"Metaphysic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... current of Buddhism had changed from a revolutionary to a reactionary doctrine. The new greater gentry of the eleventh century adopted a number of elements of this reactionary Buddhism and incorporated them in the Confucianist system. This brought into Confucianism a metaphysic which it had lacked in the past, greatly extending its influence on the people and at the same time taking the wind out of the sails of Buddhism. The greater gentry never again placed themselves on the side of the Buddhist Church ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... be. Ethical, moral, morally good, right, we take to be synonymous terms. The word metaphysical male olet, no doubt. It is unpalatable, and is suggestive of, if not synonymous with, the unreal. However, I do not think we need be concerned now with the repute or disrepute of metaphysic generally, since we all are agreed that theism, or that reality for which theism stands, is in the super-sensible, super-experiential world, and therefore if theism is an implication of ethics at all, it ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... might, Art after Art goes out, and all is Night. See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of Casuistry heaped o'er her head! Philosophy that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more; Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public Flame, nor ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... shall hear The mingled music of all modern bards Floating aloft in such peculiar strains, As strike themselves with envy and amaze; For you "bright-harped" Tennyson shall sing; Macaulay chant a more than Roman lay; And Bulwer Lytton, Lytton Bulwer erst, Unseen amidst a metaphysic fog, Howl melancholy homage to the moon; For you once more Montgomery shall rave In all his rapt rabidity of rhyme; Nankeened Cockaigne shall pipe his puny note, And our young England's ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... us in this extraordinary man—who died at Hanover, 1716, in the midst of his labors and projects—turns mainly on his speculative philosophy. It was only as an incidental pursuit that he occupied himself with metaphysic; yet no philosopher since Aristotle— with whom, though claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he has much in common—has furnished more luminous hints to the elucidation of metaphysical problems. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Alexandria was also a metaphysical phenomenon, vast and deep enough; seeing that it held for some eighteen hundred years a population of several hundred thousand souls; each of whom, at least according to the Alexandrian philosophy, stood in a very intimate relation to those metaphysic things which are imperishable and immovable and eternal, and indeed, contained them more or less, each man, woman, and child of them in themselves; having wills, reasons, consciences, affections, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as Bowles, heart honour'd Poet sang, That wakes the Tear, yet steals away the Pang, Then, or with Berkeley, or with Hobbes romance it, Dissecting Truth with metaphysic lancet. Or, drawn from up these dark unfathom'd wells, In wiser folly chink the Cap and Bells. How many tales we told! what jokes we made, Conundrum, Crambo, Rebus, or Charade; nigmas that had driven the Theban ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the first, is really expressed the present state of the biological sciences, as well as their direction. As for the idea that the living body might be treated by some superhuman calculator in the same mathematical way as our solar system, this has gradually arisen from a metaphysic which has taken a more precise form since the physical discoveries of Galileo, but which, as we shall show, was always the natural metaphysic of the human mind. Its apparent clearness, our impatient desire to find ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broken prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance. When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild GAS, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... lukewarm, for an ancient Concord book-worm With authoritative tramping, forward came and took the floor, And in Orphic mysticisms talked of life and light and prisms, And the Infinite baptisms on a transcendental shore, And the concrete metaphysic, till we yawned in anguish sore; But still he ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... an appreciation of the whole system. Accordingly, our first concern is to ascertain and exhibit this metaphysical basis. In subsequent chapters we shall analyse in detail the doctrines specifically monophysite and trace the Christological errors back to their source in metaphysic. ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... them is a priest whom they call by the name Hoh, though we should call him Metaphysic. He is head over all, in temporal and spiritual matters, and all business and lawsuits are settled by him, as the supreme authority. Three princes of equal power—viz., Pon, Sin, and Mor—assist him, and these in our tongue we should call ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... instances, no doubt, inasmuch as the various papers were written for serial publication—and that Confession of Faith and Rule of Life, published in 1907 as First and Last Things. The opening is unnecessarily complicated by the exposition of a metaphysic that is quite uncharacteristic and has little to do with the personal exposition that follows; and, indeed, I feel with regard to the whole work that it attempts to define the indefinable. I deprecate the note of finality implied in the title. "It is as it stands ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... triumph of the Orleans faction, were they not planning the ruin of the heroic city that had delivered France from her fetters and would one day deliver the universe? Now, as he listened to the sage's voice, he discerned truths of a higher and purer compass; he grasped a revolutionary metaphysic which lifted his mind above coarse, material conditions into a region of absolute, unqualified convictions, untrammelled by the errors of the senses. Things are in their nature involved and full of confusion; the complexity of circumstances is such that we lose our way amongst them. Robespierre ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... other hand, that very essence might be imperilled by a false but plausible philosophy, and grave practical consequences in the domain of conduct might arise from its spread. For if it is accurate to say that behind every ethic there stands—whether avowed or unavowed—a certain metaphysic, the converse holds true no less; every philosophy, in the exact proportion in which it is ex animo accepted, will tend to produce its ethical counterpart. What we {55} submit in all seriousness is that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the metaphysic sea No bottom was forthcoming, And all the while (how drearily!) In one eternal note of B My German ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... were very little concerned with the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriously concerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or 'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching towards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and 'empire' like 'Homoousia' and ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... differentiates between the fundamental and the superficial, the permanent and the transient, the indestructible and the destructible. This is the supreme philosophic method which contains all the others and to which all the others are reduced. Upon this metaphysic and by the aid of this dialectic, Plato constructed an extremely pure system of morality which was simply an Imitation of God (as, later on, came the Imitation of Jesus Christ). The whole duty of man was to be as like God as he could. In God exist the ideas of truth, goodness, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... they do not understand one another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all wise men as his brethren. He believes that religion does not consist either in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, or in vain display, but in worship and justice. The doing of good, there is his service; being submissive to God, there is his doctrine. The Mahometan cries to him—"Have a care if you do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca!" "Woe unto you," says a Recollet, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... above all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps toward that height—just as the Athenians did two thousand years ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable tradition—nothing that scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge undermine. Its foundations are the fundamental and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... emotions. To the bounds of its empire there is no end. It embraces in its own more abstract being all the arts. By words it does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, painting, music. It is the metaphysic of the fine arts. Philosophy finds place in poetry; and life itself, refined to its last utterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins our earth to heaven, this bridge between experience and the realms where unattainable and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of a man's body, and the nature of things helpful, or hurtful unto it. And the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he indeed build upon the depth of nature: only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... so, peculiarly limited by the fact that he could not appreciate women. If he had been pressed for a theory or metaphysic of womanhood he would have been unable to formulate any. Their presence he admitted, perforce: their utility was quite apparent to him on the surface, but, subterraneously, he doubted both their existence and their ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of the philosophers. Nature, as was known, was in constant motion, but this motion, according to the universally accepted ideas, turned eternally in a circle, and therefore never moved from the spot, and produced the same results over and ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... known in a former state, and in denying that this gift of reason can ever be obliterated or lost. In the language of some modern theologians he might be said to maintain the 'final perseverance' of those who have entered on their pilgrim's progress. Other intimations of a 'metaphysic' or 'theology' of the future may also be discerned in him: (1) The moderate predestinarianism which here, as in the Republic, acknowledges the element of chance in human life, and yet asserts the freedom and responsibility of man; (2) The recognition of a moral as well as ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... second, the principal rules of the Method which the Author has discovered, in the third, certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method; in the fourth, the reasonings by which he establishes the existence of God and of the Human Soul, which are the foundations of his Metaphysic; in the fifth, the order of the Physical questions which he has investigated, and, in particular, the explication of the motion of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to Medicine, as also the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes; and, in the last, what ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... illuminating study of the Russian character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... part enumerated (I call them forms of the first class), and which (like the letters of the alphabet) are not many, and yet make up and sustain the essences and forms of all substances—this, I say, it is which I am attempting, and which constitutes and defines that part of metaphysic of which we are now inquiring." Physics inquires into the same qualities, but does not push its investigations into ultimate reality or reach the more general causes. We thus at last attain a definite conclusion with regard to forms, and it appears clear that in Bacon's belief the true function ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to convey. Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most concerns them. As my great namesake said some two hundred years ago, they know "what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly." And they not only know what's what themselves, but can impart to one another any new what's-whatness that they may have acquired, for they are notoriously able to instruct and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... matter to a plain statement, intelligible as far as such a thing can be made intelligible, to the apprehension of such persons as have not had the luck, or the ill-luck, of a plunge into the ocean of metaphysic. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... its Hall in the City of New York, on March 30th, 1893. Since that time I have been led into a train of thought, having as its basis a more philosophical treatment of the meaning of the scarabaeus as a symbol, in the religious metaphysic conception of it by the Ancient Egyptians, and have added much new matter. I am convinced that at the period when we first meet with the symbol of the scarabaeus in Egypt, it was already the symbol and tangible expression of an elevated religious idea, embracing that of a future life of the ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... freedom you have attained of the roaming-place of Dragons!—It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, You see how easy it is! And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... critical process can be conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of [17] such eclecticism we have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. How illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the physical sciences had recently opened to philosophic thought. As, at the Revival of Learning, the thinker imprisoned in mediaeval dialectics suddenly felt under his feet the firm ground of classic argument, so, in the eighteenth century, philosophy, long suspended in the void of metaphysic, touched earth again and, Antaeus-like, drew fresh life from the contact. It was clear that Professor Vivaldi, whose very name had been unknown to Odo, was an important figure in the learned world, and one uniting the tact and firmness necessary ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Soul travails in her Night Obscure, The nadir of her desperate defeat, What heavenly dream shall help her to endure, What flaming Wisdom be her Paraclete? No curious Metaphysic can withhold The heart from that mandragora she craves:— Unreasonable, old as Earth is old, The blind ecstatic miracle that saves. Far off the pagan trumpeters of Pride Call to the blood.—Love moans.—Some fiery fashion Of rapture like the anguish of the bride Leaps ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... Robert, with all his mysticism, is never subject to the deep depressions of spirit which usually afflict men of his gifts. He does not know what it is to be languid; or to have invincible indecisions. He will die game—even if he does know German metaphysic backwards!" ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... directly and primitively know of the external world; hence in epistemology the fact that they are data is all-important. But the fact that they are all that we directly know gives, of course, no presumption that they are all that there is. If we could construct an impersonal metaphysic, independent of the accidents of our knowledge and ignorance, the privileged position of the actual data would probably disappear, and they would probably appear as a rather haphazard selection from a mass of objects more or less like them. In saying ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... of weakness among the Catholics, and it was the rising strength of the German Protestants. Therefore it was the post of danger; and it gave to a theologian the command of a public of laymen. The restoration of history coincided with the euthanasia of metaphysic; when the foremost philosophic genius of the time led over to the historic treatment both of philosophy and religion, and Hamilton, Cousin, Comte, severally converted the science into its history. Many men better equipped for speculation than for erudition went the same way; the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... married the widow of Trenchard(165) (with whom he wrote Cato's letters,) at the same time that Dr. Middleton married her companion. The Bishop of Durham (Chandler),(166) another great writer of controversy, is dead too, immensely rich; he is succeeded by Butler(167) of Bristol, a metaphysic author, much patronized by the late Queen; she never could make my father read his book, and -which she Certainly did not understand herself: he told her his religion was fixed, and that he did not want to change Or improve it. A report ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Descartes's[8] pen, Which now, assailed by Locke's, expire again. And when perhaps in pride of chemic powers, We think the keys of Nature's kingdom ours, Some Davy's magic touch the dream unsettles, And turns at once our alkalis to metals. Or should we roam in metaphysic maze Thro' fair-built theories of former days, Some Drummond from the north, more ably skilled, Like other Goths, to ruin than to build, Tramples triumphant thro' our fanes o'erthrown, Nor leaves one grace, one glory ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... no province of nature, no faculty of man, no need of intelligence or spirit, uncomprehended. But we must not forget that, though this prodigious system had its root in the affections and sympathies of human nature, it was also fenced round by a theory of metaphysic. It rested upon authority and tradition, but it also sought an expression in an intellectual philosophy of things. The essence of this philosophy was to make man the final cause of the universe. Its interpretation of the world was absolute; its conception ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... kind as the more powerful body of his fellow- countrymen, he is a true man of science, though he can hardly read or write. As my great namesake said so well, "He knows what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly." As usual, these true and thorough knowers do not know that they are scientific, and can seldom give a reason for the faith that is in them. They believe themselves to be ignorant, uncultured men, nor can even the professors whom they sometimes ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... northern sea; for Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to him relics of mediaeval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic—he contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the juventus mundi had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the earlier ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Kant, in the order of their appearance, are—Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals (1785); Critique of the Practical Reason (1788); Metaphysic of Morals (1797, in two parts—(1) Doctrine of Right or Jurisprudence, (2) Doctrine of Virtue or Ethics proper). The third work contains the details of his system; ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain |
