The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley. Significant Sentences 12.

Significant sentences from Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower, a collection of Eiseley's essays on nature and humanity's relationship to it.

Title of Essay: "The Winter of Man."

"We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her." p. 205.

Title of Essay: "Man Against the Universe."

"The accretion of ideas through the centuries does change the intellectual climate." p. 208.

"Rarely...is the contemporary mass conscious of the innovator in its midst." p. 208.

"As our probes into nature become more sophisticated, the greater becomes our reliance upon the specialist, while he, in turn, appeals to a minute audience of his peers." p. 208.

"...no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses." p. 209.

"Without detracting in the least from Darwin's massive and major achievement, one may observe that the literate public was in some measure ready to receive his views." p. 209.

"Emerson: 'What terrible questions we are learning to ask.' " p. 212.

"Emerson: 'Nature knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts into forests and festoons the globe.' " p. 216.

"Between the telescope and the microscope the...universe has widened, that's all." p. 218.

"The shifting unseen potential that we call nature has left to man but one observable dictum, to grow." p. 221.

Reflections: Man's mind is expanding, but as our knowledge grows more specialized and understood only by an audience of specialists, nature continues simply to grow.