This movement, driven by powerful and diverse motivation, built a nation out of a wilderness and, by its nature, shaped the character and destiny of an uncharted continent.
The United States is the product of two principal forces-the immigration of European peoples with their varied ideas, customs, and national characteristics and the impact of a new country which modified these traits.
But, the force of geographic conditions peculiar to America, the interplay of the varied national groups upon one another, and the sheer difficulty of maintaining old-world ways in a raw, new continent caused significant changes.
The first shiploads of immigrants bound for the territory which is now the United States crossed the Atlantic more than a hundred years after the 15th-and-16th-century explorations of North America.
The virgin forest with its richness and variety of trees was a veritable real treasure-house which extended from Maine all the way down to Georgia.
It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.
By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.
Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him.
Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression.
One could interpret much of the work of Beethovenby saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.
yet when one looks at the photographs of the gardens created by the homeless, it strikes one that, for all their diversity of styles, these gardens speak of various other fundamental urges beyond that of decoration and creative expression.
A sacred place of peace, however, crude it may be, is a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelt which is a distinctly animal need.
The gardens of the homeless which are in effect homeless garden introduce from in to an urban environment where it either didn’t exist or was not discernible as such
Mast of us give in to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological conditions until one day we find ourselves in a garden and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic
It is this implicit or explicit reference to nature that fully justifies the use of the word garden, though in a “liberated” sense, to describe these synthetic constructions.
In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything — a single generative equation for all we see.
Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification, for if all humans share common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings.
To filter out what is contingent and unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behaviour arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms.
The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality, identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many languages, which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints.
Chomsky’s grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it, whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations.
Allen’s contribution was to take an assumption we all share-that because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughts-and reveal its erroneous nature
while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a question: “Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? ”
This seems a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority of those at the top and the inferiority of those at the bottom.
circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us and if we feel that we have been “wronged” then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation .
The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible.
Scientists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them.
but we have at least drawn near the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of intrinsic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us.
Time was when biologists somewhat overworked the evidence that these creatures preserve the health of game by killing the physically weak, or that they prey only on “worthless species."
In Europe, where forestry is ecologically more advanced, the non-commercial tree species are recognized as members of native forest community, to be preserved as such ,within reason.
It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are essential to its healthy functioning.
It may be said that the measure of the worth of any social institution is its effect in enlarging and improving experience; but this effect is not a part of its original motive.
Only gradually was the by-product of the institution noted, and only more gradually still was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct of the institution.
While it is easy to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults.
Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are forming the powers which will secure this ability.
We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education -- that of direct tuition or schooling.
he believes that this very difficulty may have had the compensating advantage of forcing him to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus enabling him to detect errors in reasoning and in his own observations.
He asserted, also, that his power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought was very limited, for which reason he felt certain that he never could have succeeded with mathematics.
On the other hand, he did not accept as well founded the charge made by some of his critics that, while he was a good observer, he had no power of reasoning.
He adds humbly that perhaps he was “superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.”
Darwin was convinced that the loss of these tastes was not only a loss of happiness, but might possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character.
This movement, driven by powerful and diverse motivation, built a nation out of a wilderness and, by its nature, shaped the character and destiny of an uncharted continent.
The United States is the product of two principal forces-the immigration of European peoples with their varied ideas, customs, and national characteristics and the impact of a new country which modified these traits.
But, the force of geographic conditions peculiar to America, the interplay of the varied national groups upon one another, and the sheer difficulty of maintaining old-world ways in a raw, new continent caused significant changes.
The first shiploads of immigrants bound for the territory which is now the United States crossed the Atlantic more than a hundred years after the 15th-and-16th-century explorations of North America.
The virgin forest with its richness and variety of trees was a veritable real treasure-house which extended from Maine all the way down to Georgia.
It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.
By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.
Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him.
Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression.
One could interpret much of the work of Beethovenby saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.
yet when one looks at the photographs of the gardens created by the homeless, it strikes one that, for all their diversity of styles, these gardens speak of various other fundamental urges beyond that of decoration and creative expression.
A sacred place of peace, however, crude it may be, is a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelt which is a distinctly animal need.
The gardens of the homeless which are in effect homeless garden introduce from in to an urban environment where it either didn’t exist or was not discernible as such
Mast of us give in to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological conditions until one day we find ourselves in a garden and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic
It is this implicit or explicit reference to nature that fully justifies the use of the word garden, though in a “liberated” sense, to describe these synthetic constructions.
In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything — a single generative equation for all we see.
Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification, for if all humans share common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings.
To filter out what is contingent and unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behaviour arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms.
The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality, identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many languages, which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints.
Chomsky’s grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it, whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations.
Allen’s contribution was to take an assumption we all share-that because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughts-and reveal its erroneous nature
while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a question: “Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? ”
This seems a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority of those at the top and the inferiority of those at the bottom.
circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us and if we feel that we have been “wronged” then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation .
The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible.
Scientists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them.
but we have at least drawn near the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of intrinsic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us.
Time was when biologists somewhat overworked the evidence that these creatures preserve the health of game by killing the physically weak, or that they prey only on “worthless species."
In Europe, where forestry is ecologically more advanced, the non-commercial tree species are recognized as members of native forest community, to be preserved as such ,within reason.
It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are essential to its healthy functioning.
It may be said that the measure of the worth of any social institution is its effect in enlarging and improving experience; but this effect is not a part of its original motive.
Only gradually was the by-product of the institution noted, and only more gradually still was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct of the institution.
While it is easy to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults.
Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are forming the powers which will secure this ability.
We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education -- that of direct tuition or schooling.
he believes that this very difficulty may have had the compensating advantage of forcing him to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus enabling him to detect errors in reasoning and in his own observations.
He asserted, also, that his power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought was very limited, for which reason he felt certain that he never could have succeeded with mathematics.
On the other hand, he did not accept as well founded the charge made by some of his critics that, while he was a good observer, he had no power of reasoning.
He adds humbly that perhaps he was “superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.”
Darwin was convinced that the loss of these tastes was not only a loss of happiness, but might possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character.