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“... years after Herbert Spencer’s death, Beatrice Webb, who had known him well, referred to him as Darwin’s John the Baptist. Spencer would have relished the description, which is in many ways appropriate: he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and was responsible for popularising the term ...”

“... European destiny eclipsed its outmoded scientific speculations. The astronomer and mathematician John Herschel was more in tune with the spirit of the age: his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831) was intended to complement Henry Brougham’s programme for scientific advancement. Its aim was to teach the scientific method ...”

“... others, I got flogged two or three times a week, was taught that the earth was 4000 years old (Darwin had it all wrong) and, when we played Birkenhead School at rugby, was reminded that Protestants like them had only been prevented relatively recently from burning people like us at the stake. Accordingly we (a) had to win and (b) should leave no valuables ...”

“... When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water ...”

“... and animal had become separated, nature had been subdued and distanced. Yet it was in England that Darwin finally linked man and nature through the theory of the evolution of species. In sum, England was the most developed capitalistic society, where man lived in a largely artificial landscape, yet it was in England that respect and love for the wild, the wet ...”

“... individualism’. Hatch’s thesis is perhaps best exemplified by the Baptist preacher John Leland who, on New Year’s Day 1802, presented to the President, Thomas Jefferson, a 1235-pound cheese bearing the motto: ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ When Leland spoke before the Houses of Congress, he was described by one Congressman ...”

“... to think that the earliest types of humanity did indeed see the light in Africa, just as Darwin forecast would be found, and spread out from there, however gradually and with whatever evolutionary changes along the way, east and north across the world. So that ‘it seems that we all belong, ultimately, to Africa.’ Just how variously Torday’s ...”

“... have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful. Dewey was the most prominent ...”

“... is prominent in the aesthetics of Adorno. More interesting in this context are the observations of Darwin on the physiology of the shudder, recorded in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which has a chapter headed ‘Surprise– Astonishment–Fear–Horror’. Among the reactions to a suitable stimulus are elevation of the ...”

“... verse (from Anon on the structure of the cosmos – ‘as appel the eorthe is round’ – to John Updike on cosmic gall), is therefore fighting a lost battle. The editors make out a brave case for the similarity of poet and scientist (‘the starting-point for both of their activities is the imagination’), dispute old distinctions between ...”

“... victims, who kept on being willing no matter how they were treated. Miller cites the case of John McMaster, at one time ‘first Pope of the Church of Scientology’, who later fell into disfavour. McMaster, he says, now speaks of Hubbard with enormous bitterness, always calling him ‘Fatty’. When Hubbard had him thrown overboard one day (only in ...”

“... shells on mountains, but the Flood was itself thought of in a variety of ways. Writing in 1695, John Woodward, an English physician and fossil collector, proposed that it resulted from a temporary suspension of gravity, during which all the materials of the Earth were churned up into a thick suspension. When gravity returned, the materials settled into the ...”

“... three hundred years ago. After studying London hospital records covering nearly a century, Dr John Arbuthnot concluded that, in every year, more boys had been born than girls; each year on record was a ‘male year’. Why was this? We can imagine a mad style of reductionist explanation, accessible only to a prurient deity: describe the physical and ...”

“... But his political judgments are not easily separated from his aesthetic and moral ones. Reading John Stuart Mill made him think about the ‘conglomerated mediocrity’ that surrounded him in Britain: ‘the narrowing of men’s minds and energies’, ‘the constant increasing superficiality of life’, and of ‘general human interests’ being ‘reduced ...”

“... in July 2020. Glancingly, the Tate Modern captioning alludes to its insights. The thesis of John Elderfield’s Cezanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings, which served as the Princeton show’s catalogue (Yale, £35), turned on Cezanne’s formative twenties, prior to his teaming up with Pissarro in Normandy. Back in Aix, his discussion circle had included ...”