What is Man?

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G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1924 - Evolution - 331 pages
 

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Page 37 - Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands ; Thou hast put all things under his feet : All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field ; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, And whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
Page 261 - They are, under the point of view of religion and philosophy, wholly rotten, and from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head there is no soundness in them.
Page 42 - List rather to the deeds I did for mortals ; how, being fools before, I made them wise and true in aim of soul. And let me tell you, — not as taunting men, But teaching you the intention of my gifts, — How, first beholding, they beheld in vain, And, hearing, heard not, but, like shapes in dreams, Mixed all things wildly down the tedious time...
Page 182 - The more bountifully the Parent is gifted by nature, the more rare will be his good fortune if he begets a son who is as richly endowed as himself, and still more so if he has a son who is endowed yet more largely.
Page 116 - And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together : for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together.
Page 182 - Parent is gifted by nature, the more rare will be his good fortune if he begets a son who is as richly endowed as himself, and still more so if he has a son who is endowed yet more largely. But the law is even-handed ; it levies an equal succession-tax on the transmission of badness as of goodness. If it discourages the extravagant hopes of a gifted parent that his children will inherit all his powers ; it no less discountenances extravagant fears that they will inherit all his weakness and disease.
Page 183 - In the tenth generation a man has (theoretically) 1024 tenth great-grandparents. He is eventually the product of a population of this size, and their mean can hardly differ from that of the general population. It is the heavy weight of this mediocre ancestry which causes the son of an exceptional father to regress towards the general population mean ; it is the balance of this sturdy commonplaceness which enables the son of a degenerate father to escape the whole burden of the parental ill.
Page 234 - By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
Page 4 - We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar systemwith all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Page 46 - For his successful progress, as far as the savage state, man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger : his exceptional physical organization ; his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity and his imitativeness ; his ruthless and ferocious destructiveness when his anger is roused by opposition.

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