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Robert Chambers, né le 10 juillet 1802 à Peebles en Écosse et mort le 17 mars 1871 à St Andrews, est un naturaliste, éditeur et écrivain écossais.

Libraire à succès à Édimbourg, il écrivit de nombreux livres sur l'histoire et le folklore de l'Écosse. Avec son frère William, il était aussi éditeur d'ouvrages d'éducation populaire. Il se rendit célèbre pour trois œuvres majeures : sa Cyclopaedia of English Literature en trois tomes , ses Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation qu'il publia anonymement en 1844 car il y proposait une théorie de l'évolution et enfin en 1864 son Book of Days .. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. juillet 1802 – 17. mars 1871
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Robert Chambers: 100   citations 0   J'aime

Robert Chambers: Citations en anglais

“Geometry is that of mathematical science which is devoted to consideration of form and size, and may be said to be the best and surest guide to study of all sciences in which ideas of dimension or space are involved. Almost all the knowledge required by navigators, architects, surveyors, engineers, and opticians, in their respective occupations, is deduced from geometry and branches of mathematics. All works of art constructed according to the rules which geometry involves; and we find the same laws observed in the works of nature. The study of mathematics, generally, is also of great importance in cultivating habits of exact reasoning; and in this respect it forms a useful auxiliary to logic.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Robert Chambers, Chambers's Information for the People (1875) Vol. 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=vNpTAAAAYAAJ

“My sincere desire in the composition of the book was to give the true view of the history of nature, with as little disturbance as possible to existing beliefs, whether philosophical or religious.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 388

“There is of course no extraordinary fact resting on testimony only, of which it is not possible to presume some error in the observation or reporting, if we be set upon finding one.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 2

“Now as there are, according to Humboldt, one hundred and seventy words in common between the languages of the new and old continents, and many of these are expressive of the most primitive ideas, there is, by Dr Young's calculation, overpowering proof of the original connection of the American and other human families.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 294

“The monkeys themselves, without instruction from any quarter, learn to use sticks in fighting, and some build houses—an act which cannot in their case be considered as one of instinct, but of intelligence.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 320

“The nobler orders of being, including man himself, were contemplated from the first, and came into existence by virtue of a law, the operation of which had commenced ages before their forms were realized.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 250

“The whole history of lamentation, and mourning, and woe, from the beginning of the world—the funeral ceremonies in which the living symbolize the intensity of their grief—the monuments they rear to tell the world for centuries to come of the calamity they have suffered from the stroke of death—are enduring attestations that it is not so much in the removal of one sentient and living being off the earth, as in the change—the calamitous change to the survivors—that death is truly the King of Terrors.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Source: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 13

“I suggest, then… that the first step was an advance under favor of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 205

“This skeptical method consists very much in vicious circles. You cannot know whether a fact be a fact till you have ascertained the laws of nature in the case, and you cannot know the laws of nature till you have ascertained facts.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 9

“The scientific skepticism of our age professes to spring from a sense of the extreme fallaciousness of the human senses, and the liability besetting us all to deceive ourselves into a belief which gratifies the faculty of wonder. It is held as a rare and valuable gift to be able to observe a fact correctly. We are pathetically told that what a man thinks he saw, is often a mere hypothesis of his imagination as to what he saw, and may be wholly wrong.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 1-2

“Zoophyta, polyparia, crinoidea, conchifera, and crustacea are the orders of the animal kingdom thus found in the earliest of earth's sepulchres.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 60

“We may, indeed, set it down as an absolute certainty, that many things are erroneously deemed impossible; for, till we know all the possible—and how far we are from that need not be insisted on—how can we know what is impossible?”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 14

“I may here refer to a curious mathematical calculation by Dr. Thomas Young, to the effect, that if three words coincide in two different languages, it is ten to one they must be derived in both cases from some parent language, or introduced in some other manner.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 293

“The limbs of all the vertebrate animals are, in like manner, on one plan, however various they may appear.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 195

“The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock which was at first in a state of simplicity if not barbarism.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 305

“I believe my doctrines to be in the main true; I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 388

“We are drawn on to the supposition, that the first step in the creation of life upon this planet was a chemico-electric operation, by which simple germinal vesicles were produced.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 204-205

“Ascending to the next group of rocks, we find the traces of life become more abundant, the number of species extended, and important additions made”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 61
Contexte: Ascending to the next group of rocks, we find the traces of life become more abundant, the number of species extended, and important additions made in certain vestiges of fuci, or sea plants, and of fishes. This group of rocks has been called by English geologists, the Silurian System, because largely developed at the surface of a district of western England, formerly occupied by a people whom the Roman historians call Silures.

“The fact of the cosmical arrangements being an effect of natural law, is a powerful argument for the organic arrangements being so likewise, for how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence on one of these worlds. Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 154

“Thus we give, as is meet, a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 390

“The peculiarity of six fingers on the hand and six toes on the feet… is then sometimes seen to descend through several generations. It was Mr. Lawrence's opinion that, a pair, in which both parties were so distinguished, might be the progenitors of a new variety of the race who would be thus marked in all future time. It is not easy to surmise the causes which operate in producing such varieties. Perhaps they are simply types in nature, possible to be realized under certain appropriate conditions, but which conditions are such as altogether to elude notice.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Chambers and his brother William were both born with this condition. Robert was made lame by the operation to remove the sixth digits from his feet.
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 282-283

“There are nations, such as the inhabitants of Hindostan, known to be one in descent which nevertheless, contain groups of people of almost all shades of color, and likewise discrepant in other of those important features on which much stress has been laid.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 278-279

“Not one species of any creature which flourished before the tertiary (Ehrenberg's infusoria excepted) now exists; and of the mammalia which arose during that series, many forms are altogether gone, while of others we have now only kindred species. Thus to find not only frequent additions to the previously existing forms, but frequent withdrawals of forms which had apparently become inappropriate—a constant shifting as well as advance—is a fact calculated very forcibly to arrest attention. A candid consideration of all these circumstances can scarcely fail to introduce into our minds a somewhat different idea of organic creation from what has hitherto been generally entertained.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 152

“The first idea which all this impresses upon us is, that the formation of bodies in space is still and at present in progress. We live at a time when many have been formed and many are still forming.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 20

“The same law of development presides over the vegetable kingdom. …where a special function is required for particular circumstances, nature has provided for it, not by a new organ, but by a modification of a common one, which she has effected in development.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 197

“The elder Herschel, directing his wonderful tube towards the sides of our system, where stars are planted most rarely… was enabled with awe struck mind to see suspended in the vast empyrean astral systems, or, as he called them, firmaments, resembling our own. Like light cloudlets to a certain power of the telescope, they resolved themselves, under a greater power, into stars, though these generally seemed no larger than the finest particles of diamond dust. The general forms of these systems are various; but one at least has been detected as bearing a striking resemblance to the supposed form of our own. The distances are also various… The farthest observed by the astronomer were estimated by him as thirty-five thousand times more remote than Sirius, supposing its distance to be about twenty thousand millions of miles. It would thus appear, that not only does gravitation keep our earth in its place in the solar system, and the solar system in its place in our astral system, but it also may be presumed to have the mightier duty of preserving a local arrangement between that astral system and an immensity of others, through which the imagination is left to wander on and on without limit or stay, save that which is given by its inability to grasp the unbounded.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 6-7

“Mr. Babbage's illustration powerfully suggests that this ordinary procedure may be subordinate to a higher law which only permits it for a time, and in proper season interrupts and changes it.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 212

“Some other idea must then be come to with regard to the mode in which the Divine Author proceeded in the organic creation. Let us seek in the history of the earth's formation for a new suggestion on this point.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 153

“Indifference to life and indifference to the purity and amenity that sweeten existence must necessarily go together.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802)

Source: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 17

“We cannot doubt after what we know of the power of heat that the nebulous form of matter was attended by the condition of a very high temperature.”

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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) livre Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 30