"Metaphysician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There was a moment's silence. Wilmore, the metaphysician, saw then a strange thing. He saw a light steal across his friend's stern face. He saw his eyes for a moment soften, the hard mouth relax, something incredible, transforming, shine, as it were, out of the man's soul ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Jonathan Edwards won fame in three fields. He is (1) America's greatest metaphysician, (2) her greatest theologian, and (3) a unique poetic interpreter of the universe as a manifestation ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... pointed him to the lank Virginian without a word. The lank Virginian understood the answer, and sat down to read Bledsoe on the Soul. Bledsoe, as a slave-labor growth in metaphysics, (indeed, the only Southern metaphysician, if we except Governor Wise,) is much coddled at the South. I believe, besides, that he proves the divine right of Slavery a priori. If he begins with the "Everlasting Me," he must be just the kind of reading ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... train to New York, and so had a long afternoon in his studio. He was surprised to find how absorbed he soon became in his work. "Miss Jennie is right," he thought; "I'm an artist, and not a reformer or a metaphysician, and I had better spend my time here than in trying to solve feminine enigmas;" and he worked like a beaver until the fading light compelled him to desist. "There," he said, "that is a fair beginning. Two or three more days of work like this will secure me, I think, a friendlier glance than ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... philosopher's reflective doubt concerning his own powers is now evident. Problems are raised which are not merely urgent in themselves, but which present wholly new alternatives to the metaphysician. Rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, are doctrines which, though springing from the epistemological query concerning the possibility of knowledge, may determine an entire philosophical system. They bear upon every question of metaphysics, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... he was apparently self-taught; yet, in his seventeenth year he discovered an error in Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. He entered Trinity College where he won all kinds of distinctions, being famous not merely as a mathematician, but as a poet, a scholar, and a metaphysician. He was appointed Professor of Astronomy and Astronomer Royal whilst still an undergraduate. He predicted "conical refraction," afterwards experimentally proved by another Irishman, Humphrey Lloyd. He twice received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society: (i) for optical discoveries; (ii) for ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... fascination the holiday afternoons beneath their shade. Still do our memories haunt those old walks we loved so well: the avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still investigated, not as a brute force, or in a merely intellectual light, but in those high spiritual aspects in which our great New England metaphysician delighted to present it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of analogy, bridge, to the forming mind, the chasm between natural and revealed religion. Let the Christian Evidences be fully unfolded. We can hardly dispense ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... analogies of human experience. From the relation which human works bear to human thoughts and feelings, it infers a corresponding relation between works more or less similar, but superhuman, and superhuman thoughts and feelings. If it prove these, nobody but a metaphysician needs care whether or not it proves a mysterious substratum for them.[236] The argument from design, it seems to us, however, would have no validity if there be no external world offering marks of design. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... view of the universe of the scientist: the Vedanta is the view of the universe of the metaphysician. Haeckel unconsciously expounded the Samkhyan philosophy almost perfectly. So close to the Samkhyan is his exposition, that another idea would make it purely Samkhyan; he has not yet supplied that propinquity of ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... interest of the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of circumstances ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of a fresco by Raphael. That at the west end, by Salviati, is in memory of William Hale Hale, a voluminous writer and editor of the "Domesday of St. Paul's," who was a Residentiary, Archdeacon of London and Master of the Charterhouse. He died in 1870. The stained-glass window is in memory of the metaphysician, Henry Longueville Mansell, Dean of the Cathedral, who died suddenly, after a rule of three years, in 1871. It is by Hardman, and represents the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... in the contemplation of Nature, in arduous study, or in acts of kindness and affection. He was an elegant scholar and a profound metaphysician; without possessing much scientific knowledge, he was unrivalled in the justness and extent of his observations on natural objects; he knew every plant by its name, and was familiar with the history and habits of every production of the earth; he could interpret without a fault each ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe just a neurologist's chart of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... amidst ceaseless labor he strove unremittingly to improve his mind, studying astronomy, history, and metaphysics; and finally, from the humblest circumstances, he rose to occupy a conspicuous place as an author, a philosopher, and a metaphysician. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... it would seem, that he succeeded in becoming the most daring profligate in London. Tired of the excess of dissipation, he attempted the career of politics, and found his way into Parliament under the auspices of the whigs. When politics failed, he put on the mask of a metaphysician. Tired of that costume, he next attempted to play the farmer. Dissatisfied with farming, he wrote political pamphlets. Still discontented with his condition in the world, he strove to undermine the basis ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and Realism." But there ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... alone are capable of attracting our regard. But nothing can be more unfounded than such a supposition. It might appear to be too nearly approaching to the ludicrous, to suggest as an example to the contrary, the metaphysician's attachment to his insubstantial speculations, or the ...
— 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
... the storm, 'as seeing in it Him who is invisible.' Such recognition, indeed, is the measure of men's patriotism to-day. The man who so perverts his mind and reason as to shut out the evidence of the stars and his own consciousness (the German metaphysician's proof of Deity), and deny that God is, is simply a fool; and every reflecting mind is ready to sanction and adopt the Psalmist's word: 'The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.' Equally a fool is he who shuts his eyes to the overwhelming facts of the last two years, refusing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with his own high soul, Until his mighty heart, in its great mood, Had mitigated part, though not the whole Of its disease; he did the best he could With things not very subject to control, And turn'd, without perceiving his condition, Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... of the stage to-day. There came a critical moment also when a man of intellect and a great heart must represent Great Britain in her greatest crisis in the United States, and in that hour they sent a Scotsman, Arthur James Balfour, philosopher, metaphysician, theologian, ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... creatures, silly playthings of the forces of nature, found themselves more often than not in absurd and painful situations; but he was weak and illogical enough to believe that the Revolutionaries were more wicked and more foolish than other men, thereby falling into the error of the metaphysician. At the same time he was no Pessimist and did not hold that life was altogether bad. He admired Nature in several of her departments, especially the celestial mechanism and physical love, and accommodated himself to the labours of life, pending the arrival of the day, which could not be far ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... the offer. Herein, and in similar instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself. If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a coxcomb of me. As to the inns or hotels at Hamburgh, I should recommend you to some German inn. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Massachusetts, if Southern drew tears by the tragic tale of Oronooko, if Steele awakened a throb of indignation by the story of Inkle and Yarico, if Savage and Shenstone pointed their feeble couplets with the wrongs of 'Afric's sable children,' if the Irish metaphysician Hutcheson, struggling for a higher system of morals,—justly stigmatized the traffic; yet no public opinion lifted its voice against it. English ships, fitted out in English cities, under the special favor of the royal family, of the ministry, and of parliament, stole from Africa, in the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... the study of anatomy fail him, I know not where he will next turn. For my part, I fancy he need not look beyond the stomach. The wonder is that his own stomach has not given him the clue ere this; for, metaphysician though he be, he enjoys the good things of earth. Let me ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... application of his system may be found, as we think, under the words, dim, dumb, deaf, and death. He might have confirmed the relation between dumbness and darkness from the acutest metaphysician among poets, in Dante's ove il sol tace. We have not left ourselves room enough to illustrate Mr. Wedgwood's handling of these etymologies by extracts; we must refer our readers to the book itself. Apart from its value as suggesting thought, or quickening our perception of shades ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... would make poetry a study—not a passion—it becomes the metaphysician to reason—but the poet to protest. Yet Wordsworth and Coleridge are men in years; the one imbued in contemplation from his childhood; the other a giant in intellect and learning. The diffidence, then, with which I venture ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... it so. Let it even be admitted that egoism is the only power conceivable by a modern metaphysician to be the spring of mental energy; just as chemical excitement may be the only power traceable by the modern physician as the source of muscular energy. And still Mr. Spencer's subsequent analysis is inaccurate, and unscholarly. For egoism does not necessarily ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and what is good?" cried the metaphysician, triumphantly. "Is it implanted within us? Hobbes, according to Reid, who is our last, and consequently best, philosopher, endeavours to demonstrate that there is no difference ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Encyclopaedists, he played the wit in the salons of Paris. He became fraternally intimate with Rousseau, and brought that social dreamer back with him to England as a mark of high appreciation of his talents. He was a metaphysician by nature, but he erred in speculating with theology. That was the mistake of his life. He fell into Bolingbroke's error of excessive egotism. Standing before the superstructure of theology, he carefully ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... business. He led, when I knew him, a contemplative life, was an assiduous reader, and a deeper thinker. He had [51] a splendid library, and spent much of his time among his books. If he had had the proper training for it, I always thought he would have made a great metaphysician. His conversation was often profound, and always original, always drawn from the workings of his own mind, and was always occupied with great philosophical and religious themes. It was born of struggle, more, I think, than any man's I ever talked with. For he had a great moral nature, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... rose-coloured lands of Karnak and Luxor, is the light more pure and admirable than in these great bare plains of Numidia and the region of the Sahara. Is there not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing—of lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of fluctuating light and elusive ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... known, just as in the next generation another poet of as humble birth was spoken of as The Ettrick Shepherd. The first persons of a higher order who sought the acquaintanceship of Burns were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop. The former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphysician, one of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its University at the close of last and the beginning of this century. He happened to be passing the summer at Catrine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns's farm, and having been made ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Bartholomew-close; in Holborn, looking back to Lincoln's Inn Fields; in Holborn, near Red-lion-square; in Scotland-yard; in a house looking to St. James' Park, now belonging to an eminent writer on legislation, and lately occupied by a celebrated critic and metaphysician; and he died in Artillery-walk, Bunhill-fields; and was buried in St. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... to extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects. One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... professed to find a lighter sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point, to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians were. He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any consciousness of being read to. He kept ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... countenanced by St. Paul, and so often revived in later days (as by Schaeffle, Lilienfeld, and Rene Worms), that society is an organism in which the individuals are merely cells depending for their significance on the whole to which they belong. Just as the animal is, as Hegel, the metaphysician, called it, a "nation," and Dareste, the physiologist, a "city," made up of cells which are individuals having a common ancestor, so the actual nation, the real city, is an animal made up of individuals which are cells having a common ancestor, or, as Oken long ago put it, individuals are the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... for it bears upon all truth. And thus I answer the objection with which I opened this Discourse. I supposed the question put to me by a philosopher of the day, "Why cannot you go your way, and let us go ours?" I answer, in the name of the Science of Religion, "When Newton can dispense with the metaphysician, then may you dispense with us." So much at first sight; now I am going on to claim a little more for Theology, by classing it with branches of knowledge which may with greater decency be ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... told me that "he was a smug." Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his friend (later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed that they should combine to pay but a single subscription to the Cricket Club. A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a moralist and metaphysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm,— and told me nothing. A white-haired College servant said that "Mr. Swinburne was a very ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth phrases it: Schlegel's word is fantasie. Remember that in more cases than academic dignities may be willing to admit, the heart (where a man has one) is the only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the head; and that a mere metaphysician, and solitary speculator, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... made in 1864 by the court of appeals in Kentucky, and again in 1869 under the same presiding Judge Robertson. But Chief Justice Williams rebukes this strange ruling in most emphatic language. He says: "In all the vague, uncertain, intangible, and undefined theories of the most impractical metaphysician in psychology or moral insanity, no court of last resort in England or America, so far as has been brought to our knowledge, ever before announced such a startling, irresponsible, and dangerous proposition of law, as that laid down in the inferior court. For, if this ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... But there was another Frederic,—the Frederic of Rheinsberg, the fiddler and flute-player, the poetaster and metaphysician. Amidst the cares of state the King had retained his passion for music, for reading, for writing, for literary society. To these amusements he devoted all the time that he could snatch from the business of war and government; and perhaps more light ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thoughts and the ravin of his envy would have provided interesting bases of speculation for the reflective magistrate, since, if, according to the metaphysician, thoughts are things, he ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... He—artist, philosopher, metaphysician, religionist—stands with his head bared before nature: overawed, contemplating her gifts, feasting his eyes on beauteous forms and colors, inhaling intoxicating fragrances, aromas, odors, matching them all artistically, partaking only of what he needs for his own subsistence—eternally ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... word libertine. It is possible that many unbelievers may have loose morals, which is owing to their temperament, and not to their opinions. But how does their conduct affect their opinions? Cannot then an immoral man be a good physician, architect, geometrician, logician, or metaphysician? A man of irreproachable conduct may be extremely deficient in knowledge and reason. In quest of truth, it little concerns us from whom it comes. Let us not judge men by their opinions, nor opinions by men; let ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... whilst the students of Physics deserve the honours of discovery, they cannot safely dispense with such assistance, for which the present confused and inconsistent state of the fundamental definitions of Physical Science most urgently calls. There is here a neglected but very interesting field for the metaphysician's efforts. ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Indians, and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College. By virtue of his Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise was composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are as ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Khemnitzer's productions circulated chiefly among the lower classes, for whom his Fables are still published. His works certainly aided Dmitrieff and Kryloff in handling this new branch of poetical literature in Russia. His "The Metaphysician" still remains one of the greatest favorites among Russian fables for cultivated readers of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... earth can only be regarded as a chain of four globes consubstantial and in coadunition—four in and three out. This makes seven, and the metaphysician when talking physics uses the metaphysical terms interchangeably and speaks of "the chain of seven globes" meaning in one sentence the four material globes making this earth; in another meaning the ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... collectively as human, we must recognize also our immanent ideal, the realization of which would constitute perfection for us. That ideal cannot be destroyed except in proportion as we ourselves perish. An absolute perfection, independent of human nature and its variations, may interest the metaphysician; but the artist and the man will be satisfied with a perfection that is inseparable from the consciousness of mankind, since it is at once the natural vision of the imagination, and the rational ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... from Deity; therefore we defame the place of our exile. But who is there may set apart his destiny from the earth which bore him? I am one of those who would bring back the old reverence for the Mother, the magic, the love. I think, metaphysician, you have gone astray. You would seek within yourself for the fountain of life. Yes, there is the true, the only light. But do not dream it will lead you further away from the earth, but rather deeper into its heart. By it you are nourished with those living waters you would drink. You ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... as it is to others; for do we not see even to the present day Malthus on Population absurdly misunderstood? This reflection about Malthus has often comforted me when I have been vexed at this misstatement of my views. As for M. Janet, he is a metaphysician, and such gentlemen are so acute that I think they often misunderstand common folk. Your criticism on the double sense in which I have used Natural Selection is new to me and unanswerable; but my blunder has done no harm, for I do not ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... artist; and somewhere among the free citizens, perhaps beside his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short, square, pug- nosed boy of ten years old, looking at it all with strange eyes—"who will be one day," so said the Pythoness at Delphi, "the wisest man in Greece"—sage, metaphysician, humorist, warrior, patriot, martyr—for ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... be fascinated by my studies, which were now of quite a dignified nature. I might as well add, since it cannot but provoke a bland and suggestive smile from masculine erudition, that I had actually taken up moral philosophy, and aspired to distinguish myself later as a metaphysician of some repute. But alas! for the vanity of human purposes and desires, this empty little note of my father's came like the chillest wintry blast and smothered the small creeping flame of my newly awakened ambition. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... much wiser metaphysician could explain it; but the house, and all around it, seemed to be glorified by the loved one within. The newly painted door was bright with love; the polished doorplate and bell handle glistened with love. The name Pillbody looked, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Bolingbroke, who, however detestable as a metaphysician, must be allowed to have had admirable talents as a political writer, thus describes the House of Commons, in his 'Letter to Sir William Wyndham:' —'You know the nature of that assembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... only may a man naturally be expected to be an adept in his own art, but at the same time to show an incapacity for a very different mode of activity.[281] We rarely find an artist who takes much interest in jurisprudence, or {268} a prizefighter who is an acute metaphysician. Nay, more than this, a positive distaste may grow up, which, in the intellectual order, may amount to a spontaneous and unreasoning disbelief in that which appears to be in opposition to the more familiar concept, and this at all times. It is often and truly said, "that past ages were ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the most modern solution of puzzles which have impeded philosophical progress from time immemorial, and it has arisen naturally in the course of philosophical reflection. It answers the big problems which are as familiar to the scientist and the theologian as to the metaphysician and epistemologist, and which are both intelligible ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... society. A child is not designed by his original formation to be a manufacturer of shoes, for he may be born among a people by whom shoes are not worn, and still less is he destined by his structure to be a metaphysician, an astronomer, or a lawyer, a rope-dancer, a fortune-teller, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... can be no more a poet in the sense in which the word is applied to Spenser, or to Wordsworth, both of whom he holds to be simply intolerable bores, than he can be a metaphysician or a scientific thinker. In common phraseology, he is a Philistine—a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... distress from intense frost; and found, when he awoke, that he had thrown off the bed-clothes in his sleep, and exposed himself to cold. He had been reading, a few days before, a very particular account of this colony. The eminent metaphysician, Dr. Reid, relates of himself that the dressing of a blister, which he had applied to his head, becoming ruffled, so as to produce pain, he dreamed that he had fallen into the hands of a party of North American Indians, who were scalping him. These were dreams ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... war. Plato's political disillusionment and perversity are easy to understand. But it is curious and interesting to watch the clash between his political bitterness and his intellectual serenity. In the intellectual and artistic sphere—as a writer, musician, mathematician, metaphysician—he stood consciously at the zenith of Greek history; but whenever he turned to politics he seems to have felt that the spring had gone out of the year. He instinctively antedated the setting of his dialogues. The characters nearly all belong to the generation of Sokrates, which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient; the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... a French writer, Pierre Bayle was "the last metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth and the first philosopher in