The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, c...oncentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dri...ed,--very dry, I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks,--which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off. They do not walk without their bed. Some, to me, seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations are for them everlastingly settled,--as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Greeks would not have called the ocean atrugetos, or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by th...e light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that "the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,"Mthough not of vegetable life.... The dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way to the heavens, for, "in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water." We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as atrugetos, or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the "laboratory of continents."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »