Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
obscure depths with the figures of animals and heroes, or by likening
their shining lines of cosmic cloud to a road or highway for the march
of beings celestial and terrestrial. Thus, for the speakers of
Sanskrit the Milky Way was "The Path of the Gods"; the Lithuanians
dubbed it "The Bird Road"; in Low German it is known as "The Way of
Cows"; the Cymris associated it with the course of the wind; for
Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the Persians viewed it as
the route along which the straw carrier drew his burden; to this day
the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of the Chiefs."[F]
Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer
realities are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by
man and by the societies which he forms. Such words as "attraction,"
"repulsion," "resistance," "nature," "body," "atom," "current,"
contain obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the
idea conveyed by the term "inertia" may be more or less veiled by
unfamiliar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again in
_Trägheit_, "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase
"natural selection" contains a teleological element which has more
than once been used to throw discredit on the process which it
describes. And when one observes how persistently such an
anthropopathic expression as "affinity" is still applied to chemical
reaction, or with what _naïveté_ the term "law" is transferred from
the realm of human jurisprudence into the domain of natural processes,
one ceases to wonder at the constant confusions of outer with inner in
which so much of the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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