"Formalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do so to more than a very limited extent; yet two reflections seem to force themselves upon us as the result of the archæological enquiries which have produced the last three chapters of this work. One of these is the evil consequences of a barren formalism in religion. The monkish perfunctory services, with their “vain repetitions” and “long players,” reduced the individual well-nigh to the level of a praying machine, which could run off, as it were, from the reel, so many litanies ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... events, the war game, in its sociological motivation, contains absolutely nothing but struggle itself. The worthless markers, for the sake of which men often play with the same earnestness with which they play for gold pieces, indicate the formalism of this impulse which, even in the play for gold pieces, often far outweighs the material interest. The thing to be noticed, however, is that, in order that the foregoing situations may occur, certain sociological forms—in the narrower ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... true representatives of the school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... when Carlyle was beginning his work in England, must be regarded as a protest against the moralizing bigotry of the classical school no less than against its antiquated formalities. The men who raised it were themselves not free from the charge of formalism; but the forms they worshipped were at least those inspired by the spontaneous genius of the artist, not the mechanical rules inherited from the traditions of the past. Nor, whatever may be the case with those who have taken ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... effect caused, as there is a moral, would not there be a sad disfigurement? Men and women with lips blacker than coal! It is a wise prayer, "Let the words of my mouth be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord." Deceit, flattery, formalism in prayer are abominable to God. It would be well if, when in church or chapel, we could see it in plain letters, "The Lord will not hold him guiltless that ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... and, shaken by the face which had looked in out of the night, and which still might be watching his movements, his resolution gave way. The habit of a life of formalism prevailed. The thing was as good as his, she would get it presently. Why, then, cause talk and scandal by keeping these persons—whoever they were—outside, when the thing might ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... of all the virtues; yet the excess of its religious ceremonial, robbed it of vital fructifying energies. The frequency and publicity of sacerdotal service, usurped the place of daily individual piety. The tendency of all outward symbolical observances, unduly multiplied, is to substitute mere formalism ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... this way by their comrades. But there was no plan at the bottom of it—nothing to constitute them a name. The Apostles were always inveighing against cant—always affecting much earnestness, and a hearty dislike of formalism, which rendered them far from popular with the high and dry in literature, politics, or religion. They were eyed with terror by the conservatives as something foreign—German, radical, altogether monstrous. But, in reality, their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... we ought, perhaps, to make a special order by itself from the New Testament writings. They are so full of life, light, and love—they are so strong yet so tender—so pure yet so free! They have no cant of piety, no formalism, but breathe throughout a heavenly atmosphere. Their inspiration is of the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... stretches of country rose, in front of the other city edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs, and rows of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up here. The wicket from which the pair had lately emerged was in the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... with a tendency to strip genius of all that is individual and spontaneous, or to accredit it only 'when it moves abroad sedately, clad in the uniform of a peculiar college.' Mr Taylor's 'solicitous and premeditated formalism' of poetical doctrine is, it must be confessed, a little too strait-laced. The true poet is born, not made. Still, in their place, our author's dogmas have their use, and might, if duly marked and inwardly digested, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... her to be told that such unuttered longings for the knowledge of God could be of the nature of prayer. Brought up in intense formalism, it never occurred to her that it was possible to pray without an image, a crucifix, or a pair of beads. She crept to her poor straw pallet, and lay down. But the latest thought in her heart, ere she dropped asleep, was, "God loves me; God will take ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... disputes of mediaeval times, however, one may make out with some clearness the fundamental principle of the Raskol: it is a scrupulous veneration for the letter—formalism, in a word. "In such a year," says a Novgorod chronicler of the fifteenth century, "certain philosophers began to chant, 'O Lord, have mercy upon us!' while others said, 'Lord, have mercy upon us!'"[004] In this remark the whole ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... produces that inner fervour without which virtue is a name and religion a yoke. Here is the contrast, not only to John's baptism, but to all worldly religion, to all formalism and decent deadness of external propriety. Here is the consecration of enthusiasm—not a lurid, sullen heat of ignorant fanaticism, but a living glow of an enkindled nature, which flames because kindled by the inextinguishable blaze of His love ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... fullness and harmony of style, justness in the exposition of doctrine, and weight of exhortation. He was prudent without being timid, and zealous without being rash; eminently practical, though possessing a love of ideal beauty, and a cultivated and sensitive taste, and as far removed from formalism on the one side as from fanaticism on the other. Dignified and courteous in manner, he was highly respected by all his acquaintances, and while a pastor, greatly esteemed and beloved by his people. His fine natural qualities ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... rigid orthodoxy with a high spiritual tone and Raphael's conception of Judaism as outlined in his first leader, his view of it as a happy human compromise between an empty unpractical spiritualism and a choked-up over-practical formalism, avoiding the opposite extremes of its offshoots, Christianity and Mohammedanism, was novel to many of his readers, unaccustomed to think about their faith. Dissatisfied as Raphael was with the number, he felt he had fluttered some of the dove-cotes ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... thing of traditional forms and clear-cut divisions; the religious ritual showed through, and the visible gods and the disguised dancers were allowed their full value. And Euripides in the matter of outward formalism went back to the Aeschylean type and even beyond it: prologue, chorus, messenger, visible god, all the traditional forms were left clear-cut and undisguised and all developed to full effectiveness on separate and specific lines. But Sophocles worked by blurring his ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... seem always to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... he oust common-sense with what he imagined a riper wisdom. One must not take things funereally. Face to face with a woman in the prime of her beauty, he heard a voice warning him against the pedantic spirit of middle age, against formalism ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the temporary character of the 'dispensation.' The more fixed and elaborate the externals of worship, the more danger of the spirit being stifled by them. The Old Testament worship was necessarily ceremonial, but here is a caveat against the stiffening of ceremonial into stereotyped formalism. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... often spoke with me about education, and in particular of religious instruction. Her views are very serious, but at the same time liberal and comprehensive. She (as well as Prince Albert) hates all formalism. The Queen reads a great deal, and has done my book on 'The Church of the Future' the honor to read it so attentively, that the other day, when at Cashiobury, seeing the book on the table, she looked out passages which she had approved in order ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... stimulated by the Dissenters, and that section of Churchmen who most resembled them. The High Church party, the descendants of the old connection which had rallied round Sacheverell, had subsided into formalism, and shrank from any very active ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... which his genius was capable. It was left for other men to accomplish, namely, for Correggio and Titian. These two painters were the first who relieved the foregrounds of their landscape from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded formalism of the early painters; and gave a close approximation to the forms of nature in all things; retaining, however, thus much of the old system, that the distances were for the most part painted in deep ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... inspired this feeling of boredom may be imagined from the way in which his performance of Macbeth was once received. To those who remembered how magnificently Betterton had played the part, the chill formalism of the new aspirant must have seemed presumptuous, and one night the contrast proved too much for a country gentleman possessed of more honesty than politeness. After watching the progress of the tragedy with growing indignation his feelings became ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... of all kindred Courts. The light dancing march of this new "Epic," and the brisk clash of cymbal music audible in it, had, as we find afterwards, greatly captivated the young man. All is not pipe-clay, then, and torpid formalism; aloft from the murk of commonplace rise glancings of a starry ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... loud protestations of religion no more than a hissing and a byword before the ungodly you profess to despise. You are no better than a Pharisee, full of loud-mouthed prayers and vain conceit of righteousness, a false prophet, haggling over formalism when the slightest sacrifice of what you hold the letter of the law would result in the salvation of human life. You call yourself a Christian, a follower of that Nazarene who died for sinners on the cross, deeming yourself better than those who cling to other creed. You sneer at that rosary ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... when the whole moral world was sinking in a vortex of scoundrelism, and faith in morality, public or private, had been lost. Of course the character is formal, and in some respects even grotesque. But you may trace formalism, if you look closely enough, in every life led by a rule; in everything in fact between the purest spiritual impulse on one side and abandoned sensuality on ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... that in his Esterhazy time he was of great service to artists, but the music he then wrote was mainly second-rate, and I am now speaking of his best. Here his form is clear enough, but one does not listen to music merely for that. His form, indeed, became formalism and formality. It was natural to a man who had spent his life in looking for a principle that he should to a degree mistake the accident for the essence. Those first and second subjects with the half-closes between—they became as dreadful in their unfailing regularity as the contrapuntal ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... It was a fresh dawning of Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more had infested the national letters. But the author of The Gentle Shepherd himself—and small blame to him—did not fully comprehend the nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the prevalent idea ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain complicity in the formalism of its past. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... pines away, and finally dies, gracious, lovable, and even forgiving to the last. Then the death angel comes close to the clergyman and his wife, hovering over their only child, and at last the barrier of formalism and prejudice and religious bigotry is swept away from their minds. Their natural sympathies, long repressed, resume full sway, and they realize how deeply they, have sinned toward the dead woman. The sister seeks a reconciliation with her brother, but he repulses ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... intellectual acceptance of a creed and that true partaking of the sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if it ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... fearless, as when regnant on his estrade in class. His presence was such a surprise: I had not once thought of expecting him, though I knew he filled the chair of Belles Lettres in the college. With him in that Tribune, I felt sure that neither formalism nor flattery would be our doom; but for what was vouchsafed us, for what was poured suddenly, rapidly, continuously, on our heads —I own I ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... apparently in answer to my thoughts, "those 'high' services are fast becoming pure Formalism. More and more the people are beginning to regard them as 'performances,' in which they only 'assist' in the French sense. And it is specially bad for the little boys. They'd be much less self-conscious as pantomime-fairies. With all ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierre was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry, his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the very quick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface. Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of the members of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom it is a stain to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... absorbed—albeit reluctantly—in affairs of State. Blameless, even austere in their own lives, patrons of learning, sincerely pious, they lacked the Reformer's passion, without which it was vain to combat the vis inertiae; generated by long years of clerical sloth, and of the formalism by which the highest Mysteries were vulgarly distorted into superstitions and Faith into ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... beautiful things are an oblation; they are the best that we can give, as distinguished from a pleasure arranged for ourselves and got as cheap as possible. Herein lies the impassable gulf between the church and theatre, considered aesthetically; for it is only in the basest times, of formalism in art as in religion, of superstition and sensualism, that we find the church imitating the theatre in its paper glories and plaster painted like marble. The real, living religious spirit insists on bringing, as in St Mark's, a gift of precious material, of delicate antique ornament, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main significance is religious, though nothing could be farther from him than creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism. There is an atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about any other poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd, parsimonious, New England puritanic stock. The stress and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... of Halle seems to have been largely prompted by jealousy. In 1666 a revolt against the prevailing cold formalism of the Lutheran Church was begun by Philip Jacob Spener, a minister of that Church, who strongly urged the need for real personal piety on the part of each individual. His ideas were warmly received by some, and disliked by others, who stigmatized ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... service, he had seen men meant for better things broken as a reed on the wheel of military formalism; he had seen them retiring when but in the prime of life, broken in spirit, unfit for any new career, impaired in health, perfectly useless—victims of the conventional ideas that rule supreme in the army. Others he had seen forced to ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... then between religion and morality seems almost complete and it is not strange that most modern writers speak of the Roman religion as a tiresome ritual formalism, almost wholly lacking in ethical value. And yet it did not present itself in this light to the Romans themselves. Cicero, sceptic as he was, could speak of it as the cause of Rome's greatness; Augustus, the practical politician, could believe ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... his Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried to barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had produced formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had their successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal peace and good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the world, paved the way for much beautiful art and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... absence of formalism in uttering ceremonies, scarcely two persons speak exactly the same words, though I believe the purport of each ceremony, as uttered by two people, to be the same. This looseness may be due in part to the absence of a developed cult having the ceremonies in charge ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... divided powers, and while division of power is one of the principal features of the Constitution, it is the plain duty of those who are called upon to draw the dividing lines to ascertain the essential, recognize the practical, and avoid a slavish formalism which can only serve to ossify the Government and reduce its efficiency without any compensating good. The function of making laws is peculiar to Congress, and the Executive can not exercise that function to any ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded Kneller, and made a great reputation and fortune; but he was a very mean artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor without his genius. His stiff hard style was formality itself; but was approved in an age of formalism; the earlier half of the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sight sadly disappointing. Little is seen of the ancient City of Zion and Moriah, the far-famed capital of the Jewish Empire, in the narrow, crooked and ill-paved streets of the modern town. The combination of wild superstitions, with the merest formalism which is everywhere observed, and the fanaticism and jealous exclusiveness of the numerous religious communities of Jerusalem, form the chief modern characteristics of that memorable city which was once the fountain-head from which the knowledge of the true God was wont ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... begins. The best art of the world—let us say Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—was contributed by people who probably did not think about it as art at all. Fancy Homer going in for questions of form! It is always, I believe, a sign of decadence when formalism begins. It is just like religion, which starts with a teacher who has an overwhelming sense of the beauty of holiness; and then that degenerates into theology. These young men are to art what the theologians are to religion. ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to use whatever methods may be going, and to breathe new value and life into them. Drowsy, hair-splitting disputations about nothings and endless casuistry were the staple of the synagogue talk; but when He opened His mouth there, the weary formalism went out of the service, and men's hearts glowed again when they once more heard a Voice that lived, speaking from a Soul that saw the invisible. Mark has no mission to record many of our Lord's sayings. His Gospel ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... making war on stilted rhetoric and conventionalism of phrase. Schumann touches hands with the Romantic poets in their strivings in two directions. His artistic conduct, especially in his early years, is inexplicable if Jean Paul be omitted from the equation. His music rebels against the formalism which had held despotic sway over the art, and also seeks to disclose the beauty which lies buried in the world of mystery in and around us, and give expression to the multitude of emotions to which unyielding formalism had refused adequate utterance. This, I think, is the ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... repeat, as these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... which has neither a greater nor a less claim to genuine spirituality than that which is usually contrasted with it. Only its spirituality is wont to take, in many respects, a different tone. Instead of shrinking from forms which by their abuse may tend to formalism, and simplifying to the utmost all the accessories of worship, in jealous fear lest at any time the senses should be impressed at the expense of the spirit, it prefers rather to recognise as far as possible a lofty sacramental ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... its legal formalism, was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The new dispensation was—"But I say unto you, Love your enemies." Enmity begets enmity. It is as senseless as it is godless. It runs through all his teachings and through every ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... was no sin. And I ran out to play, pleased to find that I was free, like other little girls in the street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and obligations at every step. And yet if the golden truth of Judaism had not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have been so ready to put away ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... fame which had run through the earlier books, and flies at higher game. He represents the Goddess Dullness as "coming in her majesty to destroy Order and Science, and to substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth." He attacks the pedantry and formalism of university education in his day, the dissipation and false taste of the traveled gentry, the foolish pretensions to learning of collectors and virtuosi, and the daringly irreverent speculations of freethinkers and infidels. At the ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... to the place where John first baptized, near Enon, on the wooded banks of the Jordan. It must have been to Him a spot and season of calm and grateful repose; a pleasing transition from the rude hatred and heartless formalism which met Him in the degenerate "City of Solemnities." The savour of the Baptist's name and spirit seemed to linger around this sequestered region. John had evidently prepared, by his faithful ministry, the way for a mightier Preacher, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... nature," writes Leigh Hunt, in the 'Tatler', July 25, 1831, "displaced Quin's formalism; and in precisely the same way did Kean displace Kemble. ... Everything with Kemble was literally a 'personation'—it was a mask and a sounding-pipe. It was all external and artificial.... Kean's face is full of light and shade, his tones vary, his voice trembles, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... we cannot have the greatest tragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the great books of the world, in Isaiah and the Gospels, the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... small, barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural gods of the Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism, and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,[1406] for this is always the effect of geographical seclusion. But when all these limitations of Judaism are acknowledged, the fact remains that that segregated mountain environment performed the inestimable service for the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Lamtunas, so on the advice of his patron Yahya, who accompanied him, he retired to an island in the Niger, where he founded a ribat or Moslem monastery, from which as a centre his influence spread. There was no element of heresy in his creed, which was mainly distinguished by a rigid formalism and strict obedience to the letter of the Koran and the orthodox tradition or Sunna. 'Abd-Allah imposed a penitential scourging on all converts as a purification, and enforced a regular system of discipline for every breach of the law, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... better Christian than Montaigne in all his century." It appears, therefore, that the sixteenth century, instead of being, as we had supposed, one in which the Reformation had brought with it a revival of religious earnestness and a reaction against religious formalism, and in which on the battle-field, in the dungeon and at the stake, as well as through voluntary exile and the relinquishment of property, thousands in every country testified to the fervor and sincerity of their religious convictions, was in truth, like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... of modern times into the mysteries of existence. Though not formal enough to throw his philosophy into a system, he has left an impress on the English literature of this century. In every branch of literature which he has surveyed, he has made it his mission to expose the hollow formalism, the cold materialism, which he considers that utilitarian philosophy had produced. "Self in the sense of selfishness, and God as the artificial property of a party;" these have been said to be the two faults which he sees in politics, in science, in law, in literature, in ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... centuries is totally absent. Those who care for the delicately poised balance of classical taste, for wit and brilliance of dialogue, will be disconcerted by childishness or fierce passion. It is an abrupt literature, but spontaneous and sincere, which has not been spoilt by formalism and scepticism, but which has not acquired, from a purely technical point of view, the perfection of the French. Having remained inarticulate during the two centuries of classical education, it has lost nothing and ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... goes; but when the divorce is completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest, enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read the book cannot ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... host appear now the formalism of acquaintanceship just made has somewhat disappeared, and they are talking easily and with freedom. Occasionally a movement of one or the other brings his head to a favorable angle, whereat the light, dropping on the freshly shaven ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... are called deep-hearted. He was dungeon-deep. The prisoner underneath might clamour and leap; none heard him or knew of him; nor did he ever view the day. Diana's frank: 'Ah, Mr. Redworth, how glad I am to see you!' was met by the calmest formalism of the wish for her happiness. He became a guest at her London house, and his report of the domesticity there, and notably of the lord of the house, pleased Lady Dunstane more than her husband's. He saw the kind of man accurately, as far as men are to be seen on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... them. Suffused with the Slavonic spirit and its tincture of Orientalism, the importation assumed a character of its own. Liszt, who did not speak merely from hearsay, emphasises, in giving expression to his admiration of the elegant and refined manners of the Polish aristocracy, the absence of formalism and stiff artificiality:— ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... were preachers of personal righteousness. In {47} times of falsehood and hypocrisy they were witnesses for integrity and truth, upholding the personal virtues of justice, sincerity, and mercy against the idolatry and formalism of the priesthood. 'What doth the Lord require of thee,' said Micah, 'but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.'[14] In the same strain Isaiah exclaimed, 'Bring no more vain oblations, but wash you and make you ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the older discussions of English versification labored under two difficulties: an undue adherence to the traditions of Greek and Latin prosody more or less perfectly understood, and an exaggerated formalism. But recently the interest and excitement (now happily abated) over free-verse have reopened the old questions and let in upon them not a little light. Even today, however, a great deal of metrical analysis has wrecked itself on the visible rocks of a false accuracy, and it is therefore ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... eliminated from all the dictations; the life must not be shut out of the lessons in order that we may hear a pin drop, nor should they be allowed to degenerate into a tedious formalism and mechanical puppet-show, in which we pull the strings and the poor little dummies move with ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... framed strict and well-defined codes of rules (Tablatures) by means of which they tested a singer's capabilities. As the chief aims which they set before themselves were the invention of new tunes or melodies, and also songs (words), it resulted that they fell into the inevitable vice of cold formalism, and banished the true spirit of poetry by their many arbitrary rules about rhyme, measure, and melody, and the dry business-like manner in which they worked. The guild or company generally consisted of five distinct grades, the ultimate one being that of master, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... condemn such a remark as a disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he warns ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... Spain. Mr Hopgood had never been particularly in earnest about religion, but his wife was a believer, neither High Church nor Low Church, but inclined towards a kind of quietism not uncommon in the Church of England, even during its bad time, a reaction against the formalism which generally prevailed. When she married, Mrs Hopgood did not altogether follow her husband. She never separated herself from her faith, and never would have confessed that she had separated herself from her church. But although she knew that his creed externally was not hers, ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... require much expert knowledge. Yet he need not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his supreme business to see that ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth; and while, in the center of Europe, a refined and purely descended art was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and consistency. The reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as broadly divided into ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... institutions, American traditions, American history, American sports, American life, and the spirit that is American. If you, upon your return to your homes, could organize in the cities that you represent, throughout the breadth of this land, some such league as that, and by individual effort, and without formalism, pledge the body of those with whom you come in contact to make Americans by sympathy and by understanding, I believe we would make great progress in the solution ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... having authority. He condemned the formalism of their worship; declared a faith that went deeper than exterior rites and ceremonies; and spoke with an independence and fearlessness such deep and soul-searching truths, that the people took up stones ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... in question is absolute reason as such, and that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune 'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the barest intellectualistic formalism remains. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... preparing for the Sabbath services. He was not brief when, in his study, he pleaded with some awakened but unbelieving soul to cast itself unreservedly on the finished work of our Saviour. He was a man who carried his tact and common-sense into his religious duties; who hated formalism, regarding it as one of the great stumbling-blocks in the progress of Christianity, and who endeavoured at all times to suit his words and actions to ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... to deal with such errorists. There was a time when he had valued himself upon his Pharisaic strictness, but when God revealed to him His glory in the face of Jesus Christ, he was taught to distinguish between a living faith, and a dead formalism. He still maintained his social status, as one of the "chosen people," by the keeping of the law; but he knew that it merely prefigured the great redemption, and that its types and shadows must quickly disappear ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... is, after all, for rational beings! Who on earth could believe that the religion these people use to render your life so absolutely miserable is meant for the same thing as the one that makes my poor dear brother Ronald so perfectly and inexpressibly serene and happy? The formalism of lower natures, like your father's, has turned it into a machine for crushing all the spontaneity out of your existence. What a regime for a high-spirited girl like you to be ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... woven. Addison, though less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed with little vitality, he suffered mentally as well as bodily from languor and lassitude. His lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even in an age which prided itself in ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism—antique 'Reign of God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to the modern reign of the No-God, whom men name devil; this, in its multitudinous meanings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... naturally went to what he called the mother's room, which we should call the nursery, and to the garden where the child finds his "bright round smooth pebble" and his "brilliant quaint leaf." No one would seek to under-value the importance of sense discrimination, but it can be exercised without formalism, and it need not be mere discrimination. It is in connection with the Taste and Smell games that Froebel tells the mother that "the higher is rooted in the lower, morality in instinct, the spiritual in the material." The baby enjoys ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... sides, each in its way leading people on to an apprehension of the ideal in existence. The first side may be called the negative or destructive, the second, the positive or constructive. In the first, whose object was to break down all formalism, all mere regard for rules or traditions or unreasoned maxims, his method had considerable resemblance to that of the Sophists; like them he descended not infrequently to what looked very like quibbling and word-play. ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... place and its degree. The life of the spirit languishes if it is not fed. But except these things issue in the practical service of Christ in daily life they are worse than futile. They degenerate either into formalism and hypocrisy, or into spiritual self- indulgence. "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." "By their fruits ye shall know them." And the "fruits" of Christian living are to be discovered, not in the hours spent ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... furnish him with a discipline for his entry into life, and a satisfying vision of the universe. And if secularists have not always grasped this necessity, we may perhaps find therein one main reason why secularism has not met with so enormous and enthusiastic a reception as the languor and formalism of the churches seemed to ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Politics," these words: "Herbert Spencer's contributions to political and historical science seem to us mere commonplaces, sometimes false, sometimes true, but in both cases trying to disguise their essential flatness and commonness in a garb of dogmatic formalism."[212] Such an opinion, evidencing a conflict between two intellectual guides, staggered me, and it was with some curiosity that I looked subsequently, when the Index to Periodicals came out, to see who had the temerity thus to belittle ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes |
