Vulgar words in Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications (Page 1)
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,240 ~ ~ ~
A strong-armed blockhead is not the less obviously able to pump up water because the terms 'muscular contractility' and 'atmospheric pressure' are as heathen Greek to him; or because the pump-handle, which alone is directly moved by him, touches, not the water itself, but only the first link in a chain of mechanism connecting it with the water; or because, if the sucker of the pump got choked, or the well were to dry up, it would be vain for him to go on moving the pump-handle.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,241 ~ ~ ~
Blockhead as he is, nothing of all this in the least diminishes his conviction that as long as the pump continues in order and there remains water in the well, he can oblige the water to rise by moving the pump-handle; nor can anything analogous prevent the mind from feeling that whenever, in ordinary circumstances, it wills that the limbs be moved, the limbs not only will be moved, but cannot help being moved accordingly.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,812 ~ ~ ~
Even an ass knows that thistles are good to eat, and that certain movements of his tongue and larynx will result in a bray; while man not only daily discovers fresh uses for things, but imagines that if he had had the fashioning of them, he might have materially increased their utility; King Alfonso of Castile, for instance, boasting of the valuable cosmogonical advice he could have given had he been taken into council; and one of Kaiser Wilhelm's predecessors on the throne of Prussia intimating that he, in like case, would have proved conclusively that pounded quartz and silex may easily be in excess in arable soil.