"Materialist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... markedly different temperaments—Shelley intensely spiritual; Rossetti with a strong tinge of sensuousness, of "earthiness" in his nature; Browning, the keenly intellectual man of the world, and Patmore a curious mixture of materialist and mystic; yet to all four love is the secret of life, the one thing worth giving ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity, and A General History of the Christian Church to the Fall of the Western Empire. He was the discoverer of oxygen, and holds a high place in the history of science. He was a materialist, but believed in immortality; and he believed that Christ was a ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... a materialist if you will, for his "deism" meant no more to him than a distant blue sky giving the world space and perspective and free air; but a materialism that renders men kind and courteous, urbane and sweet-tempered, honest and clear-headed, is better ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the savage much beneath the materialist, instead of superior to him. The latter possesses, although he frequently abuses it, the faculty of self-control and forethought, which is entirely wanting in the former. (Lectures, No. 6.) Dunoyer, De la Liberte du Travaeil, liv. IV, ch. I, 8, an apology for the moral wholesomeness ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... road calls for the mythical third horse, always paid for but never seen. A man of Minoret's build, and Minoret's wealth, at the head of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the last vertebrae ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... qualified to serve as a common denominator for various aspects of experience. The very readiness with which we can picture the corpuscular scheme is a source of embarrassment to the seeker after unity. That which is so distinct is bristling with incompatibilities. The most aggressive materialist hesitates to describe thought as a motion of bodies in space. Energy, on the other hand, exacts little if anything beyond the character of measurable power. Thought is at any rate in some sense a power, and to some degree ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Foul surmises prevailed, especially in the latter part of his life, as to the means by which he possessed himself of the estates he then held in right of his lady, and those too that he enjoyed through the attainder of her uncle, Sir James Harrington. He acknowledged himself a freethinker and a materialist, a character of rare occurrence in those ages, showing him to be as daring in his opinions as in his pursuits. That the soul of man was like the winding up of a watch, and that when the spring was run down the man died, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... stands at present, how is it that a nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything—save the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be "nobly wild, not mad." Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... come forward boldly with a large and continuous policy of public works and immigration based on borrowed money. The scheme was Sir Julius Vogel's. As a politician this gentleman may not unfairly be defined as an imaginative materialist and an Imperialist of the school of which Cecil Rhodes is the best-known colonial exponent. His grasp of finance, sanguine, kindly nature, quick constructive faculty, and peculiarly persuasive manner rapidly brought him to the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the true meaning of a symbolical art, in an age of strict inquiry and tardy imagination, ought rather to surrender something of the fullness which his own faith perceives, than expose the fabric of his vision, too finely woven, to the hard handling of the materialist; and we sincerely regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions of our author's well-grounded statement of real significances, once of all men understood, because these are rashly blended with his own accidental perceptions ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... least hope of bettering its condition, for the false philosophy of materialism which they advocate gives to a man nothing to live for except his own animal nature. This philosophy says all is well as long as you dodge the sharp corners of the laws of your country. If the materialist can avoid paying fines, along with all other penalties of the laws of his country, what need he care for one course of life in preference to another? Do you say he has a conscience? Well, it may be that it is not seared so that he is past feeling. Very few men, I know, ever reach such ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... be a gross materialist to doubt that there are latent powers in man which man, in modern times, neglects, or knows not how to develop. I became suddenly conscious of a burning curiosity respecting this lonely traveler who traveled at an hour so strange. With no definite plan in mind, ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... of court. But materialism has supernaturalism for its nemesis. An abstract science, erecting itself into a false philosophy, leaves half our nature unsatisfied, and becomes morally bankrupt before its intellectual errors are exposed. Supernaturalism is the refuge of the materialist who wishes to make room for ideal values without abandoning the presuppositions of materialism. By dovetailing acts of God into the order of nature, he materialises the spiritual, but brings the Divine will into the world of experience, from which it had been expelled, and produces ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... wit, curiosity. The sceptical mind consequently denies that there is any connection between human destiny and the prognostications obtained by the seven or eight principal methods known to astrology; and the occult sciences, like many natural phenomena, are passed over by the freethinker or the materialist philosopher, id est, by those who believe in nothing but visible and tangible facts, in the results given by the chemist's retort and the scales of modern physical science. The occult sciences still exist; they are at work, but they make no progress, for the greatest intellects of two ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... which we have already found, like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion? By an inquiry setting out from a purely religious starting-point we have already reached conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of an extreme materialist. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... sanctimony with Tammany scoundrelism. It was an edifying union, yet did not comprise all of the forces linked in that historic coalition. The Church, as an institution, cast into it the whole weight of its influence and power. Soaked with the materialist spirit while dogmatically preaching the spiritual, dominated and pervaded by capitalist influences, the Church, of all creeds and denominations, lost no time in subtly aligning itself in its expected ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... agreed at once. But he insisted that the good air at Pavlofsk and the greenness would certainly cause a physical change for the better, and that my excitement, and my DREAMS, would be perhaps relieved. I remarked to him, with a smile, that he spoke like a materialist, and he answered that he had always been one. As he never tells a lie, there must be something in his words. His smile is a pleasant one. I have had a good look at him. I don't know whether I like him or not; and ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of Voltaire, of Hume, of Paine, and an admirer of Ingersoll, a doubter of scriptural authenticity, and almost a materialist in belief, this weird and piteous utterance came with peculiar effect. That she who uttered it had only told the tale of her own sad life and hope he understood at once, and what was of more force, that she believed and felt in her own heart that every word of her recital was heard ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... existence apart from our minds." The ablest modern thinkers, then, believe that the only real things that exist are the mind and God, and that the universe is only the infinitely varied manifestation of God in the human conscience. It is evident, then, that matter, the only thing the materialist concedes real existence, is simply an orderly phantasmagoria; and God and soul, which materialists regard as mere fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions that answer to ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... thinkers and investigators of both views of the world, the theistic and the pantheistic, the ideal and the materialistic,—have worked with equal merit, and have equally enjoyed its fruits, with perhaps the single exception of so pure a materialist as Ludwig Buechner, who, it seems, does not like to give up his old doctrine of force and matter as the two inseparable, equivalent, and equally eternal elements of the universe. That matter itself, even when looked upon from a purely ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... and palpable circumstances that surround them. This spirituality, whose place in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-stated, sinks wholly out of sight in connection with such heroes as the coarse and materialist Bonaparte, of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the not less coarse and materialist Frederick, about whom no misgiving is permitted to the loyal disciple. The admiration for military ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... which exists only as a sound, or a symbol. I will not repeat your words, M. du Pallet, outside this cloister, because the consequences to you would certainly be fatal; but it is only too clear that you are a materialist, and as such your fate must be decided by a Church Council, unless you prefer the stake by ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... unselfish. His spirituality separated him from sensuousness, and caused the selfish materialist 51:30 to hate him; but it was this spirituality which enabled Jesus to heal the sick, cast out evil, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... from my mother and family my doubts and halting faith in the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my classmate so completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became very grave. The entire scheme of Christianity disappeared from my firmament; but, in the immediately previous years, I had been a reader of Swedenborg, and I held immovably an intuition of immortality,—or, if the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... this syllabus is meant to place the character of Jesus in its true and high light, as no impostor himself, but a great reformer of the Hebrew code of religion, it is not to be understood that I am with him in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism: he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it, &c. &c. It is the innocence of his character, the purity and sublimity ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... philanthropic reports and on municipal committees (there were even rumours of its having been put up at a well-known club); and the rector of a wealthy parish, who was raising funds for a chantry, was known to have met him at dinner and to have stated afterward that "the man was not wholly a materialist." ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... have recognised the situation, as you did not, and realise that we have no right to obey nature if we know at the same time we are flouting civilisation. You think you're doing right by considering Sabina's future. You are a gross materialist, Raymond, and the end of that is always dust and ashes and defeated hopes. I won't bring religion into it, because that wouldn't carry weight with you; but I bring justice into it and your debt to the social order, that has made you what you ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Thoth. If Ra were the physical sun it would be obvious that he would see all that was being done on earth; it would rather be he who would inform Thoth. The conception of the gods must therefore have been not pantheistic or materialist, but solely as spiritual powers who needed to obtain information, and who only could act through intermediaries. Further, nothing can be done without the consent of Ra; Thoth is powerless over men, and ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... c. ii., s. iv., n. 2, p. 22.) The love that we bear to ourselves and our neighbour, in view of our coming from God and going to God, is called the love of charity. Charity differs from philanthropy in looking beyond the present life, and above creatures. A materialist and atheist may possess philanthropy, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... compromise with the Christian view. And so Father Uriel, who never wanted to be behind the times, became a rationalistic Christian, who was given the thankless task of combating Rationalism and himself. (Pause.) I'll shorten the whole sad history for Father Uriel's sake. In 1850 he again became a materialist and an enemy of Christianity. In 1870 he became a hypnotist, in 1880 a theosophist, and 1890 he wanted to shoot himself! I met him just at that time. He was sitting on a bench in Unter den Linden in Berlin, and he was blind. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... once dining in company with a French gentleman, who had been before dinner indulging in a number of free-thinking speculations, and had ended by avowing himself a materialist. "Very good soup, this," said Mr. Smith. "Oui, monsieur, c'est excellente," was the reply. "Pray, sir, do you believe in a cook?" ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... a thorough-going empiricist, and certainly to a thorough-going materialist, it will appear quite unnecessary to translate the obvious spectacle of the world, with oneself as a physical body in the centre of it, into mental symbols and pictorial representations of the above character. Of such an one ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the miserable calculations of the materialist instinct have led astray the nations, and God at last urges the world on toward believing Reason ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... I did not care to try and discuss the question with her. To begin with, my mind was too weary with all the emotions through which I had passed, and, in the second place, I knew that I should get the worst of it. It is weary work enough to argue with an ordinary materialist, who hurls statistics and whole strata of geological facts at your head, whilst you can only buffet him with deductions and instincts and the snowflakes of faith, that are, alas! so apt to melt in the hot embers of our troubles. How little chance, then, should I have against one whose brain ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... I ask to embolden me to go forwards is single, not double. It is necessary and not arbitrary, and it is one which the veriest sceptic or the most cynical materialist will recognise as sufficient. If I am to work out the Scheme I have outlined in this book, I must have ample means for doing so. How much would be required to establish this Plan of Campaign in all its fulness, overshadowing all the land with ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of the masses toward the secret and conspiratory methods of both the idealist anarchist and the materialist anarchist is the same. If the latter distrust the people, the people no less distrust them. If the masses would mob the terrorist who springs forth to commit some fearful act, the purpose of which they cannot in the least understand, they would, if possible, also mob the individual responsible for ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... "A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing. Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece by Pythagoras, one of the demigods ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... weighed down by demands for outward success. The perpetual changes, incident to our society, make the blood circulate freely through the body politic, and, if not favorable at present to the grace and bloom of life, they are so to activity, resource, and would be to reflection, but for a low materialist tendency, from which the women are generally exempt in themselves, though its existence, among the men, has a tendency to repress their impulses and make them doubt their instincts, thus often paralyzing their action ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Essay on Man, must at once be convinced, from ocular demonstration, of the infamous falshood of this assertion. That his lordship was a theist, and a disbeliever in miracles and revelations, cannot and need not be denied. But that he was no atheist, no materialist, his acknowledged good sense is, alone, a sufficient proof. I do think scepticism the best and truest philosophy; and I scruple not to own, I have called in question, one time or other, the truth of most things which cannot ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... somehow she felt that these words would not carry any added conviction to her mistress. And, indeed, they would not have done so, for Miss Farrow, though she was much too polite and too well-bred ever to have said so, even to herself, did not believe in a Supreme Being. She was a complete materialist. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... mangoes. Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... was drawn to this elderly man by very much the same kind of feelings as a son might have. And yet it is hardly possible to conceive two characters with less in common. The doctor was a dogmatic materialist—and remains so still—Frank was a Catholic. The doctor was scientific to his finger-tips—Frank romantic to the same extremities; the doctor was old and a confirmed stay-at-home—Frank was young, and an incorrigible gipsy. Yet so the matter ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Three principal schools of Logicians are commonly recognised: Nominalist, Conceptualist, and Materialist, who differ as to what it is that Logic really treats of: the Nominalists say, 'of language'; the Conceptualists, 'of thought'; the Materialists, 'of relations of fact.' To illustrate these positions let us take authors who, if some of them are now neglected, have ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... that it is idle to reason about what we cannot conceive, it is sufficient answer to say that man cannot help it. The scientist and the materialist in the ardent pursuit of knowledge soon experience the necessity of indulging in assumptions concerning force and matter, the hypothetical ether and molecules, atoms and vortices, which are as purely metaphysical as any assumptions ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... proud of that? Once filled with pride I will soon be filled also with contempt for other men. Selfishness and denial of God will follow my pride; this is called by a scientific word materialism. Being a materialist, as long as I possess a certain amount of intellectual and physical strength, I will be proud of myself. But as soon as my body or spirit are affected by any illness (it may be only a headache or toothache), I will plunge into a dark ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... have attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day. As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, "Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist's own." Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this connection these should be ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of finding a means of exposure; but the whole performance had been so transparently open and aboveboard that Professor Marcus Hartley, D.Sc., M.A., F.R.S., etc., etc., felt that, as a consistent materialist, he had not been given a fair chance. Still, he did not despair; and by the time he got back into his own den he had resolved that when it did come, as of course it must do sooner or later, the exposure of Phadrig the Adept and the vindication ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion. I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But—but I think it's heart-rending that ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... your nature,—no! You have made your body like a transparent scabbard through which the glitter of the soul-sword is almost visible. But I am different. I am so much of a materialist that I like to pull down Heaven to the warm bosom of Earth and make them mingle. You would lift up Earth to Heaven! Ah, that is difficult! Even Christ came down! It is the chief thing I admire in Him, that He 'descended ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist or a pantheist, a materialist or an idealist, a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer. The one thing on which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Hum-Drum was a Materialist, and Kopy-Keck was a Spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty; the latter had generally the first ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... directly to the youth and put her hand on his shoulder with motherly freedom and kindliness. Beyond even the word of sympathy is the touch of sympathy, and it often conveys to the fainting heart a subtle power to hope and trust again which the materialist cannot explain. The Divine Physician often touched those whom he healed. He laid his hand fearlessly on the leper from whom all shrank with inexpressible dread. The moral leper who trembled under Mrs. Arnot's ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... explanations which either contradict or transcend human reason; but he insists that human reason is one of the causal facts which he has to consider; and this brings him into conflict with both the mystic and the materialist. ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... wet if they've come from the bottom of the sea?" demanded Freckles the materialist. "Why isn't ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... materialist. Agatha says that I am a rank one. I tell her that is an excellent reason for shortening our engagement, since I am in such urgent need of her spirituality. And yet I may claim to be a curious example of the effect of education upon temperament, for by nature I am, unless I deceive ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that you are a crass materialist. I am beginning to despair of ever inculcating in you any respect for the finer and subtler things of life. I must try Bolton. Bolton, have you ever seen a finer moon? Remember that I won't move a step until you have carefully considered the matter ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... in all the grandeur and in all the narrowness of that unfashionable and misunderstood creed. The time had not come for "advanced thinkers" to repudiate a personal God and supernatural agencies. Then an atheist, or even a deist, and indeed a materialist of the school of Democritus and Lucretius, was unknown. John Milton was one of the representative men of the Puritans of the seventeenth century,—men who colonized New England, and planted the germs of institutions which have spread ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... came the footsteps, then the room door opened with a protest of rusty hinges, and Ruan saw the Parson standing on the threshold. A woman's face, pale and strained, swam out of the darkness behind, and to Ruan, materialist though he was, came the thought that the pale blur looked like the face of someone drowning in a black flood. He put the idea aside and nodded slightly at the woman. She gave a gasp of relief, and, pushing by the priest, walked over ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... sharply: "Please don't quote what Serviss says. His view is that of the worldly wise materialist. You should listen to ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... (perfect) inaction are both serviceable in that respect (i.e., for procuring emancipation). Indeed, both are sure means for the attainment of emancipation. The man, however, that is wise, achieveth success by knowledge (inaction). On the other hand, the materialist acquireth merit (by action) and (as the consequence thereof) emancipation. He hath also (in course of his pursuit) to incur sin. Having obtained again fruits of both virtue and vice which are transitory, (heaven having its end as also hell in respect of the virtuous ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... materialist conception of history by Marx—La Misere de la Philosophie, a criticism of Proudhon—Marx's first essay in economic science—His frank recognition of the Ricardians—Marx in England becomes familiar with the work of the Ricardians from whom he is accused of "pillaging" ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... I said, rolling him on his back and punching him on the chest till his breathing became stertorous. "You don't see the sense of it, I know. But then you've got none of the finer feelings. You're a jolly good dog, Robert, but you're a rank materialist. Bones and cheese and potatoes with gravy over them make you happy. You don't know what it is to be in love. You'd better get right side up ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... would listen to nothing, and he killed the boy!—I tell you, sir, I bathed the child's corpse in my tears, crying out to the Power I do not know, and which is above us all! I, who do not believe in God!—(For if I were not a materialist, I should not ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... one may have no difficulty in accepting the spirit of man as an entity, for the phenomena of ratiocination are altogether so widely different from all physical phenomena that they can hardly be explained by any of the physical forces known to us. The materialist, who tells us that consciousness, sensation, thought, and the spontaneous power of the will, so peculiar to man and to the higher animals, are altogether so many outcomes of certain conditions of matter and nothing else, makes at best ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of purple moorland lying round us; air and scenery were good to breathe and to look on; and now, as the three of us sat on a turf seat outside the cottage door enjoying the soft sleepy inaction of the afternoon, a question of mine concerning the folk-lore of the district, after which, hardened materialist though I called myself, I was conscious of a secret hankering, had drawn the foregoing remark from the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... peace nowadays is neither possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite pole of speculation—from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of the immediate might have led ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... a man is a scientist, a philosopher or a materialist, and the world will know at once what we mean, but if we say that he is a transcendentalist we leave an open doorway for investigation; there is something yet to be learned about him, something that no one knows ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... authority and wealth, and on the other to consolidate his own by establishing a firm administration, he neglected no means of acquiring popularity. A fervent disciple of Mahomet when among fanatic Mussulmans, a materialist with the Bektagis who professed a rude pantheism, a Christian among the Greeks, with whom he drank to the health of the Holy Virgin, he made everywhere partisans by flattering the idea most in vogue. But if he constantly changed both opinions and language when dealing with subordinates ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... horse-shoe of our own times, or protects against hostile will-power, and especially against the evil eye. This curious and widely-spread superstition was probably the raison d'etre of most of the amulets worn or carried by Romans. A modern Italian, even if he be a complete sceptic and materialist, will probably be found to have some amulet about him against the evil eye, "just to be on the safe side."[119] A list of amulets, both Greek and Roman, will be found in the Dictionary of Antiquities, and in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopaedie, s.v. "amulet," and it is not necessary ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... the materialist, what this vital principle is, and he answers: "It is the all-pervading force that is modified by the organic structure." That is, in his philosophy, the "vital force is produced by the organism," and the "organism is produced by the vital principle?" So, being at the last limit ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... supposed to be producing nothing but motion; mind-changes nothing but mind-changes: both producing both simultaneously, neither could be what it is without the other, because without the other neither could be the cause which in fact it is. Impossible, therefore, is the supposition of the materialist that consciousness is adventitious, or that in the absence of mind changes of brain could be what they are; for it belongs to the very causation of these changes that they should have a mental side. The use of mind to animals is thus rendered ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... until Germany is either strong enough to refuse to pay or ruined beyond the possibility of paying? Meanwhile Russia, reduced to a scrap of fish and a pint of cabbage soup a day, has fallen into the hands of rulers who perceive that Materialist Communism is at all events more effective than Materialist Nihilism, and are attempting to move in an intelligent and ordered manner, practising a very strenuous Intentional Selection of workers as fitter to survive than idlers; whilst the Western Powers ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... panegyrist breaks out into eulogy of "the grandest hero of free-thought," and claims for Bruno the proud distinction of materialist. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... than you know," said Belle solemnly. "If I hadn't taken in some of the Brotherhood ideas I wonder where that pretty, innocent young girl would have been by this time. Would you like me to go back and be as I was in the old days, a rank materialist, caring for nothing but dress, dancing, and having a good time? You know you wouldn't, David. You know as well as I do that Theosophy has been the making of me, and through me it shall be ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... a few minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the sordid commonplaces of man. He was standing before a glaringly printed bill, one of many that were ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... subscribed to; for the poor man had pined at the loss of his favorite patients,—though Heaven knows they did not add much to his income. And as for my father, there was no man who diverted him more than Squills, though he accused him of being a materialist, and set his whole spiritual pack of sages to worry and bark at him, from Plato and Zeno ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... two 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, without attempting a philosophy of the Unconditioned at all. But it is also possible, and in itself natural, when such a philosophy is attempted, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... of the sort were pitched overboard long ago. I suppose one is bound to be illogical on one point, if only to prove to oneself the absolutism of one's logic on all others. Thus do I, otherwise sane and consistent realist, materialist, pessimist, cling to my one dream and ideal—take it out, dandle it, nourish and cherish it, with weakly sentimental faithfulness. To do so is ludicrous. But then my being here at all, calmly considered, is ludicrous. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The materialist ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... other world and material proofs, what next! And if you come to that, does proving there's a devil prove that there's a God? I want to join an idealist society, I'll lead the opposition in it, I'll say I am a realist, but not a materialist, he he!" ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... may not be an easy task at present; but I am, nevertheless, convinced there is a world apart from matter—a superphysical plane with which part of us, at least, is in some way connected, and I discredit the materialist's dogma, partly because something in my nature compels me to an opposite conclusion, and partly because certain phenomena I have experienced, cannot, I am certain, have been produced ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... point suddenly collapses into "a dreadful croaker," styling his own age "barren, brainless, soulless, faithless." [4] But the reason is, of course, that "he suffered from chronic dyspepsia" and was unable "to eat his three square meals a day." A very consistent explanation for an avowed materialist, but slightly destructive to the value of his own conclusions, being a two-edged sword. Indeed he almost allows as much. "For such dyspeptic patients there is an excuse. Pessimism is probably as inevitably their creed, as optimism is for the more fortunate mortals who enjoy ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the transient or terrestrial passion that remained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland; and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at Worcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist matter in both countries—a mere brigandage of barons; and even John Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton and Mary ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied with that explanation was treated to that very "plain argument"—"confound you eternally"—wherewith Lord Peter overcomes the doubts of his brothers in the "Tale of a Tub." "Materialist" was the mildest term applied to him—fortunate if he escaped pelting with "infidel" and "atheist." There may be scientific Rip Van Winkles about, who still hold by vital force; but among those biologists who have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century "vital force" no longer figures ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the causes of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... horrible for Dorn, because it seemed a realization of his imagined visions. He felt like a child among old savages of a war tribe. Yet he was fascinated by this close-up suggestion of man to man in battle, of German to American, of materialist to idealist, and beyond all control was the bursting surge of his blood. The exercises he had gone through, the trick he had acquired, somehow had strange ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... firm and serious, although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made him bald before his time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a cuirass; he was a materialist ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... replied—"Primmins and a subordinate are on the way hither with various creature comforts. Music and Poetry must pause awhile. Yet why should there be a pause? It is for this that I am a follower of Omar Kayyam. He was a materialist as well as a spiritualist, and his music admits of the aforesaid creature comforts as much as the exalted and subtle philosophies and ironies ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... everywhere, it haunts him. He sees it on the horizon of landscapes, and it crosses his path on lonely roads. When it is not hovering over his head, it is circling round him as around Gustave Moreau's pale youth.... Can he, the determined materialist, really fear the stupor of eternal sleep, or the dispersion of the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... speaking of the St.-Medard manifestations, says,—"We have of these pretended miracles a vast collection, which may brave the most determined incredulity. Its author, Carre de Montgeron, is a magistrate, a man of gravity, who up to that time had been a professed materialist,—on insufficient grounds, it is true, but yet a man who certainly had no expectation of making his fortune by becoming a Jansenist. An eye-witness of the facts he relates, and of which he had an opportunity of judging dispassionately and disinterestedly, his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... existed long before the Christian aera,—is the strongest extrinsic argument against the Arians, Socinians, and Unitarians, in proof that St. John must have meant to deceive his readers, if he did not use them in the known and received sense. To a Materialist indeed, or to those who deny all knowledges not resolvable into notices from the five senses, these terms as applied to spiritual beings must appear inexplicable or senseless. But so must spirit. To me, (why do I say to me?) to Bull, to ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ago a friend of ours, who is an LL.D., had to undergo this "purgation," and it nearly cost him his reason. When we remonstrated with him, pointing out that in his case it was simply foolish to submit, he being a materialist by conviction and not caring a straw for Brahmanism, he replied that he was bound to do so for ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... history of heroes and villains; this history full of pugnacious ethics and of nothing else, is the right kind of history for children. I have often wondered how the scientific Marxians and the believers in "the materialist view of history" will ever manage to teach their dreary economic generalisations to children: but I suppose they will have no children. Dickens's history will always be popular with the young; almost as popular as Dickens's novels, and for the same reason: because ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... so from the materialist's own stand-point. Time, they all agree, is practically infinite—past time, as well as future; while matter is susceptible of an infinite number of diverse movements, changes, modifications, combinations, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... greatness to be achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and purity of purpose—a reward allotted to the just. This is fanciful, may be, but it is not illogical. And without being either a Christian or a Materialist, without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity, surely the best emotion that our natures know—pity—must be large enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in view of the endless suffering, the continual injustice, the appalling contrasts, with which the world ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... outer world, transcendent, a thing in itself; all else is our doing; and if you wish to call it matter or the material world, well and good, but at least it is not the prius of mind, but the posterius, that which is demanded by the mind, but is always unattainable. Even the professional materialist ascribes inertia to matter. The atoms, if he assumes atoms, are motionless, unless disturbed. From whence comes this disturbance? It must proceed from something outside the atoms, or the matter, so that we can ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... speaking, the Roman element stands for energy, material progress, authority, and the Greek for thought; the Roman is the British Philistine, the Greek the man of culture. Lucian is conscious enough of the distinction, and there is no doubt where his own preference lies. He may be a materialist, so far as he is anything, in philosophy; but in practice he puts the things of the mind before the things ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... regiment of women,' as the old writer hath it. Look at the diseases from which we are suffering—materialism and hysteria. The one has been intensified and extended, the other has newly declared itself, since women came to the front. No materialist like a woman; give her a voice in the control of things, and good-bye to all our ideals. Hard cash, military glory, glittering and clanging triumph—these be the gods of a woman's heart. Thought and talk drowned by a scream; nerves worried into fiddle-strings. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Chesterfield or his deafness, but which contains a good deal of Voltaire's crispest writing, especially the definition of that English freedom which he sometimes used to extol. With thirty guineas a year,[359] the materialist doctor Sidrac informs the unfortunate Goudman, who has lost a living by the said deafness, "on peut dire tout ce qu'on pense de la compagnie des Indes, du parlement, de nos colonies, du roi, de l'etat en general, de l'homme et de Dieu—ce qui ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... will be better understood if we place it beside "materialism," which expresses an opposite view of life. The difference may be summarized in the statement that the idealist is a man of spirit, or idea, in that he trusts the evidence of the soul; while the materialist is a man of flesh, or sense, in that he believes only what is evident to the senses. One judges the world by himself; the other judges himself by ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... for to define is necessarily to limit, and we are thinking of the illimitable. But we ought to understand clearly that to disbelieve in God is an impossibility; everyone believes in God if he believes in his own existence. The blankest materialist that ever lived, whoever he may have been, must have affirmed God even in the act of denying Him. Professor Haeckel declares his belief in God on every page of his "Riddle of the Universe," the famous book in which he says ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... gross materialist as I hurried home to my roses and red-thorn, leaving him to that visionary garden and those ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... are ghosts. I do not mean that they are unreal: I believe in ghosts. So does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finest literature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deep sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. But Meredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is a disembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be an embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves one of the two or three things which most of the Victorians did not understand—the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... equal to the demands of the present day, it will be by moving out of their grooves of worn-out tradition and routine, and by enlarging their teachings so that the men they send out into the world may be more equal than most of them appear now to meet in argument the Positivist, Rationalist and Materialist, or whatever the disciple of the modern schools of philosophy may call himself. The man of true liberality and faith in the truth of his religious principles must be fully prepared to allow the freest expression ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... accepted by minds of the most divergent religious and philosophical profession. No fundamental or recondite admissions are proposed here, but only that the every-day life for every-day purposes has this shape and nature. The utter materialist may say that life to him is a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, a chance kinking in the universal fabric of matter. It is not our present business to confute him. The fact remains this is the form the kinking has taken. The believer, sedulous for his soul's welfare, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... remarkable man, and that for many reasons. Like almost all medical men he is a sceptic and a materialist, but, at the same time, he is a genuine poet—a poet always in deeds and often in words, although he has never written two verses in his life. He has mastered all the living chords of the human heart, just as one learns ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... inhibition plays a terrible part in the history of cowardice and of unsuccessful love. No man can be brave without blood to sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the German materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus. The fainting lover must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend him her smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks. Porphyro got over his faintness before he ran away with Madeline, and Cesar Birotteau ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the arts, and that undoubtedly which possesses the greatest future, presents enormous attractions to the bourgeoisie. In the first place, it obviates the necessity of conversation; it is not necessary to know whether your neighbor is a sceptic or a believer, a materialist or a spiritualist; no possible argument can arise concerning the meaning and metaphysics of life. Instead of war, there is peace. The music lover may argue, but his conceptions are entirely circumscribed by ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... explaining this grand work—which I shall come to hear again to-morrow with a fuller comprehension, thanks to you, of its structure and its effect—you have frequently spoken of the color of the music, and of the ideas it depicts; now I, as an analyst, a materialist, must confess that I have always rebelled against the affectation of certain enthusiasts, who try to make us believe that music paints with tones. Would it not be the same thing if Raphael's admirers spoke of his ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... a surgeon, just as I was a materialist. When I was young, I was caught by the lure of so-called science, and became a surgeon, because it was precise, definite,—and I am something of a dab at it now—ask the boys here! ... But surgery is artisan work. Younger hands will always beat you. Pallegrew in there is as good as I am ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... was really both sensitive and imaginative, used to tell Margaret that he was a realist. Logotheti, who was by nature, talent and education a thorough materialist, loved to believe that he possessed both a rich imagination and ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... general, the next day, as he sat in the mill, going over the plans of the college buildings with Barclay, who was chairman of the board of directors, "John, why are you so crass, so gross a materialist? You have enough money—why don't you stop getting it and do something ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... always quite consistently[201]—assumed a correspondence of mind and matter, he could very well give these terms an indirect importance for psychical evolution. Spencer has always, in my opinion with full right, repudiated the ascription of materialism. He is no more a materialist than Spinoza. In his Principles of Psychology (Sec. 63) he expressed himself very clearly: "Though it seems easier to translate so-called matter into so-called spirit, than to translate so-called spirit into so-called matter—which latter is indeed ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... tendencies of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to religion and morality. Heavy missiles were hurled—such phrases as "sapping the foundations," "breaking down the bulwarks," and the like; and, withal, a new missile was used with much effect—the epithet "materialist." ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national life dying or dead around them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very shame—cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadian simplicity and innocence? When I read Petronius ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... again shall I know the misery of finding myself alone. Even if I die before you, my Perdita, treasure up my ashes till yours may mingle with mine. It is a foolish sentiment for one who is not a materialist, yet, methinks, even in that dark cell, I may feel that my inanimate dust mingles with yours, and thus have a companion in decay." In her resentful mood, these expressions had been remembered with acrimony and disdain; ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... example that might be cited to prove the incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, were of scarcely greater significance than ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than that implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism, though very shocking, having a note of Calvanistic orthodoxy; but, if a man is a materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of man, respectable folks look upon him as an ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... course not, you wretched materialist. I sold it in the first good market I came to. No good ever came of material possessions, and always much payment of storage bills. But I have a collection of memories ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... order of the universe, the ethical responsibility of the present to all the future, the immeasurable consequence of every thought and deed, the ultimate disparition of evil, and the power of attainment to conditions of infinite memory and infinite vision,—cannot be termed either an atheist or a materialist, except by bigotry and ignorance. Profound as may be the difference between his religion and our own, in respect of symbols and modes of thought, the moral conclusions reached in either case ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... force, an agency, that the materialist cannot calculate, weigh, or measure, or laugh scornfully ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... inner man or soul expresses itself in the physical universe. Various materialistic theories have been given in the past, trying to explain the mighty phenomena of dreams, but these theories have always been more or less unsatisfactory. Why? Because the-materialist tries to explain the riddle of human existence without an individual human spirit his explanation ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... more of a fatalist than a materialist. In my heart I feel, I know, you are wrong. What you say seems so plausible as to be true; but my very soul revolts at it all. There is a deep undertone of sadness in your words, and they point to ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... on the actual meaning of the manners and customs and morals of England? Is it not the deification of matter? a well-defined, carefully considered Epicureanism, judiciously applied? No matter what may be said against the statement, England is materialist,—possibly she does not know it herself. She lays claim to religion and morality, from which, however, divine spirituality, the catholic soul, is absent; and its fructifying grace cannot be replaced by any counterfeit, however well presented it may be. England possesses in the highest ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... to make the distinction in his favor that a thing might be true in religion and false in philosophy. Thus he denied his belief in demons and spirits as a philosopher, while affirming that he believed in them as a Christian. He was in fact a materialist. He placed Christianity, Mohammedanism and Judaism on the same level, broadly hinting that all ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the university, an out-and-out materialist, a psychologist who made life interesting for those who agreed with William James. His investigations of ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... are innumerable, multifarious, interwoven, and infinitely perplexing, and you may spend a happy life in unravelling their relations and devising their evolutions; but until you have looked through them and seen the ideas that are behind them you are a mere materialist and a blind worker. The soul of Nature is hid ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton) |
