Rejecting any academic training they had experienced, Monet and the other Impressionists believed that their art, with its objective methods of painting what they saw before them, was more sincere than any academic art. They all agreed that they aimed to capture their "sensations" or what they could see as they painted. These sensations included the flickering effects of light that our eyes capture as we regard things. In complete contrast to the Academie, the Impressionists painted ordinary, modern people in everyday and up-to-date settings, making no attempt to hide their painting techniques. They avoided symbols or any narrative content, preventing viewers from "reading" a picture, but making them experience their paintings as an isolated moment in time.

Plants assess when they need to be competitive and when it is more prudent to be collaborative. To make this kind of decision, they weigh the energy cost relative to the benefit for improved growth and persistence. For example, although a plant would generally attempt to grow taller than a closely situated neighbor for preferential access to sunlight, if the neighbor is already significantly taller and the race is likely to be lost, the plant will temper its competitive instinct. That is, plants compete only when competition is needed to improve their ability to support their own growth and reproduction and has some likelihood of success. Once competition yields the needed results, they cease competing and shift their energy to living. For plants, competition is about survival, not the thrill of victory.

Mechanisation speeded up vertical movement. Stairs and ramps were traditionally how you went up and down, so few buildings in frequent use exceeded five storeys. The Otis Company, founded in 1853 in New York, changed all that with the invention of the safety elevator (safe because it locked the car in place should the cables fail) that made taller buildings possible. Escalators came later bringing greater capacity to move more people over shorter vertical distance; they made their debut, and were a sensation, at the 1900 Paris Exposition. With elevators and escalators cities could now spread underground, with deep basements, subways and tunnels, and upwards, with high rise buildings, as well as outwards. The modern cityscape ― of which Manhattan is still the iconic exemplar ― was created.

If you wanted to be entertained in a theater before the nineteenth century, you could not avoid the fact that you were at some level participating in a dialog, a conversation, either with your fellow members of the audience, or with the actors. The idea of the audience sitting in the dark and watching the stage in silence is a new thing. Prior to the nineteenth century the audience were lit and often extremely vocal and active, even leaping on stage to fight with the cast. It was the actor David Garrick in the eighteenth century who pioneered the idea that an audience should shut up and listen. The passive and reverential silence in which today's actors can indulge themselves is a new phenomenon, as, of course, is the cinema, where our surrogates on the screen can unfold their stories unaware of our responses.