In coming closer to nature, man shows himself superior to it. As a mere part of nature, man’s existence would be a series of isolated phenomena. All life would proceed from and depend on contact with the outside world.
Series
To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.
If you’re writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you’re reading a poem that’s written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you’re not going to see the thing whole in the song. You’re going to hear it in series, and you can’t skip back.