"Mysticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greatly increased in their intensity by this means. So, in dealing with his pupils, and especially with a prodigy like young Hartman, Prof. Reminitsky would call into service all the paraphernalia of religious mysticism; teaching his pupil to regard woman as the object of exalted adoration, a being too holy to be attained to even in thought. And now, of course, when the proposed accompanist turns out to be a decidedly alluring young female, it is necessary to take ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... have fain declined; no indeterminate thoughts, no indefinite sensations; no languishment; and above all never more the portentous, the ominous look which often in that entrancing dance exhibits to us the mysticism of the Sybil, without one ray of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... have demonstrated how the symbolism of the modern fraternal organization has grown out of alchemy, mysticism and rosicrucianism. Some centuries ago these symbols were charged with a literal meaning. If a man, however, in the 20th century attaches a similar significance to these symbols he is rightly adjudged insane. For instance, no one in a modern civilization can retain his mental balance ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds. If he describes, as in The Vicar of Tours, the woes of an old priest, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... said that the theological and philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages was "scholastic," not mystical. No doubt "mysticism," as a mode of life aiming at the realisation of the presence of God, is as distinct from scholasticism as empiricism is from rationalism, or "tough-minded" philosophy (to use JAMES' happy phrase) is from "tender-minded". ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... the notion of actual mental achievement during sleep is unthought of. Dreams are allowed to run an absurd riot through the brain, disturbing physical rest. The remedy for this universal ailment and waste of time was to be found in "white sleep," a bit of Indian mysticism, purporting to accomplish a partial detachment of mind and body, so that the will, which is always the expression of the link between these two, is, for the time, dissolved. The body rests, but ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... and bold element of the Sinfonia Eroica was distinctly discernible, especially in the first movement. The slow movement, on the contrary, contained reminiscences of my former musical mysticism. A kind of repeated interrogative exclamation of the minor third merging into the fifth connected in my mind this work (which I had finished with the utmost effort at clearness) with my very earliest period of ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... which brings the divine into the consciousness is here represented as the feminine element. The soul which as yet is without wisdom is the mother of what leads to the divine. This brings us to an important conception of mysticism. The soul is recognised as the mother of the divine. Unconsciously it leads man to the divine, with the inevitableness ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... contain? Surely something he himself had written; but what? A confession, probably of his sins. The conception of such an action, the manner in which it had been carried out, would be in harmony with his innate mysticism, with the predominance in him of imagination over reason, with his intellectual physiognomy. Three years had passed since the day at Vena di Fonte Alta, when Jeanne in despair had sworn to herself to love Piero no longer, feeling that henceforward ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr. Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's commerce with God (Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott)—a book the first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most perfect Lutheran manual—tells us in another place,[18] referring to this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective knowledge of God and of Christ, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... her receptions, busied herself with her children, determined to become a good mother of a family; no favorite friend was seen at her house. She went to church, reformed her dress, wore gray, and talked Catholicism, mysticism, and so forth. All this produced, in 1825, another little son, whom she named Theodore. Soon after, in 1826, Colleville was appointed sub-director of the Clergeot division, and later, in 1828, collector of taxes in a Paris arrondissement. He also received the cross of the Legion of honor, ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... idea, erroneous as it may seem in its application to the Universal Spirit, was, and is, claimed by too many great philosophers to be put aside as entirely chimerical. In the case of the Theodidaktoi, the only controvertible point, the dark spot on this philosophy of extreme mysticism, was its claim to include that which is simply ecstatic illumination, under the head of sensuous perception. In the case of the Yogis, who maintained their ability to see Iswara "face to face," this claim was successfully overthrown by the stern ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... David Hume who appealed unequivocally to reason. But what the faculty was which was to guide or to overrule reason in the search for truth was a question to which I do not think that he could give any distinct answer. He was too much a lover of clearness to be attracted by the mysticism of Coleridge, and yet he shrank from the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... effort. The pictures and the sculpture of the alcoves and the half-dome tell their own story. Here is no elusive mysticism, no obscure symbolism to be dug out with the help of guidebooks, like a hard lesson. The treasures of the Seasons are on the surface, glowing in ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... which gave birth to the Baptists of England, the Anabaptists, Mennonites, Pietists, and Quietists of the Continent. Their movement was an extreme revolt against the formalism, corporate character, and externality of established religion. It contained a deep element of mysticism. The Quakers declared all believers, irrespective of learning, sex, or official appointment, to be priests. [Footnote: Fox, Letters, No. 249.] They asserted the adequacy of the "inner light" to guide every man in his faith ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... Aristotle had been dethroned from his position of dictator in European thought. But the "Guide" of Maimonides was a great achievement for its spirit more than for its contents. If it inevitably became obsolete as a system of theology, it permanently acted as an antidote to the mysticism which in the thirteenth century began to gain a hold on Judaism, and which, but for Maimonides, might have completely undermined the beliefs of the Synagogue. Maimonides remained the exemplar of reasoning faith long after ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... Mr. Lethaby, in his Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, observes: 'We may see embodied in this myth of the centre-stone the result of the general direction of thought; as each people were certainly "the people" first born and best beloved of the gods, so their country occupied the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... supernatural. By the middle of this century this advance had reached a point where scientists, at least, were ready to believe that nature's forces were all-powerful to account for nature's phenomena. Science had passed from the reign of mysticism to the ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... event and to tell her with what equanimity the old German philosopher had borne it. Here is the answer of Sand's mother; it will serve to show the character of the woman whose mighty heart never belied itself in the midst of the severest suffering; the answer bears the stamp of that German mysticism of which we ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... two years later he was formally recognized as a preacher, his fame soon spreading through the neighbouring counties. His wife died soon after their removal to Bedford, and he also lost his friend and pastor, Mr Gifford. His earliest work was directed against Quaker mysticism and appeared in 1656. It was entitled Some Gospel Truths Opened; it was followed in the same year by a second tract in the same sense, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... religions are ignorant of their founders, all the moral creeds of the world proceed from a moral source, i.e. a human will. Brahmanism, Gnosticism, the Sufism of Persia, the Mysteries of Egypt and Greece, Neo-Platonism, the Christian Mysticism of the Middle Ages,—these have, strictly speaking, no founder. Every tendency to the abstract, to the infinite, ignores personality.[133] Individual mystics we know, but never the founder of any such system. The religions in which the moral element is depressed, as those of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... with Louise Nast, is important for his Weltschmerz only in its bearing upon the development of his general character. This influence was a twofold one: in the first place his sweetheart was herself inclined to a sort of visionary mysticism, and therefore had an unwholesome influence upon the youth, who had already been carried too far in that direction. She too was a lover of solitude and wrote her letters to him in the stillness of the night, when all others were asleep. There can be no doubt ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... so real, so vital, as that only the separating wall of personality and individual consciousness comes in between—that is the New Testament teaching of the relation of the Christian to Christ. Is it your experience, dear brother? Do not be frightened by talking about mysticism. If a Christianity has no mysticism it has no life. There is a wholesome mysticism and there is a morbid one, and the wholesome one is the very nerve of the Gospel as it is presented by Jesus Himself: 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in you.' If our nineteenth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... nothing clumsy or coarse about this patron of the plough—something, rather, of the movement of delicate wind or fire, about him and his chariot. And this finer character is explained, if, as we are justified in doing, we bring him into closest connexion with that episode, so full of a strange mysticism, of the Nursing of Demophoon, in the Homeric hymn. For, according to some traditions, none other [107] than Triptolemus himself was the subject of that mysterious experiment, in which Demeter laid the child nightly, in the red heat of the fire; and he lives afterwards, not immortal indeed, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... is found to present a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, "Is Brand the expression of Ibsen's own nature?" Yes, and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... insight into the humbler conditions of life. On the whole, Buchanan is at his best in these narrative poems, though he essayed a more ambitious flight in The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic, a study in mysticism, which appeared in 1870. He was a frequent contributor to periodical literature, and obtained notoriety by an article which, under the nom de plume of Thomas Maitland, he contributed to the Contemporary Review ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... ever read that most enchanting book of Celtic mysticism, inconsequent whimsey and profound symbolism—"The Crock of Gold"—by one James Stevens? The author is not a Villager, and his message is one which has its root and spring in the signs and wonders of another, an older and a more intimately wise land than ours. But when I ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... read him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some he appeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide. Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash of mysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen to expend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank on that side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly more important than the way of saying it, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... through the life, conflicts of religious creeds, strifes between Protestantism and Catholicism, between Platonism, Mysticism, and Rationalism. In dealing with such delicate and serious topics I have avoided all controversy, and have ventured only on the simplest and briefest exposition. My effort has been to state the ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... vileness of sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy, suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed nakedness, that he, like ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... It rules in philosophy as elsewhere, and we are now about to see the most rigid and arid of analysts, the leader of the so-called realist school, or school of exact science in Germany in the nineteenth century, plunge headlong into aesthetic mysticism. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... work—that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,—a point we must leave open here—it will appear without any trappings of sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to the flesh necessary to secure efficiency. Assuming in our typical case that pure indulgence does not appear ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... executioner, a division of the honours of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will, tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Laert., Lives of Phil.] All this is unintelligible or indefinite. We cannot comprehend how the number theory will account for the production of corporeal magnitude any easier than we can identify monads with mathematical points. But underlying this mysticism is the thought that there prevails in the phenomena of nature a rational order, harmony, and conformity to law, and that these laws can be represented by numbers. Number or harmony is the principle of the universe, and order holds together the world. Like ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... rather by action than in speech. She had great imagination, adds Madame Surville; and, says the novelist, "this imagination, which she has bequeathed me, bandies her ever from north to south and from south to north." Exceedingly pious, with a bias to mysticism, she possessed a library of books bearing on such doctrines, which were read by her son and afterwards utilized by him in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... clear that consciousness is moving away from its absorption in materiality because it is losing faith in materialism. Clairvoyance, psychism, the recrudescence of mysticism, of occultism—these signs of the times are straws which show which way the wind now sets, and indicate that the modern mind is beginning to find itself at home in what is called the fourth dimension. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... eternal, for it is, after all, but one form of religion, which other forms preceded and which others will follow. Religions may disappear, but religious feeling will create new ones even with the help of Science. Pierre thought of that alleged repulse of Science by the present-day awakening of mysticism, the causes of which he had indicated in his book: the discredit into which the idea of liberty has fallen among the people, duped in the last social reorganisation, and the uneasiness of the elite, in despair at the void in which their liberated minds ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... get rid of the wife who brought him his fortune and now stands in the way of his unholy love of Mrs. Langhorne. He used you to get the poison with which you treated him. He used the Rapports with money to play on her mysticism by their so-called death thought, while he watched his opportunity to inject ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... were? Why should pious people be so stupid?" Jesus looks on to the needs that must occur in his religion for sagacity, prudence, discretion, and the perils that will come to it from sentimentalism, mysticism, silliness, and he asks: "Why is it that the children of this world are so much shrewder than the ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... of that Western faculty, the Russians misapply it. They seem to be impelled by a variety of causes—such as climatic and economic influences, a long course of misgovernment, Byzantinism in religion, and an inherited leaning to Oriental mysticism—to distort their reasoning powers, and far from using them, as was the case with the pre-eminently sane Greek genius, to temper the excesses of the imagination, to employ them rather as an oestrus to lash the imaginative faculties to a state ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Pierrette opened her heart and ears to the words of this imposing priest. Sufferings predispose the mind to devotion, and nearly all young girls, impelled by instinctive tenderness, are inclined to mysticism, the deepest aspect of religion. The priest found good soil in which to sow the seed of the Gospel and the dogmas of the Church. He completely changed the current of the girl's thoughts. Pierrette loved Jesus Christ in the light in which he is presented to young ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... twilight of antiquity there were still wholly unchristian figures, which were more beautiful, harmonious, and pure than those of any Christians: e.g., Proclus. His mysticism and syncretism were things that precisely Christianity cannot reproach him with. In any case, it would be my desire to live together with such people. In comparison with them Christianity looks like some crude brutalisation, ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... been in love so often: nevertheless, she had never loved. Joan Gildea perfectly realised the distinction. Biddy had been as much, and more in love with ideas as with persons. Art, Literature, Higher Thought, Nature, Philanthrophy, Mysticism—she spelled everything with a capital letter—Platonic Passion—the last most dangerous and most recurrent. As soon as one Emotional Interest burned out another rose from the ashes. And, while they lasted, she never counted the cost ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... must again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,—that Fra Angelico was a man of (humanly speaking) perfect piety—humility, charity, and faith—that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his love ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of brain, a very large cerebellum, and a cerebrum comparatively small. Their intellect was as characteristically statical as that of the other yellow races, the dynamic impulse manifesting itself only in symbolism, mysticism, and the like. At the head of all stood the white races, Aryans for the most part, but with the Semites—Chaldeans, Phoeniceans, Hebrews, Carthaginians, Arabs—as a subdivision. Ideally, their facial angle was 90 deg.—the right angle—and their cubic inches ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... altogether. Paul's use of them in the framing of his theology is ingenious but not convincing, and was not essential to his gospel; in fact the juridical and the ethical elements in Paul's teaching stand in irreconcilable contrast. His theology is saved by his mysticism, for no sooner has he enunciated these unbelievable propositions about the death penalty of sin, the judicial sovereignty of God, justification by faith, the imputed merits of the Redeemer, and such like, than he proceeds to use them as symbols to illustrate ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... Oversoul spoken of by Emerson, but only recently has it been recognized scientifically." The French scientist pointed out that from the superconsciousness come inspiration, genius, moral values. "Belief in this is not mysticism though it recognized and valued the qualities ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... stroke. Her over-wrought nature saw in it a Judgment of Heaven. She refused to resubmit the papers; and even, when a few years later, Prince Wittgenstein died and she was free, she regarded marriage with Liszt as opposed by the Divine will. A strain of mysticism, nurtured by busy ecclesiastics, developed itself in her; she became possessed of the idea that she was a chosen instrument in the Church's hands to further its interests; and with feverish, desperate energy she devoted herself to literary work as its champion. She ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... as I have said in the great collection of popular sayings which makes the bulk of it, has no enthusiasm, no poetry, no mysticism. It has religion, and it has a very pure and lofty morality, but, for the most part, it deals with maxims of worldly prudence, and sometimes with cynical ones, and represents, on the whole, the wisdom of the market-place, and the 'man in the street.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... from the book of life with its quaint old woodcuts." G.K. makes us see all the painter could have thought or imagined as he sets us before "Mammon" or "Jonah" or "Hope" and bids us read their legend and note the texture and lines of the painting. His distinction between the Irish mysticism of Yeats and the English mysticism of Watts is especially valuable, and the book, perhaps even more than the Browning or the Dickens, manifests Gilbert's insight into the mind of the last generation. The depths and limitations of the Victorian outlook may be read in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... suffering, or vice, or sickness. All that he saw at this moment he saw tragically. The doors set open about him were still, as Keats, himself hurried to his end by an experience of passion, once expressed it, 'all dark,' and leading to darkness. There were times when Dora's faith and Ancrum's mysticism drew him irresistibly; other times when they were almost as repulsive to him as they had ever been, because they sounded to him like the formula of people setting out to explain the world 'with a light heart,' as Ollivier had gone ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in 1622 at Montigny-sur-Avre. Brought up at the College of the Jesuits at Lafleche, a prolonged sojourn in the famous Hermitage of Caen set the seal of a militant mysticism upon his life. While still young the death of an elder brother had made him heir to the title and wealth of one of the most distinguished families in France; but the ardent student renounced these feudal glories that he might devote himself entirely ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... a field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke—the line of Historical Research into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none has tried to realise, the nature ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... the sacred relics without being exposed to the danger of assassination. The visitor should also notice the inlaid stone pavement, with its frequent repetition of the fleur-de-lis and the three castles. The whole breathes the mysticism of St. Louis; the lightness of the architecture, the height of the apparently unsupported roof, and the magnificence of the decoration, render this the most perfect ecclesiastical ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the Gorgias, Philebus, Phaedrus, and Symposium is responsible for this misunderstanding, but it is well to make perfectly clear that the beautiful, of which Plato discourses in those dialogues, has nothing to do with the artistically beautiful, nor with the mysticism of the neo-Platonicians. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... dust particle, enclosing within the intricacies of its atomic form all the mystery of the cosmos, has also implanted in us the desire to question and understand. To the theological bias was added the misgivings about the inherent bent of the Indian mind towards mysticism and unchecked imagination. But in India this burning imagination which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, is also held in check by the habit of meditation. It is this restraint which confers the power to ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... there was more in the truest and deepest chivalry than the mere feats of arms and acts of dauntless daring that so often went by that name. Hazy and indistinct as his ideas were, tinged with much of the mysticism, much of the superstition of the age, they were beginning to assume definite proportions, and to threaten to colour the whole future course of his life; and beneath all the dimness and confusion one settled, leading idea ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... philosophers have erred in too rigid an exclusion of feeling and imagination. It is impossible to help feeling that his philosophy is largely moulded and created by his feeling for art—and by his oriental mysticism. He can be curiously prosaic at the same time, and this is another proof of the infinite complexity of the mind:—he can be inartistic and unpoetic so that he almost staggers us, as in his unillumining remarks on Landscape Art. Vegetation, according to Schopenhauer's theory, ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... VAQUIERAS lived at a time when prolonged habits of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend a false air of mysticism to love. . . . It is as if the intellect and the will had become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... decipher, picked up for a song at second-hand shops or on the book stands installed upon the parapets of the Seine. Only a man holding the key of tongues could get together such volumes. An atmosphere of mysticism, of superhuman insight, of secrets intact for many centuries appeared to emanate from these heaps of dusty volumes with worm-eaten leaves. And mixed with these ancient tomes were others red and conspicuous, pamphlets of socialistic propaganda, leaflets in all the languages ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... consisted in the repose and complete inaction of the soul, that life ought to be one of entire passive contemplation, and that good works and active industry were only fitting for those who were toiling in a lower sphere and had not attained to the higher regions of spiritual mysticism. Thus the '[Greek: Aesuchastai]' on Mount Athos contemplated their nose or their navel, and called the effect of their meditations "the divine light," and Molinos pined in his dungeon, and left his works to be castigated ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... that the knowledge of right and wrong and our sense of justice and right-living have been developed quite independently of all religious beliefs. The moral law embodied in the golden rule is not an outgrowth of mysticism, or of man's notions of the unknowable; but, on the contrary, is the result of experience, and was formulated in response to a recognized law of human necessity,—a law which involves the fundamental principle of ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... sense it is true that the kindness, tenderness and wisdom we find in Jesus Christ is the reflection of the same kindness, tenderness and wisdom which we recognise in the governance of the universe." This may be called mysticism, but we think it moonshine. Gross and literal sense, forsooth! Why, was not Jesus Christ a man, a most literal fact, "gross as a mountain, open, palpable?" Dean Stanley approves the Mahometan's objection, ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... a "Mystic" because he preaches a doctrine of Intuition. But his metaphysical Intuition bears no relation to the mysticism of the saint or of the fervid religious mind. He expressly says, "The doctrine I hold is a protest against mysticism since it professes to reconstruct the bridge (broken since Kant) between metaphysics and science." Yet, if by mysticism one means a certain ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... beauty a passion with the author? What is the author's attitude toward Nature—(1) does he view Nature in a purely objective way, as a mass of material things, a series of material phenomena or a mere embodiment of sensuous beauty; or (2) is there symbolism or mysticism in his attitude, that is—does he view Nature with awe as a spiritual power; or (3) is he thoroughly subjective, reading his own moods into Nature or using Nature chiefly for the expression of his ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the pupil of the learned Rhazes, and the tutor of the equally learned Avicenna, the link, in fact, between them; but his name, for some reason, perhaps because he mixed with his practice a greater degree of mysticism than was approved by the Arabian schools of the next generation, has not come down to us. This man identified the product which had defied Ibn Jasher's tests with a substance even then considered by most to be fabulous, or to be ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... in the fusion of Greeks and Egyptians which took place in Ptolemaic times (cf. Scott- Moncrieff, Paganism and Christianity in Egypt, p. 33 f.). But we may assume that already in the Persian period the Osiris cult had begun to acquire a tinge of mysticism, which, though it did not affect the mechanical reproduction of the native texts, appealed to the Oriental mind as well as to certain elements in Greek religion. Persian influence probably prepared the way for the Platonic exegesis ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the room suggested a recluse who liked to be cosy, who, perhaps, was drawn toward mystery, even mysticism, and who loved the ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a pearl of great price in the mysticism of Paul, which presupposes, not the Jesus of modern critics, nor yet the Jesus of the Synoptics, but a splendid heart-uplifting Jesus in the colours of mythology. In this Jesus Paul lived, and had a constant ecstatic joy in the everlasting ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... whatever object became statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were indiscriminately regarded by them as barbarous. But guarded by the bounds of their civilization, as by the circumfluent ocean-stream of their olden tradition, they were prompted in all ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... of fasting and of sober fare upon the perspicacity of the sleeping brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism. Philostratus, in his "Life of Apollonius Tyaneus," represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... scientific readers: Neither mysticism and pietism, nor dogmatism alone are able to sustain the Protestant churches. Mysticism and pietism yield to more consistent Catholicism; dogmatism, without symbolical books, which lose their authority where the press is free, succumbs to philosophy. The simple eternal dogma of Christ ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... this dramatic poem, (in which is attempted a picture of the mind of this celebrated character,) but it is dreamy and obscure. Writers would do well to remember, (by way of example,) that though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of Shelley, we love him and have taken him to our hearts as a poet, not because of these characteristics—but in ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... cupola a survival of Nature-worship, incorporated with the later Buddhism in a form derived from the tree temples of primeval days, and built over a receptacle for the cremated ashes of the Buddhist priesthood. A touch of mysticism added by an unfinished statue in the gloom of the shadowy vault, suggests the unknown beauty of the soul which attains Nirvana's supremest height, for the supernal exaltation of purified humanity to Divine union may not be interpreted or expressed by mortal hands, but must for ever ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... apostles, in the latter part of the last century. The movements are alike in this: that they both sought inspiration in mediaevalism, in feudalism, in the symbols of a Christianity that ran to mysticism, in the quaint, strictly pre-Raphael art which was supposed to be the result of a simple faith. In the one case, the artless and childlike remains of old German pictures and statuary were exhumed and set up as ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that he said appealed to the lofty-minded and serious; his dry cynicism, savage dislike of civilization, and frank affection for Nature, attracted others. He hit hard, but he never resented rough knocks in return, and no man had seen him out of temper with anything but mysticism and the art bred therefrom. Upon the whole, however, his materialism annoyed more than his ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... [Fr.], bedevilment; witchcraft, witchery; glamor; fetishism, fetichism, feticism^; ghost dance, hoodoo; obi, obiism^; voodoo, voodooism; Shamanism (Esquimaux), vampirism; conjuration; bewitchery, exorcism, enchantment, mysticism, second sight, mesmerism, animal magnetism; od force, odylic force^; electrobiology^, clairvoyance; spiritualism, spirit rapping, table turning. divination &c (prediction) 511; sortilege^, ordeal, sortes Virgilianae^; hocus-pocus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... S. T. P. for the purpose of puzzling the critics, were not a little amused, in the sequel, by the many guesses and conjectures into which we had ensnared some of our readers. We could even enjoy the mysticism, qualified as it was by the poor compliment, that our carefully written Address exhibited no "very prominent trait of absurdity," when we saw it thus noticed in the Edinburgh Review for November 1812:- "An Address by S. T. P. we can make nothing of; and professing our ignorance of the ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, "I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and half the personages whom he has ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the essayist return to this note of mysticism, so distinct from the daylight practicality of his normal utterance. And it was surely with these musings in his mind that the poet makes Prospero pronounce upon the phantasmagoria that the spirits have performed at his behest. We know, indeed, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... ever memorable; surveyed the spoils of Etruscan tombs; and lingered amid the varieties of household things from the barbarous nations of the present hour; and not wholly profitless have the journeys been, even if the scientific mysticism be not mastered, so that there remains in the mind a general impression of the time that has gone by, the great laws that govern the universe, and the humility that becomes man, when he sees his individuality, in relation with the mighty ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he thought it might have been the Princess for the ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... the three, in his prison at Agra. The prince died invoking the aid of Jesus, and was favourably disposed towards Christianity. He was also attracted by the doctrines of Sufism, or heretical Muhammadan mysticism, and by those of the Hindoo Upanishads. In fact, his religions attitude seems to have much resembled that of his great-grandfather Akbar. The 'Broad Church' principles and practice of Akbar failed to leave any permanent mark on Muhammadan institutions or the education of the people, and if ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the consideration of preliminary matters, such as Method, or the principles which should guide the student of Theology, and the different theories as to the source and standard of our knowledge of divine things, Rationalism, Mysticism, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Rule of Faith, and the Protestant ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... of Clairvaux (1091-1153), the strenuous opponent of Abaelard, and the great upholder of mysticism against rationalism in the early scholastic period when the two were not yet reconciled, gave utterance, in the course of his mystical effusions, to some special ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... daughters sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Beauty, mysticism and music—music in all things, from the silver flow of the river to the soft notes of the native's tongue, and dominating all, simple faith and deep-rooted, ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger? [Would that this was so:—error, superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... have leaned toward the scholastic method, now so much out of favor; but certainly he would put his own personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of evolution, from the earliest scientific writings that have been preserved, those of the Greek philosophers, down to the present time. The author shows how the ruling classes, living on the labor of others, have always supported some form of theology or mysticism, while the working classes have developed the theory of evolution, which is rounded out to its logical completion by the work of Marx, Engels and Dietzgen. The author frankly recognizes that no writer can avoid being influenced by his class environment, and he himself speaks ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His Journal is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... That an order of ideas has been established, which all deep philosophy has demanded, even when it could not make good its claim. This postulate is fulfilled. 2ndly, The postulate is fulfilled without mysticism or Platonic reveries. Ideas, however indispensable to human needs, and even to the connection of our thoughts, which came to us from nobody knew whence, must for ever have been suspicious; and, as in the memorable instance cited from ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... coldly reasoned system as an aspiration, a yearning, a deep-felt need of something better than the mob of gods who came in the train of Indra, and the darker deities who were still crowding in. Even in spite of the counteracting power of the Gospel mysticism has run easily into pantheism in Europe, and orthodox Christians sometimes slide unconsciously into it, or at least into its language.[14] But, as has been already noted, a strain of pantheism existed in the Hindu mind ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... mysticism, it seems very much akin to mental abilities which we meet frequently in our ordinary intercourse. Take, for example, the prescience of a skilled business man. Nothing is more inadequate than the rules for success laid ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... accessibility in English translation. Sa'di also was a twelfth-century poet, although of a later time than Omar. He was a student of the College in Baghdad, and he lived as a hermit for sixty years in Shiraz, singing of love and war. His mind is full of mysticism, wisdom and beauty going hand in hand through a dim twilight land. Dominating all his thought is the primary conviction that the soul is essentially part of God, and will return to God again, and meanwhile is ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... wish to call your attention to a few stamps which tell most interesting stones, and which have a touch of mysticism and symbolism, ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... of the ancient philosophy of the country, and in this assertion the reader will, in most cases, find cause for surprise. The Greek travellers in Egypt, who returned to their native land impressed with the wonderful mysticism of the Egyptians, committed their amazement to paper, and so led off that feeling of awed reverence which is felt for the philosophy of Pharaoh's subjects. But in their case there was the presence of the priests and wise men eloquently to baffle them into the state of respect, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... inquiries into large notebooks, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively. It may be added that Eeldrop was a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism, and Appleplex a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism; that Eeldrop was learned in theology, and that Appleplex studied ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... all human activities should proceed. Finally. 'Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.' Here we pass into the sphere of mystery and mysticism. The language, according to Chu Hsi, 'describes the meritorious achievements and transforming influence of sage and spiritual men in their highest extent.' From the path of duty, where we tread on solid ground, the writer suddenly raises us ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... earnest and constant prayer to his God. The God he worshipped was one whose face was not yet revealed to the crowd that hung on his strangely halting words. He spoke in mystic symbols. His mysticism was always the source of his power over the religious leaders who had gathered about him. They had not stopped to analyze the meaning of this appeal. They looked once into his shining blue-gray eyes and became his followers. He ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... yield that dream up without a regret. I can turn back from the threshold I have crossed... May there not be a purpose in our meeting like this—in the prospect of our union? If the time has come to teach, and to speak out boldly what has long been veiled in mysticism and doubt, where could a teacher so eloquent be found, or one whose natural gifts and loveliness could make those teachings of so much weight? and I—I, too, can help and protect her. Our souls need not descend from ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... that question of inductive philosophy very nice. He had read something about it in Macaulay. He liked that Platonic question very much. It bordered upon poetry and mysticism Then St. Augustine! That would be charming. He had always such a love for St. Augustine! But Fenelon? The "dove of Cambrai" versus the "eagle of Meaux!" What a delightful idea! No good housekeeper, at a cheap sale, was ever so puzzled. Finally, we decided ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... captain probably pleased her, for, if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known hardship and spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the street. 'My friends,' he was saying, 'you have the kingdom of heaven within you and it would take a pretty big ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... theosophy and spiritualism—the mysticism of the East—have been permeating Christendom in recent years. Mme. Jean Delaire, writing in a London review, said some ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her—an enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... will convince him that it is true. I mean a very much simpler thing than that, and a very much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you know about God?—I put emphasis upon the word 'know'—What do you know about Him, however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear, and hope, and question, about Him? What ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... went leaping from one swing to another, from one carousel or toboggan-chute to the next, without having any special object in view, without knowing why and wherefor. He even entered such mazes of philosophy, such labyrinths of mysticism as put those of the Arabian grammaticasters in the shade. To him, education was a sport, pursued in a free spirit after his own fancy, without method or discipline. For two years and more he did little but ramble ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Then came a series of works by Hudson, including "Psychic Phenomena," then Oliver Lodge's "Survival of Man," "Man and the Universe," and "Life and Matter." Farther along were works by Lowes Dickinson and Professor William James, Bowden's "The Imitation of Buddha" and Inge's "Christian Mysticism." At the end of the shelf, bound in white vellum, was Don Lorenzo ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... you keep these old things?" he said, startled entirely out of his absurd tact of mysticism. "Why do you hang them ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the opening of my Classes for the study of the pre-Reformation, Reformation, and post-Reformation Mystics during Session 1894-5. A Lecture on WILLIAM LAW was delivered at the opening of a former Session as an Introduction to the whole subject of Mysticism. ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... crackpot's idea back then. In spite of the work of many intelligent, sane men, who had shown that mental powers above and beyond the ordinary did exist, the average man simply laughed off such nonsense. It was mysticism; it was magic; it was foolish superstition. It was anything ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... deliberate confidence he set to work to conquer her, and make her his own. It was a traitorous return, but a very natural one. And she, sweet creature! walked straight into the pleasant snare, utterly blind, because she fancied that she saw clearly. In the pride of her mysticism, she had fancied herself above so commonplace a passion as love. It was a curious feature of lower humanity, which she might investigate and analyse harmlessly as a cold scientific spectator; and, in her mingled pride and purity, she used to indulge Lancelot in metaphysical disquisitions ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for the same realities to every reader. But ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the Sermon on the Mount, and not go picking and choosing bits out of it. For I am sure that if you will take the whole of its teaching you will find yourself next door to, if not in the very inmost chamber of, the mysticism of the Gospel of John ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... universally acknowledged; the high pretensions of his system, pretensions, it is true, such as had been a thousand times put forth, a thousand times found wanting, still excited notice, when so backed by ability and reputation. The air of mysticism connected with these doctrines was attractive to the German mind, with which the vague and the vast are always pleasing qualities; the dreadful array of first principles, the forest huge of terminology and definitions, where the panting intellect of weaker men wanders ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... of the social forces of production within modern society, and the better knowledge the workers obtain of their true relations to each other and to Nature, loosen the chains of ghost worship and mysticism from their limbs and lessen the power of religion as a political weapon in the hands of the ruling class, while they form, at the same time, the material and intellectual preparation for an intelligently organized society. The matter has been put ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... millions, the worshipper has glimpses of one single divine essence. The ritual, as we have seen, is more or less magical in character. The general elements of the beliefs are found, in various proportions, everywhere; the pantheistic mysticism is almost peculiar to India. It is, perhaps, needless to repeat that a faith so very composite, and already so strongly differentiated, cannot possibly be "primitive," and that the beliefs and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... accustomed to divide for separate study. It embodies in one living structure grand and peculiar views of physical science, refined and subtle theorems on abstract metaphysics, an edifice of fanciful mysticism, a most elaborate and far-reaching system of practical morality, and finally a church organization as broad in its principles and as finely wrought in its most intricate network as ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... heap they may. I may have theorized a little too much in laying stress on the supernatural element in Wuthering Heights. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Bronte's "mysticism". It is because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Bronte was in love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that Charlotte was in love with ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... measure more than it has entered into his heart to conceive? Is the moon a name only for a certain tonnage of dead matter, and is the law of passion parochial while the law of gravitation is universal? Mysticism will observe no such ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... element in the process was due to the conscious action of Robert de Borron, who well understood the character of his material, and radically remodelled the whole on the basis of the triple Mystery tradition translated into terms of high Christian Mysticism. A notable feature of Borron's version is his utilization of the tradition of the final Messianic Feast, in combination with his Eucharistic symbolism, a combination thoroughly familiar ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... diametrically opposite; and this opposition seems to arise less from the various degrees of intellectual culture, than from the different dispositions of nations, some of which are more inclined to mysticism, and others more governed by the senses, and by external impressions. Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon earth, charging them with the care of ruling nations, and giving them laws, as in the fables of the East; ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the senses, its mystical picturesqueness—Des Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his only care in art—for the somewhat diseased, or ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons |
