"Metaphysician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of John G. Webster. He was born at Portsmouth, N.H., on the 8th of April, 1811, and was, therefore, nearly 75 years of age. He was a distant kinsman of Daniel Webster. His paternal grandmother was a kinsman of John Locke, the English philosopher and metaphysician. His maternal ancestors, from whom he received his middle name,—the Gerrisbes,—emigrated from England to this ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... do not know, would be to say that I am ignorant of something; and God forbid, that a transcendental metaphysician, who has pure anticipated cognitions of every thing, and carries the whole science of geometry in his head without ever having looked into Euclid, should fall into so empirical an error as to declare himself ignorant of any thing: to say that I do know, would be to pretend to positive and ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the historian, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the Heroes, Demi-gods, Cyclops, Furies ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... objects of curious interest which adorn Judge Edwards's residence, are the family portraits. Here we may look upon the lineaments of the great metaphysician, exhibiting the calm simplicity of greatness. A fitting companion to this is found in Sarah, his wife. As one gazes upon it he can not help admiring the serene beauty of her who softened the stern Puritanism ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with human beings. But this is not to say that they may not possess a consciousness, which though different from man's consciousness, is yet akin to it and linked to it. Nay, the nature-mystic's experiences, as well as the metaphysician's speculations, declare that the linking up must be regarded as a fact. And when we examine more carefully what Jefferies says, we find that he in no way disputes this fact. How could it be, with his vivid sense of communion with forms of being still more remote from the human than ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... we have the names of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury; Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice; John Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge; and Samuel Clarke, divine and metaphysician; and, indeed, a very considerable list ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... make poetry a study—not a passion—it becomes the metaphysician to reason—but the poet to protest. Yet Wordsworth and Coleridge are men in years; the one imbued in contemplation from his childhood; the other a giant in intellect and learning. The diffidence, then, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... was being prepared, except one of the heads of houses; his appeal was generally scouted, because his Sanskrit style was vulgarly intelligible, and he had the bad name of being a practical man. The metaphysician Rashik Lall sneered to Vaiswata the poet, who passed on the look to the theo-philosopher Vardhaman. Haridatt the antiquarian whispered the metaphysician Vasudeva, who burst into a loud laugh; whilst Narayan, Jagasharma, and Devaswami, all very learned in the Vedas, opened ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... economy, seemed peculiarly to invite the philosophical Poor Richard to its venerable retreats. Here, of gray, chilly, drizzly November mornings, in the dark-stoned quadrangle of the time-honored Sorbonne, walked the lean and slippered metaphysician,—oblivious for the moment that his sublime thoughts and tattered wardrobe were famous throughout Europe,—meditating on the theme of his next lecture; at the same time, in the well-worn chambers overhead, some clayey-visaged chemist in ragged robe-de-chambre, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... distinction between contingent and necessary truths; and it is against his statement of the doctrine in question, that Mr Mill directs his observations. Perhaps the controverted tenets would have sustained a more equal combat under the auspices of a more practised and more complete metaphysician than Mr Whewell; but a difficulty was probably experienced in finding a statement in any other well-known English author full and explicit. Referring ourselves to Mr Whewell's volumes for an extract, in order to give the distinction here contended ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... coloured the thoughts of Elia as he penned that exquisite portrait of his friend: "Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus, or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—while the walls ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... too much on the reader's patience to attempt a delineation of the characters of the politician, the metaphysician, the scholar, the poet, the virtuoso, the man of taste, in all their varieties. Of these and many other classes which might be enumerated, suffice it to remark, and to appeal to every man's own ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... occasional resort; in which we may forget the infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel every lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common metaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become a metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... unwilling to imagine that the meagre categories of the understanding, however ingeniously arranged or displayed, are the image of God;—that what all religions were seeking after from the beginning was the Hegelian philosophy which has been revealed in the latter days. The great metaphysician, like a prophet of old, was naturally inclined to believe that his own thoughts were divine realities. We may almost say that whatever came into his head seemed to him to be a necessary truth. He never appears to have criticized himself, or to have subjected his own ideas to the process of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... off, and kneel to you If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days Looking on him was listening Love the difficulty better than the woman Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous Not much esteem for non-professional actresses Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... "Therein the metaphysician must minister to himself. I cannot suggest to you any test of the truth, if you have none with you. Everyone capable of pronouncing a judgment on any matter must feel how truthfully the personages in the Bible ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... of Sir William Hamilton, the Metaphysician), author of Cyril Thornton, Men and Manners in America, Annals of the Peninsular Campaign, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... a moment's silence. Wilmore, the metaphysician, saw then a strange thing. He saw a light steal across his friend's stern face. He saw his eyes for a moment soften, the hard mouth relax, something incredible, transforming, shine, as it were, out of the man's soul in that moment of self-revelation. It ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Platonic than Aristotelian, he has much in common—has furnished more luminous hints to the elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were those which concern the most inscrutable, but, to the genuine metaphysician, most fascinating of all topics, the nature of substance, matter and spirit, absolute being,—in a word, Ontology. This department of metaphysic, the most interesting, and, agonistically [14], the most important branch of that study, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... things hoped for, the proving of things not seen." In the authorised version, "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence" for "proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words, [Greek: hypostasis] and [Greek: elegchos] affords a fine field of discussion for the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall be not far from the mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind the profound psychological truth, that men constantly feel certain about things for which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the legal or logical sense of the word; ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... The real Yogis avoid appearing in public, and spend their lives in secluded retirement and studies, except when, as in Dayanand's case, they come forth in time of need to aid their country. However, it is 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, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... which we are, but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries. "J'etais," she says, "un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions a man usage, qui ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... mighty heart, in its great mood, Had mitigated part, though not the whole Of its disease; he did the best he could With things not very subject to control, And turn'd, without perceiving his condition, Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... psychologist would think it absurd if any one were to maintain that there is one separate existence in nature corresponding to the syllable mat-, and another separate existence corresponding to the syllable ter—the component syllables of the word "matter." In the estimation of the metaphysician, it is just as ridiculous to suppose that there is an existing fact or modification in us corresponding to the three syllables perception, and a fact or existence in nature corresponding to the two syllables matter. The word "perception" is merely part of a word ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects. One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... immorality is due to their temperament, and not to their opinions. But what has their conduct to do with these opinions? Can not an immoral man be a good physician, a good architect, a good geometer, a good logician, a good metaphysician? With an irreproachable conduct, one can be ignorant upon many things, and reason very badly. When truth is presented, it matters not from whom it comes. Let us not judge men by their opinions, or opinions by ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... nor a much wiser metaphysician could explain it; but the house, and all around it, seemed to be glorified by the loved one within. The newly painted door was bright with love; the polished doorplate and bell handle glistened with love. The name Pillbody looked, somehow, musical and winning, because the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... life, was an assiduous reader, and a deeper thinker. He had [51] a splendid library, and spent much of his time among his books. If he had had the proper training for it, I always thought he would have made a great metaphysician. His conversation was often profound, and always original, always drawn from the workings of his own mind, and was always occupied with great philosophical and religious themes. It was born of struggle, more, I think, than any man's I ever talked with. For he ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... Yorick, raised over the table a long, eruptive roar. Nor was that all. For a moment he would assume the moralist, the theologian, or,—leaving both revelation and the pandects,—become the philosopher, pacing the universe for occult truth; or the metaphysician, tracking the region of the supersensuous; and, over every theme, flying on mocking mental pinions, seeming an intellectual satan, passing through the region of vain questionings and doubtful disquisition, dim out to ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... tired of poking fun at his philosophical friends in Edinburgh. When sending some Scotch grouse to Lady Holland, he said—"I take the liberty to send you two brace of grouse—curious, because killed by a Scotch metaphysician: in other and better language, they are mere ideas, shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun." In another letter to the same correspondent he says—"I hope you are reading Mr. Stewart's book, and are far gone in the Philosophy of Mind—a science, as he repeatedly ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... circulated chiefly among the lower classes, for whom his Fables are still published. His works certainly aided Dmitrieff and Kryloff in handling this new branch of poetical literature in Russia. His "The Metaphysician" still remains one of the greatest favorites among Russian fables for cultivated readers of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... philosophy of the mind; pneumatology[obs3], phrenology; craniology[Med], cranioscopy[Med]. ideality, idealism; transcendentalism, spiritualism; immateriality &c. 317; universal concept, universal conception. metaphysician, psychologist &c. V. note, notice, mark; take notice of, take cognizance of be aware of, be conscious of; realize; appreciate; ruminate &c. (think) 451; fancy &c. (imagine) 515. Adj. intellectual[Relating to intellect], mental, rational, subjective, metaphysical, nooscopic[obs3], spiritual; ghostly; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and how should she obtain even workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician. Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender—Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame and a degradation by reason of obvious ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... train to New York, and so had a long afternoon in his studio. He was surprised to find how absorbed he soon became in his work. "Miss Jennie is right," he thought; "I'm an artist, and not a reformer or a metaphysician, and I had better spend my time here than in trying to solve feminine enigmas;" and he worked like a beaver until the fading light compelled him to desist. "There," he said, "that is a fair beginning. Two or three more days of work ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted him, though it was an exasperated urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons has spoken of his "icy ecstasy" ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Encyclopaedists, he played the wit in the salons of Paris. He became fraternally intimate with Rousseau, and brought that social dreamer back with him to England as a mark of high appreciation of his talents. He was a metaphysician by nature, but he erred in speculating with theology. That was the mistake of his life. He fell into Bolingbroke's error of excessive egotism. Standing before the superstructure of theology, he carefully surveyed ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst—symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus—this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace—this ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... latter explanation, and full of his recent information he held Luther, Kant and Wagner responsible for the violation of Belgian neutrality, and the crimes of the German army. He, however, to use a colloquial expression, had never been to see for himself, being neither musician, theologian, or metaphysician. He trusted to the word of Academicians, and only made exceptions in favour of Beethoven, who was Flemish, and Goethe, citizen of a free city and almost a Strassburger, which is half French,—or French and a ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... intelligent young man, accustomed to accurate reasoning, yet brought up without any metaphysical prejudices, would be a treasure to a metaphysician to cross examine: he would be eager to hear the unprejudiced youth's evidence, as the monarch, who had ordered a child to be shut up, without hearing one word of any human language, from infancy to manhood, was impatient to hear what ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... self-taught; yet, in his seventeenth year he discovered an error in Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. He entered Trinity College where he won all kinds of distinctions, being famous not merely as a mathematician, but as a poet, a scholar, and a metaphysician. He was appointed Professor of Astronomy and Astronomer Royal whilst still an undergraduate. He predicted "conical refraction," afterwards experimentally proved by another Irishman, Humphrey Lloyd. He twice received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society: (i) for ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... reflective doubt concerning his own powers is now evident. Problems are raised which are not merely urgent in themselves, but which present wholly new alternatives to the metaphysician. Rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, are doctrines which, though springing from the epistemological query concerning the possibility of knowledge, may determine an entire philosophical system. They bear upon every question of metaphysics, whether the fundamental conception of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... knowing what place in our metaphysical theory we ought to secure for emotion seems difficult to resolve, and we even find some pleasure in leaving it in suspense, in order that it may be understood that a metaphysician is not compelled to explain everything. Besides, the difficulties which atop us here are peculiarly of a psychological order. They proceed from the fact that studies on the nature of the emotions are still very ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... memory of William Hale Hale, a voluminous writer and editor of the "Domesday of St. Paul's," who was a Residentiary, Archdeacon of London and Master of the Charterhouse. He died in 1870. The stained-glass window is in memory of the metaphysician, Henry Longueville Mansell, Dean of the Cathedral, who died suddenly, after a rule of three years, in 1871. It is by Hardman, and represents the Risen Christ ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... said that Jesus was way over the heads of his reporters. That was inevitable. Even Paul misunderstood him at times. But—and here is the important fact for us—Paul's letters exhibit a marvelous spiritual growth in the man, and show him at last to be the grand master-metaphysician of the Christian era. Has it ever occurred to you that what the Gospels tell about is almost wholly spiritual? The material is all but neglected by their composers. Indeed, with the questions of time and place, the Gospel narrators seemed to have been but slightly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... calling. In my home I have tried to be good-natured, affectionate, and philosophical. I have seen little opportunity for anything more. I do not complain, but merely state a fact which indicates the general lot. We can rarely escape the law of heredity, however. A poet and a metaphysician were among our German ancestry; therefore, leading from the business-like and matter-of-fact apartment of my mind, I have a private door by which I can slip away into the realm of speculation, romance, and ideals. You perceive that I have no unnatural or shame-faced reticence ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the Virgin at St. Roch. The charm of his character had often caused people to forget his violence, which he himself no longer remembered the next day. "I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician," was the remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at Paris; and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician, the Abbe Sieyes, gave the signal: "It is time," said he, "to cut ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... was spoken of as The Ettrick Shepherd. The first persons of a higher order who sought the acquaintanceship of Burns were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop. The former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphysician, one of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its University at the close of last and the beginning of this century. He happened to be passing the summer at Catrine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns's farm, and having been made acquainted with the poet's works and character by Mr. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... such a state of apprehension intolerable, he confided in an old man who was reputed a sage and metaphysician—one who was extremely well versed in all matters appertaining to the spiritual world. "There is only one course to pursue," the old man said, "you must have the evil spirit in her exorcized, and you must have it done immediately. Otherwise, she will continue her depredations, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant justification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophy would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion. Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician might adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and indubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be self-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying that a slave's life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the labours of a million ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Jonathan Edwards won fame in three fields. He is (1) America's greatest metaphysician, (2) her greatest theologian, and (3) a unique poetic interpreter of the universe as a manifestation of the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... and the ravin of his envy would have provided interesting bases of speculation for the reflective magistrate, since, if, according to the metaphysician, thoughts are things, ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... art, but at the same time to show an incapacity for a very different mode of activity.[281] We rarely find an artist who takes much interest in jurisprudence, or {268} a prizefighter who is an acute metaphysician. Nay, more than this, a positive distaste may grow up, which, in the intellectual order, may amount to a spontaneous and unreasoning disbelief in that which appears to be in opposition to the more familiar concept, and this at all times. It is often and truly said, "that ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... moral, social, as well as of natural science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use of the word is very common and very influential. It is important that this fact should be recognized. In common usage, a scientific man is distinguished specially from a metaphysician. The one investigates the phenomena of matter, the other studies the phenomena of mind, according to the old distinction between physics and metaphysics. Science, therefore, is the ordered knowledge of ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... as abstruse, if not so continuous, as those of a metaphysician—for boys are not unfrequently more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps, willing to believe—were not by any means confined to such subjects: castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely hours; and for this exercise of the constructive faculty, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... willed she could not only have cleared up the mystery about Doctor Marsh's medicine, but she could have furnished her sister with the key to Martin's caprices, and thereby saved the metaphysician not only much worry but also ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... exist." I should not even like very much to have to explain, under such circumstances, that Sea-View Cottage might exist, but was unthinkable by the human mind. Nor should I like any better to be the bungling and absurd metaphysician who professed to be able to see everywhere the aspects of a truth that is not there. Of course, it is perfectly obvious that there are truths in Kipling, that there are truths in Shaw or Wells. But ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... What he shall see will depend on what he looks for. The man whose taste is in the world of imagination looks for forms of poetic or artistic beauty, and so sees these. Every man looks for that which he is most interested in, whether he be metaphysician or mechanic. The world of ideal beauty and truth, which overhangs ours, has a thousand portals, and we can pass in through one or another, and see that which suits our various tastes and desires. Memory, reflection, and sight,—these are the three sources of our thoughts. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the palace where those two sensuous imaginations were wandering. The doctor, too, tried to understand, and he understood, for he was one of the Pleiades of genius belonging to the Paris school of medicine, from which a true physician comes out as much a metaphysician as an ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world; and hunts out misery in imaginary regions. He would be a metaphysician before he has become a practical philosopher. He quits the contemplation of realities to meditate on chimeras. He neglects experience to feed on conjecture, to indulge in hypothesis. He dares not cultivate his reason, because from his earliest days he has been taught ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... the early days of the 17th century; a ruffling young theologue new to the city; a beautiful and innocent girl, suspected of witchcraft; a crafty scholar and metaphysician seeking to give over the city into the hands of the Savoyards; a stern and powerful syndic whom the scholar beguiles to betray his office by promises of an elixir which shall save him from his fatal ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... water in the moon, so are we sure, by the same unerring rule of reasoning according to the inductive philosophy, that there is not one drop of water in slavery for the parched lips of a dying slave. I stated this to a member of our Junior Class who is a wonderful metaphysician. He was kind enough to say that he could discover no flaw in the logic. Your letter, which, I trust, is now on its way to me, I know will fully confirm ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... of a French writer, Pierre Bayle was "the last metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth and the first philosopher in the sense of the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... dem geistigen Leben der Gegenwart (1890), Darwinismus und Socialismus (1894), Im Dienste der Wahrheit (1899). He died at Darmstadt on the 1st of May 1899. In estimating Buechner's philosophy it must be remembered that he was primarily a physiologist, not a metaphysician. Matter and force (or energy) are infinite; the conservation of force follows from the imperishability of matter, the ultimate basis of all science. Buechner is not always clear in his theory of the relation between matter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... is resident above five months out of the twelve; he wanders from land to land, and spends some part of each winter in town: he frequently brings visitors with him when he comes to ——shire, and these visitors are often foreigners; sometimes he has a German metaphysician, sometimes a French savant; he had once a dissatisfied and savage-looking Italian, who neither sang nor played, and of whom Frances affirmed that he had "tout ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... That is what neither you nor any one will ever know. The great questions awaiting an answer are these: "Are our innate tendencies invincible? If not, can they be modified merely or wholly destroyed by education?" For myself, I would not dare to affirm. I am neither a metaphysician, nor a psychologist, nor a philosopher; but I have had a terrible life, gentlemen, and if I were a legislator, I would order that man to have his tongue torn out, or his head cut off, who dared to preach or write that ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... circle of his speciality? In rejecting the guidance of the Poet to whom shall we apply? To the Priest? He mumbles the litany of an ancient time which falls on unbelieving ears. To the Lawyer? He is a metaphysician with precedents for data. To the Litterateur? He is a phrasemaker by profession. To the Politician? He cannot rise above the conception of a "bill." One and all are copious in phrases, empty of positive ideas as drums. The initial laws of social ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... well built, and had an enormous shock of hair, which was the joy of caricaturists. He was shy and awkward, in addition to all this. He nevertheless appeared in various salons, and was naturally more or less ridiculous. In January, 1840, Beranger writes: "You must know that our metaphysician has surrounded himself with women, at the head of whom are George Sand and Marliani, and that, in gilded drawing-rooms, under the light of chandeliers, he exposes his religious principles and his muddy boots." George Sand herself made fun of ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... metaphysician he stands foremost among those who have attempted the investigation of its ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment,—whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that, in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even soared ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... this explanation leaves a good deal to be desired. It is the explanation of a metaphysician rather than that of an experimental scientist. Such phrases as "matter immediately begins to strive to fashion itself," for example, have no place in the reasoning of inductive science. Nevertheless, the hypothesis ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... academic work has been the union of both in the effort of all concerned to build up a system of university training whose ideal is at once one of scholarly method and of scientific comprehension of fact. For the scholar, as such, be he biologist, or grammarian, or metaphysician, the exclusive opposition between 'words' and 'things' has no meaning. He works to understand truth, and the truth is at once word and thing, thought and object, insight and apprehension, law and content, form and matter. * * * There is no science unexpressed; ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... paths the utmost depths of the searching intellect with the utmost sensibility to the powers and purposes of Art: whilst, as a creator in Art, he had pretensions which neither Plato nor Schelling could make. His powers as a Psychologist (not as a Metaphysician) seem to me absolutely unrivalled on earth. And had his health been better, so as to have sustained the natural cheerfulness towards which his nature tended, had his pecuniary embarrassments been even moderately lightened in their pressure, and had his studies ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... we are justified in saying that we stand on the ground of indisputable fact. It is no mere hypothesis of science, still less a figment of the metaphysician's imagination, or an outpouring of a poet's inspiration, that Permanence is the indispensable postulate of the commonest facts of material existence. We have no explanation to give as to the method of such action as ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... show that he was a good common lawyer, that he understood the theory of colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a master of the science of medicine, especially in its relation to mental disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight in politics,—all these, while they may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... such sources and such accidents had ever supplied the want of genius in the individual. Effects were here again mistaken for causes. Could Spenser have kindled a poet in Cowley, Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician in Malebranche, if those master-minds, pointed out as having been such from accident, had not first received the indelible mint-stamp struck by the hand of Nature, and which, to give it a name, we may be allowed to call the predisposition of genius? The accidents ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... obvious distinction on this subject, of some practical importance, first suggested, so far as I am aware, by the Scotch metaphysician, Dr. Reid, between attention as directed to external objects, and the same faculty directed to what passes within us. When we attend to what is without us, to what we hear, or see, or smell, or taste, or touch, the process is called observation. When, on the other hand, dismissing for the time ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... tutor but seven years after he was relieved and gratified by the removal of Edwards to Stockbridge, as the Indian missionary at that station, seven miles only from his own residence; and for several years the great metaphysician and his favorite pupil enjoyed the privilege of familiar intercourse with each other. The removal of the former in 1758 to Princeton, New Jersey, and his death, which soon followed, are mentioned in the diary of Hopkins as sore trials ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which degree ends and kind begins. There is no such line. All differences resolve themselves into differences of degree. Everything can in the end be united with everything by easy stages if a way long enough and round-about enough be taken. Hence to the metaphysician everything will become one, being united with everything else by degrees so subtle that there is no escape from seeing the universe as a single whole. This in theory; but in practice it would get us into such a mess ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... scandalous and growing corruptions of the age, is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight of parentheses for its special ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... key to Emerson. He was a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal, consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; he "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might be, into the pages ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 1864 by the court of appeals in Kentucky, and again in 1869 under the same presiding Judge Robertson. But Chief Justice Williams rebukes this strange ruling in most emphatic language. He says: "In all the vague, uncertain, intangible, and undefined theories of the most impractical metaphysician in psychology or moral insanity, no court of last resort in England or America, so far as has been brought to our knowledge, ever before announced such a startling, irresponsible, and dangerous proposition ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... the incurious gaze may see many objects without looking at or knowing them, a mere desire to know brings out into distinctness every object in succession on which the desire fixes. 'Instantly, or almost instantly,' continues the metaphysician, 'without our consciousness of any new or peculiar state of mind intervening in the process, the landscape becomes to our vision altogether different. Certain parts only—those parts which we wished to know particularly—are seen by us; the remaining parts seem almost to have ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... pass to another. (This letter is quite a study to a metaphysician who wishes to illustrate the Law of Association.) We have no official tidings yet of Malkin's appointment to the vacant seat on the Bench at Calcutta. I cannot tell you how delighted I am at the prospect of having him here. An honest enlightened ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... was given me of the most extraordinary declaration of love that ever was made. Have you seen young Poniatowski?(479) he is very handsome. You have seen the figure of the Duchess of Gordon,(480) who looks like a raw-boned Scotch metaphysician that has got a red face by drinking water. One day at the drawing-room, having never spoken to him, she sent one of the foreign ministers to invite Poniatowski to dinner with her for the next day. He bowed and went. The moment the door ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... accounts of his biographer, it would seem, that he succeeded in becoming the most daring profligate in London. Tired of the excess of dissipation, he attempted the career of politics, and found his way into Parliament under the auspices of the whigs. When politics failed, he put on the mask of a metaphysician. Tired of that costume, he next attempted to play the farmer. Dissatisfied with farming, he wrote political pamphlets. Still discontented with his condition in the world, he strove to undermine the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... "Naku, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can't conceive of it, eh? Sed patet experientia and contra experientiam negantem, fusilibus est arguendum, do you understand? And can't you conceive, with your philosophical head, that one can ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... presence, which shone at the heart of the pillar, and dwelt afterwards between the cherubim, but probably we must attach a loftier meaning to it here, and rather think of what we should call the uncreated and infinite divine essence. Only do not let us make Moses talk like a metaphysician or a theological professor. Rather we should hear in his cry the voice of a soul thrilled through and through with the astounding consciousness of God's favour, blessed with love-gifts in answered prayers, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Lowe is credited with having said that a metaphysician resembled a blind man groping in a dark room for a black hat that was not there. The comparison might almost have been applied to the Foreign Minister of the Dual Empire, vainly seeking for a coherent policy among the mists and cross-currents of rival nationalities. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... century knew nothing of gas-light, and that it would require a prodigious and wasteful expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate the Tunnel sufficiently to discern even a ghost. On this account, however, it would be all the more suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to keep him from bewildering mankind with his shadowy speculations; and, being shut off from external converse, the dark corridor would help him to make rich discoveries in those cavernous regions and mysterious by-paths of the intellect, which he had so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... or space], we only deceive ourselves by substituting the indefinite for the infinite, than which no two notions can be more opposed." In fact, Mr. Mill does not seem to be aware that what the mathematician calls infinite, the metaphysician calls indefinite, and that arguments drawn from the mathematical use of the term infinite are wholly irrelevant to the metaphysical. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Can any man suppose that, when the Divine attributes are spoken of as infinite, it is meant that they are ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... one-sighted earnestness that despises the wit and banter of society, and affects the isolation and grandeur of pure thought. The mountain summit is too far removed from the walks of men to make it possible for the recluse to wield all the influence that his powers may entitle him to exert. The metaphysician less than the poet, the country minister less than the successful lawyer, is the ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... facility of his race he learned all the languages in the curriculum and read ferociously in many literatures. In his junior year the appearance of a great and genial work on psychology made him the metaphysician he has remained through all digressions in the connoisseurship and criticism of art. How his search for ultimate principles involved a mastery of the minutiae of the Venetian school I could only guess. But one could imagine the process. Seeking to ground his personal preferences ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe just a neurologist's chart of Hester's nerve ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... render us the service of bringing to a focus that phase of life it represents. The mirror which the dramatist holds up to nature should be a concave mirror, which concentrates the rays impinging on it to a luminous focal image. Hamlet was too much a metaphysician to busy his mind about the simpler science of physics; but surely this figure of the concave mirror, with its phenomenon of concentration, represents most suggestively his belief concerning the purpose of playing and of plays. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... Martin, but the exposition it now received at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as metaphysicians. Phenomenon and noumenon were bandied back and forth. They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... therefore we defame the place of our exile. But who is there may set apart his destiny from the earth which bore him? I am one of those who would bring back the old reverence for the Mother, the magic, the love. I think, metaphysician, you have gone astray. You would seek within yourself for the fountain of life. Yes, there is the true, the only light. But do not dream it will lead you further away from the earth, but rather ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... among his countrymen, and attracted the notice of several successive sovereigns. He is said to have been a skilful physician, an accomplished painter, and an excellent astronomer, as well as an acute metaphysician. Like Montanus, he laid claim to a divine commission, and alleged that he was the Paraclete who was promised to guide into all truth. He maintained that there are two First Principles of all things, light and darkness: God, in the kingdom of light, and the devil, in the kingdom of darkness, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... opened this Discourse. I supposed the question put to me by a philosopher of the day, "Why cannot you go your way, and let us go ours?" I answer, in the name of the Science of Religion, "When Newton can dispense with the metaphysician, then may you dispense with us." So much at first sight; now I am going on to claim a little more for Theology, by classing it with branches of knowledge which may with greater ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... that?" the Doctor said, with that shade of curiosity in his tone which a metaphysician would probably say is an index of a certain tendency to belief in the superstition to which the ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... metaphysician, born in Wilts; studied Descartes and Malebranche, and who, anticipating Berkeley, published a "Demonstration of the Non-Existence and the Impossibility of an External ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of the adapted organisation. It solves the great problem: how could the finely adapted structure of the animal or plant body be formed unless it was built on a preconceived plan? It thus enables us to dispense with the teleology of the metaphysician and the dualist, and to set aside the old mythological and poetic legends of creation. The idea had occurred in vague form to the great Empedocles 2000 years before the time of Darwin, but it was reserved for modern research to ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... woman of the first abilities, I think, I have ever seen; she is more in the style of Mrs. Thrale than of any other celebrated character, but she has infinitely more depth, and seems an even profound politician and metaphysician. She has suffered us to hear some of her works in MS., which are truly wonderful, for powers both of thinking and expression. She adores her father, but is much alarmed at having had no news from him since he has heard of the massacre of the martyred Louis; and who can ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... but, in the end, he is very apt to become obstreperous. His cunning, too, is proverbial and great. If he has a project in view, he conceals his design with a marvellous wisdom; and the dexterity with which he counterfeits sanity, presents, to the metaphysician, one of the most singular problems in the study of mind. When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... said looking hard at her, 'hands, head, and feet. I am psychometrist, dentist, physician, metaphysician all ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... a thought which dwells in men's minds. It is of no consequence at all for our purpose, whether it is a positive conception, or simply the thinking away of all limitations. 'I know what God is, when you do not ask me.' I know what eternity is, though I cannot define the word to satisfy a metaphysician. The little child taught by some grandmother Lois, in a cottage, knows what she means when she tells him 'you will live for ever,' though both scholar and teacher would be puzzled to put it into other words. When we say eternity flows round this bank and shoal of time, men know what ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... silly, frivolous girl, who counted for nothing in her sister's actions. He had fallen into the usual masculine blunder of mixing up smartness of intelligence with strength of character. Sybil, without being a metaphysician, willed anything which she willed at all with more energy than her sister did, who was worn out with the effort of life. Mr. Ratcliffe missed this point, and was left to wonder who it was that had crossed ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... docility of her taste by eating up something that was very disagreeable. Here was an opportunity at once of acting out the great principles to which she had been listening. And while a boy, evidently destined to be a metaphysician, and evidently possessed of the spirit of resistance to constituted authority whether in government or doctrine, boldly argued that it could not be wicked in him to hate onions, because God had made him so ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, and the occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudy crowds of angels. Thousand "hints chance dropped from nature's sphere," pregnant with friendly tidings, reassure us. "Strange," said a gifted metaphysician once, "that the barrel organ, man, should terminate every tune with the strain of immortality!" Not strange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to the thrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score of destiny. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... others; for do we not see even to the present day Malthus on Population absurdly misunderstood? This reflection about Malthus has often comforted me when I have been vexed at this misstatement of my views. As for M. Janet, he is a metaphysician, and such gentlemen are so acute that I think they often misunderstand common folk. Your criticism on the double sense in which I have used Natural Selection is new to me and unanswerable; but my blunder has done no harm, for I do not believe that ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... maintaining, in contradiction to universal experience, that objects of vision alone are capable of attracting our regard. But nothing can be more unfounded than such a supposition. It might appear to be too nearly approaching to the ludicrous, to suggest as an example to the contrary, the metaphysician's attachment to his insubstantial speculations, or the ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... stranger to the subtleties of metaphysical thought, it appears quite inconceivable, when he is told that the existence of the visible and palpable scene before him should be converted into a problem of apparently invincible difficulty. Yet so it is. The metaphysician first carries off in triumph what are called its secondary qualities, as colour and heat, proving them to be no qualities of matter, but of mind, or the sensitive being. He next assails what had been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the Astronomer, a little incredulously,—what there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a mathematician or a metaphysician? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
