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Anthropomorphism   Listen
noun
Anthropomorphism  n.  
1.
The representation of the Deity, or of a polytheistic deity, under a human form, or with human attributes and affections.
2.
The ascription of human characteristics to things not human.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Anthropomorphism" Quotes from Famous Books



... consequence of sin, but it is not a vindictive punishment; it is that we may learn our mistake. But we must give up the revengeful idea of God: that is imported into our scale of values by the grossest anthropomorphism. Only the weak man, who fears that his safety will be menaced if he does not make an example, deals in revenge. He is indignant at anything which mortifies his vanity, which implies any doubt of his power or any disregard of his wishes. Revenge is born of terror, and to think of God as ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... forces, but is not of them. This may be only my anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But what is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It sounds at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature." This is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... of words....[3] He is as real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace" (p. 56). And again, on the same page: "He feels us and knows us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and attempts." There is no limit to the anthropomorphism of the language which Mr. Wells currently employs. Or rather, there is only one limit: he disclaims the notion that his God is actually existent in space, that he has parts and dimensions, and inhabits a form in any way analogous to ours. He is the Invisible King, not merely, like the Spanish Fleet, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... which can be offered for the expression sons of the universe as applied to these invisible companions is to be found in the inevitable anthropomorphism of all human thought. The breaking point, so to speak, of man's vision, that ecstasy of comprehension which I call his apex-thought, is the moment which makes him aware of these companions' existence. And, at this ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... their country. It does not appear that he ever entered on any inquiry respecting the nature of God, simply viewing his existence as a fact of which there was abundant and incontrovertible proof. Though rejecting the crude religious ideas of his nation, and totally opposed to anthropomorphism, he carefully avoided the giving of public offence by improper allusions to the prevailing superstition; nay, even as a good citizen, he set an example of conforming to its requirements. In his judgment, the fault of the Sophists consisted in this, that they had subverted ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... Anthropomorphism is found at its height in "A Life," by Wilbur Daniel Steele. Dr. Edward J. Wheeler places this story first of the year's brief fiction, on the score of originality, power, and satisfactory evolution of the struggle, with its triumphant dramatic reverse. Other ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... Mary are the constant themes of the most devout religious art, not to speak of the numerous saints who correspond more or less to the gods of a polytheistic system. Philosophical thought was antagonistic to anthropomorphism, which, as we have seen, was the most characteristic feature of popular religion in Greece, and which was essential to Greek religious art. As soon as the human form is a mere symbol, no longer regarded as the express image of the god and the embodiment of his individuality, it loses touch ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... several gods. In other words, it applies to God the mathematical concept of unity, a concept which can only come into cognition by virtue of contrasts and determinations, and which forces therefore the believer either to Pantheism or anthropomorphism to reconcile his belief with his reason. No other resource is left him. With monotheism there must always be the idea of numerical separateness, which is incompatible with ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... under pretence of being kind, and fanaticism and mischief are baptized as Duty. The divinely ordained institutions of society are sacrificed, and ruin and chaos inevitably result. Having shown that Philosophy, developed in its natural form, can produce nothing better than Pantheism, Atheism, Anthropomorphism, and Skepticism, there arises an inquiry for the causes which have produced these seemingly unhappy results. And now it appears "that the Consciousness must be developed in its natural form from a natural point of view before its spiritual form can be developed; and therefore ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... from the point of view of men, since we are men? We cannot look at them in any other way. Let us be, then, anthropomorphic. The only thing we need to guard against is this: we must not assume that we have exhausted the universe, and that we know it all. This is the evil of a certain type of anthropomorphism. But I cannot understand why it is important for us to be anything else but anthropomorphic. I want to know how things look to a man, what things are to a man, how things affect a man, how I am to deal ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... heterodoxy; error &c 495; false doctrine, heresy, schism; schismaticism^, schismaticalness; recusancy, backsliding, apostasy; atheism &c (irreligion) 989 [Obs.]. bigotry &c (obstinacy) 606; fanaticism, iconoclasm; hyperorthodoxy^, precisianism^, bibliolatry^, sabbatarianism^, puritanism; anthropomorphism; idolatry &c 991; superstition &c (credulity) 486; dissent &c 489. sectarism^, sectarianism; noncomformity^; secularism; syncretism^. [religious sects.] protestantism, Arianism^, Adventism, Jansenism, Stundism^, Erastianism^, Calvinism, quakerism^, methodism, anabaptism^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... of psychic states generally plays upon them unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of the world, in the anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely related and largely identical ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... of Plato's two higher forms of "divine" mania—has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the "defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the scholastic realism ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... doubtful observations, there is no lack of verified and authentic material, but it still remains to interpret them. As soon as we begin to conjecture we know how difficult it is to divest ourselves of all anthropomorphism. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... (Hebrew) Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai, Jah. Associated Words: theism, deism, atheism, theocracy, theocrasy, theology, theomachy, pantheism, acosmism, pancosmism, theocentric, thearchy, theomania, theosophy, theochristic, theodicy, theophany, demiurge, anthropomorphism, anthropomorphology, tetragrammaton, anthropopathism, psychotheism. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... I have purposely omitted the controversy which arose among the monks of Egypt, concerning Origenism and Anthropomorphism; the dissimulation and violence of Theophilus; his artful management of the simplicity of Epiphanius; the persecution and flight of the long, or tall, brothers; the ambiguous support which they received at ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... of many religious and in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most of these have a fundamental similarity, inasmuch as they offer pictures in which the mode and order of creation are given in the minutest detail and with the simplest kind of anthropomorphism; in which the Creator is represented with familiar human characteristics. But these general considerations, so obvious now that we have learned to read the Bible narrative without passion or prejudice, were not plain to the early ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... relatively correct predicates of God to be determined from revelation are his unity (c. Cels I. 23), his absolute spirituality ([Greek: pneuma asomatos, aulos, aschematistos])—this is maintained both in opposition to Stoicism and anthropomorphism; see Orig. [Greek: peri archon] I. 1, Origen's polemic against Melito's conception of God, and Clem., Strom. V. 11. 68: V. 12. 82,—his unbegottenness, his immortality (this is eternity conceived as enjoyment; the eternity of God itself, however, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... him—or say, "If you ask not, you receive not?" Give me a God finer and greater and juster and nobler than myself—something higher than the Chaplain's jealous, capricious, inconsequent and illogical God. Anthropomorphism! ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... applied to Deity; and without definition, so many various conceptions may be included under the terms as to entangle a discussion hopelessly. No educated Christian, I imagine, believes in an anthropomorphic Deity in the sense in which this anthropomorphism is condemned in the noble passage of Xenophanes which he quotes in the first part of his work. In another sense, our author himself in his concluding chapter betrays his anthropomorphism; for he attributes to the Divine Being wisdom and beneficence and forethought, which ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... in possession of this accession, it will go to work with these ideas as speculative reason (properly only to assure the certainty of its practical use) in a negative manner: that is, not extending but clearing up its knowledge so as on one side to keep off anthropomorphism, as the source of superstition, or seeming extension of these conceptions by supposed experience; and on the other side fanaticism, which promises the same by means of supersensible intuition or feelings of the like kind. All these are hindrances to the practical use of pure reason, so that ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant

... informed that no such things as fairies ever really existed. "Do you mean to say it's all lies?" asked Charlotte, bluntly. Miss Smedley deprecated the use of any such unladylike words in any connection at all. "These stories had their origin, my dear," she explained, "in a mistaken anthropomorphism in the interpretation of nature. But though we are now too well informed to fall into similar errors, there are still many beautiful lessons to ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... perpetuity of the species. It was this method of interpretation that was in later years to lead to those great creations of Greek art whose beauty is still the wonder of mankind. Between these Chaldaean figures and those of the Greek sculptors the difference was one of degree. The anthropomorphism of the Chaldees was franker than that of the Egyptians, and so far the art of Chaldaea was an advance upon that of Egypt, although it was excelled by the latter in executive qualities. The method to which it had committed itself, the diligent and passionate study of the human figure, was the royal ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... deity starts with a more or less natural and obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the profane speculator falls flat upon ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton



Words linked to "Anthropomorphism" :   anthropomorphise, representational process, theanthropism



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