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Dogmatic   Listen
noun
dogmatic  n.  One of an ancient sect of physicians who went by general principles; opposed to the Empiric.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dogmatic" Quotes from Famous Books



... which the individual organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing or counterbalancing that in which it super-abounds,—a theory upon which some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success. But on these essays, slight and suggestive, rather than dogmatic, I set no value. I had been for the last two years engaged on a work of much wider range, endeared to me by a far bolder ambition,—a work upon which I fondly hoped to found an enduring reputation as a severe and original physiologist. It was an Inquiry into Organic ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... title-deeds of our opinions, the reason of our practices, are demanded. Our very right to exist as a distinct society is questioned. Our old literature—the precious journals and biographies of early and later Friends—is comparatively neglected for sensational and dogmatic publications. We bear complaints of a want of educated ministers; the utility of silent meetings is denied, and praying and preaching regarded as matters of will and option. There is a growing desire for experimenting upon the dogmas and expedients ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... other hand, has laughed at M. Leroux and his ideas on property, charging him with TAUTOLOGY and CHILDISHNESS. "Le National" does not wish to understand. Is it necessary to remind this journal that it has no right to deride a dogmatic philosopher, because it is without a doctrine itself? From its foundation, "Le National" has been a nursery of intriguers and renegades. From time to time it takes care to warn its readers. Instead of lamenting over all its defections, the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... to declare that the religious state is an obstacle to the fulfilment of such like duties. This error is rejected by Pope Boniface [*Boniface IV] for the reasons given above. His words which are quoted (XVI, qu. i, can. Sunt. nonnulli) are these: "There are some who without any dogmatic proof, and with extreme daring, inspired with a zeal rather of bitterness than of love, assert that monks though they be dead to the world and live to God, are unworthy of the power of the priestly office, and that they cannot confer penance, nor christen, nor absolve in virtue ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... board, and children with and without the golden spoon; there were men whose names were known on both sides of the Atlantic and whose reputations for integrity, sagacity, intellect, and,—it must be confessed,—corruptness, (with the author's apology for the inclusion); doughty but dogmatic university men who had penetrated the wildernesses as naturalists, entomologists, mineralogists, archaeologists, explorers; sportsmen who had forsaken the lion, rhinoceros, hartebeest and elephant of Africa for the jaguar, cougar, armadillo ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... not intended to be dogmatic, but it may be worth while to state from the pupil's point of view and from memory what kind of teacher a college student who is really interested in literature would ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... to deliver his conscience before conveying the message of State with which he is charged—is often wordy, sometimes tedious, now and then narrow as a village gossip, always supremely and absolutely dogmatic, seeing no way but his own and acknowledging no possibility of error; and the extreme and perpetual movement of his ever-active mind, his high-blooded intolerance, the restless force about him which never pauses to take breath, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... time to time, was observable in the increased impatience of allusion to national institutions and conventional distinctions to be found in his later books. Party divisions he cared for less and less as life moved on; but the decisive, peremptory, dogmatic style, into which a habit of rapid remark on topics of the day will betray the most candid and considerate commentator, displayed its influence, perhaps not always consciously to himself, in the underlying ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... provoke the reader almost as much as the former gives him delight. It disturbs the least critical mind to find the keenest insight in company with the loudest bravado, and the statement of a wise or beautiful thought followed up by a dogmatic assertion of infallibility as harsh as a slap on the face. The indisposition to recognize such a genius comes from the fact that he irritates as well as stimulates the minds he addresses. Everybody reads him, but the fooling he inspires is made up of admiration and exasperation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... Any static or dogmatic definition of Socialism, like any purely idealistic formulation, no matter how revolutionary or accurate it may be, necessarily invites purely opportunist methods. A widely accepted static definition declares that Socialism is "the collective ownership of the means of production ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... then, lurks the transcendent power of Christianity as an organ of political movement? Simply in the fact that it brings men into the most tender and affecting relations with God, and, over and above this, that it rests upon a dogmatic or doctrinal basis. These features were never suspected even as possible until Christianity revealed them. Hence Christianity 'carried along with itself its own authentication; since, while other religions introduced men simply to ceremonies ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every thought of a world to come, or else caused it to assume a poetic instead of a dogmatic form. