"Freewill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... self-consisting independence of Hungary was never disputed, but was recognized by all powers of the earth, sanctioned by treaties made with the Hapsburg dynasty, at the era when this dynasty, by the freewill of my nation, which acted as one of two contracting parties, was invested with the kingly crown of Hungary. Even more, this independence of the kingdom was acknowledged to make a part of the international law of Europe, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... elimination it was possible to found sociology. But it may be urged that it is patent on the face of history that its course has constantly been shaped and modified by the wills of individuals (We can ignore here the metaphysical question of freewill and determinism. For the character of the individual's brain depends in any case on ante-natal accidents and coincidences, and so it may be said that the role of individuals ultimately depends on chance,—the accidental coincidence of independent sequences.), ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... he had not created it, the action could not have resulted, yet He has created the soul to act upon its own promptings, and entirely independent of Himself, holding it, at the same time, to a strict accountability for all the deeds done in the body. To deny this, is to deny the whole doctrine of freewill agency, and with it that of all human responsibility, unless we go to the other and blasphemous extreme of branding with cruelty and injustice the entire system of revealed religion. In consequence, then, of this independent action ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... irreconcilable. If Chance does not exist, we must admit fatalism, that is to say, the compulsory co-ordination of things under the rule of a general plan. Why then do we rebel? If man is not free, what becomes of the scaffolding of his moral sense? Or, if he can control his destiny, if by his own freewill he can interfere with the execution of the general ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... even in mathematical truth I think there is an element of morality. If a man could believe that two and two are five, he would appear to me a worse man, morally, for so believing. So then, conscience rather than freewill is the highest quality of the soul, because it deals with questions solely in ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity—give them anything high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to think ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... other, viz., that man is never the agent of his acts right or wrong. Indeed, like a wooden machine, man is not an agent (in all he does). In this respect, three opinions are entertained; some say that everything is ordained by God; some say that our acts are the result of free-will; and others say that our acts are the result of those of our past lives. Listen then, therefore, with patience, to the evil that hath ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Butler. He thought it untrue even absurd—but he did not fear its practical consequences. He showed, on the contrary, in the 'Analogy,' that as far as human conduct is concerned, the two theories of free-will and necessity would come to the same in ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... faith and understanding. For all the world's sin alone Christ paid the price, In his only death was man's life always resting, And not in will-works, nor yet in man's deserving, The light of our faith makes this thing evident, And not the practice of other experiment. Where is now free-will, whom the hypocrites commend, Whereby they report they may at their own pleasure Do good of themselves, though grace and faith be absent, And have good intents their madness with to measure? The will of the flesh is proved here small treasure, And so is man's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told, that he—and not perverse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher principle, than the apprehension of setting ill patterns ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... "Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church." The recipe is simple and efficacious—cease to hire them, and they will cease to be hirelings. Suppress all ecclesiastical endowments, and let the clergyman be supported by free-will offerings. The fact that this would have consigned about half the established clergy to beggary does not trouble him; nor were they likely to be greatly troubled by a proposal so sublimely impracticable. Vested interests can only be over-ridden ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... injury to France by acting as a proclamation of its embarrassed state to all the world, at home and abroad. The King would not listen to his reasonings, but declared himself willing to receive all the plate that was sent to him as a free-will offering. He announced this; and two means were indicated at the same time, which all good citizens might follow. One was, to send their plate to the King's goldsmith; the other, to send it to the Mint. Those who made an unconditional ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to take to the roads?" said the mistress. "I have not advised you to do any such thing, and if you do it, it is of your own free-will. Neither has Senor Don Inocencio said a word to you to that effect. But if that is your decision, you have no doubt strong reasons for coming to it. Tell me, Cristobal, will you have some supper? Will you take ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... home I could not think of losing without a shudder. Alas, my faith seemed, for a time, to flee, and I see just what a poor, weak human being is without it. But before daylight crept into my room light from on high streamed into my heart, and I gave even this, my ewe-lamb, away, as my free-will offering to God. Could I refuse Him my child because she was the very apple of my eye? Nay then, but let me give to Him, not what, I value least, but what I prize and delight in most. Could I not endure heart-sickness for ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... married this man. It is plain that many people will think she has done much better in marrying a country gentleman than in marrying a young surgeon. Her letter is perfectly lucid. There is no trace of compulsion. To all intents and purposes she has married him of her own free-will, and there is nothing to show that she desires to be released from him or from the passion which we may suppose ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... a very old transcript of the work—that of Aldina—the note alludes to a brave line in the text, and runs thus:— "Diverting to tell, it was this passage that an old prosodist, one Pollo, claimed for his own. He maintained he made a free-will offering of it to Lombardo. Several things are yet extant of this Pollo, who died some weeks ago. He seems to have been one of those, who would do great things if they could; but are content to compass the small. He imagined, that the precedence of authors he had established ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... used me as an instrument, an unwilling instrument, remember! ... whereby to break open the prison doors of your chafed, and fretting spirit,—and the end of it all is that you depart from hence tomorrow of your own free-will and choice, to fulfill the appointed tryst made with you, as you believe, by a phantom in a vision. In brief"—here he spoke more slowly and with marked emphasis—"you go to the field of Ardath to solve a puzzling problem ... namely, as to whether what we ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... home not only love but enjoy for themselves the liberty which our soldiers and our sailors are fighting by land and by sea to maintain and to extend for others. There is no question of compulsion or bribery. What we want we believe you are ready and eager to give as the free-will offering of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... moralists have determined the essence of virtue; our duty is made apparent by its proximate consequences, though the general and ultimate reason should never be discovered. Religion may regulate the life of him to whom the Scotists and Thomists are alike unknown; and the assertors of fate and free-will, however different in their talk, agree to act ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... The smooth cadences, the polished gestures, and, above all, the manuscript sermon of a Boston divine, would have disgusted the men and women of the frontier. What cared they for predestination or free-will, or for any of the dogmas of the schools? They wanted to hear the simple, fundamental truths of the Gospel, and they wanted to hear them from a man of their own stamp. They wanted a "fire and brimstone" preacher, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... Papa, as in my happy days you taught me to call you, to implore your interest with my Papa, to engage him to dispense with a command, which, if insisted upon, will deprive me of my free-will, and make me ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... majesty, these seven years that I have lived in your majesty's house, I could not conceive that your majesty regarded my marriage at all; whereas if your majesty had vouchsafed to tell me your mind, and accept the free-will offering of my obedience, I would not have offended your majesty, of whose gracious goodness I presume so much, that if it were now as convenient in a worldly respect, as malice make it seem, to separate us, whom God hath joined, your majesty would not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... avail me naught, For they with sin were stained; Free-will against God's judgment fought, And dead to good remained. Grief drove me to despair, and I Had nothing left me but to die, To hell I ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... economic remedy. All was for man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is endowed with knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it, was a fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's assertion of free-will. The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory. In the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of God. Its suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... were all the Huguenots who emigrated from France for the sake of worshiping God in their own way rather than that of the Pope. We Puritans did not take all the free-will," declared Betty spiritedly. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... philosophy because of the inestimable advantages man could derive from it, people loudly objected to on the ground that it robbed man's life of all moral and religious value. Determinism, they exclaimed, reduces man to the rank of inanimate Nature; without "free-will" man is no better than a slave, his life doomed by an inexorable fate. True enough, nothing is more abhorrent or more deadly to the striving soul of man than to be bound in a fatalistic doctrine. But the anti-determinists wildly confuse a perverted determinism of ends with a scientific determinism ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... proposals that ought to be accepted, and such as would not have been asked of me. What have I done, that I must be banished and confined thus disgracefully? that I must not be allowed to have any free-will in an article that concerns my ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Johnson, how many?' 'Two, sir.' 'What ages?' 'Seven and ten.' 'Mrs. B., how many?' and so on, until the required number is made up. The people who go upon the stage, however poor their pay or hard their lot, love it too well ever to adopt another vocation of their free-will. A mother will frequently be in the wardrobe, children in the pantomime, elder sisters in the ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... as will be shown in detail in Eleh Pekude[76]; the second, the contribution of the altar, consisting of a beka from each person, thrown into the coffers for the purchase of congre gational sacrifices; and, third, the contribution for the Tabernacle, a free-will offering. The thirteen kinds of material to be mentioned were all necessary for the construction of the Tabernacle and for the making of priestly vestments, as will be evident from a ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... as a moral capacity is the power of self-determination, or as it is popularly called—free-will. If conscience is the manifestation of man as knowing, will is more especially his manifestation as a being who acts. The subject which we now approach presents at once a problem and a task. The nature of freedom has been keenly debated from the earliest ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... for him, and yet Thou wert He who came to "lay down His life for His friends!" Thou hast burdened man's soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the instinct of workmanship or the pleasure that is connected with a successful display of energy. The scientist gets this satisfaction without diminishing the value of life of his fellow being, and the same should be true for the business man.... Although we recognize no metaphysical free-will, we do not deny personal responsibility. We can fill the memory of the young generation with such associations as will prevent wrong doing or dissipation.... Cruelty in the penal code and the tendency to exaggerate punishment are sure signs of a low civilization and ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... was making notes—on the 'Prentice Pillar in Roslyn Chapel. Then he smiled at the thought of the contrast it offered to his own chapel in the meadows by the lake shore. In that, every stone, as in the making of the Tabernacle of old, had been a free-will offering from the men—each laid in its place by a willing worker; and, because willing, the rough walls were as eloquent of earnest endeavor as the famed ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... hundred rubles, and finally the house was offered for sale. No one would buy it, for among our people the praiseworthy custom rules that they never buy a house put up at auction till they convince themselves that the owner sells it of his own free-will. The household furniture was also sold, and Sarkis became almost a beggar, and was obliged, half naked, to leave his house, with ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... unnecessary Ostentation of Learning, which likewise occurs very frequently. It is certain that both Homer and Virgil were Masters of all the Learning of their Times, but it shews it self in their Works after an indirect and concealed manner. Milton seems ambitious of letting us know, by his Excursions on Free-Will and Predestination, and his many Glances upon History, Astronomy, Geography, and the like, as well as by the Terms and Phrases he sometimes makes use of, that he was acquainted with the whole Circle of Arts ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to read the letter, only because it ought to have been concealed from him; the frequent interruptions of amorous impatience; the faint expostulations of a voluntary slave; the imperious haughtiness of a tyrant without power; the deep reflection of the yielding rebel upon fate and free-will; and his wise wish to lose his reason as soon as he finds himself about to do what he cannot persuade his reason to approve, are sufficient to awaken the most ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Ozias Mounce, Tony's governor and bear-leader, was just putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a sermon on Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s anchor rattled overboard. Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would have made one plunge with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on being roused from his lucubrations, earnestly protested against leaving his argument in suspense. What ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... which truly merits the country's admiration. While carrying on the commerce of the Empire—that vital commerce without which there would be bankruptcy and no sinews of war, nor indeed any England left to defend—they have vowed themselves also, of their own free-will, to the helping of the wounded. Day or night the Bluebottle is liable to be called from his desk or his home by the telephone: like the Florentine Brother of the Misericordia he must instantly hurry into his uniform and rush to ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... besides, I am wanted on deck. My engagement is with a Rev. Mr. Barrows, who is bound as missionary to Hong Kong. This worthy Methodist gentleman is very much exercised because I insist that potentiality is necessity and rebut his arguments on free-will. He got quite excited yesterday, and said to me severely: "Do you mean to say, young man, that I can't do as I please?" I must say I don't think his warmth was much allayed by my replying: "I certainly mean to say you can't please as you please. You may eat sugar ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... so lonesome—I thought I'd go crazy. And I kept thinking how good and patient Joe had been, and how badly I'd used him, and how lovely it would be to be back in the little parlor at Hinksville, even with Mrs. Glenn and the minister talking about free-will and predestination. So at last I wrote to Joe. I wrote him the humblest letters you ever read, one after another; but I ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... of the Gospel was thus spreading on every side from our land, Britain was also becoming all too famous as the nurse of error. The British Pelagius,[427] who erred concerning the doctrine of free-will, grew to be a heresiarch of the first order;[428] and his follower Fastidius, or Faustus, the saintly Abbot of Lerins in the Hyeres, the friend of Sidonius Apollinaris,[429] was, in his day, only less renowned. He asserted the materiality of the soul. Both were able writers; and Pelagius was ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... another a-ranting; one again runs after the Baptism, and another after the Independency. Here is one for free-will, and another for Presbytery; and yet possibly most of all these sects run quite the wrong way, and yet every one is for his life, his soul, either for ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of important teaching. It commences with instruction concerning the burnt-offering, the sacrifice in performing a vow, and the free-will offering. It was not to be supposed that any one might present his sacrifice to GOD according to his own thought and plan. If it were to be acceptable—a sweet savour unto the LORD—it must be an offering ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... grave!" cried Denzil, horror-stricken at the idea of such a sacrifice. "Free-will and reason obscured in a cloud of incense! All the great uses of a noble life brought down to petty observances and childish mummeries, prayers and genuflections before waxen relics and dressed-up madonnas. Oh, my dearest girl, next worst ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... for ten pounds has just come, and I am truly glad to get it. But why will you write so bitterly? Ah—well, if I had only had the money I should have been on my way to America by this time, so don't think I want to bore you of my own free-will. Who can you have met with at that new place? Remember I say this in no malignant tone, but certainly the facts go to prove that you have deserted me! You are inconstant—I know it. O, why are you so? Now I have lost you, I love you in spite of your neglect. I am weakly fond—that's ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... his household about him while he read the great stories of the Bible, in which no king ruled when he had ceased to advance his kingdom, in which each man was shut up to God in the most vital things of his life. The discussion of the time grew keen about predestination and free-will. One meant that only God had power; the other meant that men, and if men, then specially kings, might control other men if only they could. Not fully, but vaguely, the crowd understood. Very fully, and not vaguely, the leaders understood. Predestination and Parliament became a cry. That is, control ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... that Lebedeff is intriguing against you. He wants to put you under control. Imagine that! To take 'from you the use of your free-will and your money—that' is to say, the two things that distinguish us from the animals! I have heard it said positively. It is the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... such as Augustine or Dante would object to this because it ignores free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the soul. The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism is not in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God; it is that it denies the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of many small influences, and in none of the thirty-five cases is it largely, much less wholly, ascribed to that cause. In not a single instance have I met with a word about the growing dissimilarity being due to the action of the firm free-will of one or both of the twins, which had triumphed over natural tendencies; and yet a large proportion of my correspondents happen to be clergymen, whose bent of mind is opposed, as I feel assured from the tone of their letters, to ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... Remember that generous humanity that taught the oppressed, groaning under the weight of insulted rights, to save the lives of oppressors! Extinguish the mean prejudices of nations, and let your numbers be collected and sent as a free-will offering to the national assembly! But is it possible to forget that your own parliament is venal? Your ministers hypocritical? Your clergy legal oppressors? The reigning family extravagant? The crown of a certain great personage becoming every day too ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Captain Gow's crew. Hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping, in June, 1724. He was not one of the original crew of the George galley, but was taken out of a prize and joined the pirates of his own free-will. ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... this are some of the ambiguities in the free-will controversy; which, as they will come under special consideration in the concluding Book, I only mention memoriae causa. In that discussion, too, the word I is often shifted from one meaning to another, at one time standing ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of Herbert Spencer that I had put him through, he retained his unshaken faith in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I remember very well the arguments we used to have on the vexed question of 'Free-will,' and being myself more or less of a fatalist, it annoyed me that I never could in the very slightest degree shake his convictions on that point. Moreover, when I plagued him too much with Herbert Spencer, he had a way of retaliating, and would foist upon me his favourite ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... said the Pedlar. "You lock up your house, or leave me in charge with Lizbet and Lenora, and you and the two other children start off at once to ask the help of the Goat-king. He is a mild, humane creature, and will very likely order out a detachment of the 'Free-will' goats to help to defend ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... think he knew even then, at the back of his mind, that I was right; that is why he pressed me to give reasons for my preference. Zola came to hate Catholicism as much as I, and his hatred was for the same reason as mine; we both learnt that any religion which robs a man of the right of free-will and private judgment degrades the soul, renders it lethargic and timid, takes the edge off the intellect. Zola lived to write "that the Catholic countries are dead, and the clergy are the worms in the corpses." The observation is "quelconque"; I should ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... a direct, "face to face" perception of external things. He held that the range of the mind's power of conceptive thought lies between two inconceivables, one of which must be real. Thus we can not conceive of free-will (which would be a new beginning), nor can we conceive of an endless series of causes. Free-will—and the same is true of the fundamental truths of religion—is verified to us as real by our moral nature. A Scottish writer of ability, who, however, opposed the peculiar tenets of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... presentations of sense, or (2) by intuitions, are invalid as representations of real truth. Yet the conception of God referred to is justified by our primary intuitions, and we can assure ourselves that it does stand for an actuality by comparing it with (1) our intuitions of free-will and causation, and (2) our intuitions of morality and responsibility. That we have these intuitions is a point on which the Author joins issue with Mr. Spencer, and confidently affirms that they cannot logically be denied without at the same time ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... an earnest yet melancholy voice—'nothing is the work of chance—nothing is the consequence of free-will—the liberty of which the Englishman boasts gives as little real freedom to its owner as the despotism, of an Eastern sultan permits to his slave. The usurper, William of Nassau, went forth to hunt, and thought, doubtless, that it was by an act of his own royal pleasure that the horse of his murdered ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Original sin. Free-will. The infallibility of the church of Rome. The infallibility of the pope. Justification by faith. Purgatory. Transubstantiation. Mass. Auricular confession. Prayers for the dead. The host. Prayers for saints. Going on pilgrimages. Extreme ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... thirsty soul that drains This Anodyne of Thought its rim contains— Free-will the can, Necessity the must, Pour off the must, ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... existing Government is not the less sacred to me because it was not sealed with blood. I honor it the more because it was the free-will offering of men who chose to live together. It rooted in fraternity, and fraternity supported its trunk and all its branches. Every bud and leaflet depends entirely on the nurture it receives from fraternity as the root of the tree. When that is destroyed, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... day of thy power shall thy people offer thee free-will offerings with an holy worship: the dew of thy birth is of the ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... Samas-palassar, the son of the priest of the Sun-god, has, of his own free-will, sealed all his estate, which he had inherited from Nebo-balasu-iqbi, the son of Nur-Ea, the son of the priest of the Sun-god, the father of his mother, and from Kabt, the mother of Assat-Belit, his grandmother, consisting of a piece of land, a house and the slaves or serfs attached to it, in ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... perceive what I now heard, that free-will was the cause of our doing ill, and Thy just judgment of our suffering ill. But I was not able clearly to discern it. So then endeavouring to draw my soul's vision out of that deep pit, I was again plunged therein, and endeavouring ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... know that he not only believed in God as revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of exclusions," and note, in the first place, what ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... professedly addressed to Pope. "I write," he says (fragment 65), "to you and for you, and you would think yourself little obliged to me if I took the pains of explaining in prose what you would not think it necessary to explain in verse,"—that is, the free-will puzzle. The manuscripts seen by Mallet may probably have been a commonplace book in which Bolingbroke had set down some of these fragments, by way of instructing Pope, and preparing for his own more systematic work. No ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... both, worm and angel, to that service By which both worms and angels hold their life, Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt, Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him? No; let him show himself the creatures' Lord By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice Which they, perforce, by Nature's ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... elect, he says. How? Not of themselves, but according to God's purpose: for we should be unable to raise ourselves to heaven, or create faith within ourselves. God will not permit all men to enter heaven; those who are his own he will receive with all readiness. The human doctrine of free-will, and of our own ability, is futile. The matter does not lie in our wills, but in the will ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... incurring his displeasure was still the greatest; so rooted were their confidence in, and submission to that man who had subjected the world to them; whose genius, hitherto uniformly victorious and infallible, had assumed the place of their free-will, and who having so long in his hands the book of pensions, of rank, and of history, had found wherewithal to satisfy not only covetous spirits, ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... right; for before I knew you, Bathilde, I had abandoned a part of my free-will; this portion of myself no longer belongs to me, but submits to a supreme law, and to unforeseen events. It is a black point in a clear sky. According to the way the wind blows, it may disappear as a vapor or increase into a storm. The hand which holds and guides mine may lead ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... secret." That is all we have in our human hands, that malleable stuff out of which Fate made us—and only in the shrewd, unwearied use of that shall we prove our love to the Being "who cannot love us in return" and make our illusion of Free-Will part of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... where there is a corresponding dedication of all that belongs to home, it promotes and preserves the highest privileges and the greatest well-being of the child. With the deep and sublime feelings of faith we should, therefore, take our little ones, in infancy, before the Lord, as the free-will offering of the Christian home; and in all subsequent periods of their life under the parental roof, we should eagerly watch, in each expanding faculty, in each growing inclination, in the bent of each tender thought, in the warm glow of each feeling and desire, for some indications of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my own free-will I wore it. Is ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... between predestination and free-will serves admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take life at the level of common sensation and common experience and there is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... ourselves if there is such a thing as duty in the abstract, or if this word does not cover one of the numerous illusions of our forefathers. For duty, in truth, supposes liberty, and the question of liberty leads us into metaphysics. How can we talk of liberty so long as this grave problem of free-will is not solved? Theoretically there is no objection to this; and if life were a theory, and we were here to work out a complete system of the universe, it would be absurd to concern ourselves with duty until we had clarified the subject of liberty, determined ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... understand the term?—negotiated in the market at a reduction of so much per cent in value, and if one of your friends happening to be present should buy them in, the creditors having sold them of their own free-will without constraint, the estate of the late Grandet ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... pray; but indeed to pray, to pray with a faith to which a blessing is promised, this is the reward of faith, this is the gift of God to the elect. Oh! if to feel how infinitely worthless I am, how poor a wretch, with just free-will enough to be deserving of wrath, and of my own contempt, and of none to merit a moment's peace, can make a part of a Christian's creed; so ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... extends to all human acts, according to 1 Cor. 16:14: "Let all your things be done in charity." Now the principle of human acts is the free-will. Therefore it seems that charity is chiefly in the free-will as its subject ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... and slaves of circumstance, Life is a fiddler, and we all must dance. From gloom where mocks that will-o'-wisp, Free-will I heard a voice cry: "Say, ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... this connection, that the woman suffrage organization had not a dollar to pay for newspaper influence, had no advertising to bestow, and that even the notices for meetings were gratuitous. All this advocacy on the part of the papers was purely a free-will offering and represented the honest and courageous sentiments of the editors. It is deemed especially worthy of notice because there was never anything like it in previous suffrage campaigns. Toward the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... man I ever met was more censorious of his own actions, or more obstinate in his defence of any principle or theory he was advocating in argument, no matter how hare-brained it might seem. We used to spend hours arguing over anything, from free-will to the "loose-head." I knew, of course, how much he disliked the class of work (requisitioning of local supplies) he was doing for me, though no one could have worked harder and few have done it better; but the commercialism ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Summum Bonum, which is God Himself, the knowledge of whom is the highest happiness. Then, in order a little to lighten his difficulties as to the permission of evil by the All-wise and Almighty One, she enters into a discussion of the relation between Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free-will, but this discussion, a thorny and difficult one, is not ended when the book comes to an abrupt conclusion, being probably interrupted by the arrival of the messengers of Theodoric, who brought the warrant ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... some of the difficulties and mistakes attaching to the WILL. Here there are the questions of world-renown, questions known even in Pandemonium—Free-will, Responsibility, Moral Ability, and Inability. It is now suspected, on good grounds, that, on these questions, we have somehow got into a wrong groove—that we are lost in a maze of ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... all the earnestness of his nature and his very young fears was strenuously resolved to watch himself narrowly in his intercourse with his too fascinating relative; little recking how infinitesimal is the power of a man's free-will upon the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... "Down South" envelopes are laboriously addressed with the names of stations and vias here and vias there; and throughout the Territory men move hither and thither by compulsion or free-will giving never a thought to an address; while the Department, knowing the ways of its people, delivers its letters in spite of, not because of, these addresses. It reads only the name of the man that heads the address ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... three weeks in the family of the Franks, before Elise felt herself disposed to give him a new title, that of Disputer-General, so great was the ability he discovered to dispute on every subject, from human free-will to rules for cookery; nay, even for the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... "Doctor Universahs.'' It must, however, be admitted that much of his knowledge was ill digested; it even appears that he regarded Plato and Speusippus as Stoics. Albertus is frequently mentioned by Dante, who made his doctrine of free-will the basis of his ethical system. Dante places him with his pupil Aquinas among the great lovers of wisdom (Spiriti Sapienti) in the Heaven of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... quilt's like livin' a life? And as for sermons, why, they ain't no better sermon to me than a patchwork quilt, and the doctrines is right there a heap plainer'n they are in the catechism. Many a time I've set and listened to Parson Page preachin' about predestination and free-will, and I've said to myself, 'Well, I ain't never been through Centre College up at Danville, but if I could jest git up in the pulpit with one of my quilts, I could make it a heap plainer to folks ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... those who maintained the doctrine of predestination and those who held that of free-will raged with no less animation at Chaucer's day, and before it, than it has done in the subsequent five centuries; the Dominicans upholding the sterner creed, the Franciscans taking the other side. Chaucer has more briefly, and with the same ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... they did, on personal religion, i.e. on experience, instead of on theology, they naturally became exponents of free-will, and that, too, in a period when fore-ordination was a central dogma of theology. This problem of freedom, which is as deep as personality itself, always has its answer "determined" by the point of approach. For those who begin with an absolute ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... never stopped of his own free-will, though he was stopped: once when he walked up to a man kneeling—and he was a poacher—and did not see him till, if I may so put it, the man coughed, when he ran like winkle into the hedge, and promptly became a ball for ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... expressing himself in an infallible manner through means of popular and generally accepted ideas. Before all, I cordially agreed with him in his praise of the saints who had chosen poverty of their own free-will. I had further to admire even in those sophisms his high poetic imagination and power of representation, just as I admire Beethoven's musical art in the last movement of his "Ninth Sympthony." I had further to acknowledge, with deepest and most sublime emotion, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... the gods had intended the accident to be fatal, and that only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady's-maid. He had not, you see, lost all sense of free-will. While Mr. Druce put the finishing touches to his shin, "I am utterly purposed," he said to himself, "that for this death of mine I will choose my own manner and my own—well, not 'time' exactly, but whatever moment within my ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... follow these honourable callings as is the captain who has charge of an ocean steamer to follow the sea. And even in the selection of these lowly occupations the path is divinely indicated, while the free-will is left to the influence of common sense, so that the robust youth with powerful frame and sinews will probably select the pit, and the comparatively delicate ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... forming within his mind. What he said was said very simply, and with a loving sorrow for the pain that might come to us through shaping our actions in accordance with his strong desire; and this desire was: that, of our own free-will, we should retire from the valley by the way that we came thither, and so leave the Council free to accept unhesitatingly the Priest ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... position which they could not any longer, with a good conscience, retain; and both proved equal to the emergency of dealing with financial problems which all at once they were called upon to solve. Casting herself promptly and entirely on the system of Free-Will Offerings as the means of her future sustenance, the Free Church met with a response so liberal and spontaneous that it is almost without parallel in history. In all these arrangements Dr. Buchanan took an active interest, and his sound practical ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... and it may occasionally be useful. But what are men? How much easier is it to occupy their attention and to strike their imaginations by absurdities than by rational ideas! But can a man of sound sense listen for one moment to such a doctrine? Either predestination admits the existence of free-will, or it rejects it. If it admits it, what kind of predetermined result can that be which a simple resolution, a step, a word, may alter or modify ad infinitum? If predestination, on the contrary, rejects the existence of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... nobody in the world to harbor an evil thought against them, they will hide under the corn-stalks as carefully as if a sheriff were on their track. They will not go to their nests while you are about, but tarry midway and meditate profoundly on fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, till you are tired of watching and waiting, and withdraw. No, you did not know it all before. The world is in a state of Cimmerian darkness regarding hens. There were never any chickens hatched till three weeks from a week before Fast Day. How should you, my readers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... and could we appreciate the worth of every art and every landscape and man, they would be identical. As I am a better man, the more soluble is the great outspreading riddle of nature, and the more distinct and full the delicate grace of art. As an old, quaint divine said of fate and free-will, they are two converging lines which of necessity must somewhere unite, though our human vision does not see the point; so all mysteries are radii, and could we follow one implicitly, then we have found the centre of all. Therefore the best critic of art is the man ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... truth than has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of necessarians. The latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do as to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... finite is brought into contact with the Infinite, that there must be a dead-lock, a leading up successively to two conclusions, one of which is almost, if not quite, contrary to the other. A very striking instance of this is the question of Predestination and Free-will. From the finite side, I am conscious that I am a free agent: I can will to rise up and to lie down. It is true that my will may be influenced, strongly or feebly, by various means—by the effect of habit, by the inherited tendency of my constitution, by some present motive of temptation, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... religious respect paid to them in honor of a divinity of the Hindoo mythology, who is represented as having the body of an ape. Because of this superstition, such numbers of these animals are supported by the free-will offerings of pilgrims, that no one dares to resist or ill-treat them. Hence, access to the town is often difficult; for should one of the apes take a dislike to any unlucky traveller, he is sure to be assailed by the whole community, who follow ...
— Anecdotes of Animals • Unknown
... love towards the Supreme Being is in question, these marks and evidences are no where to be met with. It is in itself a decisive evidence of a contrary feeling in those nominal Christians, that they find no pleasure in the service and worship of God. Their devotional acts resemble less the free-will offerings of a grateful heart, than that constrained and reluctant homage, which is exacted by some hard master from his oppressed dependents, and paid with cold sullenness, and slavish apprehension. It was the very charge brought by God against his ungrateful ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... repose or against the Catholic worship. He added that, as he had no intention of usurping any superiority over the states-general assembled at Brussels, he was content to leave the settlement of this point to their free-will and wisdom, engaging himself neither to offer nor permit any hindrance ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... secured, he felt proud of the position he occupied amongst them. He little thought that the movement would have proved so successful when he embarked in it, for with but little effort we have received the free-will offerings of L170. Of course printing, advertising, and other incidental expenses were incurred, and cannot be dispensed with in order to succeed in similar objects. The Royal Humane Society had awarded to Ellerthorpe an especial vote of thanks; the Board of Trade, through Sir Emmerson Tennant, ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... believe that this movement is involuntary, and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them. But even when the general fact which governs the private volition of all individuals is supposed to be discovered upon the earth, the principle of human free-will is not secure. A cause sufficiently extensive to affect millions of men at once, and sufficiently strong to bend them all together in the same direction, may well seem irresistible: having seen that mankind do yield to it, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... go up this evening and inquire for our May," said Adam, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "She would never stay away from us so long of her own free-will; and either one of the ladies must have been taken ill, and they cannot spare her, or she herself ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... naturally atheistic, of a word which may serve to commend their doctrine. The "law" of which they speak has its origin in matter itself, and is not under the control of a Supreme Intelligence. That this is the fact is shown by the denial of free-will in man and of the superintending providence of God; of the efficacy of prayer and of the forgiveness of sin; and by the prominence given in their writings to the absolute control of all things by ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... be forgotten that the vote is the free-will offering of our forty-eight states to any man who chooses to make this land his home. Let it not be overlooked that millions of immigrant voters have been added to our electorate within a generation, men mainly uneducated and all moulded by European traditions, and let ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... to do a kindness, she could be vivacious in conversation and enjoy giving pleasure. A spell of mischief also lurked in her on occasions when out on the moors. She enjoyed leading Charlotte where she would not dare to go of her own free-will. Charlotte had a mortal dread of unknown animals, and it was Emily's pleasure to lead her into close vicinity, and then to tell her of how and of what she had done, laughing at her horror with great amusement. If ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... been created slaves; they'd been enough sight happier an' better off, an' so would other folks that they have to do with, than to have so many ways, an' not sense enough to manage 'em. I don't believe in free-will, for ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cents, other offerings being entirely voluntary, each giving, "as the Lord hath prospered him." The first week in October was designated, as the time for an annual public meeting, to give emphasis to the work of the society and solicit free-will offerings from everybody. Other congregations were requested to form similar organizations, to create a visible bond of union in the support ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... but automata, worked by springs, moved by the stronger impulse, and unable to choose for ourselves which impulse that shall be? Even now, in decreeing my own destruction, do I exercise free-will, or am I the sport of hereditary tendencies, of mistaken views of honour, of a seeming self-sacrifice, which, perhaps, is but selfishness in disguise? I blight my unfortunate father's old age; I destroy the last ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... pressure Of mine. What, I that held the orange blossom Dark as the yew? but may not those, who march Before their age, turn back at times, and make Courtesy to custom? and now the stronger motive, Misnamed free-will—the crowd would call it conscience— Moves me—to what? I am dreaming; for the past Look'd thro' the present, Eva's eyes thro' her's— A spell upon me! Surely I loved Eva More than I knew! or is it but the past ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... meant.' He seemed trying to steady himself. 'I'm damned if I'd ever give up my free-will to anybody, and I wouldn't like even the woman who was my mate to do it either. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... hospital, and a third, at that time, was in the trenches. She did not weep nor wail at the death or the sickness but accepted the dispensation. During the time I was in her house, she ministered to me to such an extent that I cannot adequately describe her kindness. Of her own free-will she washed my clothes, arranged my bed, and polished my boots daily for three months. She washed down my bedroom daily with hot water, having herself heated it. Each morning she prepared me a tray with bread, butter, ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling
... broke a mug and a bowl, and sanded the floor with a general conglomeration of scratches, instead of the neat herring-bone on which she usually prided herself. It was the only way she had to exercise her free-will in its desperate struggle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... The object of my thesis has been precisely to find a position intermediate between 'moral Liberty' and 'Free Will.' Liberty, such as I understand it, is situated between these two terms, but not at equal distances from both; if I were obliged to blend it with one of the two, I should select 'Free-Will.'" Nor is Liberty to be reduced to spontaneity. "At most, this would be the case in the animal world where the psychological life is principally that of the affections. But in the case of a man, a thinking being, the free act can be called a synthesis ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... power of making undue elections, he being suffered to range, as it were, only among lawful objects of choice. But the answer to this seems sound, that such a will would only be free in name; it would be free to choose among certain things, but would not be free-will. The objector again urges, that either the choice is free and may fall upon evil objects, against the goodness of God, or it is so restrained as only to fall on good objects. Against freedom of the will King's solution is, that more evil would ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham |
