"Materialistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the democratizer—is banished because it jars too much on the desire for communion. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the action ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the society of the Kingdom should be. The reformer is one who changes an existing social environment for approximately this ideal environment of his own thought. When he breaks an idol, it is not the idol itself that he everlastingly hates, it is the materialistic concept of the community. What he wishes in place of the idol is a right conception. No man could break up every idol in the Sandwich Islands. But a man went about implanting a spiritual idea of God, and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... days, of Barnwells and Hugers. And yonder is a stump-orator perched on his barrel, pouring out his exhortations to fidelity in war and in religion. To-night for the first time I have heard an harangue in a different strain, quite saucy, sceptical, and defiant, appealing to them in a sort of French materialistic style, and claiming some personal experience of warfare. "You don't know notin' about it, boys. You tink you's brave enough; how you tink, if you stan' clar in de open field,—here you, and dar de Secesh? You's ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the complete solution of the problem, she leaves her socialist heroes, as she herself felt, in doubt and perplexity. There was something in the schemes and doctrines she conscientiously approved, irreconcilable with her artist-nature—a materialistic tendency which clashed with her poetical instincts. When the stern demagogue Michel denounced the whole tribe of artists as a corrupting influence, enervating to the courage and will of a nation, she rose up energetically in defense ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... your secretary a few minutes in the hotel lobby this morning and he told me that while some of you were in the nut business with a majority of you it was a hobby. That is the altruistic spirit that counts in these days when most of us look upon things in a materialistic way. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... intention of testing it as soon as I could command the means." But in order to command the means, he was obliged to devote himself to his art, and in this he did not meet with the encouragement which he had expected and which he deserved. His ideals were always high, perhaps too high for the materialistic age in which he found himself. The following fugitive note will illustrate the trend of his thoughts, and is not inapplicable to ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... prescribed formulas of supposed power, accompanied by symbolical acts. There is indeed no branch of human knowledge which so persistently retains its connection with religious beliefs among all peoples of antiquity as the one which to-day is regarded as resting solely upon a materialistic basis. As a consequence the Babylonians, although they made some progress in medicinal methods, and more especially in medical diagnosis, never dissociated medicinal remedies from the appeal to the gods. The recital of formulas was supposed to secure by their magic force the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... experiences of daily labor with great spiritual interpretations, gives little of value to country people. The rural home awakens to its opportunities only when it is invigorated by vital spiritual inspiration. A materialistic philosophy of life will eat the heart out of the country and leave it in despair. Country people seldom have wide choice; they must either penetrate common experience with the eye of confident idealism, or ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... deliberations and "volitions of men," and by his own power now executes his decree. As we do not wish to use opprobrious names, we shall characterize these three several schemes of doctrine by the appellations given to them by their advocates. The first we shall call, "materialistic fatalism;" the second, "Stoical fatalism;" and the third we shall ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... a Mr. Atkinson have just published a volume entitled "Letters on Man's Nature and Development," in which they handle very boldly the subjects of Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, Phrenology, &c. It is altogether and avowedly materialistic. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... championship of the useful. Miss Wycliffe's appeal had brought out the confession of a special interest, which had stamped him unduly. In addition, the section of the country from which he came was against him. The bishop was not without his prejudices, and was disposed to father all the materialistic spirit of the age upon his guest, whether or no. He had noted that lapse into slang, and his attitude had become like that of the loiterers in the hall of Caiaphas, the high priest. Had his thought become vocal, it would have run like a garbled version of their triumphant charge ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... great man who shall save us from the shipwreck which is imminent will no doubt avail himself of individualism when he makes a nation of us once more; but until this regeneration comes, we bide our time in a materialistic and utilitarian age. Utilitarianism—to this conclusion we have come. We are all rated, not at our just worth, but according to our social importance. People will scarcely look at an energetic man if ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... that corner of Vanity Fair which takes a frankly materialistic view of life and of life's responsibilities, is shrewder than we generally credit, and the diplomatist's intimacy with the Pargeter household had aroused but small comment in the strange polyglot society in which lived, by choice, Tom ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... rather different scheme with skill that was nothing short of exquisite. And Mr. Ritson's own work was often very good; spoilt here and there for some tastes by the "cataloguing" method, a somewhat materialistic way of taking an inventory of the holy country things; but, for that very reason, contrasting to a great advantage with Lucian's hints and dreams and note of haunting. And here and there Mr. Ritson had made little alterations in the style ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... though since he had written the "Apology for Atheism" he had not changed his mind as to his metaphysical