"Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worthy goals but failed to reach them and new programs that provide a better way to realize those goals; and choices, too, between competing programs—all of which may be desirable in themselves but only some of which we can afford with the finite resources at ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... all those texts there is not the slightest trace of any reference to the wretched individual soul, as insignificant and weak as a tiny glow-worm, implicated in Nescience and all the other evils of finite existence. And the fruit of that knowledge of the highest Person the texts expressly declare, in many places, to be immortality—which consists in attaining to Him. The view of knowledge by itself benefitting man therefore is well founded.—The ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... profound problems of the greater universe, and a statement of the reasons for their feeling this pressure. These reasons are well suggested by Professor B.G. Harrison, in his Popular Astronomy. He says: "With the idea of a universe of finite dimensions there is the obvious difficulty of the beyond. The truth is that a universe of finite proportions is equally difficult to realize as one of infinite extent. Perhaps the nearest analogy to infinity that we ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the Almighty are discussed? Facts only are obvious to our reason; we must judge of them by the evidence of their reality if that is sufficient to establish the facts; why, or how they were produced, is beyond our comprehension. Let us learn that finite minds cannot judge of infinite wisdom, and confine our reason within its proper sphere.' By these, and many other arguments, Mr Selvyn was brought to believe the possibility of what he did not comprehend; ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... mean, with Spinoza, to blot out all created agents, and all subordinate agency, from existence? If not, then certainly God may refuse to be the author of sin, without leaving it to blind chance, which is incapable of such a thing. He may leave it, as we conceive he has done, to the determination of finite created intelligences. If sin is to come into the world, as come it evidently does, it is infinitely better, we say, that it should be left to proceed from the creature, and not be made to emanate from God himself, the fountain of light, and the great ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... about as near as the finite intellect can get to it, I should say," replied Redgrave. "But I don't think metaphysics are much in our line. If you've finished we may as well go and have a look ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as were still to be found. In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion, and brought to an unexampled pitch of accuracy. Little children of the labouring classes, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... right line, which is a right line so long as it is finite, by changing infinitely little its direction, becomes an infinite curve; and that a curve may become infinitely ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... philosopher of Jewish parentage, the chief representative of Pantheism, "the doctrine of one infinite substance, of which all finite existences are modes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... eternal necessary Obligation of all Rational Free Agents to do and feel those Sentiments which are Right. The identification of this law with His will constitutes the Holiness of the Infinite God. Voluntary and disinterested obedience to this law constitutes the Virtue of all finite creatures. Virtue is capable of infinite growth, of endless approach to the Divine nature and to perfect conformity with the law. God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and all worlds for rational ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... idealism specially valuable is his application of it to religion. Religion has been in all ages the mighty uplifting power in human life. It stands for a negation of the finite and fleeting, and an affirmation of the spiritual and the eternal. This is specially true of the Christian religion. Christianity is the supreme type of religion because it best answers the question, 'What can religion do for life?' ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... in terms; whatever is once numbered, we all see, cannot be infinite. "I think," said Mr. Johnson, after a pause, "we must settle the matter thus: numeration is certainly infinite, for eternity might be employed in adding unit to unit; but every number is in itself finite, as the possibility of doubling it easily proves; besides, stop at what point you will, you find yourself as far from infinitude as ever." These passages I wrote down as soon as I had heard them, and repent that I did ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... quoted in the Gospels and Epistles, this word aionios is frequently applied to things that have ended, e. g., the gift of the land of Canaan, the priesthood of Aaron, the kingdom of David, the temple at Jerusalem, the daily offerings, etc. When the noun always means a finite period and the adjective is applied both to that which is ended and to that which is endless it would surely be poor scholarship if the Revisers allowed the word "everlasting" to remain as its translation, ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... with St. Helena that all biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte hitherto published have ended, and perhaps it is just as well that these entertaining works, prepared by purely finite minds, should end there. It is well for an historian not to tell more than he knows, a principle which has guided our pen from the inception of this work to this point, and which must continue to the bitter end. We shall be relentless and truthful to the last, even ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... thing finite, suo genere, when it can be limited by another (or others) of the same nature—e.g. a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the "Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, oh if I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Absolute, of course, we can know practically nothing, because it transcends all human experience and Man has nothing with which he can measure the Infinite. Spinoza was right when he said that "to define God is to deny him," for any attempt to define, is, of course an attempt to limit or make finite the Infinite. To define a thing is to identify it with something else—and where is the something else with which to identify the Infinite? The Absolute cannot be described in terms of the Relative. It is ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... truly said by Christians that Confucius might have made a religion of his system of ethics, by adding a sixth and supreme relation—that between God and man. This he declined to do, and so left his people without any aspiration toward the Infinite. By setting before them only a finite goal he sapped the principles ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... greater, and so her joy is deeper. And is not this true of our HEAVENLY FATHER? When His heart blesses ours, and ours blesses HIM, we are full of joy; but His heart is infinitely greater than ours, and His joy in His people as far exceeds all their joy in Him, as the infinite exceeds the finite. ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... things, we must of course neglect others. This imperfection which we observe in ourselves is an imperfection that cleaves in some degree to creatures of the highest capacities, as they are creatures, that is, beings of finite and limited natures. The presence of every created being is confined to a certain measure of space, and consequently his observation is stinted to a certain number of objects. The sphere in which we move, and act, and understand, is of a wider ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... These strong hands were quivering; they hovered above the signs on the rocks. The mystic letters, the inspired words, where were they? Grope as he might, he could not find them. Alas! doubt and denial had climbed the mountain—the awful limitations of the more finite human creature—and his inspiration and the finer enthusiasms of the truth ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... beautiful, or in no relation to the beautiful, or a specific class in various degrees opposed to the beautiful. And the negative may be a negation of fact or of thought (ou and me). Lastly, there are certain ideas, such as 'beginning,' 'becoming,' 'the finite,' 'the abstract,' in which the negative cannot be separated from the positive, and 'Being' ...
— Sophist • Plato
... requisite books, which were in French, and consisted of Francoeur's pure "Mathematics," and his "Elements of Mechanics," La Croix's "Algebra," and his large work on the "Differential and Integral Calculus," together with his work on "Finite Differences and Series," Biot's "Analytical Geometry and Astronomy," Poisson's "Treatise on Mechanics," La Grange's "Theory of Analytical Functions," Euler's "Algebra," Euler's "Isoperimetrical Problems" (in ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... years, it is but an evidence of their exceptional vitality. It seems to be true that the experiences of a long life of sixty or eighty years is crowded into a narrow compass of four years by a miracle of spheres not comprehended by finite minds. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... "running down." Some writers have maintained this, but their argument implies that we know a great deal more about the universe than we actually do. The scientific man does not know whether the universe is finite or infinite, temporal or eternal; and he declines to speculate where there are no facts to guide him. He knows only that the great gaseous nebulae promise myriads of worlds in the future, and he concedes the possibility that new nebulae ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... continuity will bring us to be something different from what we were. The three views are not mutually exclusive. As Vatke says, "The influence of Divine grace does not differ from the immanent development of the deepest Divine germ of life in man, only that it here stands over-against man regarded as a finite and separate being—as something external to himself. If the Divine image is the true nature of man, and if it only possesses reality in virtue of its identity with its type or with the Logos, then there can be no true self-determination in man which is not at the same ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... not, according to my understanding of the question. I do not like to deal in abstractions. It seldom leads to any useful ends. There are few universal truths. I do not now remember any single moral truth universally acknowledged. We have no assurance that it is given to our finite understanding to comprehend abstract moral truth. Apart from revelation and the inspired writings, what ideas should we have even of God, salvation, and immortality? Let the heathen answer. Justice itself is impalpable as an abstraction, and abstract liberty ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the main category of the Greeks, the absolute form which embraced all their finite forms. It moulded their literature, as it did their sculpture, architecture, and the action of their gymnasts and orators. They therefore delighted only in the highest orders and purest specimens of literature, refused to retain in remembrance any of the unsuccessful attempts at poetry which may ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... rather an assumption among a certain class of critics that the artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their minds to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... law, he may refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition. To apply the same explanation to the evil which God causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent. Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words 'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent misrepresentation ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... the Intellect, which is the result of Education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the human mind is that all its perceptions are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity. The same limitation therefore applies to the world as it appears to our reasoning intellect, and in the world of science there is no infinity, and conceptions such as God and the immortality ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... bunk with him, I dressed myself with one of my two white shirts, and with the change of raiment which had been tight squeezed in my portmanteau. The old overcoat was the best part of it, as in a finite world it often is. I sold my felt hat to Zekiel, and appeared with a light travelling-cap. I do not know how Fausta liked my metamorphosis. I only know that, like butterflies, for a day or two after they go through theirs, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... is causa sui, its own cause, I mean a thing the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which cannot be conceived of except as existing. 2. I call a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be circumscribed by another (or others) of the same nature, e.g. a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body larger than it; but body is not circumscribed by thought, nor thought by body. 3. By substance ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... living creatures; and from the union of one with the diverse is generated the Universe. Hence the progression from ascent to descent, from spirit to that which we call matter; from the cause to the origin, and the process of metaphysics, which, from the finite world of sense rises to the intelligent, passing through the intermediate numbers of infinite substance to active being ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... our visions of the unpicturable, the ideal world, which our imagination paints and which our logical reasoning calls for as the necessary cap or final corollary to any finite world which our intelligence can actually define,— that such visions are nothing but the pictures of infantile desires projected on to a great screen and made to mock us with the appearance ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... and rose. Heart, spirit, and body, and brain, Thou art utterly mine, as I thine; But the love of the flesh, tho' at first When I saw you and loved you it burst With the love of the spirit one flame, Neither greater nor less, but the same, Is yet finite, attains not the height Of the spirit enfranchised, and must With the body slip back into dust. ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the house, and returned with a well- thumbed brown book. She turned the pages thoughtfully, and read aloud, presumably for the benefit of the cats: "In a symbol there is concealment yet revelation, the infinite is made to blend with the finite, to stand visible, and as it were attainable there." The Child sighed, "We had better go to the Recluse," she said. So the ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... paths, and, as we move forward, are still at a greater distance from each other. As a question becomes more complicated and involved, and extends to a greater number of relations, disagreement of opinion will always be multiplied; not because we are irrational, but because we are finite beings, furnished with different kinds of knowledge, exerting different degrees of attention, one discovering consequences which escape another, none taking in the whole concatenation of causes and effects, and most comprehending but a ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... anatomically constructed race of beings might subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to vanities, to vanities of vanities and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being final or otherwise than finite. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... at least to a noble ambition to perfect it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil—if we understand by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart and will in morals—the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the devil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!—life in the making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification means loss of interest; and loss of interest, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... the supersensible. He makes us feel that the image is inadequate, though he has to use it; poetry is driven upon its very limit. At this point specially we note the kinship of the Odyssey with Romantic Art, which through the finite form suggests the Infinite. Dante comes to mind, whose great poem is one vast struggle of the limited symbol with the unlimited spirit which is symbolized. Thus the old Greek song becomes prophetic, foreshadowing the next great world-poem, or Literary Bible, written ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... used other men's ideas, and that he made up his mind slowly. All this is true, and these very qualities help to show his greatness, for only small minds mistake their relations with the universe, and confuse their finite powers with omniscience. The great man, who sees facts and reads the future, uses other men, knows the bounds of possibility in action, can decide instantly if need be, but leaves rash conclusions to those who are incapable of reaching ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... (dimensions) 192; amplitude, magnitude, mass, amount, sum, quantum, measure, substance, strength, force. [Science of quantity.] mathematics, mathesis^. [Logic.] category, general conception, universal predicament. [Definite or finite quantity.] armful, handful, mouthful, spoonful, capful; stock, batch, lot, dose; yaffle^. V. quantify, measure, fix, estimate, determine, quantitate, enumerate. Adj. quantitative, some, any, aught, more or less, a few. Adv. to the tune of, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... assumption of attributes we again reach the highest possible synthesis. This must be the method of the divine activity, successive differentiation and integration, the closing in of a mighty circle of infinity, embracing all the finite, but never losing the essential characteristic of ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... that there is any existing force capable of opposing him, and imagines that he has but to go on in his own way to grasp all worlds and the secrets of their being. At this juncture, so often arrived at by many, a kind of super-sureness sets in, persuading the finite nature that it has reached the infinite. The whole mental organisation of the man thrilled with an awful consciousness of power. He said within himself "I hold the lives of ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... some have maintained? Is it just the sum of all forms of consciousness—our consciousnesses being organs or phases of the Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker strictly personal, carrying on a thought-world by the power of his will and calling into existence finite thinkers in his own image? Assuming that the world is the expression of the thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in the forces of nature and creates men in his own image, the further question arises as to the ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... theoretically invariable, since something may intervene to disturb them. In order to obtain invariable physical laws, we have to proceed to differential equations, showing the direction of change at each moment, not the integral change after a finite interval, however short. But for the purposes of daily life many sequences are to all in tents and purposes invariable. With the behaviour of human beings, however, this is by no means the case. If you say to an Englishman, "You have a smut ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... in this case the reproduction of nebulous masses fit for generating new systems of worlds must go on through space that is endless, and consequently the process can never come to an end and can never have had a beginning. We have, therefore, three alternatives: either the visible universe is finite, while the ether is infinite; or both are finite; or both are infinite. Only on the first supposition, I think, do we get a universe which began in time and must end in time. Between such stupendous alternatives we have no grounds for choosing. But it would ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the reduction of all machine-industry to public routine services, when it becomes possible, will imply a net diminution in the scope of individual self-expression, rests upon the patent fallacy of assigning certain fixed and finite limits to human interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest. If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities which are engaged in satisfying ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... stumbling block to many. I lately asked a very eminent man in England, the president of a theological college, how he would get over that difficulty. He replied that he believed that the word "aion" would more fully meet the case, and that that word would more exactly accord with the capacity of our finite mind, the word "forever" expressing an idea entirely beyond our comprehension. That seems to be good sense, and more in harmony with the whole ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... placed under a large ash tree. From that point St. Mary's spire was visible, about half a mile away in the west, rising boldly, confidently, one might say, into the sky, as if it dared to claim that it too, although on earth and finite, could match itself against the infinite heaven above. On this particular evening the spire was specially obvious and attractive, for it divided the sunset clouds, standing out black against the long, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the contrary. Their doubts arise not from pride, but from humility: not because they do not appreciate divine truth, but on the contrary they doubt whether we can appreciate it sufficiently, and are sceptical whether the infinite can be reduced to the finite. ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... stated above (A. 3), concupiscence is twofold; one is natural, the other is not natural. Natural concupiscence cannot be actually infinite: because it is of that which nature requires; and nature ever tends to something finite and fixed. Hence man never desires infinite meat, or infinite drink. But just as in nature there is potential successive infinity, so can this kind of concupiscence be infinite successively; so that, for instance, after getting food, a man may ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... corresponding individual body; and whether it terminates with the end of the corporeal series, or goes on after the existence of the body has ended. And, in both cases, there arises the further question, whether the excess of duration of the mental series over that of the body, is finite ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... whether Pleasure or Knowledge is the chief good. A metaphysical argument which follows that of the Parmenides ends in the characteristic Greek distinction between the Finite and the Infinite. Pleasure is infinite, because it can exist in greater or less degree; there is a mixed life compounded of finite and infinite and there is a creative faculty to which mind belongs. Pleasure is of ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... frequency of lightning oscillations is great. The impedance of a few turns of heavy wire may be negligible to alternating currents of ordinary frequencies because the resistance of the wire is low, its inductance small, and the frequency finite. On the other hand, the impedance of such a coil to a lightning discharge is much higher, due to the very high frequency of ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... walls that close the world around He far o'erleaped; his spirit soared on high Through the vast whole, the one infinity. Victor, he brought the tidings from the skies What things in nature may, or may not, rise; What stated laws a power finite assign, And still with bounds impassable confine. Thus trod beneath our feet the phantom lies; We mount o'er Superstition to the skies. —Trans. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... in a rage, upbraided her with being a blinded fool, and asked her whether she did not know that the world was finite and limited, whilst what the convent contained was eternal ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that gods were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... again, Jimmy! Forget as Uncle Al will forget—until we come for you. Be a little shantyboat boy! You are safe on the wide bosom of the Father of Waters. Your parents planted you in a rich and kindly loam, and in all the finite universes you will find no cosier nook, for life flows here with a diversity that is infinite and—Pigtail! She gets on your nerves ...
— The Mississippi Saucer • Frank Belknap Long
... Sustain the Theory. Does not Account for the Origin of Anything. Wild Assumptions Made by Darwin. Erroneous Assumption of the Tendency of Natural Selection to Improve Breeds. Assumption of Infinite Possibility of Progress in Finite Creatures. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... accomplished itself and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that, besides the vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc)—besides, these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe), ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... himself believe them, with fire and torture makes other men believe them; until finally, in the confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the discovery that his tools are inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative, while the First Cause ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... can never have in regard to any moral truth whatever. The Divine law is a deduction necessarily and mathematically certain as much so as any truth in geometry. Human law can aim only at such a probable deduction as results from a finite and imperfect knowledge. ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... smote upon my ear, for they seemed to be the utterance of some human being in the very last extremity of both physical and mental anguish, the protest of a lost soul being wrenched violently out of its sinful human tenement, cries of such utter, unimaginable despair as the finite mind of man is unable to find a cause for. Yet, despite the agony of horror that froze my blood, I instinctively thrust my helm hard down and flattened in the sheets fore and aft; for the thought came to me that, perchance, a few fathoms out there, veiled ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... cluster in the heavens, which appears to our eyes as the Milky Way; while outside our star cluster again are innumerable others, which far transcend, alike in magnitude, in grandeur, and in distance, the feeble powers of our finite imagination. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... through the Christian religion that the absolute idea of God, in if true conception, attained consciousness. Here man, too, finds himself comprehended in his true nature, given in the specific conception of "the Son." Man, finite when regarded for himself, is yet at the same time the image of God and a fountain of infinity in himself. Consequently he has his true home in a super-sensuous world—an infinite subjectivity, gained only by a rupture with ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... but joyous citizen of the world at large was Mr. Phelan Harrihan, as, with a soul wholly in tune with the finite, he half sat and half reclined on a baggage-truck at Lebanon Junction. He wag relieving the tedium of his waiting moments by entertaining a critical if not ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... with the outside of things as it were, it is evident that the stronger the light of the understanding, the further can it penetrate into the heart of things. Now the natural light of our understanding is of finite power; wherefore it can reach to a certain fixed point. Consequently man needs a supernatural light in order to penetrate further still so as to know what it cannot know by its natural light: ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... captivity. So the Maryland colonists, recognizing that their proprietor meant well, forgave him his generosity, and his activities in their behalf—but only because they knew that his day would presently be past. Man is infinite as well as finite: infinite in his claims, finite in his power of giving. And for Baltimore to presume to give the people all they claimed, was as much as to say that his fullness could equal their want, or that his rights and capacities were more than theirs. He gave them all that a democracy can possess ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... confidence in one who, ordering them out, stays underground himself. I am learning, but, oh! so slowly, for mine is not a nature that is really shaped for war. A vivid imagination is here a handicap, and it is those who have little or none who make the best soldiers. At last the "finished and finite clod" has come into his own. Stolid, in a danger he hardly realizes, he remains at his post, while the other, perchance shaking in every limb, has double the battle to fight. My pencil wanders on and I hardly seem to know what I write. Confused thoughts and half-formed ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a similitude of thought and language: the discourse of a philosopher would vibrate without effect on the ear of a peasant; yet how minute is the distance of their understandings, if it be compared with the contact of an infinite and a finite mind, with the word of God expressed by the tongue or the pen of a mortal! The inspiration of the Hebrew prophets, of the apostles and evangelists of Christ, might not be incompatible with the exercise of their reason and memory; and the diversity of their genius is strongly marked in the style ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... he can subdue the North. He disclaims the open threat, but his conduct still implies it. How little that Senator knows himself or the strength of the cause which he persecutes! He is but a mortal man; against him is an immortal principle. With finite power he wrestles with the infinite, and he must fall. Against him are stronger battalions than any marshalled by mortal arm—the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human heart; against him is nature in ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Omniscience we may not, in our finite intelligence, fully cognize, because full cognition would preclude the possibility of ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... in which we may pass to the most diverse forms by insensible gradations. Arguing the matter some time since with a learned professor, I illustrated my position thus:—You admit that there is no apparent relationship between a circle and an hyperbola. The one is a finite curve; the other is an infinite one. All parts of the one are alike; of the other no parts are alike [save parts on its opposite sides]. The one incloses a space; the other will not inclose a space though produced ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... originally founded in the human organization. By virtue of this organization we are bound, in all our knowledge of the world of appearances, to the law of causality. Science does not get beyond this causal chain of finite and relative causes and effects; to the "thing per se" there is nowhere to be found a bridge, not even as Kant supposes, in the categoric imperative, nor in ideas. Inasmuch as science does not get ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... cruel, imperious, brutal, he imposed himself upon those who became his followers; but in him were to be found none of the statesmanlike qualities which distinguished his far greater younger brother. His was the absolutely finite intellect of the tactician as opposed to the strategist, who, seeing his objective, was capable of dealing with circumstances as they immediately arose; but, partly no doubt from defective education, but principally from the lack of ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... to Gaston. The master's wistful tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age, attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him. Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... everything, to make life pleasant, and lo! death has entered, and your hopes are darkened and in the dust; I appeal to you, O types of this streaming humanity, that wears so many masks, yet, carries under all a common heart; and ask you, if there is not some void that no earthly good can fill—that no finite thing can sustain and satisfy? Can you go on with the common business of the world, discharge all its obligations, control yourself in its excitements, resist its evil solicitations, bear up under its trials, and, finally, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... who causes the motion, but to that which is moved. In answer to your remark that it is more fitting for an infinite power to reveal a large part of itself rather than a little, I answer that, in relation to the infinite, one part is not greater than another, if both are finite. Hence it is unallowable to say that a hundred thousand is a larger part of an infinite number than two, although the former is fifty thousand times greater than the latter. If, therefore, we consider the moving bodies, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the gates of consciousness upon us when we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; which was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us as life itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite to affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the evening midge for its opinion ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... man the citizen of an intelligible world. There can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it. However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not only a law-giver, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... between death and deathlessness. Yet this measureless gulf is bridged in a moment when the self revealing one reveals himself in the soul. There the miracle happens, for there is the meeting-ground of the finite and infinite. Father, completely sweep away all my sins! [Footnote: Vishvanideva savitar duratani parasuva.] For in sin man takes part with the finite against the infinite that is in him. It is the defeat of his ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... her prosaic marriage flashed into my mind. It seemed to me that now I could grasp the inner meaning in your life. Oh! my sweet, why do we speak a different tongue? Your marriage of convenience and my love match are two worlds, as widely separated as the finite from infinity. You still walk the earth, whilst I range the heavens! Your sphere is human, mine divine! Love crowned me queen, you reign by reason and duty. So lofty are the regions where I soar, that a fall ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... this Constituent Assembly does to the last continue to be something. With a sigh, it sees itself incessantly forced away from its infinite divine task, of perfecting 'the Theory of Irregular Verbs,'—to finite terrestrial tasks, which latter have still a significance for us. It is the cynosure of revolutionary France, this National Assembly. All work of Government has fallen into its hands, or under ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... values is that, as Mr Upton[15] has well expressed it, "there is a certain self-revelation of the eternal and infinite One to the finite soul, and therefore an indestructible basis for religious ideas and beliefs as distinguished from what is called scientific knowledge. . . . This immanent universal principle does not pertain to, and is ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... persons incomparably most happy that have least to do with any at all, but jog on in the common road of nature, which will never mislead us, except we voluntarily leap over those boundaries which she has cautiously set to our finite beings. Nature glitters most in her own plain, homely garb, and then gives the greatest lustre when she is ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... starting In accordance with the data of the question to be solved, it should continue its movements regularly, progressively, and undeviatingly towards the required solution, since these movements, however complex, are never imagined to be otherwise than finite and determinate. But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... indefinite, the natural, commands; the Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our cultus,—a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than men, the common reason of the age in which we live ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... by ordinary means. It was enough for me that I heard and understood, and felt the goodness and glory of God. I may say that my first great lessons in true philosophy were obtained in these lectures, where I learned to distinguish between the finite and infinite, ceasing to envy any, while I inclined to worship one. The benevolence of Providence is extended to all its creatures, each receiving it in a mode adapted to its own powers of improvement. My destiny being toward a communion with man—or rather with woman—I have ever ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... general ideas, according to the common method of explaining them. We must certainly seek some new system on this head, and there plainly is none beside what I have proposed. If ideas be particular in their nature, and at the same time finite in their number, it is only by custom they can become general in their representation, and contain an infinite number of other ideas ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed, in talking to my class, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our root F,—F being any finite constant—" ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... As the Infinite differs from the Finite and the Unconditioned from the Conditioned.—Ed. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... elective offices, focus the attention on a few alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter. The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because "logic" ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... SOMETHING was indescribably STRONGER than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any individual ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... clouding his aspirations toward the mountain peaks and the stars. For the desert must ever remain an unsolved enigma, never to be reduced to a formula, never to be explained by any human standards; now whispering to man of the mysteries of the soul and revealing to him more of the infinite than his finite senses may grasp; and now mocking him with illusions, her beautiful mirages wrought of airbeams and sunlight, and transforming him into a beast of greed with her haunting intimations of ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... to the idea of what is agreeable or useful, but to the idea of what is simply right. If educated into a religious being, she learns to submit her will to the Divine Will, and in her relation to God, she first becomes freed from the bonds of all finite and transitory things, and attains to the region where perfect obedience and perfect freedom coincide.[24] A woman who is virtuous, so to speak, with regard to the first, might be characterized as polite; she who is virtuous in regard to the second, as conscientious; ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... would have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of such ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... force capable of controlling and humanizing material forces. To this doctrine, which rests upon man as its centre and which was essentially human, German thought opposes itself as the infinite opposes the finite, the absolute the relative, the whole the part. The disciples of the Greeks had at their disposition no light except that of human reason; the German genius possesses a transcendent reason which pierces the mysteries of the absolute, of ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... of the word 'Infinity.' We look out toward the stars, fancying that only in unlimited space can we find the infinite. We little suspect we ourselves are infinity! It is only our five senses that make us finite. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... of corporeal dimensions. These black Opinions of Death and the Non-entity of Souls (darker than Hell it self) shrink up the free-born Spirit which is within us, which would otherwise be dilating and spreading it self boundlessly beyond all Finite Being: and when these sorry pinching mists are once blown away, it finds this narrow sphear of Being to give way before it; and having once seen beyond Time and Matter, it finds then no more ends nor bounds to stop its swift and restless motion. It may then fly upwards from one heaven ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... I have said, are merely academic. Your true angler is a philosopher. Enough is to him worth fifteen courses, and if the finite mind of man could imagine anything to be desired as an addition to his present possessions on the River, he at least knows nothing of it. Already he commands ten miles of water—swift, clear water—running over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he has ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... living one of the best able to cope with such an untimely situation as this. A contriving, sagacious, gentle-mannered man, a philosopher who saw that the only constant attribute of life is change, he held that, as long as she lives, there is nothing finite in the most impassioned attitude a woman may take up. In twelve months his girl-wife's recent infatuation might be as distasteful to her mind as it was now to his own. In a few years her very flesh would change—so said the scientific;—her spirit, so much more ephemeral, ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... I suppose we cannot comprehend infinity, because we are essentially finite ourselves. But it by no means follows that we cannot apprehend and believe in attributes which we are unable to comprehend. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Can the Finite the Infinite search! Did the blind discover the stars? Is the thought that I think a thought, Or a throb of a ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... really desired, however, was the office of sei-i tai-shogun (barbarian-subduing great general). This high title had been conferred more than once previously, but only for the purpose of some finite and clearly indicated purpose, on the attainment of which the office had to be surrendered. The Kamakura chief's plan was to remove these limitations, and to make the appointment not only for life but also general in the scope of its functions ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... more, you adore more strangely its repose, you steep yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate from it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it at last perhaps you understand the infinite; you understand where is the bourne to which the finite flows with all its greatness, as the great Nile flows from beyond Victoria Nyanza to ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... doctrine, indeed, there are successive cycles of activity and repose, each cycle being measured by countless milliards of centuries. According to the moderns, self-evolution being necessary, there can be no repose, so that Ohne Welt kein Gott. (4.) The Finite is, therefore, the existence form of the Infinite; all that is in the latter for the time being is in the former. All that is possible is actual. (5.) The Finite is the Infinite, or, to use theistic language, the World is God, in the sense that all the world ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... being whether one and the same religious need is to be recognized in all the varieties, he finds the root of sacrificial observances in the yearning of the believer for abiding communion with the supernatural Power to which he feels himself akin, the longing of finite man to become one with ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... some given law. In this manner it calculates astronomical, logarithmic, and navigation tables, as well as tables of the powers and products of numbers. It can integrate, too, innumerable equations of finite differences; and, in addition to these functions, it does its work cheaply and quickly; it corrects whatever errors are accidentally committed, and it prints all ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... which broods over its best achievements, the attainment of all its desires. That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could be ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... intervals of every few years, and war itself is only one of a series of catastrophes and calamities that splash the human chronicle with innocent blood. They give it up, sorrowfully, and find a thin consolation in learned formulae about the impossibility of a finite mind understanding an infinite mind, and so on: which give, as I say, thin consolation, for one may at least see that an infinite benevolence ought not to act worse ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... company of those who are dear, the source of our happiness would still be our own thought and love; and if they are great and noble, we cannot be miserable however meanly surrounded. What is reality but a state of soul, finite in man, infinite in God? Theory underlies fact, and to the divine mind all things are godlike and beautiful. The chemical elements are as sweet and pure in the buried corpse as in the blooming ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... money, Janoah's jealousy and evil suspicions—ah, it did not take long for such influences to mar the peace of a heaven and smear the grime of earth upon its fairness! Only glimpses of perfection were granted the dwellers of this planet,—quick, transient flashes that mirrored a future free from finite limitations. He who expected to remain on the heights in this world was ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... progress. O Lord! from the depths of my heart I would implore Thee to aid me in all good intentions. My heart overflows with its fulness of gratitude for what Thou hast done for me, and I know Thou wilt not shorten Thy hand. Thy beauty, Thy loveliness, O God! is beyond our finite vision, far above our expression. Lord, all I can utter is, Help ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... may prolong the period of time between the action we are examining and the judgment upon it, that period will be finite, while time is infinite, and so in this respect too there can never ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... circumstances, it is an irrevelant enquiry, to ask, Are Time and Space finite or infinite? Many philosophers have put the question, and even answered it. They say Time has no beginning and no end, and Space has no boundaries; or, as otherwise expressed,—Time and Space are Infinite: an answer of such vagueness as to mean anything, from a harmless and proper assertion of the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... human souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal value. They differ only in power to apprehend, and this may be more easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. I would even dare to quote of this Universal Truth the words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love: "I see now that if God's love reaches up to every star and down to every ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of God, and the dignity of our own soul.... Man independent would be an object of contempt; the feeling of his own imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it reveals to him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can satisfy his desires in the possession ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... Pre-Raphaelitism from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions have been but imperfectly made. The most exact and truthful representation of Nature may be the rule of the artist, but it is not an easy thing to attain to an understanding of the truth of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Jehovah he does not introduce an altogether new element, but emphasizes motifs already developed in the earlier dialogues. The effect of these speeches upon Job are threefold: (1) They rebuke his over-accentuated individualism. (2) They reveal the fundamental contrast between the infinite God and finite man. In the light of this revelation Job plainly recognizes his presumption and folly in attempting, with his limited outlook, to comprehend, much less to criticise, the mighty ruler of all the universe. (3) ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... this ship our world, penned in as we were on every side, and separated from all else by an ocean inexorable and illimitable as space, and were not we likewise looking forward to a fiery doom—our finite, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... last into prejudice and tradition. I never could advance my curiosity to conviction; but came away at last only willing to believe.' See also post, March 24, 1775. Hume said of the evidence in favour of second-sight—:'As finite added to finite never approaches a hair's breadth nearer to infinite, so a fact incredible in itself acquires not the smallest accession of probability by the accumulation of testimony.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... people had been keeping Christmas with Sam Perry and Lycidas and Harry and me; and here were Yokohama and the Japanese, the Daily Argus and its ten million tokens and their readers,—poor Fanny Woodhull and her sick mother there, keeping Christmas too! For a finite world, these are a good many "waits" to be singing in one poor fellow's ears ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... at strife; That the great marvel of His death To the one order witnesseth, No doubt of changeless goodness wakes, No link of cause and sequence breaks, But, one with nature, rooted is In the eternal verities; Whereby, while differing in degree As finite from infinity, The pain and loss for others borne, Love's crown of suffering meekly worn, The life man giveth for his friend Become vicarious in the end; Their healing place in nature take, And make life sweeter for ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... my large faith unto gloom allied, Sprang up a shadow sunshine could not quell, And the voice said, Would'st haste to go outside This continent of being, it were well: Where finite, growing toward the Infinite, Gathers its robe of glory out of dust, And looking down the radiances white, Sees all God's purposes about us, just. Canst thou, Elhadra, reach out of the grave, And draw ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... in Himself. His holy soul shrank from that which a holy God must hate, that which He hated—SIN. He was about to be made sin and He knew no sin. What suffering this produced in the Holy One of God to take all upon Himself and to stand in the sinner's place before a holy sin-hating God, our poor finite ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... sense of justice. She appears to have reasoned of many things, usually taken by childhood for granted, and assented to their results only if they seemed to her childishness just. If after life showed her that the affairs of this life can be but seldom regulated according to the ideas of finite justice, she never seems to have lost a certain fairness of judgment and opinion, which is rare in one of her sex and circumstances. When five years old, her mother, wishing her to give up a pet doll to a little crippled friend, told her that sympathy should suggest her doing it; that it ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... to me, that if the matter of our sun and planets, and all the matter of the universe, were evenly scattered, throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity towards all the rest, and the whole space, throughout which this matter was scattered, was but finite, the matter on the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend towards all the matter on the inside, and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass. But if the matter ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... this apparent yielding of invisible forces into human hands, are signs and portents of terror. You remember the line 'the powers of heaven shall be shaken'? Those powers are being shaken now! We cannot hold them back;—they are here, with us;—but they mean much more than mere common utility to our finite selves. They are the material declarations of what is spiritual. They are the scientific proofs that Christ's words to 'THIS generation,' namely, this particular phase of creation,—are true. 'Blessed are they which have not seen ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... again becomes dark, then, as the dynamo gets up speed, glows again. If the brake be screwed up tight, the lamp once more becomes dark. The explanation is simple. Owing to the coefficient of self-induction of the dynamo machine being considerable, it takes a finite time for the current to obtain an appreciable intensity, but the lamp having no self-induction, the current at once passes through it, and causes it to glow. Secondly, the electrical inertia of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... certainly must say, every year shows me more and more that the idea of Christian politics cannot be realised in the state according to its present conditions of existence. For purposes sufficient, I believe, but partial and finite, I am more than content to be where I am. But the perfect freedom of the new covenant can only, it seems to me, be breathed in other air; and the day may come when God may grant to me the application of this conviction ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... cannot be explained by Metaphysics; for it is prior to them and much more nearly allied to sense. It is not likely that the meaning of the cases is ultimately resolvable into relations of space and time. Nor can we suppose the conception of cause and effect or of the finite and infinite or of the same and other to be latent in language at a time when in their abstract form they had never entered into the mind of man...If the science of Comparative Philology had possessed 'enough of Metaphysics to get rid of Metaphysics,' it ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... goodness must be the simple actuating principle within him; this being the moral quality which is amiable, or the immediate object of love as distinct from other affections of approbation. Here then is a finite object for our mind to tend towards, to exercise itself upon: a creature, perfect according to his capacity, fixed, steady, equally unmoved by weak pity or more weak fury and resentment; forming the justest scheme of conduct; ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... qualities are not of a nature to be comprehended by finite minds. The natural consequence must be, that divine qualities are not made to occupy finite minds. But religion tells us, that the poor finite mind of man ought never to lose sight of an inconceivable being, whose qualities he can never comprehend. Thus, we see, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... earth, heaven and hell, Would own, "Thou didst create us!" Naught impedes We voice the other name, man's most of might, Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love Mutely await their working, leave to sight All of the issue as—below—above— Shakespeare's creation rises: one remove, Though dread—this finite from that infinite. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... a very high view of the matter; but apart from it I cannot well explain why cowardice seems contemptible, and personal courage a noble and sublime thing; for no lower point of view enables me to see why a finite individual who is everything to himself—nay, who is himself even the very fundamental condition of the existence of the rest of the world—should not put his own preservation above every other aim. It is, then, an insufficient explanation of Courage to make it rest only on utility, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... understanding Do thine own work, and know thyself Effect and performance are not at all in our power Fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting Folly of gaping after future things Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere If they chop upon one truth, that carries a mighty report Iimpotencies that so unseasonably surprise the lover Let it be permitted to the timid to hope Light griefs can speak: ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... mountains mine, — All forests, stintless stars, As much of noon as I could take Between my finite eyes. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... Jesus," As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you! It would have been infinitely more than we had reason to expect, if He had said, "As my Father hath loved ANGELS, so have I loved you." But the love borne to no finite beings is an appropriate symbol. Long before the birth of time or of worlds, that love existed. It was coeval with Eternity itself. Hear how the two themes of the Saviour's eternal rejoicing—the love of His Father, ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... measured. Yet you will easily find a man in whom the latter so abounds as not only to shut him out from others, but to absorb all the vital resource generated in his own bosom, leaving to the pure personality nothing. The finite nature fares sumptuously every day; the other is a heavenly Lazarus sitting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King's head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... writing this paper is to show, by the further help of illustration from a popular religious sect of Bengal, that the religious instinct of man urges him towards a truth, by which he can transcend the finite nature of the individual self. Man would never feel the indignity of his limitations if these were inevitable. Within him he has glimpses of the Infinite, which give him assurance that this truth is not in his limitations, but that ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... wonder that he insists so much on his finite God. The postulate hardly touches his real thesis. And I find it easier to believe that there may be some things behind "this round world" that Mr. WELLS cannot fully understand because he (the author) is finite—and busy—than accept what seems a contradiction in terms to no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... of St. Anselm: To conceive God is to prove that He is; the conception of God is proof of His existence; for every idea has its object; above all, an idea which has infinity for object takes for granted the existence of infinity; for all being finite here below, what would give the idea of infinity to the human mind? Therefore, if the human brain has the idea of infinity it is because of the existence of infinity. The argument is perhaps open to difference of opinion, but as proof of a singular vigour of mind ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet |