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... the ingenuous simplification of opinions peculiar to assemblies is offered by the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Dogmatic and logical to a man, and their brains full of vague generalities, they busied themselves with the application of fixed-principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them, with reason, that ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... so readily used as a framework for those theological concepts which Christianity had brought into the world. Thus adopted by men who were recognized authorities in the Church,—especially men like Augustine and the Areopagite,—Platonism endured for centuries as the rational element in dogmatic exposition. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... evil. But the general attitude towards life which is suggested in that essay still seems to me, in the main, the one which must be adopted in times of stress and difficulty by those who have no dogmatic religious beliefs, if inward defeat is ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... encountered, the insults they endured, the sacrifices they submitted to, the discouragements they confronted in many ways and forms in prosecuting their arduous undertaking. On the contrary, he has only bitter words of condemnation. In his estimation, and according to his dogmatic utterance, they were criminals—political criminals. His words make it very manifest that, if Mr. Roosevelt had been a voter in 1840, he would not have been an Abolitionist. He would not have been one of that devoted little band of political philanthropists who went out, like ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... on such subjects, the expected Coleridge cast of thought was very visible; and he seemed to express it even with exaggeration, and in a fearless dogmatic manner. Identity of sentiment, difference of opinion: these are the known elements of a pleasant dialogue. We parted with the mutual wish to meet again;—which accordingly, at his Father's house and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... over him. His old religious peace had been unexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the wars of dogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the United States these were impassioned and rancorous to a degree which even now, less than half a century later, can scarce be understood; so rapidly has ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... ill-judging, wrong-headed; prejudiced &c. v.; jaundiced; shortsighted, purblind; partial, one-sided, superficial. narrow-minded, narrow-souled[obs3]; mean-spirited; confined, illiberal, intolerant, besotted, infatuated, fanatical, entete[Fr], positive, dogmatic, conceited; opinative, opiniative[obs3]; opinioned, opinionate, opinionative, opinionated; self-opinioned, wedded to an opinion, opinitre; bigoted &c. (obstinate) 606; crotchety, fussy, impracticable; unreasonable, stupid &c. 499; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... use of the word: the 'irreligious' man is one who has made up his mind either that there is no future world, or that it is so remote, as regards effectivity, as to have no bearing upon this. And that is a religion—at least it is a dogmatic creed—as much ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... Gallican bishops welcomed at that time with lively satisfaction, its eloquent pleadings in favor of their cause. But, at a later period, the French clergy discovered in St. Cyran's book free-thinking concealed under dogmatic forms. "In case of heresy any Christian may become judge," said Petrus Aurelius. Who, then, should be commissioned to define heresy? So M. de St. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... Agatha spoke in a dogmatic way that amused Magdalen, and she said, "Well, I shall be able to judge when we are at the Goyle. Vera, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality: Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogant motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... have had to encounter the dislike of mealy-mouthed Freethinkers, who want omelettes without breaking of eggs and revolutions without shedding of blood. They object to ridiculing people who say that twice two are five. They even resent a dogmatic statement that twice two are four. Perhaps they think four and a half a very fair compromise. Now this is recreancy to truth, and therefore to progress. No great cause was ever won by the half-hearted. Let us be faithful to our convictions, and shun ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote

... volume, stepped nearer to him. The Inca repulsed him with disdain. Wrenching open the covers he glanced rapidly at the book, and perhaps suddenly realizing the full sense of the insult which had been offered to him in the demands {83} of the dogmatic and domineering Dominican, he threw the sacred volume to the ground in ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... accept the law of Allah as written by His prophet, which will assuredly bring you unimaginable joys, as is promised in the Book of the Camel? For what says the chosen one?"—and he broke away into one of those dogmatic texts which pass in every creed as an argument. "Besides, is it not clear that God is with us, since from the beginning, when we had but sticks against the rifles of the Turks, victory has always been with us? Have we ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... deepen them and to remove the wreck of the sea's destroying action" ("Geol. Observations," pages 66, 67).) that rivers deepen and the sea widens valleys, and I am inclined largely to stick to this, adding ice to water. I am sorry to hear that Tyndall has grown dogmatic. H. Wedgwood was saying the other day that T.'s writings and speaking gave him the idea of intense conceit. I hope it is not so, for he is a grand man ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... in an aggressive way, saluted the book with an emphatic and explosive kiss, and then stood erect, square-shouldered and defiant, giving the court and all concerned to understand by her attitude that it must not be imagined any advantage could be taken of her. She told her story in a bluff dogmatic way. She was bailed up by the miscreants and scared out of her seven senses. They demanded her money or her life, and she believed that it was their intention to leave her 'welterin' in her gore'; and having said as much she squared round ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... discharged from the ship ignorant of the colony, were at once thrown into every temptation of convict associations. They had been instructed in the principles of religion, reading and needlework, and the fruit of these labors will hereafter perhaps, appear; but whoever expects much from mere dogmatic knowledge, will be doomed to disappointment. On the death of her husband Mrs. Bowden returned to England, convinced that moral insanity is far more hopeless than the diseases of Hanwell. This lady and her friends and coadjutors, the Misses Holdich, found the women ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world—it had evidently been meant to go there— and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... dogmatic, controversy was the result of these letters. In a letter to Jane Smith, Angelina says: "I cannot understand why they (the abolitionists) so exceedingly regret sister's having begun those letters. Brother Weld was not satisfied with writing us one letter about them, but we have received two more ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... sends his spirit upon you, great changes in your beliefs will take place. Views concerning dogmatic Christianity should broaden after this dream, or you may be severely chastised for some indiscreet action which has brought shame upon you. God speaks oftener to those who transgress than those who do not. It is ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... is the yearly presence of American whalers among them making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic, so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... however, to one obvious connecting link, and that is, the horse-riding nomads of the north, who are now, it is true, in some parts a little more settled than they used to be, and who have been tamed in various degrees by dogmatic religions unknown to them in ancient times, but who remain in many respects now very much what they were 3000 years ago. Of course pedlars, hawkers, and even long-course caravans travelled, whenever the routes ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... lost himself again in the recollection of Mrs. Travers and Immada looking at each other—the beginning and the end, the flower and the leaf, the phrase and the cry. Mr. Travers' voice went on dogmatic and obstinate for a long time. The end came with a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... the nineteenth century came nearer bringing mind and body together again. The new astronomical conception of the world and the growing objective experimental science gradually began to command confidence, and from being a destroyer of excessively dogmatic notions, science began to rise to its modern constructive and creative position. But the problem of mind remained on a wrong basis and still does so even with most scientists. Too much had been claimed for the psyche, and because of the singling out of a great world ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... mighty god into a demon huntsman, who pursued his nightly round in chase of human souls, saw in the train of the infernal master of the hunt only the spectres of suicides, drunkards, and ruffians; and, with all the uncharitableness of a dogmatic faith, the spirits of children who died unbaptized, whose hard fate had thrown them into such evil company. This was the way in which that wide-spread superstition arose, which sees in the phantoms of the clouds ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... have been greater geniuses, others more learned, others more devout, and others more amiable and interesting; but none ever evinced greater intrepidity, or combined greater qualities of mind and heart. He had his faults: he was irritable, dogmatic, and abusive in his controversial writings. He had no toleration for those who differed from him—the fault of the age. But he was genial, joyous, friendly, and disinterested. His labors were gigantic; his sincerity unimpeached; his piety enlightened; his zeal ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... Christendom is conducted, for the most part, on both sides, with distinguished courtesy. Not that the question at issue is, or is felt to be, any less vital than former ones. The aim of modern free-inquiry is to remove religious life from the dogmatic basis, upon which, in Christian lands, it has hitherto stood. Denying the existence, and sometimes the possibility, of a supernatural revelation, now admitting, now doubting, and now rejecting the personal immortality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... the whole movement as evil and teach that the world must grow increasingly worse until some divine cataclysm shall bring its hopeless corruption to an end; others treat the movement as useful but of minor import, while they try to save men by belief in dogmatic creeds or by carefully engineered emotional experiences. Meanwhile, no words can exaggerate the fidelity, the vigour, the hopefulness, and the elevated spirit with which many of our best young men and women ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... is also illustrated by the tone of his correspondence. Deferential or indulgent, he never adopted a superior manner, was never positive or dogmatic. When his correspondents were wrong, he sought to justify their mistakes; when he combated the explanation of another, he never used a cutting expression, or a spiteful allusion, as Ibn Ezra ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... worldly souls are so quick to burn. He would have said that he himself professed no holiness beyond the average, and would have acknowledged privately at least that he was at any rate uncertain of the whole dogmatic scheme of religion; but that he could not tolerate a man whose whole life was on the outside confessedly devoted to both sides of religion, faith and morals, and who claimed the world's reverence for himself on the score of it. He knit his forehead in a righteous fury, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... this title, the demand in question assumes a lofty bearing and readily adopts a position, not merely of discontent, but of open revolt against the actual condition of the world. To estimate such a feeling and such views aright, the demands insisted upon and the very dogmatic opinions asserted must be examined. At no time so much as in our own, have such general principles and notions been advanced, or with greater assurance. If, in days gone by, history seems to present ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... possible, it revolves round the earth in the condition, for the most part, of a globular mass of vesicular lava or slag, possessing no interest except as a notable example of a "burnt-out planet." In answer to these dogmatic assertions, it may be said that, notwithstanding the multiplication of monographs and photographs, the knowledge we possess, even of the larger and more prominent objects, is far too slight to justify us ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... heard that theologians were inclined to be dogmatic in controversy, and I fear that you are no exception, Mr. Hemstead. So, since I have had the last word, with your permission, I retire 'of ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that Peer Gynt is a poem, not a satire; The League of Youth a 'simple comedy and nothing more'; Emperor and Galilean an 'entirely realistic work'; that in Ghosts 'there is not a single ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... clever and sympathetic woman may arouse in philosophic minds of a certain calibre—in a Condillac, a Joubert, a D'Alembert, a Mill. Though Hemsterhuys himself never advanced from a philosophy of religion to the active region of dogmatic professions, his disciple could not find contentment on his austere heights. In the very year of Diderot's death (1784) the Princess Galitzin became a catholic, and her son became not only a catholic but a zealous missionary of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... presence of objects possessing a distinct and peculiar plan of structure." Two years later, however, in a lecture before this association, he took a truer position. "Our views of the universe," he said, "are undergoing important changes; let us wait for more facts with minds unfettered by any dogmatic theory, and, therefore, free to receive the teaching, whatever it may ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... inner door opened and in the opening appeared the short and blocky figure of a somewhat elderly, old-fashioned-looking man with a square homely face—a face which instantly she classified as belonging to a rather stupid, very dogmatic and utterly honest man. He had outjutting, belligerent eyebrows and a stubborn underjaw that was badly undershot. He spoke as he entered and his tone ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... bearer too of a noble name, to his parents as their daughter-in-law, he replied that, being a Greek, she was of course a Melchite. Those present asked no better reason; as soon as the question of creed was raised the conversation, as usual in these convivial evenings, became a squabble over dogmatic differences; in the course of it a legal official ventured to opine that if the case had been that of a less personage than a son of the Mukaukas—for whom it was, of course, out of the question—of a mere Jacobite citizen and his Melchite ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the coming century is in perfect harmony with the entire current of modern thought. This harmony manifests itself even on the fundamental question of the predominance given to the vital necessity of collective or social solidarity over the dogmatic exaggerations of individualism, and if the latter at the close of the last century was the outward sign of a potent and fruitful awakening, it inevitably leads, through the pathological manifestations of unbridled competition, to the "libertarian" explosions of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... find that the clips are too wide for your nose, showing that the lady's nose was very broad at the base. This sort of nose is usually a short and coarse one, but there are a sufficient number of exceptions to prevent me from being dogmatic or from insisting upon this point in my description. My own face is a narrow one, and yet I find that I cannot get my eyes into the centre, or near the centre, of these glasses. Therefore the lady's eyes are set very ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... These statements were dogmatic, and the reverse of conciliatory. One should not, in attempting to convert any person, begin by reviling his religion. Knox adopted the same method with Mary Stuart: the method is impossible. It is not to be marvelled at if the Regent did style the ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... men—for with but another exception they were so—discharged their duty as became them. The process of expulsion was gone into, but rather with a spirit of sorrow for the failings of an erring and sinful fellow-creature, than with any of the dogmatic and fiery indignation, which, under the plea of charity for his soul, is too often poured upon the head of a backslider. The fact now was that the consequences of his crime were about to come home to him, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... into the claws of the Megatherium, though I do not suppose that the restorer ever expected, when he did so, that any one would entertain the idea that this gigantic beast was in the habit of climbing trees; but I would fain ask your correspondent on what grounds he makes the dogmatic assertion that "Palms there were none, at that period of telluric formation." I will simply remind him of the vast numbers of fossil fruits, and other remains of palms, in the London clay of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various

... followed later on by the Eclectici and a troop of other sects, whose wranglings, and whose very names, are now forgotten. In his History of Medicine, Dr. Bostock gives a sketch of the attitude of Galen towards the rival schools. "In his general principles he may be considered as belonging to the Dogmatic sect, for his method was to reduce all his knowledge, as acquired by the observation of facts, to general theoretical principles. These principles he indeed professed to deduce from experience and observation,[267] and we have abundant proofs of his diligence ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... by inveteracy; "fierce as wild bulls, untamable as flies." Of such men we have nowadays too many. Men are too much in the way of supposing that doing is being; that theology and excogitation, and fierce dogmatic assertion of what they consider truth, is godliness; that obedience is merely an occasional great act, and not a series of acts, issuing from a state, like the stream ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... rooms, where the Revolution had sought him out to put to a sudden test his dormant instincts, his half-conscious thoughts and almost wholly unconscious ambitions, by the touch as of some furious and dogmatic religion, with its call to frantic sacrifices, its tender resignations, its dreams and hopes uplifting the soul by the side of the most sombre moods of despair. And Mr. Razumov had let go the door-handle and had come back to the middle of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... to the exercise of undue authority of the hierarchy over the lay membership. This dominating principle became dogmatic, until the members of the church became slaves to an arbitrary government. The only saving quality in this was the fact that the members of the clergy were chosen from the laity, which kept up the connection between the higher and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... large measure to his influence over the popular imagination by the magic power of high-sounding words, which were mostly beyond the comprehension of his hearers. His teachings have been aptly described as a system of dogmatic and fantastic pseudo-philosophy. The following quotation may serve as ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... relation to the desire for happiness? If the dictates of the moral sense be treated as ultimate, an absolutely arbitrary element is introduced; and we have one of the 'innate ideas' exploded by Locke, a belief summarily intruded into the system without definite relations to any other beliefs: a dogmatic assertion which refuses to be tested or to be correlated with other dogmas; a reduction therefore of the whole system to chaos. It is at best an instinctive belief which requires to be justified and corrected by reference to some other criterion. Or resolve morality into 'reason,' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... is a temperate critic, MacColl a brilliant, revolutionary one. The critical temper in either man is not dogmatic. Seurat, the French Neo-Impressionist, has defended his theories; indeed, the number of talented Frenchmen who paint well and write with style as well as substance is amazing. Rossetti would no longer be a rare bird in these days of piping painters, musicians who are poets, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... grey dawn of early times whom superstition had transformed into gods, or Euhemerism as it was called,(8) there were chiefly three philosophical schools that came to be of importance for Italy; viz. the two dogmatic schools of Epicurus (484) and Zeno (491) and the sceptical school of Arcesilaus (513) and Carneades (541-625), or, to use the school-names, Epicureanism, the Stoa, and the newer Academy. The last of these schools, which started from the impossibility of assured knowledge and in its ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... season; the flower drops off But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death Days when you lay on your back and the sky rained apples Decent insincerity Determine that the future is in our debt, and draw on it Discreet play with her eyelids in our encounters Dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man Excellent is pride; but oh! be sure of its foundations Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them Habit of antedating his sagacity He clearly could not learn from misfortune He thinks or he chews He would neither retort nor defend himself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... their popularity was reached about 1764. A feeling that the true increase of wealth was not in a mere increase of money, but in the products of the soil, led them naturally into a reaction against mercantilism, but also made them dogmatic and overbearing in their one-sided system, which did not recognize that labor in all industries created wealth. As the mercantile system found a great minister in Colbert to carry those opinions into effect on a national scale, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... precisely his. Your doctrine is simply Pessimism, with an element of dogmatic faith added. With Schopenhauer, the will to live is the root of sin; mortify this, deny the first instincts of your being, and you approach righteousness. Buddhism has the same system. And, in deducing all this from the plain teachings of Christianity, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... Lectures. It was the belief of the testator that any orderly presentation of the facts of nature or history contributed to the end of this foundation more effectively than any attempt to emphasize the elements of doctrine or of creed; and he therefore provided that lectures on dogmatic or polemical theology should be excluded from the scope of this foundation, and that the subjects should be selected rather from the domains of natural science and history, giving special prominence to astronomy, chemistry, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... metaphysicians rarely make avowals of this kind. They present their systems as a well-connected whole, and they set forth its different parts, even the boldest of them, in the same dogmatic tone, and without warning that we ought to attach very unequal degrees of confidence to these various parts. This is a deplorable method, and to it is perhaps due the kind of disdain that observers and experimentalists feel for metaphysics—a disdain ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... a fallacy in this somewhat dogmatic statement. Perhaps the blind are not so utterly dark but they may have certain dim simulacra of external objects before their eyes and minds. Apart from this, however, Blacklock's poetry endures only from its connexion with the author's misfortune, and from the fact that ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... thing, delicately built, slender yet not thin, with lustrous golden hair, large, well-opened, dark blue eyes, a complexion daintily white and roseate,—a fairy-like presence indeed, but with a prosaic, matter-of-fact manner and a dogmatic pose ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... a mere versification of the Creed, yet when Adam ceased to be dogmatic and broke into true prayer, his verse added a lofty beauty even to the Holy Ghost; a beauty ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small; yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence. These speculations, instead of being treated as the amusement of a vacant hour, became the most serious business of the present, and the most useful preparation for a future, life. A theology, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... could no longer seek in the poets the inspiration and light that lead to goodness and truth. In our own day, almost above all others, we need the poets for these ethical and religious purposes. For the utterances of the dogmatic teacher of religion have been divested of much of their ancient authority; and the moral philosopher is often regarded either as a vendor of commonplaces or as the votary of a discredited science, whose primary principles are matter of ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... his own mind was open to the best method of preparing the country and that Mr. Garrison showed petulance and impatience in handling the matter—the sober, second thought of the country readily and quickly came to the President's support in the belief that the dogmatic attitude of the Secretary of War, instead of ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... the term, yet they are ingeniously invented by Ten Dai Dai Shi to set the Buddhist Scriptures in the order of doctrinal development, and place Saddharma-pundarika in the highest rank among the Mahayana books. His argument, however dogmatic and anti-historical in no small degree, would be not a little valuable for our reader, who wants to know the general phase of the Buddhist Canon, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... need not be as completely dogmatic as the Roman. Our battle is too varying an affair. But some clearly defined rules, established by experience, would prevent the gross errors of inefficients. (Such as causing skirmishers to fall ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... to see a joke and loving laughter for its own sake, even when the point told against themselves, this people of mockers felt convinced the Gods appreciated raillery just as well as men did. Moreover, the Greeks do not appear to have had any very strong attachment to Paganism as a matter of dogmatic belief. To say nothing of the enlightened classes, who saw in this vast hierarchy of divinities only an ingenious allegory, the populace even was mainly concerned with the processions and songs and dances, the banquets and spectacular shows and all the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... she drew was, in truth, the picture of one of those social facts on which perhaps the future of England depends. She drew it girlishly, quite unconscious of its large bearings, gossiping about this person and that, with a free expenditure of very dogmatic opinion on the habits and ways which were not hers. But, on the whole, the picture emerged, and David had never liked her talk so well. The little self-centred thing had somehow been made to wonder and admire; which is much ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... religion are incompatible and antagonistic, so dear to the hearts of the scientists in the middle of the nineteenth century, and still repeated with mechanical certainty in every secularist mission-hall, is likely to undergo a complete revision in the near future. The antagonism between dogmatic religion and materialistic science will never be removed. But the signs are apparent everywhere that religion is shedding its adherence to outer forms and entering into the freedom of the living spirit, whilst science is turning to problems which used ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... unable to see that they cannot alter the time of day for all that; only they can and do prevent many well-intentioned people from trusting to it any longer. But there are others here and there whom a dogmatic form of religion has been quite unable to spoil, whose more simple turn of mind draws out of the very system that appears to you so lifeless and effete, a real faith, a personal possession, which no one can take ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... quite probable that such things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind without logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than Politics—unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that one can really say for ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... Brissot, the inspirer of the Gironde, the dogmatic statesman of a party which needed ideas and a leader, ascended the tribune in the midst of anticipated plaudits which betokened his importance in the new Assembly. His voice was for war, as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... also where this idea that it is necessary artificially to stimulate the defensive zeal of each country by resisting any tendency to agreement and understanding leads. It leads even so good a man as Lord Roberts into the trap of dogmatic prophesy concerning the intentions of a very complex heterogeneous nation of 65 million people. Lord Roberts could not possibly tell you what his own country will do five, ten, or fifteen years hence in such matters as Home Rule or the Suffragists, or even the payment of doctors, but ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward was extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those who did not venture to assert themselves, but with the self-assertive he was very modest. He was impressed by Philip's assurance, and accepted meekly Philip's implied suggestion that the painter's arrogant claim to be the sole possible judge of painting has ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... though the Church exerted a considerable influence on the growth of a common type of civilization in the West, in modern times religion has proved a divisive rather than a unifying factor. During the last generation or two, however, there has been a decline of the dogmatic and sectarian tempers. This change is largely due to the growth of the scientific spirit, and, as in other realms of inquiry so in the study of religion, international co-operation has steadily developed. Both literary criticism and psychological ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... yet from propounding anything which might be inconsistent with the ascertained meaning of the Pope, now insisted without hesitation on this contradiction. That Papal pronouncement, he declared, did not bear the character of a dogmatic decree, and a distinction was to be drawn between a decree of the Pope and its acceptance by ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings into a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore, be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical and sympathetic, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... opinions of men or measures, and hence he very often gave offense. It should be borne in mind that the public men of the age when General Scott came on the stage, both military and civil, were as a rule dignified, formal, and to some extent dogmatic. They held themselves with great dignity, and their magnetism was the result of their commanding abilities and high character, and they did not rely for popularity upon ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright

... It is very interesting as showing the length to which men will go in the interest of peace, even to the use of violence. It illustrates also the fact that kindness to the sick and wounded, simply because they are helpless and needy, is modern, a humanitarian not a dogmatic development. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... can make revolutions with gloves on," he said in a solemn, dogmatic tone. "The men of 'ninety-three did not wear them. You can not make an omelette without first breaking ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... "Finality, in a time of upheaval, is a relative term, and I hope, at intervals of six months or so, to publish my penultimate, quasi-ultimate and paulo-post-ultimate views on the vital beliefs which underlie the fantastic superstructure of dogmatic theology." The new work will be illustrated with three portraits of the author by Mr. Marcellus Thom, taken at various stages of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various

... the dogmatic rejoinder. "Nor nobody knows as much now as they did in ancient times a'ready. I mean back in ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin

... early became acquainted with the dogmas of Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. They separated, compared and analyzed, and saw for themselves that dogmatic religions were all much alike. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In studying the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion fits a certain man in a certain stage of his evolution, and so perhaps ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... narrowest dogmatists of science are beginning to have a glimpse of the nobler knowledge of the future. Prof. Huxley, the most dogmatic of British sceptics, has ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... Elder in a dogmatic axent, real doggy it wuz, "I say again, the saloon is the Poor ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... twig will bend upwards. The movements of the twig may thus be accounted for, but, comparatively, so little is known or understood of the marvellous influences and workings of electricity that it is impossible to be dogmatic on the question. ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... had crammed too many impressions and emotions into his visit; and now he was going back to well-known and peaceful activities. The sight of his rooms pleased him, and the foregathering with the three or four of his colleagues was a great relief. Mr. Redmayne was incisive and dogmatic, but evidently pleased to see him back. He had not been away, and professed that holidays and change of scene were distracting and exhausting. "It takes me six weeks to recover from a holiday," he said. He had had an old friend to stay with him, a country parson, and he had ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... have a hearing? How often must it be repeated that theology as well as physical science is satisfied by the Diluvial explanation of the origin of petrified organisms, whereas inexorable logic compels the Vulcanists to own that their thesis is subversive of all dogmatic belief?" ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... of dogmatic controversy, metaphysical speculation, and desire for system, explanations have been devised in a hundred different forms, from that of Aquinas to that of Calvin; from that of Anselm to that of Grotius; from that of Socinus to that of Bushnell. Tertullian describes the profound ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... lived in stormy times, agitated by frightful disorders, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under the astonishing High Priest of Emesa, Elagabalus, and he tranquilly prepared his sermons, his dogmatic writings, his pleadings, his homelies, while the Roman Empire shook on its foundations, while the follies of Asia, while the ordures of paganism were full to the brim. With the utmost sang-froid, he recommended carnal abstinence, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... Peters, one of those preachers who was able to exchange the obscurity of a country parish for the public fame of a London pulpit, by reason of a certain gift of rhetorical power, the value of which it is impossible to estimate to-day. Such of his sermons as are still extant are prosy, long-winded, dogmatic absurdities, overloaded with periphrastic illustrations in scriptural language. They are meaningless to a degree, which would make one wonder at the docility and patience of a seventeenth century congregation, if one had not witnessed a similar spirit ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry

... is where he seems to have revised! "Would that he had blotted a thousand"—a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture once more to say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome German superstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmatic faith in the plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare's clowns. Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said, of Richard's meek "undoing" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in fact, the play ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that they are not), but because most Russians—indeed, nearly all Russian— are in that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible, and which makes religion possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To be a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the State. But in countries that have come under the influence of what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky



Words linked to "Dogmatic" :   narrow, narrow-minded



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