"Causation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creature's conforming his will to that of his Maker; this is the trait of the angels who were steadfast in their faith. How can you here couple fatality and will? If ours be a state of probation, it is only by a certain freedom of action, an originating power of causation in ourselves, that we can conceive of our being put to proof. Possibly, in fallen man, that freedom is limited to the power of rejecting or yielding to the influences of grace. Yet within that narrow range it may be still a perfect freedom. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... idea that continence, as an economy in the expenditure of sexual force, may be practised to aid the physical and mental development, while folklore reveals various sayings in regard to the supposed influence of sexual abstinence in the causation of insanity. There is a certain underlying basis of reason in such beliefs, though in an unqualified form they cannot be accepted, for they take no account of the complexity of the factors involved, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... body of the fish by a broad base. A few minims of chloroform injected hypodermatically rendered the animal anaesthetic, and I could then proceed at my leisure, without being inconvenienced by its movements. The causation of tinctumutation is now definitely known. The theory that light acts directly on the chromatophoric cells has been proved to be incorrect. Even the theory that light occasions pigmentation is no longer tenable. I have, time ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... life of thought, in order to elevate that of fancy. The origin of aestheticism is the same as that of mysticism. Both proceed from a rebellion against the predominance of the abstract sciences and against the undue abuse of the principle of causation in metaphysic. When we pass from the stuffed animals of the zoological museums, from anatomical reconstructions, from tables of figures, from classes and sub-classes constituted by means of abstract characters, or from the fixation and mechanization of life for the ends ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... benefited by those methods have been and are such as are amenable to mental healing, of whatever kind. A writer in the "American Medical Quarterly," January, 1900, avers that Eddyism is an intellectual distemper, of a contagious character; that it is epidemic in this country, and that, in its causation, its rise and spread, it presents a close analogy to the great epidemics ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... new species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present,—and which we call 'spontaneous,' because we are ignorant of their causation,—is as wholly unknown to the historian of scientific ideas as it was to biological specialists ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... thought,—the mood, the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,—its cardinal idea,—that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... 2: This comparison is true in so far as the devil is somewhat the cause of our sins, even as God is in a certain way the cause of our good actions, but does not extend to the mode of causation: for God causes good things in us by moving the will inwardly, whereas the devil cannot move us in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... cannot look across the borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the Lutheran theory of justification is that it disregards the law of causation. According to Luther a man is justified by the firm belief and trust that his sins are forgiven. This "belief" is either true or false. If it is false, I can have no certainty with regard to my salvation, but am deceiving myself. If true, ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... nothing in the least mystical in the kind of sympathy that exists between Cyril and myself. It's all purely physical. We're very like one another. But that's all. There's none of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of natural causation." ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... are seeking, therefore, is to discover how to arrange things in such an order as to set in motion a train of causation that will harmonize our own conditions without antagonizing the exercise of a like power by others. This therefore means that all individual exercise of this power is the particular application of a universal power which itself operates creatively on ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... down to the eternal principle of natural, necessary causation and result, just as does the last verse which I have quoted from Galatians, "Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," not something else, that. Here is a clear and explicit annunciation of the eternal, universal ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... ever urged the contrary, that was worth listening to? I believe the human race will be more and more unhappy as science grows. But am I on that account likely to preach a crusade against it? Sister mine, we are what we are; we think and speak and do what causation determines. If you can still hold another belief, do so, and be thrice blessed. I would so gladly see you ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing |
