"Metaphysics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sometimes as abstruse, if not so continuous, as those of a metaphysician—for boys are not unfrequently more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps, willing to believe—were not by any means confined to such subjects: castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely hours; and for this exercise of the constructive faculty, what he knew, or rather what ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... mind, enervators of intellect, fathers of idleness, and what not, let us at once take a high ground, and say,—Go you to your own employments, and to such dull studies as you fancy; go and bob for triangles, from the Pons Asinorum; go enjoy your dull black draughts of metaphysics; go fumble over history books, and dissert upon Herodotus and Livy; OUR histories are, perhaps, as true as yours; our drink is the brisk sparkling champagne drink, from the presses of Colburn, Bentley and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to Egypt, or Assyria, or Greece. Nor had the Jew any such interest in religious philosophy as has marked other people. The Aryan nations, both East and West, might throw themselves with ardor into those high questions of metaphysics, but he contented himself with the utterances of revelation. The world may have inherited no advances in political science from the Hebrew, no great epic, no school of architecture, no high lessons in philosophy, no wide extension of human thought ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... struck by a gun-shot, simply by an act of his volition,—of water turned into wine, and wine into brandy, to the somnambulic taste,—and so on, till we got wandering into crooked by-paths of physics and metaphysics, that seemed to lead us nowhere in particular,—when I said, "Come, Cousin Moses, suppose you try it on me, by way of experiment. But I have my doubts if you'll ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the world what the world calls the scandale of love, one must have at least the courage of one's passion. In this respect the women of the eighteenth century are better than you: they did not subtilise love in metaphysics [elles n'alambiquaient ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... He remained in New Haven as a school-teacher, a tutor in college, and a student in the theological department until 1836, when he entered the ministry. In 1846 he was recalled to the college as Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics; and in 1858 he also assumed the duties of the professorship of Systematic Theology, for a period of seven years. Upon the retirement of President Woolsey in 1871, he was elected to fill the office, which he held until ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... It must also be understood that the teacher does not look at the voice, he listens to it. Here voice teachers automatically separate themselves from each other. No two things so diametrically opposite as physics and metaphysics can abide peaceably in the ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... between music, his own imagination, and a pretty woman. At present he mixes them all up together. It is a sort of transcendental omelette. But I think the pretty woman has more to do with it than metaphysics!' ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... me with such a metaphysics of genius," said the teacher's companion, "and I have only a hazy conception of the accuracy of your similitude. On the other hand, I fully understand what you have said about the surplus of public schools and the corresponding surplus of higher grade teachers; and in ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... his letters, especially those written in French, present no very great obstacles; but with Wagner the case is different. He also is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... muscarine. Alchemy furnishes the theme for one tale; the protagonist seeks an alcahest, a human victim for his crucible. We are left in doubt as to whether he chooses his wife, who wears a diamond set in one of her teeth, or a gorilla. There are dramas of dual personality and of death. Metaphysics and spiritualism rise dimly out of the charm of this book. There is a duchess who mews like a cat and somewhere we are assured that Perche non posso odiarte from La Sonnnambula is the most beautiful aria in the Italian ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... dogma that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true, in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... of the animal world; why not of the vegetable? This is a delightful monograph, executed with consummate skill and verisimilitude throughout. The author, who holds the Professorship of Cereal Metaphysics at the University of Tokio, has devoted the greater part of his life to the study of the vegetable kingdom; and we need hardly remind our readers of the exceedingly interesting treatise, entitled "The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... nobility, the rising bourgeois class, and, above all, that large body of necessitous students, including many of the children of the ill-paid clergy, whom M. Leroy-Beaulieu styles the "intellectual proletariat." Classical studies, German metaphysics, and the scientific theories and discoveries of recent years have had much to do with the fermentation that has led to so many violent explosions, the universities have been the chief foci of agitation, and in the attempts to suppress it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... sharp in the investment of his moneys, and recognizes the tangible nature of India bonds, Spanish certificates, and Egyptian scrip—as contrasted with the painful uncertainty of an Ego or a non-Ego in metaphysics. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... eccentric in many ways, but his throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British Constitution. The bad habits of ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... in propounding and supporting, for the thousandth time, each his favourite theories. For the condition of the princess afforded delightful scope for the discussion of every question arising from the division of thought—in fact, of all the Metaphysics of the Chinese Empire. But it is only justice to say that they did not altogether neglect the discussion of the practical question, what was to ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... dispute beat the air; they worry their own shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation, where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles. Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion she throws her bulwark of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... followed as one, the Parson amused himself, between sermons of powerful doctrine and parochial duties of a more human interest, with educating Lucinda, whose intellect was more like his own than her mother's. A strange training it was for a young girl,—mathematics, metaphysics, Latin, theology of the driest sort; and after an utter failure at Greek and Hebrew, though she had toiled patiently through seven books of the "Aeneid," Parson Manners mildly sniffed at the inferiority of the female mind, and betook himself to teaching her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... its schools, and porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched beneath the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks; when he showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics, the Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of Agrippa, the crudities of Cardan, and passed, with his calin smile, into the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. Its place is in another and a perfectly distinct department of science, to which the name metaphysics more particularly belongs: that portion of mental philosophy which attempts to determine what part of the furniture of the mind belongs to it originally, and what part is constructed out of materials furnished to it from without. To this science appertain the great and much debated questions ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that scroll work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel ourselves ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... never to visit Madame Orio's house, and on that very day I held an argument in metaphysics, in which I contended that any being of whom we had only an abstract idea, could only exist abstractedly, and I was right; but it was a very easy task to give to my thesis an irreligious turn, and I was obliged to recant. A few days afterwards I went to Padua, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for books, her great powers of acquisition, the range of her attainments—embracing not only modern languages and their literature, but Latin, Greek and Hebrew—her ability to maintain discussions on German metaphysics and theology with learned Professors, all seemed to point her out as the one likely to achieve distinction in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the "spiritual essences" of Plato. They are the eternal, immutable principles which are discernible to the eye of the soul, as the sensible objects they represent are discernible to the eye of the body. Modern metaphysics may deem them mere abstractions, but a higher realistic philosophy will treat them as substantive forms, of which the objective ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... motives which are at once the inspiration and the happiness of all good men—how madly he rested on the conviction that religion is an abstract matter, and has nothing more to do with life and conduct than any other abstruse branch of metaphysics. But in spite of this unsound state of things, the gentleman possessed all the showy surface-virtues that go so very far towards eliciting the favourable verdict of mankind. He prided himself upon a delicate, a surprising sense of honour. He professed himself ready to part ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Puritan preacher, who for a quarter of a century filled the Northampton pulpit, would ever rank among the giants of intellect. At the distance of one hundred years no name is more powerfully felt in the theology of America than his, while in metaphysics, and in the sphere of pure thought, his position, like that of Shakspeare in literature, is one of enviable greatness. This man is not to be confounded with his son of the same name, who, though of distinguished ability, was far from equaling his father; both, however, were ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "They appeared in the form of a copious"—mark the word!—"review of a work on Chinese Metaphysics." It had need to be copious therefor, for it is a very large subject. Mr. Pickwick himself must have been very familiar with the Encyclopedia, for he at once objected that he was not aware that so abstruse a topic was dealt with in its pages. He had perhaps consulted the book, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... worthy of mention, that Mr. Davy laid down for himself a plan of education, which embraced the circle of the sciences. By his eighteenth year he had acquired the rudiments of botany, anatomy, and physiology, the simpler mathematics, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and chemistry. But chemistry soon arrested his whole attention. Having made some experiments on the air disengaged by sea-weeds from the water of the ocean, which convinced him ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... so in my life," he replied. "Why, I've been splendidly entertained by a little black princess, who called herself your waiting maid, and discoursed most eloquently of METAPHYSICS and all that." ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... heavily to bed. The elder student who had accompanied Mr. Thomas informed him that, on the whole, he had acquitted himself very well, but that it would be better, perhaps, in future to be a little simpler, and avoid what "may be called the metaphysics of Redemption." ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... had a practical and literal spirit, very indifferent to pure science and metaphysics. They took interest in Greek philosophy only so far as they believed it had a bearing ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... believe) less Than others do, on errands sleeveless; Can listen to a tale humdrum, And with attention read Tom Thumb; My spirits with my body progging, Both hand in hand together jogging; Sunk over head and ears in matter. Nor can of metaphysics smatter; Am more diverted with a quibble Than dream of words intelligible; And think all notions too abstracted Are like the ravings of a crackt head; What intercourse of minds can be Betwixt the knight sublime and me, If when I ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. They ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... universe as a rational order designed by an all-wise and all-good Creator for the benefit of man, his highest product; while other thinkers regarded Spinozism as the only rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... no God!" Such is the exulting song of many a human heart when bewildering metaphysics or superficial science has crowded from its convictions faith in the Deity and his moral government. Few men have reached the pure, unclouded heights of religion and morality, where the unselfish love of the holy and ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... foredoomed to it: how could I, or how can I, help it?" The mind of his Majesty shudders, as if looking over the edge of an abyss. He is meditating much whether nothing can be done to save the lost Fritz, at least the soul of him, from this horrible delusion:—hurls forth your fine Duhan, with his metaphysics, to remote Memel, as the first step. And signifies withal, though as yet only historically and in a speculative way, to Finkenstein and Kalkstein themselves, That their method of training up a young soul, to ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... doctrines of Hegel with reference to the history of metaphysics, and within the precincts of the school in which it occupies a large place and demands the most serious attention; I am tracing the influence of those doctrines on the public mind at large. This influence is visible in the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 'Substance' is 'unsatisfactory'; and agrees with some 'strictures' on the early chapters of Mill's 'Political Economy.' He writes an essay to explode the poor old social contract. He holds that the study of metaphysics is desirable, but adds the note, 'not including ontological inquiries under the head of metaphysics.' He denies, however, the proposition that 'all general truths are founded on experience.' He thinks that a meaning can be attached to ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Spain England had been supporting, when his accession to the German throne had not seemed probable. His coronation as Charles VI. was, therefore, one cause of the peace. Leopold, born in 1640, and educated by the Jesuits, became Emperor in 1658, and reigned 49 years. He was an adept in metaphysics and theology, as well as in wood-turning, but a feeble and oppressive ruler, whose empire was twice saved for him; by Sobiesld from the Turks, and from ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... fair ones debate incessantly, and consequently cannot figure what must be the issue of this triple alliance: we have some idea of it. Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all. You shall have the journals of this notable academy." Walpole sent, some seven weeks later, an account of the lady to the ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... ask his listeners to engage in intellectual disquisitions about the aspects of infinity: He did not preach free-will metaphysics or trouble his hearers with a satisfactory philosophical account of the origin of evil. He spoke about things that reached not only the understanding but also the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... [Footnote: See Mankind in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological knowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning "species" and "individual" have undergone in the last ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... are no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing the dialectical method. On the other hand, the kindred spirit of Hegel ...
— Sophist • Plato
... In true metaphysics I believe that, contrary to common opinion, unbelief far oftener needs a reason and requires an effort than belief. Naturally, and if man were made according to the pattern of the logicians, he would ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... the plan of educating youths in the public grammar schools of our own country; that some of the most precious years of their lives, when the faculties were in growing vigour, and the plastic mind most susceptible of receiving and retaining impressions, are wasted in poring over the metaphysics of a Latin Grammar, which they cannot possibly comprehend; and in learning by heart a number of declinations, conjugations, and syntax rules, which serve only to puzzle and disgust, instead of affording instruction or amusement: that ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... indeed these memories are of people who are passed away like the snow in harvest; and now, with the sharp-sickle reapers of full shocks of the fattening wheat of metaphysics, and fair novelists Ruth-like in the fields of barley, or more mischievously coming through the rye,—what will the public, so vigorously sustained by these, care to hear of the lovely writers of old days, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of discoveries in science and art to the uses of mankind—is a peculiarly isolated one. But very little is known about it among those outside of the profession. Laymen know something about law, a little about medicine, quite a lot—nowadays—about metaphysics. But laymen know nothing about engineering. Indeed, a source of common amusement among engineers is the peculiar fact that the average layman cannot differentiate between the man who runs a locomotive ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... the rest of the world here, wore the convenient and cleanly blue cotton trousers and blue blouse of the country. The third spare seat was occupied by a neighbouring notary, the two men discussing metaphysics, literature, and the origin of things, on ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in which he had made captive a host of Greek nouns and Latin verbs, and brought off rich booty in ancient saws and apophthegms, which he was wont to parade in his public harangues, as a triumphant general of yore his spolia opima. Of metaphysics he knew enough to confound all hearers and himself into the bargain. In logic, he knew the whole family of syllogisms and dilemmas, and was so proud of his skill that he never suffered even a self-evident fact to pass unargued. It was observed, however, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... edition of them in ten volumes was published in 1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Oxford drawing-room, she had found herself absorbing metaphysics, as it were through the pores of her skin, without any previous discipline in that exacting science; now, in a London studio, she became aware of a similarly miraculous influx of power. Yesterday she would have told you that ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... machine is as necessary to production as the raw material itself. How then can food, without which the human machine could do no work, be excluded from the list of things indispensable to the producer? Can this be a relic of religious metaphysics? The rich man's feast is indeed a matter of luxury, but the food of the worker is just as much a part of production as the fuel burnt by ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... intellectual ability, the French are certainly inferior to no other nation. They have not, perhaps, so frequently as others, that cool, sound judgment in matters of speculation, which can fit them for unravelling with success the perplexities of metaphysics; but their unparalleled success in mathematical pursuits is the best possible proof of the accuracy and quickness of their reasoning powers, when confined within due bounds. We do not refer to the astonishing efforts of such men ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... interesting autobiographical scraps, such as the account of My First Rout, from which a quotation has already been given. A writer in Blackwood reviewed the work in a vein of ironical admiration, professing to be much impressed by the author's knowledge of metaphysics as exemplified in such a sentence as: 'The idea of cause is a consequence of our consciousness of the force we exert in subjecting externals to the changes dictated by our volition.' Unable to keep up the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... therefore, I think, shows the settled greatness of the people of the States more significantly than their firm establishment of a national literature. This literature runs over all subjects: American authors have excelled in poetry, in science, in history, in metaphysics, in law, in theology, and in fiction. They have attempted all, and failed in none. What Englishman has devoted a room to books, and devoted no portion of that room to the ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... to work quickly; and after upwards of an hour's severe rummaging, among uninteresting folios and quartos of medicine, canon-law, scholastic metaphysics, and dry comments upon the decretals of Popes Boniface and Gratian—it was rather from courtesy, than complete satisfaction, that I pitched upon a few ... of a miscellaneous description—begging to have ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... distinction between the two systems, far from being a matter of abstract theory of metaphysics or logic chopping, is just the difference which distinguishes the Briton from the Turk, which distinguishes Britain from Turkey. The Turk has just as much physical vigour as the Briton, is just as virile, manly and military. The Turk has the same raw materials of Nature, soil and water. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... with certainty to determine, for it is but the vanishing ripple of a preceding ocean of thought, from which he is just stepping out upon the shore of the articulate. He may have been plunged in some profound depth of the metaphysics of existence, or he may have been occupied with the one practical question, that of the slaying of his uncle, which has, now in one form, now in another, haunted his spirit for weeks. Perhaps, from the message he has ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... gods, O Philosophy!" exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in place of Christianity. "These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!" the Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... available here; and their place must be filled by other matter. What this matter should be is suggested by the natural division of speculative science into Ethics, or the study of man's conduct as a moral being; Politics, or the science relating to his behaviour in regard to the social order; and Metaphysics, which for Dante is synonymous with theology, the investigation of all that concerns his spiritual part, as well as the Divine order generally. With the first two we have dealt in the Hell and the Purgatory respectively; the third ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... should not be surprised if many people preferred it to her letters to Musset. In the first place, it is not spoiled by that preoccupation which the Venice lovers had, of writing literature. Mingled with the accents of sincere passion, we do not find extraordinary conceptions of paradoxical metaphysics. It is Nature which speaks in these letters, and for that very reason they are none the less sorrowful. They, too, tell us of a veritable martyrdom. We can easily imagine from them that Michel was coarse, despotic, faithless and jealous. We know, ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... of Imagination too often characterizes Theology and Metaphysics, and prevents mankind from receiving the instruction from works on these topics that they need. In the early days of man's history, Religion and Philosophy addressed themselves to the Imagination, and then the people listened to their teachings; but gradually these heaven-born teachers ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... describe by culture or the spirit of the age. Bright clear common sense was for once having its own way, and tyrannizing over the faculties from which it too often suffers violence. The favoured faculty never doubted its own qualification for supremacy in every department. In metaphysics it was triumphing with Hobbes and Locke over the remnants of scholasticism; under Tillotson, it was expelling mystery from religion; and in art it was declaring war against the extravagant, the romantic, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... life and the world, and soon introduced metaphysics, from whence the word was to emanate which should solve all mysteries. He developed his theme with great distinctness, and led forward ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian piles, coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the New World, before being finally assimilated, need first and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Hernan, is my fair kinswoman's bower—her boudoir, her retiring-room, or whatever else you like to call it—where she sits brooding in silence, watching the stars and the moon sometimes, ye ken, or reading romances and works on philosophy, metaphysics, astrology, and other subjects far too deep for my poor brain," said Lawrence, as he entered ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... feminine courage which no man can understand, that is not physical nor even mental, born perhaps of that mysterious relation which modern philosophy calls sex antagonism—a spiritual hardihood which deals in the metaphysics of emotion and pays no tribute to any form of materiality. Captain Goritz, whatever his quality, to Marishka was merely a man. And whatever the forces at his command, her promise, the half uttered threat as to her fate—which she had refused to ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... going to write Concerning Disappointment and Success. In the days when I studied metaphysics, I should have objected to that title, inasmuch as the antithesis is imperfect between the two things named in it. Disappointment and Success are not properly antithetic; Failure and Success are. Disappointment is the feeling caused by failure, and caused ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Seven Wise Masters; and we have the beginnings of geometry, metaphysics, and ethics: then the partialists,—deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. At last, comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tranquillity and happiness we enjoy in this country, in spite of the philosophizing serpents we have in our bosom, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Woolstoncrofts. I am glad you have not read the tract of the last-mentioned writer. I would not look at it, though assured it contains neither metaphysics nor politics; but as she entered the lists on the latter, and borrowed her title from the demon's book, which aimed at spreading the wrongs of men, she is excommunicated from the pale of my library. We have had enough of new systems, and the world a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... to seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for the following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the question of honeymoons and ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... don't want to introduce metaphysics," said Charles, "but I will adopt your own image. Suppose I suspected the bread before me to have arsenic in it, or merely to be unwholesome, would it be wonderful if I tried to ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... including "Prolegomina Logica," "Metaphysics," "Limits of Demonstrative Evidence," "Philosophy of Kant," etc. 12mo, ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... been selected for his latent capacities, his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he could get out of himself. A mind of the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... laid his hand on Richard's bridle. "Mr. Clare," said he, "I have no wish to talk metaphysics over this matter. You had better say no more. I know that your feelings are not of an enviable kind, and I am therefore prepared to be good-natured with you. But you must be civil yourself. You have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... never liked any of her charges since the renowned Anna Webster so well as Phoebe Fulmort; although her abilities did not rise above the 'very fair,' and she was apt to be bewildered in metaphysics and political economy; but then she had none of the eccentricities of will and temper of Miss Fennimore's clever girls, nor was she like most good-humoured ones, recklessly insouciante. Her only drawback, in the governess's eyes, was that she never seemed desirous of going beyond what was ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reward us for our pains, Jeanne, who had regained something of her former vivacity, asked us in less than a quarter of an hour one dozen questions, to answer which would have required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... the close of this period. Metaphysics at war with theology had ended in this attempt at reconciliation. The multiplicity of systems had discredited science itself. Metaphysics was regarded as a revival of theology. The Idea seemed a substitute for providence. Those philosophies of history, of religion, of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... remains purely symbolic and does not attempt to rationalize its symbolism, a dogmatic religion must always contain within the circle of its creed many profound and illuminating secrets. The false and ephemeral portion of a dogmatic religion is its metaphysical aspect, because the whole science of metaphysics is an ambiguity from the start, since it is a projection of one isolated attribute of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... easily the first. It was the opinion of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and literature,—an opinion expressed to me since the death of Tazewell,—that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any other ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... it has assumed. Chiefly intent upon recognizing and putting forward the phenomenal proofs of a future existence, it concerns itself little with speculations on the distinction between matter and spirit, and rather prides itself on having demolished Materialism without the aid of metaphysics. Perhaps a Platonist might say that the recognition of a future existence is consistent with a very practical and even dogmatic materialism, but it is rather to be feared that such a materialism as this would not greatly disturb ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of its subjects, sufficiently accounts for the exaggerated importance given to and assumed by the French writers, even before they had become, in the language of the Reviewer, "the interpreters between England and mankind:" he asserts, "that all the great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science, are ours but no foreign nation, except France, has received them from us by direct communication: isolated in our situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but did not ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition, you take another flight, and come back the way you were before. So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... universe. These systems have had an effect not to be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day. Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel ...
— Progress and History • Various
... good deal of French tournure; and the gentleness with which her fine eyes and sweet voice directed the movements of a young female slave, was really touching: the way, too, in which she blended her French talk of modes with her customers, and her English talk of metaphysics with her friends, had a pretty air of indifference in it, that gave her ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... James was reading Scotch metaphysics, and reconciling himself to the concealment of his freer opinions, upon which concealment depended the success of his probation, and his license. But the close of his studies in divinity ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... answered, "Perhaps." All vistas close in the unseen—no one doubts it—but Helen closed them rather too quickly for her taste. At every turn of speech one was confronted with reality and the absolute. Perhaps Margaret grew too old for metaphysics, perhaps Henry was weaning her from them, but she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily shreds the visible. The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... strong holds, and be governed by our own laws. Thus all combined, yet all were separate; all served, yet all were free. Such a government could not exist in a dark age. Our ancestors may not indeed have been deep in the metaphysics of the schools; they may not have shone in the fine arts; but much knowledge of human nature, much practical wisdom must have existed amongst them, when this admirable constitution was formed; and I believe it is a decided truth, though ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... favourites or pets; but they were found mischievous and dangerous. Their morality was easy,—but difficult to understand; compounded of three-fourths sentiment—nine-tenths selfishness, twelve-ninths instinct, self-devotion, metaphysics, and cant. 'Twas hard to come at a common denominator. John Bull, with his four rules of vulgar arithmetic, could never make it out; altogether he never could abide these foreign bores. Thought 'em confounded dull too—Civilly told them ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... humanised my soul"); each has his education completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhaeuser" story. However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Bruennhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... religious subjects, and over thirty given to nature. It is interesting to note that he devotes more paragraphs to woman than to man; and more to society than to solitude, though only to express his dislike of the former and his love for the latter. There are more thoughts about science than about metaphysics, more about war than about love, more about poetry than about philosophy, more on beauty than on knowledge, more on walking than on books. There are three times as many paragraphs on nature (thirty-three) as on the Bible, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... with myself On life and art, and whether, after all, A larger metaphysics might not help Our physics—a completer poetry Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants More fully than the special outside plans, Phalansteries, material institutes, The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries, Preferred ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Betty swore an oath)— The sirloin's spoiled: I'll give it him!"— And Betty did look fierce and grim. Bob, who saw mischief in her eye, Avoided her—approaching nigh: He feared the broomstick, too, with physics As dread as Betty's metaphysics. ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... discussion itself, and the timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not recollect,) that the subtle nation of the Greeks were busily employed, in the Church of Santa Sophia, in a dispute of mixed natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, whether the light on Mount Tabor was created or uncreated, and were ready to massacre the holders of the unfashionable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a breach into the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and studious Freemasonic antiquary can satisfactorily explain the metaphysics of this requisition in our Book of Constitutions. For the true and faithful Brother it sufficeth to know that such a requisition exists. He will prize it the more because of its antiquity.... No man can in perfection be 'made ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... was with birds, so had it been with everything. His ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In similar manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a hopelessly ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... filings, fives, freshes, glanders, gnomonics, goods, hermeneutics, hustings, hydrodynamics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hysterics, inwards, leavings, magnetics, mathematics, measles, mechanics, mnemonics, merils, metaphysics, middlings, movables, mumps, nuptials, optics, phonics, phonetics, physics,[146] pneumatics, poetics, politics, riches, rickets, settlings, shatters, skimmings, spherics, staggers, statics, statistics, stays, strangles, sundries, sweepings, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... years since read by Mrs. Lowell to her classes, and are now incorporated in her admirable book, "Seed Grain"; nor does there seem to be any good reason why it should not be introduced at Cambridge. With a short introduction containing the main principles of metaphysics, and with the omission of some rhetorical passages unsuited to a text-book, it might supplant the books of both intellectual and moral philosophy now in use ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... his Father in the endeavour. Alone, he might labour to all eternity and not succeed. He who has not made himself, cannot set himself right without him who made him. But his maker is in him, and is his strength. The man, however, who, instead of doing what he is told, broods speculating on the metaphysics of him who calls him to his work, stands leaning his back against the door by which the Lord would enter to help him. The moment he sets about putting straight the thing that is crooked—I mean doing right where he has been doing wrong, he ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... person accustomed to these subjects that conjunctions always connect words, not propositions. The only work in which I leave seen Dr. Latham's fundamental error exposed, is in Boole's Mathematical Analysis of Logic; the learned author, though he seems unsettled on many matters of logic and metaphysics, has clearly made up his mind on the point now ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... studies we hear but little at this epoch. His genius by a stretch of fancy might be compared to one of those double stars which dart blue and red rays of light: for it was governed by two luminaries, poetry and metaphysics; and at this time the latter seems to have been in the ascendant. It is, however, interesting to learn that he read and re-read Landor's "Gebir"—stronger meat than either Southey's epics or the ghost-lyrics ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... The lists of their works handed down to us comprise the widest range of topics; they handle questions of Christian ethics, of Scriptural interpretation, of controversial divinity, of ecclesiastical order, of theological metaphysics. Was there then any possibility of a mistake here? To us the history of the Church during the second century is obscure, because all this voluminous literature, except a few meagre fragments, has been blotted ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves in the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, is it not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a something intangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, an offspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is a compound ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... cosmogony and Greek philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by this same Church as the last word on science, philosophy, history, metaphysics, and government." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Clays may display their vain oratory and metaphysics, but they tremble when they behold the colored man is in the intellectual field. The time is at hand, when this terrible denunciation shall thunder in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... this is the case of the great trio, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. All three started as poets. Coleridge was distracted from poetry into metaphysics, mainly, I believe, by his indulgence in opium, and the torturing contemplation of his own moral impotence. He turned to philosophy to see if he could find some clue to the bewildering riddle of life, and he lost his way ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that, without taking it upon him to say whether his friend's ideas were good or bad, they had no practical value; but Caesar insisted once and many times on the advantages he saw in his metaphysics. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... Upanishads, far from realising their debt, maintain that the Brahma of India is a mere abstraction, a negation of all that is in the world. In a word, that the Infinite Being is to be found nowhere except in metaphysics. It may be, that such a doctrine has been and still is prevalent with a section of our countrymen. But this is certainly not in accord with the pervading spirit of the Indian mind. Instead, it is the practice of realising and affirming ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... discipline, Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray; Or so devote to Aristotle's checks As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd. Balk logic with acquaintance that you have, And practise rhetoric in your common talk; Music and poesy use to quicken you; The mathematics and the metaphysics, Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you: No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en; In brief, sir, study what you ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... Pretended Dream and Interpreted by Psychoanalysis. By Raymond Bellamy Freud and His School (Concluded). By A. W. Van Rentergham, M. D. Anger as a primary Emotion, and the Application of Freudian Mechanism to its Phenomena. By G. Stanley Hall The Necessity of Metaphysics. By James J. Putnam, M. D. Aspects of Dream Life. The Contribution of a Woman Remarks Upon Dr. Coriat's Paper, "Stammering as a Psychoneurosis." By Meyer Solomon, M. D. Constructive Delusions. By John T. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... rock and Sir Basil was extended beside her on the moss. She had been reading Emerson to him, and when the essay was finished and she had talked to him a little about the "over-soul,"—dear Basil's recollections of metaphysics were very confused,—she presently said to him, letting her hand slide into his while she spoke:—"Basil, dearest,—I want to ask you something, and you must answer very truly, for you need never fear that I would flinch ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... on this problem which we shall find, dwells in the realm of metaphysics rather than in the world of material reality. Ornament, more than any other element of architecture, is deeply psychological, it is an externalization of an inner life. This is so true that any time-worn fragment out of the past when art was a language can usually ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... ourselves essentially, but they did not believe that there was nothing in us which should be smothered or strangled. Perhaps some day we shall go back to them, and find that the "Rape of the Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... and the anthropomorphites did not end in words. A proposition in theology, or a doubt in metaphysics, was no better cause of civil war than the old quarrels about the bull Apis or the crocodile; but a change of religion had not changed the national character. The patriarch, finding his party the stronger, attacked ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... which it moved, even while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category of Jewish Messiah to the categories of the Fourth Gospel. And if, in our generation, a conservative scholar like the late Dr. Sanday pleaded for the necessity of a new Christology, it was not ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... served to make her more remarkable. She had beauty when she was young, and she still had an expressive face and a sweet smile. She was well educated, and always continued to educate herself; she was fond of letters, art, politics, and metaphysics. She delighted in theological controversy, and also delighted in contests of mere wit. But of all her valuable gifts, the most valuable for herself and for the country was the capacity she had for governing her husband. She governed him through his very anxiety not to be governed by his wife. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie |
