Letters and Social Aims

The perception of matter is made the common-sense, and for cause. This was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn…

Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on American manners. I do not think it is to be resented. Rather, if we are wise, we shall…

I do not know any kind of history, except the event of a battle, to which people listen with more interest than to any anecdote of…

Men are made up of potences. We are magnets in an iron globe. We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage…

A taste for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only joker in nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds,…

Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked…

Address read before the Φ Β Κ Society at Cambridge, July 18, 1867.

To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna in 1856, we owe our best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German,…

It was Watt who told King George III. that he dealt in an article of which kings were said to be fond,—Power. ’Tis certain that the one…

There is a prize which we are all aiming at, and the more power and goodness we have, so much more the energy of that aim. Every human…

In the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king, was deliberating on receiving the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles…