"Materialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible outcome. Nor do I see any way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of physiology. If we persist in regarding the association between brain and thought exclusively from a physiological point of view, we must of necessity be materialists. Further, so far as we are physiologists our materialism can do us no harm. On the contrary, it is to us of the utmost service, as at once the simplest physiological explanation of facts already known, and the best working hypothesis to guide us in our further researches. But it does not follow from ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... former of these terms, we are not speaking of Materialism and Idealism as they have always actually manifested themselves, but only of the distinguishing principle of these systems when pushed to its extreme result. It is quite possible to be a materialist or an idealist with respect to the immediate phenomena of consciousness, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... be shaken." Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and the transient. Behind the uncharted ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... system of philosophy, the leading principle of which is that the world as represented to our senses depends for its existence on being perceived. Of this theory the Principles gives the exposition and the Dialogues the defence. One of his main objects was to combat the prevailing materialism of the time. A theory so novel was, as might be expected, received with widespread ridicule, though his genius was realised by some of the more elect spirits, such as Dr. S. Clarke. Shortly afterwards B. visited England, and was received into the circle of Addison, Pope, and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the son of Adam Ward saw men of many religions, sects and creeds: Christians and pagans; Catholics and Protestants; men who worshiped the God of Abraham and men who worshiped no God; followers of strange fanatical spiritualism and followers of a stranger materialism. And he saw those many shades of human beliefs blended and harmonized—brought into one comprehensive whole by the power of the common necessities of ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... Ram Juna. He has been with me now for two months, and is to stay indefinitely. He is engaged on a work that will, I am convinced, add one more to the sacred books of the world. We need such men in this age of materialism, do we not? And I feel gratefully the beneficent effect of such ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... middle of the sixteenth century, and on the choice and treatment of the subjects pertaining to the Madonna, can hardly be calculated; it was like that of Dante in the fourteenth century, but in its nature and result how different! The grand materialism of Michael Angelo is supposed to have been allied to the genius of Dante; but would Dante have acknowledged the group of the Holy Family in the Florentine Gallery, to my feeling, one of the most profane and offensive of the so-called religious pictures, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... his purpose to exhibit to the spectators. There remains no very distinct impression of it on my memory. It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead materialism. I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of a sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it. He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that would link ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness, the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know that his gods had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his daughter's arms about his ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... (torn, stormy, even as I, amid these vehement days;) I have the idea of all, and am all, and believe in all; I believe materialism is true, and spiritualism is true—I ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... that materialism makes man a mere machine, which is said to be very dishonourable. But, will it be much more honourable for man, if we should say, that he acts by the secret impulses of a spirit, or by a certain I know not what, that animates him ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... never been before, and which instantly struck him as being the identical chamber of his dream. He turned directly to the window, where the same knot in the shutter caught his eye. This incident, to his investigating spirit, induced a train of reflection which overthrew his cherished theories of materialism, and resulted in conviction that there were spiritual agencies as susceptible of proof as any facts of physical science; and this appears to have been one of the links in that mysterious chain of events by which, according to the inscrutable purposes of the ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... in a heroic age. I constantly hear of this being an age of materialism, of the worship of the "almighty dollar." I challenge all the past, in all the endeavors of man, to reach a higher level, to equal the heroism of the age in which we have been called to perform our part—the devotion to duty, the ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... dream, and not even a beautiful dream, for war is part of God's scheme of the world. In war the noblest virtues of man develop courage and renunciation, the sense of duty and abnegation, and all at the risk of his life. Without war the world would be swallowed up in the morass of materialism. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... unjustly, she failed to realize the spiritual piteousness of his plight. If the war has done anything in this country, it has saved the young women of the gentler classes, at any rate, from the abyss of sordid and cynical materialism. Hesitating to announce the rupture of the engagement, she allowed it to remain in a state of suspended animation, and as a symbolic act, ceased to wear the ring. Nancy's taunts had goaded her to a more heroic attitude. The first ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Assisi, the "Seraphic City," prefigures itself almost as a journey to the Mount of Vision. "Any line of truth that leads us above materialism," says Dr. Wilberforce, Venerable Archdeacon of Westminster Abbey, "that forces us to think, that encourages the imagination to pierce the world's cobwebs, that forces us to remember that we are enwrapped by the supernatural, is helpful and stimulating. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... to pacify France and restore her to her due rank and power. Were there not certain signs of this resurrection on every hand? The New Spirit was the revival of the Ideal, the protest of the soul against degrading materialism, the triumph of spirituality over filthy literature; and it was also Science accepted, but set in its proper place, reconciled with Faith, since it no longer pretended to encroach on the latter's sacred domain; and it was further ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue." Again, "Few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality.... It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g. sex deities and obscene rites in polytheism, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... operations of the higher; and that, accordingly, our first ideas are such as are conceived of things external and sensible. Hence all men whose intellect appeals only to external sense, are prone to a philosophy which reverses the order of things pertaining to the mind, and tends to materialism, if not to atheism. "But"—to refer again to Harris—"the intellectual scheme which never forgets Deity, postpones every thing corporeal to the primary mental Cause. It is here it looks for the origin of intelligible ideas, even of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... discomfort among certain American authors, especially just now, when, for the first time since the Civil War and the materialism that succeeded it, we are finding our national self once again in literature. Mr. Mencken and Mr. Dreiser have vigorously expressed this annoyance with American tradition. They wish to break with it—at least Mr. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of materialism; he cared little what the dogma was, provided that dogma recognized a Creator. One beautiful evening in Messidor, on board his vessel, as it glided along between the twofold azure of the sky and sea, certain mathematicians declared there was no ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... and liberty and equality flourished in the frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps never before in history. American democracy came from the forest, and its destiny drove it to material conquests; but the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull contented materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... attention to the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a great outpouring of lyricism, which infused itself into prose as well as verse. When this movement had exhausted itself there came by inevitable reaction a period of materialism, when realism succeeded romanticism and prose fiction largely replaced verse. And now sociological and pseudo-scientific writings threaten the very existence of idealistic literature. And yet through it all there ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... caution. Dearth of Missionary enterprise. The slave trade and its horrors. Progressive barbarism. Carping benevolence. Geology of Southern Africa. The fountain sources. African elephants. A venerable piece of artillery. Livingstone on Materialism. Bin Nassib. The Baganda leave at ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... 1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others it lagged far behind. The Industrial Revolution, which was to turn us from a nation of peasants and traders into a nation of manufacturers, had begun; but its chief fruits as yet were increased materialism and greed, and politically the period was one of blackest reaction. Alone of European peoples we had been untouched by the tide of Napoleon's conquests, which, when it receded from the Continent, at least left behind a framework of enlightened institutions, while our success in ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... "Materialism is the source from which modern literature takes its inspiration," continued the old lady; "and this poisonous stream not only dries up the thoughts which would expand toward heaven, but also withers all that is noble in human sentiment. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... hypocritical England! This was what he had expected, coming to, such a country, where the climate was all fog, and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in profiteering and the grossest materialism. Conscious that Hannah Hobdey was murmuring, "Hear, hear!" and Jimmy Portugal sniggering, June grew crimson, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a Spartan-like severity in this, but so was Dante very severe. It was his mission to purify the moral sense of his countrymen in an age when the Church no longer encouraged virtue; and Emerson no less vigorously opposed the rank materialism of America in a period of ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the harmonious development of all the faculties, the one-sided, somewhat restricted, or undeveloped, view of Pestalozzi and others of his followers, surely not individual efficiency for personal gain, the selfish view of crass materialism, but social efficiency is the present-day motive in education. And the definition of education takes on a different color. Not merely the development of inner life but in conjunction with that or in ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... recognised deities of the country? These they do not openly disregard, for conformity until absolutely intolerable is a law of Ydgrun, yet they have no real belief in the objective existence of beings which so readily explain themselves as abstractions, and whose personality demands a quasi- materialism which it baffles the imagination to realise. They keep their opinions, however, greatly to themselves, inasmuch as most of their countrymen feel strongly about the gods, and they hold it wrong to give pain, unless for some greater good than seems ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... imagination is in truth neutral; it only increases the force and tightens the hold of any impression upon us, to whatever class the impression may belong, and surrenders itself to a superstitious or a physical idea, as it may be. Materialism itself is the result of imagination, which is so impressed by matter that it cannot realise the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... embodiment, elements; importance, significance, moment, consequence, weight, materiality; pus, purulence; manuscript, copy. Associated Words: material, immaterial, materiality, immateriality, atom, molecule, chemistry, hylism, hylotheism, hylopathism, hylogenesis, materialism, physics, somatics, somatology. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but manifestation of that something invisible which we ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... to this assumed relationship in genetic types, we have not so much as laid the first abutment of the bridge by which these revivers of Lucretian materialism would span the chasm between mind and matter, between the spiritual and physical side of man, between dark brute sense and "a soul as white as heaven." For going back to undifferentiated primeval mist, and following down the whole line of vital phenomena, from ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... French; and the French intelligence is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... like that," I answered huskily, as I wondered what she might know or dream of that which lay beyond the ken of the gross materialism of her race. "Immortality is a very beautiful idea," I went on, "and science has destroyed much that is beautiful. But it is a pity that Col. Hellar had to eliminate the idea of immortality from the German Bible. Surely such a book makes no ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... compose alas!—the majority. There is a frightful preponderance of evil influences in the world! Industry, and commerce, and science have advanced, and yet a noble and upright standard of conduct among men is sadly lacking. Men are seeking for happiness in Materialism, and find nothing but satiety and misery,— satiety and misery which become so insupportable that very often suicide presents itself as the only way out of such a tangle of wretchedness! Yes, child!—all this is true—and if you think you have a lesson to give which will be useful in ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... all-real it can not consistently be identified with only a part of that world; and if it be identified with the whole, its all-goodness contradicts the moral distinction within the world of experience, between good and evil. The theory is now confronted with the opposite danger, that of materialism, or moral promiscuousness. Let me illustrate this full swing of the pendulum from formalism to materialism by briefly summarizing certain well-known types ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... which were his main characteristics, greatly simplified the difficult task before him. His impartiality was shown most clearly in his attitude on the question of religion; but it partook very largely of a hard materialism which concealed itself under a nominal indifference. At first he treated with equal consideration Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, and even Judaism, and he said that he treated them all with equal consideration because he hoped that the greatest among ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... make him not merely a beast, but a devil of a beast. Therefore the recognition of psychic powers, when not safeguarded by the higher principles of Truth, plunges man even deeper into darkness than does a simple materialism; and so the two go hand in hand on the downward path. There is abundant evidence that this is increasingly the case at the present day; and therefore it is that the Bible Promises culminate in the Promise of the return ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... wisdom contained in the works of this philosopher, as we may conclude from the present specimen, is it fit so divine a treasure should be concealed in shameful oblivion? With respect to true philosophy you must be sensible that all modern sects are in a state of barbarous ignorance; for Materialism and its attendant Sensuality have darkened the eyes of the many with the mists of error, and are continually strengthening their corporeal tie. And can anything more effectually dissipate this increasing gloom than ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... Darwinism." "A system," His Holiness adds, "which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God—pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... charm much more than literary, a charm almost religious and prophetic. The constant gist of his discourse was lamentation over the sunk condition of the world; which he recognized to be given up to Atheism and Materialism, full of mere sordid misbeliefs, mispursuits and misresults. All Science had become mechanical; the science not of men, but of a kind of human beavers. Churches themselves had died away into a godless mechanical condition; ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... find the body wasted, the features sharp with the great life-struggle, than to look on the face from which the mind is gone,—the eyes in which there is no recognition. Such a sight is a startling shock to that unconscious habitual materialism with which we are apt familiarly to regard those we love; for in thus missing the mind, the heart, the affection that sprang to ours, we are suddenly made aware that it was the something within the form, and not the form itself, that was so dear to us. The form itself ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... politics of the Revolution neither interested nor affected the Liberalism or Radicalism of the middle classes. It was not only the loftier and wholesomer poetry of Wordsworth and of Tennyson which averted enthusiasm from Byron, not only moral earnestness and religious revival but the optimism and the materialism of commercial prosperity. As time went on, a severer and more intelligent criticism was brought to bear on his handiwork as a poet. It was pointed out that his constructions were loose and ambiguous, that his grammar was faulty, that his rhythm was inharmonious, and it was argued that these ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Thermae was a marble court, where better known philosophers discoursed on topics of the day, each to his own group of admirers. A Christian, dressed like any other Roman, held one corner with a crowd around him. There was a tremendous undercurrent of reaction against the prevalent cynical materialism and the vortex of fashion was also the cauldron of new aspirations ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... suggest a thought to the mind, by their pictures. And we should remember, and remember always, that while our modern art having won its technical and artistic skill within the past few hundred years, is now beginning to emancipate itself from the materialism of the eye by efforts towards the "impressionist" methods, these ancient peoples had long since arrived at the ability to convey "impressions" through the medium of harmonious compositions of the most rigid conventional elements—an ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... political materialism there is everywhere the assumption that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his merits, we cannot ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His play, Les Tenebres, reveals the influences of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. It is a shocking arraignment of self-satisfied materialism. A young revolutionary is the protagonist. The woman in the case belongs to the same profession as Dostoievsky's Sonia. Not encouraging, this. Yet high hopes are centred upon Andreiev. For the rest ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate. By reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived all really "animistic" gods, all that from the first partake of the nature of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases that hunger may have been transferred, we surmise, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... without his knowing it—as Phadrig had assured him more than once that they could be—was totally beyond the power of the bravest or strongest of men. No, it was impossible: he could not, would not, believe that, such a thing could be. His invincible materialism came suddenly to his aid, and saved him from the reproach of ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... whatever for believing that America cannot have as many good artists as any other country. It simply does not have them because the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the intriguing agencies of materialism. Painters find the struggle too keen and it is easy to become the advertising designer, or the merchant in painting, which is what many of our respectable artists have become. The lust for prosperity takes the place of artistic ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... thought, and at once sought out the Saint-Simonians, under whose influence he was led to declare himself definitely a Socialist. At first this seems difficult to explain, so wide is the chasm which yawns between the "New Christianity" of Saint-Simon and the materialism of Marx. There seems to be no bond of sympathy between the religious mysticism of the French dreamer and the scientific thought of ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... manner, in place of being only a uniform mask, repressing the character of each individual under the symmetry of the same lines, rather serve to contain the passions without stifling them, coloring only that bald crudity of tone which is so injurious to their beauty, elevating that materialism which debases them, robbing them of that license which vulgarizes them, lowering that vehemence which vitiates them, pruning that exuberance which exhausts them, teaching the "lovers of the ideal" to unite the virtues which have sprung from a knowledge of evil, with those ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... order. And Delsarte might have met with thinkers like Leibnitz, Descartes and Jean Reynaud, on that height where religion is purged of superstition and fanaticism, philosophy set free from atheism and materialism! ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage and the abnegation of self, faithfulness to duty, and the spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, and lose itself in materialism. ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... of the men who ventured upon such sacred ground did not wither at their sides. To paint old men with tremendous white flowing beards—a cross between Santa Claus and Bluebeard—and call them God! Here is materialism for you with a vengeance. These audacious men forgot that He was not seen in the whirlwind, neither in the storm, but never seen at all; only heard in the ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne's long legs propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander Hall, he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he doubted the war—Germany stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force; it was just that Burne's face stayed in his memory and he was sick of the hysteria ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the Quakers. Listen. "Through the dark cloud of selfishness and materialism shines the eternal light of Christ in man. It can never perish.... The profound need of our time is to realise the everlasting truth of the common Fatherhood of God—the Spirit of Love—and the oneness of the human race." I wondered ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... is in her father's house and has to help in the housekeeping can do by the Holy Spirit. People often ask: What does the Church of our day do to reach the masses? They ask, though they ask it tremblingly, for they feel so helpless: What can we do against the materialism and infidelity in places like London and Berlin and New York and Paris? We have given it up as hopeless. Ah, if men and women could be called out to band themselves together to take hold upon God! I am not speaking of any ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... right hands to every man—whatever may be the label he puts on his theories—who is striving in single-minded devotion for a millennial peace. The new era will have to be of a spiritual, ethical type. Coarser forms of materialism, whether in thought or life, will have to be banished, because the scales have at last dropped from our eyes, and we intend to regard a human being no longer as a thing of luxury, or wealth, or greedy passions, but as the possessor of ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... elucidated by comparison with the other great European literatures. In France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or, as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by his allies, the Encyclopaedists. While Helvetius and Holbach were expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, after their characteristic ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... their intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that has ever been presented. They were, too, contemporaries of Descartes, and they followed with intense interest the attempt of the great Frenchman to put philosophy in possession of a method as adequate for its problems as the method of geometry was for the mathematical sciences. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... lean altogether upon sheer logic and the pure materialism of this divided by that and multiplied by something else," she returned. "But there are two kinds of regeneration, Jimmie, dear; the kind which involves a radical change in the life-motive, and the other which is merely a stripping ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the moral of his time, either in theory or in its application? On one side, a gross materialism, of which the shameless maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... kinsmen. When he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false smartness and a false audacity,—the wise American will do well to ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation being interesting," and to ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... in such a place, the glamour, the romance, of night! Romance. . . . What was left of life without romance? He remembered his talk with Marten; he thought of the scientists crude notions of romance. He pitied the materialism which denied him joys like these. This moonlit landscape—how full of suggestion! That grotto down below—what tales it ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... career in itself for most busy men—so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of her pursuit of Art for Art's sake, with being not only an ambassador but a monarch. Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... Proceeding from this point, he asserted, further, that every faculty and emotion are derived from sensation; that all minds are originally equal; that pleasure is the only good, and self-interest the only ground of morality. The materialism of Helvetius was the mere revival of pagan Epicurianism; but it was popular, and his work, called De l'Esprit, made a great sensation. It was congenial with the taste of a court and a generation that tolerated Madame de Pompadour. But the Parliament of Paris condemned it, and pronounced it derogatory ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from pursuing any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sake, the pure passion, the high, immaculate abstraction; no gambling, mind you; no playing for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement. With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism; but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent, the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... remember that notion anywhere. Take care no enemy rake out of it something of materialism. Guard well thy empty hot brain; it may hatch more evil. As for those odd words, I myself would fain see no great harm in them, knowing that grief and frenzy strike out many things which would else lie still, and neither spurt nor sparkle. I also know that thou hast never ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and commentator, Chu Hsi, A.D. 1130-1200, whose interpretations of the Confucian Canon are the only ones now officially recognised, has done more than any one since Confucius himself to disseminate a rigid materialism among his fellow-countrymen. The "God" of the Canon is explained away as an "Eternal Principle;" the phenomena of the universe are attributed to Nature, with its absurd personification so commonly met with in Western writers; and spirits generally are associated with the perfervid imaginations ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... studied his dialogues in the original: but the substance of them, seen through Mdme. Dacier's version, acted powerfully on the poet's sympathetic intellect. In fact, although at the time he had adopted the conclusions of materialism, he was at heart all through his life an idealist. Therefore the mixture of the poet and the sage in Plato fascinated him. The doctrine of anamnesis, which offers so strange a vista to speculative ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... pastoral life of Mexico in the tropics. The old Spaniards built well; their solid masonry defies the centuries; and their most prosaic structures were invested with an architectural charm which the rapid money-seeker of to-day cares little for, in his corrugated iron and temporary materialism. Near to the arches, columns, and turrets of the old haciendas the garden lies, replete with strange fruits and flowers. The gleam of oranges and limes comes from the tangled groves; grapes and pomegranates ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... the other's confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of—believe in," he burst out finally. "It comes too late—the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most." He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin followed the direction ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... was a religion; "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto" were holy writ enshrining the dogmata of Marxism-Leninism, and the conflict with the West was a jehad, a holy war in which God, in His manifestation as Dialectic Materialism, would naturally win out ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... And pacific Russia—the heart and soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only real traitor to this saving morality of the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... emergency; and that no harm will come to those who can rule themselves according to their own will. Still, however, finding her imagination, and yet more that of her husband, troublesome, she effects a marvellous combination of materialism and idealism, and asserts that things are not, cannot be, and shall not be more or other than people choose to ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... those refining and spiritualizing truths that are so far above the comprehension of the base and ignoble common herd? Indeed, he understood her language; he understood fully, why the sordid, brutal materialism of her crude and uncultured environment so repulsed and disgusted her. He understood, more fully than Kitty herself, in fact, and explained to her clearly, that her desires for the higher intellectual and spiritual life were born of her own ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses? It is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time, and a third. We fell into discussion—philosophy, science, evolution, religion. He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read man, and, it must be granted, the sureness and directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... culture and of the esthetic view of art and life, who hated all national exclusiveness and showed a love of his country no less true and intense than Wergeland's by chastising the Norwegians of his time for their big, empty words and their crass materialism. For this he was rewarded with abuse, and called "traitor to his country" and "matricide." In reality Welhaven was a dreamer, a worshiper of nature, a man of tender feeling. His subjective lyric poetry is not surpassed in richness of content and beauty ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... of Berlin and Vienna can scarcely be said to be threatened with permanent decline. The governments of Prussia and Austria recognize the necessity of a great university in a great capital to give tone to the administrative departments and to resist the spread of the spirit of materialism. Besides, the resident population of each of these cities is entitled to a university, and would be sufficient of itself to support one. We may rest assured, therefore, that the Prussian government will act in the future as it has done in the past, by sparing no efforts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... appreciative, yet concludes with a charge of something like blindness, in your not seeing that Natural Selection requires the constant watching of an intelligent "chooser," like man's selection to which you so often compare it; and (2) in Janet's recent work on the "Materialism of the Present Day," reviewed in last Saturday's "Reader," by an extract from which I see that he considers your weak point to be that you do not see that "thought and direction are essential to the action of Natural Selection." The same objection ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... firmament and the throne of God. So Nature may be material, but it is material interpenetrated by the divine; if you call it a fabric, the woof may be material but the warp is God. This view contains all the truth of materialism and pantheism, and vastly more than they, and it ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions, then rational theology, cosmology, and psychology are impossible, and it is futile to philosophize about ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... not always bemoaning yourselves, you penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl. What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who revolts against that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... [34] Compare the materialism of the North American Indians, in Cleveland reissue of Jesuit Relations, viii, p. 119; xx, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... and scepticism in religion. Few people who were present will ever forget the dignified yet stately manner with which she rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism, lately published; and some among them, also, will not forget the expression of amused surprise on Mr. Hamilton's face, that gradually changed to sardonic gravity, as he courteously waived his point; certainly not Mr. Oakhurst, who, from that moment, began to be uneasily impatient ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... the most perfect outline of materialism in general. "They believed in a supreme force, but denied the existence of a Supreme Being. They rejected inquiry into first causes as unscientific," maintaining that facts alone were to be dealt with ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... The marvel is not that one should thus retain, but that any should ever lose them Go the world over, and after you have put away the wonder and tenderness of youth what is there left? The few sprigs of green that sometimes invade the barrenness of your materialism, the few glimpses of summer which flash past the eye of the wintry soul, the half hours off during the long tedium of burrowing, these reveal to the hardened earth-seeker the universe which the youthful mind has with it always. ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... sanctum, at once, study, counting-house, library, and general receptacle of odds and ends connected with his calling. Here and there, to complete the jumble, were plaster casts of Shakspeare, Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon, suggestive of the presidency of literature over the materialism of commerce which marked the career of this singular being. By dint of great industry he began to flourish in business, and, at one time, could make a profit of L20 a-day without moving from his seat. During this prosperous period he built a handsome ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the sweet and humanizing influences of nature, has produced an unnatural and unhealthy mentality, to which we shall find no parallels in the past. Its chief characteristic is profound secularity or materialism. The typical town artisan has no religion and no superstitions; he has no ideals beyond the visible and tangible world of the senses. This of course opens an impassable gulf between him and Greek religion, and a still wider gulf between him ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... your production, though your name is not affixed to the title-page. The whole city, not only the priests, but the worldlings, are enraged over this book. They declare it is a monster of unbelief and materialism. If, in spite of all this, I accept you as my son-in-law, it is because I wish to show the world that I despise it, and am not in the slightest degree influenced by its prejudices and opinions, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Dualism introduced by Des Cartes—Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita—Hylozoism—Materialism —None of these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... which seemed to preserve the early Christians from the overwhelming materialism of the times was the asceticism which so early became prevalent. It had not been taught by Jesus, but seemed to arise from the necessities of the times. It was a fierce protest against the luxuries of an enervated age. The passion for dress and ornament, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... corruption in France in the reign of Louis Philippe. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed in history. The thirst for gold having obtained possession of minds agitated by impure desires, society terminated by sinking into a brutal materialism. The formula of selfishness, every one by himself and for himself, had been adopted by the sovereign as the maxim of state; and that maxim, alike hideous and fatal, had become the ruling principle of government. It ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus [107] accounted for the operation of the meat-jack [108] by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... education was so called individualistic. This ideal was supported equally by the churches and by science and art. Extreme individualism, developed in Germany more than in any other country, resulted in pride, pride resulted in materialism, materialism in pessimism. Put upon a dangerous and false base every evil result followed quite naturally. If my poor personality is of limitless value, without any effort and merit of my own, why should not I be proud? If the aim of the ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... the premier's favorite bugaboo examples of stage realism tried out in real life. But it was ridiculous to compare him with the stalwart figure sitting across the table, who had spoken the language of materialism ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer |
