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Many of our visitors seem to find the content of one of our pages -


Which is about Human Nature, (and 'Very Possibly' related matters)


- to be particularly fascinating!!!


There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee.
William Shakespeare

"…can we possibly refuse to admit that there exist in each of us the same generic parts and characteristics as are found in the state? For I presume the state has not received them from any other source. It would be ridiculous to imagine that the presence of the spirited element in cities is not to be traced to individuals, wherever this character is imputed to the people, as it is to the natives of Thrace, and Scythia, and generally speaking, of the northern countries; or the love of knowledge, which would be chiefly attributed to our own country; or the love of riches, which people would especially connect with the Phoenicians and the Egyptians.
From Plato's most famous work ~ The Republic ~ detailing conversations entered into by his friend, and teacher, Socrates




Archæology
Space Archæology discoveries
Space Archæologist Dr Sarah Parcak
History
Historical Biography
Quotations & Quotes
Social Psychology
Spirituality & Comparative Religion
Gautama Buddha & Buddhism
Other Popular Pages


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Archaeology


Qin Terracotta Warriors
chinese clay army - pictures - images
Otzi the Iceman
Heinrich Schliemann
Antikythera Mechanism Otzi / Oetzi The Iceman
discovery site location map
More Archaeology Pages




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Space Archaeology discoveries

Space Archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak


Point Rosee - North American
Norse or Viking settlement sites
Sarah Parcak
Space Archaeologist
Dr Sarah Parcak
satellite remote sensing discoveries
Space Archaeology
Satellite infrared imaging
Street plan of Tanis
More Space Archaeology Pages




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Space Archæology discoveries
Space Archæologist Dr Sarah Parcak


History

  "History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived."

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Famous Historians Guide to our History Pages
The European Revolutions of 1848
  "1848 remains a seed-plot of history. It crystallized ideas and projected the pattern of things to come; it determined the course of the following century."

  Lewis Namier
The European Revolution of 1848 begins
A broad outline of the background to the onset of the turmoils and a consideration of some of the early events.

The French Revolution of 1848
A particular focus on France - as an Austrian foreign minister said "When France sneezes Europe catches a cold".

The Revolution of 1848 in Germany and central Europe
the Germanies - Germany - had a movement for a single parliament in 1848 and many central European would-be "nations" attempted to assert a distinct existence separate from the dynastic sovereignties they had been living under.

The "Italian" Revolution of 1848
A "liberal" Papacy after 1846 helps allow the embers of an "Italian" national aspiration to rekindle across the Italian Peninsula.

The European Revolutions - reactionary aftermath 1848-1849
Some instances of social and political extremism allow previously pro-reform liberal elements to join conservative elements in supporting the return of traditional authority. Such nationalities living within the Habsburg Empire as the Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Serbs and Roumanians, find it more credible to look to the Emperor, rather than to the democratised assemblies recently established in Vienna and in Budapest as a result of populist agitation, for the future protection of their nationality.
The Austrian Emperor and many Kings and Dukes regain political powers. Louis Napoleon, (who later became the Emperor Napoleon III), elected as President in France offering social stability at home but ultimately follows policies productive of dramatic change in the wider European structure of states and their sovereignty.
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and
the Unification of Risorgimento Italy
Otto von Bismarck &
The Wars of German Unification
Italian unification map
Risorgimento Italy
Map of German unification
Famous quotations and quotes about
Learning from History

Famous quotations and quotes about
The Lessons of History

Understanding the Past, Present and Future : Human Nature and History
Emerson's call for a
transcendentalist approach
to the study of History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosophy of History

Oswald Spengler
Decline of the West
Karl Marx
Historical Materialism
R G Collingwood
philosophy of history

Wilhelm Dilthey
Introduction to the Human Sciences

Arnold Toynbee
A Study of History
The Whig Interpretation
of History
Philosophy of History index
History & Social Theory
The diplomacy during World War One




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Historical Biography


Otto von Bismarck
Count Camillo Cavour Metternich
Giuseppe Mazzini Maximilien Robespierre
French Revolution
Reign of Terror
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adam Smith
More Historical Biographies




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Quotations & Quotes

Introduction to our selections of
key poetical and topical quotations



  Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.
  William Wordsworth

Quotes about
Learning from History
Man proposes but God disposes quotation
Nietzsche : "God is Dead" quotation
Darwin's views about God Charles Darwin : "Survival of the Fittest" quotation
Stephen Hawking : God & Religion quotes Stephen Hawking : Philosophy is Dead quote
Richard Dawkins
quotations and quotes
Science Darwin & Evolution
Richard Dawkins
quotations and quotes
about God and Religion
Faith and Religious Beliefs
Science and Religion quotes
1984 : George Orwell
quotations and quotes
The wit of Oscar Wilde
Marcel Proust
having / seeing with new eyes
quote citation source
Niemoller - They came for
Communists, Socialists and Jews
Pearls of Wisdom
Karl Marx quotation
On religion as the opium of the people
Otto von Bismarck
Blood and Iron quotation
Stephen Fry
quotations and quotes
on Gods and Religions
Faith and Religious Beliefs
A Transcription of the Irish TV interview
with key comments from Stephen Fry and Gay Byrne
Christopher Hitchens
quotations and quotes
on Gods and Religions
Charles Darwin's
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank" - quotation
Charles Darwin quotations
about the struggle for existence
Charles Darwin quotation
on the spontaneous generation of life
in some - warm little pond
The "there is grandeur in this view of life" closing
sentence to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species




