Robert Chambers Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

The same law of development presides over the vegetable kingdom.... where a special function is required for particular circumstances, nature has provided for it, not by a new organ, but by a modification of a common one, which she has effected in development.

Robert Chambers
I suggest, then... that the first step was an advance under favor of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.

Robert Chambers
Thus we give, as is meet, a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter.

Robert Chambers
Mr. Babbage's illustration powerfully suggests that this ordinary procedure may be subordinate to a higher law which only permits it for a time, and in proper season interrupts and changes it.

Robert Chambers
There are nations, such as the inhabitants of Hindostan, known to be one in descent which nevertheless, contain groups of people of almost all shades of color, and likewise discrepant in other of those important features on which much stress has been laid.

Robert Chambers
Is it not a wiser course, since reconciliation has come in so many instances, still to hope for it, still to go on with our new truths, trusting that they also will in time be found harmonious with all others? Thus we avoid the damage which the very appearance of an opposition to natural truth is calculated to inflict on any system presumed to require such support.

Robert Chambers
A sensible parallax of about one second has been ascertained in the case of the double star [Alpha Centauri] of the constellation of the Centaur, and one of the third of that amount for the double star, 61 Cygni; which gave reason to presume that the distance of the former might be about twenty thousand millions of miles, and the latter of much greater amount. If we suppose that similar intervals exist between all the stars, we shall readily see that the space occupied by even the comparatively small number visible to the naked eye, must be vast beyond all powers of conception.

Robert Chambers
This skeptical method consists very much in vicious circles. You cannot know whether a fact be a fact till you have ascertained the laws of nature in the case, and you cannot know the laws of nature till you have ascertained facts.

Robert Chambers
We are ignorant of the laws of variety-production; but we see it going on as a principle in nature, and it is obviously favorable to the supposition that all the great families of men are of one stock.

Robert Chambers
The skeptical view appears to me out of harmony with the inductive philosophy. Bacon gives us many warnings against preconceived opinions and prejudices; but he does not bid us despair of ascertaining facts from our own senses and from testimony.... we do not find in Bacon any dogma like that of Mr. Faraday that the 'laws of nature are the foundation of our knowledge in natural things,' and that these form our only safe test for any new fact presented to our observation. Bacon's method is rather the contrary, namely, that facts are to serve as the foundation of the laws of nature.

Robert Chambers
I believe my doctrines to be in the main true; I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing.

Robert Chambers
Of late years... it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin, for anything that can be inferred from external peculiarities.

Robert Chambers
We are drawn on to the supposition, that the first step in the creation of life upon this planet was a chemico-electric operation, by which simple germinal vesicles were produced.

Robert Chambers
The law of organic development is still daily seen at work to certain effects, only somewhat short of a transition from species to species.

Robert Chambers
One important remark has been made, that a comparatively small variety of species is found in the older rocks, although of some particular ones the remains are very abundant...

Robert Chambers
All, we see, is done by certain laws of matter, so that it becomes a question of extreme interest, what are such laws? All that can yet be said, in answer, is, that we see certain natural events proceeding in an invariable order under certain conditions, and thence infer the existence of some fundamental arrangement which, for the bringing about of these events, has a force and certainty of action similar to, but more precise and unerring than those arrangements which human society makes for its own benefit, and calls laws. It is remarkable of physical laws, that we see them operating on every kind of scale as to magnitude, with the same regularity and perseverance.

Robert Chambers
The evidence of the existence of other astral systems besides our own is much more decided than might be expected when we consider that the nearest of them must needs be placed at a mighty interval beyond our own.

Robert Chambers
The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims.

Robert Chambers
Abstract perfection should always be the direction aimed at by human efforts, however imperfect they may be; and the success of sanitary legislation will be indicated by the nearness or the distance of its actual practice from this perfect idea.

Robert Chambers
Phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish's, a reptile's, and a mammifer's brain, and finally becomes human.

Robert Chambers
I cannot but here remind the reader of what Dr. Wiseman has shewn so strikingly in his lectures, how different new philosophic doctrines are apt to appear after we have become somewhat familiar with them.

Robert Chambers
It must be borne in mind that the gestation of a single organism is the work of but a few days, weeks, or months, but the gestation (so to speak) of a whole creation is a matter probably involving enormous spaces of time.

Robert Chambers
Let the reconciliation of whatever is true in my views with whatever is true in other systems come about in the fulness of calm and careful inquiry.

Robert Chambers
Analogy would lead us to conclude that the combinations of the primordial matter, forming our so-called elements, are as universal or as liable to take place everywhere as are the laws of gravitation and centrifugal force. We must therefore presume that the gases, the metals, the earths, and other simple substances, (besides whatever more of which we have no acquaintance,) exist or are liable to come into existence under proper conditions, as well in the astral system, which is thirty five thousand times more distant than Sirius, as within the bounds of our own solar system or our own globe.

Robert Chambers
Not one species of any creature which flourished before the tertiary (Ehrenberg's infusoria excepted) now exists; and of the mammalia which arose during that series, many forms are altogether gone, while of others we have now only kindred species. Thus to find not only frequent additions to the previously existing forms, but frequent withdrawals of forms which had apparently become inappropriate—a constant shifting as well as advance—is a fact calculated very forcibly to arrest attention. A candid consideration of all these circumstances can scarcely fail to introduce into our minds a somewhat different idea of organic creation from what has hitherto been generally entertained.

Robert Chambers
Indifference to life and indifference to the purity and amenity that sweeten existence must necessarily go together.

Robert Chambers
We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling-place or what his history! Man pauses breathless at the contemplation of a subject so much above his finite faculties, and only can wonder and adore!

Robert Chambers
The nobler orders of being, including man himself, were contemplated from the first, and came into existence by virtue of a law, the operation of which had commenced ages before their forms were realized.

Robert Chambers
The first chapter of the Mosaic record is not only not in harmony with the ordinary ideas of mankind respecting cosmical and organic creation, but is opposed to them, and only in accordance with the views here taken. When we carefully peruse it with awakened minds, we find that all the procedure is represented primarily and pre-eminently as flowing from commands and expressions of will, not from direct acts.... Thus the scriptural objection quickly vanishes, and the prevalent ideas about the organic creation appear only as a mistaken inference from the text, formed at a time when man's ignorance prevented him from drawing therefrom a just conclusion.

Robert Chambers
Geometry is that of mathematical science which is devoted to consideration of form and size, and may be said to be the best and surest guide to study of all sciences in which ideas of dimension or space are involved. Almost all the knowledge required by navigators, architects, surveyors, engineers, and opticians, in their respective occupations, is deduced from geometry and branches of mathematics. All works of art constructed according to the rules which geometry involves; and we find the same laws observed in the works of nature. The study of mathematics, generally, is also of great importance in cultivating habits of exact reasoning; and in this respect it forms a useful auxiliary to logic.

Robert Chambers