"Metaphysical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing can be more fanciful than this bit ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... is as old as the Battle of the Books, a quite interminable wrangle, which I will not even attempt to summarize here. For my own part I believe all this defence of the classics on the part of men with classical education is but one more example of that human weakness that splashes Oxford metaphysical writings with needless tags and shreds of Greek and set Demetrius the silversmith bawling in the streets. If the reader is of another opinion there is no need to convert him in this present argument, provided only that he will admit the uselessness of his high mystery for the training ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... he had next to none. His life was neither a mission nor a miracle. But he was blessed with that keen delight in his own sensations which makes a world full of beautiful and amusing things, charming people, wine, and warm sunshine seem, on the whole, a very tolerable place, and all metaphysical speculation and political passion a little unnecessary. He made an art of living, and his novels are a part of his life. He wrote them because he had a subtle sense of the ludicrous, a turn for satire, and style. He wrote because he enjoyed writing; and, with a ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... himself how many years of life he would have to drag through before God released him from his prison. If he wished to die he could, for our lives are in our own hands. But he did not know that he cared to die and, overpowered with grief, he abandoned himself to metaphysical speculation, asking himself again if it were not true that to be born into this world meant to pass out of one life into another; therefore, if so, to die in this world only meant to pass into another, a life ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... employment on the part of his son which was for generations a tradition among persons of business, and which is perhaps not quite extinct yet. For this opposition, as is well known, rather stimulates than checks, even in dutiful offspring, the noble rage. It was due partly, perhaps, to a metaphysical cause—the fact that until Scott was well past his twentieth year, the wind of the spirit was not yet blowing, that the new poetical and literary day had not yet dawned; and partly to a more commonplace reason ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... intelligence, certainly! but he is a sugar loaf. Brain on a lofty scale, head of an Indian, with gentle instincts, almost impossible to find; all for metaphysical thought which becomes an instinct and a passion that dominates everything. Add to that a character that one can only compare to Garibaldi. A creature of incredible sanctity and perfection. Immense worth without immediate application in France. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: "What morality do they (or does he) aim at?" Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... indestructible thing, a State of the American Union—that immortal product of mortal wisdom, that creature which is greater than its creator, that part which is more than the whole, that servant which is lord and master also. If she had been given to metaphysical researches, she would have found much pleasure in tracing the queer involutions of that network of wisdom that our forefathers devised, which their sons have labored to explain, and of which the sword had ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' or of 'Mesmeric Revelations,' we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies of what was most remarkable and peculiar in the author's intellectual nature. But we see here only the better phases of his nature, only the symbols of his juster action, for his harsh experience had deprived him of all faith in man or woman. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to the laity. Not only are the presidents of the larger universities in the United States, with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing is seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical theology. At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty years ago, they were entirely under ecclesiastical control. Now, all this is changed. An eminent member of the present British Government has recently said, "A candidate for high university position is handicapped by holy orders." I refer ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... bee, ant, beaver, consist of a group of movements adapted for a determinate end that is always the same. Now, what would be a creative instinct in general which, by hypothesis, could produce in turn an opera, a machine, a metaphysical theory, a system of finance, a plan of military campaign, and so forth? It is a pure fancy. Inventive genius has ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... enough in themselves, and joins them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is a scientific language ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and thus placed in the very midst of the fight touching the annexations. The great Webster was here. He had opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, and was the spokesman of the Whig party. He had split metaphysical hairs with Calhoun, also here. Calhoun declared that the Constitution was over the territory and by that fact carried slavery into it; no imperialism in America. To this Webster rejoined that the territory was the property of the United States and not a part of it. Hence the Constitution was not ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... cycle in every respect differing in nature and action from the past cycle of 2,160 years. The sign Aquarius is masculine, electric, positive. It is intellectual in character, scientific, philosophic, artistic, intuitive and metaphysical. It is the sign of the Man. The truths of the past are becoming etherealized. Our solar parent has scarcely crossed the threshold of the sign Aquarius, and already we observe in many directions ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... profoundly the enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous assent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite pole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeare of the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeare of the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeare of the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... and obstinate in disputation; and as there is nobody in the house that makes any pretension to rival him in certain subtleties of argument, he is in great danger of considering himself a miracle of metaphysical light, which he is not, I am persuaded, by any means, since he has much more skill in rending down than in building up, in perplexing than in making clear. Ernst is no friend of metaphysical hair-splitting, and when Jacobi begins to doubt the most perceptible ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... sonnets in the second 'group' (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like Lyly's song of 'Cupid and Campaspe,' and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly's songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv. soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... her father's attitude that had induced these metaphysical hysterics. She had expected that some demon within him would spring out and gibber. Instead of which he had told her, and so gently, that she was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The tears had come, but the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... prudence, respecting the application of general rules to moral questions, which Burke has handled so admirably. "Nothing universal," he observes, "can be rationally affirmed on any moral, or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like ideal lines of mathematicks. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... said, without thinking of any metaphysical mythology, thinking indeed of the ambitious people whom we meet everywhere, and thinking only of giving them some good advice: "The best way to get there is to come down." Nothing could be more philosophical, Nietzsche would reply; it ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Carlovingian monarchies, have disappeared and dwindled away, and their places have been supplied by the more enterprising, or the nouveau riche men of the old world, or by restless, acute lawyers, and metaphysical body-curers. ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... an Epicurean, John, in all but the disbelief in the immortality of the soul. She has evolved a theory of her own about that. It partakes of Buddhism. After I have discussed metaphysical propositions with her over which she will argue clearly, she will suddenly cut the whole knot with a lightning flash, and you see the naked truth, and words become meaningless, ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... are terms somewhat too metaphysical; but they are so indispensable to accurate thinking that we are inclined to show them some indulgence; and, the more so, in cases where the mere position and connection of the words are half sufficient to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... city. During a visit to Liverpool, in the summer of 1793, he was introduced to Dr Currie, who, presenting him with a copy of Dugald Stewart's "Elements of Philosophy," was the means of directing his attention to metaphysical inquiries. The following session he became a student in Professor Stewart's class; and differing from a theory advanced in one of the lectures, he modestly read his sentiments on the subject to his venerable preceptor. The philosopher and pupil were ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... matter,' she said, 'I remember the words—indeed, all Christian Scientists know the book by heart; it is necessary in our practice. We should otherwise make mistakes and do harm. She begins thus: "In the year 1866 I discovered the Science of Metaphysical Healing, and named it Christian Science." And she says—quite beautifully, I think—"Through Christian Science, religion and medicine are inspired with a diviner nature and essence, fresh pinions are given to faith and understanding, and thoughts acquaint themselves intelligently ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Difference between a sequence in logic and a sequence in etymology.—The ideas or notions of thou, thy, thee, are ideas between which there is a metaphysical or logical connexion. The train of such ideas may be said to form a sequence, and such a sequence may ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... writing a book about her. He propped up a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to spend long delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical intimacy. He had never heard her voice—but now he heard it as often as Pauline opened her lips. He owned her—he possessed her—she lived under his roof—she was always waiting for him in his study. She is real to you? She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him. He saw her, knew her, felt ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... interrupted just at this moment. He is just getting the point of it straight in his mind. "You see," he says, "the thing begun to dissolve itself in my philosophy, and by that I discovered the pint the whole thing stands on. Its entirely metaphysical, though," he says, with a significant shake of the head. He laughs at his discovery; his father, long since, told him he was exceedingly clever. Quite a match for the publican in all matters requiring a comprehensive mind, he declares there ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... these floating metaphysical gossamers are found in Homer! Yes, but not in a metaphysical form; Homer's organ is poetic, he lived in the age ere philosophers had dawned. Still he too had before him the problems of the soul and of the world. Nor would he have been a true Greek unless he had grappled with ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are to be retained if any possible construction will retain them, may by a course of refined and metaphysical reasoning... explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... exclude history; by testimony? we exclude metaphysics; by abstract reasoning? we exclude physics. Is not the being of a God reported to us by testimony, handed down by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the suggestions of our conscience? It is a truth in the natural order, as well as in the supernatural. So much for its origin; and, when obtained, what is it worth? Is it a great truth or a small one? Is it a comprehensive ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... here, in His thoughts of the present and the future, lets us see what He thought that the work of God in the world was. The disciples looked at the blind man sitting by the wayside, and what he suggested to them was a curious, half theological, half metaphysical question, in which Rabbinical subtlety delighted. 'Who did sin, this man or his parents?' They only thought of talking over the theological problem involved in the fact that, before he had done anything in this world to account for the calamity, he was born blind. Jesus Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... at this moment, if these laws had not been passed? I have given my opinion that we should have had a civil war. I refer it to you, therefore, for your consideration; meditate on it; do not be carried away by any abstract notions or metaphysical ideas; think practically on the great question, What would have been the condition of the United States at this moment, if we had not settled these agitating questions? I repeat, in my opinion, there would ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... late French translator of the Paradise well remarks, his reasoning is physical; that of Dante partly metaphysical and partly theologic. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... rather dense this afternoon," he said with hasty apology, "I think your first act is beautifully written—the lines are full of music; nobody with an ear for euphony could doubt that; but I—forgive me, I fancy you are sometimes a shade too metaphysical—and those scientific terms which you occasionally employ, I fear will be a little over the heads ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... placed in a very different predicament from the guardian or instructor, who, having selected at random the pursuit which his fancy dictates, and in the choice of which he is encouraged by the presumptuous assertions of a wild metaphysical philosophy, must often, in spite of himself, feel a secret misgiving as to the final event. He may succeed, and present to a wondering world a consummate musician, painter, poet, or philosopher; for even blind chance may sometimes hit the mark, as truly as the most perfect ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... The 'countersign' selected was 'Zeus,' and fortunately was not betrayed. The hall being full at half past ten, the doors were closed, and the exercises commenced with music. Then followed numerous pieces of various character, and among them an Oration, a Poem, Funeral Sermon (of a very metaphysical character), a Dirge, and, at the grave, a Prayer to Pluto. These pieces all exhibited taste and labor, and were acknowledged to be of a higher tone than that of any productions which have ever been delivered on a similar occasion. Besides these, there were ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... from others. Earwaker's habit of reflection had much to do with the strange feelings awakened in Godwin when he transferred to his mother's house the cabinets which had been Mr. Gunnery's pride for thirty or forty years. Joy of possession was subdued in him by the conflict of metaphysical questionings. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... his poor masculine pride of sequence Hewson wanted to ask if that were why she was so nice; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, "Yes, there's a whole tragedy in it. I wonder if it's potential or actual." He somehow felt safe in being so metaphysical. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... future, had no lasting effect on the course of justice, as the severities against witches were most unhappily still considered necessary. Through the whole of the sixteenth, and the greater part of the seventeenth century, little abatement in the persecution of this metaphysical crime of witchcraft can be traced in the kingdom. Even while the Independents held the reins of government, Cromwell himself, and his major-generals and substitutes, were obliged to please the common people of Scotland by abandoning the victims accused ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into the extremes into which other writers carried it, Paracelsus is, indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but Sordello combines with a similar history a tale of political and warlike ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... he was fairly chargeable with Socinian views, but what most offended James was his metaphysical speculations on the Divine attributes. I will quote from Vorst two passages which vexed the royal soul, and should teach us to rejoice that the reign of such discussions shows signs ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... the first essential, they must, in order to achieve their full effect, be in tune with the infinite. Artistic singing involves complete physiological control of the voice-producing function, combined with complete command of the metaphysical resources of art. Thus only can voice be produced with that apparent spontaneity which we call artistic, and at the same time be charged with the emotional quality which ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... when you grow metaphysical and analytical," he said, leaning his face upon his hand. "Go a little further in your analysis; say, 'I love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... some say in mockery that he was like a dancing-master and earned him from others the name of the "French Orpheus." Robespierre, speaking in a clear voice, delivered an eloquent discourse against the enemies of the Republic. He belaboured with metaphysical and uncompromising arguments Brissot and his accomplices. He spoke at great length, in free-flowing harmonious periods. Soaring in the celestial spheres of philosophy, he launched his lightnings at the base conspirators ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the primordial cell, or perhaps even on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... above recorded was no greater than many occultists have performed in all times—no greater than the many similar cures that have been performed by the modern healers of the many metaphysical cults. It was simply an application of the subtle forces of nature called into operation by mental concentration. It was an instance of what in modern phrase is called "absent treatment" along metaphysical lines. In saying this we wish in no way to detract from the wonder that Jesus had wrought, ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... perfect philosophy of the natural kind, only staves off our IGNORANCE a little longer; as, perhaps, the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind, serves only to discover ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Scot is more excitable, more easily brought to a glow of passion, more apt to be eagerly absorbed in one thing at a time. He is also more fond of abstract intellectual effort. It is not merely that the taste for metaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland than in England, but that the Scotch have a stronger relish for general principles. They like to set out by ascertaining and defining such principles, and then to pursue a series of logical deductions from them. They are, therefore, somewhat ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... himself said, that he was in reality a werwolf. His preference for the society of animals and love of isolated regions; his sudden fallings asleep and sensations of undergoing metamorphosis, though that metamorphosis was spiritual and metaphysical only, which is very often the case, all help to substantiate ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... goodness and sweetness she seems to have been somewhat matter-of-fact. But there is abundant indirect evidence of Mr. Browning's love of music having come to him through her, and we are certainly justified in holding the Scottish-German descent as accountable, in great measure at least, for the metaphysical quality so early apparent in the poet's mind, and of which we find no evidence in that of his father. His strong religious instincts must have been derived from both parents, though most anxiously fostered by ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of Christian Science Mind-healing was started by the author with only one student in xi:27 Lynn, Massachusetts, about the year 1867. In 1881, she opened the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, under the seal of the Commonwealth, a law xi:30 relative to colleges having been passed, which enabled her to get this institution chartered for medical pur- xii:1 poses. No charters were granted to Christian Scien- tists ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... to the rule of their predecessors, whose thoughts were on justice and liberty, and whose works breathe forth a wholesome quality, a large number of the present writers have been gradually attracted by metaphysical questions, which fill their works with a veritable chaos of morbid conceptions and disenchantment. Some express with acuteness man's unconquerable fear of life or death; others treat of the divine or satanic principles in man; still others study, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... also, the only result of any efforts we make to acquaint ourselves with the subjects of metaphysical inquiry has been an increased sense of the prudence of lying placidly and unreflectively in our pools, or at least limiting ourselves to such gentle efforts of imagination as may be consistent with the as yet imperfectly developed powers, I do not say ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... sciences, in philosophy, and along literary lines, long before the golden age of Greece. From the earliest times even up to the present day the Hindu has been wont to put his thought into rhythmic form. The first of this poetry—it well deserves this name, being also worthy from a metaphysical point of view[44]—consists of the Vedas, hymns of praise and poems of worship, collected during the Vedic period which dates from approximately 2000 B.C. to 1400 B.C.[45] Following this work, or possibly contemporary with it, is the Brahmanic literature, which is partly ritualistic (the Br[a]hma[n.]as), ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... The superstitions of every age, for no age is free from them, will present the popular modes of thinking in an intelligible and easily accessible form, and may be taken as a means of gauging (if the expression be permitted) the philosophical and metaphysical capacities of the period. In this light, the volumes here presented to the reader will be found of great value, for they give a picture of the popular mind at a time or great interest, and furnish a clue to many difficulties ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... The tenth is the only one which has a moral significance, and it has also a higher subjective value than the others; it takes its arguments from an entirely different sphere of thought, and deals with metaphysical and religious contradictions in opinion, and with the question of good and evil. That this Trope is one of the oldest, we know from its distinct mention in connection with the foundation theories ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... the result. It was an accident in the thermal history of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume of essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life," enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms the metaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the problem, and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy of mechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms; and all our activities, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... will see that friend in half the impossible people who are coming through the wicket. I once began an essay on "The Art of Knowing what gives one Pleasure," but soon found myself out of the diatonic with it, in all manner of strange keys, amid a maze of metaphysical accidentals and double and treble flats, so I left it alone as a question not worth the trouble it seemed likely to take in answering. It is like everything else, if we much want to know our own ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... observable on one side of a main street; while nearly adjoining is the church of St. Paul. There are thus every Sunday, in simultaneous local devotion, the ceremonial Catholics, the moral Unitarians, the metaphysical Calvinists, the serious disciples of John Wesley, and the spiritual members ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... products; we judge, that, like these, it has its law and justification. We assume that it is to be studied as Lyell studies the earth's crust, or Agassiz its life, or Mueller its languages. As our author shuns metaphysical, so do we shun metapsychical inquiries. We do not presume to go behind universal fact, and inquire whether it has any business to be fact; we simply endeavor to see it in its largest and most interior aspect, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thus defer to the discrimination, respect the feeling, and join in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the frequent assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy or propriety, of the metaphysical analogies, in accordance with which his work has unhappily been arranged. Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely, considered, it had still been no light error of judgment to thrust them with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... many months ago, had, in Two successive Papers, I think Two, communicated to the Academy a Discovery of Metaphysico-Mathematical or altogether Metaphysical nature, on the Laws of Motion;—Discovery which he has, since that, brought to complete perfection, and sent forth to the Universe at large, in his sublime little Book of COSMOLOGY; [In La Beaumelle,—Vie de Maupertuis—(Paris, 1856), pp. 105-130, confused account ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take;—we remit some rights that we may enjoy others.... Man acts from motives relative to his interests; and not on metaphysical speculations.[29] These are the words of wisdom and truth, if we can be sure that men will interpret them in all the fulness of their meaning, and not be content to take only that part of the meaning which ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Lincolnshire, who, without aid of men or books, discovered the rotation of the earth, the principles of spherical astronomy, and invented a planetary system akin to the Tychonic; of a country Shoemaker, who became distinguished as one of the ablest metaphysical writers in Britain, and who, at more than fifty years of age, was removed by the influence of his talents and their worth, from his native country to London, where he was employed to edit some useful publications devoted ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... in retirement, his own had been utter defeat. His last step conducted him out of the kingdom. The disarmed king had remained the hostage of the ancient regime in the hands of the nation. The declaration of the rights of man and citizen, the sole metaphysical act of the Revolution to this time, had given it a social and universal signification. This declaration had been much jeered; it certainly contained some errors, and confused in terms the state of nature and the state of society; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of Confucius were, in fact, too sublime and too metaphysical to preserve their purity among a people so unprepared, as his countrymen were, to receive and cherish them. The attention of the multitude would seem, indeed, in all nations to require being fixed on something gross and material. How difficult was it for the priest and the leader of the Jews, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... find the trail by which we would classify him. He belongs to a school of which not impossibly he may hardly have read a line—the Metaphysical School. To a large extent he is what the Metaphysical School should have been. That school was a certain kind of poetry trying for a range. Shelley is the range found. Crashaw and Shelley sprang from the same seed; but in the one ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... "Obscure ideas," "metaphysical jargon," "pretentious and empty language," "puerile and superannuated personifications." Mr. Darwin has many and hot opponents on this side of the Channel and in Germany, but we do not recollect to have found precisely ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... be noticed that these three interpretations, the spiritualistic, the experimental, and the metaphysical, are in formal opposition with that which I have set forth earlier in these pages. They deny the supposition that the nervous system serves us as an intermediary with nature, and that it transforms nature before bringing it to our consciousness. And it might seem that by contradicting my fundamental ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim "If facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts." He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and then he adds: "but they must have known them all the same." To give one instance ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... ideas of things, which are not supposed to possess hardness and figure, except metaphorically, as virtue, wisdom; which have therefore been termed abstracted ideas. 3. Those which have been called by metaphysical writers reflex ideas, and mean those of the operations of the mind, as sensation, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... to spend much time in subtle speculation either as to whether his vision of my body resembled mine, or as to whether the body he really MEANT to insult were not some body in his mind's eye, altogether other from my own. The practical point of view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs away. If what he have in mind be not MY body, why call we it a body at all? His mind is inferred by me as a term, to whose existence we trace the things that happen. The inference is quite void if the term, once inferred, be separated from its connection with the ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... with an eloquence and power not surpassed by the orators of antiquity; Gibbon wrote a history which such men as Guizot and Milman pronounced wonderful both for art and learning; Hume, Reid, and Stewart, carried metaphysical inquiry to its utmost depth; Gray, Burns, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, were not unworthy successors of Dryden and Pope; Adam Smith called into existence the science of political economy, and nearly ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... to the first question, I must admit that Christ, in contrast to Buddha, entertained not a transcendental and metaphysical, but a very material and literal idea of equality. It is true that He pronounced the poor in spirit blessed; but the rich, who according to Him would find it harder to get into heaven than it is for a rope of camel's hair to go through a needle's eye, were ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... them. The old English muse was frank, guileless, sincere, and although very learned, still learned without art. No general error evinces a more thorough confusion of ideas than the error of supposing Donne and Cowley metaphysical in the sense wherein Wordsworth and Coleridge are so. With the two former ethics were the end-with the two latter the means. The poet of the "Creation" wished, by highly artificial verse, to inculcate what he supposed to be moral truth-the poet of the "Ancient ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... highest professional reputation, contracted a cold that led to a partial deafness. This made it impossible for him to go on practising with safety, and retiring to his study he turned from physical to metaphysical pursuits. In spite of his deafness, as severe an embargo on social reputation as can well be laid, Dr. Leighton is said to have been equally noted among his friends for his keen intellectual ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... is neither wit nor humor in the mirth. Imitation, Mirth or Humor, and Wit follow each other in a line. The so-called organ of Wit (Gall) or Mirthfulness (Spurzheim) is the seat of the most profound reasoning faculty, while the CAUSALITY of Spurzheim, the METAPHYSICAL DEPTH of thought of Gall, though it gives a clear analytical intelligence has really less profundity and ability in reasoning than the organ which they have misnamed Wit and Mirthfulness, which is pre-eminently the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... dish full of rare fruit, tempts the metaphysical appetite by the wealth and variety of its appeal; but not to weary the reader, the author will content himself by the abstraction of a single plum. The plum in question is simply this (and the reader is asked to read the quotation carefully again): may not every ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that differentiation, and, in short, the most irrational hodgepodge of contradictory conclusions the thinking mind can conceive. This pre-cognition that enables one to arrive at the tenuous statement, 'I think, therefore I am,' is nicely thrown out by tagging it with another metaphysical intangible called illusion—as if the mind can separate illusion from ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... metaphysical way, keen at the moment on the scent of illustrations for the philosophy of Kant, said, "Pantagruel is the Reason; Panurge the Understanding." Rabelais himself, in the fourth book of his romance, written in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... who have split and anatomised the doctrine of free government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity; and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling. They have disputed, whether liberty be a positive or a negative idea; whether it does not consist in being governed by laws, without considering ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... in 1828,[179] "Let us draw the conclusion that even if these animals can be spoken of as ennobled molluscs, as molluscs raised to a higher power, or if they are embryos of reptiles, the beginnings of reptiles, this can be true of them only in an abstract and metaphysical sense, and that even this abstract statement would be very far from giving an accurate idea of their organisation." From the fact that the respiratory and circulatory organs of fish greatly resemble those of tadpoles the conclusion ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... undoubtedly Pantheists. But we cannot say this of Plato himself, nor of his master Socrates. For though these great men were more profoundly interested in the moral order of the world than in any questions of physical nature, or even of metaphysical subtleties, they were never given to the kind of contemplation suggested above in extracts from the Classical Books of the East, the contemplation which educes the moral ideal from unreserved subordination of self to the Universe as of the part to the Whole. Doubtless ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... thousand." His is better magic than Owen Glendower's, for the note "did come when he did call it!" for a confiding individual in the boxes (dress circle of course) actually did lend him, the Wizard, a cool hundred! Conceive the power, in a metaphysical sense, the conjuror must have had over the lender's mind! Was it animal magnetism?—was it terror raised by his extraordinary performances, that spirited the cash out of the pocket of the man? who, perhaps, thought that such supernatural talents might be otherwise employed against his very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Paradise, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who, when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... order of things which decreed that about the time Herod, brother to no man, died, Jesus, brother to all men, should be born; and that Rabelais, moral jester, should see light the very year that orthodox Louis XI passed on, by that same metaphysical scheme reduced to its lowliest, Essman's drop-picture machine, patent applied for, was completed the identical year that, for Rudolph Pelz, the rainy-day skirt slumped from a ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... perfectly certain that India never saw a more learned Sanskrit scholar, a deeper metaphysician, a more wonderful orator, and a more fearless denunciator of every evil, than Dayanand, since the time of Sankharacharya, the celebrated founder of the Vedanta philosophy, the most metaphysical of Indian systems, in fact, the crown of pantheistic teaching. Then, Dayanand's personal appearance is striking. He is immensely tall, his complexion is pale, rather European than Indian, his eyes are large and bright, and his greyish hair is long. The Yogis and Dikshatas (initiated) ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... formulate the principles of anarchism, and Marx the principles of socialism. "He was much more advanced than I was," wrote Bakounin of Marx at this period. "I knew nothing then of political economy, I was not yet freed from metaphysical abstraction, and my socialism was only instinctive.... It was precisely at this epoch that he elaborated the first fundamentals of his present system. We saw each other rather often, for I respected him deeply for his science and for his passionate and serious ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... symbol may be evolved by a process of thought from the concept itself; but it is no very exhaustive or practically useful distinction. Symbols are less obvious and more artificial than mere signs, require convention, are not only abstract, but metaphysical, and often need explanation from history, religion, and customs. They do not depict but suggest subjects; do not speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind knowledge of an ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... stood alone, making war upon the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft, and of Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and subduing the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his rhymes. Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together— half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore— from the volcano of his passionate mind. Such being the nature of Campanella's style, when in addition it is remembered that his text is sometimes ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Edwin Palmer, Professor of Latin, was reputed to be the best scholar in Oxford, and Mrs. Palmer was a most genial hostess. Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, was, I suppose, the most accomplished man of his time;[16] yet he lives, not by his performances in the unthinkable sphere of metaphysical mathematics, but by his intervention at Gladstone's last contest for the University. Those were the days of open voting, and Smith was watching the votes in Gladstone's interest. Professor ——, who never could manage his h's, wished to vote ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... and exhibited itself in a variety of shapes. At the present day its doctrines, as cherished among the Jainas of Guzerat and Rajpootana[2], differ widely from its mysteries, as administered by the Lama of Thibet; and both are equally distinct from the metaphysical abstractions propounded by the monks of Nepal. Its observances in Japan have undergone a still more striking alteration from their vicinity to the Syntoos; and in China they have been similarly modified in their contact ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... dagger between his ribs. Reality,—what a delight it is! The actual touch and feeling of the spontaneous natural creature have been so buried beneath centuries of hypocrisy and humbug that we have ceased to believe in them save as a metaphysical abstraction. But even as water, long depressed under-ground in perverse channels, surges up to the surface, and above it, at last, in a fountain of relief, so Nature, after enduring ages of outrage and banishment, leaps back to her rightful domain in some individual whom we call ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... of these particularly he gave the reins to his fancy, and luxuriated in every idea as it rose; in all there is that sense of mystery which formed an essential portion of his perception of life—a clinging to the subtler inner spirit, rather than to the outward form—a curious and metaphysical anatomy of ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... it has been made to embrace the whole of the endless contrast between the poetical and the prosaic in our natures,—between heroism and generosity on one side, as if they were mere illusions, and a cold selfishness on the other, as if it were the truth and reality of life. But this is a metaphysical conclusion drawn from views of the work at once imperfect and exaggerated; a conclusion contrary to the spirit of the age, which was not given to a satire so philosophical and generalizing, and contrary ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Europe. Philip was there, too, enjoying himself thoroughly in the midst of such good company, and so was Robert Monteith, bleak and grim as usual, but deeply interested for the moment in dividing metaphysical and theological cobwebs with his friend the Dean, who as a brother Scotsman loved a good discussion better almost than he loved a good discourse. General Claviger, for his part, was congenially engaged in describing to Bertram his pet ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... meet this want must have theory; yet the theory must not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the concrete facts with which ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... 9:30.—Philosophical and metaphysical argument between M. Colline, hyperphysical philosopher, and M. Schaunard. To avoid any collision between the two antagonists, they ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... poetical performance set forth the courtship and nuptials of a promising young coal-whipper with a certain 'lovely Peg,' the accomplished daughter of the master and part-owner of a Newcastle collier. In this stirring legend, Captain Cuttle descried a profound metaphysical bearing on the case of Walter and Florence; and it excited him so much, that on very festive occasions, as birthdays and a few other non-Dominical holidays, he would roar through the whole song in ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... conclusions for record, not for instant use, they pass through the intermediate stage of a general proposition (to which class Dr. Whewell, without sanction from facts, or from the usage of Reid and Stewart, the founders of modern English metaphysical terminology, limits the term induction), or are drawn direct from particulars to a supposed parallel case. Neither does it make any difference in the character of the induction, whether the process be experiment or ratiocination, and whether the object ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... lives, until they lose all energy and then become slavishly superstitious. He said a curious thing of the Esquimaux, namely, that their language is a most complex and highly artificial one, calculated to express the most delicate metaphysical subtleties, yet they have no literature, nor are there any traces of their ever having had one—a most curious anomaly; hence he simply argues that you can ill judge of a ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... into an articulate system, was more ambitious than anything attempted since St. Thomas or Descartes. Most thinkers have confined themselves either to generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a fashion, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics. Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on in some one of his many volumes. His erudition was prodigious. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... undeniable; and the subordinate and collateral points of his system invested with a high degree of probability; the falsehood of a conclusion fairly drawn from such premises as we have pointed out would be nearer akin to a metaphysical impossibility; and so long as the light of every other gem that glitters in a nation's diadem is faint and feeble when compared with the splendour of intellectual glory, Spain will owe a debt of gratitude to him among her sons who has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... have pursued this metaphysical subject but for her catching a glimpse of a substantial fact behind him, in the shape of a gentleman attired in mourning, and cloaked and booted like a rider on horseback, who stood at the bar-door. He seemed attentive ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... second. It is "the helping hand of grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does not understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the depths, the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological problem; its existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience shows that though grace may work apart from institutions it does in fact normally work ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... said upon it, up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, he so carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with certain serious gaps now for the first time fill'd, that it becomes a coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there can be any answer) to the foregoing question—a system which, while I distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... well- defined physical space, the same First Amendment standards apply. See Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 830 (1995) (holding that a state university's student activities fund "is a forum more in a metaphysical than a spatial or geographic sense, but the same principles are applicable"); see also Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 801 (identifying the Combined Federal Campaign charity drive as the relevant unit of analysis for application of public forum doctrine). ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... higher order than the mere possessors of talents—Moral evil probably necessary to the production of moral excellence—Excitements from intellectual wants continually kept up by the infinite variety of nature, and the obscurity that involves metaphysical subjects—The difficulties in revelation to be accounted for upon this principle—The degree of evidence which the scriptures contain, probably, best suited to the improvements of the human faculties, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... upon profits; according to this argument, it will settle upon price, and not upon profits; yet again on price in such a way as to escape the absurdity of two relations of value existing between the very same things. But, Phdrus, this rise will be a mere metaphysical one, and no real rise. The hat, you say, has risen; but still it commands no more of the gloves, because they also have risen. How, then, has either risen? The ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Miss Darry and Mr. Leopold obliged me to participate. They had an admirable power of drawing each other out, and he seemed greatly attracted by her brilliant criticisms of life and Art. Had I known of the theory which, robbed of its metaphysical subtilties, is advanced in some of our fashionable romances, I should have been convinced that evening that Miss Darry was, intellectually at least, my counterpart. If I faltered in my vocabulary, when expressing an opinion or replying to a question, she supplied the missing word, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... here," cries Thackeray, "watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly." Finally we may turn neither to novelist nor historian, but to the metaphysical philosopher, "How charming! How wholesome is Fielding!" says Coleridge, "to take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room, heated by stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May." Such are some estimates ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... proper, under such conditions and with such limitations as he may impose; but to surrender any portion of his sovereignty to another is to annihilate the whole. The Senator from Delaware (Mr. Clayton) calls this metaphysical reasoning, which he says he cannot comprehend. If by metaphysics he means that scholastic refinement which makes distinctions without difference, no one can hold it in more utter contempt than I do; ...
— Remarks of Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina on the bill to prevent the interference of certain federal officers in elections: delivered in the Senate of the United States February 22, 1839 • John C. Calhoun
... for which it is so natural to seek, might perhaps be found after all. Curiosity is always retained on the lover's side in the suit. The secret tribunal was still sitting when Vandenesse appeared, and his presence put the metaphysical spectre, reason, to flight. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... sound reasoning. It is to be regretted that Sherlock had not confined himself to logical comments on the Scripture, instead of attempting metaphysical solutions. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... wide-awake in pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story where Hester walks forth ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this point it has been necessary to lay the foundations of the science by the statement of highly abstract general principles which we have reached by purely metaphysical reasoning. We now pass on to the consideration of certain natural laws which have been established by a long series of experiments and observations, the full meaning and importance of which will become clear when we see their application to the general principles which have hitherto ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... enough to survive them. Bonaparte has heaped upon him presents, places, and pensions; national property, senatories, knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not supposed one of our Emperor's most dutiful subjects, because many of the late changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation, of regeneration, and of overthrow. He has too high an opinion of his own deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to be a contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy by his labours ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... me both just and valuable. The prejudice against such knowledge, he said, and the custom of opposing it to that which is learnt by practice, originated in those times when books were almost confined to theology, and to logical and metaphysical subtleties; but that at present there is scarcely any practical knowledge which is not to be found in books. The press is the means by which intelligent men now converse with each other, and persons of all classes and all ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. "No doubt," he wrote in one place, "much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to bad thinking." At times ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... instance, and Luther, below Johnson. They had too much purpose in their talk to be artists about it. The endless eloquence of the Highgate days, to say nothing about the greater days before Highgate, was a powerful element in that revival of a spiritual or metaphysical, as opposed to a merely sensational, philosophy which has been going on ever since. No such results can be attributed to Johnson's talk. But talk is one thing and preaching another: and the final criticism on Coleridge as a talker was given ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or [ix] experience—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... as a sufficient illustration of Froebel's metaphysical way of looking at his subject. It is scarcely our habit at the present day to regard the science of being (ontology) as a science at all, since it is utterly incapable of verification; but it is not difficult to trace the important truth really held by Froebel even through ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel |
