Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Suppose the log makes a bang on passing me. We can say these bangs are separated by equal, or unequal, intervals.

We could also say one set of bangs was twice as fast as another set. But the equality or inequality of intervals so measured is entirely different from that measured by a clock.

Hence the criteria for equality of intervals between passing logs and for equality of intervals measured by a clock are different.

Suppose that at certain intervals situations repeated themselves, and that someone said time was circular.

But as the former grow thinner every page, in proportion as we advance nearer the enlightened ages, we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature.

Thus "the unconscious" becomes a sort of underground prisoner, living in a dungeon, breaking in at long intervals upon our daylight respectability with dark groans and maledictions and strange atavistic lusts.

In order to understand the phrase "this morning" it is necessary that we should have a way of feeling time-intervals, and that this feeling should give what is constant in the meaning of the words "this morning."

This appreciation of time-intervals is, however, obviously a product of memory, not a presupposition of it.

And therefore far better things, and more of them, and at shorter intervals, are to be expected from man's reason and industry and direction and fixed application than from accident and animal instinct and the like, in which inventions have hitherto had their origin.

And therefore, if in my natural history, which has been collected and tested with so much diligence, severity, and I may say religious care, there still lurk at intervals certain falsities or errors in the particulars, what is to be said of common natural history, which in comparison with mine is so negligent and inexact?