In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.
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Alas! While the speculative honourable professor explains the entire existence has he in distraction forgotten his own name, that he is a man, purely and simply a man, not a fantastic 3
8 of a paragraph.
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A central theme in the speculative writing on technology of the past century is that forms of technics, like forms of biological life, undergo...
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Two young Harvard M.B.A.'s worked up some highly optimistic projections -- with the caveat that these were speculative and should of course be tested.
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The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.
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All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
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This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.
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