Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution, with Abstracts of the Discourses, Volume 17

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W. Nicol, Printer to the Royal Institution, 1906 - Science
 

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Page 380 - He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who fears to put it to the touch, To win or lose it all.
Page 24 - It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
Page 359 - ... possession of the ancestral estate ; and that from the Cretaceous period (if not much earlier) to the present day, the deep sea has covered a large part of what is now the area of the Atlantic. But if...
Page 164 - The unit of force is that force which, acting for one second on a mass of one gramme, gives to it a velocity of one centimetre per second.
Page 13 - It is our ignorance of the future and our persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely incurable that alone gives the past its enormous predominance in our thoughts.
Page 224 - The spectroscopic examination of these gases throws new light upon the question of the aurora and the nature of the upper air. On passing electric discharges through the tubes containing the most volatile of the atmospheric gases, they glow with a bright orange light, which is especially marked at the negative pole. The spectroscope shows that this light consist*, in the visible part of the spectrum, chiefly of a succession of strong rays in the red, orange, and yellow, attributed to hydrogen, helium,...
Page 22 - I suppose most of us entertain certain necessary persuasions, without which a moral life in this world is neither a reasonable nor a possible thing. All this paper is built finally upon certain negative beliefs that are incapable of scientific establishment. Our lives and powers are limited, our scope in space and time is limited, and it is not unreasonable that for fundamental beliefs we must go outside the sphere of reason and set our feet upon faith. Implicit in all such speculations as this is...
Page 223 - This resulting ocean is subjected to the pressure of the remaining uncondensed gases, and as these are slightly soluble they dissolve to some extent in the fluid. The gases in solution can be taken out by distillation or by exhausting the water, and if we compare their volume with the volume of the water as steam, we should find about 1 volume of air in 60,000 volumes of steam.
Page 10 - ... of acts and the imperatives of right and wrong. Our lives are to reap the fruits of determinate things, and it is still a fundamental presumption of the established morality that one must do right though the heavens fall. But there are people coming into this world who would refuse to call it right if it brought the heavens about our heads, however authoritative its sources and sanctions, and this new disposition is, I believe, a growing one. I suppose in all ages people in a timid, hesitating,...
Page 14 - Only about the latter he has some material for belief and about the former practically none. And the question arises how far this absolute ignorance of the future is a fixed and necessary condition of human life, and how far some application of intellectual methods may not attenuate, even if it does not absolutely set aside, the veil between ourselves and things to come. And I am venturing to suggest to you that along certain lines and with certain qualifications and limitations a working knowledge...

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