26 quotes
True history is the generalized result of all things that have been thought and done by men.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
It might be said, even at this late day, that the whole intellectual structure of the world rests on the concrete of tradition.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Above all other branches of knowledge, history sits and broods, with wings outspread as though the universe of things were pregnant and must bring forth under the shadow and power of thought.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
The line of division is made on the principle that the remains of what man has done shall fall to archaeology, and the remains of what man was to anthropology.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Man is a speaking animal. No other characteristic of his nature is more universal or prevailing. Speech is the invariable index of the intellectual and moral condition of the human kind.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Ethnic history...regards the human being as a maker—a maker of houses first, and of all things afterwards.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
With what a sense of impotency must the primitive man have come to the seashore! Even after the age of boats and ships, how did he cling to the shores and inlets of the seemingly infinite deep!
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
There was in the thought of antiquity a conception of evolution and a conception of creation. The two were blended. Man was made out of clay; but a supernatural being was the maker.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Ethnology proceeds confidently by comparison, by hypothesis, by analogy, along the lines of growth and expansion until it reaches the grand discoveries and noble impulses which constitute the ripe fruit of the most recent epochs.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
We are now at the beginning of a vast and varied scholarship devoted to an exposition of the human family, and of the various parts into which our race has differentiated.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Geology takes up the investigation of planet life where astronomy leaves off. The latter deals with worlds in their relation to each other, and incidentally with world constitution. The former investigates the history of our own earth in particular.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Primitive man was rife with conjectures and dim memories of his former state....Doubtless the former experiences of the half-conscious race were transmitted to him with his blood.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
We may safely assume that the processes of the natural world which we observe around us are the same processes which have been giving form and feature to the surface of our planet through eons of past time.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
The attempt to derive Hebrew and German from a single original is, to say the least, beset with as many difficulties as confronts the ethnologist in his effort to trace an Anglo-American to the same stock with an aboriginal Australian.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
It is as difficult to reach a common original for all existing linguistic forms as it is to find a common ancestry for the cave dwellers of Western Europe, the native Australians, the blubber-eating Esquimaux, and the flint-chipping barbarians of Polynesia.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
The religious instinct is found to have been deeply implanted in nearly or quite all the peoples of the world. This was true in the dawn and morning of history, and it is still true at the high noon of nationality, power, and greatness.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
If the beginnings of history are to be found in wide-apart regions of the earth at a date as remote as twenty centuries before the common era, how great must be the. distance of that childhood of the race and that early youth when the mind, still surrounded with all visions and dreams, looked forth into a landscape and beheld on every side men as trees walking!
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
He who studies the prehistoric career of mankind...is as the observer who, sitting by the window of the flying car, may see the moving spectra of distant landscapes appearing and disappearing among the shadows of the other side.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
The historian in the ideal history is as little seen as Shakespeare is seen in the tragedy of Hamlet....The camera is not seen in the sun picture; neither are the easel, the brush, the hand, and the eye of the artist seen on his canvas.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)
Ethnic history is especially rich in the suggestions which it offers for illustration. It seems to call loudly for drawings and type-pictures and charts, to the end of a clearer and more vivid apprehension of the subject under consideration.
Ridpath's History of the World (1897)