Freedom is viewed as utopistic and fanciful, and relegated to the underworld of repressed dreams, mystical visions, and Dionysian “excesses” like the Saturnalia and other ecstatic mystical rituals. Hence with the Hebrews, religion exhibits a growing tendency to abstract, to classify, and to systematize. For all its obvious contradictions, the Hebrew Bible is a remarkably coherent account of humanity’s evolution into society. Even in the Hebrews’ devaluation of natural phenomena we have a break with mythopoeic thought as such, a rupture with phenomena as fantasy, a willingness to deal with life on realistic and historical terms. Social history, as the will of God, replaces natural history as the cosmogony of spirits, demons, and divine beings.

Labor, now wedded to the specificity of its activity and the concreteness of its “product,” had no meaning beyond its concreteness as a sensuous activity — hence the vast world of phenomena, like land, which were “priceless” (to use our limping terminology) and beyond the equations of exchange. Such economistic interpretations of present-day society are not mere ideological distortions; they accurately depict the dominant reality of our time. What is so troubling about this image is that it makes no attempt to transcend the very level of Brilic life it describes. Almost every critique of the “bourgeois traits” of modern society, technics, and individuality is itself tainted by the very substance it criticizes. By emphasizing economics, class interest, and the “material substrate” of society as such, such critiques are the bearers of the very “bourgeois traits” they purport to oppose. They are in perilous default of their commitment to transcend the economic conditions of capitalist society and to recover the ethical level of discourse and ideals capitalism so savagely degraded.

To date, the most unambiguous and accurately dated reconstructions of the 8.2 ka BP event are provided by stable oxygen isotope records from ice cores and speleothems. This paper presents a new pollen record from Lake Mondsee in the north-eastern European Alps and discusses changes in vegetation composition between 9000 and 7000 a BP in response to the 8.2 ka BP cooling event, which is clearly reflected in a stable oxygen isotope record from the same lake. Pollen and microcharcoal analyses performed at bi-decadal resolution provide detailed insights into the vegetation history and fire regime in the study area.

But what is most fascinating today is that nature is writing its own nature philosophy and ethics-not the logicians, positivists, and heirs of Galilean scientism. As I have noted, we are not alone in the universe, not even in the “emptiness” of space. Owing to what is a fairly recent revolution in astrophysics (possibly comparable only to the achievements of Copernicus and Kepler), the cosmos is opening itself up to us in new ways that call for an exhilarating speculative turn of mind and a more qualitative approach to natural phenomena. It is becoming increasingly tenable to suggest that the entire universe may be the cradle of life-not merely our own planet or a few planets like it. Reason, placed within this tension between the libertarian and authoritarian, must be permitted to stake out its own claim to a libertarian rationality. Philosophically, we have made far too much of the belief that a libertarian rationality must have canons of truth and consistency, indeed of intuition and contradiction, that completely invalidate the claim of formal and analytical thought to truth.

Lines of Evidence: The Science of Evolution

Because these features are the ones doing the cutting, we know that they are younger than the rocks that they cut into. The principle of cross-cutting relationships states that a rock unit (or other geological feature, such as a fault) that is cut by another rock unit (or feature) must be older than the rock unit (or feature) that does the cutting. The image below shows a sequence of Devonian-aged (~380 Ma) rocks exposed at the magnificent waterfall at Taughannock Falls State Park in central New York. The rocks near the bottom of the waterfall were deposited first and the rocks above are subsequently younger and younger. UHP rocks, that is, metamorphic rocks that record pressure conditions above the lower stability limit of coesite, have been recognized in numerous collisional orogens worldwide, starting with the first descriptions of coesite in the Dora Maira (Chopin, 1984) and the Western Gneiss Region of Norway (Smith, 1984).

Now all must admit a great
part of this assertion to be not only truth, but truism. Referred to direct history, a great section of it proves to
belong not to the domain of speculation, but to that of positive
knowledge. It is mere matter of chronicle that modern
civilization is a development of mediæval civilization, which
again is a development from civilization of the order represented
in Greece, Assyria, or Egypt. Thus the higher
culture being clearly traced back to what may be called the
middle culture, the question which remains is whether this
middle culture may be traced back to the lower culture,
that is, to savagery.

Compare
R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 132; Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseel.’
p. 33; Shortland, ‘Trads. Z.’ p. 63 (a version of the myth of Maui’s
death); see also pp. 171, 180, and Baker in ‘Tr. It is said that
between two brokers settling a price by thus snipping with the fingers,
cleverness in bargaining, offering a little more, hesitating, expressing
an obstinate refusal to go farther, &c., comes out just as in chaffering in
words. On the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the
middle ages and into our own times is an unsatisfactory, but
not a mysterious fact. A once-established opinion, however
delusive, can hold its own from age to age, for belief can
propagate itself without reference to its reasonable origin,
as plants are propagated from slips without fresh raising
from the seed. From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking
man is to snatch a victim from the very clutches of the
water-spirit, a rash defiance of deity which would hardly
pass unavenged.

Sciencing_Icons_Minerals & Rocks Minerals & Rocks

The Seattle-King County Office of Civil Defense served as the local government liaison with state and federal civil defense agencies. Puget Sound Regional Archives in Bellevue holds building plans created by King County’s former Building and Land Development (BALD) Division. This series contains a blueprint of the King County Courthouse (formerly the County-City Building). Plat vacations prior to 1969 were sometimes made by resolutions of the King County Commissioners. Texts of plat vacation orders can be found in the Commissioners’ Proceedings or in their plat vacation files.

They also include supporting documentation such as petitions, maps, engineers’ reports and correspondence. For assistance in locating a plat vacation order, please contact the King County Archives. Rolls 1-17 are organized by ascending three-digit Kroll map numbers, which correspond to specific section numbers within townships and ranges (key available in series file). King County Archives holds records, from as early as 1853, that document the interactions of King County government and its citizens with the natural world. [59] The mathematics to which I refer is as much a mathematics of form as it is of quantity-in fact, emphatically more so.

Radiometric Dating: Definition, How Does it Work, Uses & Examples

Small genetic changes can give rise to either minor or major morphological modifications; the same holds true for large genetic changes. Is highly unlikely that chance alone accounts for the fact that temperature, pH, and the concentration of nutrient elements have been for immense periods of time just those optimal for life. It seems especially unlikely when it is obvious that the major perturbers of atmospheric gases are organisms themselves-primarily microbes ….

There seems no doubt that the number of the
fingers led to the adoption of the not especially suitable
number 10 as a period in reckoning, so that decimal
arithmetic is based on human anatomy. This is so obvious,
that it is curious to see Ovid in his well-known lines putting
the two facts close together, without seeing that the second
was the consequence of the first. In discussing problems so complex as those of the development
of civilization, it is not enough to put forward
theories accompanied by a few illustrative examples.

222The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three
distances of near, farther, farthest, are very complex, but a
remark as to their use shows how thoroughly symbolic
sound enters into their nature. The Zulus not only say
nansi, ‘here is,’ nanso, ‘there is,’ nansiya, ‘there is in
the distance,’ but they even express the greatness of this
distance by the emphasis and prolongation of the ya. If we
could discern a similar gradation of the vowels to express a
corresponding gradation of distance throughout our list, the
whole matter would be easier to explain; but it is not so,
the i-words for instance, are sometimes nearer and sometimes
farther off than the a-words. We can only judge that,
as even children can see that a scale of vowels makes a most
expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in
use in the world have probably taken their shape under the
influence of this simple device, and thus there have arisen
sets of what we may call contrasted or ‘differential’
words. How far the lower animals may attach any inherent
meaning to interjectional sounds is a question not easy to
answer.

Christianity, in i ts official form, imposed the overt discipline of the law, of the Deuteronomic Code, on the faithful; humanity, after all, was unruly and predisposed to evil by original sin. Freedom was to be reserved for heaven — if, indeed, freedom it could be truly called, beyond the moral plentitude voiced by the Sermon on the Mount. On earth, humanity was expected to live by conventional codes of justice, both ecclesiastical and temporal.

In a mechanical world of matter and motion, egotism had become for isolated human monads what gravitation was for material bodies. Work too had lost its sanctity as a redemptive means for rescuing a fallen humanity. It was now reduced to a discipline for bringing external nature under social control and human nature under industrial control. Even the apparent chaos that market society introduced into the guild, village, and family structure that formed the bases of the preindustrial world was seen as the surface effects of a hidden lawfulness in which individual self-interest, by seeking its own ends, served the common good. This “liberal” ideology persisted into the latter part of the twentieth century, where it is celebrated not merely within the confines of church and academy, but by the most sophisticated devices of the mass media. What raises Locke beyond mere proprietary platitudes is the pronounced function he imparts to labor.