Our mind in some strange way acts on our nerves, and our nerves in some equally strange way store up the consequences, and somehow the result, as a rule and commonly enough, goes down to our descendants; these primitive facts all theories…
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
gutenberg.org
All these theories admit--indeed they are but various theories to account for--the fact that what we call matter has consequences in what we call mind, and that what we call mind produces results in what we call matter; and the doctrines I…
We have here the continuous force which binds age to age, which enables each to begin with some improvement on the last, if the last did itself improve; which makes each civilisation not a set of detached dots, but a line of colour, surely…
I do not think any who do not acquire--and it takes a hard effort to acquire--this notion of a transmitted nerve element will ever understand 'the connective tissue' of civilisation.
The regular transmutation of motions which are at first voluntary into secondary automatic motions, as Hartley calls them, is due to a gradually effected organisation; and we may rest assured of this, that co-ordinate activity always…
The body of the accomplished man has thus become by training different from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man; it is charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it unconsciously.
That is to say, an action may require all our attention and all our volition for its first, or second, or third performance, but by frequent repetition it becomes, in a manner, part our organisation, and is performed without volition, or…
But what physical science does is, not to discover the hereditary element, but to render it distinct,--to give us an accurate conception of what we may expect, and a good account of the evidence by which we are led to expect it.
Each nerve has a sort of memory of its past life, is trained or not trained, dulled or quickened, as the case may be; each feature is shaped and characterised, or left loose and meaningless, as may happen; each hand is marked with its…
Such subsidiary sciences are to the decipherer of the present day what old languages were to the antiquary of other days; they construe for him the words which he discovers, they give a richness and a truth-like complexity to the picture…
Science tries to find in each bit of earth the record of the causes which made it precisely what it is; those forces have left their trace, she knows, as much as the tact and hand of the artist left their mark on a classical gem.
A full estimate of these effects would require a great book, and I am sure I could not write it; but I think I may usefully, in a few papers, show how, upon one or two great points, the new ideas are modifying two old sciences--politics…
A new world of inventions--of railways and of telegraphs--has grown up around us which we cannot help seeing; a new world of ideas is in the air and affects us, though we do not see it.
Politicians like Walter Bagehot
