The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting t...ogether in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices tha...t will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable ...of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and... conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the... secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful: it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reas...on. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind, an order, a symmetry, and comeliness in the moral world. And as the eye perceiveth the one, so the mind doth by a certain interior sense perceive the other, which sense, talent, or faculty, is ever quickest and purest in the noblest minds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province of... woman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »