"Immutability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... changeless love; of the understanding, with pure incarnate truth; of the conscience, with infinite peace; of the child, with the Father; of my emptiness, with His fulness; of my changeableness, with His immutability; of my incompleteness, with His perfectness. They to whom this stream passes shall know no thirst; they who possess it from them it shall come. Out of him 'shall flow rivers of living water.' That all-sufficient Spirit not only becomes to its possessor ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... extend over infinity, and are conceived by us as, after a fashion, eternal, and Nature works in accordance with them in a fixed and immutable order; therefore, such laws indicate to us in a certain degree the infinity, the eternity and the immutability ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... greater length than it was in one particular instance by Descartes, when, as a proof of one of his physical principles, that the quantity of motion in the universe is invariable, he had recourse to the immutability of the Divine Nature. Reasoning of a very similar character is, however, nearly as common now as it was in his time, and does duty largely as a means of fencing off disagreeable conclusions. Writers have not yet ceased to oppose the theory of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... controversy. At all events, the theory of evolution is in perfect, unquestionable harmony with the inductions of socialism and, or the contrary, it flatly contradicts the hypothesis of the absoluteness and immutability of the "natural" laws of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... preferred to them. Here, indeed, as well as in other countries, are found both useful and pernicious establishments, both rational and absurd institutions; yet still we must admire the steadiness which constitutes the national character, the immutability which reigns in the administration of their laws and in the exercise of their public functions, the unwearied assiduity of this nation to do and to promote what is useful, and a hundred other things of a similar nature. That so numerous a people as this should ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... as it now exists, must seem to all of you a mere human institution. Look through the universe of matter and mind—all God's arrangements are perfect, harmonious, and complete! There is no discord, friction, or failure in His eternal plans. Immutability, perfection, beauty, are stamped on all His laws. Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... By the Immutability of God is meant that God's nature is absolute|y unchangeable. It is not possible that He should possess one attribute at one time that He does not possess at another. Nor can there be any change in the Deity for better or for worse. ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... corps diplomatique, and are willing to join hands to propagate their main beliefs; and when one writes of progress—in railways, in the army, in gaols, in schools, in public works, in no matter what—one is ever confronted by that dogged immutability which characterizes ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the secretary's room Shan Tung waited. As McDowell was the iron and steel embodiment of the law, so Shan Tung was the flesh and blood spirit of the mysticism and immutability of his race. His face was the face of an image made of an unemotional living tissue in place of wood or stone, dispassionate, tolerant, patient. What passed in the brain behind his yellow-tinged eyes only Shan Tung knew. It was his secret. And McDowell ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... politicians from the Restoration to the accession of the House of Hanover. "One who in such an age is determined to attain civil greatness must renounce all thought of consistency. Instead of affecting immutability in the midst of mutation, he must always be on the watch for the indications of a coming reaction. He must seize the exact moment for deserting a falling cause. He has seen so many institutions from which much had been expected ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... and that one metal as a basis varies less than two. Some of our statesmen have got themselves into such a condition of mind on this point as to really believe that, while all other products of human labor are changing in value, gold alone is gifted with the great attribute of God—immutability. It is sheer blasphemy. It is conclusively proved, and by many different lines of reasoning, that silver is many times more stable in ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... mother, who was sitting knitting in the salle a manger, for inspection and approval before she started. Of course, upon such an occasion, the art of the blanchisseuse was taxed to the utmost. Lace was not spared; and the most recherche coiffure was adopted, that the rigorous immutability of village modes ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... brought out concerning the new star was that it upset the received Aristotelian doctrine of the immutability of the heavens. According to that doctrine the heavens were unchangeable, perfect, subject neither to growth nor to decay. Here was a body, not a meteor but a real distant star, which had not been visible and which would shortly fade away again, but which meanwhile ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... was so completely deceived, as were many others, by such expressions as "the continuous operation of creative power," that I included Professor Owen with other palaeontologists as being firmly convinced of the immutability of species; but it appears ("Anat. of Vertebrates", vol. iii, page 796) that this was on my part a preposterous error. In the last edition of this work I inferred, and the inference still seems to me perfectly just, from a passage beginning with the words "no doubt the type-form," etc.(Ibid., vol. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... heaven is to be one vast lazy retrospect? Why is not eternity to have action and change, yet both like God, compatible with rest and immutability? This earth is but one minor planet of a minor system. Are there no more worlds? Will there not be incident and action springing from these when the fate of this world is decided? Has the evil one touched this alone? Is it not self-conceit which ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... imagination has anticipated the praises of futurity, how many statues have risen to the eye of vanity, how many ideal converts have elevated zeal, how often wit has exulted in the eternal infamy of his antagonists, and dogmatism has delighted in the gradual advances of his authority, the immutability of his decrees, and the perpetuity of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... microscope in his hand and stopped a moment to take in the scene—the rawness and newness and flimsiness of the mushroom village, with its hundred unpainted bass-wood houses, the sweetness, peacefulness, and freshness of the unfurrowed prairie beyond, the calmness and immutability of the clear, star-lit sky above—when he heard a voice round the corner of the building that put out his eyes and opened his ears, if I may so speak. Somebody was reproaching somebody else with being "spooney ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... up towards their value. Though the price of public paper is considered as the barometer of the public credit, it is truly so only as to the general average of prices. The real credit of the United States depends on their ability, and the immutability of their will, to pay their debts. These were as evident when their paper fell to nineteen shillings, as when it was at twenty-seven shillings. The momentary variation was like that in the price of corn, or any other ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whosoever would make acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice tends, should seek it in the ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... inflexibility of Lord Elmwood; he married Lady Elmwood contrary to his determination, because he loved; and for the sake of this beloved object, he had, contrary to his resolution, taken under his immediate care young Rushbrook; but the magic which once enchanted away this spirit of immutability was no more—Lady Elmwood was no more, and ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... booksellers to purchase the MS., for a trifle, and it now yields an annual income. Collins burnt his odes after indemnifying his publisher. The publication of Dr. Blair's Sermons was refused by Strahan, and the "Essay on the Immutability of Truth," by Dr. Beattie, could find no publisher, and was printed by two friends of the author, at their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of others like them, are constantly obtruding themselves upon our attention to show, in harmony with the Bible Genesis, the immutability of species—the absolute fixity of types—rather than their variability, as claimed. If nature abhors anything more than a vacuum, it is manifestly any marked transition from fixed types, and she ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... rashly thought, but is decidedly in its favor. If the identification were so perfect that no more differences were observable between the tertiary and the recent shells than between various individuals of either, then Darwin's opponents, who argue the immutability of species from the ibises and cats preserved by the ancient Egyptians being just like those of the present day, could triumphantly add a few hundred thousand years more to the length of the experiment and to the force of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... all supernatural teaching, at a certain stage of its development. But here, as in the former instance, the change is not effected suddenly; the human mind advances gradually from Polytheism to Monotheism, through the intermediate stage of the idea of Immutability or Destiny,—an idea suggested partly by the study of the invariable order of Nature, and partly by the irresistible domination of one great temporal power, such as the iron empire of Rome.[63] Historically, indeed, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... sympathetic, who understood his Eastern lore as if with a mind of the East, poured forth his curious knowledge. And Isaacson gripped it as only the Jew can grip. He listened and listened, saying little, until Starnworth began to speak of the strange immutability that is apparent in Islam, and of how the East must ever, despite the most powerful outside influences, remain ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... carried on silently and spontaneously in the mind of a party or school, of necessity come to light at a later date, and are recognised, and their issues are scientifically arranged." Consequently, though dogma is unchangeable as truth is unchangeable, this immutability does not exclude progress. In the Church, such progress is nothing else than the development of the principles laid down in the beginning by Jesus Christ Himself. Thus—to take a simple illustration—in three different councils, the Church has declared ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... here says too much, as the following passages in the Plan prove:—'Who upon this survey can forbear to wish that these fundamental atoms of our speech might obtain the firmness and immutability of the primogenial and constituent particles of matter?' 'Those translators who, for want of understanding the characteristical difference of tongues, have formed a chaotick dialect of heterogeneous phrases;' 'In one part refinement will be subtilised beyond exactness, and evidence dilated in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... deductions have been the most implacable foes to the progress of science. Men have built systems of philosophy around their conception of anthropomorphic deities; they have linked to these systems of philosophy the allied conception of the immutability of man's spirit, and they have asked that scientific progress should stop short at the brink of these systems of philosophy and accept their dictates as final. Yet there is not to-day in existence, and there never has been, one jot of scientific ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Mr. Darwin says, "No clear line of demarcation has yet been drawn between species and sub-species, and varieties." (p. 61) It is absolutely necessary, therefore, that a distinction should be made between artificial and natural species. No man asserts the immutability of all those varieties of plants and animals, which naturalists, for the convenience of classification, may call distinct species. Haeckel, for example, gives a list of twelve species of man. So any one ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... bareheaded with reversed arms, and muffled drums, and colours, escorted his body to the grave, singing, as they marched, that lofty and melancholy psalm, in which the fragility of human life is contrasted with the immutability of Him, in whose sight a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is passed, and as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... of money! That is the secret of the whole criminal business. Money controls art. Money rejects art. Money's a sensitive thing, too. It rejects force, spontaneity, originality. It wants repetition, immutability, things calculable. Money... You can talk with satisfaction of money controlling Butcher after our heavenly day with the sweet air ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... of this literature was the constant immutability of its ideas and language. Just as the Church perpetuated the primitive form of holy objects, so she has preserved the relics of her dogmas, piously retaining, as the frame that encloses them, the oratorical language of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... in the immutability of species often maintain that, even in the most variable forms, the characters which they consider of specific value are unchangeable. To give an example from a conscientious writer,[753] who, relying on the labours of M. Naudin and {359} referring to the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... resumed the Lord, "a manner of speaking in accordance with my old cosmogony and one which I cannot give up without losing my immutability. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the ultimate fate of the body. What should they know of the Master of Dark Truth Who saw the wide world in a jade cup, By illumined conception got clear of heaven and earth: On the chariot of Mutation entered the Gate of Immutability? ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... sturdily sought to pull himself together. It was none of his decree; it was none of his deed, he argued. The older moonshiners, who managed all the details of the enterprise, would direct the event with absolute authority and the immutability of fate. But whatever should be done, he revolted from any knowledge of it, as from any share in the act. He had risen to leave the place, all strange of aspect now, metamorphosed,—various disorderly details of the prohibited industry ever and anon surging up from the still-room ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... merely an illustration of the admirable laws, first laid down by Mr. Lyell, on the geographical distribution of animals, as influenced by geological changes. The whole reasoning, of course, is founded on the assumption of the immutability of species; otherwise the difference in the species in the two regions might be considered as superinduced ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the enormous lapse of time measured by the existence of our universe, is of no more weight against the possibility of change in them, in the infinity of antecedent time, than the constancy of species in Egypt, since the days of Rameses or Cheops, is evidence of their immutability during all past epochs of the earth's history. It seems safe to prophesy that the hypothesis of the evolution of the elements from a primitive matter will, in future, play no less a part in the history of science than the atomic hypothesis, which, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... for it is always necessary to beware of the open mind. I myself find it very difficult to believe the same thing every day. And the fact is that whatever you believe will probably not alter the truth, which may be said to have a certain mysterious immutability, considering the number of efforts men have made to change it from time to time. We are now, however, just above the City Tabernacle, and if you will close your wings we shall penetrate it through ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable. The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed and previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse, every drop of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided, stamped and branded, without chance of variation. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the nobility, and the clergy. All lines are clearly marked; there the revolutionary level found the masses too rugged and too hard to plane; its instrument would have been notched, if not broken. The character of immutability which science gives to zoological species is found in Breton human nature. Even now, after the Revolution of 1830, Guerande is still a town apart, essentially Breton, fervently Catholic, silent, self-contained,—a place where ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... how you will long to crucify me alive! I fear it will produce no other effect on you; but if it should stagger you in ever so slight a degree, in this case, I am fully convinced that you will become, year after year, less fixed in your belief in the immutability of species. With this audacious and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... by Moses of God's view of man's wickedness: "And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." Gen. 6:6. The robust common sense of any plain reader will at once adjust the interpretation of these words to God's known omniscience and immutability; just as he will the prayer of the psalmist: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." Psa. 139:23, 24. The immutable God does nothing which is ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... philosophical systems, based on the analysis of the idea of Immutability and of the idea of "Nothing"—Relation of metaphysical problems to the idea of "Nothing"—Real ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... however, were almost universally abandoned after the two leaders died. In the scholastic discussions of the 12th century the question came to the front again, for the doctrine as framed by Alcuin was not universally accepted. Thus both Abelard and Peter Lombard, in the interest of the immutability of the divine substance (holding that God could not "become', anything), gravitated towards a Nestorian position. The great opponent of their Christology, which was known as Nihilianism, was the German scholar Gerhoch, who, for his bold assertion of the perfect interpenetration ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... absolute, because He is absolute creator, and He rightly governs as absolute and universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises only His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness, justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always be right, wise, just, and good. The despot is a man attempting to be God upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power. Despotism is based on, the parental right, and the parental right is assumed ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... instances the British statesmen were voicing the policy of the European concert taken as a whole. In the first place, the Foreign Secretary was led into believing that Turkey might prove victorious against the Balkan coalition, and the warning about the immutability of the Balkan frontiers was only for Turkey, in case her victorious armies were to cross the boundaries into Bulgaria, Servia, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... sacred songs were handed down in families, as were also the functions of the sacrificers. And here among the Vedic Aryans are seen in process of elaboration the germs of the institution which later gained so much power in India and which dominates it still with apparent immutability. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... As to the immutability of the Deity, it is difficult to guess how that is proved, except by the argument of Lucus a non lucendo, because every thing is changing here; therefore the Deity never changes; which is neither an ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... by the advocates of the immutability of species that domesticated races, if allowed to run wild, always revert to their parent type. Mr. Wallace had said in reply that a domesticated species, if it loses the protection of Man, can only stand its ground in a wild state by resuming ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... of prescribed generalities, for he is constantly refreshed by the living and ever flowing stream of individual experience. The rationalist has a fixed unchangeable Idea or reason or method, whose reality and value consists in its unity, permanence and immutability. In favor of this hypostatised reason, the rationalist Ibn Daud is ready to sacrifice so fundamental an institution as sacrifice in the face of the entire book of Leviticus, pretending that a single ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Eternal; The All-powerful, The All-wise, The All- merciful, The All-holy. [Attributes and perfections] infinite power, infinite wisdom, infinite goodness, infinite justice, infinite truth, infinite mercy; omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence; unity, immutability, holiness, glory, majesty, sovereignty, infinity, eternity. The Trinity, The Holy Trinity, The Trinity in Unity, The Triune God, God the Father Son and Holy Ghost . God the Father; The Maker, The Creator, The Preserver. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... its uncomfortable excrescences! She felt quite affectionately towards it, as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange lands. The immutability of things, as compared with the constant fluctuation of life and circumstance, struck her poignantly. Here was this rock—cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago and washed by the waves of a million tides—still unchanged and changeless, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... is a check to the irregularities of men; they will first sin, and then seek the means to appease God. Every Religion, which expiates crime and promises a remission of them, if it restrain some persons, encourages the majority to commit evil. Notwithstanding his immutability, God, in every Religion, is a true Proteus. His priests represent him at one time armed with severity, at another full of clemency and mildness; sometimes cruel and unmerciful, and sometimes easily melted by the sorrow and tears of sinners. Consequently, men see the Divinity only on the ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... us to try to discuss with intelligence the currency question until we are impressed with the truth, the universality, and the immutability, of this axiom. Many of the crude ideas now advanced spring from ignoring it. The most ingenious sophistries are answered by it. It is the governing principle of finance. It is proved by experience, is stated clearly by every leading writer on political economy, and is now here, in our ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... his adorable Head and Surety. The colossal Heart of redeemed humanity beats upon the throne, sending its mighty pulsations through every member of His body; so that, before the believer's spiritual life can be destroyed, Omnipotence must become feebleness, and Immutability ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... been careful to explain that he does not present any signs as precisely those of primitive man, not being so carried away by enthusiasm as to suppose them possessed of immutability and immortality not found in any other mode of human utterance. Yet such signs as are generally prevalent among Indian tribes, and also in other parts of the world, must be of great antiquity. The use of derivative meanings to a sign ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... an entirely new path. He declared his own ignorance, and sought to convince other people of theirs. He did not seek to reveal truth so much as to expose error. And yet it was his object to attain correct ideas as to moral obligations. He proclaimed the sovereignty of virtue and the immutability of justice. He sought to delineate and enforce the practical duties of life. His great object was the elucidation of morals; and he was the first to teach ethics systematically from the immutable principles of moral obligation. Moral certitude was the lofty platform from which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... is sent to the church in Thyatira. He who is the "Son of God," a divine person, possessing the essential attributes of omniscience and immutability, has more to say to this church than to any of the rest. Commending, as usual, whatever was commendable,—their "works, charity, service," etc.; "and the last to be more than the first:" he has, nevertheless, "a few ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... indifference to the crowd of flatterers and suitors that hovered round her, Maltravers no longer dreaded a rival. He began to feel assured that they had both gone through the ordeal; and that he might ask for love without a doubt of its immutability and faith. At this period they were both invited, with the Doltimores, to spend a few days at the villa of De Montaigne, near St. Cloud. And there it was that Maltravers determined to know ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the particular and private nature, with its unenlightened instincts of passion, humour, will, caprice,—that self which is changeful, at war with itself, self-inconsistent, and, therefore, truly, no SELF,—since the true self is the principle of identity and immutability,—the distinction between that 'private' nature when it is developed instinctively as 'selfishness,' and that rational immutable self which is constitutionally present though latent, in all men, and one ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the color and the rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with the background ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... careful to distinguish. The first is that scheme of fatalism which rests on the fundamental idea that there is nothing in the universe besides matter and local motion. This doctrine, of course, denies the spirituality of the Divine Being, as well as of all created souls, and strikes a fatal blow at the immutability of moral distinctions. It is unnecessary to say, that in such a sense of the word, neither Calvin nor Luther can be justly accused of fatalism; as it is well known that both of them maintained the spirituality ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon. Oh! I could weep at being left by the wayside; left with the grass and the clouds and a few dumb animals. True, I feel at home in the society of these symbols of life's immutability. In the procession I should feel the crushing feet, the clashing discords, the ruthless hands and stifling breath. I could not hear the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... comments farther on the objections to the reality and immutability of moral distinctions and to the universal diffusion of the moral faculty. The reference is, in the first instance, to Locke, and then to what he terms, after Adam Smith, the licentious moralists—La Rochefoucauld and Mandeville. The replies to these writers contain nothing ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... of existence, and which puts an end to so many of our joys, is entirely removed by our union with God in the Beatific Vision. "We shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as he is." One of the essential attributes of God is immutability, or the total absence of change, or even of the power to change. He is the selfsame forever. He is, as St. James beautifully expresses it, "The Father of lights, with whom there is no change nor shadow of alteration."* By our union with Him we are "made partakers of the Divine ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... one commandment of the Most High God, alias Eros, and that is so interwoven into the fabric of creation that we cannot break it if we would, although we may and do break ourselves in trying to live in defiance of its immutability. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... pair. If we except the believers in the hypotheses relative to the origin of existing varieties of animals and plants, propounded by Lamarck, Darwin, and other naturalists of the "advanced school," there is a general belief in the immutability of species. The individuals of an existing species, say dogs, can never acquire the peculiar features of another species; nor can their descendants, if we except hybrids, ever become animals in which the ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... over infinity, and are conceived by us as, after a fashion, eternal, and nature works in accordance with them in a fixed and immutable order; therefore, such laws indicate to us in a certain degree the infinity, the eternity, and the immutability of God. ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... walked beside the brook, it spoke to me of many things, grave and gay, delivering itself of observations upon the folly of Humans, comparing us very unfavorably with the godlike dignity of trees, the immutability of mountains, and the profound philosophy of brooks. Indeed it waged most eloquent upon this theme, caustic, if you will, but with a ripple, between whiles, like the deep-throated chuckle of the wise old ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... labour, were enabled to foul the stream of human endeavour. It is gratifying to think how thoroughly the modern Jews have shaken off their ancient bigotry—a good refutation, by the way, of those scholars who still argue about the "immutability ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... oath is adduced not on account of any defect in the angel, as though one ought not to credit his mere word, but in order to show that the statement made issues from God's infallible disposition. Thus too God is sometimes spoken of by Scripture as swearing, in order to express the immutability of His word, as the Apostle declares ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... delivered, it is from a certain small, cheap wisdom which expresses itself in general verdicts on all humanity, and enables the fribbler or dolt who can not see beyond his nose to give an offhand summary of the infinite. There is 'an aping of the devil' in this flippant assumption of our immutability, which strangely combines the pitiful and painful. Oh! if the ne plus ultra which antique Ignorance complacently inscribes on the gates of its world should ever be worn away, let it be replaced by this owlish credo in the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you have written under the fourth article, generally speaking, is satisfactory, till I come to the last sentence; and even with that I have not much fault to charge you with. It is true we may be mistaken as to our ideas of the eternity or immutability of any thing; but then, as it respects argument, it is just as well as though we were correct, as no one can prove us otherwise; no, nor even raise a reasonable doubt on the subject. But even if it could be demonstrated that there is not a rational being ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... approach this question with any fairness it is absolutely essential to clear the mind from our current theories regarding the family. The order is not sacred in the sense that it has always had the same form. It is this belief in the immutability of our form of the sexual relationship which accounts for the prejudice with which this question is so often approached. I fully admit the dark side of the mother-age among many peoples; its sexual licence, often ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... The immutability of the constitution of France is a necessary consequence of the laws of that country. To begin with the most important of all the laws, that which decides the order of succession to the throne; what can be more ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... must roll on continually through the spaces of her mind. Who can recall the spoken word, and who can set a limit on its echoes? It is not so with most women, but here and there may be found a nature where it is so. Spirits like this poor girl's are too deep, and partake too much of a divine immutability, to shift and suit themselves to the changing circumstances of a fickle world. They have no middle course; they cannot halt half-way; they set all their fortune on a throw. And when the throw is lost ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... have time requirements to insure the immutability of their inspired state document. Thus the Vermont Constitution can be amended only once in ten years—it was last amended in 1913—and five others set a term of years before the same amendment can be submitted again. Among ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... of constitutions, writes in the "Nation," October 8, 1885: "The Referendum must be considered, on the whole, a conservative arrangement. It tends at once to hinder rapid change and also to get rid of that inflexibility or immutability which, in the eyes of Englishmen at least, is a defect in the constitution ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... Clifford's Inn, but there almost unconsciously his feet halted. There was something in the quiet immutability of the place that sobered energy, both mental and physical. A sense of changelessness—the changelessness of inanimate things, that rises in such solemn contrast to the variableness of mere human nature, ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... due to an attempt on the part of those in authority to establish for nations a system of morals totally different from that which is binding upon the individual. Nothing but a real belief in God and confidence in the immutability of His decrees can stay the arm of strength ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Foreign Minister question. It must therefore be of importance to the Swedish government, to have the proposition worded in such a way that it would remove the doubts of the Diet regarding an isolated solution of the Consular question. In the matter of the immutability of the identical laws, it had sought an effectual guarantee that the independent Consular office would not disloyally—when the time was ripe for it—be provided by Norway with its own Minister for Foreign affairs. This question had been shirked by Norway. It was therefore necessary to cling ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... loyalty is called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must be believed in somehow. Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly of it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds downward. Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as forms of mere appearance. When you accept this beatific vision of what is, in contrast with what goes on, you feel as if you had fulfilled an intellectual duty. 'Reality is not in its truest nature a process,' ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... proposed union than to become the sexual prey of a person one does not love. It is, therefore, inhuman and immoral, as much in religion as in poetry, to preach in any form, the exclusiveness of sentiments, the indissolubility of monogamous marriage, and the immutability ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... After drawing what comfort he can from "the imperfection of the geological record" (Chapter IX), which we suspect is scarcely exaggerated, the author considers the geological succession of organic beings (Chapter X), to see whether they better accord with the common view of the immutability of species, or with that of their slow and gradual modification. Geologists must settle that question. Then follow two most interesting and able chapters on the geographical distribution of plants and animals, the summary of ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... change that is within us, and which commands a constancy that is impossible, and that violates the liberty of the male and the female, by chaining them together in perpetuity;—anything more senseless than are oaths of immutability, taken by two creatures of flesh, in the face of a sky that is not an instant the same, under vaults that threaten ruin, at the base of a rock crumbling to dust, at the foot of a tree that is splitting asunder?... You may command what is opposed to nature, but you will ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of the sensation, the life of the light, are gone; and with the dulled impression the keenness of the emotion disappears. Or imagine the stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in geometrical patterns; say in a Latin cross, with the words In hoc signo vinces in a scroll around them. The beauty of the illumination would be perhaps increased, and its import, practical, religious, and cosmic, would surely be ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 1731). Ethical ideas come neither from experience nor from civil legislation nor from the will of God, but are necessary ideas in the divine and the human reason. Because of their simplicity, universality, and immutability, it is impossible for them to arise from experience, which never yields anything but that which is particular and mutable. It is just as impossible that they should spring from political constitutions, which have a temporal origin, which are transitory, and which differ ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... diversity and immutability in the Nature of things, there necessarily arises a diversity of respects and relations between them, as unchangeable as the things themselves: wherein the Will of the Creator in reference hereunto is reveal'd to every intelligent Agent, so far as ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us to make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred feet away; but we had no quarrel with them for their neighborliness, no! Their solidity, their immutability, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the inestimable freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given feeling of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a given image of the future—all these terms being contained in the present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... done for the good of the people of God,—of His Church. For her good, the glorious Ruler shall be raised. (Compare the words, [Greek: antelabeto Israel paidos hautou], in Luke i. 54, as also ver. 68, and ii. 32.) The appellation. Rock of Israel, indicates God's immutability, trustworthiness, and inviolable faithfulness; compare my comment, on Psalm xviii. 3, 32-47. The connection betwixt Ps. xviii. and the "last words of David" here also clearly appears. The fundamental passage is Deut. xxxii. 4.—That men must be conceived of ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... to this immutability of character in some animals, it is {122} undeniable, that domestic varieties have little stability, and much tendency to reversion, whatever be the true ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... a right, but cannot impair the right itself, is at variance with sound theory. Between the effect of usage on rights, and on the exercise of rights, the law draws no precise distinction. A right derived from custom acquires no immutability or immunity from the fact that the practices out of which it grew were ancient and barbarous. We may therefore ascribe the dictum in question to the influence of preconceptions, and turn for the true theory of the law to an opinion of the same great judge, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... uncertainty, when we met more sages shaking their heads, than glorious adversaries, with his calm and unalterable conviction. He aided us with opinions so fixed that neither weariness nor artifice could shake them, with a rare immutability of will, and that efficacious assistance which the creation of meritorious works always brings to a struggling cause, when it can claim them as its own. He mingled so many charms, so much moderation, so much knowledge with his daring innovations, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... mountain, bursting over every impediment, whirled into a thousand eddies, tumbling and raging on from ledge to ledge in quivering cataracts of foam, then suddenly struck rigid by a power so instantaneous in its action that even the froth and fleeting wreaths of spray have stiffened to the immutability of sculpture. Unless you had seen it, it would be almost impossible to conceive the strangeness of the contrast between the actual tranquillity of these silent crystal rivers and the violent descending energy impressed upon their exterior. You must remember too all this is upon a scale ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... and immutability possessed the woods; the great trunks loomed upwards, their fallen brothers stretched their slow length into obscurity. The sound of breathing again became audible; the shape reappeared in the aisle, and recommenced its mystic dance. Presently it was lost ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... lives of its authors, it is difficult to conceive the excitement which was raised about the case referred to in the next note from the Journal. The remembrance of it seems to throw a doubt on the reality or immutability ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... author, "holds the doctrine of final causes, will, if he is consistent, hold also that of the immutability of species; and again, the opponent of the one doctrine will oppose ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler |
