"Metaphysics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sir,' rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick's knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority—'he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... haven't changed a bit! But marvellous and angelic as Ted is, it's a sort of relief in a way to meet an ordinary man. You don't know all about everything, do you? If I asked you the most difficult question about art or science or history or metaphysics, or even dress, you wouldn't be able to answer it, would you? Do you always keep your temper? Is your judgement thoroughly sound? Can you talk modern Greek, and Arabian? I think not. You're full of faults, and delightfully ignorant and commonplace. And ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... into full maturity we have here nothing to record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics, morals, metaphysics, and language.[22] Of some he had drawn out the plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of view that belong even to the integrity ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... duodecimo volume of two hundred and ninety-six closely-printed pages, and embraces a list of several thousand volumes. In this list are histories, biographies, travels, adventures, novels, poems, educational works, works on science, art, philosophy, metaphysics—in short, books on every topic familiar to man. In the department of fiction, the success of this house has been remarkable. They have published between four and five hundred novels, in cloth and paper bindings, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... manner with these sensitive sensual motions, or ideas of imagination, are associated many other trains or tribes of ideas, which by some writers of metaphysics have been classed under the terms of resemblance, causation, and contiguity; and will be more fully treated ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... horrible? I had no idea. I'm no judge of what is horrible in theology, or metaphysics, or whatever it is. But I do profess to know when a man has made a hit, whether in theology or anything else; and I perceive quite clearly that your Mr. Holland—well, not your Mr. Holland, has made a distinct hit. What sort of face ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... under-consciousness of mud-stained boots and a clumsily cut overcoat, mixed itself painfully with this impression of pretty, scented women, and the clatter of tongues and coffee-cups. He stood rooted to the threshold in a sudden bitter realization that the great world cared nothing about metaphysics. Ease, fine furniture, a position in the world—these were the things that counted. Why had all his genius brought him none of these things? Wifeless, childless, moneyless, he stood, a solitary soul wrestling with problems. How had Mendelssohn managed to obtain everything? ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it; and after a time I can generally recollect ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... dishevelled, hysterical creature the Gallo-Democrats worshipped was a delusion, and feared she might prove a snare. Their common sense taught them to pay little attention to a priori disquisitions on natural rights, social compacts, etc.,—metaphysics of politics, nugatory for all practical American purposes,—and to reject as ridiculous the promised millennium of supreme reason and perfected man. From a long experience in the management of public affairs, they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... not stupid. The Council of Soissons was held while the architects and sculptors were building the west porch of Chartres and the Aquilon at Mont-Saint-Michel. Averroes was born at Cordova in 1126; Omar Khayyam died at Naishapur in 1123. Poetry and metaphysics owned the world, and their quarrel with theology was a private, family dispute. Very soon the tide turned decisively in Abelard's favour. Suger, a political prelate, became minister of the King, and in March, 1122, Abbot of Saint-Denis. In both capacities he took the part of Abelard, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... recedes into metaphysics, or dwindles into novels. How ignoble seems the current material of London literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... retired in silence. Their consultation consisted chiefly in propounding and supporting, for the thousandth time, each his favorite theories. For the condition of the princess afforded delightful scope for the discussion of every question arising from the the division of thought,— in fact of all the Metaphysics of the Chinese Empire. But it is only justice to say that they did not altogether neglect the discussion of the practical question, what ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... pursued the discussions of the new American realism through university gatherings and literary inquests. Stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable. It is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in itself offends the critics, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... made into the dead languages, in which he had made captive a host of Greek nouns and Latin verbs, and brought off rich booty in ancient saws and apothegms, which he was wont to parade in his public harangues, as a triumphant general of yore his spolia opima. Of metaphysics he knew enough to confound all hearers and himself into the bargain. In logic he knew the whole family of syllogisms and dilemmas, and was so proud of his skill that he never suffered even a self-evident fact to pass unargued. It was observed, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... same fashion, by and by—that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his class and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a discussion of the pure theory of ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... sometimes indifferent and some times conciliatory, it always remained independent of faith. But while Greece thus freed herself from the fetters of a superannuated mythology, and openly and boldly constructed those systems of metaphysics by means of which she claimed to solve the enigmas of the universe, her religion lost its vitality and dried up because it lacked the strengthening nourishment of reflection. It became a thing devoid of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... human habiliments of the Anglo-Saxon sect; and the leather of his shoes is patented and the loop of his necktie is copyrighted. For these things John Tom had grafted on him at college along with metaphysics and the knockout guard for the low tackle. But for his complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of his straight hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out of the city directory that subscribes for ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... same time, as it is impossible to treat of the problems of philosophy except from some point of view, it will be found that, in Chapters III to XI, a doctrine is presented. It is the same as that presented much more in detail, and with a greater wealth of reference, in my "System of Metaphysics," which was published a short time ago. In the Notes in the back of this volume, the reader will find references to those parts of the larger work which treat of the subjects more briefly discussed here. It will be helpful to the teacher to keep the larger ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment. It has been sometimes seen, in the history of the human mind, that when thus translated into terms of sentiment—of sentiment, as lying already half-way towards practice—the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the first time reveal their true significance. The metaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands or feet, becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect, when translated into a precept as to how it were best to feel and act; in other words, under ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... a place in the triangle, it is only because he was not yet known, except by the eccentricities of his conduct as a boy. But so soon as Byron was able to appreciate his genius, he lavished praises upon the poet and the man, while he blamed his metaphysics. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... several German philosophers, who, having founded various physical theories, more or less extensive, on the perspicuous metaphysics of their countrymen, were confident that, if they had not hit on the modes which Supreme Wisdom had adopted, their modes were yet very excellent modes; and they were absolutely clamorous that their experiments ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... JAMES, the author of "Moralism and Christianity," must certainly be regarded by all who come into his fit audience as one of the greatest living masters of metaphysics. Mr. James has never been mentioned in the North American Review; but then, that peculiarly national work has not in all its seventy volumes an article upon Jonathan Edwards, whom Robert Hall, Dr. Chalmers, Dugald Stuart, Sir James Mackintosh, Kant, Cousin, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Christians, and before the question thus agitated can be set at rest, we must suppose a proficiency in those inquiries which he would proscribe as dangerous. After all, we can discover no more reason why sciolists in metaphysics should bring that study into discredit, than that religion itself should be disparaged through the extravagance of fanaticism. To have met the subject fully, he ought to have shown, that not only those opinions he controverts are erroneous, but that all the systems of former metaphysicians were ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... be apprenticed to a surgeon. English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's Letters, and more by theology. After I had read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my infidel vanity never touched ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... the difficulty—the futility of attempting to fasten on Emerson any particular doctrine, philosophic, or religious theory. Emerson wrings the neck of any law, that would become exclusive and arrogant, whether a definite one of metaphysics or an indefinite one of mechanics. He hacks his way up and down, as near as he can to the absolute, the oneness of all nature both human and spiritual, and to God's benevolence. To him the ultimate of a conception is its vastness, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... digested: but he is deficient in some elements that must combine to govern my love and admiration. He has much imagination of head, but none of heart: perhaps these are absurd distinctions: but I am no hand at these definitions. His great study is metaphysics: and Kant is his idol. He is rather without company in London, and I wish much to introduce him to such men as I know: but most of your Apostolic party who could best exchange ideas with him are not in town. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... and the other branches of mathematical science. For knowledge of the various eastern tongues he was no unequal match for Lee, of Cambridge; while his acquirements in natural philosophy, political economy, and metaphysics, were such as would have fairly entitled him to prelect on these subjects in any university in Europe. Besides this, he had an exquisite poetical genius; and, in his very first contest, succeeded in carrying off the prize of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... crime is an insensate; but the public man or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of all your energies along a special line of achievement. For instance, if you would be a perfect Yogi, you must concentrate, concentrate, morning, noon and night, at all times, along that line of endeavour. You must study all the vast literature on Yoga, Psychology, Metaphysics, Mentalism, etc., and form your own synthesis on same. You must think hard and work hard for Yoga. "Genius is the power to bear infinite pain." Nothing ought to be too great a sacrifice, including your own life, for the right ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... Dionysius. He was a great general and statesman, as well as a philosopher. In philosophy he was a Pythagorean; and, like most of that school, a great mathematician; and applied his favourite science not only to music, but also to metaphysics. Aristotle is believed to have borrowed from him his ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... contending that he is composed of a material frame (descended from the apes) and an immortal immaterial soul (infused by a higher power). This dual conception, moreover, is still predominant in the wide circles of modern theology and metaphysics, and has the general and influential adherence of the ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... metaphysics, which tend to regard the Buddha essence or Nirvana much as Brahman is regarded ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... song and new simile holds good), 'A dainty dish to set before the King' Or Regent, who admires such kind of food. And Coleridge too has lately taken wing, But like a hawk encumbered with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation. I wish he ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... but with Wagner the case is different. He also is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning is always deep, but to arrive ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... upon this truth in everything. The privacy of the family is sacredly guarded in essentials, but the social instinct is so highly developed with us that we like to eat together in large refectories, and we meet constantly to argue and dispute on questions of aesthetics and metaphysics. We do not, perhaps, read so many books as you do, for most of our reading, when not for special research, but for culture and entertainment, is done by public readers, to large groups of listeners. We have no social meetings which are ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... And in many others, sir, I believe. Morals and metaphysics, politics and political economy, the way to make the most of all the modifications of smoke; steam, gas, and paper currency; you have all these to learn from us; in short, all the arts and sciences. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... further exercise. He lit a pipe and smoked quietly for a little. "Odd that you didn't know Hollond. You must have heard his name. I thought you amused yourself with metaphysics." ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... respectability. I conceive that it was a feeling of the importance of this precaution which induced Mr. Locke to style himself 'Gent.' on the title-page of his Essay, as who should say to his readers that they could receive his metaphysics on the honor of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... nine-tenths of his real consciousness is given to his smoking, and one-tenth to what he is reading, we are reminded of the commercial traveler who "wanted to make the show of a library at home, so he wrote to a book merchant in London, saying: 'Send me six feet of theology, and about as much metaphysics, and near a yard of civil law in old folio.'" Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but Dr. James Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers, favors a dreamy, imaginative, and imbecile ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... I of Destiny or Chance; Luck seems to me the same thing as Intention; In metaphysics I could ne'er advance, And think it of the Devil's own invention. Enough of joy to know though when I wed I must be married, yet I may ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he has felt the 'pang of philosophy,' and has experienced the youthful intoxication which is depicted in the Philebus. But he has hitherto been unable to make the transition from mathematics to metaphysics. He can form a general conception of square and oblong numbers, but he is unable to attain a similar expression of knowledge in the abstract. Yet at length he begins to recognize that there are universal conceptions ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... in his inspiration. It is not the description of a musical mood, but the showing of a man who has the mood. It is the exultation and religious feeling of a man in the very act. The noble lines are not fine things attempting to set forth the metaphysics of musical expression and enjoyment, but they represent a man at the very climax of his musical passion. Is the effect any the less dramatic because the man is not committing a murder, or conspiring, or seducing, or overreaching, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... her, for fairies as we know, understand things almost by instinct, and Queen Mab, one evening, chanced to overhear a good deal of the missionaries' conversation. She learned, for instance, the precise meanings, and the bearings on modern theology and metaphysics, of such words as kathenotheism, hagiography, transubstantiation, eschatology, Positivist, noumenony begriffy vorstellung, Paulisimus, wissenschaft, and others, quite new to her, and of great ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... with the shadows of Theology, the bubbles of Metaphysics, and the ignes-fatui of Morality, without being able to bring his mind to a firm conviction, at length cast himself into the dark fields of Magic, in the hope of forcing from Nature what she had so obstinately withheld from him. His first attainment ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... buoyant and immortal sentence with which Aristotle begins his Metaphysics, 'All mankind naturally desire knowledge.'" Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible, cli. iv. This sentence of Aristotle is cited by Dante in the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... a common impression, but an utterly false one. The preliminary training that is the undergraduate work at the universities consisted of the Seven Liberal Arts—the trivium and quadrivium, which embraced logic, rhetoric, grammar, metaphysics, under which was included not a little of physics, cosmology in which some biology was studied, as well as psychology and mathematics, astronomy, and music. This was a thoroughly rounded course in intellectual training. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics - namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the fulness of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Bassi, was then professor of physics. He became a priest, but devoted his life to teaching and experimenting. He must have been something of what we in Ireland used to call a "polymath," for he professed at one time or another, in various universities, logic, metaphysics, Greek, and finally natural history. He first explained the physics of what children call "ducks and drakes" made by flat pebbles on water; laid the foundations of meteorology and vulcanology, and is perhaps best of all known in connection with what ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... of them has a right to say: "There is no place for you in the Theosophical Society." Neither must the person who is strong on the subject of phenomena try to silence those who meet phenomena with disbelief, or who think them dangerous; nor should a person who stands only on philosophy and metaphysics say to the Theosophical acceptor of the phenomena: "Your views are wrong and dangerous." Perfect freedom of thought is the law and life of the Society; and if we are not fit for that, if we have not reached the position where we ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... sprite, much given to routs and reading; "'Tis I who teach your spinsters of good breeding, "The reigning taste in chemistry and caps, "The last new bounds of tuckers and of maps, "And when the waltz has twirled her giddy brain "With metaphysics twirl it back again!" I viewed him, as he spoke—his hose were blue, His wings—the covers of the last Review— Cerulean, bordered with a jaundice hue, And tinselled gayly o'er, for evening wear, Till the next quarter ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... equality, and even their liberty. Thus the two very difficult points, superiority in the presiding state, and freedom in the subordinate, were on the whole sufficiently, that is, practically, reconciled; without agitating those vexatious questions, which in truth rather belong to metaphysics than politics, and which can never be moved without shaking the foundations of the best governments that have ever been constituted by human wisdom. By this measure was let loose that dangerous spirit of disquisition, not in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ETHICS OF PESSIMISM.—On the metaphysics of the pessimists I shall make no comment save that there appears to be here sufficient vagueness to satisfy the most poetical of minds. But the following points in the ethics of pessimism ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and Wordsworth,—and sees them discharging the severer offices of the whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the evening,—"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... profit of the sale at Vienna, and the Mohawk set up his carriage, on the difference in the value of markets! Thus, you see, in order to run a fair race, the horses must start even, carry equal weights, and, after all, one commonly wins. Your metaphysics are no better than so much philosophical gold leaf, which a cunning reasoner beats out into a sheet as large as the broadest American lake, to make dunces believe the earth can be transmuted into the precious material; while a plain practical man puts the value of the metal into ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... don't want to introduce metaphysics," said Charles, "but I will adopt your own image. Suppose I suspected the bread before me to have arsenic in it, or merely to be unwholesome, would it be wonderful if I tried to ascertain how ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... have been always, let me say, "romantic,"— Eager for color, for beauty, soon discontented With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing: Even before the question grew to problem And drove you bickering into metaphysics, You met on lower planes the same great dragon, Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction, In strange aesthetics . . . You tried, as I remember, One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid, The ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... secours de la science, d'interroger les deux grandes ecoles rivales au profit de la verite.—COUSIN, Fragments Litteraires, 1843, 95, on Degerando. No branch of philosophical doctrine, indeed, can be fairly investigated or apprehended apart from its history. All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas.— CLIFFE LESLIE, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, 1879, 149. The ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... harsher and harsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds. "What good have you ever done, you race of German sausages? Yards of barbarian etiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy! Gas of northern metaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like balloons. Bad pictures and bad manners and pantheism and the Albert Memorial. Go back to Hanover, you ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... risk at the outset of these studies that girls will take the pose of philosophical students, and talk logic and metaphysics, to the confusion of their friends and of their own feelings later on, when they come to years of discretion and realize the absurdity of these "lively sallies," as they would have been called in early Victorian times—the name alone might serve as ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... Schoene Seele, that ideal of gentle pietism, in Wilhelm Meister: but to the large vision of Goethe, that seemed to be a phase of life that a man might feel all round, and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... somewhere and somehow; but you have to endow it with a fictitious immortality. An anvil you feel safer about, but then you have to use it somewhere, and account for its surplus, if there is any. Any one with a turn for metaphysics would be at home in Ordnance; Aristotle would have revelled ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... oath)— The sirloin's spoiled: I'll give it him!"— And Betty did look fierce and grim. Bob, who saw mischief in her eye, Avoided her—approaching nigh: He feared the broomstick, too, with physics As dread as Betty's metaphysics. ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... entertained, that Leibnitz did not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than what he is described in the book before us.—if his metaphysics were "miserable," if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes,—we can assure M. de Caroil that we should long ago have heard the last ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... ask through idle curiosity to know the number of the Angels; nor for the solution of a logical puzzle, nor for that of a question in metaphysics, or of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... you on your increased industry and application, though you were always more studious than myself. I wish, dear Florry, you could imbue me with some of your fondness for metaphysics and mathematics," Mary replied, with a ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... listener. He talked well and fluently, with little regard to logical sequence, and with something of the dogmatism natural to one whose opinions had seldom been subjected to scrutiny. He seemed equally at home in the most abstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and in the more practical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and cattle-raising. It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that patient and close observation of the processes of Nature which often places the unlettered ploughman and mechanic ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... An association was in consequence formed by them, which took the title of Moral and Scientific Union. The government approved of it, merely interdicting it from political discussions. This resolution, noble as it was, would probably have been lost, like many others, in the vagueness of German metaphysics; but about that time William, Duke of Brunswick, who had been stripped of his duchy, had retired to his principality of Oels in Silesia. In the bosom of this retreat he is said to have observed the first progress of the Moral Union among the Prussians. He became a member of it; and his heart ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... and, like the rest of the world here, wore the convenient and cleanly blue cotton trousers and blue blouse of the country. The third spare seat was occupied by a neighbouring notary, the two men discussing metaphysics, literature, and the origin of ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... than Voltaire to behold the part that Zadig now "performs." The amusing Babylonian, now regarded as the aristocratic ancestor of modern story-detectives, was created as a chief mocker in a satire on eighteenth-century manners, morals, and metaphysics. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge; for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Voltaire; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates wisdom; he hates wit; he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible, and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose; he hates all poetry but his own; he hates the dialogues in Shakespeare; he hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... nine-tenths of its subjects, sufficiently accounts for the exaggerated importance given to and assumed by the French writers, even before they had become, in the language of the Reviewer, "the interpreters between England and mankind:" he asserts, "that all the great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science, are ours but no foreign nation, except France, has received them from us by direct communication: isolated in our situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but did not impart it." (9) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... illustrated construction of the instrument.) The victim would be thrown upon that instrument and the strain upon the muscles was such that insanity would sometimes come to his relief. See what we owe to the civilizing influence of the gentlemen who have made a certain idea in metaphysics necessary to salvation—see what ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... needless to remark that this little group of simple people had no speculative theology. Jesus wisely kept himself far removed from all metaphysics. He had only one dogma, his own divine Sonship and the divinity of his mission. The whole symbol of the primitive Church might be embraced in one line: "Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God." This belief rested upon a peremptory argument—the fact ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... a great reader of history, poetry, metaphysics, and fiction, but this is not what made him a great scientist. Original men make books, they do not need to read them. Yet Huxley loved to read. He even in his old age studied Greek to read Aristotle and the New ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... were appropriated to theology; six to canon law; four to medicine; one to anatomy; one to surgery; eight to the arts, as they were called, embracing logic, physics, and metaphysics; one to ethics; one to mathematics; four to the ancient languages; four to rhetoric; and six to grammar. One is struck with the disproportion of the mathematical studies to the rest. Though an important part of general education, and consequently of the course embraced ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... confusing sort of an experience. He began to wonder, at last, whether or not it were possible that he could be somebody else without knowing it; and if it were, in whom, precisely, his identity was vested. Being but a simple-minded young fellow, with no taste whatever for metaphysics, this line ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... while, but we shall bring her round easily. A splendid constitution, a noble frame; but I think she has overworked her brain a little, reading Huxley and Darwin, and the German physiologists upon whom Huxley and Darwin have built themselves. Metaphysics too. Schopenhauer, and the rest of them. A wonderful woman! Very few brains could hold what hers has had poured into it in the last thirty years. The conducting nerves between the brain and the spinal marrow ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... has become one of pure metaphysics, Free-will has been the favourite dogma, as being most consonant to the dignity of man, which appears to be its chief recommendation, and its only argument. The weight of reasoning is, I believe, in favour of necessity; but the word carries with it a seeming affront, and hardly any amount ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... at Mrs. Murray's Sabbath evening Bible class in the Little Church. Straight Rory had been educated for a teacher in Scotland, and was something of a scholar. He loved school examinations, where he was the terror of pupils and teachers alike. His acute mind reveled in the metaphysics of theology, which made him the dread of all candidates who appeared before the session desiring "to come forward." It was to many an impressive sight to see Straight Rory rise in the precentor's box, feel round, with much facial contortion, for the pitch—he despised a tuning-fork—and then, ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... Webster. The Constitution extends over newly acquired territory proprio vigore, replied Calhoun.[286] Douglas declined to enter into the subtle questions of constitutional law thus raised. The "metaphysics" of the subject did not disturb him. If the Senate would not pass his statehood bill, he was for the Walker amendment. A fearful responsibility rested upon Congress. The sad fate of a family from his own State, which had moved to California, had brought ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... February of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten, Essay on Taste, which contained (p. 129) the authorized exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of his book, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... rules on easy and simple questions, as those of the mathematics. Then, when he has acquired some skill in discovering the truth in these questions, he should commence to apply himself in earnest to true philosophy, of which the first part is Metaphysics, containing the principles of knowledge, among which is the explication of the principal attributes of God, of the immateriality of the soul, and of all the clear and simple notions that are in us; the second is Physics, in which, after finding the true principles ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, typewriting, typesetting and practical geometry, so as to draw lines, angles and circles and find their volumes and areas, but algebra, astronomy, grammar, geology, physiology, biology and metaphysics are reserved for the high schools, where every boy and girl is sent when they are fifteen years of age and kept there for three years at the expense of the government. The high school is located in the district reserve as near the center of the district as conditions will permit in the vicinity ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... 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. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... representative in cognition? That certainly has its road, but it can scarcely be said to be a "method". Will breaks its way upwards by sheer unflinching determination, keeping its eyes fixed on the end, and using either buddhi or manes indifferently as a means to that end. Metaphysics is used to realise the Self; science is used to understand the Not-Self; but either is grasped, either is thrown aside, as it serves, or fails to serve, the needs of the moment. Often the man, in whom will is predominant, does not know how he gains the object he is aiming at; it ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... Buddhist tripitaka or canon consists of three collections, containing, according to Eitel (p. 150), "doctrinal aphorisms (or statements, purporting to be from Buddha himself); works on discipline; and works on metaphysics:"—called sutra, vinaya, and abhidharma; in Chinese, king {.}, leuh {.}, and lun {.}, or texts, laws or rules, and discussions. Dr. Rhys Davids objects to the designation of "metaphysics" as used of the abhidharma works, saying that "they bear much more the relation to 'dharma' which ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... Locke's chapter on 'Substance' is 'unsatisfactory'; and agrees with some 'strictures' on the early chapters of Mill's 'Political Economy.' He writes an essay to explode the poor old social contract. He holds that the study of metaphysics is desirable, but adds the note, 'not including ontological inquiries under the head of metaphysics.' He denies, however, the proposition that 'all general truths are founded on experience.' He thinks that a ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute litterature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.' ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... union of one with the diverse is generated the Universe. Hence the progression from ascent to descent, from spirit to that which we call matter; from the cause to the origin, and the process of metaphysics, which, from the finite world of sense rises to the intelligent, passing through the intermediate numbers of infinite substance to active being and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... himself a mediator, but judge and censor of things which he had never studied, nor well understood. Thus in our day, that little which Aristotle can bring, is peculiar for its inventive reasoning, its suggestiveness, its metaphysics, and is useful for other pedants, who work with the same "Sursum corda," who institute new dialectics and modes of forming the reason (judgment?) which are as much viler than those of Aristotle, as may be the philosophy of Aristotle is incomparably viler than that of the ancients. And it has ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... scientific man to discover and study mechanisms. But he must remember that mechanism does not produce force, it only transmits it. If he maintains that he has nothing to do with anything outside of mechanism, that the invisible and imponderable force lies outside of his domain, he has handed over to metaphysics the fairest and richest portion of his realm. In our fear of being metaphysical we have swung to another extreme, and have lost sight of valuable truth which lay at the bottom of the old vitalistic ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... principles of beauty and art. In his treatises on poetry and rhetoric he gives us, along with a theory of these arts, certain general principles of beauty; and scattered among his other writings we find many valuable suggestions on the same subject. He seeks (in the Metaphysics) to distinguish the good and the beautiful by saying that the former is always in action ('en praxei) whereas the latter may exist in motionless things as well ('en akinetois.) At the same time he had as a Greek to allow that though essentially different ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Hope, and the "Dilettanti crew," were also omitted. Stanza ix. of the Second Canto, on the immortality of the soul, was recast, and "sure and certain" hopelessness exchanged for a pious, if hypothetical, aspiration. But with regard to the general tenor of his politics and metaphysics, Byron stood ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... fancied that he could do everything, and this fancy produced in him the appearance of a courage which his moral nature never possessed. He had the audacity which results from presumption, not the wholesome strength which comes from the conscious possession of a right purpose. But a truce to our metaphysics. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... of Medical Jurisprudence in the John A. Creighton Medical College, Omaha, Neb., author of Text-Books on Metaphysics, Ethics, Oratory, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... asking him to dine at Eldon's, and spent twelve francs at that restaurant. During the dinner Daniel admitted Lucien into the secret of his hopes and studies. Daniel d'Arthez would not allow that any writer could attain to a pre-eminent rank without a profound knowledge of metaphysics. He was engaged in ransacking the spoils of ancient and modern philosophy, and in the assimilation of it all; he would be like Moliere, a profound philosopher first, and a writer of comedies afterwards. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... ability, the French are certainly inferior to no other nation. They have not, perhaps, so frequently as others, that cool, sound judgment in matters of speculation, which can fit them for unravelling with success the perplexities of metaphysics; but their unparalleled success in mathematical pursuits is the best possible proof of the accuracy and quickness of their reasoning powers, when confined within due bounds. We do not refer to the astonishing efforts of such men as d'Alembert or La Place, but to the general ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... I know well, of things in which I have no skill to speak; I know no philosophy or metaphysics; to look into a philosophical book is to me like looking into a room piled up with bricks, the pure materials of thought; they have no meaning for me, until the beautiful mind of some literary architect has built them into a house of life; but just as a shallow pool can reflect the dark ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... reproduces.[82-1] This acute and extraordinary analysis of the origin and laws of organic life, clothed under the ancient belief in the action of the winds, reveals a depth of thought for which we were hardly prepared, and is perhaps the single instance of anything like metaphysics among the red race. It is clearly visible in the earlier portions of the legends of the Quiches, and is the more surely of native origin as it has been quite lost ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... stated, metaphysics and theology are to be avoided. But since Mysticism is generally associated with belief in an Unconditioned Absolute, and since such an Absolute is fatal to the claims of any genuine Nature Mysticism, a preliminary flying incursion into the perilous ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Privatmoral unterwirft, sondern selbst vor groben Verletzungen dieser Moral durch den Fuersten nicht zurueckschreckt, wenn das Wohl des Ganzen und die Freiheit des Vaterlandes nicht anders vorbereitet und vermittelt werden kann." In Kuno Fischer's progress through the systems of metaphysics Machiavelli appears at almost every step; his influence is manifest to Dr. Abbott throughout the whole of Bacon's political writings; Hobbes followed up his theory to the conclusions which he abstained from; ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... undoubting—her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil, Ovid, and Statius—keen and subtle as a schoolman—as much an idolater of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance—his eye is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... them, and Imogen sat on her former ledge of sunny rock and Sir Basil was extended beside her on the moss. She had been reading Emerson to him, and when the essay was finished and she had talked to him a little about the "over-soul,"—dear Basil's recollections of metaphysics were very confused,—she presently said to him, letting her hand slide into his while she spoke:—"Basil, dearest,—I want to ask you something, and you must answer very truly, for you need never fear ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was brought up according to the strictest of old Piedmontese conventions. No one forgot that he was a younger son. Gustave, the elder brother, received a classical education, and acquired a strong taste for metaphysics. He became a thinker rather than a man of action, and was one of the first and staunchest friends of the philosopher-theologian Rosmini, whose attempts to reconcile religion and philosophy led him into a bitter struggle with Rome. For Camille another sort of life was planned. ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... were wont to call the Grand Tour—were recreations almost unknown to the ancient world. If Plato went into Egypt, it was not to ascend the Nile, nor to study the monumental pictures of a land whose history was graven on rocks, but to hold close colloquy on metaphysics or divinity with the Dean and Chapter at Memphis. The Greeks indeed, fortunately for posterity, had an incredible itch for Egyptian yarns, and no sooner had King Psammetichus given them a general invitation to the Delta, than they flocked thither ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... commentary on the 13th book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, shows in defense of Socrates, Plato, the Parmenideans, and Pythagoreans, that ideas were not introduced by these divine men according to the usual meaning of names, as was the opinion of Chrysippus, ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... is in no sense an intimate or authorised biography of Huxley. It is simply an outline of the external features of his life and an account of his contributions to biology, to educational and social problems, and to philosophy and metaphysics. In preparing it, I have been indebted to his own Autobiography, to the obituary notice written by Sir Michael Foster for the Royal Society of London, to a sketch of him by Professor Howes, his successor ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Helvetius, Diderot, D'Alembert. Can they not weigh against Locke and Newton, and even more than Locke and Newton, since their store of knowledge and learning was at hand to be added to their own, and among them are those who singly possessed equal science in mathematics as in metaphysics? It is not impossible, perhaps not improbable, from his course of learning and inquiries, that if Dr. Priestley had not from his first initiation into science been dedicated for what is called the immediate service of God, he himself might have been one of the ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... like to see the dead languages, as well as Saxon and Sanscrit, made elective studies every where; also the higher mathematics, mystic metaphysics, and studies of the conscious and subconscious, the ego and non-ego, matters of such uncertain study. When one stops to realize the tragic brevity of life on this earth, and to learn from statistics ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... said, 'As these rude bones to us, are we to her That will be.' 'Dare we dream of that,' I asked, 'Which wrought us, as the workman and his work, That practice betters?' 'How,' she cried, 'you love The metaphysics! read and earn our prize, A golden brooch: beneath an emerald plane Sits Diotima, teaching him that died Of hemlock; our device; wrought to the life; She rapt upon her subject, he on her: For there are schools for all.' 'And yet' I said ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... in 1830. Seventeen years later appeared his "Carmen, the Power of Love," of which Taine, in his celebrated essay on the work, says, "Many dissertations on our primitive savage methods, many knowing treatises like Schopenhauer's on the metaphysics of love and death, cannot compare to the hundred pages ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... In metaphysics recondite, In realms of verse by royal right Of Genevieve and Christabel The first upon the mystic shell; And yet his greatest charm and might ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... of dress, over piles of fern and ivy-covered rocks, or hopping across brooks on extemporised stepping-stones, usually in the very thick of some mauvais pas, discussing some tremendous point of metaphysics or languages and breaking off in it to scream at the beauty of the view, or to pity ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... needful to the present age, because the currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us dry on this side;—I mean the Imaginative. A right metaphysics should do justice to the cooerdinate powers of Imagination, Insight, Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding pas de quatre. He may arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the most desolating ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... antagonist *Cata down catalepsy, cataclysm *Dia through, across diameter, dialogue *Epi upon epidemic, epithet, epode, ephemeral *Hyper over, extremely hypercritical, hyperbola *Hypo under, in smaller hypodermic, hypophosphate measure *Meta after, over metaphysics, metaphor *Para beside paraphrase, paraphernalia *Peri around, about periscope, peristyle *Pro before proboscis, prophet *Syn together, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... classics in the influences which moulded their minds, were the dogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the power of novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from a purely sensuous mind. Shelley no more innovated or created in metaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift of imagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of the universe. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images which pose like Grecian ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... intellectual banks of the generation through which it moved, even while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category of Jewish Messiah to the categories of the Fourth Gospel. And if, in our generation, a conservative scholar like the late Dr. Sanday pleaded for the necessity of a new Christology, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... reasoning, and a technical language. Of the subjects which have whetted the intellectual appetite of the moderns, there is scarcely one, except Physics, which has not been filtered through Roman jurisprudence. The science of pure Metaphysics had, indeed, rather a Greek than a Roman parentage, but Politics, Moral Philosophy, and even Theology, found in Roman law not only a vehicle of expression, but a nidus in which some of their profoundest inquiries were nourished into maturity. For the purpose ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... a matter of common observation that, though often separated, fine taste and fine judgment go very much together, and especially that a man with gross want of taste, though he may act sensibly and correctly for a while, is yet apt to break out, sooner or later, into gross practical error. In metaphysics, probably both taste and judgment involve what is termed 'poise of mind,' that is the power of true passiveness—the faculty of 'waiting' till the stream of impressions, whether those of life or those of art have done all that they have to do, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... ago, in an Oxford drawing-room, she had found herself absorbing metaphysics, as it were through the pores of her skin, without any previous discipline in that exacting science; now, in a London studio, she became aware of a similarly miraculous influx of power. Yesterday she would have told you that she knew nothing about art, and cared less. To-day ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... princess was obliged to quit Holland, but kept up a philosophical correspondence with Descartes. It is to her that the Principles of Philosophy were dedicated; and in her alone, according to Descartes, were united those generally separated talents for metaphysics and for mathematics which are so characteristically co-operative in the Cartesian system. Two Dutch friends, Constantijn Huygens (von Zuylichem), father of the more celebrated Huygens, and Hoogheland, figure amongst the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... mite. You discourse just as of old, when in our den at the university we befogged ourselves in the tobacco-smoke and the denser obscurities of German metaphysics, only your theme is infinitely more interesting. Now, when I met my paragon, Grace, whom you have limned with the feeling of an artist rather than of an analyst, although with a blending of both, I ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... seductive pictures of the felicity that awaits the nations under the systems they wish to establish, such is their manner of procedure, particularly in private. More circumspect in their writings, they usually disguise the poison they dare not proffer openly under obscure metaphysics or more or less ingenious allegories. Often indeed texts from Holy Writ serve as an envelope and vehicle for these ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... established on such a foundation could not meet the wants of this individualized epoch. That he should not have perceived that the capital and necessary precursor of any true Science of Society must be a Universal Science, a Science of Universal Laws underlying and unifying Physics and Metaphysics, is not strange, when we consider his peculiar mental characteristics. That he should ever have anticipated any permanent acceptance of his Sociological Theories, or regarded his Social Institutions as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and the Noseless One were ogres that beset the way of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their creeds ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... moment you may see the yard covered with hurrying groups, some just released from metaphysics or the blackboard, and some just arisen from their beds where they have indulged in the luxury of sleeping over,—a luxury, however, which is sadly diminished by the anticipated necessity of making up back-lessons.—Harv. Reg., ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... not given to metaphysics, and, indeed, had few or no opinions in that department of inquiry; but the odd girl interested him, and he was ready to meet her on any ground. He had uttered his own practical unbelief, however, with considerable ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Gnostics, and the works of innumerable others, who in seeking to throw light on the super-physical realms seem often only to have succeeded in plunging them into greater darkness. Augmented by all these obscure products of philosophy and metaphysics, the new Theosophy gives the impression of a gigantic and impenetrable maze, but it must be admitted that its followers have drawn from it maxims whose justice and high ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... most occasion for dispute. The new Photinians, disputing the first two Mysteries, made use of certain philosophic maxims which Andreas Kessler, a theologian of the Augsburg Confession, summarized in the various treatises that he published on the parts of the Socinian philosophy. But as to their metaphysics, one might instruct oneself better therein by reading the [84] work of Christopher Stegmann the Socinian. It is not yet in print; but I saw it in my youth and it has been recently ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... New Englander, of whom I wrote last night, is perhaps the most intolerable bore on this vast continent. He drones, and snuffles, and writes poems, and talks small philosophy and metaphysics, and never will be quiet, under any circumstances. He is going to a great temperance convention at Cincinnati; along with a doctor of whom I saw something at Pittsburgh. The doctor, in addition to being everything that the New Englander is, is a phrenologist ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in spite of the philosophizing serpents we have in our bosom, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Woolstoncrofts. I am glad you have not read the tract of the last-mentioned writer. I would not look at it, though assured it contains neither metaphysics nor politics; but as she entered the lists on the latter, and borrowed her title from the demon's book, which aimed at spreading the wrongs of men, she is excommunicated from the pale of my library. We have had enough ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... that there are within us powers and forces that we are making but inadequate use of, and others that we are scarcely using at all. Practical metaphysics, a more simplified and concrete psychology, well-known laws of mental and spiritual science, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... doctor. "I have come to the conclusion,—that in order to be One and Somewhat, it is necessary to begin by being Nought and All—Thus ranging myself in security on both sides of a great abyss of metaphysics. What do ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... meaning is the right which is identical with might. [Footnote: See e.g. Plato's "Laws". X. 887.] Against these conclusions the whole soul of Plato rose in revolt. To reconstruct religion, he was driven back upon metaphysics; and elaborated at last the system which from his day to our own has not ceased to perplex and fascinate the world, and whose rare and radiant combination of gifts, speculative, artistic, and religious, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson |
