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Figment   Listen
noun
Figment  n.  An invention; a fiction; something feigned or imagined. "Social figments, feints, and formalism." "It carried rather an appearance of figment and invention... than of truth and reality."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Figment" Quotes from Famous Books



... the seasons, and to divide the day into parts. But the term Ouran the Greeks by a strange misconception changed to [Greek: ourein]; of which mistake they have afforded other instances: and from this abuse of terms the silly figment took its rise. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant

... it was impossible it could strand him in worse case. For the sentimental side of it—separation, long absence—well, the droop of the cynical corners of the mouth became more emphasized at the recollection of that faded old figment, "home, sweet home," and glowing aspirations after the so-called holy and pure joys of the family circle; whereas the reality, a sort of Punch and Judy show at best. No, there was no sentimental ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... their garnet he marvelled, having once projected the idea that this late comer was, himself, the "wolf's head" whom they were to chase down for a rich reward, incongruously hunting amidst his own hue and cry. Or, Seymour again doubted, had he merely constructed a figment of a scheme from his own imaginings and these attenuations of suggestion? For there seemed, after all, scant communication between the two, and this was even less when the moon was unveiled, the shifting shimmer of the clouds falling away from the great sphere of pearl, gemming ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... exempt from the universal law. They are not creatures of man's hand, yet they are creatures of his brain. What are they but his own fancies, brooded on till they become facts of memory, and seem to possess an objective existence? The process is natural and easy. A figment of the imagination may become intensely real. Have we not a clearer idea of Hamlet and Othello than of half our closest acquaintances? Feuerbach went straight to the mark when he aimed to prove "that the powers before which man crouches ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... springing forth luxuriantly in his path. His spirit is big with rightness, his brain is clear, his conscience is clean, his eyes look upward, his words are sincere, his thoughts are lofty, his purposes are true, and his acts distill blessings. He is no mere figment of fancy, but rather a noble reality whose prototype may be found on the bench, in the forum, in the study, in the sanctum, in the school and the college, in the factory, on the farm, and ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... it seems absurd for our earth to hold the giant sun in thraldom; then perhaps his imagination would have reached out to the heliocentric doctrine, and the cobweb hypothesis of epicycles, with that yet more intangible figment of the perfect circle, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... uncertainty. Things were happening around me which I could only dimly guess at, and I had no power to take one step in defence. That Wardlaw should have felt the same without any hint from me was the final proof that the mystery was no figment of my nerves. I had written to Colles and got no answer. Now the letter with Japp's resignation in it had gone to Durban. Surely some notice would be taken of that. If I was given the post, Colles was bound to consider what I had said in my earlier letter and give me some directions. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... year, when an unusually beautiful cloud attracted my attention, and as I watched its rapidly changing forms, there was slowly evolved from it the kindly loving face of my mother. It was no fancy, no distorted figment of a dream. The dear face smiled upon me with angelic sweetness, glanced upward, and was gone; then I knew that I had another ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... thereon at all," said Ebbo, gloomily. "It is a figment of the old serpent to hinder us from snatching his ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in vain! How often has the actor led the child of his imagination to the footlights, only to realise that he has brought into the world a weakling or a deformity which may not live! And how often he has sat through the long night brooding over the corpse of this dear figment of his fancy! It has lately become customary with many actor-managers to avoid these pangs of childbirth. They have determinedly declined the responsibility they owe to the poet and the public, and have instead dazzled the eye with a succession of such splendid pictures that ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... the most primitive facilities one can imagine. Only on calendars do we see a beauteous Indian maiden draped in velvet, reclining on a mossy bank, and gazing at her own image in a placid pool. That Indian is the figment of a fevered artist brain in a New York studio. Should a real Indian woman try that stunt she'd search a long way for the water. Then she'd likely recline in a cactus bed and gaze at a medley of hoofs and horns of ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... explanation, that anyone else standing where you were at that time would have seen exactly the same thing. The rock stands out of the water; it is just above a deep pool, and probably it was a sort of mirage effect, and not by any means a figment of your brain." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... result, and the result only—just as we praise or blame perfect or imperfect flowers. If it comes to a remorseless probing of motives, there are none of us who can escape a charge of selfishness; and, in fact, a perfectly abstract disinterestedness is a mere logical and impossible figment. ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford

... different from ourselves; but they do not exist," and we cannot be sure they would be better than we if they did. For, when we imagine them, we must imagine their entire environment; they would have to be a part of some whole that does not now exist. And that new whole, that new reality, being merely a figment of our little minds, "would probably be inferior to the reality that is. For there is this to be said in favor of reality: that we have nothing to compare it with. Our fantasies are always incomplete, because they are fantasies. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... of education is not a figment of fancy but a reality whose verification can be attested by a thousand examples. We have only to look about us to see people who are living among things that are unbeautiful and who might be living in beautiful worlds had they elected to do so. Others are spending their lives among things ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... us is not one of education, not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... and comfort, the teachings of science are too often disregarded, if they interfere with our habits. Science, when not practically applied, loses its value; it wants fixedness, stability. Its application is its embodiment; without it, it is a mere figment of the brain. Its business is to inform the mind, and remove erroneous impressions; and its highest aim is usefulness. The popular belief with respect to dress, that a black dress is warmer, both in winter ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various

... not be tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it serves them right. There is always some means of dissolution. The conditions ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... that at a moment when she was for once not thinking of Peregrine, her imagination should conjure him up, and there was a strong feeling within her that it was something external that had flitted across the shadow, not a mere figment of her brain, though the notion was evidently accepted, and she could hear a muttering of Mrs. Labadie that this was the consequence of employing young wenches with their ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... thoughts. And then again: had he not promised, had he not shaken hands and broken bread? and that with open eyes? and if so, how could he take action, and not forfeit honour? But honour? what was honour? A figment, which, in the hot pursuit of crime, he ought to dash aside. Ay, but crime? A figment, too, which his enfranchised intellect discarded. All day, he wandered in the parks, a prey to whirling thoughts; all night, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... can the circle have to do with the numbers alive at the end of a given time?"—"I cannot demonstrate it to you; but it is demonstrated."—"Oh! stuff! I think you can prove anything with your differential calculus: figment, {286} depend upon it." I said no more; but, a few days afterwards, I went to him and very gravely told him that I had discovered the law of human mortality in the Carlisle Table, of which he thought very highly. I told him that the law was involved in this circumstance. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... of the First Baptist Church, of which church Mr. Drowne was a deacon. As a metal worker he made the grasshopper, Indian, and other vanes; but that he ever carved a pump head, urn, gate-post, "Admiral Vernon," or any other wooden image, there is not a scintilla of evidence; nothing but the figment ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various

... of the whole ground, our belief is that no such persons as Professors Teufelsdrockh or Counsellor Heuschrecke ever existed; that the six Paper-bags, with their China-ink inscriptions and multifarious contents, are a mere figment of the brain; that the 'present Editor' is the only person who has ever written upon the Philosophy of Clothes; and that the Sartor Resartus is the only treatise that has yet appeared upon that subject;—in short, that the whole ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... even the pleased look at a woman; fighting—only the One above could know with what desperate valour—against the warm-hearted girl with the gray eyes and the red lips, who laughed in her knowledge that she drew him—fighting her away for a sentimental figment, until she ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson

... said testily. "That's just something I picked up out of the blue, so to speak. Inspirational thought. For all I know it's just a figment ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips

... see again, And but my chair is empty; 'mid them all 'Tis I that seem the dead: they all remain Immortal, changeless creatures of the brain: Wellnigh I doubt which world is real most, Of sense or spirit to the truly sane; 210 In this abstraction it were light to deem Myself the figment of some stronger dream; They are the real things, and I the ghost That glide unhindered through the solid door, Vainly for recognition seek from chair to chair, And strive to speak and am but futile air, As truly most of us are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... destroyed will be released, and that whose Nescience is not destroyed will remain in Bondage!—You now argue on the assumption of a special avidy for each soul. But what about the distinction of souls implied therein? Is that distinction essential to the nature of the soul, or is it the figment of Nescience? The former alternative is excluded, as it is admitted that the soul essentially is pure, non-differenced intelligence; and because on that alternative the assumption of avidy to account for the distinction of souls would be purposeless. On the latter alternative ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... that sanctuary did not seem incongruous; Doris watched the motion as she might a figment loose in the sunlight. It was as much a prayer of thanks as any ever uttered in the ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... which was granted to him. He at once began to address him on the necessity of a change of heart, belief in the one Hope of sinners, and abandonment of all creature mediators. He announced to him the glad tidings, and assured him there was pardon for all. He warned him against the figment of baptismal regeneration; and then, proceeding to apply the word, he urged him, though in the eleventh hour, to receive the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible. The Pope listened with marked attention, and ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... for himself his own purgatory and heaven, and these are not planes, but states of consciousness. Hell does not exist; it is only a figment of the theological imagination; but a man who lives foolishly may make for himself a very unpleasant and long enduring purgatory. Neither purgatory nor heaven can ever be eternal, for a finite cause cannot produce an infinite result. The variations in individual cases ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater

... assert that the natural light of reason can teach nothing of any value concerning the true way of salvation. People who lay no claims to reason for themselves are not able to prove by reason this their assertion; and if they hawk about something superior to reason, it is a mere figment, and far below reason, as their general method of life sufficiently shows. But there is no need to dwell upon such persons. I will merely add that we can only judge of a man by his works. If a man abounds in the fruits of the Spirit, charity, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... Statesman, Boise, Idaho, telephonically contacted the Butte Office and asked if the FBI was checking on the flying discs reported to have been seen by many citizens. He advised that so many had reported having seen them that it undoubtedly was not a figment of the imagination. He said that these discs had been seen on July 1, 1947, in the vicinity of Trail Creek near Sun ...
— Federal Bureau of Investigation FOIA Documents - Unidentified Flying Objects • United States Federal Bureau of Investigation

... many times of the Gargantuan exploits of Crochard—"The Invincible," as he loved to call himself, and with good reason. But his achievements, at least as the papers described them, seemed too fantastic to be true. I had suspected more than once that he was merely a figment of the Parisian space-writers, a sort of reserve for the dull season; or else that he was a kind of scape-goat saddled by the French police with every crime which proved too much for them. Now, however, it seemed that Crochard really existed; I held ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... until he discovers beauty, the revelry of the pair together, followed by the horrors of flight, to end in the misery of exile without her, the return when the emperor passes again by the fatal spot, home where everything reminds him of her, and finally spirit-land. This last is a figment of the poet's imagination. He pictures the disconsolate emperor sending a magician to discover Yang Kuei-fei's whereabouts in the next world, and to bear to her a message of uninterrupted love. The magician, after a long search, finds her in one ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... appealed to my pity, too. He told me that if I did not go with him abroad he would have to go alone, a sick man among strangers. I soon found out, too, that even my belief in my own property was largely a figment of my own imagination. It is true some little money had been left to me, and had been lost in the way I have indicated, but without him I could never have gone to Oxford, without him I should have been practically a waif. Besides, he was a man of strong personality, ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... kind, and affectionate than his friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,— sheer nonsense! What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet's heart, and that his ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... ignorance, error.' And then there are other theorists that say: 'Sin! There is no sin in following natural laws and impulses. Circumstances shape men; heredity shapes them. The notion that their actions are criminal is a mere figment of an exploded superstition.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... nonsense that the Reverend Bill and Captain Luniac and poor old Ormonde and people talk when they're 'in love'. Love! It's just sentimental idealizing and the worship of what does not exist and therefore cannot last. You love me, don't you, Dammy, not an impossible figment of a heated imagination? This will last, dear.... If you'd idealized me into something unearthly and impossible you'd have tired of me in six months or less. You'd have hated me when you saw the reality, and found yourself tied to it ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... Gervasio is the actual fountain hymned by Horace—ah, that is quite another affair! Few poets, to be sure, have clung more tenaciously to the memories of their childhood than did he and Virgil. And yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his imagination—the very word Bandusia may have been coined by him. Who can tell? Then there is the Digentia hypothesis. I know it, I know it! I have read some of its defenders, and consider (entre nous) that they have made out a pretty strong case. But I am not in the mood for discussing ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... on't," said the personage who first appeared on the scene.—"Sir, I will hear no more on it. Besides being a most false and impudent figment, as I can testify—it is Scandaalum Magnaatum, sir—Scandaalum Magnaatum" he reiterated with a broad accentuation of the first vowel, well known in the colleges of Edinburgh and Glasgow, which we can only express ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... child of the exiled Theodomir. The paper stuffed in the candle-stick in a reckless moment had been but the ingenious figment of a man's brain for the entertainment of an hour. The old chief and Sho-caw with their broken tale to Philip had but tangled the net the more. As the blood of the Indian mother had driven Diane forth to the forest, so had the blood of the artist father driven Keela forth from ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... Guerin observes that, according to some authorities, La Salle, some time between the years 1669 and 1671, descended the Mississippi, as far as the Arkansas, by the river Ohio. There can be no doubt that the story is a mere figment.] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... opinion and belief. We have found that, imposing as it may seem to be, and high as its pretensions are, that theory has no claim to the character of a scientific doctrine; that it is a mere hypothesis, and nothing more; a speculative figment, which may be injurious to those who thoughtlessly dally with it, but which can have no power to hurt any one who will resolutely lay hold of ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... well content with the state of affairs at Hilton House in all but one respect. The fulfilment of his purpose was not approaching with sufficient rapidity. The rich marriage which he had talked about for Reginald was a pure figment; the virtuous ironmonger, with the richly dowered daughter, existed only in his prolific brain—the need of money was growing pressing. He had done much, but there was still much to do, and he must make haste to do it. He had also been mistaken on one point of much importance ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... a figment. No jury and no judge can be impartial. The other day a man was charged with striking a Socialist orator with an ice-pick. The judge lectured the orator on his Bolshevism, and then gave the accused imprisonment for a short term in the second division. Suppose that the Bolshevist had used an ice-pick ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill

... spirit, up yonder in the sky!" shouted Mr. Waples, with much firmness, "if thou art not mere nightmare, mere figment of the sciences, let me feel thy strength unequally, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... said neutrally. 'But really, Colin,' she went on with strenuous emphasis, 'I can't understand this phase of you. You—a hard-headed Bushman, to be dreaming romantic dreams and falling all of a sudden over head and ears in love with—with a figment of your imagination—just because you happen to have read by mistake some sentimental outpourings of a woman you know nothing about and who would never forgive me if she knew I'd ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... absolution as a mystical gift conveyed to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, in our lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin: just so far as we do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, we drive men ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... dying Cuitlahua as "stoically wrapping himself in his feathered mantle," and "rejoicing at his expected welcome to the celestial hunting-grounds," where he "felt that he was worthy a name among the immortal braves." This "wild figment" from Mr. Wilson's "fertile fancy" was, perhaps, suggested by Theobald's famous emendation in the description of Falstaff's death-scene,—"a babbled o' green fields." On such occasions, Mr. Wilson explains that he is relating the occurrences "as they are understood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... accuse, or whether we think that the word "accuse" over-dignifies an attitude toward a quasi-astronomer, or mere figment in a super-dream, our acceptance is that Leverrier never did ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... introduction. The northern Peel, a castle, as in the Isle of Man, was originally applied to a stockade, Old Fr. pel (pieu), a stake, Lat. Palos. Hence also Peall, Peile. Keep comes from the central tower of the castle, where the baron and his family kept, i.e. lived. A moated Grange is a poetic figment, for the word comes from Fr, grange, a barn (to Lat. granum); ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... no one on earth but Iris Wayne, yet that insubstantial grey shadow which seemed to speak was only another ghost, a figment of his overwrought brain. He wished—how he wished—that these ghosts would leave him, would return to the haunted place whence they came and allow him to sink once more into the blessed oblivion from which they called him ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... the Lords' Committee, Bedloe again gave evidence. The 2,100 pounds were now 4,000 pounds offered to Bedloe, by Le Fevre, early in October, to kill a man. The attendant in the Queen's chapel was at the scene (a pure figment) of the corpse exposed under the dark lantern. The motive of the murder was to seize Godfrey's examinations, which he said he had sent to Whitehall. At a trial which followed in February 1679, Mr. Robinson, who had known Godfrey for some forty years, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... that it must be a lie like everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and there could be no doubt that people were born. He had heard ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... its contact, its lovers' delight, it was no more than a slow clasping and unclasping of the hands; the spirit and flesh, merged, became spiritual; the height of stars was not a figment.... Here, since the conception of domnei has so utterly vanished, the break between the ages impassable, the sympathy born of understanding is interrupted. Hardly a woman, to-day, would value a sigh the passion which turned a man steadfastly away that he might be with her forever beyond the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... feel slightly dangerous. Maybe he was a famous gangster. He wasn't sure. Maybe all this about being an FBI agent was just a figment of his imagination. Blows on the head did funny things. "I'll drill everybody full of holes," he said in a harsh, underworld sort of voice, but it didn't sound very convincing. Sam approached him gently and fished out his wallet with great care, as if Malone were ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Prince," written by Machiavelli. That book has often been called the treatise on the art of lying. Never was such cunning exhibited. Never was the father of lies invoked with such skill as by the German leaders. In their sight truth is contemptible, kindness is weakness, honour is a figment. ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... an appraising glance at her. He had been inclined to regard Dean's suspicion that she was in love with the younger Hoff as the mere figment of jealousy, but where two young persons of the opposite sex are thrown together, there is always the possibility of romance. Jane colored a little under his searching glance, yet what he read in her face seemed to satisfy his doubts, and he made up his ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston

... among the artists of his country. This tale is traditionary, and the reader will easily perceive, by our studiously omitting to heighten many points of the narrative, when a little additional colouring might have added effect to the recital, that we have desired to lay before him, not a figment of the brain, but a curious tradition connected with, and belonging to, the biography of ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... the same haunting and subtle spiritual wistfulness that is to be seen in the Madonnas of Raphael. Each of these men loved a woman—and each pictured her again and again. Whether this woman had an existence outside the figment of the brain matters not: both painted her as they saw her— tender, gentle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... Perhaps it is merely that I am fashioned of baser stuff than—-say, Achille Cazaio or de Soyecourt. Or perhaps it is that this overmastering, all-engulfing love is a mere figment of the poet, an age-long superstition as zealously preserved as that of the inscrutability of women, by men who don't believe a syllable of the nonsense they are transmitting. Ysoude is dead; and I love my young French wife as thoroughly as ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... We know her slavish thrall To the strange sway despotical Of that strong figment, Fashion; But is there nought in this to move The being born for grace and love To ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various

... declining the cardinalate, if indeed the offer were not a figment of his own brain, Laud would have been diplomatic enough not to allow his reasons to transpire, and probably the Pope never knew them. The importance of the statement lies for posterity entirely in the anti-Roman tendency which ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... among the foremost and withal the most mischievous of the old theories which will fall, will be that figment of the imagination—the Nebular Hypothesis.[14] How strangely, and how strongly, has that hypothesis maintained its ground, even after nebulous masses have been resolved into clusters of stars. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then living—I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then three score and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... duel for life. He pressed himself closer and closer against the bank, and sought to detect some movement of the stranger. He saw nothing and he did not hear a sound. It seemed that the man had absolutely vanished into space. It occurred to Ned that it might have been a mere figment of the dusk and his excited brain, but he quickly dismissed the idea. He had seen the man and he had seen him leap into the arroyo. There could be no ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Mr. Somerset passed through such an experience before. Had he not felt her actual weight and warmth, he might have fancied the whole episode a figment of the imagination. It seemed as if those musicians had thrown a double sweetness into their notes on seeing the mistress of the castle in the dance, that a perfumed southern atmosphere had begun to pervade the marquee, and that human beings were shaking themselves ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... comes from those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will receive the attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for changing the essential principle of our self-governing system is a figment which its contrivers laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against the invader? We are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... look at it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication, like a dull landscape painted on a wall, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... must worship something, instead of taking a figment of the imagination, why not pick out something real and established, about whose insistence there can be no doubt—the most logical and admirable thing on earth—your own self and your scientifically enlightened intellect? If ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... bear. Lewis and Clark were the first white men to give an account of this beast. Many of the Indian lodge-tales to which they had listened rang with the fame of the grizzly, as a background for the greater fame of the narrators. As a matter of course, fact and figment were inextricably blended in these tales; but, while they did not show the animal as it was, they could not exaggerate its untamable courage, its ferocity, or its rugged power of endurance. On April 29th, Captain Lewis, with a party of hunters, proved the truth ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton

... on your shoulder, but with your face a-smile and your palms open to offer and to receive hand-clasps. Sympathize with the ambitions of other men, with their hopes and dreams. Remember that each part of every work of man, however substantial and enduring it now may be, was once no more than a figment of the imagination of some one's mind. So do not be altogether "practical" when prospecting. It is a mistake to neglect ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins

... "No, no," he replied, "it is either as you suggest, a figment of my own diseased brain, and therefore just as horrible as a real apparition; or it is a supernatural visitation. Whether it exists or not, it is reality to me and in no way a dream. The full horror of it is present with me ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... terrible as the forest which Dante traversed on his way to the world of pain. Every advance step they made was upon the enemy's territory. And one has only to read the writings of the two Mathers to perceive that that enemy was to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment of a poetical fancy, but a living, active reality, alternating between the sublimest possibilities of evil and the lowest details of mean mischief; now a "tricksy spirit," disturbing the good-wife's platters or soiling her newwashed linen, and anon riding ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him living, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... for it. He was her guardian; he had the right to correct her as the master did his slave in the South. Such was the chivalry of that old common law from which we derive our judicial education. A vast remnant of that old prejudice is still lurking in the minds of our community. It is a mere figment of proscription and nothing else, descended to us, and we have not overcome it. It is not founded in reason; it is not founded in common sense; and it is being done away with very ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... England pretending to represent the Russian workmen are so many deputational frauds. There cannot be such a delegate from the very nature of things, as will be seen if the facts are studied on the spot. The lower middle classes, especially the professional teacher class, have invented the figment of organised Russian ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... saying to herself that she "never could rememberhim," so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... an Arabic word, meaning "lord" or "chief." The man to whom it was applied was a real personage, not a figment of fancy, though it is to poetry and romance that he owes his fame, his story having been expanded and embellished in chronicles, epic poems, and ballads until it bears little semblance to actual history. Yet the deeds of the man himself probably ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... suspected that this unseen visitor was no more than a figment of his own lonely imagination, but as the days passed, this suspicion vanished. Whatever this entity might be, an entity it was, entirely distinct from his own ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper

... then, this much truth in the old figment of the Press being "an organ of opinion," that it must in some degree (and that a large degree) present real matter for observation and debate. It can and does select. It can and does garble. But it has to do ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc

... looked; through a faint veil of mist, turret and tower quivered; strong lines of masonry vibrated. Wavering as in the spell of an optical illusion, the structure might have seemed but a figment of imagination, or one of those fanciful castles sung by the Elizabethan brotherhood of poets. Did the image occur to John Steele, did he feel for the time, despite other disquieting, extraneous thoughts, the subtle enchantment of the scene? The minutes passed; ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... rather I dare not withhold my avowal—that both Bull and Waterland are here hunting on the trail of an old blunder or figment, concocted by the gross ignorance of the Gentile Christians and their Fathers in all that respected Hebrew literature and the Palestine Christians. I persist in the belief that, though a refuse of the persecuted ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... loyalty. "That depends on what you mean by it," returned our girl graduate. "LOI- AUTE, steadfastness to principle, is noble, but personal loyalty, to some mere puppet or the bush the crown hangs on, is a pernicious figment." Charley shouted that this was the No. 1 letter A point in Pie's prize essay, and there the discussion ended, Isa only sighing to herself, "Ah, if I had any ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and your religion are as far apart as the poles!" Had he, Hodder, outgrown the dean's religion, or had it ever been his own? Was there, after all, such a thing as religion? Might it not be merely a figment of the fertile imagination of man? He did not escape the terror of this thought when he paused to consider his labour of the past two years and the vanity of its results. And little by little the feeling grew ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... it is that it is no longer pure matter. Aristotle's answer is that it is true that pure matter is never found as an objective existence. Point to any real object and it is composed of matter and form. And yet it is not true that matter is a pure figment of the imagination; it has an existence of its own, a potential existence. And this leads us to another important ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... meer Figment of the brain, my be Personated; as were the Gods of the Heathen; which by such Officers as the State appointed, were Personated, and held Possessions, and other Goods, and Rights, which men from time ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... in keeping with all this that our knowledge of this girl of eighteen is very vague and uncertain. Some of Dante's commentators believe her to have been a figment of his brain, a woman who never lived, or an allegory of wisdom, virtue, the Church, theology, etc. But at the death of her father Beatrice again behaves like any other earthly maiden. There is a grain of truth in every one of these theories, for Dante ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be right in thinking him a figment of my brain. ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm

... their way into the houses and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the bonfire. As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment of a pious 'rising generation,' by a ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... at all? Perhaps you're just a figment of the overstrained ear. And if I undertook to look, there wouldn't be anything there ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... remembered, lest this scene be set down as a figment of the imagination, that the people of this land are still the people of the Bible: their dress, their habits, their methods of travelling are precisely as they were two thousand years ago. The husbandman still uses the cumbersome wooden plough of the Old Testament, ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... were trivial in comparison with those which our author hurtles out after a glance at M. Quetelet. "A continuous average of so many murders a year; then so many must happen; then somebody must commit them; then free-will is a figment, and society is the source of all action which we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... to hear this of the mother whom she only knew as calm, majestic, and impassible. With a sudden impulse, she hastened to her room. She was with Mrs. Nesbit, and Theodora following, found her reading aloud, without a trace of emotion. No doubt it was a figment of Miss Standaloft, and there was a sidelong glance of satisfaction in her aunt's eyes, which made Theodora so indignant, that she was obliged to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and experience should for a moment entertain the idea that he could make out a case of capital crime against a person of my standing, solely upon the hysterical pseudo-testimony of a girl whose brain is overwrought. This midnight conference, which you so glibly quote, is a figment of her distraught mind—or, if it actually occurred (a fact of which you have no proof), Miss Lawton admits, by the words she has just uttered, that she did not see the mysterious visitor, but is attempting to ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander

... South; it is so clearly and so unequivocally set forth, that he who runs may read. Why, then, is it overlooked by Dr. Wayland? Why is he pleased to imagine that he is combating Southern principles, when, in reality, he is merely combating the monstrous figment, the distorted conception of his own brain,—namely, the right of one man to sacrifice the happiness of multitudes to his own will and pleasure? Is it because facts do not lie within the province of the moral philosopher? Is ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... and, seating herself on a stool in the corner with her plate on her lap, she set him an example. Apart from her weary attitude, and the droop of her head, he might have deemed the scene in which they had taken part a figment of his brain. But round them was the gloom of the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... A mere figment of the imagination!" exclaimed Dick suddenly. "Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed time,—just add hot water and it swells to six times ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... Greek who flew before Nero in the circus; but he, I admit, had a bad fall, as Seutonius recounts. That character of Lucian's, who employed an eagle's wing and a vulture's in his flight, I take to be a mere figment of the satirist's imagination. But what do you make of Simon Magus? He, I cannot doubt, had invented a machine in which, like myself, he made use of steam or naphtha. This may be gathered from Arnobius, our earliest authority. He mentions expressly ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... souls, or of the dead generally, fortify themselves with Psalm 139:8, and also Psalm 16:10; and yet the first passage may only imply the omnipresence of God, and the second, the resurrection of the incorruptible body of Christ from the grave. The descent of Christ into the place of torment is a figment, a monkish fable, in which Bible incidents and heathen myths are woven together to delude a credulous and ignorant laity. The formulary designated the Apostles' creed, has, beyond question, a high claim to antiquity, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... pointed out that the personality of Katie in appearance and character differed considerably from that of the medium, and that it was impossible to regard the materialized form as but a phantasm of the living. A stupendous discovery or a pitiful figment of a lunatic brain! But no flash of lightning rent the halls of learning; Sir William Crookes' researches into radiant matter could safely be accepted as workable intellectual ground, but not ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... sometimes preached by men fast bound in fetters of malignity and spiritual pride. We have the destruction of the ruling influence of the clergy inculcated by men dogmatic as Spanish Inquisitors. We are taught that the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures is a mere figment, by those who are firmly convinced that their own inspiration is perfect and unfailing. The result of all this is the development of characters as deformed as are the bodies of victims to hydrocephalus or goitre; while, in painful contrast to such victims, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler

... globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 and H2O.[2] Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;[3] science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh

... fundamental article in the creed of modern Christianity, that Jesus was divine in his nature, and of miraculous origin and nativity. Now, no human being of ordinary intelligence, unwarped by educational bias, would ever profess to believe in such a monstrous figment, which only shows the blindness of ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith

... a wink, so the question of Drink, though you timidly shrink from it, harries you. Your wit's in a whirl, as you think, if some girl with a penchant for you, ups and marries you. And ties you for life to the thing called a Wife,—that figment, that fraud, that illusion, Where, what will you be? And you can't find a key to the epoch's chaotic confusion. It seems Local Option is sure of adoption, and what a tyrannic majority May "opt" for one day, you're unable to say, and in vain you appeal to Authority. The Law of the Land is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various

... inventor like the novelist—as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a character—the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of every man who writes his life. Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment of another man’s brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick? But a poet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work may be, is occupied during his entire life in painting his ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... What a figment of the imagination this boasted impregnability of the Bank of England was the sequel will show. And as for those masters of finance, those earthly Joves of the financial world who sat serene above the clouds, "the Governor and Company of the Bank of England," they soon ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... he does not do them he ceases to will them, and when he ceases to will them he ceases also to understand and know them. For what does willing amount to if man when he is able does not do? Is it not a figment of reason? From this it follows that conjunction is effected when a man does the ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg

... you have actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, "From Papa," "From Uncle Edward," "From Sister Kate," "From dear Mamma," lest a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile brain. The "Arabian Nights'" (and "Arabian Days'") "Entertainments" are on your Index Expurgatorius. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated Red Ridinghood as no better ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... passionless Being generating and regulating all passions. Universalists consider the general course of nature, though strangely unheeded, does proclaim with 'most miraculous organ,' that dogmatisers about any such 'figment of imagination' would, in a rational community, be viewed with the same feelings of compassion, which, even in these irrational days, are exhibited towards ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell

... up in worship of that supernal splendor. But the splendor froze, not scorched. He wanted the eternal Being to be conscious of his existence; nay, to send him a whisper that He was not a metaphysical figment. Otherwise he found himself saying what Voltaire has made Spinoza say: "Je crois, entre nous, que vous n'existez pas." Obedience? Worship? He could have prostrated himself for hours on the flags, worn out his knees in prayer. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... memoir by Noon Talfourd, she ventures to make one or two startling innovations. Her hero is no longer a pale, romantic young man of gentle birth, but a stolid, worthy merchant. Here, at last, she indulges in a substantial spectre, who cannot be explained away as the figment of a disordered imagination, since he seriously alarms, not a solitary heroine or a scared lady's-maid, but Henry III. himself and his assembled barons. Yet apart from this daring escapade, it is ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... calm, in meeting again this woman who had wrought him such signal injury, who had put upon him such insufferable indignity. Surely he could feel naught for her but the rancor she had earned! From the beginning, she had been all siren, all deceit. She was but the semblance, the figment, of his foolish dream, and why should the dream move him still, shattered as it was by the torturing realities of the truth? Why must he needs bring tribute to her powers, flatter her ascendency in his life, by faltering before her casual presence? He rallied all his forces. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... chronology" of Herodotus; and it may be doubted whether anything less than the discovery that the native records of Assyria entirely contradicted Ctesias would have sufficed to drive from the field his figment of early ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson

... say that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but absolutely in the centre ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... denied with equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler. There is no permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and the robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again,—not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... existence. On the other hand, there was this strange, wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing, it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living, of which the legends ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... Percy Smith-Oldwick was not only an English gentleman and an officer in name, he was also what these implied—a brave man; but when he realized that the sweet picture he had looked upon was but the figment of a dream, and that in reality he still lay where he had fallen at the foot of the grating with a lion standing over him licking his face, the tears sprang to his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Never, he thought, had an unkind fate ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... articles; or, if this were denied as too wild an hypothesis—and, confounded as I was, I did deny it—there remained but to conclude that I had myself passed into an abnormal state of mind; in short, that I was very ill and delirious: and even then, mine was the strangest figment with which delirium had ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... confess that I had a vague idea of some shape flitting away across the room; a white shape—therefore probably a figment ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... political significance of those old restrictions and barriers against which his early zeal had tilted. Certainly in the ideal state the rights and obligations of the different classes would be more evenly adjusted. But the ideal state was a figment of the brain. The real one, as Crescenti had long ago pointed out, was the gradual and heterogeneous product of remote social conditions, wherein every seeming inconsistency had its roots in some bygone need, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... inclined to exclaim with Shakespeare's Prince Hal: "Prithee, let him alone: we shall have more anon." Where there is such inconsistency in the putting of a statement, the account looks uncommonly like a figment. We may be equally sure that the learned Goth never had an existence, any more than the "two" volumes, or the "three" volumes; (for, with the different statements, it is difficult to determine their number), nor, consequently, can there be any truth about the communication made by the Goth to ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... Trebizond at the piano with the vision of the mind, her soul enrapt, her features transfigured. She was a figment of the emotions. And the Princess and I listened, she with a little dubitating look of perplexity, paying me no heed now, and I singularly moved. I walked down the corridor, past where Princess Alix stood, and as I went by I could ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... did: he might speak of them with sharp impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and then,—for he was human like the rest of us! But mark you this, my brothers, for, in an age which, under one figment or another, whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much self-will,—we shall do well to remember it,—his was a life of orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the Church's plain and stately ways: kept to ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... fixed Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... of Northwick's own language and nation to perceive that his gentlemanly decorum and grave repose of manner masked a complete ignorance of the things that interest cultivated people, and that he was merely and purely a business man, a figment of commercial civilization, with only the crudest tastes and ambitions outside of the narrow circle of money-making. He found that he had a pleasure in horses and cattle, and from hints which Northwick let fall, regarding his life at home, that he was fond of having ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... of the Indians in a Great Spirit is a figment of the imagination on the part of the whites. It is now extremely difficult to discover what the original belief of the Passamaquoddies was, as they are now Christianized and ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes

... suggests universe beyond universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange fascination. The prosaic truth is really more poetical than the old figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling conception of the universe represented by Dante's superlative power; and made incredible the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... undiluted truth; truth and falsehood are, it is perhaps maintainable, so intricately blended in the world that discrimination is impossible. Still the man who argues thus is bound to assign some grounds for his melancholy scepticism; and to show further that the destruction of the figment is too dearly bought by the assertion of the truth. Therefore, I might be content to say that, in such cases, the innocence of the plain speaker ought to be assumed until his guilt is demonstrated. If we had always waited to clear away shams till we ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... thou, too, flutterest an impatient wing, Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail, Thou most unbodied thing, Whose very being is thy going hence, And passage and departure all thy theme; Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem, And thou at height of thy magnificence A figment and a dream. ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... hand-to-hand combat. Pistols were fired and windows broken, and Shelley's nightgown was shot through: but the assassin made his escape from the house without being recognized. His motive and his personality still remain matters of conjecture. Whether the whole affair was a figment of Shelley's brain, rendered more than usually susceptible by laudanum taken to assuage intense physical pain; whether it was a perilous hoax played upon him by the Irish servant, Daniel Hill; or whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was instigated by an unfriendly ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... Hennepin, dreaming a way to the Pacific. Here Lincoln and Douglas, antagonist and protagonist of slavery argument, had contested; here had arisen "Joe" Smith, propagator of that strange American dogma of the Latter-Day Saints. What a state, Cowperwood sometimes thought; what a figment of the brain, and yet how wonderful! He had crossed it often on his way to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Denver, and had been touched by its very simplicity—the small, new wooden towns, so redolent of American tradition, prejudice, force, and illusion. The white-steepled church, the lawn-faced, tree-shaded ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... this to commit sin, before the measure of its iniquities be filled, and the exterminating judgments of God overtake it. For what is left us but "a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation"? Or is God but a phantom, and the Eternal Law but a figment of the imagination? Has an everlasting divorce been effected between cause and effect, and is it an absurd doctrine that, as a nation sows, so shall it also reap? "Wherefore, hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people: Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison

... less than in the inward sparkle that provoked it—an honest delight, she would not have minded confessing it. Her height, her symmetry, her perfect abounding health were separate joys to her; she found absorbing and critical interest in the very figment of her being. It was entirely preposterous that a young woman should kneel at an attic window in a flood of spring moonlight, with, her hair about the shoulders of her nightgown, repeating Rossetti to the wakeful ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... wholly free from the pernicious influence of human holiness. They ever seek to bring their own works and merits before God. I know for myself what pains are inflicted by this godless wisdom, this figment of righteousness, and what effort must be made before ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther

... sceptics on their own ground. There is nothing in the world, he says, except our own sensations and ideas. In order to exist for us, things have to be perceived by the mind; therefore, everything, in order to exist, must exist in the mind of God. But when Berkeley had proved that matter was figment, David Hume, born in 1711, came forward and showed that mind was also an illusion. You know nothing of matter, said Berkeley; you have only perceptions and the ideas based thereon. You know nothing of mind, replied Hume; you have only a succession ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... leaving these complicating conditions out of account, though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... license. Nothing, however, could be further from the case. That there were libertines among the Greeks, as everywhere else, goes without saying; but the conception that the Greek rule of life was to follow impulse and abandon restraint is a figment of would-be "Hellenists" of our own time. The word which best sums up the ideal of the Greeks is "temperance"; "the mean," "order," "harmony," as we saw, are its characteristic expressions; and the self- realisation to which they ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... in his being, Allen Drew felt that he was in the presence of the supernatural. He had not imagined the figure. It was no figment of a ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes

... his discovery. This mysterious and occult connection between Adwaita philosophy and Arabian commerce is pointed out in p. 212 of his book, and it may have some bearing on the present question, if it is anything more than a figment of his fancy. The only reason given by him in support of his theory is, however, in my humble opinion, worthless. The Hindus had a Prominent example of a grand religious movement under the guidance of a single teacher in the life of Buddha, and it ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... demonstrations in your lives of the truth of the Gospel. Men ought to say about us, 'There must be something in the religion that has done that for these people.' We ought to be such that our characters shall induce the thought that the Christ who has made men like us cannot be a figment. Do you show, Christian men, that you are grafted upon the true Vine by the abundance of the fruit that you bring forth? Can you venture to say, as Paul said, If you want to know what Jesus Christ's love and power are, look at me? Do not venture ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the writer has not been honest with himself or with us in his views of human life. There may be just as much lying in novels as anywhere else. The novelist who offers us what he declares to be a figment of his own brain may be just as untrue as the reporter who sets forth a figment of his own brain which he declares to be a real occurrence. That is, just as much faithfulness to life is required of the novelist as of the reporter, and in a much higher degree. The novelist must not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... wonder if the missing book is a figment of her imagination," he thought; but in this he wronged her, for that little red-edged copy of Keble's Christian Year ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... and as to the exact designs of Spain against his country, by the ostentatious statements of the; Spanish ambassador in Paris himself, the English, envoy was still inclined to believe that these statements were a figment, expressly intended to deceive. Yet he was aware that Lord Westmoreland, Lord Paget, Sir Charles Paget, Morgan, and other English refugees, were constantly meeting with Mendoza, that they were told to get themselves in readiness, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... must not lose sight of the important distinction between the natural and the supernatural love of God. Supernatural charity, in all its stages, necessarily supposes supernatural aid. The question therefore can refer only to the amor Dei naturalis.(191) That this natural charity is no mere figment appears from the ecclesiastical condemnation of two propositions ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle

... obstinacy, he had written me a letter which I should find in his safe, but I was not to open it till after his death. I found it this morning. Bell, it is the most extraordinary communication, and either it is entirely a figment of his imagination, for his brain powers were failing very much at the last, or else it is the most awful thing I ever heard of. Here is the letter; read ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade

... Lil Artha reached the bushes indicated, and the others were close on his heels, every fellow eager to find out whether what he had told them was in fact true, or if the apparition had only been a figment of Lil Artha's imagination, the tail-end, as it ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas

... in Harley Street in a state of the wildest confusion and dismay. Mrs. Rushton was dead; that, at all events, was no figment of sudden insanity, and incredible, impossible rumors were flying from mouth to mouth with bewildering rapidity and incoherence. The name of Mademoiselle de Tourville was repeated in every variety of abhorrent emphasis; but it was not till I obtained an interview with Mrs. Rushton's ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... the mocking-bird breathes forth in one of its mad, bewildered, and bewildering extravaganzas, the other birds pause almost invariably, and remain silent until his song is done. This, I assure you, is no figment of the imagination, or illusion of an excited fancy; it is just as substantial a fact as any other one in natural history. Whether the other birds stop from envy, as has been said, or from awe, cannot be so well ascertained, but I believe it is from the sentiment of awe, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... it may be, since it may serve to guard your whole life from calamities, to which it might otherwise have been exposed. And however you may consider that which you have just experienced to be a mere optical illusion, or the figment of a brain super-excited by the fumes of a vapour, look within yourself, and tell me if you do not feel an inward and unanswerable conviction that there is more reason to shun and to fear the creature you left asleep under the dead jaws of the giant serpent, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... not as lawyers. A later age imagined that the French barons brought forward a text of the law of the Salian Pranks, as a complete answer to Edward's claim from the juridical point of view. But the famous Salic law was a figment, forged by the next generation of lawyers who were eager to give a complete refutation of the elaborate legal pleadings of the partisans of the English claim. No authentic Salic law dealt with the question of the succession to the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... Egyptians came from, is a difficult question to answer. Ancient speculators, when they could not derive a people definitely from any other, took refuge in the statement, or the figment, that they were the children of the soil which they had always occupied. Modern theorists may say, if it please them, that they were evolved out of the monkeys that had their primitive abode on that particular ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... evidence, and if we add the really important fact, that of the earliest literary dealers, certain or probable, with the legend, Geoffrey, Layamon, and Walter Map were neighbours of Wales, and Wace a neighbour of Brittany, to suppose that Arthur as a subject for romantic treatment was a figment of some non-Celtic brain, Saxon or Norman, French or English, is not only gratuitous but excessively unreasonable. Again, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Merlin legends, in at least their inception, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... Are you, now? I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton

... body its local habitation; and the use of the term Germanic Confederation in the Treaty of Pressburg sounded the death-knell of an Empire which Voltaire with equal wit and truth had described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. In the new age of trenchant realities how could that venerable figment survive—where the election of the Emperor was a sham, his coronation a mere parade of tattered robes before a crowd of landless Serenities, and where the Diet was largely concerned with regulating the claims of the envoys of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... their little unconscious thumbs in their months, and a flush on the soft-pillowed cheek; made every arrangement with Colonel MacTurk, who acts as our second, and knows the other principal a great deal too well to think he will ever give in; invented a monstrous figment about going to shoot pheasants with Mac in the morning, so as to soothe the anxious fears of the dear mistress of the house; early as the hour appointed for the—the little affair—was, have we been awake hours and hours sooner; risen before daylight, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... little Amy, he said; 'I'll lay my life 'tis only some monstrous figment of Mrs. Henley's. Trust my word, it will right itself; it is only a rock to keep true love from running too smooth. Come, don't cry, as her tears began to flow fast, 'I only meant ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... classics. A shop-walker will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry. If you want virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, of self-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a class of gentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in the head, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is the teaching of the classics now discredited among you? Not because it is not as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left to understand its value. The tradesmen who govern you ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... of the little he was able, under dire reiterated pinches, to do for them; but it was "rum," for final solitary brooding, that he hadn't appeared to see his way definitely to undertake the support of a family till the last scrap of his little low-browed, high-toned business, and the last figment of "property" in the old tiled and timbered shell that housed it, had been sacrificed to creditors ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... Yehuda, Messer Leon, is the author of an epic, Shebach Nashim ("Praise of Women"), in which occurs an interesting reference to Petrarch's Laura, whom, in opposition to the consensus of opinion among his contemporaries, he considers, not a figment of the imagination, but a woman of flesh and blood. Praise and criticism of women are favorite themes in the poetic polemics of the sixteenth century. For instance, Jacob ben Elias, of Fano, in his "Shields of Heroes," a small collection of songs ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... stopped drumming. Edward Henry gazed amiably around. Right at the back of the room—before a back-window that gave on the whitewashed wall—a man was rapidly putting his signature to a number of papers. But Mr. Slosson had ignored the existence of this man, treating him apparently as a figment of the disordered brain or as ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... curls - Curls in a flickering skein, That winds and whisks and whirls A figment thin and vain, Into the vast Inane. One end for hut and hall! One end for cell and stall! Burned in one common flame Are wisdoms and insanities. For this alone we came:- ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... you shall have read Iola's letter you will see it is more than a figment of my imagination that has made me so loth to have our children know the paralyzing power ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... not murder. What treacherous lying is all the heroic poetry of battle! Men will now creep up after dark, ambushed in safety behind the celestial curtains, and drop bombs on sleepers beneath for the greater glory of some fine figment or other. It filled me, not with wrath at the work of Kaisers and Kings, for we know what is possible with them, but with dismay at the discovery that one's fellows are so docile and credulous that they will obey any order, however abominable. The very heavens had been ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... and indeed unknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations which reason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while they lasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what is this new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever present, invisible but indispensable, unknowable yet alone interesting or important? Strange that the only possible object or theme of our knowledge should be something ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... had come upon her so suddenly. What was the cause? Was it merely a freak of that incomprehensible phenomenon the human mind that had twisted the chain of her affection into so mischievous a knot, or merely a figment of the brain springing from inner consciousness to torment her with devilish ingenuity? or did the fault lie with her in some simpler, more tangible way? Was it possible that her love was not the great and boundless force that she had imagined, but weak, in that it could not dispel and overcome ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... more or less married women (for at Rome there were degrees of marriage), or women for whom marriage was a remote and immaterial event. The same controversy has raged over Ovid's Corinna, who is variously identified as Julia the daughter of the Emperor herself, as a figment of the imagination, or as an ordinary courtesan. The truth is, that in the society so brilliantly drawn in the Art of Love, such distinctions were for the time suspended, and we are in a world which, though for the time it was living and actual, is ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail



Words linked to "Figment" :   thought, idea



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