"Materialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by which alone it could enter, and there, sure enough, the elephant was. It then went through its trick of conveying a bun to its mouth, after which the boy said, "Good-bye, elephant," and it was hauled off backwards. Of course it intruded a certain gross materialism into the delicate fancy of my play, but I did not care to say so, because one has to keep in with the manager. Besides, there was the elephant, eating its head off; it might just as ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... in proportion to the palm; they then denote greater intellectuality and mental power. When short and stubby looking, the subject is inclined to animalism and gross materialism. ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... blaming him unjustly, she failed to realize the spiritual piteousness of his plight. If the war has done anything in this country, it has saved the young women of the gentler classes, at any rate, from the abyss of sordid and cynical materialism. Hesitating to announce the rupture of the engagement, she allowed it to remain in a state of suspended animation, and as a symbolic act, ceased to wear the ring. Nancy's taunts had goaded her to a more heroic attitude. The first person to whom she showed the newly-ringed ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... as she had, grew stronger, and at last she did little more than try to sleep through the long, dreary Sabbaths, that she might have strength for the almost hopeless struggle of the week. She was unconsciously drifting into a hard, apathetic materialism, in which it was her chief effort not to think or remember—from the future she recoiled in terror—but simply to try to maintain her physical power to meet the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the matter of to-morrow; my world is a world of faith that God will crystallize to-day's aspirations into to-morrow's justice; my world," the general rose and waved his poker as if to beat down the forces of materialism about him, "my world is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen." He paused. "As I was saying," he continued at last, "if this is a real world, if matter actually exists and this world is not a dream of my ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... these two sources. In all the unutterably despicable work of detective agencies and police spies that has led to the destruction of property, to riots and minor rebellions that have cost the lives of many thousands in recent decades, we find the sordid materialism of special privilege seeking to gain its secret ends. In all the unutterably tragic work of the terrorists that has cost so many lives we find the rage and despair of self-styled revolutionists seeking to gain their secret ends. After all, it matters little whether the aim of a group of conspirators ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... not need to worry over definitions of the divine. We do need to cultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will save us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us from the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing but a soulless world ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... origin in psychological, physical and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate. By reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived all really "animistic" gods, all that from the first partake of the nature of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases that hunger may have been ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... the impartiality and insight into human character, 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 the greatest ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... scientists and sceptics, and among the peasants are found many men who have no hesitation in proclaiming their disbelief in "thim owld shtories," and who even openly affirm that "laigends about fairies an' giants is all lies complately." In the face of this growing tendency towards materialism and the disposition to find in natural causes an explanation of wonderful events, it is pleasant to be able to conclude this chapter with an undisputed account of the origin of Lough Ree in the River ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... been one of the premier's favorite bugaboo examples of stage realism tried out in real life. But it was ridiculous to compare him with the stalwart figure sitting across the table, who had spoken the language of materialism without illusion. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... from the force of her achievements, and contends that devotion to machinery ends by making men machines. Many who argue thus have fastened on Germany's new war inventions as proof that Science makes for materialism and opposes the higher values of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers, Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... inherited memory of the absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by millions of years, have undoubtedly been built ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... occupied with the interpretation of classic authors, artists bent upon investing current notions with the form of beauty, could hardly be expected to exclaim: 'The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding.'[1] Materialism ruled the speculations no less than the conduct of the age. Pamponazzo preached an atheistic doctrine, with the plausible reservation of Salva Fide, which then covered all. The more delicate thinkers, Pico and Ficino, sought to reconcile ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the last three years, has deprived it of the respect and has secured for it the contempt of every one of the great civilized nations of mankind. Peace treaties and windy Fourth-of-July eloquence and the base materialism which seeks profit as an incident to the abandonment of duty will not help us now. For five years our rulers at Washington have believed that all this people cared for was easy money, absence of risk and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Materialism, it is objected, makes of man a mere machine, which is considered very debasing to the human race. But will the human race be more honored when it can be said that man acts by the secret impulsions of a spirit, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... shoulder of MacIan. His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful. In many sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism. All his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact. But he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this—that he preferred a fact even ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... but rarely witty; and without the smallest affectation of learning, had as much sentiment in it as would have puzzled a Turk, upon his principles of female materialism, to account for. Her beneficence was unbounded; indeed the natural tenderness of her heart might have been argued, by the frigidity of a casuist, as detracting from her virtue in this respect, for ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... quality is a mental representation based on a sensation, and this quality varies as the sensation varies; in other words, the object is not a stable immutable thing. It is only a thing as I perceive it. Berkeley's idealistic position was taken to crush atheistic materialism. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... most vivid way the torments of the damned and the scheme of man's, salvation. The first week was occupied in an examination of the conscience; the second in contemplation of Christ's Kingdom upon earth; the third in meditation on the Passion; the fourth in an ascent to the glory of the risen Lord. Materialism of the crudest type mingled with the indulgence of a reverie in this long spiritual journey. At every step the neophyte employed his five senses in the effort of intellectual realization. Prostrate upon the ground, gazing ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... debt, and now abuses the great man because he has not provided for her in a princely style, "pour se beaux yeux;" for it must be admitted, that she can boast as fine a pair of black eyes as ever were seen. The circumstance of this taste for materialism, is as unfortunate to the possessor, as a convulsive nod of the head once was to a rich gentleman, who was never without being engaged in some law suit or other, for lots knocked down to him at auctions, owing to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... by accident. A cousin of Mrs. Darcy's, one of your strong, thorough, energetic women, came to spend the winter with them; and Jack's mother, watching the throes of her son's soul, a little afraid of socialism, materialism, and all the other isms, proposed that Jack should take a journey West or South, and have a glimpse of the men and things beyond ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... 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 duties ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... idealism; often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce has so well ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... had beset him rose clearly before him; the scenes themselves stood up in their solid materialism—he could have touched the places; the people, the thoughts, the arguments that Satan had urged in behalf of sin, were reproduced with the vividness of a present time. And he knew that the thoughts were illusions, the arguments false and hollow; for in ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his merits, we ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... against the prevailing tone of infidelity and 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; ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... people will say that all this is no more than a proposal to make man better by machinery, that you cannot reform the world by Board of Trade Regulations and all the rest of it. They will say that such work as this is a scheme of grim materialism, and that the Soul of Man gains no benefit by this "so-called Progress," that it is not birth-rates that want raising but Ideals. We shall deal later with Ideals in general. Here I will mention only one, and that is, unhappily, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... 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
... right to exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And here we are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life, trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism, endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever have ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... hero, 'The Man,' is great and vigorous; he is by nature a poet. Belonging to the Future by the very essence of his being, he yet becomes disgusted by the debasing materialism into which its living exponents, the 'New Men, have fallen, he loses all hope in the possible progress of humanity, and is presented to us as the champion of the dying but poetic Past. But in this he finds no rest, and is involved in perpetual struggles ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... prejudice and set so much of our life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis, and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human liberty and happiness and will have shown ...
— Progress and History • Various
... which shows the struggle of the group, led by an individual, rather 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 ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... returned Thorndyke's look, and continued: "You see, I am not a man of science: therefore my beliefs are not limited to things that can be weighed and measured. There are things, Dr. Thorndyke, which are outside the range of our puny intellects; things that science, with its arrogant materialism, puts aside and ignores with close-shut eyes. I prefer to believe in things which obviously exist, even though I cannot explain them. It is the humbler and, I think, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... it was horrible, the mad infatuation of a man prostrate before false gods, idols, a rabid materialism. That one, to fall crushed and bleeding from the dizzy height of the ledge of sacrifice upon a red-daubed stone representation of the repulsive emblem, could thus wipe out the deadly sin of murder, ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... less strange, 11. Their temperamental differences, 12. Their systems must be reasoned out, 13. Their tendency to over-technicality, 15. Excess of this in Germany, 17. The type of vision is the important thing in a philosopher, 20. Primitive thought, 21. Spiritualism and Materialism: Spiritualism shows two types, 23. Theism and Pantheism, 24. Theism makes a duality of Man and God, and leaves Man an outsider, 25. Pantheism identifies Man with God, 29. The contemporary tendency is towards Pantheism, 30. Legitimacy of our demand to be essential in the Universe, 33. Pluralism ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... was like you once. I could once be content with Materialism—I could find it supportable once; but, should you ever come to love as I have loved (and, for your own happiness, child, I hope you never may), you will And that Materialism is intolerable, is hell itself, to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will And that it is madness, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 seems to be necessary physic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... As materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity, so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions, and, vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes—Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita—Hylozoism—Materialism —None of these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... He has been with me now for two months, and is to stay indefinitely. He is engaged on a work that will, I am convinced, add one more to the sacred books of the world. We need such men in this age of materialism, do we not? And I feel gratefully the beneficent effect of such a ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... even that of well-ordered reason; it is to learn to see by shutting our eyes. We must have studied bodies long enough before we can form any true idea of spirits, or even suspect that there are such beings. The contrary practice merely puts materialism on ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... seen.' I confess, indeed, that I have often felt as though this present age were even unduly favoured;—as though no future revelation and calm could equal the joy of this great struggle from doubt into certainty;—from the materialism or agnosticism which accompany the first advance of Science into the deeper scientific conviction that there is a deathless soul in man. I can imagine no other crisis of ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... Old Church that most of the weddings of Amsterdam are celebrated. Thursday is the day, for then the fees are practically nothing; on other days to be married is an expense. The koster deplores the modern materialism which leads so many young men to be satisfied with the civil function; but the little enclosure, like a small arena, in which the church blesses unions, had to me a hardly less business-like appearance than a registry office. The comedian ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... favorably; if he justly appreciated the pernicious influence of Rousseau, "that great professor and hero of vanity," he ought to have discerned that a nation, the higher classes of which were undermined by materialism and unbelief, while the masses lived in deep misery, was incapable of a temperate reform; the follies and terrors of the revolution were the children of the sins of the "ancien regime." But how amply has history ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... races in the world; bullying, hypocritical England! This was what he had expected, coming to, such a country, where the climate was all fog, and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in profiteering and the grossest materialism. Conscious that Hannah Hobdey was murmuring, "Hear, hear!" and Jimmy Portugal sniggering, June grew crimson, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a fatal blunder, the blunder of a people who had been so blinded by materialism that they do not seem to have so much as the consciousness that there is such a thing as moral strength on earth. No one who had followed with intelligent understanding the career of President Wilson could have doubted ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... places and at different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... intended to deny? Man distinguishing within himself a spiritual principle and a material principle,—what is this but Nature herself, proclaiming by turns her double essence, and bearing testimony to her own laws? And notice the inconsistency of materialism: it denies, and has to deny, that man is free; now, the less liberty man has, the more weight is to be attached to his words, and the greater their claim to be regarded as the expression of truth. When I hear ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... remarkable which on this dark subject has ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another question; yet undoubtedly it provides an answer for every difficulty; it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy that it will explain phenomena and reconcile difficulties, it is hard to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so admirably, should nevertheless be so ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... whether you have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but manifestation of that something invisible which we call human soul. And so pure is the soul in him, so mighty, so ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... look upon it as a duty, following on so many others, to offer it anew, this time in the clear, logical, illuminating form presented in theosophic teachings. The necessity thereof is all the more imperative when we consider the growth of scepticism and materialism amongst the more intellectual classes, whilst the mass of the people have forsaken their blind faith only to ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... written and on the whole appreciative, yet concludes with a charge of something like blindness, in your not seeing that Natural Selection requires the constant watching of an intelligent "chooser," like man's selection to which you so often compare it; and (2) in Janet's recent work on the "Materialism of the Present Day," reviewed in last Saturday's Reader, by an extract from which I see that he considers your weak point to be that you do not see that "thought and direction are essential to the action of Natural Selection." The same ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... "This exceptionally interesting book is from the practiced hand of Dr. James J. Walsh. It is a suggestive thought that all of the great specialists portrayed were God-fearing men, men of faith, far removed from the shallow materialism that frequently flaunts itself as inherently worthy of extra consideration for ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside. But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds, but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would actually let you pull all its teeth ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... address to the reader, in which the poet laments the prevailing tendency of public opinion, and protests against what he considers a determined war on all old and honored beliefs and feelings, and a substitution therefor of a vague and revolting materialism. Then come five sonnets to Pietro Aretino, the witty poet and scoffer of the Renaissance era. Aretino is invited to reappear among men, for the world, says Rizzi, has again become worthy of such a man's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than the mere recognition of it as philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all like the mood in which we reject the corpuscular ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... His sudden change from materialism. The difficulty of clear enunciation. His unfailing belief in the divinity of his revelations. How they compare with experiences of others. The frequent reception of the Light. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... observation of these habitudes, constitutes the foundations of chemical science. When the power and intelligence of the supreme Artificer is conspicuous in the ultimate particles of matter, we ought to be more temperate in our invectives against the doctrine of materialism. ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... culprits named for chief condemnation in this department being Biddle and Paul Best; and so on the catalogue proceeds through various forms of Arminianism, Antinomianism, Seekerism, Anti-Sabbatarianism, Antipaedobaptism, Anabaptism, Materialism or Mortalism, ending in Tolerationism. Among the Arminians denounced as notorious are Paul Best again, Paul Hobson, but especially John Goodwin again, and the Episcopalian and Royalist Dr. Henry Hammond, whose Practical Catechism, published in 1644, is cited ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... ah! this is materialism! this is the doctrine of matter! What is matter? I take a handful of earth in my hands, and into that dust I put seeds, and arrows from the eternal quiver of the sun smite it, and the seeds grow and bud and blossom, and fill the air with perfume in my sight. Do you understand that? ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... sittlich berechtigt? (1915) as being the work of a theologian and Biblical scholar of Vienna who has written a book on the politics of Isaiah and discussed the germs of historical veridity in the history of Abraham. "A world-history without war," he declares, "would be a history of materialism and degeneration"; and again: "The solution is not 'Weapons down!' but 'Weapons up!' With pure hands and calm conscience let us grasp the sword." He dwells, of course, on the supposed purifying and ennobling effects of war and insists that, in spite of ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... elevation of Mount Olympus? But Zeus's eagle sat on it, and top me Olympus, after you have imagined the eagle aloft there! after Homer, is the meaning. That will be one of the lessons for our young Republicans—to teach them not to give themselves up to the embrace of dead materialism because, as they fancy, they have had to depend on material weapons for carving their way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidal delusion! The spiritual weapon has done most, and always ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the fittest! Why, Samuel, the very idea is a denial of spirituality—what are we that we should call ourselves fit? To think that is to be exposed to all the base passions of the human heart—to greed and jealousy and hate! Such doctrines are the cause of all the wickedness, of all the materialism of our time—of crime and murder and war! My boy, do you read that Jesus went about, worrying about His own survival, and robbing others because they were less fit than He? Only think how it would have been with you had you been called to face ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... nature; there are cloud-gods, sea-gods, river-gods, fire-gods, rain-gods, storm-gods, etc., etc., etc. Everywhere, throughout all nature, the Inoit, or Aleutian system of theology, penetrates, stripped, it is true, of much of its original materialism, yet retaining enough to show its undoubted origin in the sensual percepts, recepts, and ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... is theoretically the union of two such lines. Again, time can only be measured by space, space by time; they are true universals and contraries; their synthesis is motion, a conception which requires them both and is completed by them. Or again, the philosophical extremes of downright materialism and idealism are each wholly true, yet but half the truth. The insoluble enigmas that either meets in standing alone are kindred to those which puzzled the old philosophers in the sophisms relating to motion, as, for instance, that as a body cannot move where it ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... to Him the realities of all life and all religion. There are those, I know, in our day, to whom these ideas are mere assumptions—"dogmas of a tremendous kind," to assume which is to assume everything. But with this order of thought we have in the meantime nothing to do. The questions of materialism are outside of Christianity altogether. They were nothing to Christ, whose whole thought moved in a higher sphere of personal love, embracing this lower world. The spiritual life was to Him the life of reality and fact; and so it is to ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... You will excuse these precautions, but I am a man of somewhat retiring, and I might even say refined, tastes, and there is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman. I have a natural shrinking from all forms of rough materialism. I seldom come in contact with the rough crowd. I live, as you see, with some little atmosphere of elegance around me. I may call myself a patron of the arts. It is my weakness. The landscape is a genuine Corot, and, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... acts of faith in their place and prevent the element of the "impossible" becoming the element of the absurd. The philosophy of the complex vision, though far more sympathetic to much that is called "materialism" than to much that is called "idealism," certainly cannot itself be regarded as materialistic. And it cannot be so regarded because its central assumption and implication is the concrete basis of personality which we call the "soul." And the "soul," when ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of Freemasonry. It's all organized from there—such as it is. And no one is quite comfortable about Germany. The Emperor Frederick is a perfectly sincere man, but really rather uneducated; he still holds on to some sort of materialism; and ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... 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
... sympathize with my feeling in regard to this form of the materialism of our day, will forgive this divergence. I submit to the artistic blame of such as do not, and ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... nobleness, yet driven to the grim deserts of Radicalism for a faith, his 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 condition; and stood there as mere Cases ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 realize the chimera ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the very angels in heaven, if they are permitted to look down upon us from their bright abodes in bliss, must mourn over the sad result of man's semi-barbarism, and his worship of the world's materialism. Long ere this mind should have been the controlling force in all nations claiming to be civilized. Pure intellect and its struggles, its aspirations for light and truth, should have relegated to the regions of barbarism and darkness mere animal contests. Not only so, but intellectual supremacy ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... philosophers discoursed on topics of the day, each to his own group of admirers. A Christian, dressed like any other Roman, held one corner with a crowd around him. There was a tremendous undercurrent of reaction against the prevalent cynical materialism and the vortex of fashion was also the cauldron of new aspirations and the battle-ground ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... with you, and my state of mind returned, my feeling of dependence and the gloomy Thanksgiving dinner. The shock of contrast between my old and my new self stopped me short in the road. In a flash I saw the lying materialism on which the world is based, the curse of dollar worship that keeps opportunity away from the young, at the same time it keeps the old in a prison of loneliness and suspicion. If we worshipped life instead of metal disks, we would see ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... mechanical condition, standing as the lifeless form of a church, a mere case of theories, like the carcass of a once swift camel, left withering in the thirst of the universal desert. That in certain circles there was ground for such reproach is sufficiently proved. Materialism had crept into its colleges, sapping away their spiritual life and driving young men either into Atheism or into the Roman Catholic Communion. Such activity as it had, was in the evangelical circles only The common people still listened eagerly to Wesley's successors and were intensely in earnest ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... publishing my memoirs, my purpose is to reveal to a world still engulfed in a vulgar materialism Your Majesty's lofty thoughts about art, poetry, and philosophy. The inspiration of this book, Sire, is due to yourself, and to those other remarkable men whom Fortune—always the protector of my younger years—has given me ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... a tragic catastrophe like the wreck of the Titanic to bring out the absolute contradiction between this ideal and all the counsels of materialism and ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... his simple philosophy, was careful to avoid a centralized population, wherein lies civilization's devil. He would not be forced to accept materialism as the basic principle of his life, but preferred to reduce existence to its simplest terms. His roving out-of-door life was more precarious, no doubt, than life reduced to a system, a mechanical routine; yet in his view it was and is infinitely happier. To be sure, this philosophy of his ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... moments as they passed might be made to yield their utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him at least make the most of what was "here and now." In the actual dimness of ways from means to ends—ends in themselves ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... seriously alarmed at the Labour Parliament of 1917. That showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated the whole social atmosphere. There had been Socialists before, but none like Gustave Herve in his old age—at least no one of the same power. He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course, every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could be no adequate motive among ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... said against the materialistic tendency of the present time, the scholarship of the idealists at least did not retard its growth. Materialism abounds everywhere at present. The object sought by introducing scientific in lieu of classical studies in some of the higher institutions of learning is that facilities may be afforded the children of the productive classes, ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... 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 glittering ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... his idealistic philosophy. "Idealism sees the world in God" is with him an axiom. This philosophy seems to him to free human beings from the tyranny of materialism, to enable them to use matter as a mere symbol in the solution of the soul's problems, and to make the world conformable to thought. His famous sentence in this connection is, "The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the harmonious development of all the faculties, the one-sided, somewhat restricted, or undeveloped, view of Pestalozzi and others of his followers, surely not individual efficiency for personal gain, the selfish view of crass materialism, but social efficiency is the present-day motive in education. And the definition of education takes on a different color. Not merely the development of inner life but in conjunction with that or in addition to it, the development in the individual of the power of adjustment to an ever changing ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... would only vulgarize its incomparable art, Rheims will stand as a monument both to the thirteenth century which had made it the supreme type of the Gothic ideal to raise men's souls to God, and to the twentieth century against whose materialism it was an offence ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... 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 of the nature of this higher something ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... gestures, voice, with 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 ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... ages of repression, has resulted with many of the sex, in an agnosticism which, at first liberal, has grown to be a dogmatic materialism. She "speaks against" spiritual insight and its revelations. In forsaking her dogmas and creeds she has forsaken religion. She is to be "brought in again"— brought to see that religion is of the soul and is individual; while dogma and doctrine ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and materialism" had to be fought in the village. There was not, however, much trouble due to drink, and there was no gambling now. There might still be impropriety between young people—formerly young men used to visit the factory girls—but it was rare. Lately ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... one, two, or three hundred thousand dollars, in order that they may resume their highly legitimate undertakings and perhaps grow rich again in company with their fellow-gamblers; all these, and many more features of Wall Street life, equally vivid and equally soiled by sordid materialism, have at length wrapped the mind of this young observer in their drastic and sinister spells. When he "starts out for himself," as he is presently quite sure to do, his ultimate success is enormously doubtful. His reign as a leading personality in Wall Street means to have been a Childe ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy, imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the remorseless materialism of the day—not the philosophic materialism of the few, but the religious materialism of the many—crushes out all the delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes that might otherwise see. At first the child does ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Feeling produced, for instance, by beautiful leafage, the dawn, a delicate landscape, a touching moon. These are all things in which qualities at once fleeting and permanent isolate the human heart from all preoccupations which lead us in these times either to despairing anxiety, or to abject materialism, or again to a cheap optimism, which I wish to replace by the high hope that is common to us all, and which does not rely ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... frequently heard the materialistic tendencies of the age condemned in public, and had not been warned in private that we were all supposed to do our best to work this materialist for a million, with which to keep up the fight against materialism. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the various churches an annually repeated story of decreases 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 piety; that deep ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... and Price were only so far on the road to a thorough rationalism as to denounce the corruptions of Christianity, as they denounced abuses in politics, without anticipating a revolutionary change in church and state. Priestley, for example, combined 'materialism' and 'determinism' with Christianity and a belief in miracles, and controverted Horsley upon one side ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... error in supposing that the danger which I anticipate from the disappearance of religion is the increase of sensuality. On the contrary, I should be inclined to anticipate a decrease in sensuality, because I anticipate a decrease in life. I do not think that under modern Western materialism we should have anarchy. I doubt whether we should have enough individual valour and spirit even to have liberty. It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... most curious and interesting things in Blake's work is the value he places upon tears. All his noble mythological figures, gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutality and materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged little ones. Gods and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairies and angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... to the community—you are not likely to have upheavals of great magnitude here. Now all other countries are moved by different spirits, some by patriotism and gallantry like the French, some by superstition and ignorance worked on by mystic religion, as in my country—some by ruthless materialism like Germany; but that dull, solid sense of duty is purely English—and it is really a ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... strange, deep thrill. They are men who spake, and men listened; who called, and men came to God. Others, alas, so often call, and there is no response. They cannot make headway through the indifference, the sloth, the materialism, and the inherent vulgarity ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... bars into the inner sanctum, at once, study, counting-house, library, and general receptacle of odds and ends connected with his calling. Here and there, to complete the jumble, were plaster casts of Shakspeare, Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon, suggestive of the presidency of literature over the materialism of commerce which marked the career of this singular being. By dint of great industry he began to flourish in business, and, at one time, could make a profit of L20 a-day without moving from his seat. During this prosperous period he ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... changes in manufacturing, transportation, urban life, and business law that came with the prosperity of the early sixties gave to these years an appearance of materialism that has misled many observers. None of the developments received full contemporary notice, for war filled the front pages of the newspapers. The men who directed them were not under scrutiny, and could hardly fail to bring into business and speculation that main canon of war time ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... is wholly meaningless unless humanity's supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism, save in those last stages of its ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... her son would loyally have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great corruption later, in the state politics ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... 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 ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... would; for he had all the lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution—the steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism, well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance. What if that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... vigorously about politics and sociology; when once he has been so fired with enthusiasm for these things that he will teach and talk to others of his kind: then, at last, slowly and painfully no doubt, but none the less inevitably, will war, poverty, and materialism vanish altogether from a world not meant for them. That is why we have ventured to urge all those who both are idealists and love the public schools—but those alone—to break in on them and help to awaken the great sleeping ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... doctrine nor, more important, for theory to be put into practice. Although born in England, the philosophy of the eighteenth century could not develop itself in England; the fever for demolition and reconstruction remained but briefly and superficial there. Deism, atheism, materialism, skepticism, ideology, the theory of the return to nature, the proclamations of the rights of man, all the temerities of Bolingbroke, Collins, Toland, Tindal and Mandeville, the bold ideas of Hume, Hartley, James Mill and Bentham, all the revolutionary doctrines, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the writing of the article. On re-reading it and considering the publication of the present work I was inclined to suppress it, but decided that it ought to be included because it bears directly on the evil of materialism in religious bodies, which is a matter of grave concern to every religious ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... do you think I would slide about on my coat-tails like that? Do you think that if I could travel by volition I would slip down these infernal cliffs on my pants' seat as I have just done? And as for materialism—look at this fist; it punched you just now! Surely there was nothing spiritual ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... be religious; the first pictures in the world had been inspired by religion; outside of it, life offered nothing but base materialism, loathsome sins. Painting must be ideal, beautiful. It must always represent pretty subjects, reproduce things as they ought to be, not as they really are, and above all, look up to heaven, since there is true life, not on this earth, a valley of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... worth worrying about) must be an embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves one of the two or three things which most of the Victorians did not understand—the thing called a sacrament. It is because he had a natural affinity for this mystical materialism that Meredith, in spite of his affectations, is a poet: and, in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (or ignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere Pantheist. Mr. Henry James is at the other extreme. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... listened 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 ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... would move through the quiet streets before the decade was over. The smoke of factories was already succeeding the smoke of the battlefields, and out of the ashes of a vanquished idealism the spirit of commercial materialism was born. What was left of the old was fighting valiantly, but hopelessly, against what had come of the new. The two forces filled the streets of Dinwiddie. They were embodied in classes, in individuals, in articles ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... courage brought a reward in the shape of a relaxation of the clutch on her throat and about her heart. Her mother's wise materialism came to her mind now and she made a heartsick resolve that she would lead as physically normal a life as possible, working out of doors, forcing herself to eat, and that, above all things, she would henceforth ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Observations on the climate. Arab caution. Dearth of Missionary enterprise. The slave trade and its horrors. Progressive barbarism. Carping benevolence. Geology of Southern Africa. The fountain sources. African elephants. A venerable piece of artillery. Livingstone on Materialism. Bin Nassib. The Baganda leave at last. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... evil emergency; and that no harm will come to those who can rule themselves according to their own will. Still, however, finding her imagination, and yet more that of her husband, troublesome, she effects a marvellous combination of materialism and idealism, and asserts that things are not, cannot be, and shall not be more or other than people choose to think them. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the passage where the rebel angels cast cannon, make gunpowder, and mow the good angels down in rows, is incredibly puerile and ridiculous. The hateful materialism of the whole thing is patent. I wish that the English Church could have an Index, and put Paradise Lost upon it, and allow no one to read it until he had reached years of discretion, and then only with a certificate, and for purely ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sentiment. The fullest, if not the sole proper satisfaction of this sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. Thus it happened he ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the Vestiges well, and I detest the book for its shallowness, for the intense vulgarity of its philosophy, for its gross, unblushing materialism, for its silly credulity in catering out of every fool's dish, for its utter ignorance of what is meant by induction, for its gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physiology,—most ignorant and most false,—and for Its shameful shuffling of the facts of geology so as to ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... do not remember that notion anywhere. Take care no enemy rake out of it something of materialism. Guard well thy empty hot brain; it may hatch more evil. As for those odd words, I myself would fain see no great harm in them, knowing that grief and frenzy strike out many things which would else lie still, and neither spurt nor sparkle. I also know ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... a precarious life, yet less revered than cherished by fostering sects, and more hooted at by the advocates of potato-digging and other practical pursuits, than defended by their legitimate protectors. It is not to be denied that there is a powerful element of Materialism among us, and that too often we neither appreciate nor respect the earnest, abstruse scholar. The progress of humanity must be shouted in popular catch-words from the house-tops, and the noisy herald appropriates the laudation of him who in pain and weariness traced ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 progress, happiness, and prosperity ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... look logically at another class of possible achievements of this wonder-working, material power. In philosophical researches, analogy is a recognized and legitimate guide to truth. Admitting, then, that pure matter has done all that materialism claims it has done in the past, let us look by the light of analogy at other and graver possibilities it may have wrought in its reckless, unrestrained creations. Time is a mighty attribute of evolutionary divinities; its power seems next ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... The Christian Rome underground is a rebuke to the Papal Rome above it; and, from the worldly pomp, the tedious forms, the trickeries, the mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their graves. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... that time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' and regarded a belief in ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... of this celebrated book, it is based upon materialism; every argument must stand this test upon Hobbes's principles, and characteristically are they elaborated. Hobbes ("De Cive") says of the immortality of the soul, "It is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings, that they knew it supernaturally; or that they ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... reason. Now, it has been demonstrated, so far as words can demonstrate any truth whatever, that the difficulty of him who believes Nature never had an author, is infinitely less than the difficulty of him who believes it had a cause itself uncaused. In the 'Elements of Materialism,' an unequal but still admirable work by Dr. Knowlton, a well-known American writer, this question of comparative difficulty is well handled, and the Author of this ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... so, we owe to the Celts a debt of imperishable culture and civilisation. To them belongs more especially, in our national amalgam, the passion for the past, the ardent patriotism, the longing for spiritual beauty, which raises and relieves the Saxon materialism. ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the cell and neurone theory seemed obligatory starting-points. To-day we have become shy of such postulates of one-sided not sufficiently functional materialism. We now call for an interest in psychobiological facts in terms of critical common sense and in their own right—largely a product of psychiatry. There always is a place for elements, but there certainly is also a place for the large momentous ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... have a priest, the better classes of people even call in the services of the priests, in whom they have no confidence. The effect upon the beliefs of these better classes is most distressing. Spiritism, materialism and atheism are rampant, and one could well believe that these people set adrift without spiritual guides are in a worse condition than if they were still devout believers in the ancient practices of the Roman church. ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... of the present state of Catholicism no way exaggerated. Alexis is no more persecuted than Abelard was, and is so, for the same reasons. From the examinations of the Italian convents in Leopold's time, it seems that the grossest materialism not only reigns, but is taught and professed in them. And Catholicism loads and infects as all dead forms do, however beautiful and noble during their ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne's long legs propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander Hall, he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he doubted the war—Germany stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force; it was just that Burne's face stayed in his memory and he was sick of the hysteria he was beginning ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... yours is mine, and what's mine's me own,"' observed Bundy, and during the laughter that greeted this definition Slyme was heard to say that Socialism meant Materialism, Atheism and Free Love, and if it were ever to come about it would degrade men and women to the level of brute beasts. Harlow said Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see realized, and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... pith, embodiment, elements; importance, significance, moment, consequence, weight, materiality; pus, purulence; manuscript, copy. Associated Words: material, immaterial, materiality, immateriality, atom, molecule, chemistry, hylism, hylotheism, hylopathism, hylogenesis, materialism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sound brains and nerves by working over the humanities, the sciences, and the arts, and, at the same time, to make good sound reproductive apparatuses, not only without any especial attention to the latter, but while all available force is withdrawn from the latter and sent to the former. It is not materialism to say, that, as the brain is, so will thought be. Without discussing the French physiologist's dictum, that the brain secretes thought as the liver does bile, we may be sure, that without brain there will be no thought. The quality of the latter depends on the quality of the former. The metamorphoses ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... to most of them he looms dark and dim through the mist of years. Unhappily, a nature so transcendently humane and heroic as his is not the sort to win the admiration of the vulgar. Nay, so far is its simple grandeur removed above the common materialism of modern life that the most refined cannot, at first sight, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism by dropping a Greek Iota; she has not succumbed to Eastern influences, which would have made her forget she was the Church on earth as well as in heaven. With tremendous commonsense she has remained rational ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... civilization equalled that of almost any ancient country, and that it did not fall immeasurably behind the boasted achievements of the moderns. With much that was barbaric still attaching to them, with a rude and inartificial government, savage passions, a debasing religion, and a general tendency to materialism, they were, towards the close of their empire, in all the ordinary arts and appliances of life, very nearly on a par with ourselves; and thus their history furnishes a warning—which the records of nations constantly repeat—that the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... superior organization of the body. Proceeding from this point, he asserted, further, that every faculty and emotion are derived from sensation; that all minds are originally equal; that pleasure is the only good, and self-interest the only ground of morality. The materialism of Helvetius was the mere revival of pagan Epicurianism; but it was popular, and his work, called De l'Esprit, made a great sensation. It was congenial with the taste of a court and a generation that tolerated ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... But it should be recognized as most important by all who believe that political questions agitated by whole nations, are questions eminently religious. For religion, to all those who see more in it than the mere materialism of forms and formulae, is not only a thought of heaven, but the impulse which seeks to apply that thought, as far as possible to government on earth, our rule of action for the good of all, and for the moral development of humanity. Politics then are like ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... that 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 ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... with an absolute horror of the Person in Whose name such things—absurdities when not positive crimes—were perpetrated? I firmly believe that these wholly false ideas of God and of sin have had more to do with the spread of materialism than many will perhaps be disposed to admit. Educated people, especially those trained in scientific methods, demand a certain common sense and sobriety in their beliefs. If they are brought up to believe that a grievous sin is committed when they invent an innocent story; ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... with which he was able to give the results of his extensive reading in this, the most abstruse domain of Sanskrit literature. The publication of these papers on the schools of Indian metaphysics, which anticipated with entire fidelity the materialism and idealism of Greece and of modern thought, enabled Victor Cousin to introduce a brilliant survey of the philosophy of India into his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, first delivered, we think, in 1828. Cousin knew and thought of Colebrooke exclusively as a metaphysician. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... account for the depths of animal grossness to which they sank, whilst the approach of the cycle to its nadir inevitably accentuated this downward movement, so that there is little to be surprised at in the gradual loss by the race of the psychic faculties, and in its descent to selfishness and materialism. ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... unbelief is, of course, in the proud mind and sensual heart of man. It takes form exteriorly in an interminable series of "isms" that have the merit of appealing to the weaknesses of man. They all mean the same thing in the end, and are only forms of paganism. Rationalism and Materialism are the most frequently used terms. One stands on reason alone, the other, on matter, and both have declared war to the knife on the Supernatural. They tell us that these are new brooms destined to sweep clean the universe, new lamps intended to dissipate the clouds of ignorance and superstition ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false smartness and a false audacity,—the wise American will do well to ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation being interesting," ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... their head servant). Nothing he does can be wrong. The sovereign has the right of interpreting Scripture; and he thinks that Christians are bound to obey the laws of an infidel king, even in matters of religion. He sneers at the belief in a future state, and hints at materialism. These monstrous doctrines, which even Charles II. would not fully sanction, were naturally battered and bombarded by Harrington, Dr. Henry More, and others. Hobbes was also vehemently attacked by that disagreeable Dr. Fell, the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Hohenzollerns was 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
... aunt, the Marchesa, had nothing intolerable to a refined mind; it seemed in accord with a great grief: it had the austerity of a sacrifice offered to a noble ideal. Thus even the most legitimate touch of materialism was wanting in Mrs. Gould's character. The dead man of whom she thought with tenderness (because he was Charley's father) and with some impatience (because he had been weak), must be put completely in the wrong. Nothing else ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... which it is so terrible to meet. Less terrible is it to find the body wasted, the 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 was so dear to us. The ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to working-class interests and the waging of the class struggle. His policy (that of the Christian Socialist) is the conciliation of classes, the fraternity of robber and robbed, not the end of classes. His avowed object, indeed, is usually to purge the Socialist movement of its materialism, and this means to purge it of its Socialism and to divert it from its material aims to the fruitless chasing of spiritual will-o'-the-wisps. A Christian Socialist is, in ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... 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 ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... the two former of these terms, we are not speaking of Materialism and Idealism as they have always actually manifested themselves, but only of the distinguishing principle of these systems when pushed to its extreme result. It is quite possible to be a materialist or an idealist with respect to the immediate phenomena of consciousness, without ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... unfortunate, but it has rendered us always happy to welcome a rational treatment of disease that may be pursued at home. Self-denial and activity are the two principal lessons inculcated in the work; and if we be careful to lift them from the body to the soul, we need not fear the slight tinge of materialism that seems almost inseparable from essays on bodily health. We repeat that Dr. Lewis's book abounds in excellent suggestions, essential to all, and its wide circulation will doubtless tend to the improvement of the general health of our people. Those even who, in some ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... place of being only a uniform mask, repressing the character of each individual under the symmetry of the same lines, rather serve to contain the passions without stifling them, coloring only that bald crudity of tone which is so injurious to their beauty, elevating that materialism which debases them, robbing them of that license which vulgarizes them, lowering that vehemence which vitiates them, pruning that exuberance which exhausts them, teaching the "lovers of the ideal" to unite the virtues which have sprung from ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... 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 life were born of her own rare gifts, and evidenced ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright |
