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Mysticism   Listen
noun
Mysticism  n.  
1.
Obscurity of doctrine.
2.
(Eccl. Hist.) The doctrine of the Mystics, who professed a pure, sublime, and wholly disinterested devotion, and maintained that they had direct intercourse with the divine Spirit, and aquired a knowledge of God and of spiritual things unattainable by the natural intellect, and such as can not be analyzed or explained.
3.
(Philos.) The doctrine that the ultimate elements or principles of knowledge or belief are gained by an act or process akin to feeling or faith.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mysticism" Quotes from Famous Books



... state of perfection consisted in the repose and complete inaction of the soul, that life ought to be one of entire passive contemplation, and that good works and active industry were only fitting for those who were toiling in a lower sphere and had not attained to the higher regions of spiritual mysticism. Thus the '[Greek: Aesuchastai]' on Mount Athos contemplated their nose or their navel, and called the effect of their meditations "the divine light," and Molinos pined in his dungeon, and left his works to be castigated by the renowned Bossuet. The ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... soul at his finger tips. And she watched his downcast profile as he stared at vacancy while he played. It was in moments like these that Beth felt herself groping in the dark after him, he was so far away. And yet she was not afraid, for she knew that out of the dreams and mysticism of the half of him that was Russian he would come ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... end of it all, we go to Rome certainly; but we have taken on this apartment for another year, which Robert decided on to please me, and because it was reasonable on the whole. We have been meditating Socialism and mysticism of very various kinds, deep in Louis Blanc and Proudhon, deeper in the German spiritualists, added to which, I have by no means given up my French novels and my rapping spirits, of whom our American guests ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand francs from Mdlle. Bertin, the Queen's milliner; but later to be famous for her literary ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... the brilliant moonlight the ruined village assumed another ghostly phase. All the rugged outlines of half-fallen tepees were silvered and softened. Henry, with that extraordinary sensitiveness of his to nature and the wilderness, felt again the mysticism and unreality of this place, once inhabited by man and now given back to the forest. In another season or two the last remnant of bark would disappear, the footpaths would be grown up with bushes, and the wild animals ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... other imagery despoiled, but the edifice was actually doomed to destruction. This fortunately was spared to it, but in the same year (1793) it became a "Temple of Reason," one of those fanatical exploits of a set of madmen who are periodically let loose upon the world. Mysticism, palaverings, and orgies unspeakable took place between its walls, and it only became sanctified again when Napoleon caused it to be reopened as a place of divine worship. Again, three-quarters of a century later, it fell into evil times—when ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... shuddered to anticipate. The number of instances in which such lively dreams have been quoted, and both asserted and received as spiritual communications, is very great at all periods; in ignorant times, where the natural cause of dreaming is misapprehended and confused with an idea of mysticism, it is much greater. Yet, perhaps, considering the many thousands of dreams which must, night after night, pass through the imagination of individuals, the number of coincidences between the vision and real event are fewer and less remarkable than a fair ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... philosophers, and if they never attained to what we may call the nettete et clarte of the Greek metaphysician, they excelled all other thinkers in the boldness and profound spirituality of their philosophical mysticism. In proof of this assertion we may point to that body of ...
— Hebrew Literature

... madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the simplest vehicle of salvation, corresponding to the first of the three degrees of saintship. Characteristics of it are the preponderance of active moral asceticism, and the absence of speculative mysticism and quietism." E. H., pp. 151-2, 45, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien

... Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne. There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them rather than explain them—and here, some may say that he is wiser in a more practical way and ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... phase is coloured by mysticism which seeks emblems of the hidden source of harmony in every form of life. Anthropomorphic conceptions are laid aside; ritual is abandoned as savouring of magic; hierocracy as part of an obsolete caste ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... hard to deny it grace and exquisite proportion, in which it resembles an even more beautiful hand, that of the Greek lady, Zoe, wife of the late Archbishop of York, which seems to breathe of Ionian mysticism ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of REFUTED systems, and an extravagant expenditure which "does nobody any good". At another time the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment of knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the disregard of individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to disregard of philosophy generally. In fine, I found most frequently, behind ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... often remaining in the parlour throughout her mistress's practice period, and sometimes purring an accompaniment to tunes she especially liked—such tunes as "The Maiden's Prayer" or "Old Black Joe with Variations." There was, too, about her a touch of something which Missy thought must be mysticism; for Poppy heard sounds and saw things which no one else could—following these invisible objects with attentive eyes while Missy saw nothing; then, sometimes, she would get up suddenly, switching her tail, and watch them as they evidently disappeared. But Missy never mentioned ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... who with all his mysticism was so good a man of business that, as his biographers acquaint us, he was in special request as a trustee, "and now, concerning this roll of thine. Is it possible that the accounts connected with the installation of a few abstemious lovers of wisdom can have swollen to such a prodigous bulk? ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... man, not upon the trustworthiness of the method. Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary, philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the Orient, to mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by the unrest ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... superconscious mind has long been recognized philosophically, being in reality the Oversoul spoken of by Emerson, but only recently has it been recognized scientifically." The French scientist pointed out that from the superconsciousness come inspiration, genius, moral values. "Belief in this is not mysticism though it recognized and valued ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... narrative, and a sympathetic insight into the humbler conditions of life. On the whole, Buchanan is at his best in these narrative poems, though he essayed a more ambitious flight in The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic, a study in mysticism, which appeared in 1870. He was a frequent contributor to periodical literature, and obtained notoriety by an article which, under the nom de plume of Thomas Maitland, he contributed to the Contemporary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... Anabaptists, Mennonites, Pietists, and Quietists of the Continent. Their movement was an extreme revolt against the formalism, corporate character, and externality of established religion. It contained a deep element of mysticism. The Quakers declared all believers, irrespective of learning, sex, or official appointment, to be priests. [Footnote: Fox, Letters, No. 249.] They asserted the adequacy of the "inner light" to guide every man in his faith and in his actions. They ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... soon sink into platitudinous prose; such robust swinging rhythms, Emerson told Walt that he must have had a "long foreground." It is true. Notwithstanding his catalogues of foreign countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called "mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism—what Coleridge called "the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. His chief ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... the large square mouth, he looked a veritable type of the ecclesiastical cenobites who, since the days of Pachomius at Tabennae, have made their hearts altars of the Triple Vows, and girdled the globe with a cable of scholastic mysticism. The pale, shrunken hand he laid on the black serge that covered his breast, was delicate as a woman's, and checkered with knotted lines where ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... Byzantine, and even after the Crusades, of Norman and Gothic design, are recognizable in Moslem architecture. But the Orientalism of the conquerors and their common faith, tinged with the poetry and philosophic mysticism of the Arab, stamped these works of Copts, Syrians, and Greeks with an unmistakable character of their own, neither Byzantine nor ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... you have the sweep and wave of drapery, gentle undulations, summer-cloud floatings, soft, sinuous movements, the fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and lovely suppleness. It is grace generic,—the sublime, the evanescent mysticism of motion, without use, without aim, except its own overflowing and all-sufficing fascination. But when a man dances, it reminds me of that amusing French book called "Le Diable Boiteux," which has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... again, her eyes burning with excitement and mysticism and ambition like a fever. She seemed to take more ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... great General Staff, his enrolled professors, his army chaplains. War has always been, will forever remain, a crime; but Germany organised it as she did everything. She made a code for murder and conflagration, and over it all she poured the boiling oil of an enraged mysticism, made up of Bismarck, of Nietzsche, and of the Bible. In order to crush the world and regenerate it, the Super-Man and Christ were mobilised. The regeneration began in Belgium—a thousand years from now men will tell of it. The affrighted world looked on at the infernal spectacle ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... the Revelation be written by the same man who wrote the Gospel according to St John or not, there is, at least, one element common to the two—the mysticism. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... acknowledged; the high pretensions of his system, pretensions, it is true, such as had been a thousand times put forth, a thousand times found wanting, still excited notice, when so backed by ability and reputation. The air of mysticism connected with these doctrines was attractive to the German mind, with which the vague and the vast are always pleasing qualities; the dreadful array of first principles, the forest huge of terminology and definitions, where the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... and his uncle Aaron, who was eight years older than himself, had been made skeptical by orthodox mysticism and the disputes ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... individual, allegorical visions, miracles, and portents. Eastern splendor and northern weirdness, angelry and deviltry, together with abundant fighting and quite a phenomenal amount of swooning, which seem to reflect a strange medley of Celtic, pagan, and mythological traditions, and Christian legends and mysticism, alternate in a kaleidoscopic maze that defies the symmetry which modern aesthetic canons associate ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... a crime against sentiment, to admit of relief from common occupations or indifferent subjects; with a sort of superstitious zeal, she excludes all thoughts but those which relate to one object, and in this spirit of amorous mysticism she actually makes a penance even of love. I am astonished that her heart can endure this variety of self-inflicted torments. What will become of Olivia when she ceases to love and be loved? And what passion can be durable ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... the question, what interest can we, the descendants of the practical brother, heirs to so much historical renown, possibly take in the records of a race so historically characterless, and so sunk in reveries and mysticism? The answer is easy. Those records are written in a language closely allied to the primaeval common tongue of those two branches before they parted, and descending from a period anterior to their separation. It may, or it may not, be the very tongue ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... position of dictator in European thought. But the "Guide" of Maimonides was a great achievement for its spirit more than for its contents. If it inevitably became obsolete as a system of theology, it permanently acted as an antidote to the mysticism which in the thirteenth century began to gain a hold on Judaism, and which, but for Maimonides, might have completely undermined the beliefs of the Synagogue. Maimonides remained the exemplar of ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... life of M. Lamennais is conclusive proof of his anti-philosophical genius. Devout even to mysticism, an ardent ultramontane, an intolerant theocrat, he at first feels the double influence of the religious reaction and the literary theories which marked the beginning of this century, and falls back to the middle ages and Gregory VII.; then, suddenly becoming ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... occasional gleams of tenderness and beauty which the natural force of his imagination and affections must still shed over all his productions,—and to which we shall ever turn with delight, in spite of the affectation and mysticism and prolixity, with which they are so ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... the imagination, and convince the reason, of Maltravers; and the moment the matter came to argument, the cure was soon completed: for, however we may darken and puzzle ourselves with fancies and visions, and the ingenuities of fanatical mysticism, no man can mathematically or syllogistically contend that the world which a God made, and a Saviour visited, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... whose prose writings are as peculiar as they are valuable, was of the same age as Waller. He partakes to a considerable degree of the mysticism which was so much followed in his day, only in his case it influences his literature most—his mode of utterance more than his mode of thought. His True Christian Morals is a very valuable book, notwithstanding ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... self-captivating thing, it divorces man from the plain and bitter realities of life, it brings an anti-social emancipation to him. I can sincerely make this terrible charge against the modern world, and that is, that it is its bent towards mysticism, its blinding itself through hysteria, which makes possible in its civilization its desperate inequalities of life-expression, its tortured children, its unhappy men and women, its wasted potentiality. We have not been humble and asked what is man; we have not allowed ourselves to weigh ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... had undoubtedly intended to introduce into the recital somewhat more of mysticism and sublimity than the actual facts warranted. But once launched thereon, his sense of humour could not be denied its full enjoyment in this first telling of the entire tale. Full justice he did to the pathos, but he also shook ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... shall be happy to hear it." She was not enthusiastic. She was too deeply engrossed with pressing, practical questions to find his mysticism ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... of evolution, from the earliest scientific writings that have been preserved, those of the Greek philosophers, down to the present time. The author shows how the ruling classes, living on the labor of others, have always supported some form of theology or mysticism, while the working classes have developed the theory of evolution, which is rounded out to its logical completion by the work of Marx, Engels and Dietzgen. The author frankly recognizes that no writer can ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... St. Victor, and St. Bonaventura—all three very familiar figures to students of Dante's Paradiso—are the chief influences in the story of English mysticism. And, through the writings of his latter-day followers, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous author of the Divine Cloud of Unknowing, Richard of St. Victor is, perhaps, the most important of ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various

... remark of his, towards the end of the meal, anent the mysticism, the spiritism of the East, and the growing cult of the same order in the West, appeared to suddenly wake her from her dreaminess. Her dark eyes were turned quickly up to his, a new and eager light ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... and gave her new interests, without specially intending it he injured her soul. For he increased her worldliness and infected her with his atheism. She had always been devoted to the world. He continually suggested to her that there was nothing else, nothing beyond. All sense of mysticism had been left out of his nature. What he called "priestcraft" was abhorrent to him. The various religions seemed to him merely different forms of superstition, the assertions of their leaders only varying forms of humbug. He was greedy ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... sacred ritual of the Etruscans that have reached us are marked by a different spirit. Their prevailing characteristics are a gloomy and withal tiresome mysticism, ringing the changes on numbers, soothsaying, and that solemn enthroning of pure absurdity which at all times finds its own circle of devotees. We are far from knowing the Etruscan worship in such completeness and purity as we know ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... authors. For Dr. Bell believed that 'these intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of, the antagonistic forces at work'; but his pupil and helper, with characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted the discovery as 'a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical and in no way connected with any laws of either force or beauty.' 'Many a hard and pleasant fight we had over it,' wrote Jenkin, in later years; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 6: The term "universal agent" has been used in the mysticism of ages, to designate that subtle and all-pervading fluid, of which the phenomena of light, heat, electricity and vitality are considered to be but the grosser and ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... systems of the universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, something too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled whether by prudery or mysticism. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... thoroughly genuine character. But wherever there is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial, unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces. English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism, looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile. It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... round world do you find that combination of lofty doctrine, magnificent moral teaching, the frank recognition of the Cross; sacramentalism logically carried out, yet gripping the heart as no amateur mysticism can do; and miracles. "Mercy and Truth have met together." "These signs shall follow them that believe.... Faith can remove mountains.... All things are possible to him that believes.... Whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in My Name.... ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson

... the blending of the classic and romantic inspirations is illustrated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed, actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel combination; his classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist—in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane—dwells habitually in the delectable uplands ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... thought she loved, the same climate of mind. Of course, this book superseded all others, for the time, and tinged deeply all her thoughts. The religion, the science, the Catholicism, the worship of art, the mysticism and daemonology, and withal the clear recognition of moral distinctions as final and eternal, all charmed her; and Faust, and Tasso, and Mignon, and Makaria, and Iphigenia, became irresistible names. It was one of those agreeable historical coincidences, perhaps invariable, though not yet registered, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... Mysticism is not, as the man in the street generally thinks, the study of the "Mysterious," but is the attempt to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the ultimate Truth in everything, especially the perception of that wonderful Transcendental ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... for men, why does he let them perish? The less he has to do with us, the better we can understand our evil plight. Thus their Supreme was far beyond the weakness of human sympathy. They made him less a person than a thing or an idea, enveloped in clouds of mysticism and abolished from the world by his very exaltation over it. He must not touch it lest it perish. The Redeemer whom the Christians worship may be a hero or a prophet, an angel or a demi-god—anything except a Son of God ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin

... Perpignan, and Antwerp. Naturally, the claim was made that the book was written under divine inspiration, and the curious and oftentimes revolting details with which its pages were filled were soon the talk and scandal of the religious world. Maria, in spite of her mysticism, had proved to be a realist of the most pronounced type, and in many quarters her book was openly denounced. In Paris, the great court preacher Bossuet proclaimed it immoral; and the Sorbonne, which ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... in 1841. A dissemination of characteristics; moral and physical resemblance to his mother. Has his father's brain, influenced by the diseased condition of his mother. Heredity of a form of neurosis developing into mysticism. A priest, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... of Valdemosa that Madame Sand completed her novel of Monastic life, Spiridion, then publishing in the Revue des Deux Mondes. "For heaven's sake not so much mysticism!" prayed the editor of her, now and then; and assuredly those readers for whom George Sand was simply a purveyor of passionate romances, those critics who set her down in their minds as exclusively a glorifier of mutinous emotion and the apologist of lawless love, must have been taken aback by ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... abroad, and settled in Baden-Baden, where he married (being at the time sixty years of age, while his bride was nineteen), and never returned to Russia. During the last eleven years of his semi-invalid life, with disordered nerves, he approached very close to mysticism.[9] ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... a girl. Sadness is a sickness—a physical disorganisation that infects the mind. It makes a strange emotion of love, too, perverting it to that mysticism we call religion—and wasting it.... I suppose you're ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... all the Dark Ages is a history of the distrust of inquiry and reason, and the emphasis of blind emotional faith. Mysticism, good and evil spirits, and the interpretation of natural phenomena as manifestations of the Divine will from the first received large emphasis. The worship of saints and relics, and the great development of the sensuous and symbolic, changed the earlier religion into a crude polytheism. During ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... observance by all monks. When a man enters the monkhood, he makes four vows—that he will be pure from lust, from desire of property, from the taking of any life, from the assumption of any supernatural powers. Consider this last, how it disposes once and for all of any desire a monk may have toward mysticism, for this is what ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... found to present a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, "Is Brand the expression of Ibsen's own nature?" Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... head, leaving what the phrenologists call the bumps of ideality curiously exposed, and this, taken in conjunction with the yearning of the large prominent eyes, suggested at once a clear, delightful intelligence,—a mind timid, fearing, and doubting, such a one as would seek support in mysticism and dogma, that would rise instantly to a certain point, but to drop as suddenly as if sickened by the too intense light of the cold, pure heaven of reason to the gloom of the sanctuary and the consolations of Faith. Let us ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore

... of antiquity there were still wholly unchristian figures, which were more beautiful, harmonious, and pure than those of any Christians: e.g., Proclus. His mysticism and syncretism were things that precisely Christianity cannot reproach him with. In any case, it would be my desire to live together with such people. In comparison with them Christianity looks like some crude ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... this scenery and climate is a rare brew. The physical background is Anglo-Saxon of course; and it still breaks through in the prevailing Anglo-Saxon type. To this, the Celt has brought his poetry and mysticism. To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, the passion of ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin

... alliteration and onomatopoeia are employed with striking success. By the same author is the shorter poem entitled "Galileo and Swammerdam", which though vastly different in aspect and rhythm, yet retains that suggestion of mysticism so frequently ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, Padraic Colum and others. The first fervor gone, a short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new significance, it seemed for a while that the movement would lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the tramp, followed; an interest that was something of a reaction against the influence of Yeats and his mystic otherworldliness. And, in 1904, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... ST. AUGUSTINE. St. Augustine then defines, not without much mysticism, what is meant by the opening words of Genesis: "In the beginning." He is guided to his conclusion by another scriptural passage: "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord! in wisdom hast thou made them all." This "wisdom" is "the beginning," and in that beginning the Lord created the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... only be routine, a test, so that engineers a lifetime hence could ask the returning fleet whether their transmission had registered. (If there were any engineers by then, on an Earth sinking into poverty and mysticism.) ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson

... Keble as the editor of Fronde's Remains, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments, Essays and Reviews prosecutions, and Colenso ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with an earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with which they had never been investigated before. "Nature," says Professor Planchon, "long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was opening up infinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of the ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts. Nevertheless learning did her work. She rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, commented on the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... of these lines of Crane's, Schuyler has attacked a difficult problem in an ideal manner. To three of the short poems he has given a sense of epic vastitude, and to two of them he has given a tantalizing mysticism. The songs, which have been published privately, should be reproduced for the wide ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... metaphysical, which I was afraid it was. I was resolved to pay some tribute of sympathy to the unhonoured dead; but I wrote, as usual, with a total ignorance of the effect that I should produce.' (To Ollier, 25 September.) 'The Adonais, in spite of its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions; and, as the image of my regret and honour for poor Keats, I wish it to be so. I shall write to you probably by next post on the subject of that poem; and should have sent the promised criticism for the second edition, had I not mislaid, and in vain ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... she said, pointing to the window, when the handsome footman came in answer to the bell. "No; whatever you may say, there is some mysticism in him; without mysticism there can be no poetry," she said, with one of her black eyes angrily following the footman's movements as he was drawing the curtains. "Without poetry, mysticism is superstition; without mysticism, poetry ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... must have leaned toward the scholastic method, now so much out of favor; but certainly he would put his own personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have been called ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there runs through it all the note of the nomad. The Moslem takes literally, as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city. He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism, the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly, when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God. He has no true notion of building a house, or in our Western sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... Mysticism, which may be defined as the brooding soul of the world, cannot fail of its oracular promise as to Woman. "The mothers," "The mother of all things," are expressions of thought which lead the mind towards this side of universal growth. Whenever a mystical whisper was heard, from ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... exploring the romantic glens of the Black Valley, or wandering along the picturesque banks of the Black River. Or if the weather happened to be inclement, Mr. Berners and Mrs. Blondelle would sit in the library together, deep in German mysticism or French sentiment. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... process has an imperishable value, only we have not yet made clear its connection with other contributions. And all the work is young, liable to be drawn into unprofitable excursions, side-tracked by self-deceit and pretence; and it fatally attracts, like the older mysticism, the curiosity and the expository powers of those least in sympathy with it, ready writers who, with all the air of extended research, have been content with narrow grounds for induction. There is a danger, besides, which accompanies even the most genuine work ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... entered upon scientific subjects, as it appeared to my ignorance at least, with more assurance than knowledgewas very arbitrary in laying down and asserting his opinions, and mixed the terms of science with a strange jargon of mysticism. A simple youth whispered me that he was an Illumine', and carried on an ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... of a practical London banker was writing verses at nine, a mock drama at twelve, and at fourteen, "he broke out into periodicals, The Spy and Anti-Spy, intended to answer one another." Of his tendency toward mysticism in youth, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... combination of these elements." [Footnote: Diog. Laert., Lives of Phil.] All this is unintelligible or indefinite. We cannot comprehend how the number theory will account for the production of corporeal magnitude any easier than we can identify monads with mathematical points. But underlying this mysticism is the thought that there prevails in the phenomena of nature a rational order, harmony, and conformity to law, and that these laws can be represented by numbers. Number or harmony is the principle of the universe, and order holds together the world. Like Anaximander, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... built a two-story Administration Building to house the general office, the book department, the correspondence school in Christian Mysticism which links Headquarters with students all over the world, and the editorial offices of our monthly publications, notably the "Rosicrucian Fellowship Magazine—Rays from the Rose Cross." We have also an astrological department which conducts a correspondence ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... produced from a very wonderful bunch of such. He was in the house for nearly half an hour, and when he emerged, the notebook in his breast pocket, had there been an eye to read it, would have been seen to be filled with stranger details in regard to Oriental mysticism than even Mr. Yahi-Bahi had given to the world. So strange were they that before the Philippine chauffeur returned to the Rasselyer-Brown residence he telegraphed certain and sundry parts of them to New York. But why ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... observed, the copula. It is important that there should be no indistinctness in our conception of the nature and office of the copula; for confused notions respecting it are among the causes which have spread mysticism over the field of logic, and ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... of Nature Mysticism, and the methods adopted for attaining them, are sufficiently described in the introductory chapter. It may be said, by way of special preface, that the nature mystic here portrayed is essentially a "modern." He is assumed to have accepted the fundamentals of the hypothesis ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... confess that I had broken down over some portions of that book. Since I had become acquainted with him I had read others of his writings, especially his book on England, and had found that he improved greatly on acquaintance. I think that he has confined his mysticism to the book above named. In conversation he is very clear, and by no means above the small practical things of the world. He would, I fancy, know as well what interest he ought to receive for his money as though ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... wisdom and piety, like many other precious qualities, are of an age that had passed. In the poetry of 1700-1725, religion forgoes mysticism and exaltation; the intellectual life, daring and subtlety; the imagination, exuberance and splendor. Enthusiasm for moral ideals declines into steadfast approval of ethical principles. Yet these were changes in tone and manner rather ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... in the regions west of India[1], Indian religion is sporadic and exotic. I do not think that it had much influence on ancient Egypt, Babylon and Palestine or that it should be counted among the forces which shaped the character and teaching of Christ, though Christian monasticism and mysticism perhaps owed something to it. The debt of Manichaeism and various Gnostic sects is more certain and more considerable, but these communities have not endured and were regarded as heretical while they lasted. Among the Neoplatonists of Alexandria and the Sufis of Arabia and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... translation, completely took in even the best scholars, and this work was added to the Oriental Department of the British Museum Library. Later, however, the discovery was made that Mr. Bain, working with a mind saturated in Hindoo Mysticism and lore and Sanscrit poetry, was wholly its author, and it is now ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown

... extremely unconventional and bizarre mind. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson. The very gesture with which she tied her bonnet-strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like walks in her garden at Amherst, must have had something dreamy and Emersonian in it. She had much fancy ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his "Foundations of Belief." Crescas, in the fourteenth century, declared—like an earlier Buckle—that the excellence of the Jew sprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his recent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, alleges that when Rabbi Akiba called the Jews "Sons of God" he meant only that all other nations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said—what indeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards. In the words ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... manner, his hostile aloofness, had made it difficult to know him; but it seemed to Philip, looking back, that there had been in him a tragic force, which sought vainly to express itself in painting. He was a man of unusual character, mystical after the fashion of a time that had no leaning to mysticism, who was impatient with life because he found himself unable to say the things which the obscure impulses of his heart suggested. His intellect was not fashioned to the uses of the spirit. It was not surprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the Greek who had ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr. Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will, tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... his writings, it is conceded that "The Blue Bird" makes the strongest appeal to children. Maeterlinck has always had much in common with the young. He has the child's mysticism and awe of the unknown, the same delight in mechanical inventions, the same gift of ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc

... subject, with texts showing the development of Hebrew out of Chaldean and Egyptian conceptions, pp. 44, etc.; also pp. 127 et seq. For the early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, see Champollion; also Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, Archeologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890; and for engravings of them, see Lepsius, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... island was swinging nearer to us, the "Grey Archway" loomed almost above us, the mysticism crowded close, it enveloped me, caressed me, appealed ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson

... like the cloud pictures that float and puzzle us and break and reform and paint all Heaven in their beauty and then resolve themselves into nothing. Many people think this is Kenyon Adams's most beautiful and poetic message. Certainly in the expression of the gayety and the weird, vague mysticism of youth and poignant joy he never reached that height again. Death is ignored; it is all life and the aspirations of life and the beckonings of life and the bantering of life and the deep, awful, inexorable call ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... happy. But I thought it more, I thought it mystical. Something that her mother said to her, probably about her dress, caused her smile to vanish for a moment, and then, from beneath it as it were, appeared this shadow of innate mysticism. In a second it was gone and she was laughing again; but I, who am accustomed to observe, had caught it, perhaps alone of all that company. Moreover, it ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... and of sober fare upon the perspicacity of the sleeping brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism. Philostratus, in his "Life of Apollonius Tyaneus," represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till they have first inquired ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... the home of his parents—the house of a priest—John saturated himself with all the Inner Teachings reserved for the few, and withheld from the masses. The Secrets of the Kaballah, that system of Hebrew Occultism and Mysticism in which the higher priests of Judea were well versed, were disclosed to him, and occult tradition has it that he was initiated into the Inner Circle of the Hebrew Mystics, composed of only priests of a certain grade, and their sons. John became an Occultist and a Mystic. ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... occur to Mary Taylor to question this mysticism; she all at once understood—perhaps read the riddle in the dark, melancholy eyes that so ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... play or story. For the rest, this piece differs from the others in its presentation, not of Chekhov's favourite middle-classes, but of the moujik, nourishing, in a particularly stuffy atmosphere, an intense mysticism and an equally ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of view of religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a "spirit of freedom," in which ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... room both for the keen speculator on theological problems and for the mystic who, because he feels God, declines to reason about Him—for a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also for a Nachmanides, a Vital, and a Luria' (M. Joseph, op. cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams

... to professed mystics; the doctrine of transcendentalism has never had but one adversary, which is the density of the intellectual subject, and wherever the subject clarifies, there is idealism in philosophy and mysticism in religion. Moreover, on the part of mystics, especially here in England, the way of that revival had been prepared carefully, and there could be no astonishment that it came, and none, too, that it was accompanied, as it is accompanied almost invariably, by much that does not belong to it in ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... former productions in various dialects of France. We call the poetry of Roumanille elevated, yet it always addresses itself to the people of Provence, and borrows its images from the many-colored life of those to whom it speaks; religious, but simple and ingenuous, with a tinge of mysticism,—not the mysticism that seeks the good in dreamy inaction, as in some of the Spanish authors, nor has it the obscure tinge of the transcendental English school. The religion of Roumanille is active, not dogmatic; he incites to do, rather than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... and Mescal rose to pass to her room, then his doubt, his fear, his misery, were as though they had never been, for as Mescal said good-night she would give him one look, swift as a flash, and in it were womanliness and purity, and something beyond his comprehension. Her Indian serenity and mysticism veiled yet suggested some secret, some power by which she might yet escape the iron band of this Mormon rule. Hare could not fathom it. In that good-night glance was a meaning for him alone, if meaning ever shone in woman's ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... a few words, constantly recurring, which need brief definitions, in order to avoid confusion; they are: Unfolding, Evolution, Spirituality, Psychism, Yoga and Mysticism. ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... sheets in a darkened room. But let my eyes ache as they might, I would not give up till it was finished, within about three months from the date of its commencement. Recently, I went through this book to prepare it for a new edition, chiefly in order to cut out some of the mysticism and tall writing, for which it is too remarkable, and was pleased to find that it still interested me. But if a writer may be allowed to criticise his own work, it is two books, not one. Also, the hero is a very poor creature. Evidently I was too much ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... aloud the fancies of the young girl. From behind her voices also whispered them to her, the voices of her friends in the "Golden Legend," with whom she had peopled the air and the space around her. In this atmosphere she had ever lived—mysticism, in which she revelled until it seemed fact on one side, and the daily work of life on the other. Nothing ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola

... daughters sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... ever suspicious of intellectual contemplation, and this leads him to attribute less importance than perhaps he should to mysticism, to prayer, adoration, and worship. He admits that mysticism contains a truth that is vital to religion, but complains that it becomes for many the whole of religion. Its proper function is to liberate the human mind from the narrowly human, and to emphasise a total-life, ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones

... is, young man, but you have never learned that, and never will. For you the world will continue to wear a noble, awful face. You will never rise above mysticism.... But be happy in your ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... brought out of the ancient stock many a legend and quaint saying and even apocalyptic vision, transporting the mourners for Zion into the ecstasies of the future redemption. While official Judaism was committed to the dialectics of the Halakah, in the unofficial Haggadah mysticism exercised a potent influence by underground channels, as it were, issuing in later days in Kabbalah and offsetting the rational philosophies borrowed from Hellas. For the time being, however, the dominant note was ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the narrow path from Jerusalem ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... extraordinary gripe and unexpected resources of statement. His startling piece of advice, "Hitch your wagon to a star," is typical of the man, as combining the most unlike and widely separate qualities. Because not less marked than his idealism and mysticism is his shrewd common sense, his practical bent, his definiteness,— in fact, the sharp New England mould in which he is cast. He is the master Yankee, the centennial flower of that thrifty and peculiar stock. More especially in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... event and to tell her with what equanimity the old German philosopher had borne it. Here is the answer of Sand's mother; it will serve to show the character of the woman whose mighty heart never belied itself in the midst of the severest suffering; the answer bears the stamp of that German mysticism of which we have no idea ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... breaking their stay in town by many country visits. The most memorable of these was a visit to Lord and Lady Salisbury at Hatfield, where they again met Lord Beaconsfield, who, strange to say, though he had much in common with the Burtons—notably a love of the East and mysticism, and had a liking for them, and for Isabel especially, with whom he was wont to discuss her favourite Tancred, his book—never did anything for them, though he must have known better than most men ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism." ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... with reason, Fichte chose the latter and blazed out the path along which all the idealists have followed him. In reference to the philosophy of religion, we must say that, with all the extravagance, the pantheism and mysticism of his phrases, Fichte's great contribution was his breaking down of the old dualism between God and man which was still fundamental to Kant. It was his assertion of the unity of man and God and of the life of God in man. This thought ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... this, if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife, and entered with an unflinching heart into the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... when prolonged habits of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend a false air of mysticism to love. . . . It is as if the intellect and the will had become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... to the goal, is where I come in. Sort of mediator between your ideals and the box office. Of course you loved the fantasy. So did I, and I loved your wanting to do it. But it took vaudeville just one performance to decide that it wasn't ready for that kind of mysticism." ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... by other demands, is not exempt from danger. We may be carried away by the attraction peculiar to these noble studies, withdraw into antiquity and fall into a species of historical mysticism which ends in the affirmation, that whatever has been is true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... were extreme. Though the country generally returned to its old life and thought at the Restoration in 1660, much of the new life of the Commonwealth remained: congregations of Independents still met; Quaker ideals survived all persecution; and even the mysticism of Morgan Lloyd permeated the slowly awakening thought of the peasants whom, in his dreams, he saw welcoming the second advent ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards

... schools and the mosques, but such productions are more or less alike among all Mohammedan peoples, and those current in the Caucasus are interesting only as illustrations of a peculiar phase of Oriental mysticism—viz. the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... to the consideration of preliminary matters, such as Method, or the principles which should guide the student of Theology, and the different theories as to the source and standard of our knowledge of divine things, Rationalism, Mysticism, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Rule of Faith, and the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... mental achievement during sleep is unthought of. Dreams are allowed to run an absurd riot through the brain, disturbing physical rest. The remedy for this universal ailment and waste of time was to be found in "white sleep," a bit of Indian mysticism, purporting to accomplish a partial detachment of mind and body, so that the will, which is always the expression of the link between these two, is, for the time, dissolved. The body rests, but the unfettered mind enters upon a "will-less state of pure seeing," where dreams ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... with differences of opinion. Society profits from contrasting views, from discussion and struggle. The opposing parties in a real debate understand each other well and are working with the same logic and the same desire for order of thought. This contrast between order and mysticism has still less to do with the difference of knowledge and belief in a higher religious and philosophical sense. There is no real antagonism between science and religion, between experience and philosophical ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... and mysticism of adolescence had urged her toward a monastic life. Her father almost choked with sorrow at the idea, but it was the call of religion, that religion to which she longed to devote her life! Don Benito consented to her entering a monastery in Majorca, where he could see his daughter ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... forth in his manual, The Cell and the Tissue. In that address we read (p. 8): "With the same right, with which, for the good of scientific progress, an energetic protest has been raised against a certain mysticism which attaches to the word Vitality, I beg to give warning against an opposite extreme which is but too apt to lead to onesided and unreal, and hence also, ultimately to false notions of the vital process, against an extreme which would see in the vital process nothing ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... mysticism himself by the hour, but snubs it in every one else. "It has trout, at least; and they stand, I suppose, for its soul, as the raisins did for those of Jean Paul's gingerbread bride and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... the character of English theology, the so-called laborious Catenas. These were the real tasks of the hour, and they needed all that labour and industry could give. But the first of these inopportune Tracts was an elaborate essay, by Mr. Keble, on the "Mysticism of the Fathers in the use and interpretation of Scripture." It was hardly what the practical needs of the time required, and it took away men's thoughts from them; the prospect was hopeless that in that state ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... vision of an unrealised world—a vision which had expanded and blossomed in the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect. The world she looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze of a golden temperament"—the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man is to the body. And it was this inspired divination, this luminous idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first small gray ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... Jesus the divine Man, the master, Christos, restored to the heart of Humanity from the mysticism and miracle of monks and theologies, from the superstitions and folklore of ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... with the cloak of religion. He then attributes a divine origin to his desires and lays the precepts which he attaches to them on the commandments of his God or gods, so as to sanctify them. Hence, the unnatural influence of a mysticism, which is nothing else than the crystallized product of the fantastic imagination of men, raised to a dogma, imposes itself indirectly on natural sexual life, by entering at the back door under the cloak of religion. It ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was much more a literary than a scientific ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... felt suddenly sure that within him there were depths of imagination, of tenderness, even perhaps of mysticism. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... detested—for there was in her a queer vein of gentle cynicism. She 'saw' with extraordinary clearness, as if she had been born in Italy and still carried that clear dry atmosphere about her soul. She loved glow and warmth and colour; such mysticism as she felt was pagan; and she had few aspirations—sufficient to her were things as they showed themselves ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... scientists, but no one of special note had up to this time (1891) reported upon her. She was known as the wife of a small shop-keeper in Naples, and seemed a decent, matronly person, quite untouched by mysticism. Although not eager to sit for Lombroso and his party of scientists, she finally consented. Among those who took part in these celebrated experiments were Professor Tamburini, an eminent scientist; Dr. Bianchi, the superintendent of the Insane Asylum ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... old ex-emperor, Shah Jahan, the father of the three, in his prison at Agra. The prince died invoking the aid of Jesus, and was favourably disposed towards Christianity. He was also attracted by the doctrines of Sufism, or heretical Muhammadan mysticism, and by those of the Hindoo Upanishads. In fact, his religions attitude seems to have much resembled that of his great-grandfather Akbar. The 'Broad Church' principles and practice of Akbar failed to leave any permanent mark on Muhammadan ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... Of his mysticism, of the symbolism in which his "Journal Intime" is written in his own firm cipher, this little book is not the place to speak; though for those who have once come to know the true Holbein these have a spell, a stern, inexhaustible enchantment all ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... his love of Beatrice, so Plato would have us absorb all other loves and desires in the love of knowledge. Here is the beginning of Neoplatonism, or rather, perhaps, a proof (of which there are many) that the so-called mysticism of the East was not strange to the Greek of the fifth century before Christ. The first tumult of the affections was not wholly subdued; there were longings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, which no art could satisfy. To most men reason and passion appear to be antagonistic ...
— Symposium • Plato

... the social forces of production within modern society, and the better knowledge the workers obtain of their true relations to each other and to Nature, loosen the chains of ghost worship and mysticism from their limbs and lessen the power of religion as a political weapon in the hands of the ruling class, while they form, at the same time, the material and intellectual preparation for an intelligently organized society. The ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... would like to tell you the story of what happened several years back to a friend of mine, a young French writer. He had a good, sincere mind, but he had also a strong leaning toward mysticism,—something which was just then in danger of becoming as much of a fashion in France as it is here now. The event of which I am about to tell you threw him into what was almost a delirium, which came ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the Butterfly, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider. The four hymns in praise of Love and Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a seer of visions, of images full, brilliant, and distinct, and not like Bunyan, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... science and to the practical mind the right to reinclude rationally and constructively what a narrower view of science has, for a time at least, handed over unconditionally to uncritical fancy. But the only way to make unnecessary astrology and phrenology and playing with mysticism and with Oliver Lodge's fancies of the revelation of his son Raymond, is to recognize the true needs and yearnings of man and to show nature's real ways of granting appetites and satisfactions ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... whole, it appears to me that, with certain modifications, we must agree with Lobeck, and the more rational schools of inquiry, that it was principally in the interval between the Homeric age and the Persian war that mysticism passed into religion—that superstition assumed the attributes of a science—and that lustrations, auguries, orgies, obtained method and system from the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... creation, in dismay and bewilderment, describes the strange experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden, and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... about this patron of the plough—something, rather, of the movement of delicate wind or fire, about him and his chariot. And this finer character is explained, if, as we are justified in doing, we bring him into closest connexion with that episode, so full of a strange mysticism, of the Nursing of Demophoon, in the Homeric hymn. For, according to some traditions, none other [107] than Triptolemus himself was the subject of that mysterious experiment, in which Demeter laid the child nightly, in ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... this painful passage would introduce a jarring note; moreover, the raked embers of past controversy seldom tend to the spiritual improvement of the present. An interesting judgment by Professor Horstman on Rolle's place in mysticism is too long for quotation; but the following sentence may be taken as the pith of it:—"His position as a mystic was mainly the result of the development of scholasticism. The exuberant luxuriant growth of the brain in the system of Scotus called forth the reaction ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole

... in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he thought it might have been the Princess for the first word or two, until he turned and saw Miss Dassonville. She was staring ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... ability and ingenuity. But they were merely the outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something wholly distinct from intellectual conviction—by moral passion, by love, by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... young mind went leaping from one swing to another, from one carousel or toboggan-chute to the next, without having any special object in view, without knowing why and wherefor. He even entered such mazes of philosophy, such labyrinths of mysticism as put those of the Arabian grammaticasters in the shade. To him, education was a sport, pursued in a free spirit after his own fancy, without method or discipline. For two years and more he did little but ramble thus, drawing ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,—that Fra Angelico was a man of (humanly speaking) perfect piety—humility, charity, and faith—that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his love to God and man, and with the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Baronne, then in her fiftieth year, was the channel through which Franz Bader's theory or doctrine of the "Holy Alliance" was conveyed to the enthusiastic and receptive Czar. It was only a passing whim. Alexander's mysticism was for ornament, not for use, and, before very long, Egeria and her ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe, where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not the slightest leaning towards mysticism in his Christianity—no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... mysticism in religion has been made popular by the recent canonization of Saint Theresa, the ecstatic nun of Avila. In the ceremonies that celebrated this event there were three prizes awarded for odes to the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... the most naive form of the mystery story. It may contain a certain element of the supernatural—be tinged with mysticism—but its motive and the revelation thereof must be frankly materialistic—of the earth, earthy. In this respect it is very closely allied to the detective story. The model riddle story should be utterly mundane in motive—told in direct terms. Here again ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... there, he knew that he was waiting for someone. He shrugged. Mysticism was not even interesting to him, ordinarily. Still, though a behaviorist, he upheld certain instinctual motivation theories. And, though reluctantly, he granted Freud contributory significance. He could be an atavist, a victim of unconscious regression. Or ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton



Words linked to "Mysticism" :   intellection, mystical, cerebration, Sufism, thought process, thinking, quietism, faith, mentation, religion, mystic, thought, religious belief



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