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THREE:PREFACE
THREE:There is also a distinction between machine and hand cutting that may be noted. In machine cutting it is performed in true geometrical lines, the tools or material being moved by positive guides as in planing and turning; in hand operations, such as filing, scraping or chipping, the tools are moved without positive guidance, and act in irregular lines."But my principal!" gasped Wolffman. "The lady who is paying me----"
TWO:"After this infernal rumble, deadly silence followed, interrupted only by the groans of the wounded. The German artillery ceased to fire, and from all sides their infantry came rushing on, their faces expressing the terror caused by such great calamities. They were no longer soldiers longing to destroy, but human beings hurrying to go to the assistance of other human beings.In reality, Stoicism was not, like the older Greek philosophies, a creation of individual genius. It bears the character of a compilation both on its first exposition and on its final completion. Polemo, who had been a fine gentleman before he became a philosopher, taunted Zeno with filching his opinions from every quarter, like the cunning little Phoenician trader that he was.18 And it was said that the seven hundred treatises of Chrysippus would be reduced to a blank if everything that he had borrowed from others were to be erased. He seems, indeed, to have been the father of review-writers, and to have used the reviewers right of transcription with more than modern license. Nearly a whole tragedy of Euripides reappeared in one of his articles, and a wit on being asked what he was reading, replied, the Medea of Chrysippus.19
TWO:page314Were this intellectual despondency to issue in a permanent suspense of judgment, it would be bad enough; but practically its consequences are of a much more mischievous character. The human mind is so constituted that it must either go forward or fall back; in no case can it stand still. Accordingly, the lazy sceptic almost always ends by conforming to the established creeds and customs of his age or of the society in which he lives; thus strengthening the hands of authority in its conflict with the more energetic or courageous enquirers, whose object is to discover, by the unaided efforts of reason, some new and positive principle either of action or of belief. And the guardians of orthodoxy are so well aware of the profit to be reaped from this alliance that, when debarred from putting down their opponents by law or by public opinion, they anxiously foster false scepticism where it is already rampant, and endeavour to create it where it does not exist. Sometimes disinterested morality is the object of their attack, and at other times the foundations of inductive science. Their favourite formula is that whatever objections may be urged against their own doctrines, others equally strong may be urged against the results of free thought; whereas the truth is that such objections, being applicable to all systems alike, exactly balance one another, leaving the special arguments against irrationalism to tell with as much force as before. And they also lay great stress on the internal dissensions of their assailantsdissensions which only bring out into more vivid relief the one point on which all are agreed, that, whatever else may be true, the traditional opinions are demonstrably false.