tenets, nevertheless the study of the German philosophy, and especially of Spinoza's, had produced on him a revolution of ideas. From a materialistic atheism, which denies the existence of God in every thing, he had gone over to a kind of mystic pantheism, which supposes God to be everywhere and in every thing. This species of pantheism is in reality but a ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... beginning. In France, the pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and Renouvier alone had an original system. In Germany, the hegelian impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship, nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as Buechner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole original thinkers, and Fechner was not a ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... changes in people themselves. My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't; they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they wouldn't very likely know ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Graham Brooks's "American Syndicalism." From Professor Simkhovitch's book we Americans should learn: First, to discard crude thinking; second, to realize that the orthodox or so-called scientific or purely economic or materialistic socialism of the type preached by Marx is an exploded theory; and, third, that many of the men who call themselves Socialists to-day are in reality merely radical social reformers, with whom on many points good citizens can and ought to work in hearty general agreement, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... scoff at people who believe in other things that you think they never saw and that don't come under what you label scientific. You talk about paradoxes—why, your scientist, who thinks he is the most skeptical, the most materialistic aggregation of atoms ever gathered at the exact mathematical centre of Missouri, has more blind faith than a dervish, and more credulity, more superstition, than a cross-eyed smoke beating it past a country graveyard in the dark ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the man who discovers a new dish does more for humanity than the man who discovers a new star, because the discovery of a new dish affects the happiness of mankind more pleasantly than the addition of a new planet to an already overcrowded chart of the universe. Viewing Apicius from such a materialistic point of view he should become very popular in this age of ours so keen ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... to-day contain within themselves and their ideals the seed of rejuvenation of all life, and that a greater contribution can be made by rural communities to civilization by adhering to their ideals than by being diverted from them by the money-seeking, materialistic ideals of the urban centers. The best in rural ideals must ultimately become the ideals of the city if we are to avoid the degeneration that will inevitably follow a too materialistic ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... hospital posts. He had scientific and artistic tastes, and being possessed of private means, he quitted professional work at the age of thirty-four, and spent his subsequent life in studious retirement. Mr. Myers says that his "cast of mind was strongly materialistic, and it is remarkable that his interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena was from first to last of a purely scientific, as contrasted with an emotional or religious nature."[41] Mrs. Stanhope Speer also kept careful records of the sittings. Over sixty instalments were ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... some few of the wise and thoughtful. I should not wonder if "gross and brutal materialism" were the mildest phrase applied to them in certain quarters. And, most undoubtedly, the terms of the propositions are distinctly materialistic. Nevertheless two things are certain; the one, that I hold the statements to be substantially true; the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 1591, several months preceding the original composition of Love's Labour's Lost—and also with his "Address to the Reader," a similitude will be found that certainly passes coincidence. A comparison of Parolles' and Falstaff's opportunist and materialistic philosophy with Florio's outlook on life as we find it unconsciously exhibited in his Second Fruites, reveals a characteristic unity that plainly displays intentional parody on ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... not be entitled to assume that from the opposite, the purely materialistic, standpoint war is entirely precluded. The individual who holds such views will certainly regard it with disfavour, since it may cost him life and prosperity. The State, however, as such can also come from ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than the average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he is simply on ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... were excusable in thinking it true. It looked like truth. I did not myself conclude from what I had seen, that it was true, but I was satisfied that there was more in this wonderful universe than could be accounted for on the coarse materialistic principles of Atheism. My skepticism was not destroyed, but it was shaken and confounded. And now, when I look back on these things, it seems strange that it was not entirely swept away. But believing and disbelieving are habits, and they are subject to the same laws as other habits. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... man's in history, were mystical, abstract, moral and spiritual—while upon all of them was built, and out of all of them radiated, under the control of the average of circumstances, what the vulgar call horse-sense, and a life often bent by temporary but most urgent materialistic ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... the difficulties of the thoughts and arguments themselves. Locke on the Human Understanding is a work that has probably been often recommended to you. Perhaps, if you keep steadily in view the danger of his materialistic, unpoetic, and therefore untrue philosophy, the book may do you more good than harm; it will furnish you with useful exercise for your thinking powers; and you will see it so often quoted as authority, on one side as truth, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... of us really believe that. We cannot glance at our public libraries, our art-galleries and museums, and seriously assert that society even looks like believing it. Any one who maintains that there actually and consciously prevails such a basely materialistic meaning of "practical" is but a poor cynic maligning the world which tolerates him. When the world calls for a "practical" outcome of literary study, we mean what the Greeks meant, and what the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... which is invading our very temples of worship. God, Truth, Virtue, with them, is no longer esteemed for its own worth, but for what it can yield of the necessities and luxuries of life. And with these cynical materialistic abominations they would be supreme even in the East; they would extinguish with their dominating spirit of trade every noble virtue of the soul. And yet, they make presumption of introducing civilisation by benevolent assimilation, rather ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... purring. I'm a Gradgrind—it's quite right—anything you can say about Herbert Spencer, vivisectors, materialistic Science or Atheists, applies without correction to me. Begbie away! But now you think better of a modern Utopia? Was the lady ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... something similar to certain Western scientific conceptions of an Universal Ether. From this eternal, universal energy, Kapila held that all the universe has been evolved—all material forms or manifestations of energy being but manifestations of Prakriti. But, the Sankhya system is not materialistic, as might be supposed at first glance, for side by side with Prakriti it offers the principle of Purusha, or Soul, or Spirit, of which all individual souls are atomic units—the Principle of Purusha being an Unity ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... incomplete. The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought. Every one has a right to deduce what theory he can from his own experience. The one thing that we have no sort of right to do is to enforce that theory upon ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at the same time to overcome any unwillingness to accept a psychical explanation for such palpable physical ills. This latter point is of importance in dealing with uneducated persons. For the most part, they are intensely practical and materialistic, and a mere idea does not seem to them to account for paralysis although, of course, such skepticism is usually accompanied by superstitious credulity along other lines. Moreover, by establishing himself ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... was a small stout man, with a black cap of dubious cut, protested vehemently against such materialistic measures. Let them put their trust in Cultur! To talk Hebrew—therein lay Israel's real salvation. Let little children once again lisp in the language of Isaiah and Hosea—that ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... uncanny to hear that voice going to and fro the orchard, there somewhere amid the bright sun-dazzled boughs—yet not a human creature to be seen—not another house even within half a mile. The most materialistic mind could hardly but conclude that here was something "not dreamed of in our philosophy." It seemed to me that the only reasonable explanation was the entirely irrational one—that my orchard was haunted: haunted by some beautiful young spirit, with some sorrow ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... would be denounced as rankest heresy, and that whoever accepts it is placing his foot on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the 'reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.' He frankly owns that the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic: nay, that whoever commits himself to them will be temporarily landed in 'gross materialism.' Not the less, however, does he, mingling consolation with admonition, recommend us to plunge boldly into the materialistic slough, promising to point out a way of escape from it, and insisting, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... one counted the murders of the Inquisition, because it was supposed that they were committed for the benefit of humanity. Innumerable are the crimes of the doctors! But all these crimes are nothing compared with the materialistic demoralization which they introduce into the world through women. I say nothing of the fact that, if it were to follow their advice,—thanks to the microbe which they see everywhere,—humanity, instead of tending to union, would proceed straight to complete disunion. Everybody, according to ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Ideals. We shall deal later with Ideals in general. Here I will mention only one, and that is, unhappily, only an Ideal Argument. I wish I could get together all these people who are so scornful of materialistic things, out of the excessively comfortable houses they inhabit, and I wish I could concentrate them in a good typical East London slum—five or six together in each room, one lodging with another, and I wish I could leave ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... great; but it still remains for the multitude a true aristocracy, and looking up to that aristocracy for its standards—an aristocracy whose private life is now public property—the multitude has become materialistic, throwing Puritanism to the dogs, and pushing as heartily forward to the trough as any full-fed glutton in the middle or ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... harm for us honestly to confess our own limitations and our ignorance, and that is better than weak materialistic explanations, which after all explain nothing. To tell a child that the Great Father is always grieved when we are unkind or cowardly, always ready to help us and to put kindness and bravery into our hearts, that we know He has power to do ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Europe, and Asia. Some of them declare, that it is some absolutely unknown cause of all the phenomena of the universe, and others, that it is the universe itself. A large class speak of it as the great soul of the world, while the more materialistic regard it as the world itself, body and soul; the soul being the sum of all the imponderable forces, such as gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard intellect as a modification; ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... phenomena that strike our senses. All is matter or a function of it. Matter, then, is not an effect, but a cause. It is not caused; it is from eternity and of necessity. The cardinal point in Holbach's philosophy is an inexorable materialistic necessity. Nothing, then, is exempt from the laws of physics and chemistry. Inorganic substance and organic life fall into the same category. Man himself with all his differentiated faculties is but a function of matter and motion in extraordinary complex and involved relations. Man's imputation ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... distinct meanings: (1) Utopian socialism, i.e., schemes like More's Utopia; (2) the socialist party and its program, i.e., "the socialization of the instruments of production;" (3) The Marxist doctrine of social evolution, i.e., "the materialistic conception of history;" (4) a vague body of beliefs of the working classes, more or less derived from (2) and (3). It is of course only socialism in the second and third senses which is discussed in this chapter.] Such a vague conception ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... profession, but so far as my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road has eased him of his burden and made him ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood. Our beings were suddenly going ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... materialistic bent may here object that as the sphere of human knowledge extends it becomes increasingly evident that all the operations in the universe are under the sway of inexorable laws. The issues thus ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... denounced in his monthly journal Le Conseiller du peuple, vol. i. (1849), all the progressive gospels of the day, socialist, communist, Saint-Simonian, Fourierist, Icarian—in fact every school of social reform since the First Republic—as purely materialistic, sprung from the "cold seed of the century of Helvetius" (pp. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... or dying. We see before our eyes Welsh and Irish in process of being saved from extinction, with the hope perhaps of restoring their ancient glories in poetry and prose. Such movements show that our time is not so utilitarian and materialistic as is often supposed. A similar revivifying process is affecting Hebrew. For centuries it has been preserved as a ritual language, sheltered within the walls of the Synagogue; often not fully understood, and never spoken, by the members of the congregations. Now it is becoming in Palestine once ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... of the great churches, that take most of the honour and glory to themselves. This is, of course but right, and the discerning traveller will keep the even balance between the human interest of court and alley and market place and the awed reverence that must be felt by the most materialistic of us when we come within the immediate influence of these solemn sanctuaries, of which Salisbury is the most ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... these have mostly asserted their claim on nationalistic pleas. They were to be kings of Israel as well as inaugurators of a new regime of moral and spiritual life. But though this is true without qualification, it is equally true that the philosophers of the Middle Ages tried to remove all materialistic notions from the Messianic idea. It is very difficult to assert nowadays whether Judaism does or does not expect a personal Messiah. A very marked change has undoubtedly come over the spirit of ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... crusades. They never lead to anything and only bring needless confusion into people's thoughts. Whom is the crusade against, and what is its object? Where is the enemy and what is there dangerous about him? In the first place, the materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in the narrow journalistic sense; it is not something passing or accidental; it is necessary, inevitable, and beyond the power of man. All that lives on earth is bound to be materialistic. In animals, in savages, in Moscow merchants, all that is higher ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... took to inspecting her clothes. In such self-torture Anna did not, as might have been supposed, find any mystic pleasure: she had little imagination, she would never have understood the poetry of saints like Francis of Assisi or Teresa. Her piety was sad and materialistic. When she tormented herself, it was not in any hope of advantage to be gained in the next world, but came only from a cruel boredom which rebounded against herself, so that she only found in it an almost angry pleasure in hurting herself. Singularly enough, her hard, cold spirit was, like her ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... meaningless, and the meaning it possesses is a necessary element in the evolution of personal spiritual life. Man must enter into some relation with Nature. But such a relation produces even more than all this. When viewed in a friendly mood, [p.123] Nature herself wears an aspect higher than a materialistic or intellectual one. It calls forth the best in imagination; it enables us to feel that something of the power that dwells within the soul dwells also in all the manifestations of phenomena.[40] This fact is evident in all the poetry of the world, and without the perpetual presence ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... state of affairs to sundry causes. The first of these was the intense and ever-increasing nervous pressure of our time. The second, the spread of fatalism, The third, the advance of materialistic ideas, and of the general disbelief in the doctrine of future retribution. The fourth, a certain noticeable return in such matters to the standard of Pagan nations, especially of ancient Rome, where it was held that if things ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... but the force of your whole argument, which is much what I have tried to work out for years past, only makes me lament the more the folly of the line taken by most of the writers who shrink from the materialistic and atheistic philosophy of Mill and Tyndall—for the latter seems to put himself into the same boat. I believe that the thought of England is, on this subject, taking, or is likely to take, a very healthy turn, which such an article as yours ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... business is with the Boers exclusively. He told me that the ancient Boer families in the great region of which this village is the commercial center are falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip of the usurer—getting hopelessly in debt—and are losing their high place and retiring to second and lower. The Boer's farm does not go to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... street, was one he never forgot; nor in after years did he ever encounter that transfigured contributor without an involuntary recurrence of that old feeling of awe. No subsequent acquaintance with editorial rooms ever led him into materialistic explanations of that enchanted piece of work—a newspaper. The editors might do their best—and succeed surprisingly—in looking like ordinary mortals, you might even know the leader-writers, and, with the very public, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... river ran out into a desert, the river of progressive hopes, fed only from springs of materialistic philosophy, has done so here. At least the Greeks had their immortality and the Hebrews their coming Kingdom of God, but a modern materialist, with all his talk of progress, has neither the one nor the other, nor ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... study and reading of economic, political and philosophic works—Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx, Engels, Bakunin and, later, Kropotkin; also Henry George's "Progress and Poverty." Added to these were the works of the materialistic-natural science schools, such as Darwin, Huxley, Molleschot, Karl Vogt, Ludwig Buechner, Haeckel, that constituted the mental diet of a large number of workingmen of that period. Just as the revolutionary economists were hailed as the liberators of physical slavery, so were the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... is that forbidding doctrine, the materialistic conception of history. Men are not the masters of their souls. They are the puppets of great, blind forces. The lives they live and the deaths they die are compulsory. All social codes are but the reflexes of existing economic conditions, plus certain survivals of past economic ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... was a man of few words, no sentiments, short methods; materialistic, we might say; quietly ferocious; indifferent as to means, positive as to ends, quick of perception, sure in matters of saltpetre, a stranger at the custom-house, and altogether—take him right—very much of a gentleman. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... From a purely materialistic and utilitarian view of the subject, he observes that what we call moral progress and civilization owe their advancement more to material interest and cold, selfish calculation than to any development of the humanitarian sentiments, and that ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... mediaeval elements; but, despite growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were mediaeval; opposed to the open-air life, the physical training and the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly impressions given by the Renaissance ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... explain the fact that our annual expenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the Fatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original, most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... must rest. To my apprehension this "charm" in literature is as necessary to the amelioration and enjoyment of human life as the more solid achievements of scholarship. That Irving should find it in the prosaic and materialistic conditions of the New World as well as in the tradition-laden atmosphere of the Old, is evidence that he possessed genius of a refined and subtle quality if not of ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... any trouble about keeping his help. Besides, it seems the old hayseed who wrote him about it owned the land, and offered him land, water-power, right of way—anything!—free, just to 'help the town' by getting the mill up here. That bespeaks the materialistic Yankee, doesn't it?—to want to spoil a quiet little Paradise like this village with a ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... down the book. "O Lord! If we allowed ourselves nowadays to use such materialistic comparisons and make use of such homely terms in speaking of Thy supremely adorable Body, what a clamour would arise from the 'respectable' among the worshippers and the blessed legion of the good women who have comfortable ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... dropping out of his system the facts of consciousness which make such a distinction necessary. His whole system is, in fact, a pertinent illustration of Hamilton's remark, that "the phenomena of matter" [and of mind, he might add, treated by materialistic methods], "taken by themselves (you will observe the qualification, taken by themselves), so far from warranting any inference to the existence of a God, would, on the contrary, ground even an argument to his negation." Mr. Spencer, like Mr. Mill, denies the ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... period, we find that most of the respectable and representative opinion of the country was "prejudiced." Halls and assembly rooms in all the cities were closed against Fanny Wright, not only because her doctrines were absolutely infidel and materialistic, but because they were deemed subversive of law, order, and decency. The better portion of society in the United States was of one mind in its estimate of "The Pioneer Woman in the Cause of Woman's Eights," as she was called. In the columns ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... for steam engines and electric motors, for power presses and sewing machines, for pain-killing chloroform, and the splendid achievements of skillful surgery. But the mind has its necessities as well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an "Ode to Duty," and a "Happy Warrior," a "Snow Bound," and a "Thanatopsis," an "Evangeline" and a "Chambered Nautilus," a "Pippa Passes" or a "Biglow Papers," an "In Memoriam" ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... nothing in regard to any subject, but at the same time not to affirm that knowledge on all subjects is impossible, and consequently to have the attitude of still seeking. The standpoint of Pyrrhonism was materialistic. We find from the teachings of Sextus that he affirmed the non-existence of the soul,[1] or the ego, and denied absolute existence altogether.[2] The introductory statements of Diogenes regarding Pyrrhonism would ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... free from all theological preconceptions, raising from the very beginning the question of the origin of the world, and offering solutions, various indeed but all alike in this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. One derives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; one insists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements; but all alike reject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... so much alike in possessing disagreeable traits that he felt that Alida was the only peculiar one among them. He never thought of instituting comparisons between her and his former wife, yet he did so unconsciously. Mrs. Holcroft had been too much like himself, matter of fact, materialistic, kind, and good. Devoid of imagination, uneducated in mind, her thoughts had not ranged far from what she touched and saw. She touched them with something of their own heaviness, she saw them as objects—just what they were—and was ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... had once taken place, the whole Anglo-Saxon name attached itself to the Roman ritual. Among the motives for this change those which corresponded to the naive materialistic superstition of the time may have been the most influential, yet there were other motives also which touched the very essence of the matter. Men wished to belong to the great Church Communion which then in still ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... guard against a possible misapprehension. In eliminating the materialistic point of view in individualism—narrow individual development for personal gain—we have not thrown aside the goal of development suggested by Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Advanced educational thought has that prominently in mind—the discovery ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... laughed to scorn as the illusions of the ignorant. People read their Bibles, wherein there are countless instances shown of the power of thought, and never dreamed of applying the teaching to themselves. How such a materialistic age ever accepted Christ's miracles is a matter for wonderment, although now, looked at from the point of view of those who have investigated the currents of nature, the miracles are merely a proof of Jesus' divine understanding of ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... traced to the spirit in which it was taken up by his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling—then in his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... long been the materialistic principle which governs psychology. According to Herbert Spencer, the mind is at first, as it were, an indifferent day, on which external impressions "rain," leaving traces more or less profound. "Experiences" are, according to him and the English empiricists, the constructive ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... principle of gradation throughout organic Nature may, of course, be interpreted upon other assumptions than those of Darwin's hypothesis—certainly upon quite other than those of a materialistic philosophy, with which we ourselves have no sympathy. Still we conceive it not only possible, but probable, that this gradation, as it has its natural ground, may yet have its scientific explanation. In any case, there is no need to deny that the general facts correspond well with ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the now excited multitude. The disciples hesitated to leave their Master; but He constrained them and they obeyed. His insistence, that the Twelve depart from both Himself and the multitude, may have been due to a desire to protect the chosen disciples against possible infection by the materialistic and unrighteous designs of the throng to make Him king. By means that are not detailed, He caused the people to disperse; and, as night came on, He found that for which He had come in quest, solitude and quiet. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... world of general ideas, and that reflection has to do with this world of universals. Hence it is, too, that so much of the so-called science of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies—derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... but the heart of the ancient faith was atrophied by the indifference of the people, and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining a permanent hold upon the wandering minds and shallow feelings of a race whose deepest instincts reveal the fleeting fancies and inconstant ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... knowledge of his outlook, but he spoke with difficulty and was constantly interrupted by terrible fits of coughing, so that I could not stay. All the intellectuals whom I met—a class who have suffered terribly—expressed their gratitude to him for what he has done on their behalf. The materialistic conception of history is all very well, but some care for the higher things of civilization is a relief. The Bolsheviks are sometimes said to have done great things for art, but I could not discover that they had done more than preserve something of what existed before. When I questioned one of ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... [The history of this materialistic world is highlighted with strange events that scientists and historians, unable to explain logically, have dismissed with such labels as "supernatural," "miracle," etc. But there are those among us whose simple faith ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... and materialist, born at St. Malo; bred to medicine, served as an army surgeon at Dettingen and Fontenoy; his materialistic views were given first in a publication entitled "D'Histoire Naturelle de l'Ame," and at length in his "L'Homme Machine," both in profession of a materialism so gross and offensive, being absolutely atheistic, that he was glad to escape ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... theory is one of the best that has ever been gotten up by the champions of nescience, and is worthy of a statement in the Journal as quite an improvement on the common expression of materialistic stolidity. He claims that he does not deny immortality, but he recognizes no immortality of man—no human soul. He recognizes only the immortality of the world, such as it is, which nobody denies. The future life of man he considers nothing but an illusion, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... evidence enough of inherited weakness or flaw. How could a person who had lost teeth before twenty be ever said to die of old age, though he died at a hundred and ten? Death is not a supernatural event; it is an event of the most materialistic character, and may certainly be postponed, by the united efforts of the human race, to a period far more distant from the date of birth than has been the case during the historic period. The question has often been debated in my mind whether death is or is not wholly preventable; ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests (as he appears to do) so materialistic a view of the potency of the actual blood is, I should say, doubtful. I do not myself see that there is any reason for supposing that the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded baptism by blood very differently from the way in which the Christian Church has generally regarded baptism by water—namely, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... not entirely due to the venality of the officials, but rather to the spirit of materialistic indifference that was abroad among the orthodox Calvinists, who were alone eligible for public office. Large numbers of those who professed the established faith were in reality either nominal conformists too much immersed in affairs ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... and one by one dropped from the class, until toward the middle of the second winter none remained but Alexina, Aileen, Mrs. Hunter and Helene Ruyler, who, like Aileen, found in the "frantic interest" of the materialistic creed which antagonized every instinct in them, a distraction from the excessive gambling which had threatened to wreck their nerves, purses, and peace of mind. They confided this artlessly to Mr. Kirkpatrick, who replied dryly that they were the best ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... is founded upon a philosophy of apparitions. The vision of angels at Mons is no new thing. Catholicism is founded on such visions and no religion worthy of the name is without its story of angels. New aspects of matter have laid many materialistic theories in the dust, the mysterious potencies of matter which the latest science is revealing, the energy of electrons, and radium are giving us a new science of super-sensual physics and with ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... energy—in the course of our daily lives. But this is contrary both to experience and to all legitimate scientific thinking! Life, therefore, cannot be an intelligent or a directive energy. And so this argument also goes by the board, and we have left to us only the old materialistic conception of a non-intelligent, blind, life-force, or energy, derived from food, by a process of chemical combustion, and essentially no more mysterious than any other energy. This, therefore, is the conclusion ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... You will nowhere find an adult offspring which reproduces in any marked degree the physical features of one parent displaying in any marked degree the mental features of the other. That man whose external build and complexion is entirely modelled upon that of his hard materialistic father and who yet possesses all the artistic idealism of his maternal parent—such creatures do not exist in nature, though you may encounter them as often as you please in ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to be fair to her to say that, taking her fiction as a whole, she contentedly accepts this order of things and builds upon it. She and her world exhibit not only worldliness but that "other-worldliness" which is equally self-centered and materialistic. Jane Austen is a highly enjoyable mondaine. To compare her gamut with that of George Eliot or George Meredith is to appreciate how much has happened since in social and individual evolution. The wide social sympathy that throbs in ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day—the day Judith came—when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr. Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. If he did that, on just that phrase—what must you think, after all this confession intime d'un enfant du siecle?" She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Dick. Grim life looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle. The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A single incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of the cot-bed and groped ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Gryce was undoubtedly enjoying Bellomont. He liked the ease and glitter of the life, and the lustre conferred on him by being a member of this group of rich and conspicuous people. But he thought it a very materialistic society; there were times when he was frightened by the talk of the men and the looks of the ladies, and he was glad to find that Miss Bart, for all her ease and self-possession, was not at home in so ambiguous an ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... authorities differ on many material points. Some hold it to be "a rale island sure enough," and that its exploits are due to "jommethry or some other inchantmint," while opponents of this materialistic view are inclined to the opinion that the island is not what it seems to be, that is to say, not "airth an' shtones, like as thim we see, but only a deludherin' show that avil sper'ts, or the divil belike, makes fur to desave us poor dishsolute craythers." Public opinion on the ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... grapes. Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. I said, "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like 'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody?" Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl, understanding that he was to lecture ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... facts, and has no warranty that I can discover. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder.... The notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law; the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... the cottage I had just left, its sincerity and affection, its thrifty self-respect, its wide interests, I confessed that I had not been myself genuinely contented since I left my mother's house for college, thirty odd years before. I had become the willing victim of a materialistic society. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... Matthew, nor Saint Mark, nor Saint Luke, nor the other Evangelists had emphasized the maddening charms and depravities of the dancer. She remained vague and hidden, mysterious and swooning in the far-off mist of the centuries, not to be grasped by vulgar and materialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanic intellects made visionaries by their neuroticism; rebellious to painters of the flesh, to Rubens who disguised her as a butcher's wife of Flanders; a ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans |
