"Determinism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... universal kind, and this frees him from the ties and appeals of the world of sense and selfishness. It is a glorious conception of human personality, infinitely higher than the undignified conceptions of naturalism and determinism. ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... regulating the universe in advance in all its details) exists or not, is a question of pure metaphysics, the solution of which is quite beyond human comprehension, and need not occupy us here. We must simply depend on the scientific postulate of determinism, i.e., on the law of causality applied to the motives of our actions, a law which is very much like that of the conservation of energy, and which admits of divers possibilities for the future, for it does not assume a knowledge ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... can recognize that they may have a controlling influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the 'higher plane' or totality of things after which, as it seems to me, we are impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or determinism, and the action of living being consciously directed to ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... freedom, not to reject it. For he sees in it the condition of morality, and calls attention to the fact that the difficulties in which those who deny freedom involve themselves are far greater than those of their opponents. He shows himself entirely averse to the determinism and pantheism of Spinoza.] ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... theory that one man is as good as another; Christianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Mr. George Louis Beer rightly claims that "the chief adherents of economic determinism are economists and Socialists, to whom the past is, for the most part, merely a mine for illustrative material. The latter, strangely enough, while explaining all past development by a theory that conceives man to be a mere self-regarding automaton, yet demand a reorganization ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... as I can explain it, it's a funny kind of a mixture—partly theology, partly Darwinism, or at least, making a fetish of evolution, and partly pure economic determinism. They believe in a Supreme Being, whom they call the First Cause—that is the nearest English equivalent—and they recognize the existence of an immortal and unknowable life-principle, or soul. They believe that the First Cause has decreed the survival of the fittest as the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... that the vast majority of mankind accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very different from his own. And in that perpetual—often gratuitous —affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... crooked hypothesis, but it is less difficult for me than to think that the horse had read in my mind the number which I had there. It certainly did nothing on most occasions to upset the fairly clear and precise impression that it was obeying some more or less complex determinism." ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously brooded on the problems of existence—free-will and determinism, the whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable over ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... felt, too, that he had failed in his religious quest, though side by side with this was the consciousness that he had been meant to fail. His religious views were a vague Theism, coupled with a certain tendency to determinism, to which his wanderings had conducted him. Christian determinism he called it, because though his old unquestioning view of the historical evidences of Christianity had practically disappeared, yet his belief in Christian ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... point of evolution, as formulated by Lyell and Darwin, is to explain phenomena by known causes. Now, directive power is not a known cause. Determinism compels me to believe that every event is inevitable. If we admit a directive power, the order of nature becomes capricious and unintelligible. Excuse my saying all this. But that is the dilemma as it presents itself to my ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... supposed to exert any causal influence on bodily action; it is supposed to begin and end as a motive, or never itself to become a motor. In other words, as before stated, the Will is not supposed to be an agent; and, therefore, to this theory the doctrine of free-will and of determinism are alike irrelevant. We need not wait to prove that this important fact is habitually overlooked by materialists themselves, or that whenever a materialist espouses the cause of determinism, he is thereby and for the time being vacating his position as a materialist; for ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... aware that the concluding statement in the text is in total contradiction with the thought of Auguste Forel, who denies free will. I do not propose here to reopen the agelong dispute between free will and determinism, which seems to me largely verbal. I ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... complex riddles. Having dogmatically divided all religious symbols into male and female, he is self-satisfied enough to think that he has explained religion. There is no inkling of the points of view suggested by such words as determinism, significance, genesis, so familiar ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Impressionistic painters. I have a pamphlet by Mederic Dufour, entitled Etude sur l'AEthetique de Jules Laforgue: une Philosophie de l'Impressionisme, which is interesting, though far from conclusive, being an attack on the determinism of Taine, and a defence of Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley. But then we only formulate our preferences into laws. The best thing in it is the phrase: "There are no types, there is only humanity," to the wisdom of which we must heartily ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... determinism which modern biological knowledge has compelled us to accept, we suspect that the power of education to modify the destinies of individuals is relatively small. Abrogating larger hopes we recognise education in its two scientific aspects, as a selective agency, but equally as a ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... there are two opposing views upon this subject—held by opposite schools—the theory of Determinism, on the one hand, and of Free Will on the other. The Libertarians assert that our wills are free—we having power of choice in all our actions. The Determinists, on the other hand, contend that our thoughts and actions are determined ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... as a determinate mechanism, are equally involved in the assumption of an Eternal, Omnipotent and Omniscient Deity. The theological equivalent of the scientific conception of order is Providence; and the doctrine of determinism follows as surely from the attributes of foreknowledge assumed by the theologian, as from the universality of natural causation assumed by the man of science. The angels in 'Paradise Lost' would have found the task of enlightening Adam upon the mysteries of "Fate, Foreknowledge, and Free-will," ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... right.... Do not, I pray you, think that in saying this I am holding the candle to that deadly doctrine of determinism, or that, like the tragic novelist, I see man only as a pitiful animal caught in the trap of blind circumstance. If I believed that I should say "Better dead." But what I do say is that we are so variously composed that circumstance does play a powerful part in giving ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... not to do we should not even think of doing." And Marcus Aurelius writes, "We should accustom ourselves to think upon othing that we should hesitate to reveal to others if they asked to know it." This is sound advice. Without attempting to settle the problem of determinism or indeterminism, which falls properly within the sphere of natural rather than of moral philosophy, it is evident that our conduct is largely the result of that set of potentialities which we call character, that ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake |
