"Subjectivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sometimes the traveller's good fortune in some remote place to meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the genius loci as he has conceived it. Though his own subjectivity will assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived from study, or impressions made ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the results of his meditations forth at length. There was nothing, he said, that could not be accounted for by a very abnormal state of subjectivity. The fact that this ... this young person's name was in his mind ... ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Scientifica, published in 1665[2] and dedicated to the Royal Society. In this treatise he pointed out our present ignorance of phenomena and our inability to determine their real character, owing to the subjectivity of our perceptions of them, and insisted consequently upon the danger of dogmatism. He himself had drawn but a cockle-shell of water from the ocean of knowledge. His notion of spirit—if his works on witchcraft may be trusted—seems to have been that it is a light ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... this piece, and others like it, as a tendency rather than as a complete embodiment of tripartite arrangement. It is expected that the music lover will take these Inventions for what they really are and not search in them for those notes of intense subjectivity and dramatic power so prevalent in modern music. They are merely little pieces—a "tour de force" in polyphonic ingenuity; music rejoicing in its own inherent vitality. Accepted in this spirit they are ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... distorted and shattered by attempts to mould themselves on her grand model. And in her seeming unchartered impulses,—whose latent law was honorable integrity,—eccentric spirits might have found encouragement for capricious license. Her morbid subjectivity, too, might, by contagion, have affected others with undue self-consciousness. And, finally, even intimate friends might have been tempted, by her flattering love, to exaggerate their own importance, until they recognized ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... November 18, 1851.—The energetic subjectivity, which has faith in itself, which does not fear to be something particular and definite without any consciousness or shame of its subjective illusion, is unknown to me. I am, so far as the intellectual order is concerned, essentially objective, and my distinctive speciality, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... narrative into a vehicle for the representation of truths relating to the inner life of the believer. No one ever had a firmer grasp than Bunyan of the spiritual bearing of the facts of the recorded life of Christ on the souls of men. But he would not suffer their "subjectivity"—to adopt modern terms—to destroy their "objectivity." If the Son of God was not actually born of the Virgin Mary, if He did not live in a real human body, and in that body die, lie in the grave, rise again, and ascend up into heaven, whence He would return—and ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... this cosmopolitanism, illustrated in the Haggada, whose pages prove that nothing human is strange to the Jewish race, it reveals, in its literary development, as notably in the Halacha, a sharply defined subjectivity. Jellinek says: "Not losing itself in the contemplation of the phenomena of life, not devoting itself to any subject unless it be with an ulterior purpose, but seeing all things in their relation to itself, and subordinating them to its own ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... as our most precious possessions; and so it has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the Free Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in training exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support of wholesome, honest, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... entities which his reason assures him must lie beneath all sensible appearances. He must and will interpret nature according to the forms of his own personality, or according to the fundamental ideas of his own reason. In the childlike subjectivity of the undisciplined mind he will either transfer to nature the phenomena of his own personality, regarding the world as a living organism which has within it an informing soul, and thus attain a pantheistic conception of the universe; or else he will fix upon some ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... differences in constitution resulting from their different origins, and from the variety in their organs of sense. Sextus takes up the five senses in order, giving illustrations to prove the relative results of the mental representations in all of them, as for example the subjectivity of color[2] and sound.[3] All knowledge of objects through the senses is relative and not absolute. Sextus does not, accordingly, confine the impossibility of certain knowledge to the qualities that Locke regards as secondary, but includes also the primary ones ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... philosophical disputes the more does there grow and take shape in our own mind the idea of some mysterious and invisible watchers whose purer vision, exquisitely harmonious and clairvoyant, remains a sort of test both of our own and of others' subjectivity; becomes, in fact, an objective standard or measure or pattern of those ideas which we discover within us all, and name ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... one may welcome the OBJECTIVE spirit—and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded IPSISIMOSITY!—in the end, however, one must learn caution even with regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Beautiful she had seemed to him before, but beautiful with a sort of impersonal perfection. She was beautiful now in her own right, the beauty of a woman whom nature has claimed for her own, who acknowledges her heritage. The fear-frozen subjectivity in which he had yet found enough to fascinate him had passed away. He felt ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... imperfect, it was impossible that the absolute objective truth of anything could be seen by any mortal, but only some partial approximation, and, as it were, sketch of it, according as the object was represented with more or less refraction on the mirror of his subjectivity. And therefore, as the true inquirer deals only with the possible, and lets the impossible go, it was the business of the wise man, shunning the search after absolute truth as an impious attempt of the Titans to scale Olympus, ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... man who does not show himself friendly to you; you know that he cannot do so for any length of time unless he likes you, and that he cannot like you unless you show that you are friendly to him; then do it: your false friendliness will gradually become a true one. Your own weakness and subjectivity must have some illusion. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... with objects which it is not possible to bring into the field of the really knowable? Some will admit that religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness, affirming, however, the subjectivity of all purely spiritual life; and no more can be said, they insist, for the principles, metaphysical and logical, with which they are associated in the spiritual life of man. Now, such a theory never leaves the soul that is governed by ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... associations, which remain unbroken in the absence of other experiences to contradict and shatter them; secondly, because of the extreme weakness of his logic and especially of his conception of causality, which most often reduces itself to a post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Whence we have the thorough subjectivity of his interpretation of the world.[62] In short, primitive man makes without exception or reserve, and in terms of images, what science makes provisionally, with reserves, and by means ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... simply reflect what they see without admixture of colours of their own. Hence the paradox of His personality—the intense humanness and yet the mystery of godliness ever and anon shining through the commonest incidents of His life. (2) Even more remarkable than the absence of subjectivity on the part of the evangelists is the unconsciousness of Jesus that He is being portrayed as an example. We do not receive the impression that the Son of Man was consciously living for the edification ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Romola, her subjectivity has overpowered her objectivity. Romola is not—could never have been—the product of the period and of the civilisation from which she is described as having issued. There is far too much of George Eliot in her. It was a period, it is true, in which female culture ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... is no such divinity. He is a subjectivity existing in the imagination of orthodox Christians. You do not agree with me in this, but every day of thought and study deepens the conviction that it is true. None among the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are objectivities. The lesser ones are generally ghosts of ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... therefore, a mere subjective state, that there is, at the same time, competent to us, in an immediate perception of external things, the consciousness of a really existent, of a really objective, extended world." Here we have enunciated in one breath, first the subjectivity of space, which is the logical basis of the relative theory of perception; and secondly, the objectivity of the extended world, which is the logical basis of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. It is manifest, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... and the most that can be said for it is that it is less dreary than the void of Nagarjuna. Another and more positive synonym is dharma-dhatu, the all-embracing totality of things. It is only through our ignorance and subjectivity that things appear distinct and individuate. Could we transcend this subjectivity, isolated objects would cease to exist. Things in their fundamental nature cannot be named or explained: they are beyond ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... necessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself,' now as the subject thinking and now as the object contemplated in the manifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divine instance as Deus Subjectivus and Deus Objectimis,—that is, the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Being eternally and causatively realised in his Personality." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as necessarily involves the Idea of God ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... general period, one whose products we might have looked at without its occurring to us to ask concerning the artist, his antecedents, and his school. We have to do now with types of art, fully impressed with the subjectivity, the intimacies of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle upon which modern philosophy has been building—or unbuilding—for these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity. Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... with even more reason; for even if the one, as some say, had been an hallucination, were those sick folk an hallucination? Was Pierre de Rudder's mended leg an hallucination, or the healed wounds of Marie Borel? Or were those hundreds upon hundreds of disused crutches an illusion? Did subjectivity create all these? If so, what ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word, he was ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... inactivity, repose and barter, drives one to the indefinite subjective. Emerson's lack of interest in permanence may cause him to present a subjectivity harsher on the outside than is essential. His very universalism occasionally seems a limitation. Somewhere here may lie a weakness—real to some, apparent to others—a weakness in so far as his relation becomes less vivid—to the many; insofar as he over-disregards ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... above as to the subjectivity and non-localization of feeling do not apply altogether to the feeling-tone of sensations. The pleasantness or unpleasantness of a sensation is localized with the sensation and seems to belong to the object rather than to ourselves. The unpleasantness of a toothache seems to be in the tooth ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... phase of existence, which had been hitherto a reality to me, melted away into the thinness of an uncompleted dream; but as it melted away, there appeared behind it a whole universe, of which I had never before dreamed. I had puzzled my brains over the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity and found only words; now I grasped and comprehended the round of the thing. I looked through the full range of human cognitions, and found, from beginning to end, a proclamation of the presence of that arch-magician, Imagination. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the historic revelation in Jesus. Furthermore, so much was this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in the universe. To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to overcome its subjectivity and ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life * * * that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." Such is their language. We must either take it as truth, or reject it as falsehood. It is utter nonsense to talk of the intense subjectivity of the Jewish mind, and the belief of the apostles that the Messiah would do wonders when he came, and the powerful impressions produced by the teaching of Jesus on their minds. We are not talking about impressions on their minds, but about impressions produced on their eyes, and ears, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies such a large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25,000 years of our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs the subjectivity of our perception. The different qualities correspond, roughly speaking, to the different rhythms of contraction or dilution, to the different degrees of inner tension in the ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... same in the nations; it leads first upward and then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the mind, brings with it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays heavily for each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of national possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality, the germ of the modern spirit. For what is the modern spirit ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... time it is difficult. Hence the cow. She seemed to make things easier. She was so familiar, so solid, that surely the truths that she illustrated would in time become familiar and solid also. Is the cow there or not? This was better than deciding between objectivity and subjectivity. So at Oxford, just at the same time, one was asking, "What do our rooms look like ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... before the eyes of his subject a bright ball of carnelian or crystal, in the steady contemplation of which the sensitive swims off into the realms of subjectivity—that mysterious bourn from whence no traveler brings anything back. J. Bedford Cornish was Mr. Elkins's glittering ball; his psychic subject was the world in general and Lattimore in particular. Scientific principles, confirmed by experience, ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick |