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Social Psychology


Famous Psychology Experiments
Conformity under Social Pressure
Solomon Asch
The Robbers Cave Experiment
Muzafer Sherif et al
Stanley Milgram : Obedience to Authority Experiments Social Identity Theory
Nature vs Nurture Debate Spirituality &
the wider world
Abraham Maslow's pyramid
Pavlov and Classical Conditioning




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Gautama Buddha & Buddhism


Buddhist Philosophy Buddhism vs Christianity
Buddha's teachings Dalai Lama biography
More Buddhism Pages




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Other Popular Pages


Plato's Myth or Allegory of the Cave Stephen Hawking : Zero-Gravity Flight
Plate Tectonics
Continental Drift
Tectonic Plates
Boundaries & Boundary Types
Famous Scientists
Alfred Russel Wallace biography Theory of Evolution Development
Messel Pit Human Evolution ~ Theory
John Locke Biography Dan Brown Biography
World Religions Populations
Statistics ~ List
Western Philosophy as
Footnotes To Plato
Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Essay ~ History




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Spirituality &
Comparative Religion

Introduction to our selections of
key spiritual and poetical quotations


Central spiritual insights

Other spiritual wisdom

Central poetry insights

Other poetry insights

The Science versus Religion Debate

Coexistence ~ Faith, Reason, God, Science, Religion, Evolution?

Eastern vs. Western metaphysics and philosophy

There may be truth in the saying:-

"God is One ~ Religions many"

Buddhist Spirituality
& Mysticism Quotations
Islamic Spirituality
& Mysticism Quotations
Vedic Hindu Spirituality
& Mysticism Quotations
Christian Spirituality & Mysticism Quotations
Sikh Spirituality
& Mysticism Quotations
Taoist Spirituality
& Mysticism Quotations
Jewish Spirituality
& Mysticism Quotations


Central poetry insights
~ Secular but somewhat comparable in depth and content!!!

Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Cowper and Dryden
~ need we say more?



A collection of these wisdoms is available to



from this page


Sufi Mysticism




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Pythagoras was a prominent figure in the intellectual life of the Greek world of the sixth century B.C.
Alongside his genuine contributions to mathematics and geometry Pythogoras is also considered to have recognised that there was evidently a "Tripartite" complexity to Human Nature:-
 Pythagoras who, according to Heraclides of Pontus, the pupil of Plato and a learned man of the first rank, came, the story goes, to Philus and with a wealth of learning and words discussed certain subjects with Leon the ruler of the Philasians. And Leon after wondering at his talent and eloquence asked him to name the art in which he put most reliance. But Pythagoras said that for his part he had no acquaintance with any art, but was a philosopher. Leon was astonished at the novelty of the term and asked who philosophers were and in what they differed from the rest of the world.

 Pythagoras, the story continues, replied that the life of man seemed to him to resemble the festival which was celebrated with most magnificent games before a concourse collected from the whole of Greece. For at this festival some men whose bodies had been trained sought to win the glorious distinction of a crown, others were attracted by the prospect of making gains by buying or selling, whilst there was on the other hand a certain class, and that quite the best class of free-born men, who looked neither for applause no gain, but came for the sake of the spectacle and closely watched what was done and how it was done: So also we, as though we had come from some city to a kind of crowded festival, leaving in like fashion another life and nature of being, entered upon this life, and some were slaves of ambition, some of money; there were a special few who, counting all else as nothing, ardently contemplated the nature of things. These men he would call "lovers of wisdom" (for that is the meaning of the word philo-sopher).


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In all districts of all lands, in all the classes of communities thousands of minds are intently occupied, the merchant in his compting house, the mechanist over his plans, the statesman at his map, his treaty, & his tariff, the scholar in the skilful history & eloquence of antiquity, each stung to the quick with the desire of exalting himself to a hasty & yet unfound height above the level of his peers. Each is absorbed in the prospect of good accruing to himself but each is no less contributing to the utmost of his ability to fix & adorn human civilization.
In William H. Gilman (ed.) The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol II, 1822-1826, 305


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In what is perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous essay - 'History' - we read such things as:-
… There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. …

… We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, -- must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. …

… In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. …


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"History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."
R. G. Collingwood


To access our page about Human Nature, (and 'Very Possibly' related matters), - please click here:-


Human Nature (and the Courses of History?)