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Biology & History
- History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea.
- We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive.
- So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.
- Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition.
- War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition.
- The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection.
- Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution.
- Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
- The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed.
- Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly.
- She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality.
- Biologically, physical vitality may be, at birth, of greater value than intellectual pedigree.
- So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies.
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14 reads
MORE IDEAS ON THIS
Religion & History
- Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under.
- Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. It was fear that first made the gods. Only when priests used these ...
4
9 reads
Character & History
- Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states.
- Human beings are normally equipped by “nature” with positive and negative instincts, whose function it is to preserve the individual, the family, the group...
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8 reads
Government & History
- Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternati...
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1 read
History & The Earth
- Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty.
- History is subject to geology.
- Climate no longer controls us but it limits us.
- Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home.
- The influence of geographi...
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44 reads
Economics & History
- All economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
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13 reads
Hesitations
- The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.
- We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.
- Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of ...
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19 reads
History & War
- War is one of the constants of History and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. “Polemos pater panton” said Heracleitus; war, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states.
- Peace is an unstable equilibrium,...
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10 reads
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
Paleontology is a scientific necessity
Paleontology is the study of the history of life. Because that history is written in the fossil and geological record, paleontology allows us to place living organisms in both evolutionary (life-historical) and geological (earth-historical) context.
It is ...
Democracy
Democracy is a form of government in which the people have the authority to choose their governing legislators.
Emphasis on:
- freedom of assembly & speech
- inclusiveness and equality (minority rights)
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