"Metaphysical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... English admirer described as "the grand secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatising, p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical discoveries were the sole permanent contribution he made to knowledge, though his metaphysical and physical systems are only of historical interest, his genius exercised a more extensive and transforming influence on the future development of thought than any other ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... cross-examination, presently made it apparent that we do not always know what we mean by art and what by nature; that the ideas are so mixed in civilized society, and the words so inaccurately used, both in common conversation, and in the writings of philosophers, that no metaphysical prism can separate or reduce them to their primary meaning. Next he touched upon the distinction between art and artifice. The conversation branched out into remarks on grace and affectation, and thence to the different theories of beauty and taste, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... a most remarkable kind. Another set of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy always seems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex. Another section of Poems of the Past and Present is severely, almost didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted ball," "so ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... phlegmatic, cautious, sincere, fond of business, economical, and attached to Whig principles. He was fortunate in his wife, Queen Caroline, one of the most excellent women of the age, learned, religious, charitable, and sensible; the patroness of divines and scholars; fond of discussion on metaphysical subjects, and a ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... books, which appears to me both just and valuable. The prejudice against such knowledge, he said, and the custom of opposing it to that which is learnt by practice, originated in those times when books were almost confined to theology, and to logical and metaphysical subtleties; but that at present there is scarcely any practical knowledge which is not to be found in books. The press is the means by which intelligent men now converse with each other, and persons of all classes and all pursuits convey each the contribution of his individual ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... that these three interpretations, the spiritualistic, the experimental, and the metaphysical, are in formal opposition with that which I have set forth earlier in these pages. They deny the supposition that the nervous system serves us as an intermediary with nature, and that it transforms nature before bringing it to our ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... it deserved to be called something. But a more extraordinary circumstance is, that, though we every day see the most gigantic consequences result from what may be termed, paradoxically, less than nothing, there are certain metaphysical wiseacres who still stick to the old maxim, in spite of their own senses, even that of feeling, and declare it to be true gospel. Let them read the tale of real every-day life we are now to lay before them, and then say, if they dare, that it is impossible that anything ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, are distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in it are certain ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... firmly established its evolution always follows similar lines. Ritual becomes increasingly elaborate: metaphysical dogma grows too subtle for a layman's comprehension. Commercialism spreads from the market to the sanctuary, whose guardians exploit the all-pervading fear of the unknown to serve their lust of luxury ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... fascinated by word-lore. The Greeks and Romans played with etymology in a somewhat metaphysical fashion, a famous example of which is the derivation of lucus a non lucendo. Medieval writers delight in giving amazing information as to the origin of the words they use. Their method, which may be called learned folk-etymology, consists in attempting ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... the students sat about Miss Garvice's tea-pot and drank tea or smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The Scotchman informed Ann Veronica that your view of beauty necessarily depended on your metaphysical premises, and the young man with the Russell-like hair became anxious to distinguish himself by telling the Japanese student that Western art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that among the higher organisms the tendency was ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... which has more than, any other harassed metaphysical reasoners, but especially theologians, and upon which it is probable that no very satisfactory conclusion will ever be reached by the human faculties, is the Origin ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... but a great nation, among whom a cool selfish regard to personal comfort and enjoyment has been deliberately substituted for religious feeling, and where it is generally esteemed reasonable and wise to oppose and wrestle down, by metaphysical arguments, the natural and becoming sentiments of piety, as they arise in the human breast, is hitherto, and it is to be hoped will long continue, an anomaly in the ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... has been said to show that what we have here is only the absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of an all-dissolving metaphysical system. The most obvious meaning of the phrase 'Son of God,' its moral and spiritual, its real religious meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel claimed that the Nicene trinitarians had ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day's experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we angled as often as not in one another's baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were oppressed rather than stimulated by the weight of the inheritance. They possessed an indefinite power of accumulation, but they rarely ascended to general principles, or struck out new and important truths; at least, this is certain in regard to their metaphysical labors. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... local interest, the party spirit of a State, or of a prevailing faction in a State? Every man, of plain, unsophisticated understanding, who hears the question, will give such an answer as will preserve the Union. Metaphysical subtlety, in pursuit of an impracticable theory, could alone have devised one that ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... elements of Character,—the foundation upon which hope and charity are to be elevated. How important, then, is it that this foundation should be wisely laid! Many persons think much in relation to religious subjects from the love of metaphysical reasoning; while their lives are not influenced by the doctrines they profess. This is an abuse of Thought, one of its fruits is bigotry. The more strongly a man confirms himself in any doctrine that he does not apply to life, the more elevated he becomes ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... arose, whether her abilities were naturally more vivacious than those of her companions, or whether they had been more early developed by accidental excitation, we cannot pretend to determine, lest we should involve ourselves in the intricate question respecting natural genius—a metaphysical point, which we shall not in this place stop to discuss. Till the world has an accurate philosophical dictionary (a work not to be expected in less than half a dozen centuries), this question will never be decided to general ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... notice, mark; take notice of, take cognizance of be aware of, be conscious of; realize; appreciate; ruminate &c. (think) 451; fancy &c. (imagine) 515. Adj. intellectual[Relating to intellect], mental, rational, subjective, metaphysical, nooscopic[obs3], spiritual; ghostly; psychical[obs3], psychological; cerebral; animastic[obs3]; brainy; hyperphysical[obs3], superphysical[obs3]; subconscious, subliminal. immaterial &c. 317; endowed with reason. Adv. in petto. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... powers to be exercised by as many agents as he may think proper, under such conditions and with such limitations as he may impose; but to surrender any portion of his sovereignty to another is to annihilate the whole. The Senator from Delaware (Mr. Clayton) calls this metaphysical reasoning, which he says he cannot comprehend. If by metaphysics he means that scholastic refinement which makes distinctions without difference, no one can hold it in more utter contempt than I do; but if, on the contrary, ...
— Remarks of Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina on the bill to prevent the interference of certain federal officers in elections: delivered in the Senate of the United States February 22, 1839 • John C. Calhoun
... my father at all, only because I had received all my impressions about him into the very centre of my preconceptions about certain grand objects—about the Tropics, about summer evenings, and about some mysterious glory of the grave. It seems metaphysical to say so, but yet it is true that I knew him, speaking scholastically, through a priori ideas—I remember him transcendenter—and, were it not for the midsummer night's dream which glorified his return, to me he would have remained forever ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... settle here the metaphysical and somewhat theological question (about which so much has already been said and written), whether once in the Union means always in the Union,—agreeably to the formula, Once in grace always in grace,—it is obvious to common sense ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of metaphysical intercourse with the ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... most perfect philosophy of the natural kind, only staves off our IGNORANCE a little longer; as, perhaps, the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind, serves only to discover larger portions of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... his metaphysical opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... originated in the following circumstances. I met Werner at S——, in the midst of a numerous and noisy circle of young people. Towards the end of the evening the conversation took a philosophico-metaphysical turn. We discussed the subject of convictions, and each of us had some different ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... example be not more generally followed than it is, the fault must lie with some scribe or other who counteracts its influence by propagating opinions, and recommending studies, of a different, and less tasteful, cast of character. I am fearful that there are too many politico-economical, metaphysical, and philosophical miasmata, floating in the atmosphere of Scotland's metropolis, to render the climate there just now favourable to the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... onwards educationists, deriving their views, I suppose, from some metaphysical or theological conception of human equality, speak continually of the "mind of the child" as if the young of our species conformed to a single type. If the general spread of biological knowledge serves merely to expose that foolish ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Constitution abolishing slavery.... I thought it much better, if it were possible, to restore the Union without the necessity for a violent quarrel among its friends as to whether certain States have been in or out of the Union during the war,—a merely metaphysical question, and one unnecessary to be forced into discussion."[58] So the bill remained untouched ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... shall meet this want must have theory; yet the theory must not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the concrete facts with which conduct has ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... two really considerable men in the republic of letters from the sixth to the middle of the eleventh century—John, surnamed Scotus, or Erigena, a native of Ireland, and Gerbert, who became pope by the name of Sylvester II.: the first endowed with a bold and acute metaphysical genius, the second excellent, for the time when he lived, in mathematical science and useful mechanical invention" ("Europe during the Middle ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... four several chapels, observable on one side of a main street; while nearly adjoining is the church of St. Paul. There are thus every Sunday, in simultaneous local devotion, the ceremonial Catholics, the moral Unitarians, the metaphysical Calvinists, the serious disciples of John Wesley, and the spiritual members of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... this question:—What do people mean in a Christian land by the word 'religion?' My purpose is not to propound any metaphysical problem; I wish only, in the plainest possible sense, to ask, and to have an answer, upon this one point—how much is understood by that obscure term,* 'religion,' when used by a Christian? Only I am punctilious upon one demand, viz., that ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Sandoe's depth," Adrian replied. "Consider that phrase, 'Ophelia of the Ages'! Is not Brawnley, like a dozen other leading spirits—I think that's your term just the metaphysical Hamlet to drive her mad? She, poor maid! asks for marriage and smiling babes, while my lord lover stands questioning the Infinite, and rants ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the outset: What effect had secession had upon the States guilty of it; was it or was it not an act of state suicide? This question was warmly debated in Congress and out. Although ridiculed in some quarters as a mere metaphysical quibble, it lay at the bottom of men's political thinking on reconstruction, and their views of the proper answer to it powerfully influenced ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the pensive sage with a grave shake of his head,—"Judged by the very finest lines of metaphysical argument, you cannot really be sure whether you behold in me a Person or a Phantasm! You THINK you see me,—I THINK I see you,—but after all it is only an IMPRESSION mutually shared,—an impression which like many another, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... processes and methods of reasoning fits in the metaphysical framework of thought. To dialectics, however, which takes in the objects and their conceivable images above all in their connections, their sequence, their motion, their rise and decline, processes like ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... forms, with their high lights all white, the moment he does this in a haughty way, and thinks himself drawing in the great style, because he leaves high lights white, it is all over with him; and half the degradation of art in modern times has been owing to endeavors, much fostered by the metaphysical Germans, to see things without color, as if color were a vulgar thing, the result being, in most students, that they end by not being able to see anything at all; whereas the true and perfect way of studying any object is simply to look what its color ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... a metaphysical rather than a scientific approach is required. It's a matter of trying to satisfy the patient's needs. At times, it is helpful to allow the patient to attend a class in self-hypnosis. Being able to communicate and identify with ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... Professor muttered these metaphysical and philological reflections, the seaman was stripping himself to ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... visible a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt a sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another, and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy. The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or Schopenhauer. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... stream, and for hours, under the shade of some tree, read the books of fiction which came to our possession. After each book had been gone through, we discussed its merits, chapter by chapter, studied the characters and the plot; all this more from a metaphysical than a literary point ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... promotion of piety disposed him to look with distrust upon all metaphysical systems of theology, and all schemes of virtue and happiness purely rational; and, therefore, it was not long before he was persuaded that the positions of Pope, as they terminated, for the most part, in natural religion, were intended to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Nottinghamshire, England, April 22nd, 1816. Educated at the public schools of Nottingham, and at Glasgow University, he studied law, and at nineteen entered Lincoln's Inn. In 1840 he was admitted to the bar. But his vocation in life appears to have been metaphysical ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... cried Oxenden. "That reminds me of the German commentators who find in the Agamemnon of AEschylus or the OEdipus of Sophocles or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes of which the authors could never have dreamed, and give us a metaphysical, beer-and-tobacco, High-Dutch Clytemnestra or Antigone or Lady Macbeth. No, my boy, More was a simple sailor, and had no idea of ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... the spirits of his bygone days, with this thought: that every step of the way—whether in the city or in the desert—Jesus Christ will be by his side. Such a preaching will be sweeter to him a thousand times than perplexing metaphysical discussions. ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... to the first question, I must admit that Christ, in contrast to Buddha, entertained not a transcendental and metaphysical, but a very material and literal idea of equality. It is true that He pronounced the poor in spirit blessed; but the rich, who according to Him would find it harder to get into heaven than it is for a rope of ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... patriotism. We must not, however, be deterred by the nebulous character of some of the ideals which are floating through our minds. Ideals are always nebulous, and always resisted by the narrow sort of practical men who suggest that we are metaphysical dreamers unaware of the stern facts of life. Nevertheless, the actual progress of the world depends on the visions of idealists, and when the time comes for the reconstitution of Europe on a new basis we must already have imaginatively thought out some of the ends towards which ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... and sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy and unsubstantial, in his mode of development, to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to a satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual, or possibly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a scientific and a metaphysical teleology. Statement of the latter in legitimate terms. Criticism of this statement legitimately made on the side of Atheism as being gratuitous. Impartial ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... as great a stumbling-block to modern thought as they were a help to the contemporaries of Jesus. The study of Jesus' life cannot ignore this fact, nor make little of it. It is fair to insist, however, that the question is one of evidence, not of metaphysical possibility. Men are wisely slow to-day to claim that they can tell what are the limits of the possible. If the question is one of evidence, it is in an important sense true that the evidence for miracle in the life of Jesus is appreciable only when that life is viewed in its completeness. The miracles ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... salvation, rather than the salvation of others. Instead of reaching to the beatific vision, they became ignorant, narrow, and visionary; and, when learned, they fought for words and not for things. They were advocates of subtile and metaphysical distinctions in theology, rather than of those practical duties and simple faith which primitive Christianity enjoined. Monastic life, no less than the schools of Alexandria, was influential in creating a divinity which gave as great authority to dogmas that are the result of intellectual deductions, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... people too often fancy belong to the glorious side of His character. They draw distinctions between 'grace' and 'glory,' and think that the latter applies mainly to what I might call the physical and the metaphysical, and less to the moral, attributes of the divine nature. We adore power, and when it is expanded to infinity we think that it is the glory of God. But my text delivers us from all such misconceptions. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... but Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.' But the dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. Such metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works' and 'crucifying the Son of God afresh' were not successfully brought down to the level ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... I have written may prove fairly consistent and intelligible; but I have felt keenly the disadvantage of having missed the systematic training in metaphysics given by the Oxford school of Literae Humaniores, and also the difficulty (perhaps I should say the presumption) of addressing metaphysical arguments to an audience which included several eminent philosophers. I wish also that I had had time for a more thorough study of Fechner's works; for his system, so far as I understand it, seems to me to have a great interest and value as a scheme of philosophical ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... De Maistre's mind was of the highest type of those who fill the air with the arbitrary assumptions of theology, and the abstractions of the metaphysical stage of thought. At every point you meet the peremptorily declared volition of a divine being, or the ontological property of a natural object. The French Revolution is explained by the will of God; and the kings ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of that epoch had made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended to abysses of philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins are in some way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader; as if the few words written had been dipped in ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... department of knowledge passes in the history of it through three successive stages, and only in the last of which it is entitled to the name of science—the Theological stage, in which everything is referred to the intervention of the gods; the Metaphysical, in which everything is referred to an abstract idea; and the Positive, which, discarding at once theology and philosophy, contents itself with the study of phenomena and their sequence, and regards that as science proper. Thus is positivism essentially definable, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such promising ground—it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... possessed, in a certain sense, of an excellent education. One day, after having flatteringly informed me that I really had a "soul above buttons" and the nursery, she gravely proposed that I should improve my mind by poring six hours a day over the metaphysical subtleties of Kant, Cousin, etc., and I remember that she called me a "piece of fashionable insipidity," and taunted me with not daring to go out of the beaten track, because I truly thought (for ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... doctrine of the Society of Friends. That the Spirit of God dwells in every man was their belief,[11] and from 1650, when Fox was called "a Quaker" before Justice Bennett at Derby, England, to the Division in 1830, they applied this doctrine in practical, rather than in metaphysical ways. They were a moral, rather than a theological people. It will appear in this chapter that only when the moral grip of the Meeting was broken in a division did doctrinal questions come to discussion ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... There is not, in this wide range of spiritual subjects, a proposition held by one as true, which has not been discarded by another as an error; and there is not a paradox or an absurdity that has not found some supporters, who maintained it as a truth. Doubt and error, in abstract and metaphysical questions, are natural and inherent in mankind, so long as reason is their only ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... like a proffered dish full of rare fruit, tempts the metaphysical appetite by the wealth and variety of its appeal; but not to weary the reader, the author will content himself by the abstraction of a single plum. The plum in question is simply this (and the reader is asked to read the quotation ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... which was very frequently in his thoughts. Certain articles, however, written about this time, sufficiently indicate his general conclusions, and I therefore shall here give some account of them. They were all more or less connected with that curious body called the 'Metaphysical Society.' ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... reellement obscenes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point of view, neither disease nor health of the soul; there are only psychological states." The etats d'ames of Felicien Rops, then, may or may not have been morbid. But he has contrived that his wit in its effect upon his spectators is too often profoundly depressing ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... matter on its abstract and metaphysical side. Two facts are enough for my present purpose—one, a truth of faith, that the actual power wherewith God works for His word remains ever the same; one, a truth of observation and experience, that there are variations in the intensity of its operations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... existence from taste and sentiment. On the other hand, our modern enquirers, though they also talk much of the beauty of virtue, and deformity of vice, yet have commonly endeavoured to account for these distinctions by metaphysical reasonings, and by deductions from the most abstract principles of the understanding. Such confusion reigned in these subjects, that an opposition of the greatest consequence could prevail between one system and another, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is a scientific language set off ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... itself. The abuses of idolaters is no argument against religion. M. Kinkel's introduction to the plan of his work has but one fault. It is a national one. His mode of reasoning is conclusive; but the English reader, less accustomed to metaphysical phraseology than his German neighbours, will find some difficulty in grasping it. According to our author, two conditions are necessary to true art, which he defines to be "the incorporation of the spirit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon that idea of the infinite' which the human mind can neither put aside nor comprehend."[III-17] And so a theory which will be generally ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the descendants to be insane. Any one who has seen a single case of congenital General Paresis, where a child has a mental disease due to the syphilis of a parent, and can doubt that character and mind are organic, simply is blinded by theological or metaphysical prejudice. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... I'm rather dense this afternoon," he said with hasty apology, "I think your first act is beautifully written—the lines are full of music; nobody with an ear for euphony could doubt that; but I—forgive me, I fancy you are sometimes a shade too metaphysical—and those scientific terms which you occasionally employ, I fear will be a little over the heads ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in "As You Like It," had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not the essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... late French translator of the Paradise well remarks, his reasoning is physical; that of Dante partly metaphysical and partly theologic. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... show humanity climbing perilous peaks in pursuit of somebody's misinterpretations of somebody else's books, or fighting bloodily because somebody asserted or denied that a nation was the chosen one, or invading new continents, physical or metaphysical, because of legendary gold to be found therein, or in fact committing all its follies under the inspiration of myths—as in fact it has done. The Middle Ages are to Chesterton what King Alfred was to ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... formal canons, but a true human heart was in the breast of every really great artist. He had the greatest detestation of anything approaching to cant in respect of art; but, after long investigation of the historical evidence, as well as of the metaphysical laws bearing on this question, he was absolutely certain that a high moral and religious training was the only way to get good fruits from our youth; make them good men first, and only so, if at all, they would become good artists. With regard to the points mooted respecting the practical and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... as heretics because they declared that animal, man, or woman were mere names, and that they could not bring themselves to believe in an ideal animal, an ideal man, an ideal woman as the invisible, supernatural, or metaphysical types of the ordinary animal, the individual man, the single woman. Those philosophers, called Nominalists, in opposition to the Realists, declared that all general terms were names only, and that nothing could claim reality but ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... mechanical, partly intellectual, formed by long habit, he would extract in his synoptical passage all that he required to know. (Macaulay was, and George Lewis is, just as wonderful in this respect.) Some of the books that Mackintosh talks of, philosophical and metaphysical works, could not be so disposed of, and I should like much to know what his system or his secret was. I met Sydney Smith yesterday, and asked him why more of the journals had not been given. He said because the editors had been ill advised, but that in another ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... stirred by no movement so mighty, if it were even capable of the impulse. Tenderness he has, and pathos as well as playfulness; he has unfailing grace and ease; he has clearness like that of a trout-stream. Fashions, even our fashions, change. The more metaphysical poetry of our time has indeed too much in it, besides the metaphysics, to be in any danger of being ever laid on the shelf with the once admired conceits of Cowley; yet it may one day in part lose, while the easier and more limpid kind ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... his fame and during the winter had been lecturing brilliantly on Schopenhauer. It was Philip's introduction to philosophy. He had a practical mind and moved uneasily amid the abstract; but he found an unexpected fascination in listening to metaphysical disquisitions; they made him breathless; it was a little like watching a tight-rope dancer doing perilous feats over an abyss; but it was very exciting. The pessimism of the subject attracted his youth; and he believed that the world he was about to enter was a place of pitiless woe and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... it now, obscurely, without images, barely with words, as if it had been indeed a thing occult and metaphysical. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... poetry is unfit for union with music. This is true, first, of all highly intellectual poetry, where the emotions are embodied in complex and abstract ideas. One could not, for example, readily set Browning to music. Music may be deep, mystic, even metaphysical in its meaning, but it cannot be dialectical. The emotions that accompany subtle thought, even when intense, are not of the voluminous, massive kind which music expresses; they lack the bodily resonance ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... growth-force without the influence of use. Another element which determines the direction of growth-force, and which precedes use, is effort; and "it is thought that effort becomes incorporated into the metaphysical acquisitions of the parent, and is inherited with other metaphysical qualities by the young, which, during the period of growth, is much more susceptible to modifying influences, and is likely to exhibit structural change ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... but in violence of abuse, and scornful contempt of all but his own glosses, he yields to none of his fellow-laborers in that vast and tangled poetical, historical, biographical, philosophical, theological, and metaphysical jungle. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... discriminating analysis of the visible forms. Here it may suffice to quote Brunn's own words from the Introduction to that work: "The spiritual effect produced on us by a work of sculpture cannot be comprehended as a moral or a metaphysical peculiarity, completely independent of corporeal phenomena; it can become intelligible to us only by means of tangible sculptural forms, as the exponents of spiritual expression." And again: "The spiritual understanding of ideal artistic creations ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... cannot better describe the process than in the words of Mr Sinnett himself, where he alludes to 'the highly cultivated devotees to be met with occasionally in India, who build up a conception of nature, the universe and God, entirely on a metaphysical basis, and who have evolved their systems by sheer force of transcendental thinking—who will take some established system of philosophy as its groundwork, and amplify on this to an extent which only an oriental metaphysician ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... remarkable array of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. "No doubt," he wrote in one place, "much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to bad thinking." At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that most human trouble ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... scope and power was cramped and contracted, and the spirits lowered by incessant self-contemplation and distrust of almost all enjoyment. When, at another time, he had to examine on "Locke on the Human Understanding," the metaphysical study acting on his already introspective mind produced a sense of misery and anguish that he could hardly endure. It is pleasant, however, to find him in another mood, writing, "Since I have known God in a saving manner, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... hesitation, inform you. I am, nominally at least, a Quaker. The persons to whom I should, in my present difficulties, naturally look for assistance are among the most respectable of that body; but my attachments to literary and metaphysical studies, and a line of conduct not compatible with the strictness of Quaker discipline, have, I am afraid, brought me into disrepute with those to whom I should otherwise have confided my situation. Were I to disclose it, it would only be consider'd as a fit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... largely responsible. Our lack of abstruse philosophy—while some of our young men have already gained international reputation in scientific researches, not one has achieved anything in philosophical lines—is traceable to the neglect of metaphysical training under Bushido's regimen of education. Our sense of honor is responsible for our exaggerated sensitiveness and touchiness; and if there is the conceit in us with which some foreigners charge us, that, too, is a ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... pocket-knives; and the staircase, balustrade, and floor, as well as the adjacent doors and door-frames, have recently been renewed; the walls, moreover, are covered with new paper-hangings, the former having been torn off in tatters; and thus it becomes something like a metaphysical question whether the place of the murder ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... insert his reply, on condition that he allows me to publish it, with his article, in pamphlet form, so that readers may have both sides of the question before them. I do not follow him in detail in his apologetic, religious, metaphysical, and oratorical digressions where common-places stand for ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... p. 366. Professor Cowell, in the third volume of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society Transactions, p. 320, has printed a remarkable parallel of the story which is to be found in the great Persian metaphysical and religious poem called the Masnavi, written by Jalaluddin, who died about 1260. J. Grimm discussed these treasure-on-the-bridge stories in Kleinere Schriften, iii. 414-428, and did not attach ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... submission.[563] A certain delicacy made him unwilling to define or discuss the things for which he felt the highest reverence, and a similar detached but respectful attitude is still a living constituent of Chinese society. The scholar and gentleman will not engage in theological or metaphysical disputes, but he respectfully takes part in ceremonies performed in honour of such venerated names as Heaven, Earth and Confucius himself. Less willingly, but still without remonstrance, he ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack, on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... was also very commonly a certain confusion of the intelligence, a difficulty in self-recognition. I remember clearly as I sat on my stile that presently I had the clearest doubts of my own identity and fell into the oddest metaphysical questionings. "If this be I," I said, "then how is it I am no longer madly seeking Nettie? Nettie is now the remotest thing—and all my wrongs. Why have I suddenly passed out of all that passion? Why does not the thought of Verrall ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... as little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... might say that while in singing the vocal organs are the first essential, they must, in order to achieve their full effect, be in tune with the infinite. Artistic singing involves complete physiological control of the voice-producing function, combined with complete command of the metaphysical resources of art. Thus only can voice be produced with that apparent spontaneity which we call artistic, and at the same time be charged with the emotional quality ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... animal history; its vegetable history; its mineral history; its social history; its moral history; its political history; its scientific history; its literary history; its musical history; its artistical history; above all, its metaphysical history. She must begin with the Chinese Dynasty, and end with Japan. But first of all she must study Geology, and especially the history of the extinct races of animals—their natures, their habits, their loves, their hates, their ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... labors at Oxford, Kennett Square, Hosanah, Little Wesley and Morris Brown, Philadelphia; was ordained elder by Bishop Brown in Bethel Church, Philadelphia, June, 1883, having won the highest encomium for creditable examination passed in biblical, classical and metaphysical studies. The same year, the subject of our sketch was transferred to the New England Conference: was stationed at Chelsea, matriculated in the Boston University, where he studied for three years in the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various |
