"Materialist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there always has been, a considerable body of opinion that the solution will be a mechanical one—using the word mechanical in the widest sense—and that the living differs from the non-living not in kind, but only in degree of complexity. The upholders of the mechanistic or materialist theory, however, are perhaps less confident than their predecessors of the last century, for the solution in this direction has to face not only the problem of organic co-ordination already referred to, but also that of consciousness and mind. For although ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finest literature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deep sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. But Meredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is a disembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be an embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves one of the two or three things which most ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the Syllogism need not be a Materialist, but assuming that he is one, he is as much entitled to the hypothesis that Matter thinks as a Theist is to his hypothesis that it ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism of earth; and, failing to see his past ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... and some of whom refused to vote for Lincoln, have been particularly assailed. Messrs. Nicolay and Hay, in their Lincoln biography, even go so far as to attack them on the ground of their religious, or rather anti-religious, beliefs, calling them "materialist Missourians," ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... who believes in Forces is brother to the Calvinist who preaches Sovereignty and the Divine Decrees. The preacher lets loose upon the imagination of mankind a Setebos, who after death will plague his enemies and feast his friends. The materialist believes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... says,—"We have of these pretended miracles a vast collection, which may brave the most determined incredulity. Its author, Carre de Montgeron, is a magistrate, a man of gravity, who up to that time had been a professed materialist,—on insufficient grounds, it is true, but yet a man who certainly had no expectation of making his fortune by becoming a Jansenist. An eye-witness of the facts he relates, and of which he had an opportunity of judging dispassionately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... moorland lying round us; air and scenery were good to breathe and to look on; and now, as the three of us sat on a turf seat outside the cottage door enjoying the soft sleepy inaction of the afternoon, a question of mine concerning the folk-lore of the district, after which, hardened materialist though I called myself, I was conscious of a secret hankering, had drawn the foregoing remark from the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... are what make the heroes. The materialist, the sceptic and the coward—he cannot ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... without the least hope of bettering its condition, for the false philosophy of materialism which they advocate gives to a man nothing to live for except his own animal nature. This philosophy says all is well as long as you dodge the sharp corners of the laws of your country. If the materialist can avoid paying fines, along with all other penalties of the laws of his country, what need he care for one course of life in preference to another? Do you say he has a conscience? Well, it may be that it is not seared so that ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... that space was an apparition of God, and that soul was a projection of the character of God; and when he called me his sweet metaphysician, I called him my immortal materialist. And so we loved and were happy; and I forgave him his materialism because of his tremendous work in the world, performed without thought of soul-gain thereby, and because of his so exceeding modesty of spirit that prevented him from having pride and regal consciousness ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Colonel Estcourt, "that everything is explicable, but we must wait for the growth and development of our higher natures before we can comprehend half the mysteries of the higher life. The great fault of the materialist and the scientist is, that they would fain bring everything down to the level of their present comprehension, instead of patiently waiting the completion of their future spiritual forces. It is quite evident that we are not meant to attain our full mental stature on the ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... opinions? He had brains and literature; his pose before the world was not that of an ignorant charlatan. Vanity, no doubt, was his prime motive, but did it operate to make a cleric of a secret materialist, or to incite a display of excessive liberalism in one whose convictions were orthodox? Godwin could not answer to his satisfaction, but he preferred ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... supposed to be the one reality with which we are in immediate contact, which we see and touch and taste and handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter—matter in the sense of the Materialist—is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come in contact with a piece of matter. For in the experience which the plain man calls seeing or touching there is always present another thing. ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... the glory of outdoors. If Captain Mayo had been as well versed in psychology as he was in navigation he might have drawn a few disquieting deductions from this frank and unconscious expression of the mood of the materialist. She ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... is the power of learning by experience. Real science never makes the same mistake twice. Obviously the repetition of the past can only eventuate in the repetition of the present. And that is precisely what education sets itself to counteract. The materialist forgets three outstanding and obvious facts. Firstly, science cannot be the whole of knowledge, because "science" (in his limited sense of the term) deals only with what appears. Secondly, power of insight depends not so much upon the senses as on ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... all: many patristic authors lean towards it—Modern form of, receives impulse from advance of physical science—Karl Vogt's comparison of secretions of brain with that of kidneys—All materialist doctrines opposed to principle of heterogeneity—Modern materialism would make object generate consciousness—Materialists cannot demonstrate how molecular vibrations can be transformed into objects—Parallelism ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... the eighteenth century, and even exaggerating the spirit of that century in the dryness of his soul and of his style, a pure materialist writing with precision and with natural yet intentional nakedness, possessed valuable gifts of observation, and in his famous novel, Red and Black, in the first part of the Chartreuse of Parma, and in his Memoirs of a Tourist, knew how to draw characters with exactness, sobriety, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... most important elements of the old school and of the new. Alike by his vast force, his immense variety, his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation with ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... performance.... Daigaku no Sensei? He is but a Confucianist, bound to the letter of material substance. Nor would he confess the ignorance of the spiritual world he undoubtedly is gifted with, of the law of punishment for deeds performed in a past existence (ingwai) as taught by the Lord Buddha. The materialist has his nose to earth, and can see naught else. The idiot has his nose to heaven, and can see naught else. The Buddha's Law comprehends Heaven and Earth. Hence its truth." With this expression of the odium theologicum the worthy abbot departed ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... God. (Ethics, c. ii., s. iv., n. 2, p. 22.) The love that we bear to ourselves and our neighbour, in view of our coming from God and going to God, is called the love of charity. Charity differs from philanthropy in looking beyond the present life, and above creatures. A materialist and atheist may ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... convincing. At least, so far as it is the word of exact science on the subject it is convincing; so far as it is speculative, or philosophical, it is or is not convincing, according to the type of mind of the reader. Professor Moore is not a bald mechanist or materialist like Professor Loeb, or Ernst Haeckel, nor is he an idealist or spiritualist, like Henri Bergson or Sir Oliver Lodge. He may be called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientific research as these lines lead him ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... to destroy the power of his enemies by depriving them of both authority and wealth, and on the other to consolidate his own by establishing a firm administration, he neglected no means of acquiring popularity. A fervent disciple of Mahomet when among fanatic Mussulmans, a materialist with the Bektagis who professed a rude pantheism, a Christian among the Greeks, with whom he drank to the health of the Holy Virgin, he made everywhere partisans by flattering the idea most in vogue. But if he constantly changed both opinions and language when dealing with subordinates ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Talgarth still retains that distinction.) But it is plainly revealed by Frank's diary that he was drawn to this elderly man by very much the same kind of feelings as a son might have. And yet it is hardly possible to conceive two characters with less in common. The doctor was a dogmatic materialist—and remains so still—Frank was a Catholic. The doctor was scientific to his finger-tips—Frank romantic to the same extremities; the doctor was old and a confirmed stay-at-home—Frank was young, and an incorrigible gipsy. Yet so the matter was. I have certain ideas of my own, but there is no use ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... from my mother and family my doubts and halting faith in the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my classmate so completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became very grave. The entire scheme of Christianity disappeared from my firmament; but, in the immediately previous years, I had been a reader of Swedenborg, and I held immovably an intuition ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... former of these terms, we are not speaking of Materialism and Idealism as they have always actually manifested themselves, but only of the distinguishing principle of these systems when pushed to its extreme result. It is quite possible to be a materialist or an idealist with respect to the immediate phenomena of consciousness, without attempting a philosophy of the Unconditioned at all. But it is also possible, and in itself natural, when such a philosophy is attempted, to attempt it ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... something but were afraid to tell. Watson had said the country was queer, and if he meant fantastic, Lister agreed. There was something about it that re-acted strangely on one's imagination. In the North American wilds, one was, so to speak, a materialist and conquered savage Nature by using well-known rules. In Africa one did not know the rules and felt the power of the supernatural. It looked as if there was a mysterious, malignant force. But the pump was running badly and Lister saw ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... and wait to get their money back until Germany is either strong enough to refuse to pay or ruined beyond the possibility of paying? Meanwhile Russia, reduced to a scrap of fish and a pint of cabbage soup a day, has fallen into the hands of rulers who perceive that Materialist Communism is at all events more effective than Materialist Nihilism, and are attempting to move in an intelligent and ordered manner, practising a very strenuous Intentional Selection of workers as fitter to survive than idlers; whilst the Western Powers are drifting ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... considers the savage much beneath the materialist, instead of superior to him. The latter possesses, although he frequently abuses it, the faculty of self-control and forethought, which is entirely wanting in the former. (Lectures, No. 6.) Dunoyer, De la Liberte du Travaeil, liv. IV, ch. I, 8, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... some surprising vitality from the laboratory. Neither had he imagined, with certain sanguine theosophists, that, by faithful adoration of the Highest, unheard-of powers would be vouchsafed to man. A practical materialist, what Bannadonna had aimed at was to have been reached, not by logic, not by crucible, not by conjuration, not by altars; but by plain vice-bench and hammer. In short, to solve nature, to steal into her, to intrigue beyond her, to procure some one else to bind her to his hand;—these, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... its broadest sense as indicating a belief in spirits), may feel that his faith discloses a beauty and perfection in the union, otherwise imperceptible by him, there is no reason why this difference in faith should make him despise or quarrel with his materialist co-worker, for the latter may do as good service to science, may be as true a man, and live as holy a life, although ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The materialist is in prison. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... The socialist materialist is well content to leave this whole question of ethics to adjust itself, since he knows that equality of condition, the economic basis of Socialism, will necessarily evolve a mode of living, and standards of conduct in perfect harmony with their ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... each the complement of the other, and the only reality is in the combination of the two. The error of the extreme idealist is in endeavouring to realize the absolute without the relative, and the error of the extreme materialist is in endeavouring to realize the relative without the absolute. On the one side the mistake is in trying to realize an inside without an outside, and on the other in trying to realize an outside without an inside; both are necessary ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... be a gross materialist to doubt that there are latent powers in man which man, in modern times, neglects, or knows not how to develop. I became suddenly conscious of a burning curiosity respecting this lonely traveler who traveled at an hour so strange. ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... a curious passage preserved by St. Augustin from that one of Cicero's works which he most admired—the lost treatise on 'Glory'—which seems to show that so far from being a materialist, he held the body to be a sort of purgatory for ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... unselfish. His spirituality separated him from sensuousness, and caused the selfish materialist 51:30 to hate him; but it was this spirituality which enabled Jesus to heal the sick, cast out evil, and raise ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Anti-christian Iconoclasts themselves might probably have been content to "believe and say their prayers," had not the intolerance of philosophy made them atheists and persecutors.—The coarse legend of "death is the sleep of eternity,"* is only a compendium of the fine-drawn theories of the more elaborate materialist, and the depositaries of the dead will not corrupt more by the exhibition of this desolating standard, than the libraries of the living by the volumes which hold out the same oblivion to vice, and discouragement ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... both producing both simultaneously, neither could be what it is without the other, because without the other neither could be the cause which in fact it is. Impossible, therefore, is the supposition of the materialist that consciousness is adventitious, or that in the absence of mind changes of brain could be what they are; for it belongs to the very causation of these changes that they should have a mental side. The use of mind to animals is thus ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... rumpled, and his coffee was growing cold. This was a very different thing from the vague letters and rumours which had reached him from time to time and which he had put out of his mind with all the contempt of the materialist. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thinkers, then, believe that the only real things that exist are the mind and God, and that the universe is only the infinitely varied manifestation of God in the human conscience. It is evident, then, that matter, the only thing the materialist concedes real existence, is simply an orderly phantasmagoria; and God and soul, which materialists regard as mere fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions that answer ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... living matter was endowed with "vital force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied with that explanation was treated to that very "plain argument"—"confound you eternally"—wherewith Lord Peter overcomes the doubts of his brothers in the "Tale of a Tub." "Materialist" was the mildest term applied to him—fortunate if he escaped pelting with "infidel" and "atheist." There may be scientific Rip Van Winkles about, who still hold by vital force; but among those biologists who have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... reports and on municipal committees (there were even rumours of its having been put up at a well-known club); and the rector of a wealthy parish, who was raising funds for a chantry, was known to have met him at dinner and to have stated afterward that "the man was not wholly a materialist." ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... inhibition plays a terrible part in the history of cowardice and of unsuccessful love. No man can be brave without blood to sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the German materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus. The fainting lover must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend him her smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks. Porphyro got over his faintness ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... too, reflects a line of thought which is typical of businessmen. The rationality which can also be seen in his metaphysical ideas and which has induced modern Chinese scholars to call him an early materialist is fitting to an age in which a developing money economy and expanding trade required a cool, logical approach to the affairs ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... head of any convict may be the hell of a quite solitary crime, so in the house or under the hat of any suburban clerk may be the limbo of a quite separate philosophy. The first man may be a complete Materialist and feel his own body as a horrible machine manufacturing his own mind. He may listen to his thoughts as to the dull ticking of a clock. The man next door may be a Christian Scientist and regard his own body ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Holbach, where the most celebrated atheists of the age used to assemble, the gentlemen present were one day commenting on the absurd and foolish things with which the Bible abounds. The French encyclopedist, Diderat, a materialist himself, startled his friends by his little speech: "But it is wonderful, gentlemen, it is wonderful. I know of no man who can speak or write with such ability. I do not believe that any of you could compose such narratives, or could have laid down such sublime moral laws, so simple, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... don't quote what Serviss says. His view is that of the worldly wise materialist. You should listen ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... qualified to serve as a common denominator for various aspects of experience. The very readiness with which we can picture the corpuscular scheme is a source of embarrassment to the seeker after unity. That which is so distinct is bristling with incompatibilities. The most aggressive materialist hesitates to describe thought as a motion of bodies in space. Energy, on the other hand, exacts little if anything beyond the character of measurable power. Thought is at any rate in some sense a power, and to some ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... can't yet quite understand," said Monsignor, "is that point I mentioned the other day about Faith and Science. I don't see where one ends and the other begins. It seems to me that the controversy must be unending. The materialist says that since Nature does all things, even the most amazing things must be done by her—that we shall be able to explain them all some day, when Science has got a little farther. And the theologian says that some things are so evidently out of the reach of Nature that they must ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... will ever know how near she came upon that afternoon to yielding to his pleading, and laying her soul bare to him. But something interposed—fate? Destiny? The materialist smiles "supper." Be that as it may, had she yielded to Lapierre's plans, they would have stolen from the school that very night and proceeded to Fort Rae, to be married by the priest at the Mission. For Lapierre, fully alive to the danger of delay, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... of Logicians are commonly recognised: Nominalist, Conceptualist, and Materialist, who differ as to what it is that Logic really treats of: the Nominalists say, 'of language'; the Conceptualists, 'of thought'; the Materialists, 'of relations of fact.' To illustrate these positions let us take authors who, if some of them are now neglected, have the merit of stating ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... then, a hidebound materialist? If I know myself, hardly that. Once, in conversation with G. A., I referred to his position as that of the agnostic. He corrected me. "The agnostic grants that there may be something beyond the sphere of man's knowledge; I can make no such admission. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... "A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing. Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece by Pythagoras, one of the demigods ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... But the more I doubted in the honesty of men, the more did I believe that honesty should be the cardinal virtue of the soul. I go so far in this, that an honest thief in my eyes is more worthy of esteem than a canting materialist or a hypocritical free thinker. Still, the voice within me asked if Shakib were honest in his dealings, if I were honest in my peddling? Have I not misrepresented my gewgaws as the atheist misrepresents the truth? 'This is made in the Holy Land,'—'This is from the Holy ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... correspondence of mind and matter, he could very well give these terms an indirect importance for psychical evolution. Spencer has always, in my opinion with full right, repudiated the ascription of materialism. He is no more a materialist than Spinoza. In his "Principles of Psychology" (paragraph 63) he expressed himself very clearly: "Though it seems easier to translate so-called matter into so-called spirit, than to translate so-called spirit into so-called matter—which latter is indeed wholly impossible—yet ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... of common experience that people's ideals of manhood and womanhood vary considerably. The hardened materialist pictures perfection solely in terms of wealth, the butterfly-woman wants little but physical beauty, charm, and the qualities that attract. The sensitive man is apt to depreciate the powers he possesses ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... and put her hand on his shoulder with motherly freedom and kindliness. Beyond even the word of sympathy is the touch of sympathy, and it often conveys to the fainting heart a subtle power to hope and trust again which the materialist cannot explain. The Divine Physician often touched those whom he healed. He laid his hand fearlessly on the leper from whom all shrank with inexpressible dread. The moral leper who trembled under Mrs. Arnot's hand felt that he was not utterly lost and beyond the pale of hope, if one so good and ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Insignificant and disagreeable is his appearance, he looks as if all the bile under heaven had found its way into his complexion, and all the infernal irony of a Mephistopheles into his turned-up nose and insolent curled lip. He is, he says he is, an atheist, a materialist, a sensualist: the pains he takes to deprave and degrade his nature, render him so disgusting, that I could not even speak in his presence; I dreaded lest he should enter into conversation with me. I might have spared myself the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... of some idealized woman. Or else, by woman in the abstract—that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain. Yes, ever since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, the Beatrice-form beckoning on the staircase of Paradise, who attracted upward the dazzled gaze of man, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... as Caroline, who could not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well, or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... have known it, Didums, when I let you go on alone. I'll never forgive myself. I had a premonition and disobeyed it. You pose as a cast-iron materialist with no more ambition than money enough to retrieve your damned estates, and all the while you're the most romantic ass who ever wore out saddle-leather! Found it, have you? Then God help us all! I know what's coming! You're about to 'vert back ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... improbable that if we had sufficient knowledge we could infer the state of a man's mind from the state of his brain, or the state of his brain from the state of his mind. So long as the usual conception of causal dependence is retained, this state of affairs can be used by the materialist to urge that the state of our brain causes our thoughts, and by the idealist to urge that our thoughts cause the state of our brain. Either contention is equally valid or equally invalid. The fact seems to be that there are many correlations of the sort which ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... not,—and all things here below are secondary to him who rejects the first principle of things. Let us leave aside the fruitless discussions of false philosophy. The spiritualist generations made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the materialist generations have made to deny Spirit. Why such discussions? Does not man himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems? Do we not find in him material things and spiritual things? None but a madman ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... unexpected arrival of Miss Peggy McGuire upon the scene had been annoying. That young person was, as Peter knew, a soulless little snob and materialist with a mind which would not be slow to put the worst possible construction upon the situation. Of course as matters stood at the close of that extraordinary evening of self-revelations, it did not matter a great deal what Peggy ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... though I am not a materialist, as you are aware. My generation of practitioners has little difficulty in reconciling our creed with our cult, though few of the younger men are able to do so, I admit. But science is science, and not for a moment do I imagine anything supernatural here. I think, however, ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... which cannot measure her hidden values. On the other hand, when the self is in communion with a higher power, nature automatically obeys, without stress or strain, the will of man. This effortless command over nature is called 'miraculous' by the uncomprehending materialist. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... 'What is the cause?' 'Je ne sai pas; it is the will of the Grand Monarque.' Give him a soup-maigre, a little sallad, and a hind-quarter of a frog, and he's in spirits. 'Fal, lal, lal! Vive le Roi? Vive la bagatelle!'' Here we have a Materialist proving the affinity of matter: 'All round things are globular, all square things flat-sided. Now, if the bottom is equal to the top, and the top equal to the bottom, and the bottom and top are equal to the four ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... frightened by their apparent tendency towards what is called materialism—a word which, to many minds, expresses something very dreadful. But it ought to be known and avowed that the physical philosopher, as such, must be a pure materialist. His enquiries deal with matter and force, and with them alone. And whatever be the forms which matter and force assume, whether in the organic world or the inorganic, whether in the coal-beds and forests of the earth, or in the brains and muscles of men, the physical philosopher ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... be the cornerstone of religion and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion she throws her bulwark of invisibility; and the sword of the skeptic and the battering-ram of the materialist ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... student of Voltaire, of Hume, of Paine, and an admirer of Ingersoll, a doubter of scriptural authenticity, and almost a materialist in belief, this weird and piteous utterance came with peculiar effect. That she who uttered it had only told the tale of her own sad life and hope he understood at once, and what was of more force, that ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... very psychic persons are called, it is quite possible that, worn next the skin, a certain amount of magnetic fluid may be transmitted to the wearer, producing a distinct effect upon his vitality. There's nothing occult about that. The most thoroughgoing materialist might acknowledge it. But when it comes to spells, and all that gibberish, there, of course, I part company. The magical power of certain precious stones may be a fact of nature, but I see no proof of its truth, and therefore I don't believe ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... a force, an agency, that the materialist cannot calculate, weigh, or measure, or laugh scornfully out ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... his chair and looked dreamily out of the window. "I did not mean you to take my illustration literally. My religious beliefs are very much the same as they have always been. To a materialist like you they seem, I know, absurdly orthodox; to a church member in good standing they might seem fatally lax; but such as they are I have not changed them. Still, I was, as you know, a man with a burden. You may call the burden consequence or what you will, the name doesn't matter. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... frequent, but so diminutive that it just lifted her upper lip and no more. No insight, no foreboding troubled her. Her face, soft and golden white in the candlelight, expressed a shy and delicate content. For Flossie was a little materialist through and through. Her smooth and over feminine body seemed to have grown smoother and more feminine still under the touch of pleasure; all that was hard and immobile in her melting in ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... calls for the mythical third horse, always paid for but never seen. A man of Minoret's build, and Minoret's wealth, at the head of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... about the Communion. The Church says the Elements are changed by consecration, but this materialist says they actually are Christ's Body and Blood. Then the corn in the field and the grapes in the vineyard are already Christ's Body and Blood! He is an ass! And ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... amused, slightly caustic, he looked out for the good of himself and those related to him and considered that he was justified in closing his corporate regards at that point. He had no cant and no hypocrisy, no pose and no fads. A sane, aggressive, self-centered, rational materialist of the American brand, it was not only his friends who thought him a fine fellow. He himself would have admitted so much and have been perfectly justified ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... must leave unanswered, till physicians have become a little more of metaphysicians, and have given up their present plan of ignoring for nine hundred and ninety-nine pages that most awful and significant custom of dreaming, and then in the thousandth page talking the boldest materialist ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... of the masses toward the secret and conspiratory methods of both the idealist anarchist and the materialist anarchist is the same. If the latter distrust the people, the people no less distrust them. If the masses would mob the terrorist who springs forth to commit some fearful act, the purpose of which they cannot in the least understand, they would, if possible, also mob the individual responsible ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... serene, in the cold sunshine of Adelaide's smile, and together they watched the earthworks rising outside, and he agreed with her as to the necessity of being modern in everything, of marching with one's time, regretting nothing, using the present and making the best of it. She was utterly materialist and baldly practical. Her manners were frank and simple, she had suffered, she had studied the world and knew it, and used it without a scruple for her own advantage. The time and the court of Napoleon knew such women well: they had the fearless dignity of high rank, holding their own, in spite ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... memory. The theory of memory which relates it to an imaginary rearrangement of physical molecules of brain matter, going on at every instant of our lives, is one that presents itself as plausible to no one who can ascend one degree above the thinking level of the uncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, as even a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something more than a carcase in a state of animation, it must be a reasonable hypothesis that memory has to do ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... a Materialist, and Kopy-Keck was a Spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty; the latter had generally the first word; the ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... inquiries into large notebooks, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively. It may be added that Eeldrop was a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism, and Appleplex a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism; that Eeldrop was learned in theology, and that Appleplex studied the physical ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... seeing eye.' I think, indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion. I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But—but I think it's heart-rending that ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... my own generation, and why should I not be proud of that? Once filled with pride I will soon be filled also with contempt for other men. Selfishness and denial of God will follow my pride; this is called by a scientific word materialism. Being a materialist, as long as I possess a certain amount of intellectual and physical strength, I will be proud of myself. But as soon as my body or spirit are affected by any illness (it may be only a headache or toothache), I will plunge into a dark pessimism, always the shadow and the end of materialism. ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... ideas, as far as I can make them out, appear to me those of a materialist. His chief regret seems to be for the loss of a person he cared for, and the departure of a remarkable member of his society. Beyond these two views of the subject he does not appear to me ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... bearing on our conceptions of the final state of mankind in the world to come, and so they are preparing the way for that finer and more ethical conception of God and His Creation which will be the heritage of generations yet unborn. The materialist's day is far spent, and its sun ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... of Frenchman—godless—a materialist," he pronounced slowly, as if weighing the terms of a careful analysis. "Neither the son of his own country nor of any other," ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... condemned compromise may be absolved from the charge of insincerity on the ground that they did not care whether the Union was preserved or riot. Your true blue Abolitionist was very little of a materialist. Nor did he have primarily a crusading interest in the condition of the blacks. He was introspective. He wanted the responsibility for slavery taken off his own soul. As later events were to prove, he was also pretty nearly a pacifist; war for the Union, pure ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... French philosophers of the eighteenth century, Quintana sang also of humanity and progress, as in his ode on the invention of printing. In politics Quintana was a liberal; in religious beliefs, a materialist. Campoamor has said of Quintana that he sang not of faith or pleasures, but of duties. His enemies have accused him of stirring the colonies to revolt by his bitter sarcasm directed at past and contemporaneous Spanish rulers, but this is doubtless an exaggeration. It may be said ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... nothing, and he killed the boy!—I tell you, sir, I bathed the child's corpse in my tears, crying out to the Power I do not know, and which is above us all! I, who do not believe in God!—(For if I were not a materialist, I should ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... point suddenly collapses into "a dreadful croaker," styling his own age "barren, brainless, soulless, faithless." [4] But the reason is, of course, that "he suffered from chronic dyspepsia" and was unable "to eat his three square meals a day." A very consistent explanation for an avowed materialist, but slightly destructive to the value of his own conclusions, being a two-edged sword. Indeed he almost allows as much. "For such dyspeptic patients there is an excuse. Pessimism is probably as inevitably their creed, as optimism ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... endeavors to get the good will of man by abjectly crawling toward him on his belly and licking his feet. There was no element of true worship in the propitiatory offerings of primitive man; in the beginning he was essentially a materialist—he became a spiritualist later on. Man's first religion must have been, necessarily, a material one; he worshiped (propitiated) only that which he could see, or feel, or hear, or touch; his undeveloped psychical being could grasp nothing higher; his limited understanding could not frame an idea ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... in company with a French gentleman, who had been before dinner indulging in a number of free-thinking speculations, and had ended by avowing himself a materialist. "Very good soup, this," said Mr. Smith. "Oui, monsieur, c'est excellente," was the reply. "Pray, sir, do you believe in a ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... and his father, seeing him engaged in an assault on the castle, shouts, "George! put that sword down instantly." Mr. CORNFORD makes his points with such discretion and understanding that even the most solid materialist must, after reading, feel a little less ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... truths of geology, because they interfere with our creeds, but after awhile the sturdy truths of geology become too sturdy for us, and then we begin to patronize them, and to confer upon them the honor of harmonizing with our creeds. A man who has adopted the creed of a materialist, is entirely incompetent to receive, entertain, and represent a spiritual fact. My creed is the window at which I sit, and look at all the world of truth outside of me. All truth is tinted by the medium through which it passes to reach my mind; and such is my imperfection and my weakness, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... was in coming back, the more Mazarin thought that forty millions were worth a little risk, particularly of so hypothetic a thing as the soul. Mazarin, in his character of cardinal and prime minister, was almost an atheist, and quite a materialist. Every time that the door opened, he turned sharply round towards that door, expecting to see the return of his unfortunate donation; then, deceived in his hope, he fell back again with a sigh, and found his pains ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... prison fare, and with nothing but tenpenny London dinners to recollect in the immediate past, I trust I shall not be thought a gross materialist for appreciating these small banquets, and in such company. (The only dinner I could recall which was not a tenpenny one, except the old dinners of my childhood, was that famous dinner at Cray, where I had discovered that the Duchess of Towers was Mimsey ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Young professors' wives were not expected to trifle with visitors of such eminent solvency; but I had frequently heard the materialistic tendencies of the age condemned in public, and had not been warned in private that we were all supposed to do our best to work this materialist for a million, with which to keep up the fight ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Jewish physician is nothing to the present purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable, sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the panegyrist breaks out into eulogy of "the grandest hero of free-thought," and claims for Bruno the proud distinction of materialist. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... mean his Essay on Man, must at once be convinced, from ocular demonstration, of the infamous falshood of this assertion. That his lordship was a theist, and a disbeliever in miracles and revelations, cannot and need not be denied. But that he was no atheist, no materialist, his acknowledged good sense is, alone, a sufficient proof. I do think scepticism the best and truest philosophy; and I scruple not to own, I have called in question, one time or other, the truth of most things which cannot be demonstrated. But the ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... immortality is not an inheritance, but a greatness to be achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and purity of purpose—a reward allotted to the just. This is fanciful, may be, but it is not illogical. And without being either a Christian or a Materialist, without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity, surely the best emotion that our natures know—pity—must be large enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in view of the endless ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... therefore, though Judaism does not approve of the ascetic temper, it is far from encouraging the materialist's view of life. It has no place for monks or hermits, who think they can serve God best by renouncing the world; but, on the other hand, it sternly rebukes the worldliness that knows no ideal but sordid pleasures, no God ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Democritus, a materialist and atheist of 2500 years ago, formulated a mechanical view of phenomena in accordance with which everything that happens is due to physical impacts. "Such a materialism was a great liberation from superstition; and ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... symbols, and give a physical interpretation to the articles of her creed. A man who proposes to look for God in this miserable world and finds Him visiting the diseased imagination of a sickly nun, may perhaps be in some sense called a materialist, and there is more materialism of this variety in popular sentimentalisms about the "blood of Jesus" than in all the writings of the profane men of science. But in a philosophical sense the charge rests ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... reduced me to silence, and which were possibly invented by him. Everyone talked except myself, and as I had had no dinner I ate like an ogre, only replying by monosyllables when politeness obliged me to say something. The conversation turned on Horace, and everyone gave his opinion on the great materialist's philosophy, and the Abbe Guigiotti obliged me to speak by saying that unless I agreed with him I should not ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions." Philosophies such as Materialism, Idealism, Monism, all have in their explanations of the universe this quality of the madman's argument of "covering everything and leaving everything out." The Materialist, like the Madman is "unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; he is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers or first love or fear upon the sea. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... into life, had expressed themselves in imaginative, not in philosophical ways. To set the stagnant tide of speculative thinking in motion, involved a two-fold task: on one side the breaking down of the barriers erected by the sensationalist and materialist schools of the 17th and 18th centuries, and on the other side the letting in of a current of fresh ideas from some source outside of England. The first, or destructive, task Green performed with remarkable success ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... if I had loved you, Miss Malgregor," explained the Senior Surgeon gravely, "my offer of marriage to you would not, I fear, have been a very great oratorical success. Materialist as I am,—cynic—scientist,—any harsh thing you choose to call me,—marriage in some freak, boyish corner of my mind, still defines itself as being the mutual sharing of a—mutually original experience. Certainly whether a first marriage be ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... horse-shoe of our own times, or protects against hostile will-power, and especially against the evil eye. This curious and widely-spread superstition was probably the raison d'etre of most of the amulets worn or carried by Romans. A modern Italian, even if he be a complete sceptic and materialist, will probably be found to have some amulet about him against the evil eye, "just to be on the safe side."[119] A list of amulets, both Greek and Roman, will be found in the Dictionary of Antiquities, and in Pauly-Wissowa, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line, and divineness of harmony that triumph. You do not find in him merely the materialist symbolism so superbly thrown off by Michael Angelo; he introduces psychological analysis of deep penetration into the painter's art. Man is shown more purified, idealised; one sees more of that which is within him. And though one may be in presence of an artist of sentimental bent, a feminine ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... nothing about Lord Chesterfield or his deafness, but which contains a good deal of Voltaire's crispest writing, especially the definition of that English freedom which he sometimes used to extol. With thirty guineas a year,[359] the materialist doctor Sidrac informs the unfortunate Goudman, who has lost a living by the said deafness, "on peut dire tout ce qu'on pense de la compagnie des Indes, du parlement, de nos colonies, du roi, de l'etat en general, de l'homme et de Dieu—ce ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... way you can) bring the world to virtue; or negatively, in the words of Light on the Path: "Abstain (from vice) because it is right to abstain—not that yourself shall be kept clean." And now to travel back into the thought behind, that you may see if Confucius was a materialist; whether or not he believed in the Soul;—and that if he was not a great original thinker, at least he commanded the ends of all great, true and original thinking. Man, he says, is naturally good. That is, collectively. Man is divine and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... enough of a materialist to argue that my advantage over my less successful fellow man lies in having a bigger house, men servants instead of maid servants, and smoking cigars alleged to be from Havana instead of from Tampa; but ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... the materialist, what this vital principle is, and he answers: "It is the all-pervading force that is modified by the organic structure." That is, in his philosophy, the "vital force is produced by the organism," and the "organism is ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various |
