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More "First cause" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of self, back to him—the First Cause: Therein lies the purpose, the law of all laws. Tears, grief, disappointment, well, what are all these To the Builder of stars and the ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... art he from whom Kumara (Kartikeya) had his origin; thou art holy; thou art called Rudragarva and Hiranyakrit. Let thee, O Agni, grant me energy, let Vayu grant me life, let Earth grant me nourishment and strength, and let Water grant me prosperity. O Agni, thou who art the first cause of the waters, thou who art of great purity, thou for ministering unto whom the Vedas have sprung, thou who art the foremost of the deities, thou who art their mouth, O purify me by thy truth. Rishis and Brahmanas, Deities and Asuras pour ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... Thou great First Cause, least understood, Who all my sense confined To know but this, that thou art good, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... consequential character of childhood experience. The alienist especially has demonstrated the significant influence of childhood upon adult motives and conduct. Recent studies of human conduct have greatly magnified the importance of early experience and have disclosed how often it is the first cause of morbid thinking and anti-social actions. The conclusion is not to be doubted—a still greater effort must be made to conserve human character by a wiser control of the influences of childhood. One may discover for himself how interested conscientious parents are in detailed illustrations ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... taken as even, so far, Hume's mouth-piece, is increased when we reflect that we are dealing with an acute reasoner; and that there is no difficulty in drawing the deduction from Hume's own definition of a cause, that the very phrase, a "first cause," involves a contradiction in ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... for the generative source of that creative power of thought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its first cause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged pattern of himself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way, some, at all events, would have explained his mental process. To him that process was nothing ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... ANARCHY. I. Dearth the first cause. II. Expectations the second cause III. The provinces during the first six months of 1789 IV. Intervention of ruffians and vagabonds. V. Effect on the Population of the New Ideas. VI. The first ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Complete - Linked Table of Contents to the Six Volumes • Hippolyte A. Taine
... poetical suggestion of a Jewish theology. As the Jews came into contact with Hellenic influence, the tendency to develop the personification into a power increased, and may be traced through the first flower of Graeco-Jewish culture, the Wisdom literature. The Greek philosophers had conceived the First Cause as a ruling Mind, or universal Reason, and influenced by this conception, yet loyal to their monotheistic faith, the Jewish writers of the Hellenistic age spoke of the Wisdom as the minister of God, the power by which He ruled creation. The apocryphal ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... a construction in images belonging to the merely sketched or outlined type.[30] It results from a double activity, negative and positive, or dissociation and association, the first cause and origin of which is found in a will that it shall be so; it is the motor tendency of images in the nascent state engendering the ideal. The inventor cuts out, suppresses, sifts, according to his ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... made him see through and through the big words that swell men's bosoms, she unlocked for him the souls of men and his own soul, made him a seer, and showed him the heart of the world and every first cause hidden behind words and deeds. But what he saw was this: comedy and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Weeks, in his work on bees, says, "Two causes and two only can be assigned why bees ever swarm: the first, the crowded state of the hive; the second, to avoid the battle of the queens." The first cause producing first swarms, the other second, third, &c. Mr. Colton's patent hive, it is said, can be made to swarm "at any time within two days," merely for want of room. By removing the six boxes attached to it, the bees ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... and foolish. You pretend to venerate reason, while you discard her first principles. You need not try to evade me at this point by an appeal to nature. Here you can find no aid, for nature tells us of no first cause. The apple tree, before this window, now so richly laden with fruit, tells not of its first cause. If you say it came from an apple-seed, and that from an apple, and that from another tree, another seed, and another tree, and so on, in a circle you may always go, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... New Granada] and of Nueva Espaa have lost a part of what they had. The cost of mining is greater, the mines are poorer, and, consequently, the gains less, and less the amount obtained. Therefore, since this was the first cause of the greatness of the Indias, it is not remarkable that with its deficiency ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... gentleman somewhere who had not behaved very well to her. In the third place, she had not anything particular to do. These three nots together are enough to make a lady very ill indeed. Of course she could not help the first cause; but if the other two causes had not existed, that would have been of little consequence; she would only have to be a little careful. The second she could not help quite; but if she had had anything to do, and had done it well, it would have been very ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... him all his life His father had been twenty years dead, but she had kept his spirit alive—his aims, his ambitions, his fears, and the lessons of his life. There lay the beginnings of his ruin, his degradation, and the first cause of his deep duplicity. He had recovered everything that had been lost; he had gained all that his little world could give; and what was the worth of it? What was the price he had paid for it? "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... of this present Army. The Just and Equal Appeal, and the state of the Innocent Cause of us, who have been turned out of your Army for the exercise of our pure Consciences, who are now persecuted amongst our Brethren under the name of Quakers." Wherein they declare that "The first cause and ground of our engagement in the late wars against the Bishops and Prelates, and against Kings and Lords, and the whole body of oppressors: our first engagement, we say, against these was justly and truly upon that account of purchasing and obtaining Liberties in Civil Rights, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... fact and principle suggestive to Mr. Lincoln, not only had he accurate and exact perceptions, but he was causative, i. e., his mind ran back behind all facts, things and principles to their origin, history and first cause, to that point where forces act at once as effect and cause. He would stop and stand in the street and analyze a machine. He would whittle things to a point, and then count the numberless inclined planes, and their pitch, making the point. Mastering and defining this, he would then cut ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... gives health and refreshment to the suffering. When nature pines in winter cold or in summer drought and lacks power to revive, when the sun is darkened, when lies and evil instincts alienate the soul from its pure first cause, then Isis uplifts her complaint, calling on her husband, Osiris, to return, to take her once more in his arms and fill her with new powers, to show the benevolence of God once more to the earth and to us men. You have learnt that lament; and when you sing it at her festival, picture yourself ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... counterpoise our Constitution had settled to moderate the excess of popular power, I augmented my own. But since my death I have been often reproached by the Shades of some of the most virtuous and wisest Athenians, who have fallen victims to the caprice or fury of the people, with having been the first cause of the injustice they suffered, and of all the mischiefs perpetually brought on my country by rash undertakings, bad conduct, and fluctuating councils. They say, I delivered up the State to the government of indiscreet or venal orators, and to the passions of a misguided, infatuated ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... and looked dejectedly into the fire. After a moment he said, sadly, "I envy you, Miss Walton. I wish I could believe in a personal God who thought about us and cared for us —that is, each one of us. Of course I believe in a Supreme Being—a great First Cause; but He hides Himself behind the stars; He is lost to me in His vast universe. I think my prayers once had an effect on my own mind, and so did me some good. But that's past, and now I might as well pray to gravitation ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... of ainhum are quite numerous. The first cause is the admirable location for a furrow in the digito-plantar fold, and the excellent situation of the furrow for the entrance of sand or other particles to make the irritation constant, thus causing chronic inflammatory ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... dates from the time of the Han dynasty, or, in round numbers, about two thousand years ago. Originally it was a ceremonial worship in the temple of the First Cause, and lasted from the 13th to the 16th of the first moon, bringing to a close on the latter date all the rejoicings, feastings, and visitings consequent upon the New Year. In those early days it ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... be utterly without foundation in truth, and purely chimerical. So, in various other places, he treats this distinction as "too weak to be supported." "The will of God," says he, "is the supreme and first cause of things;" and he quotes Augustine with approbation to the effect, that "He does not remain an idle spectator, determining to permit anything; there is an intervention of an actual volition, if I may be allowed the expression, which otherwise could never ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... the fisherman, as he was the first cause of the deliverance of the young prince, the Sultan gave him much money, and made him and his family happy for ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... are compelled to regard phenomena as effects of some cause. We must believe in a cause of that cause, till we reach a first cause. The First Cause must be infinite and absolute. He then follows Mansel in showing the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Philosophers and Mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the Universe; we have no reason whatever to expect from their speculations any help, when we ascend to the first Cause and supreme Ruler of the Universe. But we might perhaps go further, and assert that they are in some respects less likely than men employed in other pursuits, to make any clear advance towards such a subject of speculation."—(Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise, p. 334.)—Scarcely less acute ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... spoken on the previous evening. He who commits high treason is disembowelled alive, and they tear out his heart and buffet his cheeks with it. Impress on yourself notions of right and justice. Never allow yourself to speak a word, and at the first cause of anxiety, run for it. Such is the bravery which I counsel and which I practise. In the way of temerity, imitate the birds; in the way of talking, imitate the fishes. England has one admirable point in her favour, that her legislation ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... strongly of the two. He knew now that Bozzle had been untrue to him, but his disgust did not spring from that so much as from the feeling that he had defiled himself by dealing with the man. Though he was quite assured that he had been right in his first cause of offence, he knew that he had fallen from bad to worse in every step that he had taken since. Colonel Osborne had marred his happiness by vanity, by wicked intrigue, by a devilish delight in doing mischief; but he, he himself, had consummated the evil by his own folly. Why had he ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... colonists are always dissatisfied with their position; because, in a pecuniary point of view, they are always poor. And why are they so? The answer is a startling one. The excess of their abundance is the first cause of their poverty; the instability of their government, the second. They possess more than they can dispose of, and are borne down by the weight of their possessions. Place the markets of England and the labour of Ireland within their reach, and they would become millionaires were they to ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... first cause may be anticipated by wise marriage laws.... The full discussion of these laws will come later, but here one may insist that Utopia will control the increase of its population. Without the determination and ability to limit that increase as well as to stimulate it ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... The first cause, so far as it can be determined, of the existence of this book may be found in the following letter, written by my only married sister, and received by me, Harry Burton, salesman of white goods, bachelor, aged twenty-eight, and received ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... who had resolved to follow the Bar, pleaded his first cause at Delft in the year 1599, at his return from France. The study of law and poetry employed one part of his time; he spent the other in publishing the works he had prepared for the press. The first he gave to the public was Martianus Capella. This is one of those obscure authors, ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... absence, am I not reduced to use human words, too feeble to express heavenly feelings? But words at any rate represent the marks these feelings leave in my soul, just as the word God imperfectly sums up the notions we form of that mysterious First Cause. But, in spite of the subtleties and infinite variety of language, I have no words that can express to you the exquisite union by which my life is merged into yours ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... It was not for many centuries that two causes led the Synagogue to formulate a creed. And even then it was not the Synagogue as a body that acted, nor was it a creed that resulted. The first cause was the rise of sects within the Synagogue. Of these sects the most important was that of the Karaites or Scripturalists. Rejecting tradition, the Karaites expounded their beliefs both as a justification of themselves against the Traditionalists and possibly as a remedy against ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... trial of President Johnson it is not my province to write. My special knowledge relates only to its first cause, above referred to, and its termination, both intimately connected with the history of the War Department, the necessities of which department, real or supposed, constituted the only vital issue involved in the impeachment trial. The following memorandum, made by ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... man lived in families, on the produce of the chase. Later on, the spirit of discovery, the more abundant food obtained by traps and by the cultivation of plants allowed men to live in tribes. Thus, intellectual development was the first cause of social life in man, and Lubbock is certainly wrong in considering that the establishment of clans dates further back than the first beginning of civilization. Westermark's conclusions ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... who the forts left unprepared? Pett. Who to supply with powder did forget Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend, and Upnor? Pett. Who all our ships exposed in Chatham net? Who should it be but the fanatick Pett? Pett, the sea-architect, in making ships, Was the first cause of all these naval slips. Had he not built, none of these faults had been; If no creation, there had been no sin But his great crime, one boat away he sent, That lost our fleet, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... congresses, the United States and the British Empire, and the rest of mankind—all boiled up into Mr. Tyndall's potencies, but all there in potency, just as truly as they ever were here in fact. Well! here is a great effect just as imperatively demanding a great First Cause as the world afterward formed out of it. These substances did not make themselves then, any more than the resulting persons or paving stones make themselves now, and they did not endow themselves with these potencies, nor calculate and establish these laws of chemical combination in exact proportion, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Raphael alone ever united form and idea. You want to be the Raphael of love; but chance cannot be commanded. Raphael was a 'fluke' of God's creation, for He foreordained that form and idea should be antagonistic; otherwise nothing could live. When the first cause is more potent than the outcome, nothing comes of it. We must live either on earth or in the skies. Remain in the skies; it is always too soon to ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... union of erudition and faith continued {33} in the Latin world. Theology became more and more a process of deification of the principles or agents discovered by science and a worship of time regarded as the first cause, the stars whose course determined the events of this world, the four elements whose innumerable combinations produced the natural phenomena, and especially the sun which preserved heat, fertility and life. The dogmas of the mysteries ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... conduct depended. The general position was clearly apprehended, and was accepted as if beyond dispute. Men spoke and thought of the Order of Nature. The world was a Cosmos, a regulated system. Order implied an Orderer. It was regarded by them as obvious that there must have been a First Cause, a great Architect and Maker of the Universe. They agreed with Aquinas that "things which have no perception can only tend toward an end if directed by a conscious and intelligent being. Therefore there is an {14} Intelligence ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... thoughts with a visible body, which gives the artist an advantage over the man of science, who presents the formula of the law with the aid of the contingent finite idea, but without connecting it with its First Cause. Confining itself to the limits of the thing examined, science tries to explain the finite rationale of its being; while art gives its formula by the aid of a material sign, a form or body, which contains or ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... personages, even of all of them fell upon Tilottama's body. And when Tilottama set out (for the city of the Asuras) with the wealth of her beauty, all regarded the task as already accomplished. After Tilottama had gone away, the great god who was the First Cause of the Universe, dismissed