"Eclecticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... claim our attention. Their influence is incontestable, and still, notwithstanding, their doctrinal value is nothing. They form merely a literary branch of the positivist school engrafted upon the eclecticism of M. Cousin. We find in their writings the pretension to limit science to the experimental study of nature and to humanity. We afterwards find there the pretension to understand and to accept all doctrines ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... governmental interference, the tortures of the censorship, with the tortures of the French September laws which presupposed freedom of the press? Just as one found the gods of all nations in the Roman pantheon, so will one find the flaws of all State forms in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism will reach a point hitherto unsuspected is guaranteed in particular by the politico-aesthetic gourmanderie of a German king, who thinks he can play all the parts of monarchy, both of the feudal and the bureaucratic, both of the absolute and the constitutional, of the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... treatise, more than in any of his other philosophical works, Cicero inclines to the teaching of the Stoics. In the others, he is rather the seeker after truth than the maintainer of a system. His is the critical eclecticism of the 'New Academy'—the spirit so prevalent in our own day, which fights against the shackles of dogmatism. And with all his respect for the nobler side of Stoicism, he is fully alive to its ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... and corner,—or dwarfs the soul and pins it to the surplice of some theologic dogmata claiming infallibility—or coffins the intellect in cramped, shallow, psychological categories,—it bore fruit in a wide-eyed, large-hearted, liberal-minded eclecticism, which, waging no crusade against the various Saladins of modern systems, quietly possessed itself of the really valuable elements that constitute the basis of every ethical, aesthetic, and scientific creed, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... philosophy has been as widely recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to proclaim the immanent superiority of Aryan civilization—it repudiates the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin—over Western civilization, it claims ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... the nature of liberty, we do not unite communism and property indiscriminately; such a process would be absurd eclecticism. We search by analysis for those elements in each which are true, and in harmony with the laws of Nature and society, disregarding the rest altogether; and the result gives us an adequate expression of the natural form of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... it, and to persecute people who oppose it; and yet, at the same time, to evade responsibility for every awkward text. This will never do. The clergy cannot have the authority of inspiration in their pulpits and the ease of eclecticism on the platform and ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... literature, and the really liberal tone which prevailed in the house removed apprehension in the pursuit of modern studies. For it was rather an ideal towards which she was working than an attainment in fact, that eclecticism of which she spoke to Wilfrid Athel. The monthly library lists which came under her eyes offered many a sore temptation. She was true on the whole to her system; she did not read at random, and never read frivolously; but a taste strongly directed to the best in literature will find much in ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... a man has such choices to make is the circumstance which most clearly distinguishes the practice of an art from that of a science, but this circumstance, instead of being an excuse for technical irresponsibility or mere eclecticism, should, on the contrary, stimulate the individual more completely to justify his choice. In his work he is fighting the battle not merely of his own personal career, but of a method, of a style, of an idea, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... shoes, held in place by gaiters of black cloth. He retained the former fashion of a muslin cravat in innumerable folds fastened by a gold buckle at the throat. The worthy man had not intended an act of political eclecticism in adopting this costume, which combined the styles of peasant, revolutionist, and aristocrat; he simply and innocently ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac |
