"Supernaturalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very striking, as they indicate his deep insight into the moral tendencies of the community in which he moved. They are high testimonies to the prophetic soul of Paul; and as such, I cannot have any desire to weaken their force. But there is nothing in them that can establish the theory of supernaturalism, in the face of his great mistake as to the speedy return ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... young Norwegian named Norden, was his assistant in this work. And every one in the place felt that Norden was closest of all to the doctor. Norden in his experiments with nervous diseases used hypnotism, suggestion, psychotherapy,—all the modern forms of supernaturalism. His attitude was ever, as he said to Isabelle, "It might be—who knows?"—"There is truth, some little truth in all the ages, in all the theories and beliefs." Isabelle had a strong liking for this uncouth Northman ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... serve to describe them all. Their claim to credence rests on the exhibition of so-called miracles—that is, on a violation of the laws of nature,—for, if religions were founded on the demonstrated truths of science, there would be no mystery, no supernaturalism, no miracles, no skepticism, no false religion. We would have only verified truths and demonstrated facts for the basis of our belief. But this simple foundation does not satisfy the unreasoning multitude. They demand signs, portents, mysteries, wonders and miracles for their faith and the supply ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... dispute between rationalism and supernaturalism was still going on, and the latter was gradually gaining the victory, through the reaction under Schleiermacher just alluded to, an English writer, Mr. Hugh James Rose,(44) published some sermons preached at Cambridge in 1825, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... which the light streams. It is dear to us, Josiah Allen, but let us not think that we must coller everybody and drag 'em into it. And let us not cry out too much at other folkses superstitions, when the rock of our own faith, that comforts us in joy and sorrow, is sot in a sea of supernaturalism. ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... kind, the seers of visions keep quiet; they do not like to be thought fanciful or mad, and they hide their experiences, which only come to light through inquiries such as these that I have been making. But let the tide of opinion change and grow favourable to supernaturalism, then the seers of visions come to the front. The faintly-perceived fantasies of ordinary persons become invested by the authority of reverend men with a claim to serious regard; they are consequently attended to and encouraged, and they increase ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... foremost and most effective champions of Darwinism, and no scientist has been more conspicuous in the battle between the doctrine of evolution and the older religious orthodoxy. Outside of this particular issue, he was a vigorous opponent of supernaturalism in all its forms, and a supporter of the agnosticism which demands that nothing shall be believed "with greater assurance than the evidence warrants"—the evidence intended being, of course, of the same kind as that ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... in like manner, {13} because of his crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his primary intention they were to be no longer objective works ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... wide influence. He was physically, intellectually, and morally of a very large pattern. There was something very grand and impressive about him. He had happened to come to Syracuse during one of my vacations; on a Saturday evening he gave a lecture upon the tendencies to loose supernaturalism as shown in what were known as "spiritualistic" phenomena; and on the following day he preached a simple, plain, straightforward sermon on Christian morals. Both these utterances impressed me and strengthened my conviction that every thinking young man and woman ought to maintain ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... narrative" of a grand exploration, to one who delights in travels. The pleasure must be greatest where faith is strongest; for instance, amongst imaginative races like the Kelts, and especially Orientals, who imbibe supernaturalism with their mothers' milk. "I am persuaded," writes Mr. Bayle St. John, "that the great scheme of preternatural energy, so fully developed in 'The Thousand and One Nights,' is believed in by the majority of the inhabitants of all the religious professions ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... development can be traced, with the exception of a comparatively small interval. This is the gap between the intellect of the anthropoid ape and that of primitive man, the one important last chapter in the story of mental evolution. Supernaturalism, driven from its strongholds of the past, has taken its last stand upon this broken link, claiming that here the line of descent fails, and that the gap could not have been filled without a direct inflow of intellect ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... words, but hollow within. Mr. McCabe is no psychologist. The fables and legends of old times may be abandoned, the desire for the realities round which fable and legend grow remains and cannot be extirpated by a rationalistic operation. Supernaturalism—in the widest sense—is ineradicable. Religion will not be suspended by the discovery that it is possible to formulate excellent theories of social equity without the assistance of priests. The hunger of the human heart for knowledge of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... from one flat into the next; the patriarchal board is replaced by clubs and grill-rooms and fried-fish shops. Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends. Note, too, that the family has outgrown its ecclesiastical sanction; the oil of supernaturalism which once greased the wheels has run dry; the machinery is creaking. Industrial conditions have killed the old home. REQUIESCAT! Honour thy father and mother. Industrialism has killed that commandment. Thou shalt ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the poet's mind the lofty indignation of one who sees, in its true light, the narrowness of an ignorant and hypocritical clergy, yet can find no solid ground on which to build up for himself a theory of supernaturalism, illumined by hope. Yet there are traces of Mysticism in his writings, which only serve to emphasize his profound longing for some knowledge of the invisible, and his foreboding that the grave is the "be-all" and "end-all" of life. The poet speaks in tones of bitterest ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Voltaire first made open war upon "revealed religion." All religions that professed a miraculous origin were to him baneful in the extreme, the foes of light and progress, the enemies of mankind. He did not perceive, as modern psychology does, that the period of supernaturalism is the childhood of the mind. Myths and fairy-tales are not of themselves base—the injury lies with the men who seek to profit by these things, and build up a tyranny founded on innocence and ignorance—seeking to perpetuate these things, issuing threats against growth, and offers ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... short skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen. I can't read dull analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action—if I'm to give my mind to a story. I can supply the reflections. I'm English—if Colney 's right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of supernaturalism. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... what was of catholic rather than of national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word. Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say little in this place. The 'Lives' have ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... space. We need some; but not too much,—not all revelation; not revelation as a customary fact. If so, I repeat, we should neglect this ordained field of thought and action. We should live in a sphere of supernaturalism,—in an atmosphere of wonder,—amid a planetary roll of miracles; still unsatisfied; still needing the suggestion of higher points to break ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... spirit of greatness. He is not interested in trivialities—trivialities of ritual, of creed, of ceremony. We have imagined a vain thing—a God of our own species; merely adding to the conception, to gild and consecrate, a futile fuzbuz of supernaturalism. My friends, the God I imagine is something more than a formula on Sundays and an ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... by the whole course of the superstition in the old times of Catholicism. Materials for exciting animosity and indignation against suspected heretics were near at hand. In the assurance of the pre-scientific world everything remote from ordinary knowledge or experience was inseparable from supernaturalism. What surpassed the limits of a very feeble understanding, what was beyond the commonest experience of every-day life, was with one accord relegated to the domain of the supernatural, or rather to that of the devil. For what was not done or taught by Holy Church ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... to the pagan mind about this arbitrary introduction of the idea of "sin" as the cause of the lamentable misery of the world. Among modern writers the idea of "sin" is ridiculed, and the notion of its supernaturalism scouted. But is ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... phantasmagoria and diablerie, I had frequent opportunities of testing the fallacy and absurdity of so-called 'presentiments and forebodings.' I am afraid it is the absence of spirituality in the hearts of the people, that drives this generation to seek supernaturalism in the realm of merely normal physics. The only true spiritualism is that which emanates from the Holy Ghost,—conquers sinful impulses, and makes a Christian heart the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Italy, especially in the University of Padua, where it was professed until the seventeenth century, and where, as a doctrine hostile to supernaturalism, it paved the way for the study of nature and the rise of modern science. Thus Averroes may fairly be said to have had a share in every movement toward freedom, wise and unwise, for the last seven hundred years. In truth, free thought in Europe owes more to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of antiquity the pagan gods had receded to a distance, practically speaking, because they were not worshipped any more. No one troubled himself about them. But in theory one had got no further, i.e. no advance had been made on the ancients, and no advance could be made as long as supernaturalism was adhered to in connexion with the ancient view of the universe. Through monotheism the notions of the divinity of the sun, moon and planets had certainly been got rid of, but not so the notion of the world—i.e. the globe enclosed within the ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... magic as it is believed in or understood by the Indians of America is extremely interesting, for it involves that of all supernaturalism or of all religion whatever. But if we, declining all question as to the origin of monotheism, limit ourselves definitely to what is known of Shamanism alone, we shall still have before us an immense field for investigation. Shamanism is the belief that ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... wise, they will be careful not to predicate or suggest the absence of intention from what comes about by degrees through the continuous operation of physical causes, even in the organic world, lest, in their endeavor to retain a probable excess of supernaturalism in that realm of Nature, they cut away the grounds for recognizing it at all in inorganic Nature, and so fall into the same condemnation that some of them award ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... more vicious. So long as the rewards for which we hope and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and spiritual, we are on safe ground. But such a scheme of rewards and punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism. It is not by becoming more virtuous that we are saved. It is not by becoming more vicious that we are lost. We are saved by obedience, we are lost by disobedience, to the formulated rules of a divinely-delivered law. To appeal to Man's higher self, when there is no higher ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... which quickened other germs of what was afterwards to be known as romanticism, brought with it a notable renascence of the ballad. By general consent the first place in the balladry of the time belongs to Brger's Lenore (1774). The uncanny supernaturalism and onomatop[oe]ic word-jingles, which had lent a mysterious fascination to many an old ballad, but had virtually disappeared from the lyric poetry of the reason-worshiping century, were here revived ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the ancient religious systems of the Persians, Jews, and Hindus, underwent essential modifications, and gave birth to a kind of electicism, which became later an important element in the development of Christian history. The rationalism of the Platonic school and the supernaturalism of the Jewish Scriptures were chiefly mingled together, and from this amalgamation sprang the system of Neo-Platonism. When the early teachers of Christianity at Alexandria strove to show the harmony of the Gospel with ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Protestantism is not at all a question of relative supernaturalism, nor of rightness and wrongness, but wholly one of the difference between the systems of economics which gave ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... and torment of Protestantism that it leads to something ever beyond its ken, finally landing its adherent in a pious skepticism. Under the solvent of self-criticism {735} German religion and philosophy have dropped, one by one, all supernaturalism and comforting private hopes and have become absorbed in the duty of living manfully the conventional life of the world. Positive religion and frivolity both disappear, and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... most conceited man in France. He quarrelled with all his friends. He made war on society itself. He declared himself a believer in Christianity, but denied all revelation, all miracles, all inspiration, all supernaturalism, and everything he could not reconcile with his reason. His bitterest enemies were the atheists themselves, who regarded him as a hypocrite, since he professed to believe in what he undermined. The hostility of the Church was excited against him, not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... us for a moment imagine that because man is ceasing to remove his hat at her entrance into crowded elevators, or because he hustles her or allows her to hang by the straps in crowded cars, that he is tending to forget this supernaturalism of woman. Such change in his manners merely means his respect for her disguise, her disguise as a business woman. By day she desires to be regarded as just that, and she resents as untimely the recognition of her sex, her ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... that regeneration and salvation were not to be obtained by blind faith in Jesus, but by intelligent moral culture and spiritual development. This view was, as far as I know, original with Wasson, and should be distinguished from the anti-miraculous standpoint of Parker and the natural supernaturalism of Emerson. Almost at the same hour an English naturalist was applying the same principle to the origin of species, and the evolution of the human race from the lower animals. The Englishman's clear, inductive insight was matched by the philosophical penetration of an American. The Darwinian theory ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... weird and silly legends of Northern Buddhism, together with a full sketch of Buddhistic ethics and ontology (Hardy, pp. 460, 387). The most famous of the Northern books, the Lotus of the Law and the Lalita Vistara, give a good idea of the extravagance and supernaturalism that already have begun to disfigure the purer faith. According to Kern, who has translated the former work again (after Burnouf), the whole intent of the Lotus is to represent Buddha as the supreme, eternal God. The works, treating of piety, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... miraculous was carefully defined. He observed the absolute impossibility of evading the conclusion that the Jewish writers, whether eye-witnesses or not, implicitly believed in 'the supernaturalism, the divine or miraculous agency almost throughout the older history of the Jews,' and that it is 'an integral, inseparable part of the narrative.' Sometimes it is possible 'with more or less probability to detect the naked fact which may lie ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which—according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy—the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner' unknown in those old, more ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... evidences of departure from ancient landmarks, and of the propagation even to New England of a spirit of doubt, were growing suspicions as to the reality of that everyday supernaturalism which formed so prominent a feature of the Puritan theology. The zeal of Increase Mather against this rising incredulity had engaged him, while the old charter was still in existence, to publish a book of Remarkable Providences, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... later confusion of nomenclature; the word being loosely applied to any type of prose fiction in contrast with the short story or tale. But here, at an early date, the severance is plainly indicated between the study of contemporary society and the elder romance of heroism, supernaturalism, and improbability. It is a difference not so much of theme as of ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... adequate utterance. This, I think, is the chief element of Romanticism. Another has more of an external nature and genesis, and this we find in the works of such composers as Von Weber, who is Romantic chiefly in his operas, because of the supernaturalism and chivalry in their stories, and Mendelssohn, who, while distinctly Romantic in many of his strivings, was yet so great a master of form, and so attached to it, that the Romantic side of him ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
