had translations made of six treatises--two, of which he gives the titles as _Livre de la royauté_ and _Petit Livre de la miséricorde_,--from Paris, and four--_Livre des balances, Livre de la miséricorde, Livre de la concentration_ and _Livre de la mercure orientale_--from Leiden. Berthelot was not prepared to assert that these treatises were actually written by Jaber, but he held it certain that they are works written in Arabic between the 9th and 12th centuries, at a period anterior to the relations of the Latins with the Arabs. In style these treatises are entirely different from the _Summa_ of Geber. Their language is vague and allegorical, full of allusions and pious Mussulman invocations; the author continually announces that he is about to speak without mystery or reserve, but all the same never gives any precise details of the secrets he professes to reveal. He holds the doctrine that everything endowed with an apparent quality possesses an opposite occult quality in much the same terms as it is found in Latin writers of the middle ages, but he makes no allusion to the theory of the generation of the metals by sulphur and mercury, a theory generally attributed to Geber, who also added arsenic to the list. Again he fully accepts the influence of the stars on the production of the metals, whereas the Latin Geber disputes it, and in general the chemical knowledge of the two is on a different plane. Here again the inference is that the Latin treatises printed from the 15th century onwards as the work of Geber are not authentic, regarded as translations of the Arabic author Jaber, always supposing that the Arabic MSS. transcribed and translated for Berthelot are really, as they profess to be, the work of Jaber, and as representative of his opinions and attainments. Entry: GEBER

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 11, Slice 5 "Gassendi, Pierre" to "Geocentric"     1910-1911