Strictly speaking, Natural Selection is not a cause at all, but is the mode of operation of a certain quite limited class of causes.
More Quotes from Chauncey Wright:
The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.Chauncey Wright
Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.
Chauncey Wright
And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.
Chauncey Wright
Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better evidence.
Chauncey Wright
All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.
Chauncey Wright
Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.
Chauncey Wright
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What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
Rabindranath Tagore
As it happened, I had a friend who was a good person who liked to present himself as a dreadful one. Using him as a role model, I created the first Buck Godot strip.
Phil Foglio