"Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lend to the Finite now, Mighty Nature! Oh, of Infinity, thou Giant daughter! Mirror God, as in water! Tempest, oh, let thine organ-peal God to the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... best achievements, the attainment of all its desires. That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could be ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... according to the common method of explaining them. We must certainly seek some new system on this head, and there plainly is none beside what I have proposed. If ideas be particular in their nature, and at the same time finite in their number, it is only by custom they can become general in their representation, and contain an infinite number ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... tells us that the supreme Life cannot be finite, temporal. But the sensible signs of the supreme Life according to our faulty perception are temporal and point to an end. The Universe that we perceive is not a perpetuum mobile. The laws of motion that we know all come to a standstill. As the scholars ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... strode noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method: man's order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker's order remote, infinite, is so beyond man's comprehension even ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or to explain, from our fragmentary knowledge of them, the relation in which his doctrine stood to the Eleatic Being or the Megarian good, or to the theories of Aristippus or Antisthenes respecting pleasure. Nor are we able to say how far Plato in the Philebus conceives the finite and infinite (which occur both in the fragments of Philolaus and in the Pythagorean table of opposites) in the same manner as ...
— Philebus • Plato
... justice. She appears to have reasoned of many things, usually taken by childhood for granted, and assented to their results only if they seemed to her childishness just. If after life showed her that the affairs of this life can be but seldom regulated according to the ideas of finite justice, she never seems to have lost a certain fairness of judgment and opinion, which is rare in one of her sex and circumstances. When five years old, her mother, wishing her to give up a pet doll to a little crippled friend, told her that sympathy should suggest her doing it; that ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them. There, I am silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for not taking them—now.' She kept in the last word for a moment, intending to imply that her refusal was finite, but somehow the word slipped out, and undid all ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... his arguments and his blandishments. The father had represented the slender patrimony of their branch of the family, compared with the enormous heritage of Philip; who, being after all, but a man, and endowed with finite powers, might sink under so great a pressure of empire as his father wished to provide for him. Maximilian, also, assured his uncle that he had as good an appetite for the crown as Philip, and could digest the dignity quite as easily. The son, too, for whom the Emperor was thus solicitous, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have in regard to any moral truth whatever. The Divine law is a deduction necessarily and mathematically certain as much so as any truth in geometry. Human law can aim only at such a probable deduction as results from a finite ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... stern grips of their destinies, Mark King and Gloria lived through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night the wind, like ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... is aught mine, nor do I exist," a passage which has been well explained by a Hindu Theosophist (Peary Chand Mittra), as meaning "that when the spiritual state is arrived at, I and mine, which belong to the finite mind, cease, and the soul, living in the universum and participating in infinity with God, manifests its infinite state." I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage from the same ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... stopped the ears of the human race. They subverted all the ideas of justice by promising infinite rewards for finite virtues, and threatening ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... rest, those that feign this matter to be eternal, must of necessity confess, that infinite cannot be separate from eternity. And then had infinite matter left no place for infinite form, but that the first matter was finite, the form which it received proves it. For conclusion of this part, whosoever will make choice, rather to believe in eternal deformity, or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life: let eternal ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... of reality, "the living, moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. "What is described in concepts," he tells us, "is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity." Schelling, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... transcends all human experience and Man has nothing with which he can measure the Infinite. Spinoza was right when he said that "to define God is to deny him," for any attempt to define, is, of course an attempt to limit or make finite the Infinite. To define a thing is to identify it with something else—and where is the something else with which to identify the Infinite? The Absolute cannot be described in terms of the Relative. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... this one defect grow more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is exempt from his fatal shafts. When death comes to the aged as the end of a fully completed life we regard it as natural. But when death comes to the young, the gifted, and the promising, we with our finite vision look upon it as sad and mysterious. ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... content with the recognition that the manner is beyond our fathoming, and to accept the fact, pressed upon our faith, that our hearts may grasp it and be at peace. God hath dwelt in humanity. The everlasting Word, who is the forthcoming of all the fulness of Deity into the realm of finite creatures, was made flesh and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... So, as Professor Max Muller tells us, the descendants of the ancient Aryans, "when they search for a name for what is most exalted and yet most dear to every one of us, when they wish to express both awe and love, the infinite and the finite, they can do but what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as near as near can be; they can but combine the self-same words and utter once more the primeval Aryan prayer, Heaven-Father, ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... ever attempt to look to the end of eternity? Have you endeavored to comprehend its duration? Alas! it is something beyond the conception of the finite mind. Look into it as far as you can and no less of it lies beyond the end of your vision. Eternity is something never begun and something that will never end. It is a circle which has no end of beginning and no end of closing. ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... of 'the sun when it shines, nor of the moon walking in brightness,' but the glory of the one, and the grace and loveliness of the other. It is not instruction, but that which lends to instruction a loftier character, ascending from the finite to the infinite. It is not morality, but that which deepens the moral impression, and sends the thrill of spiritual beauty throughout the whole being. But its appeals, says an eloquent writer, are mainly 'to those affections that are apt ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... any sensible facts, phenomena, or results, not with nature at all, but with the Author of nature,—with the one invisible, unapproachable Cause and Source of all things. It begins at the other end of knowledge, and is occupied, not with the finite, but the Infinite. It unfolds and systematizes what He Himself has told us of Himself; of His nature, His attributes, His will, and His acts. As far as it approaches towards Physics, it takes just the counterpart of the questions which occupy the Physical ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... forbearance, that seems to me God-like and Divine. Yes—what if God descended and walked on the earth? I could love Him, that He had lowered Himself to my comprehension. But God! the Infinite and Eternal! in the finite human form, undergoing death! I cannot comprehend this. But what is infinity? When I look within myself and realize my ever-changing and fleeting feelings, now glancing in expansive ranges of thought from star to star, I realize ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... concentration of wealth is irresistible. However small the amount of capital, if permitted to grow at any rate of increase it will ultimately absorb everything. Any finite quantity permitted any finite rate of increase, will, in finite time, gather all that is less ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... forces home—a question which never even comes to the mind of those who are accustomed from childhood to regard this Jew as mysteriously Divine, not so much man as God, cut off from us and our daily littleness by the immeasurable abyss that yawns between the finite and the infinite. This greatest of all the miracles, the coming of Christendom into being, has become so much a matter of course that we marvel as little at it as we do at the sunrise—which also in its way is a wonder worthy ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... be mixed up in something miraculous. He was too humble to expect anything to be revealed to himself personally, but he had great hopes of the saintly Lady Fulda; and certainly, if concessions are to be wrung from the Infinite to the Finite by perfect holiness of life and mind, she should have obtained some. She had become deeply read in that kind of lore under Father Ricardo's direction, and had meditated so much about occurrences of the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it. However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... creatures, and all inanimate objects were collected and burned as a holocaust to the Lord, they would not confer as much praise on the Almighty as a single Eucharistic sacrifice. These earthly creatures—how numerous and excellent soever—are finite and imperfect; while the offering made in the Mass is of infinite value, for it is our Lord Jesus, the acceptable Lamb without blemish, the beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased, and who "is always heard on account ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... hear Profissor Maryanna tell him that 'if th' dates iv human knowledge must be rejicted as subjictive, how much more must they be subjicted as rejictive if, as I think, we keep our thoughts fixed upon th' inanity iv th' finite in comparison with th' onthinkable truth with th' ondivided an' onimaginable reality. Boys ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... consciousness accept the doctrine that the sin of a mortal—especially under strong temptation and with all the bias of a sinful nature—is infinite. Nothing which a created mortal can do is infinite; it is only finite: the infinite belongs to God alone. Hence an infinite penalty for a finite sin conflicts with consciousness and is nowhere asserted in the Bible, which is transcendently more merciful and comforting than many theological systems of belief, however powerfully sustained ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... of the Sun (Bright cynosure of every darkling sign, Wherein all numbers consummate in One,) Poised on the bolt of an Un-finite line, As one whose spirit's state, Is unafraid but desperate, Through far unfathomed fears, Through Time to timeless years, I soar, through Shade ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the "Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the faculty of free self-government, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... so near. For what if there were hundreds, yes, thousands of books, triumphantly settling every question which an over-seething and ill-instructed brain might by any chance suggest,—what could it boot?—how was a poor finite mortal, with much the ordinary faculty and capacity, and but a very small stock already stored, to set about reading, studying, understanding, mastering, appropriating the contents of those thousands of volumes necessary to the arming of him who, without pretending himself the mighty champion to ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... emphasizes motifs already developed in the earlier dialogues. The effect of these speeches upon Job are threefold: (1) They rebuke his over-accentuated individualism. (2) They reveal the fundamental contrast between the infinite God and finite man. In the light of this revelation Job plainly recognizes his presumption and folly in attempting, with his limited outlook, to comprehend, much less to criticise, the mighty ruler of all the universe. (3) After Job had thus been ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... for every point C on AB there are two points on A'B'. Thus it is seen that the notion of one-to-one correspondence is more extensive than the notion of counting, and includes the notion of counting only when applied to finite assemblages. ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... bear a rigorous analysis; but do not think that the lustrous beauty of the language is only a brilliant veil to what in itself is absurd. We have arrived at darkness, but it is at darkness visible; the cloud is lighted up by the ray that issues from it. Our goodness, finite creatures as we are, is so much the greater as the object on which it is bestowed is less. Infinite goodness must create for itself an object. It does not love nothingness, but a creature which is nothing in itself, a creature simply possible, which, before owing ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... true of all the other planets. Small as the rate of this approach is, it is enough to confirm the belief of Sir William Thomson and others in the 19th century, that our solar system is constructed for finite (not, as Laplace and Lagrange thought, infinite) duration; the whole economy of planets will at last run down like a clock, and all the elements will be ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... The earlier editions have a period at the end of line 5, and neither Scott himself nor Lockhart changed that punctuation. But, undoubtedly, the first sentence ends with line 11, 'roll'd' in the second line being a part, and not a finite verb. Mr. Rolfe is the first to punctuate ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... the human mind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!—life in the making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification means loss of interest; and loss of interest, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it came ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... lies between two infinities. But the momentous decision, event, action, which reacts upon the life of a man or woman and influences that life so long as it is lived here on earth, is on the surface sufficiently finite for us to say: It was on such a day I made my decision; to such and such an event I can look back as the cause of all that has followed. The How thereof remains traceable to our purblind eyes for a month, a term of years, one generation, possibly two; the Where and When can generally ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... Aristotelian formula, making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery? The outcome of it all for Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emotion, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... scholasticism in the light of a new physical science. The science was mathematical in its form, mechanistical in its doctrine, and unanswerable in its evidence—it got results. But it was metaphysically intractable, and the doctrines of infinite and finite substance which it generated furnish a gallery of metaphysical grotesques; unless we are to except Leibniz; his system is, if nothing else, a miracle of ingenuity, and there are moments when we are in danger of ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... purposes, that are 'an odour of a sweet smell, well-pleasing to God,' and desecrate them by pouring from them libations before creatures. Is not love profaned when it is lavished on men or women without one reference to God? Is not the intellect desecrated when its force is spent on finite objects of thought, and never a glance towards God? Is not the will prostituted from its high vocation when it is used to drive the wheels of a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... course, easily be made unreal. In the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on Fleet Street with its taverns and its drinks, next morning's headache is always omitted: but even the finer, deeper glow of the domestic hearth has its ashy moments. No finite beings can conduct their lives with complete absence of errors and regrets. In any human relationship, however perfect, the people concerned sometimes bore or annoy or even hurt one another. That is one of the main things that sends Catholics week by week or month by month to the Confessional, which ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... more divided than, Peterborough regretted to say, the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha, Mahomet, and other impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us, that we did not discard the reason of man we admitted man's finite reason to our school of faith, and it was found refractory. Hence ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... peruses what is addressed to himself in print or writing. Lastly, whatsoever or whosoever is merely mentioned in the discourse, bears to it that more remote relation which constitutes the third person. The distinction of persons belongs to nouns, pronouns, and finite verbs; and to these it is always applied, either by peculiarity of form or construction, or by inference from the principles of concord. Pronouns are like their antecedents, and verbs are like ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... find in humanity what they deny to exist as Deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless of all. If humanity be but a vibrion, a conglomeration of gases, a mere mould holding chemicals, a mere bundle ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... competitors, inventors of new sources of wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this in common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their general effect is one of progressive revolution, of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Dutch philosopher of Jewish parentage, the chief representative of Pantheism, "the doctrine of one infinite substance, of which all finite existences ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... eternity, conducting us to the Incomprehensible. In its progress there is a ripening power, and it ripens us the more, and the more powerfully, when we duly estimate it. Listen to its voice, do not waste it, but regard it as the highest finite good, in which all ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... with it the truths of the gospel, which to a certain class ever have been, and ever will be, foolishness. The speculations and metaphysics of theologians, I verily believe, have done more harm than good,—from Athanasius to Jonathan Edwards,—whenever they have brought the aid of finite reason to support the ultimate truths declared by an infinite and almighty mind. Moses does not reason, nor speculate, nor refine; he affirms, and appeals to the law written on the heart,—to the consciousness of mankind. What ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... things as like the things perceived by the senses; he said that atoms of different kinds have different shapes, but the number of shapes is finite, because there is a limit to the number of different things we see, smell, taste, and handle; he implies, although I do not think he definitely asserts, that all atoms of one kind are identical in ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... (there would follow from that doctrine) either finite duration or absence of omniscience ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... my dream contemplate this finite world, not new-fangledly, not old-fangledly, not timidly, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... blossom and rose. Heart, spirit, and body, and brain, Thou art utterly mine, as I thine; But the love of the flesh, tho' at first When I saw you and loved you it burst With the love of the spirit one flame, Neither greater nor less, but the same, Is yet finite, attains not the height Of the spirit enfranchised, and must With the body slip back into dust. Our soul-passion is ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... In Nature, in Religion, in Art, in Life, the common cry is: "Tell me precisely where I am, what doing, and where going! Let me be free of this fearful untidiness of not knowing all about it!" The favoured religions are always those whose message is most finite. The fashionable professions—they that end us in assured positions. The most popular works of fiction, such as leave nothing to our imagination. And to this craving after prose, who would not be lenient, that has at all known life, with its usual predominance of our lower and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is absolute knowledge; and all that exists is really Brahma, one and indivisible in essence, but presenting itself illusively to the finite consciousness as a world of plurality, of most manifold subjects and objects of thought. The highest wisdom, the greatest of all secrets, is to know this truth, to realise with full consciousness that there exists only the One, ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... which we really accept, until the reading is ended. By this means we are enabled to live through the whole immortal future which he projects for himself, though he never in reality achieves any of it. This forcing of the infinite into the finite, we are again indebted to Mr. Higginson for emphasizing as "one of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." "A hundred separate tragedies," he says, "would be easier to depict than this which ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... by ordinary means. It was enough for me that I heard and understood, and felt the goodness and glory of God. I may say that my first great lessons in true philosophy were obtained in these lectures, where I learned to distinguish between the finite and infinite, ceasing to envy any, while I inclined to worship one. The benevolence of Providence is extended to all its creatures, each receiving it in a mode adapted to its own powers of improvement. My destiny being toward a communion with man—or ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... age,' &c. &c. In all those texts there is not the slightest trace of any reference to the wretched individual soul, as insignificant and weak as a tiny glow-worm, implicated in Nescience and all the other evils of finite existence. And the fruit of that knowledge of the highest Person the texts expressly declare, in many places, to be immortality—which consists in attaining to Him. The view of knowledge by itself benefitting man therefore ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Philo starts is a Platonic one; the dualism of God and the world, spirit and matter. The idea of God itself is therefore abstractly and negatively conceived (God, the real substance which is not finite), and has nothing more in common with the Old Testament conception. The possibility, however, of being able to represent God as acting on matter, which as the finite is the non-existent, and therefore the evil, is reached, with the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... no matter of mine. God, the great conservative power of the Universe, when he established the right, saw to it that it should always be the safest and best. He never laid upon a poor finite worm the staggering load of following out into infinity the complex results of his actions. We may rest on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom, confident that it is enough for us to do justice, he will see to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... mistaken career. He already knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual existence. He now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it the exigencies of the spirit. He has striven to obtain infinite consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. He has broken the law of life. He has missed (so we interpret Mr. Browning's conclusion) the ideal of that divine and human Love which would have given the freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... language that which is truly "incomprehensible,"—incomprehensible in the old sense, as in the Athanasian Symbol, "Immensus Pater, immensus Filius, immensus Spiritus sanctus"; till, indeed, men forgot, for all practical purposes that infinity transcends the grasp of finite minds (in fact, as well as in placidly accepted and then immediately neglected theory); and can be apprehended only, and that imperfectly, by the best aspirations of a heart, set of fixed purpose on ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... which draws the hearts of men to God the Father, far more than any intellectual belief that God sent our Lord into the world, ordaining that he should be crucified and rise from the dead. Christianity is addressed rather to the infinite spirit of man than to his finite intelligence, and the believing in Christ through love is more precious in the sight of God than any loving through belief. May we not hope, then, that those whose love is great may in the end find acceptance, ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... centuries were but the fretful ticking of seconds. "Outside death," he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud. A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told himself, ever written: "Before he was I am." Its vast implications easily evaded his finite mind, just as the essence of his present rapture—it was no less—lay beyond his grasp. He lingered over it; gave it up ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... years. This new doctrine was that since the Almighty punishes his erring children by tortures infinite in cruelty and eternal in duration, earthly authorities may justly imitate this divine example so far as their finite powers enable them to do so. I found this doctrine not only especially effective in the mediaeval church, but taking on even more hideous characteristics in the Protestant Church, especially in Germany. On this subject ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... but goodness must be the simple actuating principle within him; this being the moral quality which is amiable, or the immediate object of love as distinct from other affections of approbation. Here then is a finite object for our mind to tend towards, to exercise itself upon: a creature, perfect according to his capacity, fixed, steady, equally unmoved by weak pity or more weak fury and resentment; forming the justest scheme of conduct; going ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... silence almost is a sound, and dreams Take on the semblances of finite things; So potent is the spell that what but seems Elsewhere, is lifted here on Fancy's wings. The little woodland theatre seems to wait, All tremulous with hope and wistful joy, For something that is sure to come at last, Some deep emotion, satisfying, great. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... unconquered through all time, Now come, and whether to the sum of them There be a limit or be none, for thee Let us unfold; likewise what has been found To be the wide inane, or room, or space Wherein all things soever do go on, Let us examine if it finite be All and entire, or reach unmeasured round And downward an ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... the universe as finite or as infinite? In answering this question we must distinguish our terms, as they did. The All, they said, was infinite, but the Whole was finite. For the 'All' was the cosmos and the void, whereas the 'Whole' was the cosmos only. This distinction ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... excuse. By divine commission there were bishops, priests, and deacons in the new hierarchy, and it was through the Apostolic Succession that he, their rector, derived his sacerdotal powers. There were, no doubt, many obscure passages in the Scripture, but men's minds were finite; a catholic acceptance was imperative, and the evils of the present day —a sufficiently sweeping statement—were wholly due to deplorable lapses from such acceptance. The Apostolic teaching must be preserved, since it transcended all modern wanderings after ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, oh if I had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... cannot be changed into form, nor matter into matter by the power of any finite agent. Such a change, however, can be made by the power of an infinite agent, which has control over all being, because the nature of being is common to both forms and to both matters; and whatever there is of being in the one, the author of being can change into whatever there is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... an assumption among a certain class of critics that the artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their minds ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... it were possible, that man should undergo no changes save such as can be understood solely through the nature of man, it would follow that he would not be able to die, but would always necessarily exist; this would be the necessary consequence of a cause whose power was either finite or infinite; namely, either of man's power only, inasmuch as he would be capable of removing from himself all changes which could spring from external causes; or of the infinite power of Nature, whereby all individual things would be so ordered, that ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... truly singular that Plato,—whose philosophy and religion were but exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all things, genuine prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian aera,—should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification of our Shakspeare. For he relates that, when all the other guests had either dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, together with ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... truth and virtue in all their fullness, any more than I think it an objection to men of science and scientific associations that they do not know and set forth all the laws of the material universe. Men are finite, while Nature and Christianity are infinite. Christianity will always be ahead of churches, and nature will always be ahead of science, as God will always be ahead of man. I would have churches and ministers improve, and I would tell them of their faults and shortcomings that ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... belief in things unseen, not subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being final or otherwise than finite. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age, attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him. Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then demanded of the moral theorist. ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... the peace of a heaven and smear the grime of earth upon its fairness! Only glimpses of perfection were granted the dwellers of this planet,—quick, transient flashes that mirrored a future free from finite limitations. He who expected to remain on the heights in this ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... young man, far more valuable than your finite carcase! Get off them this moment and answer me—is this ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... forms of consciousness—our consciousnesses being organs or phases of the Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker strictly personal, carrying on a thought-world by the power of his will and calling into existence finite thinkers in his own image? Assuming that the world is the expression of the thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in the forces of nature and creates men in his own image, the further question arises as to the character of that Thinker. While returning ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... will contain only so much positive truth as the human mind is capable of receiving; whether that truth is attained by the exercise of reason, or communicated by revelation. It must necessarily be both limited and alloyed, to bring it within the competence of finite human intelligence. Being finite, we can form no correct or adequate idea of the Infinite; being material, we can form no clear conception of the Spiritual. We do believe in and know the infinity of Space and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... he had read Kant on the Knowable and the Unknowable, or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite. It is a common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena, the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... ineptitude, it will come about by the diffusion of a more philosophic temper, and the use of a logic that shall refuse to exclude the facts of human nature from fair treatment, that shall embrace and account for all the questions involved, and that shall decline to receive as truth errors of finite science because found in an inspired book. We welcome this volume as an example of the right spirit and tendency in these grave discussions, and shall look eagerly for the promised three ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... that if God should come to him with truth in one hand and the never-ending pursuit of truth in the other, and should offer him his choice, he would humbly and reverently take the pursuit of truth. Perhaps it is best that finite beings should not attain infinite success. But however remote that for which they seek or strive, they may by their diligence and generosity make the very effort to secure it noble. In doing this they earn, as Pope tells us, a truer commendation than success itself could ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... before us, we shall first take the case of an ethereal vortex without any reference to the ponderable bodies which it contains, considering the ether to possess only inertia. If there be a vortex around the sun, it is of finite extent; for if the ether be co-extensive with space, and the stars likewise suns with surrounding vortices, the solar vortex cannot be infinite. That there is an activity in the heavens which the mere law ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... to come here," he said at last. "We stop—our minds are very finite. After all we are just poor animals rising out of the brute, each with a mind, the poor beginning of a mind. We are so stupid. So much hurts. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... "is above the criminal and the judge, and rules them both. The law is inescapable, for an action is either lawful or unlawful. The law, indeed, may be said to have a life of its own, an existence quite apart from the finite lives of the beings who administer it. The law governs every aspect of human behavior; therefore, to the same extent that humans are lawful beings, the law is human. And being human, the law has its idiosyncrasies, ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... "Infinite torments for finite offences." I will never believe it. How divines can reconcile this monstrous tenet with the spirit of their Theology! They have palpably failed in the proof, for to put the question thus:—If he being infinite—have a care, Woodvil, the latitude of doubting ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a more adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to vanities, to vanities of vanities and to ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... pronoun is the subject of a finite verb; that is, a verb other than an infinitive. See ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... in Spanish: one the Infinitive and 4 Finite, viz., the Indicative, Conditional, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... reasoning and enforced habit to miss of the humanity. We are afraid to harbour in our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any thought of our Lord as hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human soul, a human will, and affected by events of human life, as a finite creature is: and yet one half of the efficiency of His atonement, and the whole of the efficiency of His example, depend on His having been this to the full. Consider, therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to the human feelings of our Lord. It ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... look under the altars for others that also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... same year, when he was hardly twenty-one, he published a work entitled, "A Collection of Examples of the Application of the Calculus to Finite Differences." To our young readers such a title will convey no meaning; and we refer to it here only to illustrate the industry and careful thought of the young student, which had ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... that stability! We want not to be blown hither and thither by every manifestation of strength, beauty, brain—we want to be able to enter into the meaning of what we see and cannot help admiring, without becoming the slaves of the visible and the finite. We must build on the one foundation that is laid. We must lay our affections deep down in the man Christ Jesus. As we see Him in men—and, when we cannot see that, see men in Him—we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... facetiously, sometimes sneeringly, remarked that the Attleboro jewelers are as nearly creators as finite beings can be, because they almost make something out of nothing, while the cheap trinkets they turn out by the barrel have to be hurried to market by rapid express, lest they corrode and tarnish before they can be disposed ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... mine, the mountains mine, — All forests, stintless stars, As much of noon as I could take Between my finite eyes. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... at her idol, and for the first time believed it to be within her finite powers to measure him. She began by asking herself if it were really she who had ruined his life, and whether he would ultimately have redeemed himself if he had married a woman whom the world would have recognized. Thus did the first doubt invade her heart. It was of him she was thinking ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... endowed with full powers over our system, yet, practically, as insignificant as ourselves in relation to the universe. If any one pleases, therefore, to give unrestrained liberty to his fancy, he may plead analogy in favour of the dream that there may be, somewhere, a finite being, or beings, who can play with the solar system as a child plays with a toy; and that such being may be willing to do anything which he is properly supplicated to do. For we are not justified in saying that it is impossible for beings having the nature of men, only vastly more powerful, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... it too, always. But there is another voice, which will be strong when the other has faded into eternal silence. In all bodily things, even the most beautiful, there is something finite. We must reach out our poor, feeble, trembling hands to the infinite. I think everyone who is born does that through life, often without being conscious of it. We shall do it consciously, you and I. We shall be able to do it because of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... anaesthesia during movement, although the functioning of the retina should remain unaltered. Such a central anaesthesia would just as well account for the phenomena which have been enumerated. The three luminous images could be supposed to remain unmodified for a finite interval as positive after-images, and as such first to appear in consciousness. Inasmuch as 'the arc of eye movements was 4.7 deg.' only, the time would be too brief to make possible any reliable judgment as to whether the three holes ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... them, which the thinking clothes by expressing their mutual relations. Sense-awareness discloses fact with factors which are the entities for thought. The separate distinction of an entity in thought is not a metaphysical assertion, but a method of procedure necessary for the finite expression of individual propositions. Apart from entities there could be no finite truths; they are the means by which the infinitude of irrelevance is kept ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... countenance without its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'; our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize 'the breath and finer ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... with his unspoken love and unguessed sorrows—gone where dark things shall be made light,—and where the broken or tangled chain of the soul's intelligence shall be mended and made perfect by the tender hands of the All-Wise and the All-Loving One, whose ways are too gloriously vast for our finite comprehension. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... the most delicate articulation; all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... gracefully enough. And now, in front of the stern realities of sorrow and death, he began to see a meaning in another mysterious saying of Barnakill's, which Mellot was continually quoting, that 'Art was never Art till it was more than Art; that the Finite only existed as a body of the Infinite; and that the man of genius must first know the Infinite, unless he wished to become not a poet, but a maker of idols.' Still he felt in himself a capability, nay, an infinite longing to speak; though what he should utter, or how—whether ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... most diverse forms by insensible gradations. Arguing the matter some time since with a learned professor, I illustrated my position thus:—You admit that there is no apparent relationship between a circle and an hyperbola. The one is a finite curve; the other is an infinite one. All parts of the one are alike; of the other no parts are alike [save parts on its opposite sides]. The one incloses a space; the other will not inclose a space though produced ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of this lower world shall be controlled—let it not be supposed that we for a moment doubt the truth which Demosthenes took such pains to inculcate upon his countrymen, that fortune in human affairs is for a time omnipotent. That fortune, which "erring men call chance," is the name which finite beings must apply to those secret and unknown causes which no human sagacity can penetrate or comprehend. What depends upon a few persons, observes Mr Hume, is to be ascribed to chance; what arises from a great number, may often be accounted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Sanscrit path, which was the original parting of the ways. Now the patteran which I have drawn, like the Koua of the Chinese or the mystical Swastika of the Buddhists, embraces the long line of life, or of the infinite and the short, or broken lines of the finite, and, therefore, as an ancient magical Eastern sign, would be most appropriately inscribed as a sikker-paskero dromescro—or hand post—to show the wandering Rommany how to proceed on ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... addition to this could be ascribed to Christ. Every attribute with which the Deity himself is invested is here ascribed to Jesus Christ. If our Savior is anything more than this description declares him to be, it is beyond the reach of our finite minds to comprehend. The sacred writers everywhere speak of him as a being worthy of worship and praise; and this fact, taken in connection with the universal proneness of men to take the honor from God and to give it to those who are no gods, is a convincing proof ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... have access to these pages; but it is possible that my friends may, and also certain savants who are interested; and to them, while I do not apologize for my philosophizing, I humbly explain that they are witnessing the groupings of a finite mind after the infinite, the search ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stage of the immortal mind, abounds in the materials of poetry, and it is the highest office of the bard, to detect this divine element among the grosser pleasures and labors of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the gifted eye it ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... unbind The zone that girds the incarnate mind. When the scanty shores are full With Thought's perilous, whirling pool; When frail Nature can no more, Then the Spirit strikes the hour: My servant Death, with solving rite, Pours finite into infinite. Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, Whose streams through Nature circling go? Nail the wild star to its track On the half-climbed zodiac? Light is light which radiates, Blood is blood which circulates, Life is life which generates, And many-seeming life is one,— ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the other hand, that Sin is committed by a frail finite Being, very often in its unguarded Moments, prompted by Passion and Appetite, and surrounded with the most powerful Temptations; this proves more strongly, that it cannot be infinite. By the Justice of God, is ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... discovered, and to do so is one of the principal tasks of geological science. The first steps in the production of that order lie buried in the profound and unsearchable depths of a past so prolonged as to present itself to our finite minds as almost in eternity. The last steps are in the prophetic future, and can be but dimly guessed at. Between the remote past and the distant future, we have, however, a long period which is fairly open to inspection; and in saying a "long" period, it is to be borne in ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... been placed under a large ash tree. From that point St. Mary's spire was visible, about half a mile away in the west, rising boldly, confidently, one might say, into the sky, as if it dared to claim that it too, although on earth and finite, could match itself against the infinite heaven above. On this particular evening the spire was specially obvious and attractive, for it divided the sunset clouds, standing out black against the long, narrow interspaces of tender green which lay between. It was ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... is only darkness, and then a tiny pin point of light ahead which grows wider and wider as one advances toward it until, finally, he stands out in the open with the world before him. There is no end to life, and none to human development, at least none that can be conceived of by the finite mind of man. ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... pews, sat down. A wondrous melody crept through the air, strong, noble, uncomplicated; then followed chords growing each moment more the expression of a soul on fire. They rose stronger, they swelled and strove and implored, they wailed with the passion of finite hearts that yearn infinitely; then suddenly sank back into the solemn major key whence they started. And it was as the renunciation of some terrible striving, as though the organ chanted the litany of some perfect calm reached through an agony of endeavour and suffering. Wilhelmine's ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... room-rent, And other tremendously alarming phenomena, Which stab me, Rip me most outrageously; (Without a semblance, mind you, of respect for the Hague Convention's rules governing soul-slitting.) Aye, as with the poniard of the Finite pricking the rainbow-bubble of the Infinite! (Some figure, that!) (Some little rush of syllables, that!)— And make me—(are you still whirling at my coat-tails, reader?) Make me—ahem, where was I?—oh, yes—make me, In a sudden, overwhelming gust of soul-shattering rebellion, Fall flat ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... you can't. I suppose we cannot comprehend infinity, because we are essentially finite ourselves. But it by no means follows that we cannot apprehend and believe in attributes which we are unable to comprehend. We can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... phenomenon or nature, and philosophic intuition the noumenon or spirit; so economic activity wills the phenomenon or nature, and moral activity the noumenon or spirit. The spirit which desires itself, its true self, the universal which is in the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which perhaps defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety. This will for the true self ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... thrill; and out of the cloud-ranges she tried to form mountains such as there were in Scotland, and palaces of crystal like those she read of in her fairy tales. No human being had ever told her of the mysterious links that reach from the finite to the infinite, out of which, from the buried ashes of dead Superstition, great souls can evoke those mighty spirits, Faith and Knowledge; yet she went to sleep every night believing that she felt, nay, could almost see, an angel standing at the ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement,—darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown,—there is that within that God alone can vanquish,—yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... more. A difficulty does not destroy a thesis that is solidly founded. Once a truth is clearly established, not all the difficulties in the world can make it an untruth. A difficulty as to the truth revealed argues an imperfect intelligence; it is idle to complain that we are finite. A difficulty regarding the infallible Church should not make her less infallible in our mind, it simply demands a clearing away-Theological difficulties should not surprise a novice in theological matters; they are only misunderstandings that militate less against the Church than against ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton |
