"Metaphysical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appear many hundreds yearly, as may be seen by the French catalogues; but the writer has not so much to do with works political, philosophical, historical, metaphysical, scientifical, theological, as with those for which he has been putting forward a plea—novels, namely; on which he has expended a great deal of time and study. And passing from novels in general to French novels, let us confess, with much humiliation, that we borrow ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... beyond the mind of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic impersonation of an actual Being, the form which the poet gives to the living Spirit of God in the outward world, in order that he may possess a metaphysical thought as a subject for his work ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... so metaphysical," said Hester, rising; "you quite puzzle me. How can I put myself in your friend Annie's place? I never understood her—I never wanted to. Put myself in her place?—no, certainly that I'm never likely to. I hope that I shall never be in such ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... promising young coal-whipper with a certain 'lovely Peg,' the accomplished daughter of the master and part-owner of a Newcastle collier. In this stirring legend, Captain Cuttle descried a profound metaphysical bearing on the case of Walter and Florence; and it excited him so much, that on very festive occasions, as birthdays and a few other non-Dominical holidays, he would roar through the whole song in the little back parlour; making an amazing shake on the word Pe-e-eg, with which every verse concluded, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Meiser and his disciple, does not exist; if it really existed, they say, one could not understand how it can leave a man and a tardigrade when they are desiccated, and return to them again when they are soaked.' Now, if there be no vital principle, all the metaphysical and moral theories which have been hypothecated on its existence, must be reconstructed. These ladies have listened to you patiently, it is but justice to them to admit; but all that they have been able to gather from your slightly ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... during the winter had been lecturing brilliantly on Schopenhauer. It was Philip's introduction to philosophy. He had a practical mind and moved uneasily amid the abstract; but he found an unexpected fascination in listening to metaphysical disquisitions; they made him breathless; it was a little like watching a tight-rope dancer doing perilous feats over an abyss; but it was very exciting. The pessimism of the subject attracted his youth; and he believed that the world he was about to enter was a place of pitiless ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... very cradle. It is ridiculous to say that all men are born alike in dispositions and capacities; the great poet of nature, from whom I have, as usual, taken my text, says no; and I would sooner have a single line from him than folios of ingenious theories and metaphysical arguments from the profoundest philosophers. I have not much faith in innate ideas, but I confess that I have in innate dispositions, both ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... true of the terms "universal providence" and "universal government" in reference to nature when they mean that God created the universe but endowed nature to produce everything from herself. What is "universal providence" then but a metaphysical term, and nothing but a term? Many of those who attribute everything produced to nature and everything accomplished to human prudence and yet profess orally that God created nature, regard divine providence ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... believed that she had indeed found the "true processes," and, with renewed zest, continued the work of questioning. At this stage of the conflict the pestilential scourge was laid upon the city, and she paused from her metaphysical toil to close glazed eyes and shroud soulless clay. In the awful hush of those hours of watching she looked calmly for some solution, and longed for the unquestioning faith of early years. But these influences passed without aiding her in the least, and, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... his translation, uses, not altogether without reason, the stilted term "affect" instead of the natural English term "emotion." "Affect" is closer to the Latin and it more clearly indicates the metaphysical status of the emotions as "modes" or "affectiones" of Substance. Still, practically no one has followed White in his usage. The reasons are not difficult to discover. Besides being a stilted term, having no legitimate English status, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the notion of vicarious atonement so drastically that the attempt of dogmatic Christianity to base itself on the Old Testament can only be described as text-blind. And the great answer of Jehovah to Moses's questioning—"I AM THAT I AM"—yields already the profound metaphysical Deity of Maimonides, that "invisible King" whom the anonymous ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... of some romantic encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... often asked myself why is this. And truly I can scarcely tell. Nevertheless, I have found some reasons for it; but they are of a metaphysical character, and perhaps you will not ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... or collection of facts, or the qualities or demeanor of persons, reciprocally influence each other; and by this course of juridical discipline they add to the readiness and sagacity of those who are called to plead or to judge. But as human affairs and human actions are not of a metaphysical nature, but the subject is concrete, complex, and moral, they cannot be subjected (without exceptions which reduce it almost to nothing) to any certain rule. Their rules with regard to competence were many and strict, and our lawyers have mentioned it to their reproach. "The Civilians," ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... we find a less metaphysical pair than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... shielding it against the wind and drizzle with cupped hands while his mind made one last check on the surroundings. Then he strode quickly up the five steps to the double doors which were marked: The Society For Mystical And Metaphysical Research, Inc. ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... rightness or wrongness of the drink habit we try to show its social consequences. So, too, if we discuss the rightness or wrongness of such an institution as polygamy we find ourselves forced to do so mainly in social terms. This is not denying, of course, that there are religious and metaphysical aspects to morality,—these are not necessarily in conflict with the social aspects,—but it is saying that modern ethical theory is coming more and more to base itself upon the study of the remote social consequences of ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... zur Septuaginta, 1841), but the first concrete exemplification is found in Aristobulus (e. 160 B.C.). So far as the Jewish succession is concerned, the great name is that of Philo in the first century of our era. He took Greek metaphysical theories, and, by the allegorical method, interpreted them in accordance with the Jewish Revelation. He dealt with (a) human life as explained by the relative nature of Man and God, (b) the Divine nature and the existence ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... under the "mnemic" or memory theory as consisting of fragments each of them impressed with the "memory" of some particular organ or feature of the body, and lo! we find ourselves back again in micromerism. If we are to take a non-materialistic view of memory we are plunged into a metaphysical discussion which cannot here be pursued. A third explanation, which by the way explains nothing, is that the whole matter is one of "arrangement," to which we shall return at ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... popularity of the answer to the question, "How not to worry," which is briefly, Don't! Thirdly, that enlightened by this spirit of scientific straightforwardness, man is ceasing to seek for mental truth by means of roundabout metaphysical or conventional ethical methods (based on old traditions and mysticism), and is looking directly in himself, or materially, for what Immaterialism or Idealism has really never explained at all—his discoveries having been within a few years much more valuable that all that a priori philosophy ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... disorder, an aversion to the ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous mental constitution of mind, on ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... under the Lord Abbot David the monks evidently tried to justify the latter form by the riddles they propounded so well. The solving of puzzles became the favourite recreation, no matter whether they happened to be of a metaphysical, philosophical, mathematical, or mechanical kind. It grew into an absorbing passion with them, and as I have shown above, in the case of the Abbot this passion was strong ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... necessary thought-conditions. To all who apprehend it there is then discovered in the Universal Spirit the presence of a Divine Individuality reciprocal to that of the individual man, the recognition of which is the practical solution of all metaphysical problems regarding the emanation of the individual soul from the Universal Spirit and the relations arising therefrom; for it takes these matters out of the region of intellectual speculation, which is ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... their love is no longer of any value, when all that has been placed upon the altar of affection has been found to be a vain sacrifice? Philosophy? Give that to dolls to play with. Religion? Seek first the metaphysical-minded. Aileen was no longer the lithe, forceful, dynamic girl of 1865, when Cowperwood first met her. She was still beautiful, it is true, a fair, full-blown, matronly creature not more than thirty-five, looking perhaps thirty, feeling, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... mind and the minds of other talented and high-minded men from the seat of disease in Ireland. Time and talent were wasted from the first over points of pride, trivialities which seemed portentous to over-sensitive minds; metaphysical puzzles as to the exact nature of the relations now existing between Ireland and England; whether the repeal of the Poynings' Act and the Declaratory Act were sufficient guarantees of freedom; whether Ireland herself should nominate a Regent or accept ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... what were then called the "humanities," but fairly versed in history, geography, and the mathematical sciences. His knowledge, like the bent of his mind, was practical rather than theoretical, and he knew more about fortification and sieges than about metaphysical abstractions; more about the deeds of history than about its philosophy. The new surroundings into which he was introduced by the Minim father who had accompanied him and his four comrades from Brienne, all somewhat younger than himself, were different ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... but in a failure to reason. In the first Lecture of this course the thought with which we have to deal was shown in its theological stage, to borrow Comte's well-known phraseology, as where an axe was made the object of criminal process; and also in the metaphysical stage, where the language of personification alone survived, but survived to cause confusion of reasoning. The case put seems to be an illustration of the latter. The language of the law of easements was ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... fears of chance and changes in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. It is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in love." (Stopford Brooke, The Poetry of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... entered the University of that city. During a visit to Liverpool, in the summer of 1793, he was introduced to Dr Currie, who, presenting him with a copy of Dugald Stewart's "Elements of Philosophy," was the means of directing his attention to metaphysical inquiries. The following session he became a student in Professor Stewart's class; and differing from a theory advanced in one of the lectures, he modestly read his sentiments on the subject to his venerable preceptor. The philosopher and pupil ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... had much to do with the strange feelings awakened in Godwin when he transferred to his mother's house the cabinets which had been Mr. Gunnery's pride for thirty or forty years. Joy of possession was subdued in him by the conflict of metaphysical questionings. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... has sent us 'Macmillan'; and I must tell you how much I admire your Article; though at the same time I must confess that I could not clearly follow you in some parts, which probably is in main part due to my not being at all accustomed to metaphysical trains of thought. I think that you understand my book (The 'Origin of Species.') perfectly, and that I find a very rare event with my critics. The ideas in the last page have several times vaguely crossed my mind. Owing to several correspondents I have been led lately to think, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... something very extraordinary about the man, which, amidst the feodal and knightly habits in which young persons of his high rank were then bred, prompted him to speculate, however unhappily, on any metaphysical subject. Now, whether this abominable persuasion were the cause or the effect of his actual guilt,—whether he had reasoned himself into materialism in order to drown the voice of conscience, or fell into the sin of murder because ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... then, of the two classes of laws which regulate the progress of mankind the mental class is more important than the physical. The laws of the human mind will prove to be the ultimate basis of the history of Europe. These are not to be ascertained by the metaphysical method of studying the inquirer's own mind alone, but by the historical method of studying many minds. And this whether the metaphysician belongs to the school which starts by examining the sensations, or to that which starts with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... fire-irons, tumbling in brazen confusion on the red-brick hearth. When my Uncle Peter has mounted his favourite metaphysical theory, I know that nothing can make him dismount but physical violence. I apologized for the poker and the shovel and the tongs (practising a Stevensonian omission in regard to my own share in the catastrophe), arranged the offending members in their proper station on the left of the fire-place, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... matter probably remains the last best word that has been said upon it, up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, he so carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with certain serious gaps now for the first time fill'd, that it becomes a coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there can be any answer) to the foregoing question—a system which, while I distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in its entirety, illuminating the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... one pledge himself to be a fool! Independence is my motto! I go for independence now, independence forever, and as much longer as possible. Who says I am not right? Deluded mortals, who wink at sin, and kick at brandies! Magnificent monstrosities, making manliness moonshine; metaphysical Moors murdering Munchausen-" ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... whereas, in fact, the general rule in regard to the birch-bark rolls was that they were never colored at all; indeed, the bark was not adapted to coloration. The metaphorical coloring was also used by him in a manner which, to any thorough student of the Indian philosophy and religion, seems absurd. Metaphysical expressions are attached to some of the devices, or, as he calls them, symbols, which, could never have been entertained by a people in the stage of culture of ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... panspermismus, or the dissemination theory. Leibnitz, in his celebrated monadology, carries the same view a great deal further. He conceives the whole created universe, visible and invisible, to consist of monads, which are not particles of matter, but metaphysical points of power. These monads are all souls. They are produced by what he calls fulgurations of God. The distinction between fulguration and emanation is this: in the latter case the procession is historically defined ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Clytie's excellences upon her, or whether she had an intuitive appreciation of the rites of certain other heathens, and, indulging in that "fetish" ceremony, imagined that the original of her wax model would pine away and finally die, is a metaphysical question ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft, and of Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and subduing the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his rhymes. Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together— half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore— from the volcano of his passionate mind. Such being the nature of ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... The full metaphysical drift of thought and meaning in Goethe's poem, however, can be but faintly indicated in a play. It is more distinctly indicated in Mr. Wills's play, which is used by Mr. Irving, than in any other play upon this subject that has been presented. ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of the Reformation. Far more imposing were they in their effect upon the imagination of Italians, who had never dreamed of actual rebellion, who possessed the fountain of Apostolical privileges in the person of the Pope, and whose southern temperament inclined them to a more sensuous and less metaphysical conception of Christianity than the Germans or the English. The dread of the Papal Interdict was still a reality. Though the clergy of Florence, roused to retaliative fury, might fling back in the teeth of Sixtus such words as leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius, yet ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... thou must do, if thou have it: And that which rather thou dost fear to do Than wishest should be undone." Hie thee hither, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear; And chastise with the valor of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round, Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... are,—perhaps they came at the wrong time—I never wanted them—though that makes no difference in my gratitude I trust,—but I know myself—surely—and always have done so, for is there not somewhere the little book I first printed when a boy, with John Mill, the metaphysical head, his marginal note that 'the writer possesses a deeper self-consciousness than I ever knew in a sane human being.' So I never deceived myself much, nor called my feelings for people other than they were. And who has a right to say, if I have not, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... without thinking of any metaphysical mythology, thinking indeed of the ambitious people whom we meet everywhere, and thinking only of giving them some good advice: "The best way to get there is to come down." Nothing could be more philosophical, Nietzsche would reply; it is even more true of peoples than ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... the Phaedrus and Theaetetus is still working in the mind of Plato, and the correlation of ideas, not of 'all with all,' but of 'some with some,' is asserted and explained. But they are spoken of in a different manner, and are not supposed to be recovered from a former state of existence. The metaphysical conception of truth passes into a psychological one, which is continued in the Laws, and is the final form of the Platonic philosophy, so far as can be gathered from his own writings (see especially Laws). ...
— Meno • Plato
... objection started in one of South's sermons—Credat Judaeus Appella!) I was not very much pleased at this account of Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical choke-pears, his Treatise on Human Nature, to which the Essays, in point of scholastic subtlety and close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading. Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume's general style, which I think betrayed a want of taste or candour. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... than by his medical writings. Bred up at Douai as a Jesuit, he abjured popery, and published Protestancy proved Safer than Popery' (London, 1686). But the most noticeable of his productions is A Discourse of Wit (London, 1685), which contains some of the most characteristic and most definitely-put metaphysical opinions of the Scottish philosophy of common sense. It was followed by Academia Scientiarum (1687), and by A Moral Treatise of the Power. of Interest (1690), dedicated to Robert Boyle. A Short Account of Scots Divines, by him, was printed at Edinburgh in 1833, edited by James Maidment. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... teaching children, in performing these mental operations, to think in figures, in other words, to form conceptions of the arithmetical figures and signs, which are visible objects, rather than of quantities and relations, which are mere abstractions. Multiplication is a mere metaphysical entity. The sign of multiplication is a simple, visible symbol, addressed to the eye, and capable of being conceived by the mind with unmistakable clearness and precision. A child counting its fingers in the first steps of learning to add and to take ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... naturally excited to discover what a poor, unlettered mechanic, whose book-learning had been limited to the contents of one volume, could by possibility know upon a subject so abstruse, so profound, and so highly metaphysical, as that of the Soul—its greatness—and the inconceivableness of its loss. Heathen philosophers, at the head of whose formidable array stand Plato and Aristotle, had exhausted their wit, and had not made the world a ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... self-righteous David Hume, who goes so far as to doubt the existence of the newspaper in which our adventures are now appearing; but it would neither become my cloth, nor do credit to my great experience, were I to meddle with these dangerous opinions. My alarm for you is not metaphysical, it is moral in its origin: You must be aware, my poor friend, that you are a very bad character—the worst indeed that I have met with in these pages. The author hates you, Count; and difficult as it may be to connect ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when the Pindaric odes of Cowley and his imitators, and the productions of that class of curious thinkers whom Dr. Johnson has strangely styled metaphysical Poets, were beginning to lose something of that extravagant admiration which they had excited, the Paradise Lost made its appearance. 'Fit audience find though few,' was the petition addressed by the Poet to his inspiring Muse. I have said elsewhere that he gained ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' or of 'Mesmeric Revelations,' we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies of what was most remarkable and peculiar in the author's intellectual nature. But we see here only the better phases of his nature, only the symbols of his juster action, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a visit to Paris, in 1754, was anxious to make the acquaintance of that "furious metaphysical head," as he styled Diderot. Buffon introduced him. "He is a good fellow," said the President, "very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher, a strong reasoner, but given to perpetual digressions. He made twenty-five digressions ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... fascinated by word-lore. The Greeks and Romans played with etymology in a somewhat metaphysical fashion, a famous example of which is the derivation of lucus a non lucendo. Medieval writers delight in giving amazing information as to the origin of the words they use. Their method, which may be called learned folk-etymology, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... for another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such promising ground—it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... note, that the nice balance between shall and will is much impaired by the constant use of the ellipse, "I'll, you'll," &c.; and that volition and intention are, to a great extent, co-existent and inseparable in the first person: the metaphysical reasons for this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... constitute a general theory of poetics. Perhaps his most original contribution is his attack upon the cautious contemporary styles of poetry: "strong lines," a term that originally defined the style of the metaphysical poets, but that now described the compact and pregnant manner of Dryden's satires, for example, and the "fine and agreeable," exemplified, let us say, by Pope's Pastorals or Prior's vers de societe. To these Purney preferred the bolder though ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... seen that it was disagreeable to him to be admired and praised without having merited it. He felt the same repugnance to seeking for popularity. When "Childe Harold" appeared, Dallas advised him to alter some passages, because, he said, certain metaphysical ideas expressed in the poem might do him harm in public opinion, and that, at twenty-three years of age, it was well to court in an honorable way the suffrages of his countrymen, and to abstain from wounding their feelings, opinions, and even ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... only a sort of poetical fitness of one part to another, much more like the contrived coincidences of a romance writer than like the real events and transactions of actual life. A very large portion of the work consists of long discourses on military, moral, and often metaphysical philosophy, made by generals in council, or commanders in conversation with each other when going into battle. The occurrences and incidents out of which these conversations arise always take place just as they are wanted and arrange themselves ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... between my conscious intelligent wish and will, and my physical hand, is very great. One is metaphysical, the other physical. There is, therefore, a point of correlation where the one ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... this year he began to indulge in metaphysical speculations, he was wedded to verse, and many of his early poems were planned; some of which he finished, and they were published in the "Juvenile Poems," on his entry into life; but as many more were scattered among ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... ones, for so regarding them. The educated classes had given up any honest and literal worship of the old gods. They were trying to excuse themselves for their lingering half belief in them, by turning them into allegories, powers of nature, metaphysical abstractions, as did Porphyry and Iamblichus, Plotinus and Proclus, and the rest of the Neo-Platonist school of aristocratic philosophers and fine ladies: but the lower classes still, in every region, kept up their own local beliefs ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... through which the soul discovers God and makes the supreme life-adjustment to Him, is profoundly moral and, in the best sense of the word, rational. It does not begin with an assumption, blind or otherwise, as to Christ's metaphysical nature, it does not depend upon the adoption of systematically formulated doctrines; it becomes operative through the discovery of a personal Life, historically lived—and continued through the centuries as a transforming Spirit—rich enough in its experience to ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... confession by such a bronzed veteran, and, the chords of sympathy having been struck, he opened up his heart at once, to the evident delight of Henri, who, among other curious partialities, was extremely fond of listening to and taking part in conversations that bordered on the metaphysical, and were hard to be understood. Most conversations that were not connected with eating and hunting were of this nature ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... to survive them. Bonaparte has heaped upon him presents, places, and pensions; national property, senatories, knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not supposed one of our Emperor's most dutiful subjects, because many of the late changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation, of regeneration, and of overthrow. He has too high an opinion of his own deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to be a contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy by his labours and dangers. His modesty has, for ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... of the mind on an imaginary end, associated with an immense variety of means, all of them substances not familiar to men in general, and in forms strange and unlike to those of ordinary nature. Sometimes, it seems as if the alchemists wrote like the Pythagoreans on music, imagining a metaphysical and inaudible music as the basis of the audible. It is clear that by sulphur they meant the solar rays or light, and by mercury the principle of ponderability, so that their theory was the same with that ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... adding with austere sweetness of tone: "The club deals exclusively with those conceptions or principles which lie at the base of all phenomena; including being, reality, substance, time, space, motion, change, identity, difference, and cause—in a word, my dear Philura, with ultimate metaphysical philosophy." A majestic and conclusive sweep of a perfectly gloved hand suggested infinity and reduced Miss ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder they woke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... co-operated with him were men of great learning and distinguished ability. No one will question the patristic knowledge of Pusey, the metaphysical acumen of Ward, the genuine vein of religious poetry in Keble and Faber, the wide accomplishments and scholarly criticism of Church. But on the whole the broad stream of English thought has gone in other directions. In politics the Oxford movement had brilliant representatives ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and, by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up into vigorous ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... not the fruits of free will, of individual faults, as metaphysical spiritualism believes, and neither is it an effect of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist if the workingman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is poor ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... hopeless entanglements among the steps of the mathematical demonstration showing how this can be, but no housekeeper ever meets with any practical difficulty in making her coffee rest quietly in its place on account of it. The Christian paradox, in the same way, gives rise to a great deal of metaphysical floundering and bewilderment among young theologians in their attempts to vindicate and explain it, but the humble-minded Christian parent finds no difficulty in practice. It comes very easy to him to do all he can, just as if every thing depended upon his efforts, and at the same time ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... hold that the Four Evangelists stand on their own merits. They are not to be declared impostors, either in whole or in part, beforehand, in order to save a metaphysical theory. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which would call down fire to burn up supposed foes is not removed but turned into another channel, and burns itself out in love. Jonathan Edwards retains and develops his marvelous faculty of metaphysical reasoning and uses it to influence men for God. Finney's intensely logical mind is not changed but fired and used in the ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... of Hellenic philosophy was religious. It aimed to combine the principles of many schools of the earlier period and to present a metaphysical system that would at once give a theory of being and also furnish a philosophical basis for the new religious life. This final philosophy of the antique world was Neo-Platonism. It was thoroughly eclectic ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... free agency, the link of cause and effect 'more physico' would then commence. I need not say, that the general idea is all that can be required from the poet,—not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts so as to meet metaphysical objectors. But O! how truly Shakspearian is the opening of Macbeth's character given in the 'unpossessedness' of Banquo's mind, wholly present to the present object,—an unsullied, unscarified mirror!—And ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... necessary to take up the most abstract of these questions of belief first, the metaphysical questions. It may be that to many readers the opening sections may seem the driest and least attractive. But I would ask them to begin at the beginning and read straight on, because much that follows this metaphysical ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... lie with some scribe or other who counteracts its influence by propagating opinions, and recommending studies, of a different, and less tasteful, cast of character. I am fearful that there are too many politico-economical, metaphysical, and philosophical miasmata, floating in the atmosphere of Scotland's metropolis, to render the climate there just now favourable to the legitimate cause of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... mystery of evil, concerning which I can only offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitae which is peculiar to {39} reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... satisfy me from the writings of Feuerbach, which I studied at the same time. What fascinated me so enormously about Schopenhauer's work was not only its extraordinary fate, but the clearness and manly precision with which the most difficult metaphysical problems were treated from ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... something of books, nothing of men, and I went forth like Adam among the wild beasts of the unknown wilderness of the world. My father had dedicated me to the ministry, but the day had gone when such dedications determined the lives of young men. Theology as a grave topic of historic and metaphysical investigation I delighted to pursue, but for the ministry I had no calling. I would have been idle if I could, for I had no ambition, but I had no fortune and I could not ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... lady; and the four daughters pretty, accomplished, fashionable-looking girls, from twenty-two—their mamma said seventeen—upwards, who judiciously came out in different lines; for Miss Blackmore was metaphysical, Miss Caroline sentimental, Miss Maria fast, and Miss Clementina musical. Between the last mentioned and Charles Lacy a strong and not discouraged flirtation was in progress, which afforded Harry better than ordinary opportunities for cultivating that domestic circle. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... in its consequences. It is here, never let it be forgotten, that our foundation must be laid; otherwise our superstructure, whatever we may think of it, will one day or other prove tottering and insecure. This is therefore no metaphysical speculation, but a practical matter: Slight and superficial conceptions of our state of natural degradation, and of our insufficiency to recover from it of ourselves, fall in too well with our natural inconsiderateness, and produce that fatal insensibility ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... and an account of its confused and divisive proceedings may be found in Michael Shield's Faithful Contendings Displayed (first printed at Glasgow, 1780, p. 21). It affords a singular and melancholy example how much a metaphysical and polemical spirit had crept in amongst these unhappy sufferers, since amid so many real injuries which they had to sustain, they were disposed to add disagreement and disunion concerning the character and extent of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sixty volumes octavo. The work contains three, and, according to some manuscripts, four parts, entitled Speculum naturale (Mirror of Natural Science), Speculum historiale (Mirror of Historical Science), Speculum doctrinale (Mirror of Metaphysical Science), and Speculum morale (Mirror of Moral Science). M. Daunou, in the notice he has given to it [in the xviiith volume of the Histoire litteraire de la France, begun by the Benedictines and continued by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belleslettres ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... And metaphysical treatises:— "Necessitarian not Predestinarian." "Philosophical Necessity and Predestination One Thing and The Same." "Whatever is not, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... for me. I know it of myself, and I believe you know it of yourself, and everybody knows it of themselves or himself; and why you can't be satisfied with that, passes my comprehension. As if one hasn't got puzzles enough, and bothers enough, under one's nose, without going a-field after a lot of metaphysical quibbles. No, I'm wrong,—not going a-field,—anything one has to go a-field for is all right. What a fellow meets outside himself he isn't responsible for, and must do the best he can with. But to go on for ever looking inside of one's self, and groping about amongst one's ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system? This: that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God. This difference wholly separates my system from all others. The reality of these so-called existences I ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... archaic calendar count (the day, tun, katun and cycle), the cardinal point signs, the negative particle. We have not fully solved the uinal or month sign, which seems to be chuen on the monuments and a cauac, or chuen, in the manuscripts. We are able to identify what must be regarded as metaphysical or esoteric applications of certain glyphs in certain places, such as the face numerals.[35-*] But every one of these points is either deducible directly by necessary mathematical calculation, or else from the ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... these is The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman,—a poem of great influence in the same direction as the writings of Wycliffe. It is a vision and an allegory, wherein the vices of the time, especially those of the clergy, are unsparingly dealt with. Towards the close it loses itself in a metaphysical allegory concerning Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest.[17] I do not find much poetry in it. There is more, to my mind, in another poem, written some thirty or forty years later, the author of which is unknown, perhaps because he was an imitator of William ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... to a compromise between right and expediency, and to commit an injustice for the public convenience. But I must say, that his theory soars far beyond the reach of my faculties. It is not necessary to go, on the present occasion, into a metaphysical inquiry about the origin of the right of property; and certainly nothing but the strongest necessity would lead me to discuss a subject so likely to be distasteful to the House. I agree, I own, with ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses, who appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbour in a local debating club when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me saying: "There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his sport therein." . ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... from those sights which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then, later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He will no longer perceive the creation save at odd moments in a kind of metaphysical dream, and, so to speak, across the glory of the Creator. But in these youthful years all things burst upon him with extraordinary violence and ecstasy. His undulled senses swallowed greedily the whole banquet offered by this wide world to his hunger for pleasure. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... understood at all, because these natures are more attracted by the trivial. Its most impressive confirmation is to-day furnished by art, above all else by actual representations on the boards that typify the world. "Parsifal" also is such a symbol, and in so large a world-historical and even metaphysical sense, that by it the stage has become a place dedicated to the proclamation of highest truth and morality. We have seen the grotesque anti-Semitic movement and the lamentable persecution of the Jews. What could inflict more injury to our higher nature, to our real culture? ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... Christ. His glorified body is somewhere. The value of this thought is that it gives solidity to our ideas of a future life. There they are. We need not dwell on the metaphysical difficulties about locality ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into the extremes into which other writers carried it, Paracelsus is, indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but Sordello combines with a similar history a tale of political and warlike ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... unfit for union with music. This is true, first, of all highly intellectual poetry, where the emotions are embodied in complex and abstract ideas. One could not, for example, readily set Browning to music. Music may be deep, mystic, even metaphysical in its meaning, but it cannot be dialectical. The emotions that accompany subtle thought, even when intense, are not of the voluminous, massive kind which music expresses; they lack the bodily resonance of the latter; they are, moreover, clean-cut ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... better, I thought, as I saw the great writer,—kindest as well as wisest of men, but not very patient under sentimental philosophies,—seated next the good Mr. Tagart, who soon was heard launching at him various metaphysical questions in regard to heaven and such like; and the relief was great when Thackeray introduced, with quaint whimsicality, a story which he and I had heard Macready relate in talking to us about his boyish days, of a country actor who had supported himself for six months ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Hamilton and De Morgan. The highly poetical temperament of Hamilton was remarkably contrasted with the practical realism of De Morgan. Hamilton sends sonnets to his friend, who replies by giving the poet advice about making his will. The metaphysical subtleties, with which Hamilton often filled his sheets, did not seem to have the same attraction for De Morgan that he found in battles about the quantification of the Predicate. De Morgan was exquisitely witty, and though his jokes were always appreciated by his correspondent, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... however," he continued, "connected with this German mania is, that in many cases our admiring countrymen are too late in changing their metaphysical fashions; so that they sometimes take up with rapture a man whom the Germans are just beginning to cast aside. Our servile imitators live on the crumbs that fall from the German table, or run off with the well-picked bone to ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... growth-force by use; useless ones have been produced by location of growth-force without the influence of use. Another element which determines the direction of growth-force, and which precedes use, is effort; and "it is thought that effort becomes incorporated into the metaphysical acquisitions of the parent, and is inherited with other metaphysical qualities by the young, which, during the period of growth, is much more susceptible to modifying influences, and is likely to exhibit structural ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 'metaphysical' veneer, badly applied in the first place, and wholly unsuited to the foundation material, is slowly disappearing, and our Benella is gradually returning to her normal self. Perhaps nothing has been more useful to her development than ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the adjacent doors and doorframes, have recently been renewed; the walls, moreover, are covered with new paper-hangings, the former having been torn off in tatters; and thus it becomes something like a metaphysical question whether the place ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Me. {16} It often recurred to me in after years when studying Schelling and Fichte, or reading works by Mystics, Quietists, and the like. At a very early age I was indeed very much given to indulging in states of mind resembling metaphysical abstraction—a kind of vague marvelling what I was and what others were; whether they and everything were not spirits playing me tricks, or a delusion—a kind of psychology without material or thought, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... and Akenside's "Pleasures of the Imagination," furnish adequate examples. He would, I suspect, be no discriminating critic who would deal with the "Seasons" as if they formed merely the journal of a naturalist, or by the poem of Akenside as if it were simply a metaphysical treatise. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... The prejudice against such knowledge, he said, and the custom of opposing it to that which is learnt by practice, originated in those times when books were almost confined to theology, and to logical and metaphysical subtleties; but that at present there is scarcely any practical knowledge which is not to be found in books. The press is the means by which intelligent men now converse with each other, and persons ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... satisfied with the terms of communion in the Church to which they still adhered, had individuals been left to their own responsibility on questions of disputable origin and doubtful antiquity, involving rather the subtilty of metaphysical disquisitions, than agreeable to the simplicity of Gospel truth, and essential Christian doctrine. On this point I would content myself with quoting the sentiments of a Roman Catholic author. Many of the facts alleged in his interesting ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline of science, stands before the OTHER forms of nature, with fearless Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long: "Thou art more! thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!"—this may be a strange and foolish task, but that it is a TASK, who can deny! Why did we choose it, this foolish ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... native tongue, with an amount of volubility quite surprising. Certainly it cannot be said that those whom he addressed expressed much intelligence; but Esquimaux are not usually found to be quick in their perceptions. Perchance Bryan was metaphysical! ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... publication of a monthly periodical. The latter, entitled The Rural Echo, was almost wholly occupied with the ingenious projector's own compositions, both in prose and poetry, and commanded a wide circulation. Devoted to metaphysical inquiries, Mr Wilson has latterly turned his attention to that department of study. He has likewise been ardent in the pursuit of physical science. An ingenious treatise from his pen on the nature of light, published in 1855, attracted no inconsiderable notice, and is strongly indicative ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... certain that too much learning is rather disadvantageous than otherwise to the lower classes of the people;—that the introduction of a spirit of philosophical investigation,—literary amusement,—and metaphysical speculation among those who are destined by fortune to gain their livelihood by the sweat of their brow, rather tends to make them discontented and unhappy, than to contribute any thing to their real comfort and enjoyments; ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, are distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... him in these youthful years of his nationalistic policy found in him a noticeable tendency to rash speculation and novelty. "As a politician," said Senator Mills, of Massachusetts, about 1823, he is "too theorizing, speculative, and metaphysical,— magnificent in his views of the powers and capacities of the government, and of the virtue, intelligence, and wisdom of the PEOPLE. He is in favor of elevating, cherishing, and increasing all the institutions of the government, and of a vigorous ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... referred to, and the enunciation, which at first seemed imperfect and embarrassed, became, as the preacher warmed in his progress, animated and distinct, and although the discourse could not be quoted as a correct specimen of pulpit eloquence, yet Mannering had seldom heard so much learning, metaphysical acuteness, and energy of argument, brought into the service ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... made to punish the murderers. In the irony of events the name of the judge was Lawless, and he charged the grand jury substantially as follows: "When men are hurried by some mysterious metaphysical electric frenzy to commit a deed of violence they are absolved from guilt. If you should find that such was the fact in this case, then act not at all. The case transcends your jurisdiction, and is beyond the reach of human law." Of course all the murderers went free. ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... lord, the having, as you say, deserved it, must be an excruciation to your own mind," replied his tormentor; "a kind of mental and metaphysical hanging, drawing, and quartering, which may be in some measure equipollent with the external application of hemp, iron, fire, and the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... government, dependent for its existence on the local interest, the party spirit of a State, or of a prevailing faction in a State? Every man, of plain, unsophisticated understanding, who hears the question, will give such an answer as will preserve the Union. Metaphysical subtlety, in pursuit of an impracticable theory, could alone have devised one that is calculated ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... the painter is of course supposed to be the same as the sitter, but quite apart from the metaphysical difficulties of such a supposition, there is the physical difficulty when the writer is an old man, and the model is a young boy. Is the old man likely to be a fair judge of the young man, whether it be himself or some one else? As a rule, old ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... triumphs of the righteous remnant (Isa. liii., Ezek. xxxvi.-xxxvii.). By the strong emphasis upon righteousness, the tribal Lord of Israel was revealed as the universal God, of one relationship to all men. This monotheism was not primarily cosmological nor metaphysical, but ethical. The Jews showed little capacity for abstract reasoning and never pursued their inquiries to the discovery of ultimate principles. Thus they did not develop a systematic cosmology, nor formulate a system of metaphysics. Their religion was pre-eminently "theocratic"; God was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... contrary, took a metaphysical view of the case; and, believing that Providence had not entirely dispensed with miracles in dealing with the things of this world, came to the conclusion that it was no earthly visitor they had to deal with; and he even went so far as to hint ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... "Christopher North" of Blackwood's Magazine. Nor was De Quincey idle; his habits of study were confirmed; indeed, he was already a philosopher at twenty-four. These were years of hard reading and industrious thought, wherein he accumulated much of that metaphysical wisdom which was afterward to ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... Let us kill, let us plunder!" Let the leader of the day stop following the current of the day, and he will be crushed as an obstacle or cast off as a piece of wreckage.—Judge if they are willing to be entangled in the spider's web which the Girondins put in their way. Instead of the metaphysical constitution with which the Girondins confront them, they have one in their own head ready made, simple to the last point, adapted to their capacity and their instincts. The reader will call to mind one of their chiefs, whom we have already ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... metaphysical movement lays great stress upon worldly success and "attraction" of wealth, as an evidence of possession of power and truth, but the law of equation proves that we obtain that which we most desire. A religious system which amasses great wealth in a short time does so, only because its dominant ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... necessity, or measure, or limit. Unexpected events, of which the cause was unknown to them, they attributed to chance (Thucyd.). But their conception of nature was never that of law interrupted by exceptions,—a somewhat unfortunate metaphysical invention of modern times, which is at variance with facts and has failed to satisfy ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... you as to that," said Schrotter, "and I will not keep back my objection any longer. Let me get away for a moment from your system, and say that between metaphysics and theology I do not see the least difference. A metaphysical system and a religious dogma are both attempts to explain the incomprehensible secret to human reason. The negro solves the riddle of the musical-box, believing that a spirit is inside it, which gives forth musical sounds at the white man's command; and that is precisely what ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the common consequences of irregularity into an unalterable decree of destiny. To the general he now attributed his feeling of the vanity of life, the exhaustion in the very heat of youth of all the sweets of being, and the incapacity for taking part in active life to his 'metaphysical researches,' his reasoning beyond his depth on such subjects as it is not given to man to know. These hesitances the other wisely pushed aside with the soldierly advice to strengthen his mind by the perusal of Livy and Plutarch. In return Bozzy gave an imitation of 'my revered friend ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... of nature you have stated admirably, though admitted by all naturalists and denied by no one of common sense. We all admit development as a fact of history: but how came it about? Here, in language, and still more in logic, we are point-blank at issue. There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly. 'Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it DOES through FINAL CAUSE, link material and moral; and yet DOES NOT allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, and our classification of such laws, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... where he remained the other two years of his term. For a number of years thereafter he served on circuits and stations. His health now failed and he took a superannuated relation. Brother Hamilton was a good and true man, of a metaphysical turn of thought, well versed in theology, ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... may be mentioned Boyse, who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses sitting up in bed with his arms through two holes in his blanket; who composed very respectable sacred poetry when he was sober; and who was at last run over by a hackney coach when he was drunk: Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of attending to his measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on the board where he sate cross-legged; and the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble lodging, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a Theosophist. Any person of average intellectual capacities, and a leaning toward the metaphysical; of pure, unselfish life, who finds more joy in helping his neighbor than in receiving help himself; one who is ever ready to sacrifice his own pleasures for the sake of other people; and who loves Truth, Goodness, and Wisdom for their own sake, not for the benefit they ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... history—its animal history; its vegetable history; its mineral history; its social history; its moral history; its political history; its scientific history; its literary history; its musical history; its artistical history; above all, its metaphysical history. She must begin with the Chinese Dynasty, and end with Japan. But first of all she must study Geology, and especially the history of the extinct races of animals—their natures, their habits, their loves, their hates, their ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... sort of revivification which comes of a holiday-forgetfulness of the work-shop? I can always work after I've been to your house; and if you will come to mine, now, and hear the club toot their various horns over the exasperating metaphysical question which I mean to lay before them in the disguise of a literary extravaganza, it would just brace you up like ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and to fear. There is not, in this wide range of spiritual subjects, a proposition held by one as true, which has not been discarded by another as an error; and there is not a paradox or an absurdity that has not found some supporters, who maintained it as a truth. Doubt and error, in abstract and metaphysical questions, are natural and inherent in mankind, so long as reason is their ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... the end, I should guess, lay a heavier burden upon the nuns than upon John. The indecisive battle sways hither and thither. It is the Doctor who sums up in a compromise which would shock the metaphysical theologian, but may suffice for the plain man, "God is merciful but not omnipotent. In His age-long fight against evil we can ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... not very clever either, eh? She is essentially, essentially an unaccountable character! I am sometimes quite at a loss, I assure you.... She must be forty; she says she is thirty-six, and of course she has every right to say so. But I swear I judge her intellectually, simply from the metaphysical point of view; there is a sort of symbolism sprung up between us, a sort of algebra or what not! I don't understand it! Well, that's all nonsense. Only, seeing that you are not a student now and have lost your ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... we had any business with the reasons of this, I might, perhaps, be able to show you some metaphysical ones for the enjoyment, by truly artistical minds, of the changes wrought by light, and shade, and perspective in patterned surfaces; but this is at present not to the point; and all that you need to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... be seen that the common ideal conception of "Immortality" is not only essentially wrong, but a physical and metaphysical impossibility. The idea, whether cherished by Theosophists or non-Theosophists, by Christians or Spiritualists, by Materialists or Idealists, is a chimerical illusion. But the actual prolongation of human life is possible for a time so ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does not understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the depths, the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological problem; its existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience shows that though grace may work apart from institutions it does in ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... in point of time in the development and enunciation of his ideas, we must remember that he confessed that he was baffled by many of Bergson's notions. James certainly neglected many of the deeper metaphysical aspects of Bergson's thought, which did not harmonize with his own, and are even in direct contradiction. In addition to this Bergson is no pragmatist, for him "utility," so far from being a test of truth, is rather the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... (1097-1143), who formulated the sentence "Knowledge is belief, and belief is love," and Richard (died in 1173), who applied to the intuitive perception of spiritual things and to the love of them the same dialectical and metaphysical methods as the Schoolmen applied ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... being, manifesting itself in sundry shapes, yet springing from one centre, as different coloured rays flow from the same crystal, while the beams from their source of light shift and change. But the fancy is too metaphysical for my poor powers to express as clearly as I would. Also no doubt it was but a hallucination that had its origin, perhaps, in the mischievous brain of her who ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... metaphysical way, keen at the moment on the scent of illustrations for the philosophy of Kant, said, "Pantagruel is the Reason; Panurge the Understanding." Rabelais himself, in the fourth book of his romance, written in the last years of his life, defines the spirit of the work. This fourth book, the English ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... out of this emphasis of the supremacy of Love comes the second articulate utterance in the message of Tolstoy, which is the supremacy of heart over head as a metaphysical guide of life. For God ever revealeth himself unto men, but he speaketh unto them not through their cold intellects, but through their warm hearts; not through logic, but through love. The reasoner searches God without man and finds him not; the lover finds God within man in his heart, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... perplexed, unintelligible, peripatetic Philosophy, and disfigured with romantic Legends, and Gothic Jingle! But, at the Doctor's Appearance, Entities, Quiddities, Sympathies, Antipathies, occult Qualities, substantial Forms, metaphysical Degrees, Categories, and all this unideal wordy Stuff, vanished; and were succeeded by a clear, concise Method of Reasoning, and sound, useful, and experimental Philosophy. Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaic, and Arabic, were Languages untaught, unknown, ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... of these questions was clothed, throughout a large portion of the lecture, in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh from school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow with any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... approached her, as she stood making courtesies at the door, with her daughter by her side. Some of Mrs. Light's courtesies were very low, for she had the happiness of receiving a number of the social potentates of the Roman world. She was rosy with triumph, to say nothing of a less metaphysical cause, and was evidently vastly contented with herself, with her company, and with the general promise of destiny. Her daughter was less overtly jubilant, and distributed her greetings with impartial frigidity. She ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... for the Enterprise, to which we have such title and vocation, it were perhaps uninteresting to say more. Let the British reader study and enjoy, in simplicity of heart, what is here presented him, and with whatever metaphysical acumen and talent for meditation he is possessed of. Let him strive to keep a free, open sense; cleared from the mists of prejudice, above all from the paralysis of cant; and directed rather to the Book itself than to the Editor of the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... mechanical, partly intellectual, formed by long habit, he would extract in his synoptical passage all that he required to know. (Macaulay was, and George Lewis is, just as wonderful in this respect.) Some of the books that Mackintosh talks of, philosophical and metaphysical works, could not be so disposed of, and I should like much to know what his system or his secret was. I met Sydney Smith yesterday, and asked him why more of the journals had not been given. He said because ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... unusual, in my inmost soul, rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... so essentially requisite to explain the phenomena of known and unknown substances, was studied chiefly by jugglers and fanatics;—their systems, replete with metaphysical nonsense, and composed of the most crude and heterogeneous materials, served rather to nourish superstition than to establish facts, and illustrate useful truths. Universal remedies, in various forms, met with strenuous advocates and deluded ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... young woman jealous she would think nothing of thrusting a dagger between his ribs. Reality,—what a delight it is! The actual touch and feeling of the spontaneous natural creature have been so buried beneath centuries of hypocrisy and humbug that we have ceased to believe in them save as a metaphysical abstraction. But even as water, long depressed under-ground in perverse channels, surges up to the surface, and above it, at last, in a fountain of relief, so Nature, after enduring ages of outrage and banishment, leaps back to her rightful domain in some ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... not a few Japanese thinkers rejected the teachings and philosophy of Shushi, regardless of consequences. Notable among those rejecters was Kaibara Yekken, whose book "The Great Doubt" was not published until after his death. In it he rejects in emphatic terms the philosophical and metaphysical ideas of Shushi. An article[AE] by Dr. Tetsujiro Inouye, Professor of Philosophy in the Imperial University in Tokyo, on the "Development of Philosophical Ideas in ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... simple moral ideals. The Augustan satiric alternative—returning to older beliefs in religion, government, philosophy, art—and the stylistic expression of such beliefs—formal verse satire and epistle, mock-poem, heroic or Hudibrastic couplet, diction of polite conversation, ironic metaphysical conceits, fantastic fictional situations—become irrelevant to the satirist writing when the past seems lost. In his later works, Pope took Augustan satire about as far as it could go. The Epilogue to the Satires becomes an epilogue to all Augustan satire and the conclusion ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... enough, this does not always work out with mathematical directness. Most things in the physical, as in the metaphysical, world work out as Ruskin says "not mathematically, but chemically." Though this may seem a far-fetched simile in connection with our dinner, it is a true one. To get back to our nuts. If after a meal ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... unfortunately, not a solitary one. The Medical Faculty of the University of Paris gave medals in 1866 for two dissertations, in one of which we find a denial of the act of creation and of God the Creator, and a rejection of every metaphysical idea, as useless and dangerous; while human thought is set down as produced by heat! In the other we read the following propositions: "Matter is eternal." "The action of a First Cause is useless and irrational—it ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller |
