"It seems impossible to believe that Life, so rare a fruit of the universe, intelligent Life, conscious Life, to which the long course of evolution has been so manifestly leading up all through the long ages, should have no better destiny than a final and hopeless extinction; that this Earth and all the efforts and aspirations of the long generations of men should have no worthier end than to swing, throughout the eternal ages, an empty, frozen heap of dust, circling round the extinct cinder that was once its Sun. If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none."

"The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended…"

"How helpless human beings are—in fact, how helpless all beings are! How hopelessly dependent we are upon the past, and how impossible it is to be really original! What the future will be depends upon …"

"I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for... science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the found…"

"Heroes have filled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur. Sages and lawgivers have bent their whole nature to the search for truth, and thou…"