"Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never to condemn, never to despair, never to believe that the finite can ever quite cover up the infinite, never to believe that anything is wholly explained, to see the inexplicable in all things, and to remember that words are idols and judgments are blasphemies. For words are the naming of things that are without name, and ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... profound problems of the greater universe, and a statement of the reasons for their feeling this pressure. These reasons are well suggested by Professor B.G. Harrison, in his Popular Astronomy. He says: "With the idea of a universe of finite dimensions there is the obvious difficulty of the beyond. The truth is that a universe of finite proportions is equally difficult to realize as one of infinite extent. Perhaps the nearest analogy to infinity that we can understand lies in our conception of a ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as were still to be found. In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion, and brought to an unexampled pitch of accuracy. Little children of the labouring classes, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... made flesh, whose silence is inexpressible eloquence, Thou canst never be misapprehended or mistaken. Thou becomest the life of our life, and the soul of our soul. How infinitely is thy language elevated above all the utterances of human and finite articulation. Thy adorable power, all efficacious in the soul that has received it, communicates itself through them to others. As a divine seed it ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification means loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... of words and sentences and pictures to express two or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing up from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own personal overcoming, and that we ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... was bound up have dropped or are dropping away from it: the primal curse; consequential damages to give infinite extension to every transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of relative obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to the proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the responsible being, and not the parent who gave it birth and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that at length the earth will be overfilled would be in argument just as powerful if the size of the earth were increased to that of Jupiter, or to that of the sun. It simply deduces from the axiom / fact that any finite area whatsoever will at length be overfilled by a constant unchecked increase—a reason why we should actively check the increase NOW and HERE—a deduction wholly void ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... supreme happiness, relative and absolute: one is to depict nature at her best, untouched by sin, and to show man free from every defect and blemish, in the full perfection of his being. Naturally the imagery in this case is the imagery born of finite human experiences. The other method describes, as we said, not scenes of happiness but transcendent conditions of the soul as it is brought into ultimate communion with Supreme Goodness—the finite possessing ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... not—seek to know What finite vision, to the end, Through years of strictest search below, Must ever fail to comprehend! God! whose intents so far transcend Our poor discernment, let me see Some portion of the truths that tend By ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... relations. Sense-awareness discloses fact with factors which are the entities for thought. The separate distinction of an entity in thought is not a metaphysical assertion, but a method of procedure necessary for the finite expression of individual propositions. Apart from entities there could be no finite truths; they are the means by which the infinitude of irrelevance is kept ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... Release or of bondage: 'Free from evil, free from old age,' &c. &c. In all those texts there is not the slightest trace of any reference to the wretched individual soul, as insignificant and weak as a tiny glow-worm, implicated in Nescience and all the other evils of finite existence. And the fruit of that knowledge of the highest Person the texts expressly declare, in many places, to be immortality—which consists in attaining to Him. The view of knowledge by itself benefitting man therefore is well founded.—The Stras proceed to dispose of the so-called ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the new hierarchy, and it was through the Apostolic Succession that he, their rector, derived his sacerdotal powers. There were, no doubt, many obscure passages in the Scripture, but men's minds were finite; a catholic acceptance was imperative, and the evils of the present day —a sufficiently sweeping statement—were wholly due to deplorable lapses from such acceptance. The Apostolic teaching must be preserved, since it transcended all modern wanderings after truth. Hell, though ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... procedure, and maintained it, in its most frightful form, for more than a thousand years. This new doctrine was that since the Almighty punishes his erring children by tortures infinite in cruelty and eternal in duration, earthly authorities may justly imitate this divine example so far as their finite powers enable them to do so. I found this doctrine not only especially effective in the mediaeval church, but taking on even more hideous characteristics in the Protestant Church, especially in ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Wilson's Paper, 'On Wollaston's Argument from the Limitation of the Atmosphere as to the finite Divisibility of Matter.' — 'Trans. of the Royal Society of Edinb.', vol. xvi., p. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... they are not. But I do say that I think it requires superhuman wisdom to know positively that one not only keeps all God's law, but leaves no single duty undone. Think a minute. Law proceeds from an infinite mind; can finite mind grasp it so as to know, through its own consciousness, that it comes up to this standard? On the other hand, I do believe that a way has been provided for us to be set free from an "evil conscience"; that we may live in such integrity and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Art, with its finite means, cannot hope to record the infinite variety and complexity of Nature, and so contents itself with a partial statement, addressing this to the imagination for the full and perfect meaning. This inadequation, and the artificial adjustments ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... theological college, how he would get over that difficulty. He replied that he believed that the word "aion" would more fully meet the case, and that that word would more exactly accord with the capacity of our finite mind, the word "forever" expressing an idea entirely beyond our comprehension. That seems to be good sense, and more in harmony with ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... certain that our earth is gradually approaching the sun; and that the same is true of all the other planets. Small as the rate of this approach is, it is enough to confirm the belief of Sir William Thomson and others in the 19th century, that our solar system is constructed for finite (not, as Laplace and Lagrange thought, infinite) duration; the whole economy of planets will at last run down like a clock, and all the elements will be ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... manifest to those who have been accustomed to contemplate the idea of God, and to turn their thoughts to his infinite perfections; for, although we may not comprehend them, because it is of the nature of the infinite not to be comprehended by what is finite, we nevertheless conceive them more clearly and distinctly than material objects, for this reason, that, being simple, and unobscured by limits,[Footnote: After LIMITS, "what of them we do conceive is much less confused. ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... destitution, and as long as the provisions last I do not think that there will be. So long as flour and meat last, everyone with more or less trouble will get his share. As the amount of both these articles is, however, finite, one of these days we shall hear that they are exhausted. The proprietors have been deprived of their power to sue for rents, consequently a family requires but little ready money to rub on from hand ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the greatest that human beings are capable of inflicting on the one side, and enduring on the other; even when an enemy has killed the body and ceased then, because he has no more that he can do, it is still a measurable thing. Love in a finite being's heart may swell high over it, and exult in bestowing forgiveness on the murderer with the victim's dying breath. In the beginning of the Gospel a vivid example of that very thing stands recorded: "Lord," said Stephen with fainting heart ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... of God puts on us certain obligations towards Him, but it also puts on God certain obligations towards us. "What!" you say; "God the Infinite under obligations to man, the finite? The Creator under obligations to the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... be an object of contempt; the feeling of his own imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it reveals to him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can satisfy his desires in the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... in thy hands, but Thou art the all-loving artist; Passive I lie in thy sight, yet in my self-hood I strive So to embody the life and the love thou ever impartest, That in my sphere of the finite I ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... our senses, divergency makes the difference between truth and error; but where it is question of the substitution of one analogy or symbol for another, the more elegant is not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite inadequacy of even the noblest conceivable finite symbolism to bring God down to our level, need we pride ourselves much for being on a mountain whose height is perceptible from the plain but imperceptible from ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... self reveals the fact that all our passions and antipathies, all our limitations of experience, all that is ignoble and small in us, all that is transient and finite in us is false. We "do not know" but are "pure knowledge" ourselves. We are not limited by anything, for we are the infinite; we do not suffer death, for we are immortal. Emancipation thus is not a new acquisition, product, an effect, or result of any action, but it always exists as the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... inferred as existing in others, are, according to Pantheism, only facets of an infinite Unity, which is "altogether one" in a sense inapplicable to anything else. Because that Unity is not merely the aggregate of all the finite objects which we observe or infer, but is a living whole, expressing itself in infinite variety. Of that infinite variety our gleams of consciousness are infinitesimal parts, but not parts in a sense involving any real division. ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... represented himself doing, who had seen the awful sights and heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have returned to the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever we may believe of God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believe that life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered an opportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and so infinite. A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially evil and malignant. We may menace wicked men with punishment ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mountains mine, — All forests, stintless stars, As much of noon as I could take Between my finite eyes. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... complete on the side of spirit, defective on the side of matter; full as regards the infinite, empty of the finite; recognizing eternity but not time, God but not nature. It is a vast system of spiritual pantheism, in which there is no reality but God, all else being Maya, or illusion. The Hindoo mind is singularly pious, but also singularly immoral. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... not served to represent in finite terms the values of the derangements which each planet experiences in its movement from the action of all the other planets. In the present state of science, this value is exhibited in the form of an indefinite series of terms diminishing rapidly ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... too weighty for the mind to support them without relieving itself by resting a great part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; between religion—making up the deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry—passionate for the instruction of reason; between religion—whose element is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Good men, those who combine prayer with study, need not fear necessary difference of result, from holding different views; the grand error is too loosely generalizing; a little circle suits our finite ken; we cannot, as yet, mentally span the universe. These crude and cursory remarks may serve to introduce a likely-looking idea to which my thoughts have given entertainment, and which, with others ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... second: hence the velocity of Light is more than six hundred thousand times greater than that of Sound. This, however, is quite another thing from being instantaneous, since there is all the difference between a finite thing and an infinite. Now the successive movement of Light being confirmed in this way, it follows, as I have said, that it spreads by spherical waves, like the movement ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... with his cash-accounts and larders dropping fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony-chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunky species? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of infinite value to you; or only of finite,—measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pudding, it has brought you to? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages; and will never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-talent ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... marvellous accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of the planet. The old days of virgin continents will be gone. The habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited. And in the matter of food-getting, as in everything else, man is only finite. Undreamed-of efficiencies in food-getting may be achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to face with Malthus' grim law. Not only will population catch up with subsistence, but it will press against subsistence, and the pressure will be pitiless and savage. Somewhere ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... the distance that lies between truth and untruth, between death and deathlessness. Yet this measureless gulf is bridged in a moment when the self revealing one reveals himself in the soul. There the miracle happens, for there is the meeting-ground of the finite and infinite. Father, completely sweep away all my sins! [Footnote: Vishvanideva savitar duratani parasuva.] For in sin man takes part with the finite against the infinite that is in him. It is the defeat of his soul by his self. ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... a Law of Universal Necessity?—but they are satisfied with the result of their reasonings, if not wholly, yet in part, and seldom try to search beyond that great vague vast Necessity, lest their finite brains should reel into madness worse than death. Recognizing, therefore, that in this cultivated age a wall of scepticism and cynicism is gradually being built up by intellectual thinkers of every nation ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... slice of life which Tempus edax has devoured! And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps, and then an end of Ends. [Finite is ever and Infinite beginning.] Oh, the troubles, the cares, the ennui, [the complications,] the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... expect to understand the Infinite," retorts a theist to our Martian. "What manner of reasoning is this," asks our Martian, "that denies my finite mind the right to question the 'proofs' of the existence of an Infinite, when these same 'proofs' are derived by finite minds? The theist cannot infer God from the cosmic process until he can discover some feature of it which is unintelligible ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of their destinies, Mark King and Gloria lived through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night the wind, like ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... complement will agree in case with the subject of the verb. Hence the attribute complement of an infinitive is in the objective case: [I knew it (obj.) to be him]; but the attribute complement of the subject of a finite verb is in the nominative case: [I knew it (nom.) ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; but as that mode of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... trusted, let me never be confounded. Wherefore should the wicked say—Where is now his God?" But while I fret most there comes to me an inner voice, saying—"What matter if thou art confounded. God is not. Only believe firmly that God is as good as thou with thy finite reason canst conceive; and He will make thee at last able to conceive how good He is, and thou shalt have the perfect blessing of seeing God." You will say I am inconsistent. So I am; and so, if read honestly, are David's ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... said the Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed, in talking to my class, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our root F,—F being any finite constant—" ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... of letters. If he has his lodging in the Grub Street of Dreams, his presence there brings sunlight into the squalid place, and an infinite humor, an infinite charity compensate royally for a little finite folly and finite vanity. In the great art he served and the great age he adorned Goldsmith stands, not alone, but apart, with the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a work of Greek art,—the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. [206] That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an allegory, but saturates and is identical with it. The ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... may also see how easily men may fall into grave errors through not distinguishing accurately between the imagination and the understanding; such as believing that extension must be localized, that it must be finite, that its parts are really distinct one from the other, that it is the primary and single foundation of all things, that it occupies more space at one time than at another and other similar doctrines, all entirely opposed to truth, as we shall ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... shuts the gates of consciousness upon us when we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; which was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us as life itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite to affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the evening midge for its opinion ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... more. And when Miss Boutelle returned with the doctor she was beyond the reach of finite voices. Falloner would have remained all night with them, but he could see that his presence in the contracted household was not desired. Even his offer to take Jimmy with him to the hotel was declined, and at midnight ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... sublimed and beautified, in the refined and the virtuous. As yet she knew nothing about a beautiful love of that kind; but she had in the highest degree that purer, better affection which we prize as our most sacred possession, and even attribute to the immortals, since our earthly finite minds cannot conceive any more beautiful bond uniting them. It was this flame in her heart which had kept her like one alone, apart and unsoiled in the midst of squalor and vice, which had made her girlhood so unspeakably sad. Her soul had existed in a semi- starved ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... maintained? Is it just the sum of all forms of consciousness—our consciousnesses being organs or phases of the Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker strictly personal, carrying on a thought-world by the power of his will and calling into existence finite thinkers in his own image? Assuming that the world is the expression of the thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in the forces of nature and creates men in his own image, the further question arises as to the ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... art-magic, in that preternatural hour, has she bound and spell-bound thee. "Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning again may be either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... wrong in many different ways (because, as the Pythagoreans expressed it, evil is of the class of the infinite, good of the finite), but right only in one; and so the former is easy, the latter difficult; easy to miss the mark, but hard to hit it: and for these reasons, therefore, both the excess and defect belong to Vice, and the mean state to Virtue; for, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... magnetism. When it was proved to him that the senses—faculties purely physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained—attained to some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, or at least it seemed to him to upset, the powerful arguments of Spinoza. The finite and the infinite, two incompatible elements according to that remarkable man, were here united, the one in the other. No matter what power he gave to the divisibility and mobility of matter he could not help recognizing that it possessed ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... at rest, it is never satisfied with any comprehended truth, but ever proceeds on and on towards that truth which is not comprehended. So also the will which follows the apprehension, we see that it is never satisfied with anything finite. In consequence of this, the essence of the soul is always referred to the source of its substance and entity. Then as to the natural powers, by means of which it is turned to the protection and government of matter, to which ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... public life, I certainly must say, every year shows me more and more that the idea of Christian politics cannot be realised in the state according to its present conditions of existence. For purposes sufficient, I believe, but partial and finite, I am more than content to be where I am. But the perfect freedom of the new covenant can only, it seems to me, be breathed in other air; and the day may come when God may grant to me the application ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... tributary to Mind. As it is the earth which is in motion, while the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sun rise one finds it impossible to believe the sun not to be really rising, so the body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems otherwise to finite sense; but we shall never understand this while we admit that soul is in body, or mind in matter, and that man is included in non-intelligence. Soul is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man coexists with and reflects ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is that, as Mr Upton[15] has well expressed it, "there is a certain self-revelation of the eternal and infinite One to the finite soul, and therefore an indestructible basis for religious ideas and beliefs as distinguished from what is called scientific knowledge. . . . This immanent universal principle does not pertain to, and is not the property of any individual mind, but belongs ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... I hear it too, always. But there is another voice, which will be strong when the other has faded into eternal silence. In all bodily things, even the most beautiful, there is something finite. We must reach out our poor, feeble, trembling hands to the infinite. I think everyone who is born does that through life, often without being conscious of it. We shall do it consciously, you and I. We shall be able to do it because of our dreadful suffering. We shall ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... countenance: that is not the thing their safety consists in. "Thou most upright dost weigh the path of the just," that is, of the truly sincere and devoted. Ah! how blessed that such an unerring balance should apportion the way of a finite and ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... often astonished to see the springs of artistic inspiration so rapidly exhausted in many men of genius of our own epoch, it is because of their overwhelming egotism and limited subjectivity, because the worship of the finite replaces that of the infinite, because religion has become for them a mere memory of childhood. To recover their blighted fertility of imagination, they must again become as little children, again ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of corporeal dimensions. These black Opinions of Death and the Non-entity of Souls (darker than Hell it self) shrink up the free-born Spirit which is within us, which would otherwise be dilating and spreading it self boundlessly beyond all Finite Being: and when these sorry pinching mists are once blown away, it finds this narrow sphear of Being to give way before it; and having once seen beyond Time and Matter, it finds then no more ends nor bounds to stop its swift and restless motion. It may then fly upwards ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... Agents to do and feel those Sentiments which are Right. The identification of this law with His will constitutes the Holiness of the Infinite God. Voluntary and disinterested obedience to this law constitutes the Virtue of all finite creatures. Virtue is capable of infinite growth, of endless approach to the Divine nature and to perfect conformity with the law. God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and all worlds for rational free agents. The Moral Law, therefore, not only reigns throughout His creation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... susceptibilities to pain, strode noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method: man's order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker's order remote, infinite, is so beyond man's comprehension ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Peterborough regretted to say, the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha, Mahomet, and other impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us, that we did not discard the reason of man we admitted man's finite reason to our school of faith, and it was found ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... person." No doubt personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds {48} there is allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often been maintained, "but a limit and hindrance ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... existence characterized the Hellenic world until its downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.' ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... rigorous analysis; but do not think that the lustrous beauty of the language is only a brilliant veil to what in itself is absurd. We have arrived at darkness, but it is at darkness visible; the cloud is lighted up by the ray that issues from it. Our goodness, finite creatures as we are, is so much the greater as the object on which it is bestowed is less. Infinite goodness must create for itself an object. It does not love nothingness, but a creature which is nothing in itself, a creature simply possible, which, before owing to it the blessings of existence, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement,—darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown,—there is that within that God alone can vanquish,—yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... nature of the Absolute as such, to present the Absolute to finite minds as it must be presented, if that be possible, to the Absolute itself, must ever remain impossible to man. But it is equally true that to attempt such a task has never been the urgent mission of Philosophy. The distinction between the Ideal and the ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... to him who causes the motion, but to that which is moved. In answer to your remark that it is more fitting for an infinite power to reveal a large part of itself rather than a little, I answer that, in relation to the infinite, one part is not greater than another, if both are finite. Hence it is unallowable to say that a hundred thousand is a larger part of an infinite number than two, although the former is fifty thousand times greater than the latter. If, therefore, we consider the moving bodies, we must unquestionably ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... is the knowledge of ourselves,—the science of man. This is accomplished by a demonstration of the disproportion between what is to be known, and our faculties of knowing,—the disproportion, to wit, between the infinite and the finite. In fact, the recognition of human ignorance, is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple nescience is not proud; consummated science is positively ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Montanum, Pet. Godefridum, Amorum lib. 2. cap. 6. curiosum de his, nam et numerum de finite Talimudistis, unicuique sciatis ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... And other tremendously alarming phenomena, Which stab me, Rip me most outrageously; (Without a semblance, mind you, of respect for the Hague Convention's rules governing soul-slitting.) Aye, as with the poniard of the Finite pricking the rainbow-bubble of the Infinite! (Some figure, that!) (Some little rush of syllables, that!)— And make me—(are you still whirling at my coat-tails, reader?) Make me—ahem, where was I?—oh, yes—make me, In a ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... they read,—these prophets and sibyls! Never did the always-baffled, always reaespiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite find such expression, except in the sehnsucht of music. They are buried in the volume. They cannot believe that it has not somewhere been revealed, the word of enigma, the link between the human and divine, matter and spirit. Evidently, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Christian, not only that same word wait would have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... question being whether one and the same religious need is to be recognized in all the varieties, he finds the root of sacrificial observances in the yearning of the believer for abiding communion with the supernatural Power to which he feels himself akin, the longing of finite man to become one with the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... they arrive at that belief by finding something which transcends them and which they cannot understand; i.e. by an intellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense of disappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a common road, to belief in gods. Mr. Mueller's omission, moreover, from his definition, of the practical side of religion, of the element of worship, is a fatal objection ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... flower Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks The moon in heaven, yet hath power To tell the soul the thing it seeks. And pack, as by some wizard's art, The whole within the finite part. ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... of the rancorous enmity of the carnal heart against God, than all the other enormities which blacken the world's history. All other crimes appear less atrocious than this scorn of a Saviour's love—this trampling under foot the blood of the covenant. While no finite mind could have conceived it possible, that Almighty love should be so slighted, yet the Spirit of prophecy announced this impious ingratitude, long before the incarnation. When Isaiah saw the glory of Christ, and spake of him, he also saw that he would be despised and rejected ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... advocates of the XV. Amendment put words into our mouths, and they must answer for them if they seem too extravagant. There is nothing under the sun that will so arouse man or woman as the fact that another, as needy, as finite as himself, sets stakes in the path of his progress, and says, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." It is this assumption of men, most grievous to be borne, that has compelled woman to ask that the stakes ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... created this figure, or only put together its parts according to the harmony of truths already embodied in each of the parts? For first he takes the inventions of his fellow-men, in glass, in colour, in dome: with these he represents life as finite though elevated, and as an analysis although a lovely one. Next he presents eternity as the dome of the sky above this dome of coloured glass—the sky having ever been regarded as the true symbol ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... omnipotence must be given up, if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately right; yet, so prevalent is the lazy Monism that idly haunts the regions of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally treated as a paradox; God, it was said, could not be finite. I believe that the only God worthy of the name must ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... N. quantity, magnitude; size &c. (dimensions) 192; amplitude, magnitude, mass, amount, sum, quantum, measure, substance, strength, force. [Science of quantity.] mathematics, mathesis[obs3]. [Logic.] category, general conception, universal predicament. [Definite or finite quantity.] armful, handful, mouthful, spoonful, capful; stock, batch, lot, dose; yaffle[obs3]. V. quantify, measure, fix, estimate, determine, quantitate, enumerate. Adj. quantitative, some, any, aught, more or ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... geography, and arithmetic. I do not mention grammar for that was quite beyond him. The agreement of subject and verb was one of life's great mysteries to him. So I permitted him to browse around in such pastures as seemed finite to him, and let the infinite grammar go by default so far as he ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... "Hosannah!" to-day, and "Crucify him! crucify him!" to-morrow. Human nature is not different from what it was thousands of years ago. It is no better and no worse. Unregenerate man is out of harmony with his Maker; and being possessed of a finite mind, he can never be right, do right, nor keep right until he places himself ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... worship in the Churches, which are once solemnly dedicated to God for that purpose, by the Authority of the King, or other true Representant of the Church. But to worship God, is inanimating, or inhibiting, such Image, or place; that is to say, an infinite substance in a finite place, is Idolatry: for such finite Gods, are but Idols of the brain, nothing reall; and are commonly called in the Scripture by the names of Vanity, and Lyes, and Nothing. Also to worship God, not as ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... it, Man is not so, But mortal doomed. How can he exercise Wrath without end on Man, whom death must end? Can he make deathless death? That were to make Strange contradiction, which to God himself Impossible is held; as argument Of weakness, not of power. Will he draw out, For anger's sake, finite to infinite, In punished Man, to satisfy his rigour, Satisfied never? That were to extend His sentence beyond dust and Nature's law; By which all causes else, according still To the reception of their matter, act; Not to the extent ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... used in the Upanishads to designate the Invisible-Absolute, because no word or name can fully define It. A finite object, like a table or a tree, can be defined; but God, who is infinite and unbounded, cannot be expressed by finite language. Therefore the Rishis or Divine Seers, desirous not to limit the Unlimited, chose the indefinite term "That" ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... assumption among a certain class of critics that the artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their minds to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... house, and returned with a well- thumbed brown book. She turned the pages thoughtfully, and read aloud, presumably for the benefit of the cats: "In a symbol there is concealment yet revelation, the infinite is made to blend with the finite, to stand visible, and as it were attainable there." The Child sighed, "We had better go to the Recluse," she ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... eternal whole; it feels itself unhappy and uneasy in its fragmentary existence, and yearns to go back again to the whole from whence it came. Individual life means removal from that all-embracing whole; individual death is the complete union of finite parts with the infinite whole. Thus, although life is a necessity, it is a continual pain, and ceaseless yearning; death is the freedom from pain and the fulfillment of that yearning. The only aim of life is death at the end of it, and death is the goal toward which every ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... throat. No hurt I did not feel, no death That was not mine; mine each last breath That, crying, met an answering cry From the compassion that was I. All suffering mine, and mine its rod; Mine, pity like the pity of God. Ah, awful weight! Infinity Pressed down upon the finite Me! My anguished spirit, like a bird, Beating against my lips I heard; Yet lay the weight so close about There was no room for it without. And so beneath the Weight lay I And suffered ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... shall bear for him the discomfort of a sweating brow. "God is not in all his thoughts;" nor has he any disposition to claim the help of God upon the terms upon which it is offered. The Satanic method for life prompts him to become a god by a process of self-help and development of the finite resources. ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... with St. Helena that all biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte hitherto published have ended, and perhaps it is just as well that these entertaining works, prepared by purely finite minds, should end there. It is well for an historian not to tell more than he knows, a principle which has guided our pen from the inception of this work to this point, and which must continue ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, found all ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... creation, are inherently and essentially necessary in the present order of things. A perfect intelligence, trained by a perfect education, could do no more than keep the laws of the physical and spiritual universe. An imperfect intelligence, imperfectly taught,—and this is the condition of our finite humanity,—will certainly fail to keep all these laws perfectly. Disease is one of the penalties of one of the forms of such failure. It is prefigured in the perturbations of the planets, in the disintegration of the elemental ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... greeting shower, each is a chapter from Nature's open book, full of inspiration. Beyond them and above them he sees the hand and hears the voice of God. And since he lives and works thus close to Nature's throbbing heart and in close communion with forces that link the finite to the Infinite, who dares to spurn the dignity of his toil or ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... is not for angels, it is not for cherubim or seraphim, for a moment to look. The inner glory of the divine nature burns with a blaze, if I may so with reverence speak, too intense, too radiant, for finite vision. But in its manifestations, in its outer, its more distant rays, shining on the plan of man's redemption, all is mildness, and softness, and peace. Holiness, and justice, and mercy are seen blending ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... body and which may survive the body.—This immortal soul imprisoned within the flesh has conscience for its organ. "O Conscience, divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice, unfailing guide of an ignorant and finite but free and intelligent being, infallible judge between good and evil, and rendering Man similar to God, Thou foremost the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... sufficient proof of the two orders,—Matter and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,—two worlds unknown to each other. Have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they a consciousness of the colors they present ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... which locks behind me the prisonhouse of life, and opens before me the habitations of eternal night—tell me—oh, tell me—whither—whither wilt thou lead me? Strange, unexplored land! Humanity is unnerved at the fearful thought, the elasticity of our finite nature is paralyzed, and fancy, that wanton ape of the senses, juggles our credulity with appalling phantoms. No! no! a man must be firm. Be what thou wilt, thou undefined futurity, so I remain but true to myself. Be what thou wilt, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... limit is reached, beyond which the finite character of our intelligence does not permit us to apply the Laws which we are well assured still prevail, so there is an outlying circle of practical activity which no Science can compass. The various tints of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... hyacinth blossom and rose. Heart, spirit, and body, and brain, Thou art utterly mine, as I thine; But the love of the flesh, tho' at first When I saw you and loved you it burst With the love of the spirit one flame, Neither greater nor less, but the same, Is yet finite, attains not the height Of the spirit enfranchised, and must With the body slip back into dust. Our ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... confidence in one who, ordering them out, stays underground himself. I am learning, but, oh! so slowly, for mine is not a nature that is really shaped for war. A vivid imagination is here a handicap, and it is those who have little or none who make the best soldiers. At last the "finished and finite clod" has come into his own. Stolid, in a danger he hardly realizes, he remains at his post, while the other, perchance shaking in every limb, has double the battle to fight. My pencil wanders on and I hardly seem to know what I write. Confused thoughts and half-formed impressions crowd through ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... degrading Philosophy, unchurching her ignominiously, as fit only to deal with the Finite,—in other words, making her the lackey of mere Science,—they fancy they are doing famous service to Revelation. Very well,—we are ready to say,—having scourged Philosophy out of the temple, will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... we cannot reach the inner meaning of reality, "the living, moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. "What is described in concepts," he tells us, "is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity." Schelling, who ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... many-handed poet. As to his house decorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his “anti-scrape” philippics, his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to deal with the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so very finite as this, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same naïf genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautiful expression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations. Let him who is rash enough to suppose that ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Ricardo's life was to be mixed up in something miraculous. He was too humble to expect anything to be revealed to himself personally, but he had great hopes of the saintly Lady Fulda; and certainly, if concessions are to be wrung from the Infinite to the Finite by perfect holiness of life and mind, she should have obtained some. She had become deeply read in that kind of lore under Father Ricardo's direction, and had meditated so much about occurrences of the kind that it would; not have surprised her if ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand |
