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Incorporeal   Listen
adjective
Incorporeal  adj.  
1.
Not corporeal; not having a material body or form; not consisting of matter; immaterial. "Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms Reduced their shapes immense." "Sense and perception must necessarily proceed from some incorporeal substance within us."
2.
(Law) Existing only in contemplation of law; not capable of actual visible seizin or possession; not being an object of sense; intangible; opposed to corporeal.
Incorporeal hereditament. See under Hereditament.
Synonyms: Immaterial; unsubstantial; bodiless; spiritual.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Incorporeal" Quotes from Famous Books



... Only wait till to-morrow or the day after; something will happen then which will reduce our own precious persons and this beautiful world to that nothingness which to-day is inconceivable. It is coming; I can hear from afar the brazen tramp of the airy and incorporeal monster. A queer sort of giant—smaller than the mathematical point of which we were speaking, and yet vast beyond all measurement. Aye, aye; our intelligence, polyp-like, has long arms and can apprehend vast size ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... he came to those who were with Peter, he said unto them, Take, handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal daemon. And straightway they felt and believed; being convinced both by his ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake

... the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging ...
— Sophist • Plato

... beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternise with or control the worm. . . . There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... as he seemed, the sound of his words brought her strength and some reassurance, and she grew slightly more composed. Yet, the instant that he had turned away to talk to the cabman, her fright of that unspeakable and incorporeal menace flooded her consciousness like a great wave, sweeping her—metaphorically—off her feet. And indeed, for the time, she felt as if drowning, overwhelmed in vast waters, sinking, sinking into the black abyss ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... and appeared to await an answer; but, as Halbert hesitated how to frame his speech, the vision seemed gradually to fade, and became more and more incorporeal. Justly guessing this to be a symptom of her disappearance, Halbert compelled himself to say,—"Lady, when I saw you in the glen, and when you brought back the black book of Mary Avenel, thou didst say I should one day learn to ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment re-considers those earlier physical impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice or Laura, by no means ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater

... perhaps, so much to be dreaded as the sweetly-formed and graceful ladies of the fern. These were creatures, not of flesh and blood, and yet not incorporeal like the demons, nor were they dangerous to the physical man, doing no bodily injury. The harm they did was by fascinating the soul so that it revolted from all religion and all the rites of the Church. Once resigned to the caress of the fern-woman, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... sac of eggs to the sun; or the transparent nymph of the Onthophagus taurus, "as though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous horns like those of the Aurochs"? (12/12.) What an undiscovered subject he might find in the nymph of the Ergatus (12/13.), with its almost incorporeal grace, as though made of "translucent ivory, like a communicant in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still more mysterious nymph ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... distant, must have led the savage irresistibly to the dualistic theory. But hallucinatory figures, both in dreams and waking life, are not necessarily those of the living; from the reappearance of dead friends or enemies primitive man was inevitably led to the belief that there existed an incorporeal part of man which survived the dissolution of the body. The soul was conceived to be a facsimile of the body, sometimes no less material, sometimes more subtle but yet material, sometimes altogether ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... familiar face in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and trivial. Their stage showed ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... thou gross and vulgar passion! that wouldst tempt me to kiss away the tears from her glowing cheeks. I will not soil their spotless purity. I will not seek to mix a thought of me with a sentiment not unworthy of incorporeal essences. ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin

... selected her during his stay, their bosoms full of the harbored ill will and envy of years because she had been the most desired by the young men of the tribes, the women now invoked curses upon the deserted and unprotected girl through the medium of the incorporeal powers. ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... the youth abstain, but he must wear The sacred ring wherewith she was endowed, When first religious chastity she vowed; 110 Which made his love through Sestos to be known, And thence unto Abydos sooner blown Than he could sail; for incorporeal Fame, Whose weight consists in nothing but her name, Is swifter than the wind, whose tardy plumes Are reeking water and dull ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... whole; that we have some prepositions to denote the contiguous relation of bodies, and others for the detached relation; and that both have, by degrees, been extended from local relations, to the relations of subjects incorporeal. He appears also to assume, that, in such examples as the following,—"Caius walketh with a staff; "—"The statue stood upon a pedestal;"—"The river ran over a sand;"—"He is going to Turkey;"—"The sun ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... waves Emerge again, like incorporeal hosts Rising, white-sheeted, from their gloomy graves, As if the depths ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... independent of the Peripatetics, we know that in his view of nature he laid greater stress on the material causes than Aristotle did, and so arrived at a different conception of the supreme deity. Aristotle had severed the deity from Nature and placed it outside the latter as an incorporeal being whose chief determining factor was reason. In Strato's view the deity was identical with Nature and, like the latter, was without consciousness; consciousness was only found in organic nature. Consequently ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann

... quality, it will effect no real difference in its subject, but, in a phrase which aims at interpreting what we can hardly understand, a difference of persons. For it is a canon of absolute truth that distinctions in incorporeal things are established by differences and not by spatial separation. It cannot be said that God became Father by the addition to His substance of some accident; for he never began to be Father, since the begetting of the Son belongs to His very substance; ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... words—"I am not an incorporeal demon," from the "Doctrine of Peter;" but they are found in the shorter recension of the seven letters in the "Epistle to the Smyrnaeans," Sec. 3. Had this epistle been known to him, he would certainly have quoted from an apostolic father rather than from a work which he knew to be spurious. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... necessary to believe that God is one and incorporeal: which things philosophers prove by ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... hidden in all beings, all-pervading, the Self within all beings, watching over all works, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the perceiver, the only one; free from qualities' (/S/v. Up. VI, 11); and 'He pervaded all, bright, incorporeal, scatheless, without muscles, pure, untouched by evil' (I/s/. Up. 8). But Release is nothing but being Brahman. Therefore Release is not something to be purified. And as nobody is able to show any other way in which Release could be connected with ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... indeed a terrible response. But for what purpose? "To consult the soul of the blind Theban seer Tiresias, whose mind is still unimpaired; to him alone of the dead Proserpine gave a mind to know." Clearly this means the pure intelligence without body; Ulysses must now reach forth to the incorporeal spirit, to the very Idea beyond ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... for the nonce taken on the village mind, I am as much interested in my incorporeal, invisible neighbours as in those I see and am accustomed to meet and converse with every day. They are here in the churchyard, and I am pleased to be with them. Even when I sit, as I sometimes do of an evening, on a flat tomb with a group of laughing children round me, some not yet tired ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... Aristotle, Nicostratus, Plato's peer, splitter of the straws of the sublimest philosophy, was asked about the soul as follows: How may one rightly describe the soul, as mortal, or, on the contrary, immortal? and should we speak of it as a body or incorporeal? and is it to be placed among intelligible or sensible objects, or compounded of both? So he read through the treatises of the transcendentalists, and Aristotle's /de Anima/, and explored the Platonic heights of the /Phaedo/, and wove into a single fabric the whole exact ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... was thus, O Pandu, that the beautiful Bhadra wept over the death of her lord. And the weeping Bhadra clasped in her arms the corpse in anguish of heart. Then she was addressed by an incorporeal voice in these words, "Rise up, O Bhadra, and leave this place. O thou of sweet smiles, I grant thee this boon. I will beget offspring upon thee. Lie thou down with me on thy own bed, after the catamenial bath, on the night of the eighth or the fourteenth day of the moon.' Thus addressed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... central constituent, with the subsidiary sun, planets, and stars. Above the earth is the air, and below is the watery abyss. Whether the heaven, which is conceived to be above the air, and the hell in, or below, the subterranean deeps, are to be taken as corporeal or incorporeal is not clear. However this may be, the heaven and the air, the earth and the abyss, are peopled by innumerable beings analogous in nature to the spiritual element in man, and these spirits are of two kinds, good and bad. The chief of the good spirits, infinitely ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... came into existence (for that which always is never comes into existence; and that exists for ever which possesses primary force and by nature suffers nothing): neither do they consist of bodies; for even in bodies the powers are incorporeal. Neither are they contained by space; for that is a property of bodies. Neither are they separate from the First Cause nor from one another, just as thoughts are not separate from mind nor acts ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... forced upon the people, betook themselves with their faithful followers, at the beginning of Spring, to the wild inaccessible mountains of the Hartz; and there, according to their old custom, they offered prayers and fire to the incorporeal God of Heaven and earth. In order to secure themselves against the spying, armed converters, they hit upon the idea of masking a number of their party, so as to keep their superstitious opponents at a distance, and thus, protected by caricatures of devils, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... parents, children, brothers, and sisters. The act of liberating a Christian soul from the dreadful torments which purgatory is supposed to inflict, however opposed to reason may be the idea of operating by material fire upon the incorporeal essence of the soul, is considered superior, in the estimation of every sensible and Christian heart, to any succour which can be given to hunger, misery, nakedness, or other numerous corporal afflictions. In this way the money which might be spent in wiping ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... the headings of the Decalogue, much as Philo had done long before. And so he formulates ten dogmas of Judaism. These are—(i) Creation (as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world); (ii) the existence of God; (iii) God is one and incorporeal; (iv) Moses and the other canonical prophets were called by God; (v) the Law is the Word of God, it is complete, and the Oral Tradition was unnecessary; (vi) the Law must be read by the Jew in the original ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams

... more potent than fire!" said he, in his gloomiest tone. "Even thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape it. In this little time, it has annihilated the creations of long nights and days, which I could no more reproduce, in their first glow and freshness, than cause ashes and ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... within the grave, in which memories of old days and old friendships are preserved by ghosts of an almost genial and entirely harmless disposition, we will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... that a man like Epicurus, after having discarded the gods and all incorporeal substances, could have supposed that the will, which he himself takes as composed of atoms, could have had control over the atoms, and diverted them from their path, without its being possible for one ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... to teach that God is incorporeal, as Plato also asserted, and that his providence extends over ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... his foot, no one among those intelligent and wise and proud and mighty monarchs said anything. And a shower of flowers fell on Sahadeva's head, and an incorporeal voice said—'Excellent, excellent.' Then Narada clad in black deer-skin, speaking of both the future and the past, that dispeller of all doubts, fully acquainted with all the worlds, said in the midst of innumerable creatures, these words of the clearest ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... combination of ideas, is clear from the preceding section. I must therefore be a substance; but it has been shown that there is no corporeal or material substance: it remains therefore that the CAUSE OF IDEAS is an incorporeal ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley

... found, to go further, the analogues of Varuna in the monotheistic god Viracocha of the Peruvians, to whom is addressed this prayer: "Cause of all things! ever present, helper, creator, ever near, ever fortunate one! Thou incorporeal one above the sun, infinite, and beneficent[10]"; of the Vedic Snake of the Deep, in the Mexican Cloud-serpent; of the Vedic Lightning-bird, who brings fire from heaven, in the Indian Thunder-bird, who brings fire ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... difficult to describe the subject, for I really do not understand it. It is some sort of an allegory in lyrical-dramatic form, recalling the second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of women, followed by a chorus of men, then a chorus of incorporeal powers of some sort, and at the end of all a chorus of spirits not yet living but very eager to come to life. All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, for the most part about somebody's curse, but with a tinge of the higher humour. But the scene is suddenly changed. There begins ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... nature complex, the synthesis was irresistible. His expression was complicated; he had not a frank gaze, nor did he meet his friends without a nameless reticence. This veiled manner made him difficult to decipher. Upon the stage Belus was like a desert cat, a gliding movement almost incorporeal, a glance of feline intensity, and then—the puissant attack upon the keyboard. As in sullen dreams one struggles to throw off the spell of hypnotic suggestion, so there were many who mutely fought his power, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... interested the old man until he seemed to forget the hour. Not so, Craig. He knew it was nearing half-past twelve. The more they talked the more uncanny did this house and room of spirits seem to me. In fact, I was rapidly reaching the point where I could have sworn that once or twice something incorporeal brushed by me. I know now that it was purely imagination, but it shows what tricks the imagination can play ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... imagination idealised all sorrow into poesy. She never watched the sunset, she never looked up into the starry sky at night, without picturing Elspie as there. All the foibles and peculiarities of her poor old Scottish nurse became transmuted into the image of a guardian invisible, incorporeal; which seemed to draw her own spirit nearer to heaven, with the thought that there was one she loved, and who loved her, in the glorious ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... with this invisible, this incorporeal person, stands a more solid and substantial form, a new and formidable power, till these days unknown in Europe. Master of unbounded wealth, he boasts that he is the arbiter of peace and war, and that the credit of nations depends upon his nod. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan



Words linked to "Incorporeal" :   corporeality, corporality, discorporate, unembodied, incorporeality, spiritual, unbodied, bodiless, corporeal, physicalness



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