"Materialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and invigorate a considerable part of Europe, nay, how they could succeed in overrunning and overturning "the rich but rotten, the mighty but marrowless, the disciplined but diseased, Roman empire; that gigantic and heartless and merciless usurpation of soulless materialism and abject superstition of universal despotism, of systemized and relentless plunder, and of depravity deep as hell." In connection with this subject we would refer our readers to Mallet's Northern Antiquities, ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards again a riveder le stelle. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at the point ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... thousand dollars. "Spiritual things come first?" Ah, yes! "Seek first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall be added unto you!" And it is so dreadful about the French and German Socialists, who, as the "Churchman" reports, "make a creed out of materialism." But then, what is this I find in one issue of the organ of the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the application of the laws of evolution to material things? Only the outright materialist, who asserts that life is a product of matter, can logically do so, and so great an authority in the scientific world as Sir Oliver Lodge has asserted that there is no longer any such thing as scientific materialism.[B] Those who accept the idea of the existence of the soul at all must necessarily accept the idea of the evolution of the soul. How can consciousness possibly escape the laws that evolve the media for ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Justice, "are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl. What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who revolts against that very spirit of the age, and ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Western Canada? Well established upon the highest academic level by its success in the competitive field of learning, it will stand out as the embodiment of Catholic intellectual life and the centre of Catholic activities. It will be the counter-ideal to the ideal of agnosticism and materialism so fostered and so prevalent in our neutral universities. Just as the cathedrals are the expression of the Catholic faith in Christ's abiding presence in the Sacrament of His love, so is a Catholic university the embodiment and accomplishment ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... features sharp with the great life-struggle, than to look on the face from which the mind is gone,—the eyes in which there is no recognition. Such a sight is a startling shock to that unconscious habitual materialism with which we are apt familiarly to regard those we love; for in thus missing the mind, the heart, the affection that sprang to ours, we are suddenly made aware that it was the something within the form, and not the form itself, that ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God—pride goes ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... declines to be held any longer responsible for the blind, demoniacal, irrational spirit, that would seize on his great instrument of science, and wrest it from its nobler object and intent, and debase it into the mere tool of the senses; the tool of a materialism more base and sordid than any that the world has ever known; more sordid, a thousand-fold, than the materialism of ages, when there was yet a god in the wood and the stone, when there was yet a god in the brick and the mortar. This 'broken science' ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... to play a prominent role in history, it will be more largely through the pressure exerted by the world outside than through their own initiative. Men are coming more and more to need what the Jewish people, under certain conditions, are peculiarly qualified to bestow. The period of materialism now undoubtedly coming to a close has brought with it a heavy burden of discontent, and there has been a turning from tangible comforts, a reaching out for spiritual consolation. Under the rule of enlightenment religion has gone away, and the world begins to feel its lack. One may not prophesy ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... industries have given Pittsburgh her wealth, population, supremacy, and power, commercial materialism is not the ultima thule ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... fact, was the moral of his time, either in theory or in its application? On one side, a gross materialism, of which the shameless maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility, not less suspicious, which, to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and that which is posterior to the first promulgation of such knowledge. In the first we find mainly the old accusations which have long ceased to exert any conspicuous influence, namely, Atheism, Materialism, and revolutionary plotting. Without disappearing entirely, these have been largely replaced in the second group by charges of magic and diabolism, concerning which the denunciations have been loud and fierce. One supplementary impeachment may be said in a certain sense to connect both, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... has nothing in common with either spiritualists, soul-believers, on the one hand, or materialists on the other. So far as the mortality of the soul is concerned, he may be either a spiritualist or a materialist But spiritualism or materialism is to him only an intellectual pastime. It is not his trade. In his actual work he seeks only practical results, and so confines himself wholly to the ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... more public detriment than these incessant revolutions in the value and tenure of property. Those afflict limited classes alone, but these every class; they relax and pervert the whole moral regimen of society; and if, as it is sometimes alleged, the present age is more profoundly steeped in materialism than any before,—if its enterprise is not simply more bold, but more reckless and prodigal,—if the monitions of conscience have lost their force in practical affairs, and the dictates of religion and honor alike their sanctity, it is because of the uncertain principle, the gambling spirit, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there, to my profound astonishment, I found described that experience of your father's which, in the mouth of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground of an important argument against materialism and in favour of personal immortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards. In no other poem during all these years is, to my knowledge, this experience once alluded to. I had completely forgotten it, but here it was recorded in black and white. If you turn to your father's account of ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the young men and women of our day are fast parting from their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism. Epicurism which, in my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it looks at first sight most like an angel of light. The mass, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of the Revolution neither interested nor affected the Liberalism or Radicalism of the middle classes. It was not only the loftier and wholesomer poetry of Wordsworth and of Tennyson which averted enthusiasm from Byron, not only moral earnestness and religious revival but the optimism and the materialism of commercial prosperity. As time went on, a severer and more intelligent criticism was brought to bear on his handiwork as a poet. It was pointed out that his constructions were loose and ambiguous, that his grammar was faulty, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... he entirely broke down, and became a prey to the most violent agitation. The vulgarity of the twins, and the gross materialism of Mrs. Otis, were naturally extremely annoying, but what really distressed him most was that he had been unable to wear the suit of mail. He had hoped that even modern Americans would be thrilled by the sight of a Specter in armor, if for no more sensible reason, at least out of respect ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the animals of the forest, the plants, the stones, in everything, they trace these beneficent or demoniacal powers. Every idea, every action is with them a consequence of the influence of one of these two powers, and free will is impossible. Though a rude materialism cripples the intelligence of these Indians, yet they seem to be sensible of the connexion between that which is perceptible to their senses, and something higher—something beyond the sphere of corporeal perception. But ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... in which there could be no element of remorse or bitterness. He was not a libertine. Few great artists have ever been that; for in every great painter, or sculptor, or musician there is a poet, and true poetry is the refutation of vulgar materialism. In all the nobler arts the second-rate men have invariably been the sensualists; but the masters, even in their love affairs, have always hankered after an ideal, ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses? It is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bane and curse of our Occidental world. In conversation with the learned men of the Orient I find this same delightful fact. Indeed they have no word in their languages to express our idea of fretful worry. Worry is a purely Western product, the outgrowth of our materialism, our eager striving after place and position, power and wealth, our determination to be housed, clothed, and jeweled as well as our neighbors, and a little better if possible; in fact, it comes from ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... America, so in England, a surfeit of materialism had produced a lack of high spiritual purpose in the nation at large; there was much confusion of ideas and ideals; and also much triviality, which was especially offensive when it masqueraded under some high-sounding name. ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Zindik, the Mundanist and the Agnoetic, proposed to sweep away the whole edifice. The neo-Platonism and Gnosticism which had not essentially affected Christendom,[FN339] found in Al-Islam a rich fallow and gained strength and luxuriance by the solid materialism and conservatism of its basis. Such were a few of the distracting and resolving influences which Time had brought to bear upon the True Believer and which, after some half a dozen generations, had separated the several schisms by a wider breach than that which yawns between Orthodox, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... himself, but some had done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness, the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know that his gods had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his daughter's arms about his neck, he felt that he was still bravely, persistently, pressing on toward ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the slaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... saw another movement, all the more powerful, perhaps, because it was continually changing its shape, even its purpose; and gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every change. Propagated at first by men of the school of Locke, it became at last a protest against the materialism of that school, on behalf of all that is, or calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, and honestly, all politics, it found itself sucked into the political whirlpool in spite of itself, as all human interests which have any life in them ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... materialism of Leipzig, Diemann had realized more fully than ever how thoroughly the interest in matters occult had pervaded the mind of his native country. To this department of Psychology he turned with an admitted interest in things unseen and a confidence ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... is concealed an entire system of poetic materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a whole series of consequences, the logical result of which was to lead Goethe to indifference, that moral suicide of some of the noblest energies of genius. The absolute concentration of every faculty of ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Is faith never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is neither ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... go again, forgetting the gulf between us"; and always Desmond swore stoutly that the gulf, if a gulf did yawn between them, should be bridged by friendship and hope. But, insensibly, Caesar's ideals became tainted by Scaife's materialism. Scaife, for instance, spent money lavishly upon "food" and clothes. So far as a Public Schoolboy is able, he never denied his splendid young body anything it coveted. Desmond, too proud to receive favours without returning them, tried to ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... which Manetho thus delivered himself, shocked the Northern taste of Helwyse. Through the semi-scriptural, symbolic language, he fancied he could discern a basis of materialism so revolting that the man of the world—the lover now!—listened with shame and anger. Here was a professed worshipper of Gnulemah, who ascribed to her no nobler worth than to be the incarnation of his own desires and passions! It was ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... of a higher spiritual life was overpowered by the revelation of uniform physical laws operating through a seeming infinite expanse of material existence. The one cause tended to create a notion that unassisted reason was sufficient for all human needs; the other developed a frequent bias to materialism. Both alike rendered it imperative to earnest minds that felt competent to the task to inquire what reason had to say about the nature of our spiritual life, and the principles and religious motives which chiefly govern it. Difficulties arising ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... cannot store it up. And my joy of to-day can never be as psychical fact the same joy which I may have to-morrow. Mental objects as such, as psychological material, are not destined to last. It has no meaning whatever to think of their being kept over until another time. It is a coarse materialism to conceive the mental contents like pebbles which may remain on the road from one day to another. Our ideas and feelings are mental appearances which have their existence in the act of the one experience; each new experience must be an entirely ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... to it very attentively, and said he should be glad to have some instances of that faculty well authenticated. His elevated wish for more and more evidence for spirit, in opposition to the groveling belief of materialism, led him to a love of such mysterious disquisitions. He again justly observed, that we could have no certainty of the truth of supernatural appearances, unless something was told us which we could not know by ordinary means, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... enjoyed that essay of Charles Lamb's on roast pig, Cradd," answered father as he took a second muffin. "I know that Lamb used to bore you, Cradd, but honestly now, doesn't his materialism seem—" ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... I say. Yes. A man of your tastes and mental vigor should be able to do some clean work in that profession. I know not of any other established profession that allows a larger scope of mind than this. There is some danger of materialism, but this you have already weaponed yourself against, and the scientific studies that come in the line of the profession will furnish material for thought and expression which I am sure you will know well ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... art and literature do not have, at first glance, a prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... present—and especially the late secession war—when I con them, I feel, every leaf, like stopping to see if I have not made a mistake, and fall'n on the splendid figments of some dream. But it is no dream. We stand, live, move, in the huge flow of our age s materialism—in its spirituality. We have had founded for us the most positive of lands. The founders have pass'd to other spheres—but what are these terrible ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... perfect outline of materialism in general. "They believed in a supreme force, but denied the existence of a Supreme Being. They rejected inquiry into first causes as unscientific," maintaining that facts alone were to be dealt with in all ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... Galactic Socialism has made all Earthmen look foolish. It is too bad that a competent Russian zoologist was not chosen for the trip that McLeod made; a man properly trained in the understanding of the historical forces of dialectic materialism would have realized that any Galactic society must of necessity be a Communist State, and would have interpreted it as such. The petty bourgeois mind of McLeod has made it impossible for any Earthman to hold up his head in the free Socialist society ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... weakness, as it appeared to me easy to make of it a book as agreeable to read as it was to compose. I have, however, applied myself but very little to this work, the title of which was to have been 'Morale Sensitive' ou le Materialisme du Sage. —[Sensitive Morality, or the Materialism of the Sage.]—Interruptions, the cause of which will soon appear, prevented me from continuing it, and the fate of the sketch, which is more connected with my own than it may appear to ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... actions of ordinary men, we may safely say that the sense of responsibility to a higher power, and of the constant presence of an all-seeing Judge, has exercised an influence, the removal of which would be greatly felt. Materialism has in fact already begun to show its effects on human conduct and on society. They may perhaps be more visible in communities where social conduct depends greatly on individual conviction and motive, than in communities which ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... ones. In view, however, of the fact that the world is so often lamentably ignorant of greatness, it now becomes necessary for me to carry out my second introduction and enlighten the Philistines as to what they have missed by their miserable and sordid materialism. ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... Modern materialism has ignored all this, and one of the noblest works to-day for a man of genius whose mind is sufficiently vigorous to throw off the trammels of collegiate ignorance and fashionable conservatism, would be to produce a volume upon prophecy, in which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... Communism was a religion; "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto" were holy writ enshrining the dogmata of Marxism-Leninism, and the conflict with the West was a jehad, a holy war in which God, in His manifestation as Dialectic Materialism, would naturally win out ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... struggle to preserve our nationality intact which has sanctified our war, from the red heart of which has grown a patriotism which, glowing like a central sun, burns away all the dross of our earlier materialism, gives as self-reliance, and frees us at last from our long tutelage to the Old World. And never had patriotism a more solid ground than ours, since the power, growth, and safety of our nationality are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from pursuing any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which were his main characteristics, greatly simplified the difficult task before him. His impartiality was shown most clearly in his attitude on the question of religion; but it partook very largely of a hard materialism which concealed itself under a nominal indifference. At first he treated with equal consideration Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, and even Judaism, and he said that he treated them all with equal consideration because he hoped that ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Indeed, the two soon began to get on very well together. In a great measure, of course, this was due to the change in Waymark's philosophy; whereas his early idealism had been revolted by what he then deemed Mr. Woodstock's crass materialism and vulgarity, the tolerance which had come with widened experience now made him regard these characteristics with far less certainty of condemnation. He was often merely amused at what had formerly ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... preoccupations to be reckoned to him rather as appropriate and meritorious? We must not forget that he was born and lived as a believing Christian, in an age of immorality indeed, but one which had not yet been penetrated with scientific conceptions and materialism. There is nothing hysterical or unduly ascetic in the religion of his closing years. It did not prevent him from taking the keenest interest in his family, devoting his mind to business and the purchase of property, carrying on the Herculean labour of building ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... my father had paid Ted exactly half this amount, and had found him quite willing to stay with us for half that again, or even for occasional tobacco money. Perhaps there was a mercenary vein in me at the time. I think it likely. The talk of my fellow orphans was largely of wages, and materialism dominated the atmosphere in which I lived. I know this refusal of twenty-five shillings a week and 'all found' struck me as tolerably reckless; splendid, in a way, but somewhat foolhardy, and I hinted as ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that has ever been presented. They were, too, contemporaries of Descartes, and they followed with intense interest the attempt of the great Frenchman to put philosophy in possession of a method as adequate for ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... distinction, nay, nineteen times out of twenty, in the most frivolous occupations, the most unsatisfactory amusements, do the great mass of the maturer man sink those feelings; divested of which, we become mere plodders on the earth, mere creatures of materialism: nor is it until after age and infirmity have overtaken them, they look back with regret to that real and substantial, but unenjoyed happiness, which the occupied heart and the soul's communion alone can bestow. Then indeed, when too late, are they ready to acknowledge the futility ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... of association and solidarity, for well-directed education of children, and for the instruction of the women. They give the young students a goal for their efforts and an ideal in life. They preach the duty of leading a faultless, spiritual life, the rejection of a crude materialism, into which the assimilation Jews, on account of the want of a worthy ideal, are only too apt to sink, and strict self-control in word and deed. They found athletic societies in order to promote the long neglected physical development of the rising generation. They give a new impulse to the celebration ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... instruction, and at the age of 15 was taught by philosophers of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean schools. He became initiated, writes Dr. Moore, into "the idealism of Plato, the realism of Aristotle, the scepticism of the Epicureans, and the materialism of the Stoics." At the age of 17 he was destined for the profession of medicine by his father in consequence of a dream. He studied under the most eminent men of his day. He went to Smyrna to be a pupil of Pelops, the physician, and Albinus the platonist; to Corinth to study ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... veils of spiritual realities; and "the powers of the world to come" were more actual and more momentous than those which operate in time and space. Perhaps the most important gift which God gave to the Church through his ministry was his lifelong testimony against the darkness of Materialism. ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the converse of Moses and Elias ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... off its yoke. The most intense manifestation of the revolution was found in the municipal faction. With an aim opposed to that of the committee of public safety, it desired instead of the conventional dictatorship, the most extreme local democracy; and instead of religion, the consecration of materialism. Political anarchy and religious atheism were the symbols of this party, and the means by which it aimed at establishing its own rule. A revolution is the effect of the different systems which have ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... towards human nature, although he never used his understanding of his fellow men to cultivate by trickery or device their favour and praise. He loved and idealised the ancient days of romance and chivalry, when men lived the wonderful tales of heroism that are now discredited and fading before the materialism of modern civilisation, and in this respect he had an affinity with the English composer, Elgar. He derived enjoyment from fairy tales and folk-lore, and these were his apparent consolation in his tragic last years. ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... so long as he exists, exists only by virtue of a principle which is inherent in himself, and which determines his particular nature; a principle that is not imposed upon him by a divine law-giver of any sort" (this is the "materialism" of our author!), "but is the protracted and constant result of combinations of natural causes and effects; that is not, according to the ludicrous idea of the idealists, shut up in him like a soul within ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... part of our materialism. Real sympathy costs too much money; so we try not to see the miserable creatures who might be restored to health for a couple of hundred dollars. A couple of hundred dollars? Why, you could take your wife to the theater forty times—once a ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... in protesting against sacerdotal pretensions are only beating the air—"We shall never go to Canossa," as Bismarck said. No, the real danger to spiritual religion, and therefore to the immediate future of mankind in every department of thought and action, arises from practical materialism on the one hand and an antiquated dogmatic theology on the other. I hope it will be understood by readers of these pages that in any references I may make to dogmatic theology I am passing no reflection upon the scientific theologian whose work is being done in the field of historical criticism ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... distant, I cannot but think, when the more elevated class of Spiritualists will cast loose from all these physical manifestations, which, even if they be proved genuine, are but little removed from Materialism, and eventually Materializing Seances, held on recurrent days, and at fixed hours, will ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... wise deny the good results which this Christian Catholic view of the world established in Europe. It was necessary as a wholesome reaction against the cruelly colossal materialism which had developed itself in the Roman realm and threatened to destroy all spiritual human power. As the lascivious memoirs of the last century form the pieces justificatives of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comite du salut public ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the 'reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.' He frankly owns that the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic: nay, that whoever commits himself to them will be temporarily landed in 'gross materialism.' Not the less, however, does he, mingling consolation with admonition, recommend us to plunge boldly into the materialistic slough, promising to point out a way of escape from it, and insisting, indeed, that through it lies the only path ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of—believe in," he burst out finally. "It comes too late—the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most." He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin followed ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... The materialism of Lucretius is a good instance of this. In many ways his denials bear a strong resemblance to ours. But the resemblance ceases a little below the surface. He denied the theology of his time as strongly as our positive thinkers deny the theology of ours. But the theology he denied was ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... when she looks back to those days can Rosalind see before her the grave young face in the sundown, and hear the tale of Dr. Conrad's materialism. And then she sees once more over the smooth purple sea of the day before the little boat sculled by Vereker, with Sally in the stern steering. And the white sails of the Grace Darling of St. Sennans, that had taken a large party out at sixpence each ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... which discovers itself in those comments, criticisms, and judgments which pass from man to man through a wide area and sometimes through long periods of time. The opinion which appears at first glance to be an expression of materialism often shows, upon closer study, an element of idealism or a touch of spiritual discernment. It is customary, for instance, to say of a man that he lives in his works; as if the enduring quality of his fame rested in and was dependent upon the tangible products of his genius or his skill. There ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... by its vague loveliness. She could hear, however, only the sound of the suburban trains crashing by in the distance, and the honking of the machines in the Plaisance. None of those spirit sounds of which Ray had dreamed penetrated through her vigorous materialism. But still, she knew that she was lonely; she knew Ray's going ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... command of ordinary mortals. By many it may be considered only a vague pantheism; yet, rightly regarded in a reconciliative spirit, it is of such an universal character as to harmonize with not only Deism, Theism and Polytheism, but even Atheistical Materialism. Listen to the following, which I select out of numerous examples, as a finger-post for others who seek the living springs of undefiled truth, as ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... are on the point of seeing, that materialism breeds worse fears than it cures; that economics and sociology create more social problems than they solve; that science makes it possible to destroy wealth and lives much faster than it can build them. It took years of science to achieve the airplane ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... resist attempts to deprive him of ownership, or that he will favor legislation which he thinks will increase his profits. But since there is no magic in ownership which enables a business man to know what laws will make him prosper, there is no chain of cause and effect described in economic materialism which enables anyone to prophesy whether the owner will take a long view or a short one, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... material objects and their relations. We are here confined, as it were, within narrow walls. We can catch only glimpses of what is above and around us, outside of those walls. Such glimpses may be vouchsafed, from time to time, to rescue us from sinking into materialism, and to keep alive our faith in scenes of existence remaining to be revealed when the barriers of our imprisonment shall be taken down, and what we call death lift us to a clearer and ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... purely physical, produced by an instrument which works in a method not different from that in which the glands of the mouth secrete saliva and the tubules of the stomach gastric juice. Some of my readers may say this is pure materialism, or at least leads to materialism. No inquirer who pauses to think how his investigation is going to affect his religious belief is worthy to be called scientific. The scientist, rightly so called, is a searcher after truth, whatever may be the results ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... problems of divine government and teleology; Logic, which trains the mind to discern true from false; and Ethics, which applies the knowledge thus gained and tested to practical life. The Stoic system of physics was materialism with an infusion of pantheism. In contradiction to Plato's view that the Ideas, or Prototypes, of phenomena alone really exist, the Stoics held that material objects alone existed; but immanent in the material universe was a spiritual force which acted through them, manifesting itself ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... while other thinkers regarded Spinozism as the only rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions, then rational theology, cosmology, and psychology are impossible, and it is futile to philosophize about God, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Materialism and spiritualism excluded each other, but both held the Church in contempt as a "rough philosophy for the people." Yet the Church included the true parts for both, not by asserting anything about the atoms but by recognising ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... for women or idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... definition of free-agency. "It appears to me," says Hartley, "that all the most complex ideas arise from sensation, and that reflection is not a distinct source, as Mr. Locke makes it." By this mutilation of the philosophy of Locke, it was reduced back to that dead level of materialism in which Hobbes had left it, and from which the former had scarcely endeavoured to raise it. Hence arose the rigid scheme of necessity, for which Hartley is so zealous an advocate. In reading his treatise on the "Mechanism of the Human Mind," we are ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... is the acquisition of wealth; they are "on manna bent and mortal ends," and their conception of the future is a world in which one nation competes against another for the acquisition of markets and commodities. In effect, therefore, materialism challenges the classics, but it accepts the self-seeking ideals of the past generations, and accepts also, as an integral part of the future, the scramble of conflicting interests, labour against capital, nation against nation, man against man. Now the first characteristic of the genuine scientific ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Proudhon emphasizes the special merits of that writer as a pioneer of economic criticism, and forms a counterweight to Marx's devastating criticism of Proudhon in the "Poverty of Philosophy." This piece and the sketch of French materialism are extracted from Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family), a comprehensive work of satirical criticism, in which Marx and Engels (whose share in writing the book was a very small one), settled accounts ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... gallant Lovelace of ten, despite all sentiment, had basely succumbed to the gross materialism of youthful slumber. On a cot in the corner, half hidden under the wreck of his own careless and hurried disrobing, with one arm hanging out of the coverlid, Richelieu lay supremely unconscious. On the forefinger of his small but dirty hand the missing cameo was still ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... Fine. Good. Beautiful. All this damned materialism: what good is it to anybody? Ive got a soul: dont tell me I havnt. Cut me up and you cant find it. Cut up a steam engine and you cant find the steam. But, by George, it makes the engine go. Say what you will, Summerhays, the ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... than that of the individual led by himself—a struggle as much privately caused as privately led. The main-path of all social progress has been spiritual rather than intellectual in character, but the many bypaths of individual-materialism, though never obliterating the highway, have dimmed its outlines and caused travelers to confuse the colors along the road. A more natural way of freeing the congestion in the benefits of material progress will make it less difficult ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... speculations had a charm much more than literary, a charm almost religious and prophetic. The constant gist of his discourse was lamentation over the sunk condition of the world; which he recognized to be given up to Atheism and Materialism, full of mere sordid misbeliefs, mispursuits and misresults. All Science had become mechanical; the science not of men, but of a kind of human beavers. Churches themselves had died away into a godless mechanical ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... they will hold out their right hands to every man—whatever may be the label he puts on his theories—who is striving in single-minded devotion for a millennial peace. The new era will have to be of a spiritual, ethical type. Coarser forms of materialism, whether in thought or life, will have to be banished, because the scales have at last dropped from our eyes, and we intend to regard a human being no longer as a thing of luxury, or wealth, or greedy passions, but as the ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... next world is so beautiful!" Was this "next world" in her imagination, or was it a fact? Materialists would, of course, say it was imagination. But, in the light of present-day science and discovery, who can pin one's faith on Materialism? ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... among the artists whose work went up to Brussels workshops and to other able looms of the day. We can fancy the fair face of Andrea's wife being lovingly caressed by the weaver's fingers in his work; we can imagine the beauties of Titian, the sumptuousness of Veronese's feasts, and the fat materialism of Giulio Romano's heavy cherubs, all contributing to the most beautiful ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... question "Materialism or Antimaterialism" still agitated the Georgia Augusta, in whose province the conflict had assumed still sharper forms, owing to Rudolf Wagner's speech during the convention of the Guttingen naturalists three ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... playing for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement. With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism; but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent, the science of ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... comparison with the other great European literatures. In France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or, as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by his allies, the Encyclopaedists. While Helvetius and Holbach were expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, after their characteristic fashion, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... the intuitive forces of the human reason: so that from the first it showed two sides or faces to the world—the one positive, scientific, critical, and analytical; the other mystical, metaphysical, subjective. Modern materialism and modern idealism were both contained in the audacious guesses of Bruno and Campanella; nor had the time arrived for clearly separating the two strains of thought, or for attempting a systematic synthesis of knowledge under ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... man's reaction upon his material environment. Since that time the pendulum has swung so far in this direction that many students of history and economics would seem to think that all of life can be summed up in terms of materialism, that environment after all is the only important element in the advance of society, and that mankind is a rather negligible quantity. This is just as great a mistake as the former practice of ignoring economic influence, and even so great an authority as Professor Seligman would seem to ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... concentrated. Whether it was that the people had been drilled for centuries to mechanical obedience; or that an elemental instinct for conquest and plunder, absorbing to itself the life of the nation, had simplified its aims and reduced them to materialism; or that the Prussian character was originally so made—it is certain that the idea of Prussia always evoked a vision of rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism, as if everything within her went by clockwork, from the gesture of her kings to the step ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... maintaining "that the most justifiable wars are the religious wars"; opens the Anti-Puritan League at the Shaftesbury Club, speaks for the Richmond and Kew branch of the P.N.E.U. on "The Romantic Element in Morality," for the Ilkley P.S.A., on "Christianity and Materialism," and so on without end. All these are on a few pages of his father's collection, interspersed with clippings recording articles in reviews innumerable, introductions to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... word that the Sinless One uttered while on this earth, that has not been or shall not be in time fulfilled. But I do not wish to enter into any controversies with you; you have told me your story,—I have heard it with interest,—and I may add with sympathy. You are a poet, struck dumb by Materialism because you lacked strength to resist the shock,—you would fain recover your singing-speech—and this is in truth the reason why you have come to me. You think that if you could gain some of the strange experiences which others have had ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... forced into materialism by some mental confusion or obscurity, but he revels in it, and invites all to taste and see how gracious a philosophy it is. There is an ill-concealed levity and coarseness in his handling of religious subjects ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... snobbishness of Fifth Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the snobbishness being perpetually ungratified—in such communities, beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst. No one can live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some impossible ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... observes, in a paragraph too long for quotation, that they exceed us in materialism and in utilitarianism; that we, a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the aesthetic faculty—what an abominable word aesthetic is! it ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... we know," was, as I said, the proud boast a spiritualist once made to me. And if the facts—any of the facts—of Spiritualism stand as facts, there is no doubt that it would form the strongest possible counterpoise to the materialism of our age. It presses the method of materialism into its service, and meets the doubter on his own ground of demonstration—a low ground, perhaps, but a tremendously decisive one, the very one perhaps ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... wisdom," wrote the sage Jayasthalians against the sage Gaurians, "which has assigned to man his proper state and status and station in the magnificent scale of being. We have not created the facts which we have investigated, and which we now proudly publish. We have proved materialism to be nature's own system. But our philosophy of matter cannot overturn any truth, because, if erroneous, it will necessarily sink into oblivion; if real, it will tend only to instruct and to enlighten the world. Wise are ye in your generation, O ye sages of Gaur, yet withal ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... threw him into the opposite extreme of a superstitious and mechanical piety. His marriage, his differences with the Duchess, and the evil influence of Cerveno, exposed him to new temptations, and for a time he led a life which seemed to justify the worst charges of the enemies of materialism. Recent events have flung him back on the exaggerated devotion of his youth, and now, when his health permits, he spends his time serving mass, singing in the choir at benediction and making pilgrimages to the relics of the saints in the different ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... out of a world of increasing materialism, self -sufficiency, boasting, pride, violence, war and multiplied peril, a world that under the guise of general indifferentism and cultivated cynicism mocks at the things of God and denies we have a written, final and sure ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... immortal existence, or an infinitesimal portion of a Great First Principle, inter-penetrating the Universe and the infinitude of space, and undulating like light and heat: ... and so they wandered further amid the mazes of error; and imagined vain philosophies; wallowing in the sloughs of materialism and sensualism, of beating their wings vainly in the vacuum of abstractions ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... nutrition from matter, so the soul is sustained by assimilating the spiritual substances of the invisible kingdom. The most ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consummate plant whose blossom is man's mind. This representation is not materialism; for spirit belongs to a different sphere and is the subject of different predicates from matter, though equally under a constitution of laws. Nor does this view pretend to explain what is inherently transcendent: it leaves the creation of the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... scepticism in religion. Few people who were present will ever forget the dignified yet stately manner with which she rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism, lately published; and some among them, also, will not forget the expression of amused surprise on Mr. Hamilton's face, that gradually changed to sardonic gravity, as he courteously waived his point; certainly not Mr. Oakhurst, who, from that moment, began ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... of." The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their [? the] violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to Materialism. This Materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds: it allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded. Man ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... her so many times each day. Had he not given all the years of his little life to the study of those refining and spiritualizing truths that are so far above the comprehension of the base and ignoble common herd? Indeed, he understood her language; he understood fully, why the sordid, brutal materialism of her crude and uncultured environment so repulsed and disgusted her. He understood, more fully than Kitty herself, in fact, and explained to her clearly, that her desires for the higher intellectual and spiritual ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... conceive of a power," writes Khalid in that vexing Manuscript, "which can create a beautiful parti-colored sun-flower of the shattered fragments of Idealism, Materialism, and my Hermit's theology. Why not, if in the New World—" And here, of a sudden, to surprise and bewilder us, he drags in Mrs. Eddy and the Prophet Dowie yoked under the yoke of Whitman. He marks the Key to Scripture with blades from Leaves of Grass, and such fuel as he ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... overwhelming majority of our people seek a greater opportunity for humanity to prosper and find happiness. They recognize that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through mere materialism and luxury, but that it does progress through integrity, unselfishness, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... winning greater power everywhere every day. In Denmark, intellectual stagnation has hindered it hitherto; you have political, but not yet religious, freedom. Belgium has both, and Belgium is at the present time the most fiery Catholic power there is. France is divided between extreme materialism and Madonna worship. When European thought—between 1820 and 1860, let us say—rebelled against every kind of orthodoxy, and, as always happens with rebellion, made mistakes and went too far, France played a wretched role. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... in membership, in congregations, in Sunday School scholars. We have been told, also, of a general decay of reverence for sacred things, of a growth of frivolity, a surrender of high ideals and of old faiths to the spirit of materialism which more and more, so it is said, dominates the age. That Sabbath of our youth; that attachment by families to the sanctuary which was so marked a feature of our national life; that fine old English home life and filial ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson |
