"Materialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the series," however, is vastly different from anything within the mental range of the distinguished professor, whose ultra materialism led him to revamp the old Cartesian doctrine that animals were only machines, like clocks or mills, running automatically, and destitute of sensation, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... a correspondence of mind and matter, he could very well give these terms an indirect importance for psychical evolution. Spencer has always, in my opinion with full right, repudiated the ascription of materialism. He is no more a materialist than Spinoza. In his "Principles of Psychology" (paragraph 63) he expressed himself very clearly: "Though it seems easier to translate so-called matter into so-called spirit, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... any conception of this kind. He was a man of force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy, was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive theory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational social ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... money he owed his shoemaker. The list was long, and "bills payable" lamentable. To end this dreary balance-sheet, I took it into my head to deliver him a lecture on the morality of literature and the duty of literary men. "Art," said I to him, "must escape the materialism which oppresses and will at last absorb it. We romantics of 1828 were mistaken. We thought we were reacting against the pagan and mummified school of the eighteenth century and of the First Empire. We did not perceive that a revolutionary Art can under no circumstances turn to the profit of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... in search of the shawl and stockings; for her own view of the matter, however subtle and delicate, had given way, as it always did, to the stubborn materialism of her husband. Without heeding the remonstrances of his two children, who still kept murmuring that their little snow-sister did not love the warmth, good Mr. Lindsey took his departure, shutting ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism by dropping a Greek Iota; she has not succumbed to Eastern influences, which would have made her forget she was the Church on earth as well as in heaven. With tremendous commonsense she has remained rational and chosen the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... immaterial world (he having been inclined before to pyrrhonism) quite altered his career, and that soon after he took holy orders. In this connection I may state, that according to a printed account I have seen, both Mr. and Mrs. Hall were converted from avowed materialism by spirit manifestation, and that when the question of "Cui bono?" is raised, his experience and that of divers others (the aforesaid Dr. Chambers in particular) will avouch for the practical usefulness ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... features of the Mosaic legislation so far in advance of the ideas of our modern Materialism as not to have been even yet suggested in our social congresses, nor even dreamt of by our most advanced Christian philanthropists, in their endeavors after the elevation of the masses. Moses' idea was the prevention of pauperism, and of the conflict between labor and capital, and of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and shallow to our tired gaze, when its laughter and song are a noisy discord, that deafens and distracts us! when its pledges and promises are instruments of selfish purposes and hidden cunning, and its policy, the exponent of a rabid and far-reaching materialism. These are moments, when our passions are at high tide, with our conscience riding on the topmost surface-waves, they are propitious intervals, if we choose to make the best of them, or they may only be fitful breaks in the ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... it seeks only physical well-being,—just as much as nursing lepers for pity and the love of God is pure materialism that ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the benefits that would accrue from the New Spirit, which was at last about to pacify France and restore her to her due rank and power. Were there not certain signs of this resurrection on every hand? The New Spirit was the revival of the Ideal, the protest of the soul against degrading materialism, the triumph of spirituality over filthy literature; and it was also Science accepted, but set in its proper place, reconciled with Faith, since it no longer pretended to encroach on the latter's sacred domain; and it was further the Democracy welcomed in fatherly ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... which seemed to accept every fact of experience except the fact of age. "It was a hard life, but it was life, after all. One is not put here to be contented, or one would dread death too much for the purpose of God." In spite of her uncompromising materialism, she was not without an ineradicable streak of superstition which she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... conquer the country and had failed, for the spirit of woods and open spaces, of water and trees and wind, survived among the very roofs. The conventions of the centuries, the convention of puritanism, of worldliness, of impiety, of materialism and of charity had all assailed and all fallen back before the strength of the apparently peaceful country in which the city stood. The air was soft with a peculiar, undermining softness; it carried with it a smell of flowers and fruit and earth, and if all the many miles on the farther ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... wise deny the good results which this Christian Catholic view of the world established in Europe. It was necessary as a wholesome reaction against the cruelly colossal materialism which had developed itself in the Roman realm and threatened to destroy all spiritual human power. As the lascivious memoirs of the last century form the pieces justificatives of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comite du salut public seems ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... accepted the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one: the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine the cosmic mechanism we should see the ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... me when I studied a Scots school where suppressive discipline turned good boys into demons. The brutality of the German army was a natural result of the brutality of their discipline. So is it in the individual soul, and in the national soul. Intellectualism and materialism were the Prussian drill-sergeants who enslaved the emotional life of the citizen and of the nation. War was a means ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... in a word, English. For—we may turn aside to say—in philosophy no nation is so straitened, illiberal, and hard of hearing as England, except, perhaps, China. Its tympanum is sadly thickened at once with materialism and conceit; and the consequence is that a thinker there is either ignored into silence, like Wilkinson, or driven to bellow, like Carlyle, or to put rapiers and poignards into his speech, like Ruskin. Carlyle began speaking sweetly and humanly, and was heard ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the other great Victorian writers the most obvious disciple of Carlyle in his opposition to the materialism of modern life is John Ruskin. But Ruskin is much more than any man's disciple; and he also contrasts strongly with Carlyle, first because a large part of his life was devoted to the study of Art—he is the single great art-critic in English Literature—and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... satisfy the need of general ideas which was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... individual brain is looked up the inherited memory of the absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up all the emotions ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Vestiges well, and I detest the book for its shallowness, for the intense vulgarity of its philosophy, for its gross, unblushing materialism, for its silly credulity in catering out of every fool's dish, for its utter ignorance of what is meant by induction, for its gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physiology,—most ignorant and most false,—and for Its shameful shuffling of the facts of geology ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... very attentively, and said he should be glad to have some instances of that faculty well authenticated. His elevated wish for more and more evidence for spirit[439], in opposition to the groveling belief of materialism, led him to a love of such mysterious disquisitions. He again[440] justly observed, that we could have no certainty of the truth of supernatural appearances, unless something was told us which we could not know by ordinary means, or something done which could not be done ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the critical and logical faculties, as opposed to material education, which is intended to deal with the acquisition of knowledge and its valuation, e.g., history, mathematics, &c. "Material" education, of course, has nothing to do with materialism—TR. ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... moments as they passed might be made to yield their utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him at least make the most of what was "here and now." In the actual dimness of ways from means to ends—ends in themselves desirable, yet for the most part distant and for him, certainly, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... lessening of faith in noxious doses of drugs, the increase of nervous diseases which are most easily helped by suggestive therapeutics, the attempted duplication of apostolic gifts on the part of some sects and the general reaction against the materialism of the early part of the century as shown in the great revival of psychical study and research have all been factors in ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... industries have given Pittsburgh her wealth, population, supremacy, and power, commercial materialism is not the ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... spontaneous generation. Pasteur proved that, if milk were sterilized, there would be no development of life by spontaneous generation. This discovery was of immense practical value, making milk safe to use. Prof. Tyndall, the distinguished physicist, said: "If matter is what the world believes it to be, materialism, spontaneous generation, and evolution, or development, are absurdities too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind." Dr. Clark Maxwell, another distinguished physicist, says, "I have examined all [theories ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... maintaining "that the most justifiable wars are the religious wars"; opens the Anti-Puritan League at the Shaftesbury Club, speaks for the Richmond and Kew branch of the P.N.E.U. on "The Romantic Element in Morality," for the Ilkley P.S.A., on "Christianity and Materialism," and so on without end. All these are on a few pages of his father's collection, interspersed with clippings recording articles in reviews innumerable, introductions to books, interviews ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards again a riveder le stelle. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at the point ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a picture of the materialism and monopolizing of the present century sowing seeds of decay and self-destruction in the movement of this age toward love of the truth, of the beauty of genuineness in character and earnestness in aim, is portrayed ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... leaders of the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark. Not less evil consequences have flowed from the enriching of the church in other lands. That wealth has always carried with it the curse, so prophetically pronounced, against ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... institution in question and that which is posterior to the first promulgation of such knowledge. In the first we find mainly the old accusations which have long ceased to exert any conspicuous influence, namely, Atheism, Materialism, and revolutionary plotting. Without disappearing entirely, these have been largely replaced in the second group by charges of magic and diabolism, concerning which the denunciations have been loud and fierce. One supplementary ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... had done better than himself, but some had done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness, the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know that his gods had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his daughter's arms about his neck, he felt that he was still bravely, persistently, pressing on toward the ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... the Old Church that most of the weddings of Amsterdam are celebrated. Thursday is the day, for then the fees are practically nothing; on other days to be married is an expense. The koster deplores the modern materialism which leads so many young men to be satisfied with the civil function; but the little enclosure, like a small arena, in which the church blesses unions, had to me a hardly less business-like appearance than a registry office. The comedian overflows with details. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... a typical nail-keg philosopher; just emerging from ignorance and materialism into ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... was of Aristotle before them. It was the doctrine of the Reformers, except, if we remember rightly, of Huss. The University of Leipzig was founded upon it. It is the current doctrine of the present day, and harmonizes well with the current Materialism. Not that Nominalism in itself, and as Leibnitz held it, is necessarily materialistic, but Realism is essentially antimaterialistic. The Realists held with Plato,—but not in his name, for they, too, claimed to be Aristotelian, and preeminently so,—that the ideal must precede ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... that tried to create a sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and Rome—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice—perhaps Tennyson. Browning also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boy he bought eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he did not think of becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls of men; seeking God in a series of private ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... material, substratum, hyle^, corpus, pabulum; frame. object, article, thing, something; still life; stocks and stones; materials &c 635. [Science of matter] physics; somatology^, somatics; natural philosophy, experimental philosophy; physicism^; physical science, philosophie positive [Fr.], materialism; materialist; physicist; somatism^, somatist^. Adj. material, bodily; corporeal, corporal; physical; somatic, somatoscopic^; sensible, tangible, ponderable, palpable, substantial. objective, impersonal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... correlation with the latest discoveries in the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the cell and neurone theory seemed obligatory starting-points. To-day we have become shy of such postulates of one-sided not sufficiently functional materialism. We now call for an interest in psychobiological facts in terms of critical common sense and in their own right—largely a product of psychiatry. There always is a place for elements, but there certainly is also a place for the large momentous facts of human life ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... represents them as believing that, when every thing has been interpreted in terms of Matter and Motion, nothing remains to be explained. This, however, is by no means the fact. The Doctrine of Evolution, under its purely scientific form, does not involve Materialism, though its opponents persistently represent it as doing so. Indeed, among adherents of it who are friends of mine, there are those who speak of the Materialism of Buechner and his school, with a contempt certainly ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... and there, sure enough, the elephant was. It then went through its trick of conveying a bun to its mouth, after which the boy said, "Good-bye, elephant," and it was hauled off backwards. Of course it intruded a certain gross materialism into the delicate fancy of my play, but I did not care to say so, because one has to keep in with the manager. Besides, there was the elephant, eating its head off; it might just as ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... a struggle," she said, getting back to the Irish question as the subject of her sentence, "between a people to whom art is an ideal and a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... catastrophe inglorious. Its genius was vindicated in golden sentences and with fervent arguments of impassioned logic by St John; and breathed in the intrepid eloquence and patriot soul of William Wyndham. Even now it is not dead, but sleepeth; and in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... again. Here, look at the back of my trousers, caked three inches deep in mud. If I were a spirit, do you think I would slide about on my coat-tails like that? Do you think that if I could travel by volition I would slip down these infernal cliffs on my pants' seat as I have just done? And as for materialism—look at this fist; it punched you just now! Surely there was nothing ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... immediate future of one of the world's great ones. In view, however, of the fact that the world is so often lamentably ignorant of greatness, it now becomes necessary for me to carry out my second introduction and enlighten the Philistines as to what they have missed by their miserable and sordid materialism. ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... fit for women or idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It includes ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... overcome, he called to his aid the opinion of his physician, communicating to him in confidence the story of his adventure. The doctor, who, by dint of long examining the human brain, without discovering the slightest trace of anything resembling a soul, had come to a learned conviction of materialism, did not fail to laugh heartily on listening to the recital of the nocturnal vision. This was perhaps the best manner of treating his patient; for by having the appearance of holding his fancy in derision, he forced, as it were, his self-esteem to take a part in the cure. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... association and solidarity, for well-directed education of children, and for the instruction of the women. They give the young students a goal for their efforts and an ideal in life. They preach the duty of leading a faultless, spiritual life, the rejection of a crude materialism, into which the assimilation Jews, on account of the want of a worthy ideal, are only too apt to sink, and strict self-control in word and deed. They found athletic societies in order to promote the long neglected physical development of the rising generation. They give a new impulse to the celebration ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... superior organization of the body. Proceeding from this point, he asserted, further, that every faculty and emotion are derived from sensation; that all minds are originally equal; that pleasure is the only good, and self-interest the only ground of morality. The materialism of Helvetius was the mere revival of pagan Epicurianism; but it was popular, and his work, called De l'Esprit, made a great sensation. It was congenial with the taste of a court and a generation that tolerated Madame de Pompadour. But the Parliament of Paris condemned ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... said to himself, "finds more guarantees in the law he is breaking, and even a brute like Ziemianitch has his consolation." Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear and ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... she had, grew stronger, and at last she did little more than try to sleep through the long, dreary Sabbaths, that she might have strength for the almost hopeless struggle of the week. She was unconsciously drifting into a hard, apathetic materialism, in which it was her chief effort not to think or remember—from the future she recoiled in terror—but simply to try to maintain her physical power to meet the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... greatest opulence of colour, solidly laid in, and here and there lightly glazed over in the Venetian manner; a superb work this, in which Murillo has found the right point where his idealism and his materialism meet and mingle. ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... day, to whom these ideas are mere assumptions—"dogmas of a tremendous kind," to assume which is to assume everything. But with this order of thought we have in the meantime nothing to do. The questions of materialism are outside of Christianity altogether. They were nothing to Christ, whose whole thought moved in a higher sphere of personal love, embracing this lower world. The spiritual life was to Him the life of reality and fact; and so it is to all who live in Him and know in ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... the selfish view of Rousseau, not even the harmonious development of all the faculties, the one-sided, somewhat restricted, or undeveloped, view of Pestalozzi and others of his followers, surely not individual efficiency for personal gain, the selfish view of crass materialism, but social efficiency is the present-day motive in education. And the definition of education takes on a different color. Not merely the development of inner life but in conjunction with that or in addition to it, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... while to examine the matter afresh. With respect to the Rationalists, they give out Rationalism as a very different matter from Naturalism. Roehr, the author of the Letters on Rationalism, chooses to understand by Naturalism only Materialism; and Wegscheider, only Pantheism. In this way those persons who have been usually reckoned the heads of the Naturalists; namely, Herbert, Tindal, and others; will be entirely separated from them, for they were far removed from ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... we know nothing. Then, as if in irony, or partly influenced perhaps by the advocate's love of arguing the case both ways, Cicero demolishes that grand argument of design which elsewhere he so carefully constructs,[1] and reasons in the very language of materialism—"You assert that all the universe could not have been so ingeniously made without some godlike wisdom, the majesty of which you trace down even to the perfection of bees and ants. Why, then, did the Deity, when he made everything for the sake ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... the unutterably despicable work of detective agencies and police spies that has led to the destruction of property, to riots and minor rebellions that have cost the lives of many thousands in recent decades, we find the sordid materialism of special privilege seeking to gain its secret ends. In all the unutterably tragic work of the terrorists that has cost so many lives we find the rage and despair of self-styled revolutionists seeking to ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... She declaimed against the prevailing tone of infidelity and scepticism in religion. Few people who were present will ever forget the dignified yet stately manner with which she rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism, lately published; and some among them, also, will not forget the expression of amused surprise on Mr. Hamilton's face, that gradually changed to sardonic gravity, as he courteously waived his point; certainly not Mr. Oakhurst, who, from that moment, began to be uneasily impatient of his ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... never used his understanding of his fellow men to cultivate by trickery or device their favour and praise. He loved and idealised the ancient days of romance and chivalry, when men lived the wonderful tales of heroism that are now discredited and fading before the materialism of modern civilisation, and in this respect he had an affinity with the English composer, Elgar. He derived enjoyment from fairy tales and folk-lore, and these were his apparent consolation in his tragic last years. He was a man of rare qualities, noble, sincere and unselfish to an extreme. He ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... evolution to material things? Only the outright materialist, who asserts that life is a product of matter, can logically do so, and so great an authority in the scientific world as Sir Oliver Lodge has asserted that there is no longer any such thing as scientific materialism.[B] Those who accept the idea of the existence of the soul at all must necessarily accept the idea of the evolution of the soul. How can consciousness possibly escape the laws that evolve the media for the expression of consciousness? ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that has ever been presented. They were, too, contemporaries of Descartes, and they followed with intense interest the attempt of the great Frenchman to put philosophy in possession of a method as adequate for its ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... intellect over the fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of statement is enormous; his scope of being is not enormous. The prayer he uttered many years ago for a poet of the modern, one who could see in the gigantic materialism of the times the carnival of the same deities we so much admire in Greece and Rome, seems to many to have even been explicitly answered in Whitman; but Emerson is balked by the cloud of materials, the din and dust of action, and the moving armies, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... its influence, because of the vigorous propaganda of the Christians. It was not admitted that the Hindus are adopting the Christian religion, but merely that they are losing confidence in their own and drifting toward materialism. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... not the tie of blood that binds them to him, but some more ideal tie, like that between a king and his subjects, or between a patron and his clients. And they now have a religious connection also with men who are not their kindred. The national worship is inconsistent with the gross materialism of the system of kinship, and places instead of it the belief in a god further above the world, and therefore more spiritual, and obligations to men which, as they are not derived from a common blood, are ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... set of phrases—different in content, yet strangely alike in meaning. Nonsense, we'll have a yacht ... lord it over ordinary mortals ... a long wait. He thought of the voodoo and the fingernail parings, of the savage materialism of the woman who was even now preparing herself to receive him upstairs, who was planning to relive his life with ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... my feeling in regard to this form of the materialism of our day, will forgive this divergence. I submit to the artistic blame of such as do not, and ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Negation: L. Buechner and Consistent Materialism, ... 188 Sec.2. Replacement of Religion Through a Religious Worship of the Universe.—Strauss. Oskar Schmidt. Haeckel, ... 190 Sec.3. Pious Renunciation of the Knowability of God. Wilhelm Bleek. Albert Lange. Herbert Spencer, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... definition of free-agency. "It appears to me," says Hartley, "that all the most complex ideas arise from sensation, and that reflection is not a distinct source, as Mr. Locke makes it." By this mutilation of the philosophy of Locke, it was reduced back to that dead level of materialism in which Hobbes had left it, and from which the former had scarcely endeavoured to raise it. Hence arose the rigid scheme of necessity, for which Hartley is so zealous an advocate. In reading his treatise on the "Mechanism of the Human Mind," we ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... evening, until the terror merges into tenderness. The recurrence of this minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the "Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the sorrow at the heart of things. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... characteristic of this our age—we might almost say: of this our generation. It is on the one hand a tremendously far-reaching interest in the deeper spiritual realities of life, in the things of the mind and the Spirit. On the other hand, there is a materialism that is apparent to all, likewise far-reaching. We are witnessing the two moving along, apparently at least, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... which is related by way of prototype to the human form." [125] As well might we say that because a watchmaker constructs a chronometer with a movement somewhat like that of his own heart, therefore he is mechanical, metallic, and round. Against this anthropomorphic materialism science lifts up its voice; for what modern philosopher, worthy of the name, fails to distinguish between phenomenon and fact, inert matter and active force? Says a recent writer, "We infer that as our own master of the mint is neither a sovereign ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the question, you must solve it; I can leave you only some cursory ideas, which I am satisfied are just, and upon which you may meditate at your leisure. Only for fools or the weak does materialism become a debasing dogma; assuredly, in its code there are none of those precepts of ordinary morals which our fathers entitled virtue; but I do find there a grand word which may well counterbalance many others, that is to say, Honor, self-esteem! Unquestionably a materialist may not be a saint; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... be reckoned with, and yet one with which it is hard to have any patience, is the rank materialism that regards relief as a legitimate means of attracting people to the church. Relief as a gospel agency has done far more harm than good: you cannot buy a Christian without getting a bad bargain, and yet, competition among rival churches working in the same poor neighborhood is ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... and thought see Sextus Adv. Math. VII. 127—129, qu. by R. and P. 21. The Stoics probably misunderstood him; cf. R. and P. "Heraclitus," and Grote's Plato I. 34 sq. Expers corporis: for Stoic materialism see Zeller, pp. 120 sq. The necessity of a connection between the perceiving mind and the things perceived followed from old physical principles such as that of Democritus ([Greek: ou gar enchorein ta hetera kai diapheronta paschein hyp' allelon], qu. from ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself. Now, it is true that any positive creed, true or false, would tend to be independent of itself. It might be Roman Catholicism or Mahomedanism or Materialism; but, if strongly held, it would be a thorn in the side of the Servile State. The Moslem thinks all men immortal: the Materialist thinks all men mortal. But the Moslem does not think the rich Sinbad will live forever; but the poor Sinbad will die on his deathbed. The Materialist does not ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... will not set the reader against her—the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very situation—withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St. Pancras—implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might be prosperous, but would certainly ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... most struck by the conciseness with which he was able to give the results of his extensive reading in this, the most abstruse domain of Sanskrit literature. The publication of these papers on the schools of Indian metaphysics, which anticipated with entire fidelity the materialism and idealism of Greece and of modern thought, enabled Victor Cousin to introduce a brilliant survey of the philosophy of India into his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, first delivered, we think, in 1828. Cousin knew ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... opponents of evolution love to misrepresent the Monistic philosophy based on it as "Materialism," and confuse the philosophic tendency of this name with a wholly unconnected and despicable moral materialism. Strictly speaking, it would be just as proper to call our system Spiritualism as Materialism. The real Materialistic philosophy affirms that the phenomena of life are, like all other ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... Lovelace of ten, despite all sentiment, had basely succumbed to the gross materialism of youthful slumber. On a cot in the corner, half hidden under the wreck of his own careless and hurried disrobing, with one arm hanging out of the coverlid, Richelieu lay supremely unconscious. On the forefinger of ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... shoulder of Madeleine Durand. Then after a moment's hesitation he put his other hand on the shoulder of MacIan. His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful. In many sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism. All his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact. But he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this—that he preferred a fact ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... between the treatment of Materialism in "Science and Socialism" and its treatment in "The Nihilism of Socialism." I would point out that seven years elapsed between the composition of the former and that of the latter essay. Whether the inconsistency be a sign of mental growth or deterioration ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... annihilation lasting till the day of judgment, when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this whole course of thought there are several replies to be made. In the first place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism is false: standing in the province of science and reason, it may be affirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on the body, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, but merely state it. Secondly, it is certain ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... have married differently—more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great corruption later, in the state politics ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... led me to give you such a book? What demon of perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams's Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-hearted materialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness—unrighteousness, I say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes moral deliquescence. Of course I see the ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of Pisgah, and the space is very crowded. We're all cornered on our mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's faces in our ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... A French military hospital is the scene of the story, and its chief characters are a famous Paris surgeon and a young wounded officer, whose fervent Catholic piety is in sharp contrast with the doctor's philosophic materialism. Death threatens both, and their opposing theories with regard to it are displayed in their relation to a drama of the most intense ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have said it.' Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice would become harsh, and her mockery lose phantasy and humour, when she spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of brutal phantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... everything, they trace these beneficent or demoniacal powers. Every idea, every action is with them a consequence of the influence of one of these two powers, and free will is impossible. Though a rude materialism cripples the intelligence of these Indians, yet they seem to be sensible of the connexion between that which is perceptible to their senses, and something higher—something beyond the sphere of corporeal perception. But of the nature of this higher something they have no comprehension, nor do ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Darwinism, a system which is repugnant at once to history, to the traditions of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to reason itself, would seem to need no refutation did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek support in ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... to deter serious-minded people from dealing with them a second time, while the people who formed the regular circles and had made a sect with a devotional character in it, rapidly degenerated into a credulity and materialism which were more discouraging than the most arid skepticism. Physical phenomena which met every demand for absolute guarantee of their genuineness, were very rare, and to meet with them required great patience and persistence, while the scientific student, in the habit of dealing ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... which ripped him into slivers of rotten wood. The little Napoleon had been one of the premier's favorite bugaboo examples of stage realism tried out in real life. But it was ridiculous to compare him with the stalwart figure sitting across the table, who had spoken the language of materialism without illusion. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... music-dramas, shorn of the fetters of the actual spoken word, emancipated from the materialism of acting, painting, and furniture, must be considered the greatest achievement ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... only imperfectly acquainted; and the impartiality and insight into human character, which were his main characteristics, greatly simplified the difficult task before him. His impartiality was shown most clearly in his attitude on the question of religion; but it partook very largely of a hard materialism which concealed itself under a nominal indifference. At first he treated with equal consideration Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, and even Judaism, and he said that he treated them all with equal consideration ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... writer observes, in a paragraph too long for quotation, that they exceed us in materialism and in utilitarianism; that we, a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the aesthetic ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... reason. Now, it has been demonstrated, so far as words can demonstrate any truth whatever, that the difficulty of him who believes Nature never had an author, is infinitely less than the difficulty of him who believes it had a cause itself uncaused. In the 'Elements of Materialism,' an unequal but still admirable work by Dr. Knowlton, a well-known American writer, this question of comparative difficulty is well handled, and the Author of this Apology ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... horse is the symbol of Intelligence), and equipped with the panoply of Michael, is the type of the spiritual life,—the life of heroic and active charity. All the stories about knights and dragons have one common esoteric meaning. The dragon is always Materialism in some form; the fearsome, irrepressible spirit of Unbelief, which wages war on human peace and blights the hopes of all mankind. In most of these tales, as in the typical legend of St. George, there is a princess to be delivered,—a lady, sweet and lovely, whose sacrifice is imminent ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from pursuing any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil to the world. We have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... can raise the dead. In China, these miracles, with all their authentications, have descended to the conjurer, and are performed for the amusement of children. The common expressions of that country betray the materialism and indifferentism of the people, and their consequent immorality. "The prisons," they say, "are locked night and day, but they are always full; the temples are always open, and yet there is nobody in them." Of the dead they say, with an exquisite refinement of euphemism, "He has ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... come true. Was there not a sage now who could pierce the veil of the future and sing of such a thing as sacred human life? Dorn had his doubts. Poets and dreamers appeared not to be the men who could halt materialism. Strangely then, as Dorn gazed bitterly up at these fierce fliers who fought in the heavens, he remembered the story of the three wise men and of Bethlehem. Was it only a story? Where on this sunny spring morning was Christ, and the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Claude-Adrien (1715-71), a French philosophical writer much esteemed by Schopenhauer. His chief work, De l'Esprit, excited great interest and opposition at the time of its publication, on account of the author's pronounced materialism.] ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... obtained affirmations of a new order. And Delsarte might have met with thinkers like Leibnitz, Descartes and Jean Reynaud, on that height where religion is purged of superstition and fanaticism, philosophy set free from atheism and materialism! ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... primal innocence. These spirits He clad in sensuous bodies, that they might be prepared to enter the far country of Human Life. Earth was rapidly falling under the merciless rule of a hopeless and crushing materialism, when He determined upon sending among men, Anselm, the saint; Angelo, the tone artist; Zophiel, the poet; and Jemschid, the painter. The spirits murmured not, although they knew they were to relinquish their heaven ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... conscious of this idealism; often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce has so well said, through ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... embracing everything possible to thought, whether material or immaterial. But this summum genus must be predicable of this whole. Matter and mind may thus be reduced to a single category, and the physical and the intellectual finally coalesce in this last generalization. Materialism and idealism thus differ merely in the degree of generalization reached—or rather they both agree in avoiding the final generalization which identifies both matter and mind. Materialism must always deal with the individual, for matter can appear under no other form. Idealism must always rest upon ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... letters—one of the recognized chiefs of French literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was—when we first knew him—a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion; a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same time was drifting into Conservatism; ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century, darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... As materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity, so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions, and, vice versa, to reject as inconceivable ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... ghost—a real ghost, visible, if not palpable. She was not what may be called superstitious; and though following with more or less assiduity the practices of her religion, was afflicted now and then with a fit of perfect materialism. I was surprised, therefore, to hear her relate, with every appearance of profound faith, the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... mean. In that swamp of pettiness, idiocy, and materialism, a man of your nature could not long abide. Religion—it has not yet responded to your need. And without faith your sins lose their savour. The arts—you don't know them all, the Seven Deadly Arts and the One Beautiful ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... society. Art is important, but there are things more important; and among those things are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which most ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... at that time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... is working in much of the foremost thinking of our time. The reign of materialism is passing—that of mysticism waxing in imperative insistence and extent of sway. And the heart of the nature-mystic rejoices to know that his master-principle of kinship universal is coming to its own. Anatole France and Maeterlinck are striving ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... outline of materialism in general. "They believed in a supreme force, but denied the existence of a Supreme Being. They rejected inquiry into first causes as unscientific," maintaining that facts alone were to be dealt ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... immunity against the insidious appeal of the supernatural. He succeeded. The medium was confounded, she lost her power; the phenomena did not occur. The atmosphere was chilled. Some of us felt we would rather have been visited by the village blacksmith than by this priestly exponent of sweet-faced materialism. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... great question "Materialism or Antimaterialism" still agitated the Georgia Augusta, in whose province the conflict had assumed still sharper forms, owing to Rudolf Wagner's speech during the convention of the Guttingen naturalists three years prior to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... humanity, if, assuming the form of man, they could not also have tasted his pleasures. Hence the easy step to the more or less material ideas of deities, which are apt at first to shock us, but which are indeed only dishonourable so far as they represent the gods as false and unholy. It is not the materialism, but the vice, which degrades the conception; for the materialism itself is never positive or complete. There is always some sense of exaltation in the spiritual and immortal body; and of a power proceeding from the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... were then bred, prompted him to speculate, however unhappily, on any metaphysical subject. Now, whether this abominable persuasion were the cause or the effect of his actual guilt,—whether he had reasoned himself into materialism in order to drown the voice of conscience, or fell into the sin of murder because he had previously reasoned himself out of all ideas of responsibility, does not appear; but his practice, as might have been expected, was suited to his principles, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... but whether such a belief would be favorable to that stern sense of evil which should fit us to fight the hard battle of this life is a question too easily answered. Thinkers of a high order do not have recourse to these simple devices. They retain the doctrine as a protest against materialism, but purposely retain it in the vaguest possible shape. They say that this life is not all; if it were all, they argue, we should be rightly ruled by our stomachs; but they scrupulously decline to give form and substance to their anticipations. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... quantity. The proper test of anti-slavery progress was a comparison of the anti-slavery vote of 1844 with that of 1852, and this showed an increase of nearly three-fold in the intervening space of eight years. This steady evolution of anti-slavery opinion from the deadening materialism and moral inertia of the times could not go backward, but in the very nature of things would repeat itself, and gather fresh momentum from every effort put forth to stay ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... "Indeed he cannot." And that is to be seen everywhere, all over the world, and not only among those people who were clinging blindly to a blind faith, desperately sticking to it as the only raft which remained for them to save them from being submerged in materialism. It is recognised now on all hands; literature is full of it; and it is not without significance that some months ago The Hibbert Journal—which has in it so much of the advanced thought of the day, for which bishops and archbishops and learned clerics ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... day. Had he not given all the years of his little life to the study of those refining and spiritualizing truths that are so far above the comprehension of the base and ignoble common herd? Indeed, he understood her language; he understood fully, why the sordid, brutal materialism of her crude and uncultured environment so repulsed and disgusted her. He understood, more fully than Kitty herself, in fact, and explained to her clearly, that her desires for the higher intellectual ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than the mere recognition of it as philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all like the mood in which we ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... modern poet—"an age that was dying and one that was coming to birth." Old Prussia was giving place to New Germany. The atmosphere of war had changed to an atmosphere of peace. The standards of education and comfort were rising fast. The old German idealism was being pushed aside by materialism and commercialism, and the thoughts of the nation were turning from problems of philosophy and art to problems of practical science and experiment. Thought was to be followed by action. Mankind, after conversing with the ancients for centuries, now ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... and that old witch lives in another direction. To illustrate—our bull-necked friend and illustrious critic, James Rutlidge, in my story, will be named 'Sensual.' His distinguished father was one 'Lust.' The horrible example, Mr. Edward Taine,—boon companion of 'Lust,'—is 'Materialism'." ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... objection to the description of Buddhism as "impersonal," then, is not because the word is too strong, but because it is too weak; it does not sufficiently characterize its real nature. It is as much below materialism, as materialism is below monotheism. Such a scheme of thought concerning the universe necessarily reacts on those whom it possesses, to destroy what sense they may have of the value of human personality; that which ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... His sudden change from materialism. The difficulty of clear enunciation. His unfailing belief in the divinity of his revelations. How they compare with experiences of others. The frequent reception of the Light. The blessing of ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... desirable. The present has its own theories and its own methods. But at a time when the reign of luxury is rapidly establishing false standards, and the best intellectual life makes hopeless struggles against an ever aggressive materialism, it may be profitable as well as interesting to consider the possibilities that lie in a society equally removed from frivolity and pretension, inspired by the talent, the sincerity, and the moral force of American women, and borrowing a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... centre. This condition or "state" Blake personifies as "Urizen" (Reason) a great dramatic figure who stalks through the prophetic books, proclaiming himself "God from Eternity to Eternity," taking up now one characteristic and now another, but ever of the nature of materialism, opaqueness, contraction. In the case of man, the result of this contraction is to close him up into separate "selfhoods," so that the inlets of communication with the universal spirit have become gradually stopped up; until ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... Species rightly, then nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian theory."[11] Prof. Haeckel argues to the same purpose that Darwin's theory leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism. Dr. Buchner says of Darwin's theory, "It is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor, Lamarck." Carl Vogt also commends it because "It turns the Creator, and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... kept her purer and less earthly than she would otherwise have been, by drawing a portion of her sympathies apart from earth. Amid the throng of enjoyments, and the pressure of worldly care, and all the warm materialism of this life, she had communed with a vision, and had been the better for such intercourse. Faithful to the husband of her maturity, and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever could have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still been an imaginative faith to the ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... philosophers discoursed on topics of the day, each to his own group of admirers. A Christian, dressed like any other Roman, held one corner with a crowd around him. There was a tremendous undercurrent of reaction against the prevalent cynical materialism and the vortex of fashion was also the cauldron of new aspirations and the battle-ground ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... Saint Hubert, for those who hunted. His knowledge of Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, of mediaeval England and modern Brittany helped him with many apt illustrations. Topready stuck out his chin and kept bravely to his two points the danger of materialism and the menace to the spiritual cults and festas of Holy Church as by law established ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... definition is concealed an entire system of poetic materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a whole series of consequences, the logical result of which was to lead Goethe to indifference, that moral suicide of some of the noblest energies of genius. The absolute concentration of every faculty of observation on each of the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... mirror life. If Truth has her revenge upon those who do not follow her, she is often pitiless to her worshippers. In Byzantium the two arts met—Greek art, with its intellectual sense of form, and its quick sympathy with humanity; Oriental art, with its gorgeous materialism, its frank rejection of imitation, its wonderful secrets of craft and colour, its splendid textures, its rare metals and jewels, its marvellous and priceless traditions. They had, indeed, met before, but in Byzantium they were married; and the sacred tree of the Persians, the palm of Zoroaster, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... live in a practical age, and it is the practical value, the matter-of-fact contribution to our happiness and well-being by the work of any man, ancient or modern, which counts in these days of materialism. ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... too great, whether it was asked of man, woman, or child. The spirit of materialism for the time being vanished. The newspapers shrunk to a single sheet and all commercial advertisements disappeared. Theaters, art galleries, museums, libraries, closed their doors. Upon some streets nearly every shop was closed, with the simple but eloquent placard ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... is symptomatic of the happy reaction of the twentieth century against the crude materialism of the second half of the nineteenth. It is the spirit which gives to the work of art its value, not this or that method of arrangement, this or that tint or cadence, which can always be copied ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... every man—whatever may be the label he puts on his theories—who is striving in single-minded devotion for a millennial peace. The new era will have to be of a spiritual, ethical type. Coarser forms of materialism, whether in thought or life, will have to be banished, because the scales have at last dropped from our eyes, and we intend to regard a human being no longer as a thing of luxury, or wealth, or greedy passions, but as the possessor ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... In publishing my memoirs, my purpose is to reveal to a world still engulfed in a vulgar materialism Your Majesty's lofty thoughts about art, poetry, and philosophy. The inspiration of this book, Sire, is due to yourself, and to those other remarkable men whom Fortune—always the protector of my younger years—has given ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... this materialism is a youthful idealism. Transplanted to conditions of greater opportunity, the race becomes rejuvenated, abandons outgrown customs and outworn standards, experiences an enlargement of vision and of hope, gathers courage and energy equal to its task, manages somehow to ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... existing Universe," or that "the Universe taken or conceived as a whole is God." These definitions do not fit the conception of the Absolute, of the Yogi Philosophy—they seem to breathe but a refined materialism. The Absolute is not "the combined forces and laws manifested in the universe," nor "the universe conceived as a whole." Instead, the Universe, its forces and laws, even conceived as a whole, have no existence in themselves, but are mere manifestations of the Absolute. Surely this ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... harmonised with the notions of Bonaparte. On this subject Berthollet sometimes rallied his inseparable friend Monge. Besides, Berthollet was, with his cold imagination, constantly devoted to analysis and abstractions, inclined towards materialism, an opinion with which the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... dogmatism had been the idealistic philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The old negative dogmatism had been the materialism of the Epicureans. To Plato the world was the realisation of ideas. Ideas, spiritual entities, were the counterparts and necessary antecedents of the natural objects and actual facts of life. To the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... found many men who have no hesitation in proclaiming their disbelief in "thim owld shtories," and who even openly affirm that "laigends about fairies an' giants is all lies complately." In the face of this growing tendency towards materialism and the disposition to find in natural causes an explanation of wonderful events, it is pleasant to be able to conclude this chapter with an undisputed account of the origin of Lough Ree in the River Shannon, the accuracy of ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... "clique" and the subprefect also looked about them with the same object, but they were all too late. Madame de Breautey made terrible charges against the selfishness which degraded France, —the consequence, she said, of materialism, and of the importance now given by the laws to money: nobility was no longer of value! nor beauty either! Such creatures as the Rogrons, the Vinets, could stand up and fight with the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... power of the villa residence is supreme: art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith—not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... memory; he shrank from the thought of using to another those words he had spoken to Emily. One of the points of intense secret sympathy between Emily and himself was this chastity of temperament. Constitutionally incapable of vice, he held in repugnance even that degree of materialism in the view of sexual relations which is common to men who have grown their beards. Not only had a coarse word never passed his lips; he intensely disliked the frivolous way of discussing subjects which to him were more sacred than any other. When he had decided with himself that it was his destiny ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... not believe, we know," was, as I said, the proud boast a spiritualist once made to me. And if the facts—any of the facts—of Spiritualism stand as facts, there is no doubt that it would form the strongest possible counterpoise to the materialism of our age. It presses the method of materialism into its service, and meets the doubter on his own ground of demonstration—a low ground, perhaps, but a tremendously decisive one, the very one perhaps on which the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... inner life today is at present only a spark. Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip. Only a feeble light glimmers ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... a higher spiritual life was overpowered by the revelation of uniform physical laws operating through a seeming infinite expanse of material existence. The one cause tended to create a notion that unassisted reason was sufficient for all human needs; the other developed a frequent bias to materialism. Both alike rendered it imperative to earnest minds that felt competent to the task to inquire what reason had to say about the nature of our spiritual life, and the principles and religious motives which chiefly govern it. Difficulties ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but manifestation of that something invisible which we ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... have indicated for the socialized society of the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a confession of faith in materialism? ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... revelation of song and light; and the hero passes swiftly up the heights, where, encircled with flame, sleeps the soul of his strength. In some other day, when the continent is tamed and we have struck to the heart that materialism which is our only real foe, we, too, shall climb the heights of achievement, and we shall stand face to face with that ideal which is now so dim and remote. Then comes the poet of the real new world—the world of opportunity, of sacrifice, of unselfish ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant's cerebellum, and, above all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with his huge body, ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Although not blaming him unjustly, she failed to realize the spiritual piteousness of his plight. If the war has done anything in this country, it has saved the young women of the gentler classes, at any rate, from the abyss of sordid and cynical materialism. Hesitating to announce the rupture of the engagement, she allowed it to remain in a state of suspended animation, and as a symbolic act, ceased to wear the ring. Nancy's taunts had goaded her to a more heroic attitude. The first person ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... eighteenth century had become tired of following out the sublimities and abstractions of the Cartesians, and they took the opposite course; beginning from sensation, they did not stop short of the grossest materialism and positive atheism. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... are expressing their enthusiasm in the lofty phraseology befitting a superior people. Those in the lowest classes, accustomed to console themselves for humiliations with a gross materialism, are now crying 'Nach Paris! We are going to drink champagne gratis!' The pietistic burgher, ready to do anything to attain a new honor, and the aristocracy which has given the world the greatest scandals of recent ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
