"Materialist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubt," said Colonel Estcourt, "that everything is explicable, but we must wait for the growth and development of our higher natures before we can comprehend half the mysteries of the higher life. The great fault of the materialist and the scientist is, that they would fain bring everything down to the level of their present comprehension, instead of patiently waiting the completion of their future spiritual forces. It is quite evident that we are ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... sceptical mind consequently denies that there is any connection between human destiny and the prognostications obtained by the seven or eight principal methods known to astrology; and the occult sciences, like many natural phenomena, are passed over by the freethinker or the materialist philosopher, id est, by those who believe in nothing but visible and tangible facts, in the results given by the chemist's retort and the scales of modern physical science. The occult sciences still exist; they are at work, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you, dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you don't ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... practice. "When love is over how little of love even the lover understands," she quoted to herself from one of her favourite poets, and transposed the saying into "While life is with us how little of life even the materialist understands." Most people that she knew took endless pains and precautions to preserve and prolong their lives and keep their powers of enjoyment unimpaired; few, very few, seemed to make any intelligent effort at understanding what they really wanted in the way of enjoying their ...
— When William Came • Saki
... known to the history of philosophy." Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the causes of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... manifest after the dissolution of its material shell? Does not the experimental work of Bottazzi, Morselli, and De Rochas all make for a spiritual interpretation of life rather than for the position of the materialist? I consider that they have strengthened rather than weakened the mystic side of the universe. They are bringing the wonder of the world back to the positivist. Let them go on. They will yet demonstrate, in spite of themselves, the immortality of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Judaism does not approve of the ascetic temper, it is far from encouraging the materialist's view of life. It has no place for monks or hermits, who think they can serve God best by renouncing the world; but, on the other hand, it sternly rebukes the worldliness that knows no ideal but sordid pleasures, no God but Self. It commends to ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... what you've been saying, Miss Timson," said Lady Thomson, in her fullest tones; "and I can assure you I feel under no necessity to become either a materialist or an ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything—save the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be "nobly wild, not mad." Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to seduce him in body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... that out before I came back here, Cissie. A friend of mine named Farquhar offered me a place with him up in Chicago,—a string of garages. You'd like Farquhar, Cissie. He's a materialist with an absolutely inexorable brain. He mechanizes the universe. I told him I couldn't take his offer. 'It's like this,' I argued: 'if every negro with a little ability leaves the South, our people down there will never progress.' It's really that way, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... a terrible part in the history of cowardice and of unsuccessful love. No man can be brave without blood to sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the German materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus. The fainting lover must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend him her smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks. Porphyro got over his faintness before he ran away with Madeline, and Cesar Birotteau was an accepted lover when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... urged that, as Zeus means the sky, therefore he is no more than the deep concave of heaven personified and deified, and that consequently Zeus is not the true, the only God. This argument is only equalled in feebleness by that of the materialist, who argues that "spiritus" means simply breath, therefore the breath is the soul. Even if the Greeks remembered that, originally, Zeus meant the sky, that would have no more perplexed their minds than the remembrance that "thymos"—mind—meant ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... common denominator for various aspects of experience. The very readiness with which we can picture the corpuscular scheme is a source of embarrassment to the seeker after unity. That which is so distinct is bristling with incompatibilities. The most aggressive materialist hesitates to describe thought as a motion of bodies in space. Energy, on the other hand, exacts little if anything beyond the character of measurable power. Thought is at any rate in some sense a power, and to some degree measurable. Recent discoveries of the dependence ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... respects, convincing. At least, so far as it is the word of exact science on the subject it is convincing; so far as it is speculative, or philosophical, it is or is not convincing, according to the type of mind of the reader. Professor Moore is not a bald mechanist or materialist like Professor Loeb, or Ernst Haeckel, nor is he an idealist or spiritualist, like Henri Bergson or Sir Oliver Lodge. He may be called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientific research as these lines lead ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Chilean "common grave," groping for the body among the rotten corpses, feeling for the poor lad's breast, where hung a broken rouble, token of some bygone Black Sea passion—all this tells me that I am right. Stark materialist though he is, he looks with scared awe upon the mysteries of religion, and the denunciations of the Dream on Patmos make him hope and pray that his own end may come ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... may be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than that implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism, though very shocking, having a note of Calvanistic orthodoxy; but, if a man is a materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of man, respectable ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... like a hundred other poets, felt no inclination for juristic learning. He freely and frankly abandoned himself to the metaphysical conclusions which were being then tried between Piccolomini and Pendasio, the one an Aristotelian dualist, the other a materialist for whom the soul was not immortal. Without force of mind enough to penetrate the deepest problems of philosophy, Tasso was quick to apprehend their bearings. The Paduan school of scepticism, the logomachy in vogue there, unsettled his religious opinions. He began by ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... doctrine of all: many patristic authors lean towards it—Modern form of, receives impulse from advance of physical science—Karl Vogt's comparison of secretions of brain with that of kidneys—All materialist doctrines opposed to principle of heterogeneity—Modern materialism would make object generate consciousness—Materialists cannot demonstrate how molecular vibrations can be transformed into objects—Parallelism ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He extolled the "germinating disorder" of Moscow far above the "implacable discipline" of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. "But all exaltation neglects," said Prothero. "No religion has ever boasted that ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... "Please don't quote what Serviss says. His view is that of the worldly wise materialist. You should listen ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... and bravery—these are what make the heroes. The materialist, the sceptic and the ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... nineteenth century, there were three chief schools of thought, the Sensational, the Catholic, and the Eclectic; or as it may be put in other terms, the Materialist, the Theological, and the Spiritualist. The first looked for the sources of knowledge, the sanction of morals, the inspiring fountain and standard of aesthetics, to the outside of men, to matter, and the impressions made by matter on the corporeal senses. The second looked to divine revelation, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... schools of Logicians are commonly recognised: Nominalist, Conceptualist, and Materialist, who differ as to what it is that Logic really treats of: the Nominalists say, 'of language'; the Conceptualists, 'of thought'; the Materialists, 'of relations of fact.' To illustrate these positions let us take authors who, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... one answer, which is, in its way, decisive. Professor James admits that modern psychology holds as a general postulate "there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition."[2] The 'medical materialist' can ask for no more than this. But this being granted, on what ground are we to be forbidden finding in these same organic processes the condition of the visions and ecstatic states with which The Varieties of Religious ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... with Rome, but more by its materialist philosophy than by its magnificent exhibition of material improvements. This philosophy availed itself of the exposition in order to show to what extent it prevailed; and Paris extolled mere worldly power, luxury, comfort ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... for but never seen. A man of Minoret's build, and Minoret's wealth, at the head of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Materialist, and Kopy-Keck was a Spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty; the latter had generally the first word; the former ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... which he held this belief. In the first place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal life to come had been supernaturally revealed to men by God through Christ. Secondly, as a philosopher he was intensely a materialist, holding with unwavering conviction to the conclusion that life, mind, or soul, was a concomitant or result of our physical organism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to him was the total destruction of man for the time. There ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... into touch with psychic interests; it would comfort her to have the wonderful chance of getting into communication with Oliver. At present she scouts the whole thing, like all other forms of supernatural belief. Jane has always been a materialist. It is very strange to me that my children have developed, intellectually and spiritually, along such different lines from myself. I have never been orthodox; I am not even now an orthodox theosophist; I am not of the stuff which can fall into line and accept ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... materialist if you will, for his "deism" meant no more to him than a distant blue sky giving the world space and perspective and free air; but a materialism that renders men kind and courteous, urbane and sweet-tempered, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Syllogism need not be a Materialist, but assuming that he is one, he is as much entitled to the hypothesis that Matter thinks as a Theist is to his ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... conviction to her mistress. And, indeed, they would not have done so, for Miss Farrow, though she was much too polite and too well-bred ever to have said so, even to herself, did not believe in a Supreme Being. She was a complete materialist. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... herself will ever know how near she came upon that afternoon to yielding to his pleading, and laying her soul bare to him. But something interposed—fate? Destiny? The materialist smiles "supper." Be that as it may, had she yielded to Lapierre's plans, they would have stolen from the school that very night and proceeded to Fort Rae, to be married by the priest at the Mission. For Lapierre, fully alive to ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... imagined that sex, and the sex function, began and ended in the physical. This view is excusable in the case of the materialist, if there really be such a person but it is obviously a stupid view for the theologian, who regards this life as the door to spiritual life. Since sex is the cause and the result of what we know of creation; since ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... the polite, veiled scrutiny of a man of the world. A materialist, he would look a woman over as he would a soldier when he had been a major-general making an inspection. She was slim, supple; he liked slim, supple women. Her eyes, though none the less luminous, and her lips, though none the less flexible, did not seem quite as out of proportion with the rest ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... 'monstrous regiment of women,' as the old writer hath it. Look at the diseases from which we are suffering—materialism and hysteria. The one has been intensified and extended, the other has newly declared itself, since women came to the front. No materialist like a woman; give her a voice in the control of things, and good-bye to all our ideals. Hard cash, military glory, glittering and clanging triumph—these be the gods of a woman's heart. Thought and talk drowned by a scream; nerves worried into fiddle-strings. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... possesses the greatest future, presents enormous attractions to the bourgeoisie. In the first place, it obviates the necessity of conversation; it is not necessary to know whether your neighbor is a sceptic or a believer, a materialist or a spiritualist; no possible argument can arise concerning the meaning and metaphysics of life. Instead of war, there is peace. The music lover may argue, but his conceptions are entirely circumscribed by the music, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... family my doubts and halting faith in the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my classmate so completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became very grave. The entire scheme of Christianity disappeared from my firmament; but, in the immediately previous years, I had been a reader of Swedenborg, and I held immovably an intuition of immortality,—or, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... this "Strange Story," perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it; secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... variety, and laborious accuracy of his contributions to positive knowledge; while Virchow, no less than Haeckel, has dealt in wide generalisations, and, until the obscurantists thought they could turn his recent utterances to account, no one was better abused by them as a typical free-thinker and materialist. But, as happened to the two women grinding at the same mill, one has been taken and the other left. Since the publication of his famous oration, Virchow has been received into the bosom of orthodoxy and respectability, while Haeckel remains ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... after-dinner appearance. His face was rumpled, and his coffee was growing cold. This was a very different thing from the vague letters and rumours which had reached him from time to time and which he had put out of his mind with all the contempt of the materialist. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The materialist who believes in Forces is brother to the Calvinist who preaches Sovereignty and the Divine Decrees. The preacher lets loose upon the imagination of mankind a Setebos, who after death will plague his enemies and feast his friends. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... correspondence of mind and matter, he could very well give these terms an indirect importance for psychical evolution. Spencer has always, in my opinion with full right, repudiated the ascription of materialism. He is no more a materialist than Spinoza. In his Principles of Psychology (Sec. 63) he expressed himself very clearly: "Though it seems easier to translate so-called matter into so-called spirit, than to translate so-called spirit ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... into "a dreadful croaker," styling his own age "barren, brainless, soulless, faithless." [4] But the reason is, of course, that "he suffered from chronic dyspepsia" and was unable "to eat his three square meals a day." A very consistent explanation for an avowed materialist, but slightly destructive to the value of his own conclusions, being a two-edged sword. Indeed he almost allows as much. "For such dyspeptic patients there is an excuse. Pessimism is probably as inevitably their creed, as optimism ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... (chap. vi.) he returns to this subject, and emphasises the differences of the views of the ethical-minded man and the ordinary conventional materialist, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... had a sense of crisis. He knew he must either save her, or leave her. He could not give her a little sage advice and abandon her. It would be like advising a starving man not to steal and going away with your pockets full. He could not say, "Have nothing to do with a selfish materialist like Linburne," when he knew better perhaps than any one how empty of any ideality or hope her relation to Hickson was bound to be. Yet on the other hand, he could not say, "Come to me, instead." He despised her ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... modern thinkers, then, believe that the only real things that exist are the mind and God, and that the universe is only the infinitely varied manifestation of God in the human conscience. It is evident, then, that matter, the only thing the materialist concedes real existence, is simply an orderly phantasmagoria; and God and soul, which materialists regard as mere fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions that ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... a sermon and said he was a materialist.... Pater said it was a bold thing to say.... Mr. Brough was a clear-headed man. She couldn't imagine how he stayed in the Church.... She hoped he hated that sickening, sickening, idiot humbug, Eve... meek... with silly long hair... "divinely smiling"... ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... its equivalent in another sense, to wit, that of consciousness. Yet he protests against these tenets being deemed materialistic, which, he declares, they certainly neither are nor can be, for that while he himself certainly holds them, he as certainly is not himself a materialist. Professor Huxley is among the last to be suspected of talking anything, as Monsieur Jourdain did prose, without knowing it. He knows perfectly well that he has here been talking materialism, but he insists ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... and of the new. Alike by his vast force, his immense variety, his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... of the eighteenth century, and even exaggerating the spirit of that century in the dryness of his soul and of his style, a pure materialist writing with precision and with natural yet intentional nakedness, possessed valuable gifts of observation, and in his famous novel, Red and Black, in the first part of the Chartreuse of Parma, and in his ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... which reduced me to silence, and which were possibly invented by him. Everyone talked except myself, and as I had had no dinner I ate like an ogre, only replying by monosyllables when politeness obliged me to say something. The conversation turned on Horace, and everyone gave his opinion on the great materialist's philosophy, and the Abbe Guigiotti obliged me to speak by saying that unless I agreed with him I should ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... investigators of both views of the world, the theistic and the pantheistic, the ideal and the materialistic,—have worked with equal merit, and have equally enjoyed its fruits, with perhaps the single exception of so pure a materialist as Ludwig Buechner, who, it seems, does not like to give up his old doctrine of force and matter as the two inseparable, equivalent, and equally eternal elements of the universe. That matter itself, even ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... the whole context shows, means that a man in order to be entitled to be heard on the evolution theory, must be willing to renounce his faith not only in the Bible, but in God, in the soul, in a future life, and become a monistic materialist.[46] ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... breathe and to look on; and now, as the three of us sat on a turf seat outside the cottage door enjoying the soft sleepy inaction of the afternoon, a question of mine concerning the folk-lore of the district, after which, hardened materialist though I called myself, I was conscious of a secret hankering, had drawn the foregoing remark from the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... in accepting the spirit of man as an entity, for the phenomena of ratiocination are altogether so widely different from all physical phenomena that they can hardly be explained by any of the physical forces known to us. The materialist, who tells us that consciousness, sensation, thought, and the spontaneous power of the will, so peculiar to man and to the higher animals, are altogether so many outcomes of certain conditions of matter and nothing ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... 'We will—we will'!" said Berkeley. "But can it be? Has the poick turned cynic, and the sickly sentimentalist become a materialist ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... upon him. He was quivering to it. He had reasoned himself into a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be up and stirring. I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man's sadness as the penalty which the materialist ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... force and colour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or abstract—he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved, suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him a materialist, but with something of the temper of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... them at last by the tyrant and the slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory, so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which is called the materialist theory of history. The theory is, roughly, this: that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive. In short, history is a science; a science ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... Indian does through the streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time. Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from the unseen penetrate the din of civilization. The child philosopher and materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests and priestesses, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... nature,—no! You have made your body like a transparent scabbard through which the glitter of the soul-sword is almost visible. But I am different. I am so much of a materialist that I like to pull down Heaven to the warm bosom of Earth and make them mingle. You would lift up Earth to Heaven! Ah, that is difficult! Even Christ came down! It is the chief thing I admire in Him, that He 'descended from Heaven and was made Man'. TRES CHER Felix, I shall bewilder ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... much needless pain in the world. But a reasonable being should have recognised the situation, as you did not, and realise that we have no right to obey nature if we know at the same time we are flouting civilisation. You think you're doing right by considering Sabina's future. You are a gross materialist, Raymond, and the end of that is always dust and ashes and defeated hopes. I won't bring religion into it, because that wouldn't carry weight with you; but I bring justice into it and your debt to the social order, that has made you ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... forward and gazed at it lovingly. "That is yonder tree as I see it. The base materialist with the foot rule will inform you of ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... the attitude of the masses toward the secret and conspiratory methods of both the idealist anarchist and the materialist anarchist is the same. If the latter distrust the people, the people no less distrust them. If the masses would mob the terrorist who springs forth to commit some fearful act, the purpose of which they cannot in the least ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Jewish physician is nothing to the present purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable, sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have assigned to her certain characteristics without ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... p. 22.) The love that we bear to ourselves and our neighbour, in view of our coming from God and going to God, is called the love of charity. Charity differs from philanthropy in looking beyond the present life, and above creatures. A materialist and atheist may possess philanthropy, but ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Caroline, who could not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well, or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... will pay one another, and wait to get their money back until Germany is either strong enough to refuse to pay or ruined beyond the possibility of paying? Meanwhile Russia, reduced to a scrap of fish and a pint of cabbage soup a day, has fallen into the hands of rulers who perceive that Materialist Communism is at all events more effective than Materialist Nihilism, and are attempting to move in an intelligent and ordered manner, practising a very strenuous Intentional Selection of workers as fitter to survive than idlers; whilst the Western Powers are drifting ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... man loses heart in his work he should abandon that work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her. And she was a rank infidel—a crass materialist—an intellectual Circe. Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must he lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... clear than he could have wished, as the conditions were generally unfavourable for scientific observation. Still, they afforded a very fair idea of the principal phenomena which he had met. (Cheers.) The Professor, in concluding, remarked that he himself had never been a Materialist, and that, after the experiences that attended the addition of the third bottle of brandy and the Green Chartreuse to his diurnal allowance, he could only confess that, in the words of the Poet, there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Japanese would dream now of casting any such reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day. The sun has become not only quite sexless to him, but as devoid of personality as it is to any Western materialist. Lesser deities suffered a like unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god, with his belt of drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the face, is no longer even indirectly associated with the storm. As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the fight out of all. So we went back to the chapel. One man whom I have known for years as a Socialist agitator who fought the intellectuals in his party and was a materialist of the most radical kind made this statement at the last meeting of the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... ask to embolden me to go forwards is single, not double. It is necessary and not arbitrary, and it is one which the veriest sceptic or the most cynical materialist will recognise as sufficient. If I am to work out the Scheme I have outlined in this book, I must have ample means for doing so. How much would be required to establish this Plan of Campaign in all its fulness, overshadowing all the land with its ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... "A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing. Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece by Pythagoras, one of the demigods of humanity. His doctrine of re-incarnation is ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... father, seeing him engaged in an assault on the castle, shouts, "George! put that sword down instantly." Mr. CORNFORD makes his points with such discretion and understanding that even the most solid materialist must, after reading, feel a little less sure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... men. The prefix Ur-, moreover, I use in a deeper sense than is usually attached to it as in Urwald, Urwelt, and the like. An Urmensch in the world today must suggest a survival of an almost incredible kind—a kind, too, utterly inadmissible and inexplicable to the materialist perhaps—" ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... part of him that is romantic and, in the literal sense, erratic; but that is the English part. But the French people take care of the pence that the pounds may be careless of themselves. And Belloc is almost materialist in his details, that he may be what most Englishmen would call mystical, not to say monstrous, in his aim. In this he is quite in the tradition of the only country of quite successful revolutions. Precisely because France wishes to do wild ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... reader lays down this strange story, perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of Romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... as there always has been, a considerable body of opinion that the solution will be a mechanical one—using the word mechanical in the widest sense—and that the living differs from the non-living not in kind, but only in degree of complexity. The upholders of the mechanistic or materialist theory, however, are perhaps less confident than their predecessors of the last century, for the solution in this direction has to face not only the problem of organic co-ordination already referred to, but also that of consciousness and mind. For although the study of psychology on physiological ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... concluded the infinite substance to be air. Heraclitus of Ephesus (B.C. 500) declared it to be fire; by which he meant, not physical fire, but the principle of antagonism. So, by water, Thales must have intended the fluid element in things. For that Thales was not a mere materialist appears from the sayings which have been reported as coming from him, such as this: "Of all things, the oldest is God; the most beautiful is the world; the swiftest is thought; the wisest is time." Or that other, that, "Death does not differ at all from life." Thales ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... practically nothing about Lord Chesterfield or his deafness, but which contains a good deal of Voltaire's crispest writing, especially the definition of that English freedom which he sometimes used to extol. With thirty guineas a year,[359] the materialist doctor Sidrac informs the unfortunate Goudman, who has lost a living by the said deafness, "on peut dire tout ce qu'on pense de la compagnie des Indes, du parlement, de nos colonies, du roi, de l'etat en general, de l'homme et de Dieu—ce qui est un ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... but desired to grasp and feel some of the glory of outdoors. If Captain Mayo had been as well versed in psychology as he was in navigation he might have drawn a few disquieting deductions from this frank and unconscious expression of the mood of the materialist. She emphasized that mood ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... good. He therefore endeavored to propitiate them, just as a dog endeavors to get the good will of man by abjectly crawling toward him on his belly and licking his feet. There was no element of true worship in the propitiatory offerings of primitive man; in the beginning he was essentially a materialist—he became a spiritualist later on. Man's first religion must have been, necessarily, a material one; he worshiped (propitiated) only that which he could see, or feel, or hear, or touch; his undeveloped ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... himself, he was a thorough materialist. The strange effect produced on him by the room—following on the other strange effects produced on the other relatives of his dead brother—exercised no perplexing influence over the mind of this sensible man. 'Perhaps,' ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... invited to climb Ben Lomond to enjoy the most magnificent of views, responded meekly, "Aimez-vous les beautes de la Nature? Pour moi, je les abhorre." Can you not fancy the strident emphasis on the last syllable, revealing how often the poor materialist had been victimized before he made ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence |
