Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And thus, when they became commingled during the Glacial period, the northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms.

On the theory of natural selection the extinction of old forms and the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected together.

Wollaston, that generally when varieties intermediate between two other forms occur, they are much rarer numerically than the forms which they connect.

Under genera, including the most polymorphic forms, Mr. Babington gives 251 species, whereas Mr. Bentham gives only 112,—a difference of 139 doubtful forms!

Thus the appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms, both natural and artificial, are bound together.

His semantical rules take various forms, and to make my point I shall have to distinguish certain of the forms.

To God, truly, the Giver and Architect of Forms, and it may be to the angels and higher intelligences, it belongs to have an affirmative knowledge of forms immediately, and from the first contemplation.

The framework for this system is constructed by introducing into the language new expressions with suitable rules: (1) numerals like "five" and sentence forms like "there are five books on the table"; (2) the general term "number" for the new entities, and sentence forms like "five is a number"; (3) expressions for properties of numbers (e.g. "odd," "prime"), relations (e.g., "greater than") and functions (e.g. "plus"), and sentence forms like "two plus three is five"; (4) numerical variables ("m," "n," etc.) and quantifiers for universal sentences ("for every n .

But we may go further than this; for as new forms are continually and slowly being produced, unless we believe that the number of specific forms goes on perpetually and almost indefinitely increasing, numbers inevitably must become extinct.

But in one particular sense the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancient; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms.