This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.
Category Archive: 1839
A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.
In externals we advance with lightening express speed, in modes of thought and sympathy we lumber on in stage-coach fashion.
Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.
Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things that are foul.
The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.
Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.
It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.