all the celestials ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... are aware of the identity of laws ruling the universe with laws ruling and prevailing in the historical development of man. Rarely has an American patience enough to ascend the long chain from effect to cause, until he reaches the first cause, the womb wherein was first generated the subsequent distant effect. So, likewise, they cannot realize that at the start the imperceptible deviation from the aim by and by widens to a bottomless gap until the aim is missed. Then the greatest ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... his manner of imparting the correct vocal action he was at once put on the defensive. No champion of the imitative faculty could be found. This lack of understanding of the basis of the empirical method, on the part of its most intelligent and successful exponents, was the first cause of the weakness ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... motion? What is this "primo mobile," this transitional power, in which all things live, and move, and have their being? It is by definition something different from matter, and we may call it as we choose, "first cause," or "first light," or "first heat;" but we can show no scientific proof of its not being personal, and coinciding with the ordinary conception of a supporting spirit ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... tobacco or with Putney. A murder in the Strand to that tobacconist was less than the breakdown of a motor bus opposite Putney Station; and a change of government less than a change of programme at the Putney Empire. A rather pessimistic tobacconist, not inclined to believe in a First Cause, until one day a drunken man smashed Salmon and Gluckstein's window down the High Street, whereupon his opinion of Providence went up for several days! Priam enjoyed talking to him, though the tobacconist was utterly impervious to ideas and never gave out ideas. This morning ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... views, said they saw the guiding hand of Providence directing her course from the first; but those who opposed her said it was the devil; and others again, in idleness or charity, or the calm neutrality of indifference, set it all down to the Inevitable, a fashionable first cause at this time, which is both comprehensive, convenient, and inoffensive, since it may mean anything, and so ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... beastly heat as the first cause. But Captain Giles disclosed himself possessed of a deeper philosophy. Things out East were made easy for white men. That was all right. The difficulty was to go on keeping white, and some of these nice boys did not know how. ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... of a quiet and retired life; the latter of which, Tiberius, out of a proneness to lust, and a desire to hide those unnatural pleasures which he could not so publicly practise, embraceth: the former enkindleth his fears, and there gives him first cause of doubt or suspect towards Sejanus: against whom he raiseth in private a new instrument, one Sertorius Macro, and by him underworketh, discovers the other's counsels, his means, his ends, sounds the affections of the senators, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... of one Being infinite in power, "self-created and creating all others," is by no means impossible. Indeed, as everything must have had a cause, nothing we see being by possibility self-created, we naturally mount from particulars to generals, until finally we rise to the idea of a first cause, uncreated, and self-existing, and eternal. If the phenomena compels us to affix limits to his goodness, we find it impossible to conceive limits to the power of a creative, eternal, self-existing principle. But even supposing we could form the conception of such a Being having his power limited ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... by external means. That vital instinct in NORMAL man consists in exactly the same as does the vital instinct of the lowest animal, namely, in the desire of nourishment and of propagation. For this "will of life," this metaphysical first cause of all existence, desires nothing but to live—that is, to nourish and eternally reproduce itself—and this tendency can be seen identically in the coarse stone, in the tenderer plant, and so forth up to the human animal. Only the organs are different, of which the will must avail itself in ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... that they have no patience with morbidity. Love—which put them into being and keeps the earth in existence—seems to all such a silly malady peculiar to the sentimental in early youth. So they put the First Cause—in one of its many manifestations—in the waste-paper basket, asking each other what will become of Charles if he cannot find a rich wife, and poor Alice, if she cannot entrap a suitable husband. But there are others who look on life with some hope of understanding it truly, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of Chrysantheme (her eldest child and first cause of this loss of favor), my mother-in-law, an expansive although distinguished nature, has fallen seven times into the same fatal error, and I have two little sisters-in-law: Mdlle. La Neige,[G] and Mdlle. La ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... of these he finds among the ancients, the second with Raphael, the third with Correggio, the fourth with Titian. Mengs does not succeed in rising above this empiricism of the studio, save to declaim about the beauty of nature, virtue, forms, and proportions, and indeed everything, including the First Cause, which is the most beautiful ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... appeared small and almost personal ends, having sometimes, superficially, little in common. Now it was a Giordano Bruno, burnt in Rome in defence of abstract theory with regard to the nature of the First Cause; then an Albigense hurled from his rocks because he refused to part with the leaves of his old Bible; now a Dutch peasant woman, walking serenely to the stake because she refused to bow her head before two crossed rods; ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... am sick,' either in health or heart. It were not good for us to walk ever in the plains of ease; we should be yet more apt than we be to build our nests here, and forget to stretch our wings upward toward Him who is the first cause and the last end of all hope and goodness. 'Tis only when we wake up after His likeness, to be with Him for ever, that we shall ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... controls all things—who has given me my defects, and my capacity for loving, and then placed Myra Gaunt in my way. Is there mercy to me in this? As part of a great evolutionary principle, which develops the race life at the expense of the individual, it might be consistent with the idea of a God—a first cause. But does the individual who perishes, because unfitted to survive, owe any love, or gratitude to this God? He does not! On the supposition that He exists, I deny it! And on the complete lack of evidence that He does exist, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... "That we be not spoiled through vain philosophy;" that experience demonstrates how learned men have been arch-heretics, how learned times have been inclined to atheism, and how the contemplation of second causes doth derogate from our dependence upon God, who is the first cause. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... thing needful, above all others, is to stop the cause. I have found that young men are invariably mistaken as to what is the cause. When asked as to the first cause of their trouble, they invariably say it was self-abuse, etc., but it is not. It is the thought. This precedes the handling, and, like every other cause, must be removed in order to have ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... yourselves, therefore, to fulfil the will of the Lord. To render yourselves worthy of it, take great care to preserve peace and concord among yourselves, as the ever-subsisting ties of charity. Avoid envy which was the first cause of the loss of mankind. Be patient in tribulations, and humble in success; which is the means of coming off victorious in all encounters. Imitate our Lord Jesus Christ in his poverty, chastity, and obedience; He was born poor, He lived poor, and it was in the bosom of poverty that He died. ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... Wherein our intellectual king proclaimed The task of science,—through this wilderness Of Time and Space and false appearances, To make the path straight from effect to cause, Until we come to that First Cause of all, The Power, above, beyond the blind machine, The Primal Power, the originating Power, Which cannot be mechanical. He affirmed it With absolute certainty. Whence arises all This order, this unbroken chain of law, This human will, this death-defying love? Whence, but from some divine ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... fool either honest or wise. Most popular commotions we read of in histories of Greece and Rome, took their rise from unjust quarrels to the nobles; and in the latter, the plebeians' encroachments on the patricians, were the first cause of their ruin. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... involving the idea of some ultimate end, to the realisation of which the whole process of the world as known to us is somehow a means, we may easily see that metaphysical inquiry, though distinct from ethical, is its necessary pre-supposition. The Being or Purpose of God, the great first cause, the world as fashioned, ordered and interpenetrated by Him, and man as conditioned by and dependent upon the Deity—are postulates of the moral life and must be accepted as a basis of all ethical study. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... explanation can be but a metaphysical doctrine, crowning the work of science; for the distinguishing feature of science is that it only studies efficient causes. The historian is not called upon to investigate the first cause or final causes any more than the chemist or the naturalist. And, in fact, few writers on history nowadays stop to discuss the theory of Providence in its ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... in ev'ry age, In ev'ry clime ador'd; By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord. Thou great First Cause, least understood; Who all my sense confin'd, To know but this, that thou art good, And that myself am blind: Yet gave me in this dark estate, To see the good from ill; And binding Nature fast in fate, Left free the human Will. What conscience ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... of dualism where the transition is taking place into the realm of monism. But though there may have been a tendency toward monism in early times, it was only in the Sung dynasty that the philosophers definitely placed behind the yang and the yin a First Cause—the Grand Origin, Grand Extreme, Grand Terminus, or Ultimate Ground of Existence. [9] They gave to it the name t'ai chi, and represented it by a concrete sign, the symbol of a circle. The complete scheme shows the evolution of the Sixty-four Diagrams (kua) from the ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... In addition to this first cause of an exaggerated expenditure there is another not less imperative—the necessity of voting all grants for local purposes. A Deputy is unable to oppose grants of this kind because they represent once more the exigencies of the electors, and because each individual ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of influence or non-influence may be listed under the general problem of the world's CAUSAL UNITY. If the minor causal influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God's fiat on creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and origin. Transcendental Idealism, translating ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... been placed about the Queen by the Duchess herself. In a letter, supposed to have been addressed to Bishop Burnet, the Duchess gives a brief account of this person, who was her kinswoman, in explanation to his inquiry as to the first cause of her disagreement ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... porch and look at the birds, they seem to me a revelation, as beautiful, if not so profound, as the Apocalypse. What but Goodness could have made a creature at once so beautiful and so happy? Mansel and Spencer may talk about the incomprehensibility of the First Cause; I say, here is manifestation. The little Turdus Felivox,—oho! ye ignorant children, that is he of the cat,—it sits on the bough, ten feet from me, and sings and trills and whistles, and sends [301] out little jets of music, little voluntaries, as if it were freely and ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... it they cannot be understood, as I intend more fully to show unto you in a peculiar treatise which on that purpose I am about to publish. Therefore, if you will that I take any meddling in this process, first cause all these papers to be burnt; secondly, make the two gentlemen come personally before me, and afterwards, when I shall have heard them, I will tell you my opinion freely without ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the council with his propugnacity, to joke him about his bonny sweetheart, "the Tappit-hen," and he instantly sang dumb, and quietly slipped away; by which it may be seen how curiously events come to pass, since, out of the very first cause of his thwarting me in the lamps, I found, in process of time, a way of silencing him far better than any sort of truth ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... next to the military spectacle, I had leaned a little inward; and there, with his effeminate features actually livid with rage, and writhing with impotent malignity, stood Monsieur G—, the infamous divorced husband of Madame d'Albret, and the first cause ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... triumph has been achieved—now, when others, who have been but mere instruments—blind instruments, many of them, in your hands to accomplish they knew not what—come forward and assume place and power—you, Edmond, the noble author and first cause of all, remain quietly in seclusion, unknown, unnamed, unappreciated and uncommended, while the others reap the ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... the consideration of Parliament, the House prayed Charles to punish Montagu, and to suppress and burn his books; and this Charles did in a remarkable proclamation (January 17th, 1628), wherein the Appello Caesarem is admitted to have been the first cause of those disputes and differences that have since much troubled the quiet of the Church, and is therefore called in, Charles adding, that if others write again on the subject, "we shall take such order ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... live. And declared, with genuine emotion, that nothing but a high sense of public duty had brought him hither from his dying son's bedside. He also told the court that Arthur's inability to clear his friend had really been the first cause of his illness, from which he was not expected ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... little Ada Queetie Departed this life, That was the first cause Of my seeking for God. The path of sorrow, And that path alone, Leads to the land ...
— A Complete Edition of the Works of Nancy Luce • Nancy Luce
... mediator between government and the people, endeavoring to form a plan which should have both an early and a temperate operation. I mean, that it should be substantial, that it should be systematic, that it should rather strike at the first cause of prodigality and corrupt influence than attempt to follow ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... most of them say, are either bodies or minds; and, of these, a body is the external cause to which we ascribe sensations. Berkeley and the Idealists, however, deny that there exists any cause of sensations (except, indeed, a First Cause). They argue that the whole of our notion of a body consists of a number of our own or others' sensations occurring together habitually (so that, the thought of one being associated with the thought of the others, we get what Hartley and Locke call a complex idea). They deny that a ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... fruit-trees, &c. (and I would recommend this plan to be invariably adopted,) it not only affords the teacher an opportunity of communicating much knowledge to the children, and of tracing every thing up to the Great First Cause, but it becomes the means of establishing principles of honesty. They should not on any account be allowed to pluck the fruit or flowers; every thing should be considered as sacred; and being thus early accustomed to honesty, temptations ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... of decorating the graves of their friends. It had always been a pleasure to Mary to give her flowers for this purpose, and she now determined to decorate her father's tomb in the same manner. Taking from a cupboard the beautiful basket which had been the first cause of all her unhappiness, she filled it with choice flowers of all colours, artistically interspersed with fresh green leaves, and carried it to Erlenbrunn before the hour of divine service, and laid it on her father's tomb, watering it at the same time ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... my poor mind assign, for the first comfort, the desire and longing to be comforted by God. And not without some reason call I this the first cause of comfort. For, as the cure of that person is in a manner desperate, who hath no will to be cured, so is the comfort of that person desperate, who desireth ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... principle from which it depends; because the higher a cause is, the greater the scope of its power. Now just as the causality of the efficient cause consists in its flowing into something, so the causality of the end consists in its drawing the appetite. Therefore, just as the First Cause is that which flows into all things, so the last end is that which attracts the desire of all. But being itself is that which is most desired by all. Therefore man's happiness consists most of all in things pertaining to his being, such as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... they were purposely chosen to show, that I reject the hypothesis of "first causes" for any and every special effect in the universe, except in the same sense that the action of man or of any other intelligent being is a first cause. In using such terms I wished to show plainly, that I contemplated the possibility that the development of the essentially human portions of man's structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing influence of some higher intelligent ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... her rights, and as it is never by the result of free choice that she solicits us, she also does not withdraw any of her exigencies as long as she has not been satisfied. Since, from the first cause which gave the impulsion to the threshold of the will where its jurisdiction ends, all in her is rigorously necessary, consequently she can neither give way nor go back, but must always go forward and press more ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Daughter of life's first cause; who, when he saw The ills that unborn innocents must bear, When doomed to come to earth— Bethought—and gave thee birth To charm the poison from affliction there; And from his source eternal, bade ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... began, "I have but one reason to advance against the sentence of the law. If you have interest to prevent or mitigate it, that reason will, I think, suffice to enlist you on my behalf. I said that the first cause of those offences against the law which brings me to this bar was the committing me to prison on a charge of which I was wholly innocent! My lord judge, you were the man who accused me of that charge, and subjected me to that imprisonment! Look at me well, my lord, and you may trace in ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the reasoning by which this doctrine is sought to be sustained is found in the assumption "that to all our race the existence of a First Cause is a question of philosophy," and that the idea of God lies at the end of "a gradual process of inquiry" and induction, for which a high degree of "scientific culture" is needed. Whereas the idea of a First Cause lies at the beginning, not at the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... as reason and logic, tell us that there is, and can be, only one supreme God, or First Cause of the universe, and that from this one first and fundamental Cause or Power every secondary power and everything that exists has come into existence, or been evolved within it and through its eternal activity. The whole of the universe ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... absorbed in a unity which is all-inclusive and self-existent, and has no "beyond.'' By a metaphor this process has been described as the odos ano (as of tracing a river to its source). Other phrases from different points of view have been used to describe the idea, e.g. First Cause, Vital Principle (in connexion with the origin of life), God (as the author and sum of all being), Unity, Truth (i.e. the sum and culmination of all knowledge), Causa Causans, &c. The idea in different senses appears ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... however, go into this more specially. The first cause of discord in this threefold state of man is the state in which the body is the ruler; and this, my Christian brethren, you find most visibly developed in the uneducated and irreligious poor. I say uneducated and ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... inviolable sequence; whereas it is but a fixed mode of action whether necessarily or freely determined; and it is a part of law that some activities should be liable to suspension or arrestment by others, and especially by the First Cause. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... between the Netherlands and Spain was not, therefore, primarily, a rebellion against established authority for the maintenance of civil rights. To preserve these rights was secondary. The first cause was religion. The Provinces had been fighting for years against the Inquisition. Had they not taken arms, the Inquisition would have been established in the Netherlands, and very probably in England, and England ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... obstinacy, by which his safety or happiness in this world is endangered, without feeling the pungency of remorse. He who is fully convinced, that he suffers by his own failure, can never forbear to trace back his miscarriage to its first cause, to image to himself a contrary behaviour, and to form involuntary resolutions against the like fault, even when he knows that he shall never again have the power of committing it. Danger, considered as imminent, naturally ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... fatality exercised its influence over the Caliph Mutamma, for from him dates the beginning of the decadence of his dynasty, and to him its first cause may be ascribed. The fact is, Mutasim was uneducated, without ability, and lacking in moral principles; he was unable even to write. Endowed with remarkable strength and muscles of iron, he was able, so Arab historians relate, to lift ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... in chaos hurl'd, Self-form'd of atoms, sprang the infant world: No great FIRST CAUSE inspired the happy plot, But all was matter—and no matter what. Atoms, attracted by some law occult, Settling in spheres, the globe was the result; Pure child of CHANCE, which still directs the ball, As rotatory atoms rise or fall. In ether launch'd, the peopled ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... that when God or Nature or the First Cause created that ore vein a million years ago he had Dobyans Verinder in mind ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... while, in concert, it was apprehended, with this resumption of the blockade, insurrectionary movements, instigated, as was afterwards known, by the malcontents of the Morea, manifested themselves formidably both in the town and its neighbourhood. The first cause for alarm was the landing, in canoes, from Anatolico, of a party of armed men, the followers of Cariascachi of that place, who came to demand retribution from the people of Missolonghi for some injury that, in a late affray, had been inflicted on one of their clan. It was also rumoured that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... free; I will give you my idea. The Primitive Element must be common to oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Force must be the common principle of positive and negative electricity. Demonstrate these two hypotheses, and you will hold in your hands the First Cause, the solution of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... all the Charms of Poetry, and to see so great a Strength of Reason, amidst so beautiful a Redundancy of the Imagination. The Author has shewn us that Design in all the Works of Nature, which necessarily leads us to the Knowledge of its first Cause. In short, he has illustrated, by numberless and incontestable Instances, that Divine Wisdom, which the Son of Sirach has so nobly ascribed to the Supreme Being in his Formation of the World, when he tells us, that He created her, and saw her, and numbered her, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in this time of conflict, can look beyond the passing events of time to the Great First Cause, and behold, as with the eye of faith, the providence of his God watching over all things, waiting to bring good out of evil, and causing all things to work to the one great point, when he will cause the wrath of man to praise him, and the remainder of wrath ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... employed by inferior agents, it is not upon account of any real efficacy that is in them, or necessary aptitude to produce any effect, but merely in compliance with the laws of nature, or those conditions prescribed to them by the First Cause, who is Himself above ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... intervention. We know, in fact, that Osiris or Bacchus was considered as the discoverer of the vine and of milk; that Iris was the genius of the waters of the Nile; and that the Serpent, or good genius, was the first cause of all these things. Since, moreover, sacrifices had to be made to the gods in order to obtain benefits, the flow of milk, wine, or water, as well as the hissing of the serpent, when the sacrificial flame was ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... ancient Greeks, the trinitarian God of the mediaeval school-man, the great First Cause of the eighteenth-century deist, the primordial Life-Force of the modern man of science, are all on common ground here in regard to the unfathomableness ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... steps are omitted, and the result is linked immediately to the first Cause. God Himself is the theme, and trust in Him ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... does not affirm, neither does he deny. All arguments for and against are either insufficient or equally plausible, and they fail to lodge conviction in his mind of minds. Elevated upon this pedestal of wisdom, he pretends to dismiss all further consideration of the First Cause. But he does no such thing, for he lives as though God did not exist. Why not live as though He did exist! From a rational point of view, he is a bigger fool than his atheistic brother, for if certainty is impossible, prudence suggests ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... essence, and exalting it above time and space. But when a later appearance was conceived as the aim of a series of preparations, it was frequently hypostatised and placed above these preparations even in time. The supposed aim was, in a kind of real existence, placed, as first cause, before the means which were destined to ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... water, and having cut my own hair for nearly twenty years, I never thought of going through the experiment, which I have since regretted; for, many a time and oft have I stood, in wonder, gazing at this strange anomaly of character, and searching in vain for a first cause. The barber's shop at the St. Nicholas is the most luxurious in New York, and I believe every room has its own brush, glass, &c., similarly ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Spinosa, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the Critique of Pure Reason, a certain guiding light. If 'the mere intellect' could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration that no legitimate argument could be drawn from the mere intellect 'against' its truth. 'And what is this' more than St. Paul's assertion, that by wisdom (more properly translated by the powers of reasoning) no man ever arrived ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... in so far as they encourage thousands of virtuous acts by giving warning against evil and recommending good. (But) Buddhism (alone) is altogether perfect and best of all, in investigating thousands of things and in tracing them back to their first cause, in order to acquire thorough understanding of the natures of things and to attain to ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... amusement stir. It was almost exactly what the Princess, his wife, had alleged as a reason for her wanderings. I could not help marvelling why these two had not long ere this found out their great affinity to each other. But now I see that this very likeness of nature was the first cause of their lack of agreement. Like may, indeed, draw to like, as the saw hath it. But in the things of love like and like agree not well together. Fair desires dark, stout and stark desire slender, slow desires quick, severe desires ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... are 'not our own'? But this is an answer which implies a whole theology. And at this moment of his life David had not a particle or shred of theology about him. Except, indeed, that, like Voltaire, he was graciously inclined to think a First Cause probable. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the discovery that his tools are inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative, while the First Cause ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... minister in the Colony. John Norton, who had taken Nathaniel Ward's place at Ipswich, was called after twenty years of service, to the Boston church, and his melancholy temperament and argumentative, not to say pragmatical turn of mind, made him ready to seize upon the first cause of offence. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... investigation. But it is impossible for an intelligent mind to stop there. We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling-place, or what his history! Man ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... he despised her whom every one ill-treated, he despised her to the extent even of abandoning her to the shame of an expulsion which was equivalent to having an ignominious sentence passed on her; and yet, it was he, the king himself, who was the first cause of this ignominy. A bitter smile, the only symptom of anger which during this long conflict had passed across the angelic face, appeared upon her lips. What, in fact, now remained on earth for her, after the ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... these two one was Vic Gregg, no despicable fighter himself, and the other was no less than the invincible little sheriff himself. To imagine the sheriff beaten in the speed of his draw or the accuracy of his shot was to imagine the First Cause, Infinity, or whatever else is inconceivable; nevertheless, there were such possibilities as bullets fired at night through the window, and attacks from the rear. So Rickett waited, and held its breath and kept his eyes rather more behind than ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... and simple fractures, no matter what may be the nature of the bruise, a micro-organism soon announces its presence, so that if not the parent, it is the inseparable companion, in fact the shadow, of disease. Now, though not the first cause in this instance, it has been indubitably proved, that much of the effect, the fever and pain, are produced and continued by the active, omnipresent, sleepless sperm. Either kill the micrococcus or heal ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
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