"Metaphysics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the book he began replying in the Contemporary Review for October, 1874. In November of that year he wrote to Lady de Rothschild: "You must read my metaphysics in this last Contemporary. My first and last appearance in the field of metaphysics, where you, I know, are no stranger." The completed reply was published as God and the Bible in 1875. This reply, which contained, as he thought, "the best prose he had ever ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... had not been for the Crusades, something else must have happened to relieve the unbearable tension. The world was longing for a great deed, a deed overstepping the border-line of metaphysics, and its enthusiasm was sufficient guarantee of achievement. In the case of the individual, vanity and boastfulness played no mean part. Thus the Austrian minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein, proposed taking the Cross "not to serve God but to please his mistress." ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the doctor's pet maniac. They were often closeted together in high discourse, and indeed discussed Psychology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy with indefatigable zest, long after common sense would have packed them both off to bed, the donkeys. In fact, they got so thick that Alfred thought it only fair to say one day, "Mind, doctor, all these pleasant fruitful hours ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... only in consciousness. "The world is my idea," said Schopenhauer. Said Jules de Gaultier, "The world is my invention." His dogma was that imagination created the Real. Ah, me, I know that the practical Miss West would dub my metaphysics a depressing and unhealthful exercise of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... catalogues of foreign countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called "mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism—what Coleridge called "the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. His chief asset is an extraordinary sensitiveness to the sense of touch; it is his distinguishing passion, and tactile images flood his work; this, and an eye ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... "Prolegomina Logica," "Metaphysics," "Limits of Demonstrative Evidence," "Philosophy of Kant," etc. ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may arraign existence on the most deadly ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... has been made in anatomical research, and in no other branch more than in the study of the throat and of the larynx, which is the voice-box of the human body. There also has been a great advance in the study of metaphysics. It would seem high time, therefore, that both the results of modern anatomical study and the deductions of advanced psychological research, should be recognized in the use of that subtle and beautiful thing, the human voice, which in its ultimate quality is a combination of physiological and ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... Byfield. He was an unusual man in his gifts of teaching and broad views of life. He had been blest with a wife of splendid talents, and as Miss Lyon was wont to say, "Men judge of the whole sex by their own wives," so Mr. Emerson believed women could understand metaphysics and theology as well as men. He discussed science and religion with his pupils, and the result was a class of self-respecting, self-reliant, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... not perish. With the enthusiasm of Pascal, who should have been a soldier, Ardant du Picq has the preeminent gift of expressing the infinite in magic words. He unceasingly opens an abyss under the feet of the reader. The whole metaphysics of war is contained therein and is grasped at a ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... altogether negative. The new movement extended itself to Metaphysics, and under the leadership of Descartes a resolute effort was made to reform Philosophy on ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... idealist metaphysics, which tend to regard the Buddha essence or Nirvana much as Brahman ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... least one half of the time of a young man desiring a liberal education, from twelve to twenty years of age, is given up to Greek and Latin. The other half is left for Mathematics, Geography, History, Geology, Chemistry, Natural History, Metaphysics, Ethics, Astronomy, and General Reading. Before entering college, his time must be almost wholly occupied with the study of Latin, Greek, and Mathematics. For he is required, in order to enter our principal university, to know Virgil, Caesar, Cicero, Xenophon, three books of the Iliad, Arithmetic, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... superior to the old, and so much of discrimination was shown."[AD] And somewhat earlier he likewise asserts that "There is not an original and valuable commentary by a Japanese writer. They have been content to brood over the imported works and to accept unquestioningly politics, ethics, and metaphysics." After some examination of these native philosophers, I feel that, although not without some truth, these assertions cannot be strictly maintained. It is doubtless true that no powerful thinker and writer has appeared in Japan that may be compared to ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... create realities out of the fogs of metaphysics, and to span the concrete and the abstract with a bridge such as Milton threw across space. This man can spend hours in pursuit of 'volitions' with all the excitement of the chamois-hunt. Now his eye brightens, for he has transfixed an idea, and holds it up in all the nicety ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... has gone on through the ages producing the noblest growths of faith, hope, and charity, many of the beliefs insisted upon within the church as necessary to salvation were survivals of primeval superstition, or evolved in obedience to pagan environment or Jewish habits of thought or Greek metaphysics or mediaeval interpolations in our sacred books; that most of the frightful systems and events in modern history have arisen from theological dogmatism; that the long reign of hideous cruelty in the administration ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... and in metaphysics also, where he judges religions, faith, and the Gospels with a quiet freedom of thought, seeking in Nature alone the basis of morals ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... course, expect from you such an exhaustive and formed opinion as from an older man who had made metaphysics his business, and acquainted himself with all that had been said upon the subject; at the same time you must have expended a considerable amount of ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... Paul, "Matthew," and "Luke" assert or imply the pre-existence of Jesus. At this early period he was regarded as a human being raised to participation in certain attributes of divinity; and this was as far as the dogma could be carried by the Jewish metaphysics. But soon after the date of our third gospel, a Hellenic system of Christology arose into prominence, in which the problem was reversed, and Jesus was regarded as a semi-divine being temporarily lowered to participation in certain attributes ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... risk at the outset of these studies that girls will take the pose of philosophical students, and talk logic and metaphysics, to the confusion of their friends and of their own feelings later on, when they come to years of discretion and realize the absurdity of these "lively sallies," as they would have been called in early Victorian ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to religion and its more positive gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an honest stage; and no man should ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of their science as "the morphology of common opinion." Contemporary investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with introspection; their labors have become merely physiologico-biographical, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... degree part of the living creed of savages. Civilised myths, then, they urge, are survivals from a parallel state of belief once prevalent among the ancestors of even the Aryan race. But how did this mental condition, this early sort of false metaphysics, come into existence? We have no direct historical information on the subject. If I were obliged to offer an hypothesis, it would be that early men, conscious of personality, will, and life—conscious that force, when exerted by themselves, followed on a determination of will within them—extended ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... Further, the Philosopher says at the beginning of his Metaphysics (i. 2) that speculative science is sought for its own sake. Now it cannot be said that each speculative science is the last end. Therefore man does not desire all, whatsoever he desires, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... assumed. Chiefly intent upon recognizing and putting forward the phenomenal proofs of a future existence, it concerns itself little with speculations on the distinction between matter and spirit, and rather prides itself on having demolished Materialism without the aid of metaphysics. Perhaps a Platonist might say that the recognition of a future existence is consistent with a very practical and even dogmatic materialism, but it is rather to be feared that such a materialism as this would ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... sensualists whatsoever—so excellent is all truth. What, then, is their delight who know the God of truth! What would I not give so that all the uncertain, questionable principles in logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and medicine were but certain in themselves and to me, that my dull, obscure notions of them were but quick and clear. Oh, what then should I not either perform or part with to enjoy a clear and true apprehension ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... metaphysics, there were two directions in which the Lettres Philosophiques did pioneer work of a highly important kind: they introduced both Newton and Shakespeare to the French public. The four letters on Newton show Voltaire at his best—succinct, lucid, persuasive, and bold. The few paragraphs on ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... his way, a typical product of New England, inconceivable as the offspring of any other soil in the world. Emerson, it has been said, not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and reproduced ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... were not often within her reach, but her appetite seemed to be universal, and Albinia saw her reading old-fashioned standard poetry—such as she had never herself assailed—and books of history, travels, or metaphysics. She wondered whether the girl derived any pleasure from them, or whether they were only a shield for doing nothing; but no inquiry produced an answer, and if Sophy remembered anything of them, it was not with the memory used in lesson-time. The attachment to Louisa Osborn was pertinacious ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arts cherish in them the profound faith of man in the unity of his being with all existence, the final truth of which is the truth of personality. It is a religion directly apprehended, and not a system of metaphysics to be analysed and argued. We know in our personal experience what our creations are and we instinctively know through it what creation around ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... trust,' and take the mixture of cosmogony and Greek philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by this same Church as the last word on science, philosophy, history, metaphysics, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... God be light, what more, what else can I seek than God, than God himself! Away with your doctrines! Away with your salvation from the 'justice' of a God whom it is a horror to imagine! Away with your iron cages of false metaphysics! I am saved—for God is light! My God, I come to thee. That thou shouldst be thyself is enough for time and eternity, for my soul and all its endless need. Whatever seems to me darkness, that I will not ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... was, I think, on account of their self-evidency that many persons were led to consider them abstruse. It is to Bon-Bon—but let this go no farther—it is to Bon-Bon that Kant himself is mainly indebted for his metaphysics. The former was indeed not a Platonist, nor strictly speaking an Aristotelian—nor did he, like the modern Leibnitz, waste those precious hours which might be employed in the invention of a fricasee or, facili gradu, the analysis of a sensation, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge; for to ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Logic, that, in the Scottish philosopher's words, "it is to the schoolmen that the vulgar languages are indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they possess;" and that, as the Frenchman, going still further, but hardly exaggerating, lays it down, "logic, ethics, and metaphysics itself owe to Scholasticism a precision unknown to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... would seem that the two peoples must have had much in common in the world of thought. But such is not the case. Although the exoteric religions of the Romans resembled that of the Greeks, from whom it was borrowed or inherited, there was little or no original thought along metaphysics, religion or philosophy among the Romans. This was probably due to the fact that the whole tendency of Rome was toward material advancement and attainment, little or no attention being given to matters concerning the soul, future life, ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... but when I tell you that I am more than repaid by looking at you when I feel inclined, you will acknowledge that you do me service; but we will not enter into metaphysics or psychological questions just now, it shall all be explained by-and-bye. And now the first service I ask of you is at once to leap over the dull fortnight of gradual approaching, which at last ends in intimacy. I have ever held it to be a proof of the suspiciousness of our natures ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... important that this fact should be recognized. In common usage, a scientific man is distinguished specially from a metaphysician. The one investigates the phenomena of matter, the other studies the phenomena of mind, according to the old distinction between physics and metaphysics. Science, therefore, is the ordered knowledge of the phenomena which we recognize through the senses. A scientific fact is a fact perceived by the senses. Scientific evidence is evidence addressed to the senses. At one of the meetings of the Victoria Institute, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... use, because it recorded events prior to the advent of their prophet. The politics of Greece and its eloquence were not congenial to their despotic notions, and so they passed them by. Grecian ethics were suspended by the Koran, hence Plato was overlooked. Mathematics, metaphysics, logic, and medicine, accorded with their tastes. Hence they translated and studied Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates, and illustrated them with voluminous commentaries. These works stimulated native authors to write new treatises. The Arabs, therefore, became distinguished ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... is terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple reference to the sturdy man who stepped up to the Keeper of the Book of Life and said, "Put down my name, Sir." It is true that Shaw called this heroic philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics; that was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and Bernard Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of God shouting ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... inspiration and the happiness of all good men—how madly he rested on the conviction that religion is an abstract matter, and has nothing more to do with life and conduct than any other abstruse branch of metaphysics. But in spite of this unsound state of things, the gentleman possessed all the showy surface-virtues that go so very far towards eliciting the favourable verdict of mankind. He prided himself upon a delicate, a surprising sense of honour. He professed himself ready ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... fidelity. I obeyed, although I never loved the man. He was cold and phlegmatic, and utterly devoid of that sacred fire which is the incentive to noble deeds, suspected, too, of leaning to the cold metaphysics of Calvinistic subtlety. But he was brave, wise, and experienced, and, as the event proved, possessed but too much interest with the islanders. When these rude people saw themselves without hope of relief, and pressed by a blockade, which brought ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... importance. The subjects on which the lawyer speaks come home to men's business and bosoms. Some present, immediate object is to be gained. The lawyer feels, and he aims to accomplish something. But ministers have plunged into the metaphysics of religion, and gone about to inculcate the peculiarities of a system, and have neither felt themselves, nor been able to make others feel. It has long been a most interesting question to me, Why is the ministry so inefficient? It has seemed to me, that, with the thousands ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... knows; but that is the information stated shortly. It is contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes. {5} I know it is not a censored book, because I can see for myself that it is not a novel. The author, on his side, warns me that it is not philosophy, that it is not metaphysics, that it is not natural science. After this comprehensive warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will admit, a pretty hard nut ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of those more intimately acquainted with the metaphysics of the Houyhnhnm than we pretend to be? Do the saddle or the rein convey, like metallic tractors, vibrations of the spirit betwixt the two? We know not, but this much is certain, that no servant partakes so much of the character of his master as the horse. The steed we are wont to ride ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all things are men and animals. 'Ils se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees,' says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada. {55b} 'The wind was formerly a person; he became ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... to the western University. With all his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient in consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study, worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek, and took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London house was disastrously wound up; Mr. Herrick must begin the world again as a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish his ambitions and accept with gratitude a career ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rough, but it was not stupid. The Council of Soissons was held while the architects and sculptors were building the west porch of Chartres and the Aquilon at Mont-Saint-Michel. Averroes was born at Cordova in 1126; Omar Khayyam died at Naishapur in 1123. Poetry and metaphysics owned the world, and their quarrel with theology was a private, family dispute. Very soon the tide turned decisively in Abelard's favour. Suger, a political prelate, became minister of the King, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... himself. After this H. continued to contribute to the Review, many of his papers being translated into French, German, and Italian. In 1852 they were coll. with notes and additions, and pub. as Discussions in Philosophy and Literature, etc. In 1836 H. was elected Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, which office he held with great reputation until his death, after which the lectures he had delivered were edited and pub. by Prof. Mansel and Veitch. His magnum opus was his edition ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... joined me on the sad journey. After tramping along for a while, he asked permission to put his cloak on my horse. I consented; he thanked me, and then, in a kind of soliloquy, began to praise the power of wealth, and to speak cleverly of metaphysics. Meanwhile, day was dawning; the sun was about to rise, the shadows to spread their splendour—and I was not alone! I looked at my companion—it was the man ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... published. The approximate date of these works is probably from about 400 B.C. to about 250 B.C., the first being the oldest and the third the latest of the seven. Before the publication of the texts, when they were known only by hearsay, the term Abhidhamma was usually rendered "Metaphysics.'' This is now seen to be quite erroneous. Dhamma means the doctrine, and Abhidhamma has a relation to Dhamma similar to that of by-law to law. It expands, classifies, tabulates, draws corollaries from the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... she had never liked any of her charges since the renowned Anna Webster so well as Phoebe Fulmort; although her abilities did not rise above the 'very fair,' and she was apt to be bewildered in metaphysics and political economy; but then she had none of the eccentricities of will and temper of Miss Fennimore's clever girls, nor was she like most good-humoured ones, recklessly insouciante. Her only drawback, in the governess's eyes, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of mental action of the lower animals in a clear, simple, and brief form. The author has avoided technicalities, and has also resisted the temptation of the psychologist to indulge in metaphysics. Dr. Weir has relied for evidence on the results of his own independent study of biology at first hand, disregarding the second-hand data used by many of the authors once regarded as standard authorities ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... scandal in our ancestry. Or, after we moved outside on the porch, which we had to do on account of Oswald smoking the very worst cigars he was able to find in all the world, they would get gabby about all things in the world being simply nothing, which is known to us scientists as metaphysics. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I have already ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... here professed may be vastly different from what you suppose, and I therefore crave your gracious patience to the end. 'The question of an external world,' says J. S. Mill, 'is the great battleground of metaphysics.' [Footnote: 'Examination of Hamilton,' p. 154.] Mr. Mill himself reduces external phenomena to 'possibilities of sensation.' Kant, as we have seen, made time and space 'forms' of our own intuitions. Fichte, having first by the inexorable logic of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time. I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Aristotle published his books of physics and metaphysics. Of this, Alexander who was now in Asia, got information. That ambitious prince, desirous of being in everything the first man in the world, was dissatisfied that the learning of his master should ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... of the Higher Mathematics." It would take twenty years to complete, it would cost twenty thousand pounds or more, and it would breathe into mathematics the new, vivid life that Bergson's works have breathed into metaphysics. ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... a great reader of history, poetry, metaphysics, and fiction, but this is not what made him a great scientist. Original men make books, they do not need to read them. Yet Huxley loved to read. He even in his old age studied Greek to read Aristotle and ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... volume of two hundred and ninety-six closely-printed pages, and embraces a list of several thousand volumes. In this list are histories, biographies, travels, adventures, novels, poems, educational works, works on science, art, philosophy, metaphysics—in short, books on every topic familiar to man. In the department of fiction, the success of this house has been remarkable. They have published between four and five hundred novels, in cloth and paper bindings, and the demand for their early publications ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... of the problems of philosophy except from some point of view, it will be found that, in Chapters III to XI, a doctrine is presented. It is the same as that presented much more in detail, and with a greater wealth of reference, in my "System of Metaphysics," which was published a short time ago. In the Notes in the back of this volume, the reader will find references to those parts of the larger work which treat of the subjects more briefly discussed here. It will be helpful to the teacher to keep the ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most passionate ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... since—first, in our colonial period; next, during our Confederation; lastly, by the "Southern Confederacy" and here, as elsewhere, always in vain. But experience yielded to theory—plain business sense to financial metaphysics. It was determined to issue a new paper which should be "fully secured" and "as ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... my life," he replied. "Why, I've been splendidly entertained by a little black princess, who called herself your waiting maid, and discoursed most eloquently of METAPHYSICS and all that." ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... indeed, be no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius were of a different order, it was of as rare and ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... 1. Metaphysics: the Monads, Representation, the Pre-established Harmony; the Laws of Thought and of the World 2. The Organic World 3. Man: Cognition and Volition ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... missionary, quietly. Then Bruce joyfully took him up and led him on into a discussion of evidences, and from evidences into metaphysics, the origin of evil and the freedom of the will, till the missionary, as Bill said, "was rattled worse nor a rooster in the dark." Poor little Mrs. Muir was much scandalized and looked anxiously at her husband, wishing him to take her out. But ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... harder words for metaphysics than Mr. Carlyle. 'The disease of Metaphysics' is perennial. Questions of Death and Immortality, Origin of Evil, Freedom and Necessity, are ever appearing and attempting to shape something of the universe. 'And ever ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Dionysius. He was a great general and statesman, as well as a philosopher. In philosophy he was a Pythagorean; and, like most of that school, a great mathematician; and applied his favourite science not only to music, but also to metaphysics. Aristotle is believed to have borrowed from him his System ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... a poor critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it; and after a time ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Father in the endeavour. Alone, he might labour to all eternity and not succeed. He who has not made himself, cannot set himself right without him who made him. But his maker is in him, and is his strength. The man, however, who, instead of doing what he is told, broods speculating on the metaphysics of him who calls him to his work, stands leaning his back against the door by which the Lord would enter to help him. The moment he sets about putting straight the thing that is crooked—I mean doing right where he has been doing wrong, he withdraws ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... the New Englander, of whom I wrote last night, is perhaps the most intolerable bore on this vast continent. He drones, and snuffles, and writes poems, and talks small philosophy and metaphysics, and never will be quiet, under any circumstances. He is going to a great temperance convention at Cincinnati; along with a doctor of whom I saw something at Pittsburgh. The doctor, in addition to being everything that the New Englander is, is a phrenologist besides. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... thought, seat of thought; sensorium[obs3], sensory; head, headpiece; pate, noddle[obs3], noggin, skull, scull, pericranium[Med], cerebrum, cranium, brainpan[obs3], sconce, upper story. [in computers] central processing unit, CPU; arithmetic and logical unit, ALU. [Science of mind] metaphysics; psychics, psychology; ideology; mental philosophy, moral philosophy; philosophy of the mind; pneumatology[obs3], phrenology; craniology[Med], cranioscopy[Med]. ideality, idealism; transcendentalism, spiritualism; immateriality &c. 317; universal concept, universal conception. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... metaphysics, although it is quite as valid or even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which law still remains a law, even if not quite ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, that it is in the latter, that intellects of the vaster ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... education could do for a genius which, among other qualities, "especially lacked fire and imagination," and an ear for verse—sad defects these in a child of the Muses. Your training in all the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like Rasselas, "Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a Poet." Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you received ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... the discussions of the new American realism through university gatherings and literary inquests. Stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable. It is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in itself offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of American literature. The harsh and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Detesting metaphysics, I can not help but put A philosophic moral where I think it ought to hang; I've seen a "boom" for office Grow feeble at the root, Then change into a boomlet—then to a boomerang. In caucus or convention, in village or in town: "Who openeth a jackpot may not always ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Bible, which contains the precepts of the priests' religion, is the most difficult book in the world to be understood; it requires a thorough knowledge in natural, civil, ecclesiastical history, law, husbandry, sailing, physic, pharmacy, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and everything else that can be named: And everybody who believes it ought to understand it, and must do so by force of his own freethinking, without ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Church. Straight Rory had been educated for a teacher in Scotland, and was something of a scholar. He loved school examinations, where he was the terror of pupils and teachers alike. His acute mind reveled in the metaphysics of theology, which made him the dread of all candidates who appeared before the session desiring "to come forward." It was to many an impressive sight to see Straight Rory rise in the precentor's box, feel round, with much facial ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... Chemistry. It told of the impregnation of water with carbon dioxide. It attracted attention and was translated into French. This soda-water paper won for Priestley the Copley medal (1773). While thus signally honored he continued publishing views on theology and metaphysics. These made a ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... friends, except such a one as Boswell and Dr. Johnson's, sooner or later must separate. Taine is an observer, an investigator, a critic; and having devoted himself in turn to travel and to the study of metaphysics, of art and of literature, he has now turned his attention to recent French history; and the book he has written is not at all to the taste of sentimental politicians of the About type. The reader will not need to be reminded that there is no country in the world so favorable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... scientific taste and knowledge. In a great hunting-party he carried off the honors by his fearless and admirable riding. Sporting men said: "Why, there really is something in the man beside good looks and German music and metaphysics. He can take hedges and ditches ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Dr. John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684. After toying with his father's ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... First I became cynical, but, as I was altogether too comfortable to be morose, my cynicism was of a good-natured character. Then I made merry over my own mishaps and misadventures. Then I reflected, in a lofty, philosophic frame of mind, upon the faithlessness of woman, and, passing from this into metaphysics, I soon boozed off into a gentle, a peaceful, and a very consoling doze. When I awoke, it was morning, and I concluded to go ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... credentials, delicates, dioptrics, economics, ethics, extraordinaries, filings, fives, freshes, glanders, gnomonics, goods, hermeneutics, hustings, hydrodynamics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hysterics, inwards, leavings, magnetics, mathematics, measles, mechanics, mnemonics, merils, metaphysics, middlings, movables, mumps, nuptials, optics, phonics, phonetics, physics,[146] pneumatics, poetics, politics, riches, rickets, settlings, shatters, skimmings, spherics, staggers, statics, statistics, stays, strangles, sundries, sweepings, tactics, thanks, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... we could have to record a successful issue to this anticipation. But the transit was too much for the metaphysics of the old Indian. They went on the treacherous ice, it gave ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... and an imagination deeply tinged with German ideality and speculation. Often, when others slept, this man, who appeared so resolute, hard, and uncompromising in the performance of duties, and who was understood by but few, would read deeply in metaphysics and romantic poetry. Therefore, the men and women who dwelt in his imagination were not such as he had much to do with in real life. Indeed, he had come to regard the world of reality and that of fancy as entirely distinct, and to believe that only here and there, as a man or woman possessed something ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... under-consciousness of mud-stained boots and a clumsily cut overcoat, mixed itself painfully with this impression of pretty, scented women, and the clatter of tongues and coffee-cups. He stood rooted to the threshold in a sudden bitter realization that the great world cared nothing about metaphysics. Ease, fine furniture, a position in the world—these were the things that counted. Why had all his genius brought him none of these things? Wifeless, childless, moneyless, he stood, a solitary soul wrestling ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the felicity that awaits the nations under the systems they wish to establish, such is their manner of procedure, particularly in private. More circumspect in their writings, they usually disguise the poison they dare not proffer openly under obscure metaphysics or more or less ingenious allegories. Often indeed texts from Holy Writ serve as an envelope and vehicle ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... itself, its schools, and porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched beneath the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks; when he showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics, the Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of Agrippa, the crudities of Cardan, and passed, with his calin smile, into the salons ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beautiful tone and artistic singing. It must also be understood that the teacher does not look at the voice, he listens to it. Here voice teachers automatically separate themselves from each other. No two things so diametrically opposite as physics and metaphysics can abide peaceably in ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... studied, is akin to the deepest metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of speech, it reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those categories by which we conceive the world. It is by virtue of this parallel development ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... ugly little town that was now his home, and up its chief street the Ansells' memorable facade. The spirit of a genial comedy dwelt there. It was so absurd, so kindly. The house was divided against itself and yet stood. Metaphysics, commerce, social aspirations—all lived together in harmony. Mr. Ansell had done much, but one was tempted to believe in a more capricious power—the power that abstains from "nipping." "One nips or is nipped, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Oxford drawing-room, she had found herself absorbing metaphysics, as it were through the pores of her skin, without any previous discipline in that exacting science; now, in a London studio, she became aware of a similarly miraculous influx of power. Yesterday she would have told you that she knew nothing about art, and cared less. To-day it seemed ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... their returns (in triplicate) it was found that there were forty-three subjects to be provided for, including seven languages, six branches of science, four kinds of engineering, six commercial subjects and various sundries, such as metaphysics, wool-classing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... objection of the classical to the romantic school. Jeffrey's brightness of intellect may justify Carlyle's comparison of him to Voltaire,—only a Voltaire qualified by dislike to men who were 'dreadfully in earnest.' Jeffrey was a philosophical sceptic; he interpreted Dugald Stewart as meaning that metaphysics, being all nonsense, we must make shift with common-sense; and he wrote a dissertation upon taste, to prove that there are no rules about taste whatever. He was too genuine a sceptic to sacrifice peace to the hopeless search for truth. One of the most striking passages in his Essays[145] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... unpractical. If she were truly the Church of Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after all, was the mark of His highest Divinity—namely in His Humanity towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend to men's simplest needs, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... them, vainly begging for pardon for them or some alleviation of their sentence, and this judge or this prosecutor is so hardened in his hypocrisy that he and his fellows and his wife and his household are all fully convinced that he may be a most exemplary man. According to the metaphysics of hypocrisy it is held that he is doing a work of public utility. And this man who has ruined hundreds, thousands of men, who curse him and are driven to desperation by his action, goes to mass, a smile of shining benevolence on his smooth face, in perfect faith in ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... of Imagination too often characterizes Theology and Metaphysics, and prevents mankind from receiving the instruction from works on these topics that they need. In the early days of man's history, Religion and Philosophy addressed themselves to the Imagination, and then ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... incessant attacks on the socialist movement, they have given very material aid to the anarchist element in the syndicalist movement. For a number of years I have read faithfully Le Mouvement Socialiste, but I confess that I have not understood their dazzling metaphysics, and I am somewhat comforted to see that both Levine[9] and Lewis[10] find ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the justification in theory of a revolution which had already been accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of a break in the chain of causation, cannot admit that miracles or the supernatural in the old sense, as external and arbitrary interference with the natural order, can play or ever have played any part in this universe. Yet science has to postulate a First Cause when it knows, or metaphysics knows for it, that with the Infinite there can be no first and no last, no beginning and no ending, only ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... When we shall take pleasure in the short jacket of the boy that comes after us; when people will be at liberty to be born without any legal permit, and will not be reviled for it; when humanity will speak one language; when metaphysics and religion have been forgotten, and knowledge of nature takes the place of noble birth. When we shall have broken away ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... prostitution itself, it cannot be made a misdemeanor without opening the door too widely to complete arbitrariness. The State cannot prevent a responsible adult from disposing of his own body, without introducing religion and metaphysics into legislation; but the State can require those who practice prostitution not to molest the public. It has, therefore, the right to punish solicitation in the streets by fine or imprisonment, especially in often repeated offenses. It can ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... not.' He proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease assumes. The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... his life. Every morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them in motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or harsh, would for a moment avail to coax or to corce them into the counter direction. Could retrogression by any metaphysics have been translated into progress, we excelled in that; it was our forte; we could have backed to the North Pole. That might be the way to glory, or at least to distinction—sic itur ad astra; unfortunately, it was not ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... observation before he replied to it. His look, at once struck and meditative, said, "A strange phrase; what may it mean?" He turned it over in his mind, with thought deep and slow, as some German pondering metaphysics. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... you think wholly of the Presence above, who yet seems also to be within. You are getting a taste of the practical meaning of the Trinity now, three that in effect are as one. But you are too much taken up with the gladness of it to think about the metaphysics of it. He—whether within, or above, or both—is so much more than words. The experience is so much more than any explanation. You are not concerned about the explanation so long as you can have the ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... catalepsy, cataclysm *Dia through, across diameter, dialogue *Epi upon epidemic, epithet, epode, ephemeral *Hyper over, extremely hypercritical, hyperbola *Hypo under, in smaller hypodermic, hypophosphate measure *Meta after, over metaphysics, metaphor *Para beside paraphrase, paraphernalia *Peri around, about periscope, peristyle *Pro before proboscis, prophet *Syn together, with ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the metaphysics of the prisoner's counsel about possession, that is easily disposed of. Were not these slaves found in Drayton's possession, and didn't he admit ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... not good at metaphysics?" he said, coming still nearer and passing his short thick hands over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... (approaching land is like nearing truth in metaphysics), and ere we yet touched the beach, Borabolla declared, that we were already landed. Which paradoxical assertion implied, that the hospitality of Mondoldo was such, that in all directions it radiated far out upon the lagoon, embracing a great circle; so that no canoe could sail by the island, without ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... supposed to be a necessary preparation for the career of a statesman. Tycho, however, speedily made it plain to his teachers that though he was an ardent student, yet the things which interested him were the movements of the heavenly bodies and not the subtleties of metaphysics. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... but little, and to overcome this disadvantage, my usual method was to place a book before me while at meat, and at every repast I read five or six pages." Yet, he attached the most importance to "Locke's Essay," for he acknowledged that it turned his attention to metaphysics, and, he said, "It awakened me from my stupor, and induced me to form a resolution to abandon the grovelling views which I ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... Being sometimes hostile, sometimes indifferent and some times conciliatory, it always remained independent of faith. But while Greece thus freed herself from the fetters of a superannuated mythology, and openly and boldly constructed those systems of metaphysics by means of which she claimed to solve the enigmas of the universe, her religion lost its vitality and dried up because it lacked the strengthening nourishment of reflection. It became a thing devoid of sense, whose raison d'etre was no longer understood; it embodied dead ideas and an obsolete ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... reviewer declares that such indefinite succession of ages is "virtually infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name," at least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon that idea of the infinite' which the human mind can neither put aside nor comprehend."[III-17] ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... his poems, I believe the "Pilgrims of the Sun," had dabbled a little in metaphysics, and like his heroes, had got into the clouds. Blackwood, who began to affect criticism, argued stoutly with him as to the necessity of omitting or elucidating some obscure passage. ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... strove constantly after system, and the instrument on which his effort relied was the speculative reason. He embodied in an extreme form the spirit of his age. Nothing could be less like the spirit of ours. To many people now alive metaphysics means a body of wild and meaningless assertions resting on spurious argument. A professor of metaphysics may nowadays be held to deal handsomely with the duties of his chair if he is prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... not the only one, in such an age, to think upon the mighty relations of physics and metaphysics, or, as Sidney would say, "of naturall and supernaturall philosophic." For a man to do his best, he must be upheld, even in his ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... sentiments of the moral and social man. With Lord Byron these noble dispositions of the heart and mind were naturally the consequence of his tastes and opinions, which were essentially spiritualistic. With Shelley, though in contradiction with his metaphysics, they were notwithstanding in harmony with the beautiful sentiments of his soul, which, when he was only twenty-three years of age, had already experienced the unkindness of man. Their respective souls, wounded and hurt by the perfidiousness ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... his own enthusiasm, examines his last examination, tries every estimate again and again. He distrusts his tools, and then distrusts his own distrust, lifting himself by the very boot-straps in his metaphysics, to get at some foundation which will not move. He will know what he is about and what is great. He puts Caesar, Milton, and Whitfield into his crucible; but that which went in Caesar comes out a part of himself. The bold yet modest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... obscurity that left the impression that she did not perfectly understand what she endeavoured to render intelligible to others. She was always losing herself in philosophical disquisition, and once she got entangled in the mazes of the labyrinth of metaphysics; she had no clue by which she could guide her path—the imagination that led her into her difficulties, could not get her out of them; the want of a mathematical education, which might have served as a ballast to steady and help her into the port of reason, was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... scrambling, at the risk of neck us well as of dress, over piles of fern and ivy-covered rocks, or hopping across brooks on extemporised stepping-stones, usually in the very thick of some mauvais pas, discussing some tremendous point of metaphysics or languages and breaking off in it to scream at the beauty of the view, or to ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire ...
— Sophist • Plato
... shadows of metaphysics were pursued with more curiosity and ardor. After a long oblivion, Plato was revived in Italy by a venerable Greek, [108] who taught in the house of Cosmo of Medicis. While the synod of Florence was involved in theological debate, some ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the subject might disincline you ever to take leave of the world of the unborn, whereas I am desirous of making your acquaintance as soon as possible. Let me, then, rather assure you that life is not all marionettes and metaphysics, and that I know of no reason why you should not at once enter upon an existence as real as that enjoyed by your dear father or your beautiful mother—it would be unbecoming in a son to expect more. Castellinaria is waiting to welcome you. You could not have a more delightful birthplace than ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... classics in the influences which moulded their minds, were the dogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the power of novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from a purely sensuous mind. Shelley no more innovated or created in metaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift of imagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of the universe. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images which pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world as the grave, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... speaks of him as his "Father Parmenides," whom he "revered and honoured more than all the other philosophers together." To quote Professor Jowett in his introduction to Plato's dialogue Parmenides, he was "the founder of idealism and also of dialectic, or in modern phraseology, of metaphysics and of logic." Of the logical aspect of his teaching we shall see a fuller exemplification in his pupil and successor Zeno; of his metaphysics, by way of summing up what has been already said, it may be remarked that its substantial excellence consists in the perfect clearness ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Lordship's bravery at the head of an army; of your undaunted courage in mounting a breach or scaling a wall; or to have had your pedigree traced in a lineal descent from the House of Austria; or of your wonderful talent at dress and dancing; or your profound knowledge in algebra, metaphysics, and the Oriental tongues: but to ply the world with an old beaten story of your wit, and eloquence, and learning, and wisdom, and justice, and politeness, and candour, and evenness of temper in all scenes of life; of that great discernment in discovering ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... cleverly wrought and highly interesting novel, constructed upon somewhat unconventional lines. There is just enough medical science and metaphysics in it to give it spice; there are two murders, a trial and conviction of an innocent man on circumstantial evidence, a series of confidential domestic scenes, and a dash of hypnotism—surely enough to capture the fancy of the inveterate or occasional novel reader. . . . It is a curious but entrancing ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... in reconciling these two views, which to the natural mind seem absolutely contradictory; but by ingenious manipulation of texts, by dexterous play upon phrases, and by the abundant use of metaphysics to dissolve away facts, a reconciliation was effected, and men came at least to believe that they believed in a creation of the universe instantaneous and at the same time extended through ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... wrote in reply that these doctrines were published, and yet not published: meaning that his treatise on Metaphysics was only written for those who had been instructed in philosophy by himself, and would be quite ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... I was in an ideal position to see all that went on first hand. We were within three hundred thousand miles of Metapor when we got the first indication of the change in metaphysics. I discovered it myself. I was helping the astrogator get the constants ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... pulpit, by which the products of philosophic thought are conveyed to unphilosophic minds. As naturally in France, hostility to all those influences which were believed to have brought about the Revolution, to sensationalism in metaphysics, to atheism in what should have been theology, to the notion of sovereignty of peoples in politics, inevitably sought a rallying-point in a renewed allegiance to that prodigious spiritual system which had fostered the germs of order and social feeling in Europe, and whose name remains even now ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... never to visit Madame Orio's house, and on that very day I held an argument in metaphysics, in which I contended that any being of whom we had only an abstract idea, could only exist abstractedly, and I was right; but it was a very easy task to give to my thesis an irreligious turn, and I was obliged to recant. A few days afterwards ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... oath bound him to refuse his assent to any bill for relieving Roman Catholics from civil disabilities. To argue with him was impossible. Dundas tried to explain the matter, but was told to keep his Scotch metaphysics to himself. Pitt, and Pitt's ablest colleagues, resigned their offices. It was necessary that the King should make a new arrangement. But by this time his anger and distress had brought back the malady which had, many years before, incapacitated him for the discharge ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... speaks with some acrimony about earnest students, whose motive, he thinks, is a small ambition. But surely a man may be fond of metaphysics for the sweet sake of Queen Entelechy, and, moreover, these students looked forward to days in which real work ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... thing aggravated. And yet he knew so perfectly well that he was not in love, that just to realize the knowledge, one evening, when his father was a day's march ahead, and he was having a pleasant chat with the "chief," no one else nigh, and they were dawdling away its closing hour with pipes, metaphysics, psychology, and like trifles, which Claude, of course, knew all about,—Claude told him of this singular and amusing case of haunting fantasy in his own experience. His hearer had shown even more amusement than he, and had gone on smiling every now and then afterward, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... principal of the sects now existing in Japan are the Tendai, Shingon Yoko and Ken, all of which, I may observe, are of Chinese origin. Besides these there are the Shin and the Nichiren evolved in Japan and dating from the thirteenth century. Respecting the metaphysics of Buddhism and their effect on the Japanese people I cannot, I think, do better than quote from that great authority on all things Japanese, Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain, whose writings have done so much, not only to awaken an interest in Japan but to give correct ideas respecting the life of ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... that scroll work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what I may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my abstraction. What philosophers call me and not-me, ego and non ego, preoccupied me whether I would or no. There was less me and more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... To our wisdom is due The knowledge of Sciences all; And chiefly, those rare Metaphysics of ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... than love of wisdom. Technically, it means scientifically restrained speculation about the causes of human thought and conduct; it embraces the sciences of logic, of ethics, of politics, of psychology, of metaphysics. Shakespeare's training and temper unfitted him to make any professed contribution to any of ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee |
