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Metaphysician   Listen
noun
Metaphysician  n.  One who is versed in metaphysics.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Metaphysician" Quotes from Famous Books



... by these theological controversies than the Emperor himself. He was a soldier, and not a metaphysician; and, as Emperor, he was Pontifex Maximus,—head of the Church. He hated these contentions between good and learned men. He felt that they compromised the interests of the Church universal, of which he was the protector. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... philosophy. In other words, economic science is to me the objective form and realization of metaphysics; it is metaphysics in action, metaphysics projected on the vanishing plane of time; and whoever studies the laws of labor and exchange is truly and specially a metaphysician. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... understand. But it is curious and interesting to watch the clash between his political bitterness and his intellectual serenity. In the intellectual and artistic sphere—as a writer, musician, mathematician, metaphysician—he stood consciously at the zenith of Greek history; but whenever he turned to politics he seems to have felt that the spring had gone out of the year. He instinctively antedated the setting of his dialogues. The characters nearly all belong to the generation of Sokrates, which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... moral, have all a Christian baptism; and, with all our getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still investigated, not as a brute force, or in a merely intellectual light, but in those high spiritual aspects in which our great New England metaphysician delighted to present it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of analogy, bridge, to the forming mind, the chasm between natural and revealed religion. Let the Christian Evidences be fully unfolded. We can hardly dispense with them in an age, when by means of 'Westminster ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... powers which they cannot re-establish, and of virtues no more to be revived: the scholar is early acquainted with every department of the Impossible, and expresses in proper terms his sense of the deficiencies of Titian and the errors of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from field to field his analogies of gossamer, which shake and glitter fairly in the sun, but must be torn asunder by the first plow that passes: geometry measures out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate heroism, and the shadow which should veil ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... see from thence. The astronomer looks at the laws of motion and forgets that there must have been a First Cause to commence that motion. The surgeon looks at the materialism of his own frame and forgets that matter cannot organise itself into exquisite beauty. The metaphysician buries himself in the laws of mind and forgets that there may be spiritual influences producing all those laws. And this brethren, is the unhumbled spirit of philosophy—intellectual pride. Men look ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... reasoning according to the inductive philosophy, that there is not one drop of water in slavery for the parched lips of a dying slave. I stated this to a member of our Junior Class who is a wonderful metaphysician. He was kind enough to say that he could discover no flaw in the logic. Your letter, which, I trust, is now on its way to me, I know will fully ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams

... for it, and especially his capacity to throw off the prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts—and what is the instrument of reflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... believes in these inspirations, and so looks for them. What he shall see will depend on what he looks for. The man whose taste is in the world of imagination looks for forms of poetic or artistic beauty, and so sees these. Every man looks for that which he is most interested in, whether he be metaphysician or mechanic. The world of ideal beauty and truth, which overhangs ours, has a thousand portals, and we can pass in through one or another, and see that which suits our various tastes and desires. Memory, reflection, and sight,—these are the three sources of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... flirting fascination the holiday afternoons beneath their shade. Still do our memories haunt those old walks we loved so well: the avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, where the midnight moon shone so softly through the dark masses of foliage and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... gave substance to his character and edge to his intellect, and, in the end, can scarcely be distinguished from the emotion generating his verse. There is, however, no trace of originality in his speculative writing, and we need not regret that, after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a poet, he decided against philosophy. Before finally settling to poetry, he at one time projected a complete and systematic account of the operations of the human mind. It was to be divided into sections—childhood, youth, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... may perhaps be innocent enough to apply to the accepted philosophers, especially to Aquinas, whose thoughts had been so thoroughly assimilated by the poet. No doubt that may suggest very interesting inquiries for the metaphysician; but we should find not only that the philosophy is very tough and very obsolete, and therefore very wearisome for any but the strongest intellectual appetites, but also that it does not really answer ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... had been doomed to banishment with myself. One was a metaphysician, who had offended the law by making some sage remarks upon the nature of spirits; the other was a fanatic, who, by starting doubts concerning the holiness of religion and the uniting force of the civil law, was suspected to have designed the overthrow of both. This latter would not regulate ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg

... afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College. By virtue of his Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise was composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... a metaphysician, I am a servant of science—of fact. You were told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... wretched creatures, silly playthings of the forces of nature, found themselves more often than not in absurd and painful situations; but he was weak and illogical enough to believe that the Revolutionaries were more wicked and more foolish than other men, thereby falling into the error of the metaphysician. At the same time he was no Pessimist and did not hold that life was altogether bad. He admired Nature in several of her departments, especially the celestial mechanism and physical love, and accommodated himself to the labours of life, pending the arrival of ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... long, eruptive roar. Nor was that all. For a moment he would assume the moralist, the theologian, or,—leaving both revelation and the pandects,—become the philosopher, pacing the universe for occult truth; or the metaphysician, tracking the region of the supersensuous; and, over every theme, flying on mocking mental pinions, seeming an intellectual satan, passing through the region of vain questionings and doubtful disquisition, dim out to the abyss. And thus he lived, using, and abusing, his rare gifts; no virtuous and ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... certain that Scott, though never talking much about religion (as, indeed, he never talked much about any of the deeper feelings of the heart), was a man very sincerely religious. He was not a metaphysician in any way, and therefore had no special inclination towards that face or summit of metaphysics which is called theology. And it is pretty clear that he had towards disputed points of doctrine, ceremony, and discipline, a not sharply or decidedly formulated attitude. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... those in Spain, excluded the Newtonian system. In 1771 the greatest of them all, the University of Salamanca, being urged to teach physical science, refused, making answer as follows: "Newton teaches nothing that would make a good logician or metaphysician; and Gassendi and Descartes do not agree so well with ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... elsewhere;—but I cannot comprehend what debility of that mind could suggest such a wish. I, who have heard him, cannot regret any thing but that I shall never hear him again. What! would he have been a plodder? a metaphysician?—perhaps a rhymer? a scribbler? Such an exchange must have been suggested by illness. But he is gone, and Time "shall not look upon his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment,—whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that, in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe just a neurologist's chart of Hester's nerve history ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age, is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... spend their lives in secluded retirement and studies, except when, as in Dayanand's case, they come forth in time of need to aid their country. However, it is perfectly certain that India never saw a more learned Sanskrit scholar, a deeper metaphysician, a more wonderful orator, and a more fearless denunciator of every evil, than Dayanand, since the time of Sankharacharya, the celebrated founder of the Vedanta philosophy, the most metaphysical of Indian systems, in fact, the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... motives remain the same. The philosophical mind, therefore, is not disposed to study either of these varieties of impostors; but the other two families which compose the second class are objects of paramount interest. The eccentricities and even the obliquities of great minds merit the scrutiny of the metaphysician and the moralist, and they derive a peculiar interest from the state of society in which they are exhibited. Had Cardan and Cornelius Agrippa lived in modern times, their vanity and self-importance would have been checked ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... of the philosopher's reflective doubt concerning his own powers is now evident. Problems are raised which are not merely urgent in themselves, but which present wholly new alternatives to the metaphysician. Rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, are doctrines which, though springing from the epistemological query concerning the possibility of knowledge, may determine an entire philosophical system. They bear upon every question of metaphysics, whether ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... that gallant Scot, Admiral Beatty, holds the centre of the stage to-day. There came a critical moment also when a man of intellect and a great heart must represent Great Britain in her greatest crisis in the United States, and in that hour they sent a Scotsman, Arthur James Balfour, philosopher, metaphysician, ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... apprentices, but never one that could make a coat till I had taken great pains in teaching him."' See ante, iii. 443. Robert Hall was influenced in his studies by 'his intimate association in mere childhood with a tailor, one of his father's congregation, who was an acute metaphysician.' Hall's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... metaphor be not like the metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!—You ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... question, "Will you explain the mode in which you conceive the sacred writers to have been influenced?" my father replied— "Rather a profound question, that. A profounder, I venture to say, never agitated the mind of a German metaphysician. If the query had been put to me, I should have taken the liberty to question the questioner thus: 'Can you explain to me the growth of a tree? Can you explain how the will of man influences the material muscles?—In fact the universe is full of forces or influences. Can ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... risk of being considered metaphysical,—though we fear no metaphysician would indorse the charge,—let us define what we mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or disposition. An individual, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... independent of many of the controversies which perplex the science of the ultimate constitution of the human mind, and is under no necessity of pushing the analysis of mental phenomenon to that extreme limit which alone ought to satisfy a metaphysician. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... "the power of the mind," but very much indeed about Hygiene, Dietetics, Sleep, Care of Oneself in Old Age, Hypochondria, Work, Exercise, Eating and Drinking, Illness, etc., etc., from the point of view of the aged German metaphysician, which while interesting enough in itself, and to some people, was manifestly out of place in a book treating upon the development of Mental Faculties by the Will, etc. We think that Mr. Leland's admirers will find no ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... outcasts from Deity, therefore we defame the place of our exile. But who is there may set apart his destiny from the earth which bore him? I am one of those who would bring back the old reverence for the Mother, the magic, the love. I think, metaphysician, you have gone astray. You would seek within yourself for the fountain of life. Yes, there is the true, the only light. But do not dream it will lead you farther away from the earth, but rather deeper into its' heart. By it you are nourished with those living waters you would ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... economy, seemed peculiarly to invite the philosophical Poor Richard to its venerable retreats. Here, of gray, chilly, drizzly November mornings, in the dark-stoned quadrangle of the time-honored Sorbonne, walked the lean and slippered metaphysician,—oblivious for the moment that his sublime thoughts and tattered wardrobe were famous throughout Europe,—meditating on the theme of his next lecture; at the same time, in the well-worn chambers overhead, some clayey-visaged chemist in ragged robe-de-chambre, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks, "witchery by daylight." But there were other reasons. Three years had passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and had settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which he had set out. In particular it is observable ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... enter into what we call "personal" relations with each other or with human beings. But this is not to say that they may not possess a consciousness, which though different from man's consciousness, is yet akin to it and linked to it. Nay, the nature-mystic's experiences, as well as the metaphysician's speculations, declare that the linking up must be regarded as a fact. And when we examine more carefully what Jefferies says, we find that he in no way disputes this fact. How could it be, with his vivid sense of communion with forms of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... confessed for each other burn away all that was abnormal and enigmatic, and leave only the unerring human heart, that knows its own and takes it? These reflections passed through Freeman's mind in an instant of time. But he was no metaphysician, and he obeyed the sane and wholesome instinct which has ever been man's surest and safest guide through the mysteries and bewilderments of existence. He took the beautiful woman in ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne

... metaphysician is the ideal of the animal. The animal does not worry about right or wrong, nor, with few exceptions, does it make provision for the future. Its care and forethought extend only to the next meal. But this perfect, ideal, passive trust in Nature's bounty causes the animal to remain animal ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... Sybil could have a hand in it did not occur to him. He had made up his mind that Sybil was a silly, frivolous girl, who counted for nothing in her sister's actions. He had fallen into the usual masculine blunder of mixing up smartness of intelligence with strength of character. Sybil, without being a metaphysician, willed anything which she willed at all with more energy than her sister did, who was worn out with the effort of life. Mr. Ratcliffe missed this point, and was left to wonder who it was that had crossed his path, and how Carrington had managed to be present and absent, to get a ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... off, and kneel to you If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days Looking on him was listening Love the difficulty better than the woman Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous Not much esteem for non-professional actresses Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency Philosophy skimmed, and realistic ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger

... fascinated by my studies, which were now of quite a dignified nature. I might as well add, since it cannot but provoke a bland and suggestive smile from masculine erudition, that I had actually taken up moral philosophy, and aspired to distinguish myself later as a metaphysician of some repute. But alas! for the vanity of human purposes and desires, this empty little note of my father's came like the chillest wintry blast and smothered the small creeping flame of my newly awakened ambition. I pleaded and prayed for an extension ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... feels in himself the love of praise. Every man does who is not a brute. It is a universal human faculty; Carlyle nicknames it the sixth sense. Who made it? God or the devil? Is it flesh or spirit? a difficult question; because tamed animals grow to possess it in a high degree; and our metaphysician does not yet allow them spirit. But, whichever it be, it cannot be for bad: only bad when misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the faculty which judges between good and evil. Else why has God ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself. If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a coxcomb of me. As to the inns or hotels at Hamburgh, I should recommend you to some German ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... virtues of the man and the woman are the same"? Not the Christian, certainly; for he accepts as his highest standard the being who in all history best united the highest qualities of both sexes. Not the metaphysician; for his analysis deals with the human mind as such, not with the mind of either sex. Not the evolutionist; for he is accustomed to trace back qualities to their source, and cannot deny that there is in each ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... to lay hold of the feeling that produced the expression: less than the reproduction of a similar condition in her own imaginative sensorium, subject to her leisurely examination, would in no case satisfy the little metaphysician. But what was indeed very odd was the means she took for arriving at the sympathetic knowledge she desired. As if she had been the most earnest student of dramatic expression through the facial muscles, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald

... thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... reality which changes as a whole in its inmost states, as if an accumulative memory of the past made it impossible to go back again. The mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than immediate experience. The metaphysician that we each carry unconsciously within us, and the presence of which is explained, as we shall see later on, by the very place that man occupies amongst the living beings, has its fixed requirements, its ready-made ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... automata, what a brilliant justification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophy would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion. Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician might adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and indubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be self-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying that a slave's life ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Not only may a man naturally be expected to be an adept in his own art, but at the same time to show an incapacity for a very different mode of activity.[281] We rarely find an artist who takes much interest in jurisprudence, or {268} a prizefighter who is an acute metaphysician. Nay, more than this, a positive distaste may grow up, which, in the intellectual order, may amount to a spontaneous and unreasoning disbelief in that which appears to be in opposition to the more familiar concept, and this at all times. It is often ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... her taste by eating up something that was very disagreeable. Here was an opportunity at once of acting out the great principles to which she had been listening. And while a boy, evidently destined to be a metaphysician, and evidently possessed of the spirit of resistance to constituted authority whether in government or doctrine, boldly argued that it could not be wicked in him to hate onions, because God had made him so that he did hate onions, and (going still deeper ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... and of suffering much distress from intense frost; and found, when he awoke, that he had thrown off the bed-clothes in his sleep, and exposed himself to cold. He had been reading, a few days before, a very particular account of this colony. The eminent metaphysician, Dr. Reid, relates of himself that the dressing of a blister, which he had applied to his head, becoming ruffled, so as to produce pain, he dreamed that he had fallen into the hands of a party of North American Indians, who were scalping him. These were dreams ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... a moment's silence. Wilmore, the metaphysician, saw then a strange thing. He saw a light steal across his friend's stern face. He saw his eyes for a moment soften, the hard mouth relax, something incredible, transforming, shine, as it were, out of the man's ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... months out of the twelve; he wanders from land to land, and spends some part of each winter in town: he frequently brings visitors with him when he comes to ——shire, and these visitors are often foreigners; sometimes he has a German metaphysician, sometimes a French savant; he had once a dissatisfied and savage-looking Italian, who neither sang nor played, and of whom Frances affirmed that he had "tout ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... New England divine and metaphysician, was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703. He was graduated early from Yale College, where he had given much attention to philosophy, became tutor of his college, and at nineteen began to preach. His voice and manner did not lend themselves readily to pulpit oratory, but ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser

... think out life ahead of the living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life, for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... made in 1864 by the court of appeals in Kentucky, and again in 1869 under the same presiding Judge Robertson. But Chief Justice Williams rebukes this strange ruling in most emphatic language. He says: "In all the vague, uncertain, intangible, and undefined theories of the most impractical metaphysician in psychology or moral insanity, no court of last resort in England or America, so far as has been brought to our knowledge, ever before announced such a startling, irresponsible, and dangerous proposition of law, as that laid down in the inferior ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... a metaphysician, a philanthropist, and in the highest and most earnest sense a minister of good on earth. The New England clergy had no sentimental affectation of sanctity that segregated them from wholesome human relations; and consequently our good Doctor had ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... the old type of don, if I may say so. I'm very free, you see! And so you think Jack might do well in commerce? Well, I quite approve. All I want is that he should not be out of touch with human beings. I'm not a metaphysician, but it seems to me that that is what we are here for—touch with humanity—of course on Church of England lines. I'm tolerant, I hope, and can see the good side of other creeds; but give me something comprehensive, and that is the glory ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Leben der Gegenwart (1890), Darwinismus und Socialismus (1894), Im Dienste der Wahrheit (1899). He died at Darmstadt on the 1st of May 1899. In estimating Buechner's philosophy it must be remembered that he was primarily a physiologist, not a metaphysician. Matter and force (or energy) are infinite; the conservation of force follows from the imperishability of matter, the ultimate basis of all science. Buechner is not always clear in his theory of the relation between matter and force. At one time he refuses to explain it, but generally he assumes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... most successful application of his system may be found, as we think, under the words, dim, dumb, deaf, and death. He might have confirmed the relation between dumbness and darkness from the acutest metaphysician among poets, in Dante's ove il sol tace. We have not left ourselves room enough to illustrate Mr. Wedgwood's handling of these etymologies by extracts; we must refer our readers to the book itself. Apart from its value as suggesting thought, or quickening our perception of shades of meaning, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... objects without looking at or knowing them, a mere desire to know brings out into distinctness every object in succession on which the desire fixes. 'Instantly, or almost instantly,' continues the metaphysician, 'without our consciousness of any new or peculiar state of mind intervening in the process, the landscape becomes to our vision altogether different. Certain parts only—those parts which we wished to know particularly—are ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... of caricaturists. He was shy and awkward, in addition to all this. He nevertheless appeared in various salons, and was naturally more or less ridiculous. In January, 1840, Beranger writes: "You must know that our metaphysician has surrounded himself with women, at the head of whom are George Sand and Marliani, and that, in gilded drawing-rooms, under the light of chandeliers, he exposes his religious principles and his muddy boots." George Sand herself made ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... won fame in three fields. He is (1) America's greatest metaphysician, (2) her greatest theologian, and (3) a unique poetic interpreter of the universe as a manifestation ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... some paths the utmost depths of the searching intellect with the utmost sensibility to the powers and purposes of Art: whilst, as a creator in Art, he had pretensions which neither Plato nor Schelling could make. His powers as a Psychologist (not as a Metaphysician) seem to me absolutely unrivalled on earth. And had his health been better, so as to have sustained the natural cheerfulness towards which his nature tended, had his pecuniary embarrassments been even moderately lightened ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... strove unremittingly to improve his mind, studying astronomy, history, and metaphysics; and finally, from the humblest circumstances, he rose to occupy a conspicuous place as an author, a philosopher, and a metaphysician. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson

... 'soothed,' as it is called, for a time, but, in the end, he is very apt to become obstreperous. His cunning, too, is proverbial and great. If he has a project in view, he conceals his design with a marvellous wisdom; and the dexterity with which he counterfeits sanity, presents, to the metaphysician, one of the most singular problems in the study of mind. When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... there are. That is what neither you nor any one will ever know. The great questions awaiting an answer are these: "Are our innate tendencies invincible? If not, can they be modified merely or wholly destroyed by education?" For myself, I would not dare to affirm. I am neither a metaphysician, nor a psychologist, nor a philosopher; but I have had a terrible life, gentlemen, and if I were a legislator, I would order that man to have his tongue torn out, or his head cut off, who dared to preach or write that the nature of individuals is unchangeable, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... a metaphysician. That does not mean that his head was in the clouds, or that the particular sciences lacked interest for him. Not at all—he felt a lively concern for theological debate, he was a mathematician of the first rank, he ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries. "J'etais," she says, "un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... Keats, in the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and invisible, a priest of the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... the analogies of human experience. From the relation which human works bear to human thoughts and feelings, it infers a corresponding relation between works more or less similar, but superhuman, and superhuman thoughts and feelings. If it prove these, nobody but a metaphysician needs care whether or not it proves a mysterious substratum for them.[236] The argument from design, it seems to us, however, would have no validity if there be no external world offering marks of design. If the external ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... subject. I spoke to Diderot of Condillac and his work, and I afterwards brought them acquainted with each other. They were worthy of each other's esteem, and were presently on the most friendly terms. Diderot persuaded the bookseller, Durand, to take the manuscript from the abbe, and this great metaphysician received for his first work, and almost as a favor, a hundred crowns, which perhaps he would not have obtained without my assistance. As we lived in a quarter of the town very distant from each other, we all assembled once a week at the Palais Royal, and went to dine at the Hotel du Panier Fleuri. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... you are: but you dare not. You cannot shake off your fears. The wit, the metaphysician, the young senator suspects he is only ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... The great metaphysician of New-England insists, that his scheme, and his scheme alone, is consistent with the free-agency and accountability of man. But how does he show this? Does he endeavour to shake the stern argument by which all things seem bound together in ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... his way through a primeval forest. The paper-knife generally ceased to do duty before the thirtieth page. The melancholy of the book- hunter is aroused by two questions, "Whence?" and "Whither?" The bibliophile asks about his books the question which the metaphysician asks about his soul. Whence came they? Their value depends a good deal on the answer. If they are stamped with arms, then there is a book ("Armorial du Bibliophile," by M. Guigard) which tells you who was their original owner. Any one of twenty coats-of-arms on the leather is worth a hundred ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... soldierman, trained in the elementary virtues of plain-speaking and direct dealing, love of country and the sacredness of duty, I have had no use for the metaphysician. I haven't the remotest notion what his jargon means. From Aristotle to William James, I have dipped into quite a lot of them—Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer (the thrice besotted Teutonic ass who said that women weren't beautiful), for I hate ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... Fields; in Holborn, near Red-lion-square; in Scotland-yard; in a house looking to St. James' Park, now belonging to an eminent writer on legislation, and lately occupied by a celebrated critic and metaphysician; and he died in Artillery-walk, Bunhill-fields; and was buried in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various

... indulgences go, relatively innocent. The Greeks found that the mind could carry on an absorbing game with itself. We all engage in reveries and fantasies of a homely, everyday type, concerned with our desires or resentments, but the fantasy of the metaphysician busies itself with conceptions, abstractions, distinctions, hypotheses, postulates, and logical inferences. Having made certain postulates or hypotheses, he finds new conclusions, which he follows in a seemingly convincing manner. This gives him the delightful emotion of pursuing Truth, ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson

... take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the churches—with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "logician, metaphysician, bard." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop was one of the first to seek the poet's acquaintance, and she became an almost lifelong friend; through his poems he renewed acquaintance with Mrs. Stewart of Stair. He was 'roosed' by Craigen-Gillan; Dugald Stewart, the celebrated metaphysician, and one of the best-known names in the learned and literary circles of Edinburgh, who happened to be spending his vacation at Catrine, not very far from Mossgiel, invited the poet to dine with him, and on that occasion he 'dinnered wi' a laird'—Lord ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... itself in its operations by, the infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in civilised society. A child is not designed by his original formation to be a manufacturer of shoes, for he may be born among a people by whom shoes are not worn, and still less is he destined by his structure to be a metaphysician, an astronomer, or a lawyer, a rope-dancer, a fortune-teller, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... Anthropologist, metaphysician, most of all theologian, here is a lesson which can teach you much that you will not find in your primers and catechisms. Why should I call her "poor little Helen"? Where can ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as a hand-maiden to politics or religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in New England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of a theologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way that Jonathan Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our own time, indeed, his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniable capacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. Kellner to consider ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... said that Jesus was way over the heads of his reporters. That was inevitable. Even Paul misunderstood him at times. But—and here is the important fact for us—Paul's letters exhibit a marvelous spiritual growth in the man, and show him at last to be the grand master-metaphysician of the Christian era. Has it ever occurred to you that what the Gospels tell about is almost wholly spiritual? The material is all but neglected by their composers. Indeed, with the questions of time and place, the Gospel ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... regret the existence of such a wide difference between the philosophical and the popular sense of an expression, which must occur so often both in speculative discussion and in the intercourse of common life. It may be doubted whether the metaphysician is entitled to borrow the language of society, and to engraft upon it an arbitrary definition of his own, different from and even inconsistent with that which it bears in common usage. Nor can he plead necessity ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... every man of sound mind that he should lay out for himself a plan of action," said the philosopher; and wandered to Breslau, to Amsterdam, to Potsdam, the parasite of protectors, the impecunious hack of publishers, the rebel of manners, the ingenious and honored metaphysician. When Kant declared he was the only one of his critics that understood The Critique of Pure Reason, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote himself to the philosophical work that was to give him a pinnacle apart among the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... thinking thus designated is already manifesting its importance by one of the most unequivocal signs, the appearance of thinkers who attempt a compromise or juste milieu between it and its opposite. The acute critic and metaphysician M. Taine, and the distinguished chemist M. Berthelot, are the authors of the two ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... that this explanation leaves a good deal to be desired. It is the explanation of a metaphysician rather than that of an experimental scientist. Such phrases as "matter immediately begins to strive to fashion itself," for example, have no place in the reasoning of inductive science. Nevertheless, the hypothesis ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... The highest homage, the highest act of faith which the human mind and heart can offer to God is to say that He could not be God and pronounce the Single Tax unjust! Here now is a gage of battle cast at the feet of whoever wishes to take it up, be the same logician, metaphysician or theologian. (Pardon me, Mr. Brann, for ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Wagner responsible for the violation of Belgian neutrality, and the crimes of the German army. He, however, to use a colloquial expression, had never been to see for himself, being neither musician, theologian, or metaphysician. He trusted to the word of Academicians, and only made exceptions in favour of Beethoven, who was Flemish, and Goethe, citizen of a free city and almost a Strassburger, which is half French,—or French and a half. He paused ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... meagre categories of the understanding, however ingeniously arranged or displayed, are the image of God;—that what all religions were seeking after from the beginning was the Hegelian philosophy which has been revealed in the latter days. The great metaphysician, like a prophet of old, was naturally inclined to believe that his own thoughts were divine realities. We may almost say that whatever came into his head seemed to him to be a necessary truth. He never appears to have criticized himself, or to have subjected ...
— Sophist • Plato

... beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage "Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration, the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the word "law" where I expected ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... about when he writes a play. He only has to look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is another question. I am neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, and I do not desire to discuss the subject. I only maintain that, had it not been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret would never have been discovered a second time. I cannot see any doom about it. A series ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... were a fixed line at which degree ends and kind begins. There is no such line. All differences resolve themselves into differences of degree. Everything can in the end be united with everything by easy stages if a way long enough and round-about enough be taken. Hence to the metaphysician everything will become one, being united with everything else by degrees so subtle that there is no escape from seeing the universe as a single whole. This in theory; but in practice it would get us into such a mess that we had better go on talking about differences ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... essay, which he professed to find a lighter sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point, to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians were. He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any consciousness of being read to. He kept the smile on his delicate face which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... metaphysical opticians, that, in the operations of vision, we never get beyond the eye itself, or the representations that are depicted therein. We see nothing, they tell us, but what is delineated within the eye. Now, the way in which a plain man should meet this statement, is this—he should ask the metaphysician what eye he refers to. Do you allude, sir, to an eye which belongs to my visible body, and forms a small part of the same; or do you allude to an eye which does not belong to my visible body, and which constitutes no portion thereof? If the metaphysician should say, that he refers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... and change, finiteness and unsubstantiality, must ever be connected with the idea of a created Universe when it is contrasted with the idea of THE ALL, no matter what may be our beliefs concerning the nature of both. Philosopher, metaphysician, scientist and theologian all agree upon this idea, and the thought is found in all forms of philosophical thought and religious conceptions, as well as in the theories of the respective schools ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... demonstrates. The most admirable of modern treatises in the subtile science, that masterpiece of speculation in matter and style, "The Minute Philosopher" of Bishop Berkeley, was composed in Rhode Island, and the place is still indicated where the musing metaphysician is said to have written the greater portion of the work. That Berkeley's genius did not abandon the region, when he left it, is manifest from the direction taken by the late Judge Durfee, whose "Pan-Idea," if it cannot be accepted as in all respects a satisfactory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... of poking fun at his philosophical friends in Edinburgh. When sending some Scotch grouse to Lady Holland, he said—"I take the liberty to send you two brace of grouse—curious, because killed by a Scotch metaphysician: in other and better language, they are mere ideas, shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun." In another letter to the same correspondent he says—"I hope you are reading Mr. Stewart's book, and are far gone in the Philosophy of Mind—a science, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... to extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects. One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various

... Cause of which resides in the Agent. Agent and Cause are thus identified. In other words, the Nominative Case, in the Active Transitive Locution, is the type and illustration of the Sub-Category, Cause, in the Group of Relation, as conceived by the great German metaphysician. His Correlative Sub-Category, Dependence, is the Action itself, resulting from the Activity of the Agent, and expressed by the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the controversy was passing from the metaphysicians to the physicists. Though he for the moment misinterpreted the ultimate direction of the effect of experimental discovery, he discerned its potency in the field of theological discussion. "It is not from the hands of the metaphysician," he said, "that atheism has received the weightiest strokes. The sublime meditations of Malebranche and Descartes were less calculated to shake materialism than a single observation of Malpighi's. If this dangerous hypothesis is tottering ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by differences of method. It is impossible that in ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... Carlyle wrote some Recollections of Sir William Hamilton, as a contribution to Professor Veitch's Memoir of that accomplished metaphysician. ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle

... at the heart of the pillar, and dwelt afterwards between the cherubim, but probably we must attach a loftier meaning to it here, and rather think of what we should call the uncreated and infinite divine essence. Only do not let us make Moses talk like a metaphysician or a theological professor. Rather we should hear in his cry the voice of a soul thrilled through and through with the astounding consciousness of God's favour, blessed with love-gifts in answered prayers, and yearning for more of that light ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... Adam Smith, Malebranche, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fenelon, Burke, Kant, Richter, Spinoza, Flechier, and many others. Characteristically enough, if you turn up Rousseau in the index, you will find Jean Baptiste, but not Jean Jacques. You will search in vain for Dr. Thomas Reid the metaphysician, but will readily find Isaac Reed the editor. If you look for Molinaeus, or Du Moulin, it is not there, but alphabetical vicinity gives you the good fortune to become acquainted with "Moule, Mr., his Bibliotheca Heraldica." The name of Hooker will ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley

... authorities, than to write it; and I am supposing the same number of pages in the tragedy and in the defence. Heinsius perhaps bestowed more time in defending his Herodes infanticida against Balzac, than a Spanish (or a Scotch) metaphysician bestows on a large volume of controversy, where he takes all from his own stock." I am somewhat concerned in the truth of this principle. There are articles in the present work occupying but a few pages, which could never have ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... sympathize deeply with the anatomist and the physiologist and the student of cerebral pathology, but equally deeply with the philosopher and the metaphysician who study the implications, present although hidden, that point to the bonds between the individual and the universe. To fail to recognize that these bonds exist,—as is done when the attempt is made to study human beings as if they ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... it from a study of the English classics, not from conversation; and it was odd to hear him use words colloquially which Philip had only met in the plays of Shakespeare. Frau Professor Erlin called her establishment a family and not a pension; but it would have required the subtlety of a metaphysician to find out exactly where the difference lay. When they sat down to dinner in a long dark apartment that led out of the drawing-room, Philip, feeling very shy, saw that there were sixteen people. The Frau Professor sat at one end and carved. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... Victor Cousin to introduce a brilliant survey of the philosophy of India into his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, first delivered, we think, in 1828. Cousin knew and thought of Colebrooke exclusively as a metaphysician. He probably cared nothing for his other labors. But as a metaphysician he placed him in the first rank, and never spoke of him without an expression of veneration, very unusual on the eloquent but somewhat imperious lips of the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... eludes him,—and eludes him, mark you, despite month upon month of toil in the dissecting room. If the study of anatomy fail him, I know not where he will next turn. For my part, I fancy he need not look beyond the stomach. The wonder is that his own stomach has not given him the clue ere this; for, metaphysician though he be, he enjoys the good things of earth. Let me tell you ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... there was not a single sum done right; Tho' a metaphysician amongst the crowd, In a voice that was notably deep and loud, Repeated, as fast as he was able, The whole of ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... subtleties which would make poetry a study—not a passion—it becomes the metaphysician to reason—but the poet to protest. Yet Wordsworth and Coleridge are men in years; the one imbued in contemplation from his childhood; the other a giant in intellect and learning. The diffidence, then, with which I venture to dispute their authority would be ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... so learned, or intellectual as Wesley. He was not so great a genius. But he had more eloquence, and more warmth of disposition. Wesley was a system maker, a metaphysician, a logician. He was also profoundly versed in the knowledge of human nature, and curiously adapted his system to the wants and circumstances of that class of people over whom he had the greatest power. Both Wesley and Whitefield were demanded by their times, and only such men as they were could ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do we really get over any difficulty—do we not rather create new difficulties,—by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort of seemliness ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... thoughts and the ravin of his envy would have provided interesting bases of speculation for the reflective magistrate, since, if, according to the metaphysician, thoughts are things, ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order, the materials of their existence. He is "The Answerer;" he is to find some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides having an answer ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of knowing what place in our metaphysical theory we ought to secure for emotion seems difficult to resolve, and we even find some pleasure in leaving it in suspense, in order that it may be understood that a metaphysician is not compelled to explain everything. Besides, the difficulties which atop us here are peculiarly of a psychological order. They proceed from the fact that studies on the nature of the emotions are still very little advanced. ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... from too lofty a standpoint, and is not sufficiently practical; perhaps from the exalted summit of speculation men seem so small to the metaphysician that he cannot distinguish between them; perhaps, indeed, the equality of conditions is one of those principles which are very true and sublime as generalities, but which it would be ridiculous and even ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... within. The air rang with jeers at the portrait-painter who never got a likeness, the too facile composer whose body was to be burned on a pile of five-and-twenty chests all filled with his own scores, the bad grammar of the grammarian, the supersubtle logic and the cumbrous technical language of the metaphysician, the disastrous fertility of the authors of machine-made epics.[6] The poor scholar had become proverbial; living in a garret where the very mice were starved, teaching the children of the middle classes for an uncertain pittance, glad to buy a dinner with a dedication, and gradually petrifying in ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... great French dish, and christened it by his name; he was understood to be the "unknown friend," to whom a literary Polish countess had dedicated her "Letters against the restraint of the Marriage Tie;" a female German metaphysician, sixty years old, had fallen (Platonically) in love with him, and had taken to writing erotic romances in her old age. Such were some of the rumours that reached my father's ears on the subject of his son ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... but they are not far-fetched, like those of Donne and Cowley; they generally lie on the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a poetical Heraclitus. But Johnson had caught the cant of the age, in which it was usual to designate almost any thing absurd or extravagant by the ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... passed to Rome, where he resided some time; and after visiting Naples, fixed his permanent residence in Tuscany. His acquirements were constantly augmenting, and he was without question an accomplished person. He was, however, more of a metaphysician than a poet, though there are splendid specimens of poetical thought in his works. As a man, he was objected to only on account of his speculative opinions; for he possessed many amiable qualities, was just in his intentions, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... metaphysics; psychics, psychology; ideology; mental philosophy, moral philosophy; philosophy of the mind; pneumatology[obs3], phrenology; craniology[Med], cranioscopy[Med]. ideality, idealism; transcendentalism, spiritualism; immateriality &c. 317; universal concept, universal conception. metaphysician, psychologist &c. V. note, notice, mark; take notice of, take cognizance of be aware of, be conscious of; realize; appreciate; ruminate &c. (think) 451; fancy &c. (imagine) 515. Adj. intellectual[Relating to intellect], mental, rational, subjective, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... I said looking hard at her, 'hands, head, and feet. I am psychometrist, dentist, physician, metaphysician all in one!' ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... truths from my history of the noble Gargantua and Pantagruel. I don't despair of being proved, to the entire satisfaction of some future ape, to have been, without exception, the profoundest divine and metaphysician that ever ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton

... have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which frightened me a good deal; but it went off unaccountably. Love and respects ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... Gerard would furnish a subject of profound study, both for the physiologist and the metaphysician. Neither wholly a fanatic, nor entirely a ruffian, he combined the most dangerous elements of both characters. In his puny body and mean exterior were enclosed considerable mental powers and accomplishments, a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Esq. (brother of Sir William Hamilton, the Metaphysician), author of Cyril Thornton, Men and Manners in America, Annals of the Peninsular Campaign, etc. Died ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician. Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender—Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never penetrated, and modern guessers cannot conjecture through. There ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... being prepared, except one of the heads of houses; his appeal was generally scouted, because his Sanskrit style was vulgarly intelligible, and he had the bad name of being a practical man. The metaphysician Rashik Lall sneered to Vaiswata the poet, who passed on the look to the theo-philosopher Vardhaman. Haridatt the antiquarian whispered the metaphysician Vasudeva, who burst into a loud laugh; whilst Narayan, Jagasharma, and Devaswami, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... the doctrine in question, that Mr Mill directs his observations. Perhaps the controverted tenets would have sustained a more equal combat under the auspices of a more practised and more complete metaphysician than Mr Whewell; but a difficulty was probably experienced in finding a statement in any other well-known English author full and explicit. Referring ourselves to Mr Whewell's volumes for an extract, in order to give the distinction here contended ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... since Aristotle— with whom, though claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he has much in common—has furnished more luminous hints to the elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were those which concern the most inscrutable, but, to the genuine metaphysician, most fascinating of all topics, the nature of substance, matter and spirit, absolute being,—in a word, Ontology. This department of metaphysic, the most interesting, and, agonistically [14], the most important ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... subjectivity of this situation is not apparent to the gregarious animal, which feels that the general principles of justice are on the side of its own herd. When the animal has arrived at the dignity of the metaphysician, it invents ethics as the embodiment of its belief in the justice of its own herd. So the Grand Augur invokes ethics as the justification of Augurs in their conflicts with pigs. But, it may be said, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... experiment of pure reason has a great similarity to that of the chemists, which they term the experiment of reduction, or, more usually, the synthetic process. The analysis of the metaphysician separates pure cognition a priori into two heterogeneous elements, viz., the cognition of things as phenomena, and of things in themselves. Dialectic combines these again into harmony with the necessary rational idea of ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... Jack had been seen threading his way along its ancient streets. With a countenance much resembling the portraits of Erasmus, with gray hair hanging about his shoulders, with his hat drawn over his eyes and his hands behind him, as if in deep meditation; John Fransham, the Norwich metaphysician and mathematician, might well excite the curiosity of the casual observer, especially when I add that he was bandy-legged, that he was short of stature, that he wore a green jacket, a broad hat, large shoes, and short worsted stockings. A Norwich weaver had ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... origin of the adapted organisation. It solves the great problem: how could the finely adapted structure of the animal or plant body be formed unless it was built on a preconceived plan? It thus enables us to dispense with the teleology of the metaphysician and the dualist, and to set aside the old mythological and poetic legends of creation. The idea had occurred in vague form to the great Empedocles 2000 years before the time of Darwin, but it was reserved for modern research to give it ample ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... "When Fontenelle appeared on the field, all the prizes were already distributed, all the palms already gathered: the prize of universality alone remained, Fontenelle determined to attempt it, and he was successful. He is not only a metaphysician with Malebranche, a natural philosopher with Newton, a legislator with Peter the Great, a statesman with D'Argenson; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various

... every observer has remarked in how great a degree, in the individuals of the same species, the dispositions, namely courage, pertinacity, suspicion, restlessness, confidence, temper, pugnaciousness, affection, care of their young, sagacity, &c., &c., vary. It would require a most able metaphysician to explain how many primary qualities of the mind must be changed to cause these diversities of complex dispositions. From these dispositions being inherited, of which the testimony is unanimous, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... science and was treated by hypnotic suggestion. I would seat myself in an easy-chair midst seductive surroundings and the great metaphysician would then say: "Put your objective senses in abeyance with complete mental oblivion, and enter a state of profound passivity." This interpreted into plain United States would mean: "Forget your troubles and go to sleep." When I was in a suggestible mood the doctor would ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... "If the metaphysician stood a chance of being burnt as a heretic, the natural philosopher was not in less jeopardy as a magician," is an observation of the same writer, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... character of the parent may influence the character of the child the metaphysician must decide. Certainly the character of Vivian Grey underwent, at this period of his life, a sensible change. Doubtless, constant communion with a mind highly refined, severely cultivated, and much experienced, cannot ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... for its grounds were not in the conception of any one. I speak especially of two others, who fought like cat and dog: one was dogmatical, the other categorical. The first was Hamilton himself—Sir William Hamilton of Edinburgh, the metaphysician, not Sir William Rowan Hamilton[709] of Dublin, the mathematician, a combination of peculiar genius with unprecedented learning, erudite in all he could want except mathematics, for which he had no turn, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... novelist Duclos, with his keen power of penetrating human character, would move leisurely through the throng, picking up material for his romances; and Mably would talk politics and drop ill-natured remarks. The learned metaphysician Helvetius, too, was often there, seeking for compliments, his appetite for applause being voracious; so insatiable, indeed, that he even danced one night at the opera. It was said that he was led ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris

... human passions must they subdue, before they can penetrate thy mazy walks, or approach the hidden sanctuaries of thy temple of Truth! Little thinks the babbling politician, the pedantic linguist, or the equivocating metaphysician, of the watchful hours which thy worshippers must pass,—of the never-ending patience which they must exert,—of the concurring circumstances which must favour their enthusiasm! Whether we consider the necessary magnitude ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... hoped for, the proving of things not seen." In the authorised version, "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence" for "proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words, [Greek: hypostasis] and [Greek: elenchos], affords a fine field of discussion for the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall be not far from the mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind the profound psychological truth, that men constantly feel certain about things for which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley



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