Notes
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
For the reading "sweet south" instead of "sweet sound," see Rolfe's edition of Twelfth Night.]
Charing Cross School of Medicine: a school connected with the Charing Cross Hospital in the Strand, London.]
ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE (1866)
For the history of the times mentioned in this essay, see Green's Short History of the English People.]
When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend or a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp;
When I could not sleep for the cold,
I had fire enough in my brain,
And builded, with roofs of gold,
My beautiful castles in Spain!]
A LIBERAL EDUCATION (1868)
ON A PIECE OF CHALK
"'Wie das Gestirn,
Ohne Hast,
Ohne Rast'—
something may be done, and some of Sister Lizzie's fond
imaginations turn out not altogether untrue." The quotation entire
is as follows:—
Wie das Gestirn,
Ohne Hast,
Aber ohne Rast,
Drehe sich jeder
Um die eigne Last.]
THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION (1882)
THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION (1863)
ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE (1868)
As forests change their foliage year by year,
Leaves, that come first, first fall and disappear;
So antique words die out, and in their room,
Others spring up, of vigorous growth and bloom;
Ourselves and all that's ours, to death are due,
And why should words not be mortal too?
Martin's translation.]
"The design of this work, as stated by Pope himself, is to ridicule all the false tastes in learning under the character of a man of capacity enough, that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each. It was begun by a club of some of the greatest wits of the age—Lord Oxford, the Bishop of Rochester, Pope, Congreve, Swift, Arbuthnot, and others. Gay often held the pen; and Addison liked it very well, and was not disinclined to come into it."]
"Thus there can be little doubt, that the further science advances, the more extensively and consistently will all the phaenomena of Nature be represented by materialistic formulae and symbols. But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulae and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems, for real entities—and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyze the energies and destroy the beauty of a life."]