Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...rule, apt to take short views. For such a need educated men, and among them college graduates, are peculiarly responsible, because they have been furnished above others with the means of forming opinions by ascertaining the facts on which they should be based, and by considering them from an abstract, and hence a detached, point of view. Such men are in a real sense the watchmen of the people, for if they see the evil coming and give not warning, the blood of the people who suffer should be required at their hand: and not less should it be required...
...fashioned variety of study. It is easier to sit in a comfortable chair and let the mind roam to the far reaches of a subject than it is to attempt to learn formulae, memorize passages from the great authors of the past or dig deep into abstract principles. But the former is profitless unless it rests on the firm foundations of the latter. It is true that the great inventions of the age are the children of imagination, but the automobile, the flying machine, the telephone would never have come into being if the invention had not possessed, in addition...
...undergraduate should realize that his early courses in physics and mathematics in college are as important to the future engineering student as a course in turbine or bridge design in an engineering school. He is inclined to look upon the study of mathematics, physics, or chemistry as something abstract, a kind of preliminary warming up for the real job which is to come later in the professional school. And this conception is not infrequently due to his elders who prate about "pure" science and "applied" science. It seems to him a far cry from the simple steam-engine...
...fabled face as a thing holy and remote. These tendencies follow no order of precedence. Now one, now the other, according to the temper of the times, prevails upon thought. The Italian artists before Giotto, borrowing the immaculate but dispassionate wonder of the Greeks, painted women whose faces were abstract as algebraic ellipses; later, yielding to a subtle warmth, their rapt, expressionless madonnas began softly to smile...
...watch, appeared to the uninitiated to be a nightmare of wheels, ratchets, gagets, dials, cogs, cotters, springs. Students of modern Art, however, criticized it because it revealed too much preoccupation with the actual mechanism of a watch, instead of considering the entrails of a timepiece merely as so much abstract machinery. Second prize was won by the work of Jean Marcel Paul, eccentric Frenchman who, revolting against the tradition which makes a painting square or round, affects dissymetry in his frames. His latest work, The Passions, has 13 corners, 3 curves, resembling in outline a broken flint. Another, Carpe Diem...