"Unconditioned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (astronomy being scarcely a physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... proportion to the intense moral energy which gave the impulse. In literature the straining for mental liberty was the more futile of the two, because it expressed the ardent and hopeless longing of the individual for a life which we may perhaps best call life unconditioned. And this unconditioned life, which the Byronic hero vainly seeks, and not finding, he fills the world with stormy complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any approximate form to men penetrated with gross and egotistical ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist either of soul without body, or body without soul. Unmattered condition, therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied. Strike either body or soul— that is to ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them—it knows itself to be sovereign.—On the contrary, the need of faith, of something unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man—such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... to direct his cognition to the transitory. Thereby he turns away from the eternal, and life becomes a danger to him. What happens to him, comes to him through life, but its events lose their sting if he ceases to set unconditioned value on life. In that case his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he were from the so-called seriousness of life able to return to his childhood. The adult takes many things seriously with which a child merely plays, but one who really knows, becomes like a ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... rationalis); and, lastly, of a transcendental science of God (theologia transcendentalis). It is the glory of transcendental idealism that by it the mind ascends in the series of conditions till it reaches the unconditioned, that is, the principles. We thus progress from our knowledge of self to a knowledge of the world, and through it to a knowledge of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... a freedom not without its charm. It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself as if you were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any one you may happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of soaring boldly forth into the realms of the unconditioned. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... universe. It does not reach behind the appearances of space and time. It sees only a featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the Unconditioned, can assert anything at all. At the back of all known things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or good or ill. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... this morning. If you're a good boy, and will promise not to say anything naughty, you may stop and meet her. She's a nice little thing, but rather timid at seeing so many fresh faces. You mustn't frighten her by discussing the Absolute and the Unconditioned, or bore her by talking about Aristotle's Politics, or the revolutions in Corcyra. For you know, my dear Le Breton, if you HAVE a fault, it is that you're such a consummate and irrepressible prig; ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the amount and the order of granting the credit given. This, though merely negative, interference with the industrial relations of the associations was not in harmony with the principle of the producers' right of unconditioned self-control; but was so far unavoidable, inasmuch as our commonwealth had not yet actually attained to that high degree of productiveness of labour which is the assumed result of the perfect realisation of all ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Schleicher declared languages to be "natural organisms which originated unconditioned by the human will, developed according to definite laws, grow old and die; they also are characterised by that series of phenomena which we designate by the term 'Life.' Consequently Glottic, the science of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... quality "good" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious; but that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and astonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable predicate, and the specific quality of it can ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... thus break forth at once from their encountering hearts, his soul leaped for joy of the new-created love—new, but not the less surely eternal; for God is Love, and Love is that which is, and was, and shall be for evermore—boundless, unconditioned, self-existent, creative! "Truly," he said in himself, "God is Love, and God is all and in all! He is no abstraction; he is the one eternal Individual God! In him Love evermore breaks forth anew into fresh ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... absolute, illimitable, limitless, unconditioned, boundless, immeasurable, measureless, unfathomable, countless, innumerable, numberless, unlimited, eternal, interminable, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... mobile color unconditioned by considerations of mechanical difficulty or of expense, ideas multiply in truly bewildering profusion. Sunsets, solar coronas, star spectra, auroras such as were never seen on sea or land; rainbows, bubbles, rippling water; flaming volcanoes, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... them to the monstrous conclusion that they ought not to impart Christianity to their slaves. Its extinction was a consummation devoutly to be desired, and in good earnest to be forwarded, but immediate and unconditioned emancipation, without a previous advance in character, must place the negro in a state where he would be his own worst enemy, and so must crown all the wrongs already done to him by cutting off the last hope of rising to a higher level in social existence. At some later period of his life ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Spencer's account of the matter. Mr. Spencer finds the basis of all religion in the inscrutableness of the Power which the universe manifests to us. The belief common to all religions, he holds, is the presence of something which passes comprehension. The idea of the absolute and unconditioned he regards as accompanying all our consciousness of things conditioned and limited, and as being not a negative notion, not merely the denial of limits, but a positive one. The unconditioned is that of which all our thoughts and ideas are manifestations, but which we never can know, with regard ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... In its matter and in its spirit, in its standards and in its execution, in its ideals and in its processes, it belongs to and affiliates with open-air nature, often reaching, I think, the cosmic and unconditioned. In a new sense is Whitman the brother of the orbs and cosmic processes, "conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth." All his enthusiasms, all his sympathies have to do with the major and fundamental elements of life. He is a world-poet. We do not readily adjust our indoor ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... that it does not relate to contradictories. But certain concrete analytic propositions, relating to contraries, do have this form. The contrary as distinguished from the privative. The Conditioned and Unconditioned, the Knowable and Unknowable are not true contradictions. The synthesis of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... freedom, namely, in that absolute sense in which speculative reason required it in its use of the concept of causality in order to escape the antinomy into which it inevitably falls, when in the chain of cause and effect it tries to think the unconditioned. Speculative reason could only exhibit this concept (of freedom) problematically as not impossible to thought, without assuring it any objective reality, and merely lest the supposed impossibility of what it must at least allow to be thinkable should ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... operating in a particular manner (Prop. xxvi.). If they be not conditioned by God (Prop. xxvi.), it is impossible, and not contingent, that they should condition themselves; contrariwise, if they be conditioned by God, it is impossible, and not contingent, that they should render themselves unconditioned. Wherefore all things are conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but also to exist and operate in a particular manner, and there is nothing that ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... with this difference however, that they strove after a positive satisfaction of the senses by filling them with concrete pleasurable sensations. As a consequence of this, the Stoics isolated themselves in order to maintain themselves in the exclusiveness of their internal unconditioned relation to themselves, while the Epicureans lived in companies, because they achieved the reality of their pleasure-seeking principle through harmony of feeling and through the sweetness of friendship. In so far the Epicureans were Greeks and the Stoics Romans. With both, however, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... expressions, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee;" "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee;" every one at once recognizes the purely proverbial or figurative character of the language, and this simply because its form is absolute and unconditioned. The moment you introduce anything like a condition, and make the removal of the sinning eye or the offending hand dependent upon some circumstance, you are compelled to understand the words according to their strictly literal meaning. Thus, if our Lord, instead of saying what he did in this ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of individuals. The progressive tendency can only be a tendency, it can only work its way through the inevitable obstructions around it, by means of persons who are possessed by the special progressive idea. Such ideas do not spring up uncaused and unconditioned in vacant space. They have had a definite origin and ordered antecedents. They are in direct relation with the past. They present themselves to one person or little group of persons rather than to another, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... as the one here referred to, in the limited space at our command; but surely it may be said, without any danger of misunderstanding from the most cursory reader, that if creation were the absolute or unconditioned verity which thoughtless people deem it, there could be no ratio between Creator and creature, hence no intercourse or intimacy, inasmuch as the one is being itself, and the other does not even exist or seem ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... that life is something infinite and unconditioned, and tries to look upon it and live it as though it left nothing to be desired. By method and principle the learned Philistine does the same: he believes that his methods and his principles are unconditionally perfect and objectively valid; so that as soon as he has ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... love. First, the manifested, flowing, evolving life of multiplicity: felt by you in its wonder and wholeness, once you learned to yield yourself to its rhythms, received in simplicity the undistorted messages of sense. Then, the actual unchanging ground of life, the eternal and unconditioned Whole, transcending all succession: a world inaccessible alike to senses and intelligence, but felt—vaguely, darkly, yet intensely—by the quiet and surrendered consciousness. But now you are solicited, whether you will or no, by a greater Reality, the final ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... relations of the United States toward the Isthmus, and the acquiescence by Colombia in acts which were quite incompatible with the theory of her having an absolute and unconditioned sovereignty on the Isthmus, are illustrated by the following three telegrams between two of our naval officers whose ships were at the Isthmus, and the Secretary of the Navy on the occasion of the first outbreak that occurred ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... ascribed to their Lord are inappropriate. He used arguments very similar to those which have lately been used with such ability by a distinguished Bampton Lecturer. The supreme lord of the Mystics, Kapila argued, is either absolute and unconditioned (mukta), or he is bound and conditioned (baddha). If he is absolute and unconditioned, he cannot enter into the condition of a Creator; he would have no desires which could instigate him to create. If, on the contrary, he is represented as active, and entering on the work of creation, he would ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... recorded in the accompanying tables as phenomena of inhibition no assumption is implied, it may be well to repeat, that the ideational images are forces struggling with each other for mastery. Nor is it implied, on the other hand, that they are wholly unconditioned facts, unrelated to any phenomena in which we are accustomed to see the expression of energy. Inhibition is meaningless save as an implication of power lodged somewhere. The implication is that these changes are conditioned ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... emphasis on the word shell implied that the Colonel knew what was what. To the New England inland native, beyond the reach of the east winds, the oyster unconditioned, the oyster absolute, without a qualifying adjective, is the pickled oyster. Mrs. Trecothick, who knew very well that an oyster long out of his shell (as is apt to be the case with the rural bivalve) gets homesick and loses his sprightliness, replied, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... intuition of beauty. There is a profound distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable or pleasant: the latter does not require a representation, while the former consists in representations of relations, which are immediately followed by a judgment expressing unconditioned approval. Thus the merely pleasurable becomes more and more indifferent, but the beautiful appears always as of more and more permanent value. The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable. The complete representation ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... will be reduced to the minimum compatible with coherency. Fortunately, Nature Mysticism can be at home with diverse world-views. There is, however, one exception—the world-view which is based on the concept of an Unconditioned Absolute. This will be unhesitatingly rejected as subversive of any genuine "communion" with nature. So also Symbolism will be repudiated on the ground that it furnishes a quite inadequate account of the relation ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... ourselves, we feel in what our pleasure lies. Art is a free, most open and visible space, where we disport ourselves freely. Indeed, it has long been remarked (the poet Schiller working out the theory) that, as there is in man's nature a longing for mere unconditioned exercise, one of Art's chief missions is to give us free scope to be ourselves. If therefore Art is the playground where each individual, each nation or each century, not merely toils, but untrammelled by momentary passion, unhampered by outer cares, freely ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... confinement, flinging out, radiating and spreading and breathing out space in all directions, by multitudinous motion of disentanglement! Space gone from him, space in the abstract should replace it! He would not be slave to condition! Space unconditioned should be his! For him liberty should not lie in space, but in his own soul. Room should be but the poor out-aide symbol of his inward freedom! He would spin out, he would weave, he would unroll essential liberty into spiritual space! His mind to him a kingdom was. Not a grumble, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... Denotation, for their literal meaning does not apply; [Footnote: In such sentences as "That art thou," "I am Brahman," etc., the primary power of the words, i.e. " Denotation" (abhidhâ), could not express the unconditioned Brahman destitute of all attributes; for Denotation rests upon the ordinary conventional meaning, and how could this take in an idea so far removed from ordinary experience? Nor could it be the secondary power "Indication" (laksha.nâ), as in the well- known instance of "the herd-station on ...
— The Tattva-Muktavali • Purnananda Chakravartin
... there is no God; it only declares that it is worse than useless to try and think of Him, far less pray to Him—because it is simply impossible. And that is quite scientific and philosophical, is it not? For all the great men are agreed now that the conditioned can know nothing of the unconditioned, and the finite can know nothing of the infinite. It is quite absurd to try, you know; and it is equally absurd to say anything about Him. You can't call Him Providence, because, as the universe is governed by fixed laws, there is nothing for him to provide; and we have no business to call ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... he cried, striking his brow, 'when I know that I carry here the last word of Creation, when intuitively I perceive the Unconditioned, is it LIVING to be dragged hither and thither in the ruck of men who fly at each other's throats at the word of command without knowing what they are doing? My actual life is an inverted dream. My body comes and goes and acts; it moves amid bullets, and cannon, ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... that of the Tao, the other two being that of Confucius, and that of Buddhism in its Chinese form. The difficulty in understanding Tao-ism comes from its appearing under three entirely distinct forms: (1) as a philosophy of the absolute or unconditioned, in the great work of the Tse-Lao, or old teacher;[16] (2) as a system of morality of the utilitarian school,[17] which resolves duty into prudence; and (3) as a system of magic, connected with the belief in spirits. In the Tao-te-king ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... here! We may just allude to Hegel's theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a kind of temporary atavism, or 'throwing hack' to a remotely ancient condition of the 'sensitive soul' (fueklende Seele). The 'sensitive' [unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or 'soul' is 'a disease when it becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human being of civilisation.'[22] 'Second sight,' Hegel thinks, was a product of an earlier day and earlier mental condition ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... spiritual nature, for everything bodily is subject to change; and, finally, his perfection, for the self-existent and eternal requires nothing. Since, however, he is the cause of all being, himself being unconditioned, he is the fulness of all being or true being itself (Tatian 5: [Greek: katho pasa dunamis oraton te kai aoraton autos hupostasis en, sun auto ta panta]). As the living and spiritual Being he reveals himself in free creations, which ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... inexperience. Among the books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry, which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One was Guizot's "History of Civilization," the other was Sir William Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," which I came upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the "Edinburgh Review." The latter was certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly have understood a great deal of it;[60] nevertheless, I devoured it with avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... a dream, I said above, In concrete truth deficient, Belonging to the region of The wholly Unconditioned: Yet, when I see how strange the ways Of undergrad. and Don are, Methinks it was, in classic phrase, Not upar less than ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... spirit is born of a conviction that some things matter more than others. To those possessed by it there is a sharp distinction between that which is unconditioned and universal and that which is limited and local. It is a consciousness of the unconditioned and universal that makes people religious; and it is this consciousness or, at least, a conviction that some things are unconditioned ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... "It is limitless and unconditioned. There is its grandeur. If that sea were ploughed by navies, or disfigured by the hideous black hulks of men-of-war, it would lose its magnificence. It would become a poor limited thing, with pygmies sporting on its bosom. It is now unlimited, free, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... need, I suppose, to do more than simply remind you that there are two great thoughts communicated by that self-revelation of God which lies in it. Jehovah, in its literal grammatical signification, puts emphasis upon the absolute, underived, and therefore unlimited, unconditioned, unchangeable, eternal being of God. 'I AM THAT I AM.' Men and creatures are what they are made, are what they become, and some time or other cease to be what they were. But God is what He is, and is because He is. He is the Source, the Motive, the Law, the Sustenance of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... 'Tite Poulette. Thou dost not trust me; thou fearest the kiss may loosen the hands. But I tell thee nay. I have struggled hard, even to this hour, against Love, but I yield me now; I yield; I am his unconditioned prisoner forever. God forbid that I ask aught but that ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... second resurrection. What really corresponds to the holiness and happiness of the first resurrection state is the finally perfected and all-comprehending state called "the new heaven and the new earth," life in which, according to our {114} argument, comes out of the second and last death, and is unconditioned by time. This is the heavenly state which is described in Rev. vii. 11-17, xxi. 2-4, and 10-27. Thus, although this may be regarded as that subsequent resurrection to which "the first resurrection" by its very designation points, it is not called "the second resurrection," ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision—the power to see life clearly and "see it whole." Consciousness, unconditioned by time, "in a beautiful strong dream," awakens to the perception of a world that is timeless. It brings thence some immortelle whose power of survival establishes the authenticity of the inspiration. However local and personal ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon |
