Circumstance Quotes (7)
An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.
'General Considerations Concerning Scientific Apparatus', 1876. In W. D. Niven (ed.), The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890), Vol. 2, 505.
Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge.
Culture (1931), 636.
See also: | Chance (33) | Coast (3) | Control (11) | Knowledge (330) | Magic (8) | Ritual (3) | Safety (8)
Men make their own history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past. The legacy of the dead generations weighs like an alp upon the brains of the living.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.
My Religion, translated by Huntington Smith (3rd Ed., 1885), 121.
The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.
Philosophia Botanica (1751), aphorism 162. Trans. Frans A. Statfleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735-1789 (1971), 67.
See also: | Art (25) | Class (3) | Diversity (16) | Evolution (229) | Genus (7) | Nature (243) | Order (21) | Species (49) | Variety (4)
The physiological combustion theory takes as its starting point the fundamental principle that the amount of heat that arises from the combustion of a given substance is an invariable quantity–i.e., one independent of the circumstances accompanying the combustion–from which it is more specifically concluded that the chemical effect of the combustible materials undergoes no quantitative change even as a result of the vital process, or that the living organism, with all its mysteries and marvels, is not capable of generating heat out of nothing.
Bemerkungen über das mechanische Aequivalent der Wärme [Remarks on the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat] (1851), 17-9. Trans. Kenneth L. Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (1993), 240.
See also: | Change (40) | Combustion (9) | Conclusion (24) | Fundamental (6) | Generation (9) | Heat (22) | Independent (6) | Life (155) | Marvel (2) | Mystery (27) | Organism (25) | Physiology (28) | Principle (31) | Process (15) | Quantitative (3) | Reaction (23) | Theory (179)
Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being and is subject to the law of the mental unity of crowds.
The Crowd (1895), 58-9.