the sense ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for perfect formal consistency in these abstract regions. He believed in God in the pluralistic manner, but partly from convention and partly from what I should call intellectual laziness, if laziness of any kind could be imputed to a Fechner, he let the usual monistic talk about him ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... occasional resort; in which we may forget the infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel every lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common metaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become a metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... for much companionship with the literary lions of the lakes, he was disappointed. Coleridge was absent, and missed making his acquaintance—a circumstance he afterwards regretted, saying that he could have been more useful to the young poet and metaphysician than Southey. De Quincey, though he writes ambiguously upon this point, does not seem to have met Shelley. Wordsworth paid him no attention; and though he saw a good deal of Southey, this intimacy changed Shelley's early liking for the man and ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... "If the metaphysician stood a chance of being burnt as a heretic, the natural philosopher was not in less jeopardy as a magician," is an observation of the same writer, which ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... was exactly this which the ancient metaphysicians, in the classic doctrine of the trinity, had done. They had transformed religion into metaphysics. The matter would not have been remedied by having a modern metaphysician do the same ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... discourses, and utterly impossible to retain them in the memory. They belong to what may be called political metaphysics—for though he professes to hold metaphysics in abhorrence, he is himself a thorough metaphysician in his modes of thought. He lives, indeed, in a world of abstract conceptions, in which he can scarcely perceive concrete facts, and his arguments are always a kind of clever juggling with such equivocal, conventional terms as ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Concord Transcendentalist in 1836, 1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of his mind forbade formal, consecutive, logical thought. He was not a philosopher in the accepted sense, though he was always philosophizing, nor a metaphysician in spite of his curious searchings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered in books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in quest of what interested him; he "fished in Montaigne," he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. He basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... things not seen." In the authorised version, "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence" for "proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words, [Greek: hypostasis] and [Greek: elenchos], affords a fine field of discussion for the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall be not far from the mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind the profound psychological truth, that men constantly feel certain about things for which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the legal or logical sense of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... as abstruse, if not so continuous, as those of a metaphysician—for boys are not unfrequently more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps, willing to believe—were not by any means confined to such subjects: castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely hours; and for this exercise of the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... psychological investigation, cannot help asking such questions in moments of reflection; but for the psychologist they are questions of very vital significance in his science. For Bergson, as psychologist, Memory is naturally, a subject of great importance. We must note, however, that for Bergson, as metaphysician, it plays an even more important role, since his study of Memory and conclusions as to its nature lead him on to a discussion of the relation of soul and body, spirit and matter. His second large work, which appeared in 1896, bears the title Matiere ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... whether it is a positive conception, or simply the thinking away of all limitations. 'I know what God is, when you do not ask me.' I know what eternity is, though I cannot define the word to satisfy a metaphysician. The little child taught by some grandmother Lois, in a cottage, knows what she means when she tells him 'you will live for ever,' though both scholar and teacher would be puzzled to put it into other words. When we say eternity ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which frightened me a good deal; but it went off unaccountably. Love and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... afterwards brought them acquainted with each other. They were worthy of each other's esteem, and were presently on the most friendly terms. Diderot persuaded the bookseller, Durand, to take the manuscript from the abbe, and this great metaphysician received for his first work, and almost as a favor, a hundred crowns, which perhaps he would not have obtained without my assistance. As we lived in a quarter of the town very distant from each other, we all assembled once a week at the Palais Royal, and went to dine at the Hotel du Panier Fleuri. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... or intellectual as Wesley. He was not so great a genius. But he had more eloquence, and more warmth of disposition. Wesley was a system maker, a metaphysician, a logician. He was also profoundly versed in the knowledge of human nature, and curiously adapted his system to the wants and circumstances of that class of people over whom he had the greatest power. Both Wesley and Whitefield were demanded by their times, and only such men as they were could ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... peculiarly to invite the philosophical Poor Richard to its venerable retreats. Here, of gray, chilly, drizzly November mornings, in the dark-stoned quadrangle of the time-honored Sorbonne, walked the lean and slippered metaphysician,—oblivious for the moment that his sublime thoughts and tattered wardrobe were famous throughout Europe,—meditating on the theme of his next lecture; at the same time, in the well-worn chambers overhead, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... wished to communicate. Mr. Hervey was, perhaps unusually, disposed to reflection, by having just escaped from drowning; for he had made all these comparisons, and came to this conclusion, with the accuracy of a metaphysician, who has been accustomed to study cause and effect—indeed there was no species of knowledge for which he had not taste and talents, though, to please fools, he too often affected "the bliss ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... lay there asleep in her disordered bedroom, her clothes strewing chair, dresser, floor, Floss's tastes, mental equipment, spiritual make-up, innermost thoughts, were as plainly to be read by the observer as though she had been scientifically charted by a psycho-analyst, a metaphysician and her dearest ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... the Astronomer, a little incredulously,—what there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a mathematician or a metaphysician? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... modestly bare.'.... 'Art may convince by deceit; then it blinds. When it carries conviction by contemplating truth, it enlightens. Art may persuade by evil; then it hardens. When it persuades by goodness, it perfects.' These are noble words. Orator, poet, metaphysician, artist, M. Delsarte offers new horizons to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... feeble, system of moral philosophy—Berkeley, afterwards bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, surpassed all his contemporaries in subtle and variety of metaphysical arguments, as well as in the art of deduction—lord Bolingbroke's talents as a metaphysician have been questioned since his posthumous works appeared—great progress was made in mathematics and astronomy, by Wallis, Halley, and Flamstead—the art of medicine owed some valuable improvements to the classical Dr. Friend, and the elegant Dr. Mead. Among the poets ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... respecting foreign countries; a metaphysician instructs us in the principles of moral science—principles drawn from facts already known to us. The two processes may take place at the same time: a child in learning a lesson receives both information and instruction: he is ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... Creator, Preserver, Ruler; and when the simplicity and helplessness of the child have re-entered the heart of man, the name of father will come back to the lips which had uttered in vain all the names of a philosophical despair. But from the Nirvana of the Buddhist metaphysician there is no return. He starts from the idea that the highest object is to escape pain. Life in his eyes is nothing but misery; birth the cause of all evil, from which even death cannot deliver him, because he believes ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... obtain even workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician. Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender—Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame and a degradation ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sense not to abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment,—whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that, in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and selfishness. The novelist Duclos, with his keen power of penetrating human character, would move leisurely through the throng, picking up material for his romances; and Mably would talk politics and drop ill-natured remarks. The learned metaphysician Helvetius, too, was often there, seeking for compliments, his appetite for applause being voracious; so insatiable, indeed, that he even danced one night at the opera. It was said that he was led to study mathematics by seeing a circle ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... never tired of poking fun at his philosophical friends in Edinburgh. When sending some Scotch grouse to Lady Holland, he said—"I take the liberty to send you two brace of grouse—curious, because killed by a Scotch metaphysician: in other and better language, they are mere ideas, shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun." In another letter to the same correspondent he says—"I hope you are reading Mr. Stewart's book, and are far gone in the ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... miracles. The real Yogis avoid appearing in public, and spend their lives in secluded retirement and studies, except when, as in Dayanand's case, they come forth in time of need to aid their country. However, it is perfectly certain that India never saw a more learned Sanskrit scholar, a deeper metaphysician, a more wonderful orator, and a more fearless denunciator of every evil, than Dayanand, since the time of Sankharacharya, the celebrated founder of the Vedanta philosophy, the most metaphysical of Indian systems, in fact, the crown of pantheistic teaching. Then, Dayanand's ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he has much in common—has furnished more luminous hints to the elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were those which concern the most inscrutable, but, to the genuine metaphysician, most fascinating of all topics, the nature of substance, matter and spirit, absolute being,—in a word, Ontology. This department of metaphysic, the most interesting, and, agonistically [14], the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... England divine and metaphysician, was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703. He was graduated early from Yale College, where he had given much attention to philosophy, became tutor of his college, and at nineteen began to preach. His voice and manner did not lend themselves readily to pulpit oratory, but his ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... as libertines. It may be that many incredulous people are immoral; this immorality is due to their temperament, and not to their opinions. But what has their conduct to do with these opinions? Can not an immoral man be a good physician, a good architect, a good geometer, a good logician, a good metaphysician? With an irreproachable conduct, one can be ignorant upon many things, and reason very badly. When truth is presented, it matters not from whom it comes. Let us not judge men by their opinions, or opinions by men; let us judge men ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Nonentity (Dr.), a metaphysician, and thought by most people to be a profound scholar. He generally spreads himself before the fire, sucks his pipe, talks little, drinks much, and is reckoned very good company. You may know him by his long grey wig, and the blue handkerchief ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... are, but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... group are desirable ends, the ends pursued by hostile groups are nefarious. The subjectivity of this situation is not apparent to the gregarious animal, which feels that the general principles of justice are on the side of its own herd. When the animal has arrived at the dignity of the metaphysician, it invents ethics as the embodiment of its belief in the justice of its own herd. So the Grand Augur invokes ethics as the justification of Augurs in their conflicts with pigs. But, it may be said, this view of ethics takes no account of such truly ethical notions ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... matters of high import; he drew the boundary line between the terrible and the horrible, and he never passed it; the former he knew was allied to grandeur, the latter to deformity and disgust. An eminent metaphysician visited the gallery before the public exhibition; he saw the Hamlet's Ghost of Fuseli, and exclaimed, like Burns' rustic in Halloween, "Lord, preserve me!" He declared that it haunted him round ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... venerable mystic truths from my history of the noble Gargantua and Pantagruel. I don't despair of being proved, to the entire satisfaction of some future ape, to have been, without exception, the profoundest divine and metaphysician that ever ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... reason has a great similarity to that of the chemists, which they term the experiment of reduction, or, more usually, the synthetic process. The analysis of the metaphysician separates pure cognition a priori into two heterogeneous elements, viz., the cognition of things as phenomena, and of things in themselves. Dialectic combines these again into harmony with the necessary rational idea of the unconditioned, and ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... grounds were not in the conception of any one. I speak especially of two others, who fought like cat and dog: one was dogmatical, the other categorical. The first was Hamilton himself—Sir William Hamilton of Edinburgh, the metaphysician, not Sir William Rowan Hamilton[709] of Dublin, the mathematician, a combination of peculiar genius with unprecedented learning, erudite in all he could want except mathematics, for which he had no turn, and in which he had not even a schoolboy's knowledge, thanks to the Oxford ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... to the subtleties of metaphysical thought, it appears quite inconceivable, when he is told that the existence of the visible and palpable scene before him should be converted into a problem of apparently invincible difficulty. Yet so it is. The metaphysician first carries off in triumph what are called its secondary qualities, as colour and heat, proving them to be no qualities of matter, but of mind, or the sensitive being. He next assails what had been pronounced to be its primary or essential qualities; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted him, though it was an exasperated urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and immediate bearing upon my religious and moral life; what may I believe about God and Duty, about the world and its ultimate meaning, about the soul and its destiny?' For such purposes solutions stopping short of what will fully satisfy the legitimate demands of the professed Metaphysician may be all that is necessary, or at least all that is possible for those who are not intending to make a serious and elaborate study of Metaphysic. I have no sympathy with the attempt to base Religion upon anything but honest enquiry into truth: ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... some one—I believe it was Voltaire—said that while Newton had excited the envy of the intellectual world by his mathematical accomplishments, it had gotten even with him the moment his commentaries were published. Spinoza was not a mathematician, particularly. He was a metaphysician, an honest thinker, whose influence is felt, and will be felt so long as these great questions have the slightest ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... character of the parent may influence the character of the child the metaphysician must decide. Certainly the character of Vivian Grey underwent, at this period of his life, a sensible change. Doubtless, constant communion with a mind highly refined, severely cultivated, and much experienced, cannot but produce a beneficial impression, even upon a mind ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... region where Thought weds Fact, where the mental operation of the mathematician and the physical action of the molecules are seen in their true relation? Does not the way to it pass through the very den of the metaphysician, strewed with the remains of former explorers, and abhorred by every man of science? It would indeed be a foolhardy adventure for me to take up the valuable time of the Section by leading you into those speculations which require, as we know, thousands of ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... as from heavy I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days Looking on him was listening Love the difficulty better than the woman Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous Not much esteem for non-professional actresses Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... poet declining to be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the historian, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the Heroes, Demi-gods, Cyclops, Furies and ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... objects without looking at or knowing them, a mere desire to know brings out into distinctness every object in succession on which the desire fixes. 'Instantly, or almost instantly,' continues the metaphysician, 'without our consciousness of any new or peculiar state of mind intervening in the process, the landscape becomes to our vision altogether different. Certain parts only—those parts which we wished to know particularly—are seen ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... earnestness that despises the wit and banter of society, and affects the isolation and grandeur of pure thought. The mountain summit is too far removed from the walks of men to make it possible for the recluse to wield all the influence that his powers may entitle him to exert. The metaphysician less than the poet, the country minister less than the successful lawyer, is ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... our great poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well—that is as ill—as Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a great poet? Nay—we shall not be deterred by the fear of self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a great prose-writer? ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... gradually made them naturally inclined to that virtue—an inclination which was strengthened by inveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love. Thus it happened that self-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a specifically feminine virtue; so much so that the German metaphysician Fichte could declare that "the woman's life should disappear in the man's without a remnant," and that this process is love. No doubt it is love, but love demands at the same time that the man's life should disappear ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... be—at the moment: it could not be any better. For if it could have been, it would have been: it has no interest in being otherwise. That it is not perfect in our sense of the word matters little to the metaphysician. We have such limited experiences of universes that we cannot judge what a really good one should be like; and to say that ours is bad is to foul ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... great a degree, in the individuals of the same species, the dispositions, namely courage, pertinacity, suspicion, restlessness, confidence, temper, pugnaciousness, affection, care of their young, sagacity, &c., &c., vary. It would require a most able metaphysician to explain how many primary qualities of the mind must be changed to cause these diversities of complex dispositions. From these dispositions being inherited, of which the testimony is unanimous, families and breeds arise, varying in these respects. I may instance the good ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... that?" the Doctor said, with that shade of curiosity in his tone which a metaphysician would probably say is an index of a certain tendency to belief in the superstition to ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... information he held Luther, Kant and Wagner responsible for the violation of Belgian neutrality, and the crimes of the German army. He, however, to use a colloquial expression, had never been to see for himself, being neither musician, theologian, or metaphysician. He trusted to the word of Academicians, and only made exceptions in favour of Beethoven, who was Flemish, and Goethe, citizen of a free city and almost a Strassburger, which is half French,—or French and a half. He paused ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... philosophers, and if they never attained to what we may call the nettete et clarte of the Greek metaphysician, they excelled all other thinkers in the boldness and profound spirituality of their philosophical mysticism. In proof of this assertion we may point to that body of writings ...
— Hebrew Literature
... be admitted that this explanation leaves a good deal to be desired. It is the explanation of a metaphysician rather than that of an experimental scientist. Such phrases as "matter immediately begins to strive to fashion itself," for example, have no place in the reasoning of inductive science. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of Kant is a remarkable conception; it attempts ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... have the names of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury; Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice; John Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge; and Samuel Clarke, divine and metaphysician; and, indeed, a very considerable list ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... its inmost states, as if an accumulative memory of the past made it impossible to go back again. The mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than immediate experience. The metaphysician that we each carry unconsciously within us, and the presence of which is explained, as we shall see later on, by the very place that man occupies amongst the living beings, has its fixed requirements, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... was more disturbed by these theological controversies than the Emperor himself. He was a soldier, and not a metaphysician; and, as Emperor, he was Pontifex Maximus,—head of the Church. He hated these contentions between good and learned men. He felt that they compromised the interests of the Church universal, of which he was the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... not even a Cockney humourist." I do not mind his saying that I am not a humourist—in which (to tell the truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am not a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French writer said of me, "He is no metaphysician: not even an English metaphysician," I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but I should feel angry about the insult to my country. So I do not urge that I am a humourist; but I do insist that I am ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... This was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as a hand-maiden to politics or religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in New England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of a theologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way that Jonathan Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our own time, indeed, his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniable capacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. Kellner to consider him purely as a literary artist, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... John G. Webster. He was born at Portsmouth, N.H., on the 8th of April, 1811, and was, therefore, nearly 75 years of age. He was a distant kinsman of Daniel Webster. His paternal grandmother was a kinsman of John Locke, the English philosopher and metaphysician. His maternal ancestors, from whom he received his middle name,—the Gerrisbes,—emigrated from England to this ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... have relation to themselves in the form of that object. Whether there are any such cases of reflex relation or not, and whether that sort of knowledge which we term Temperance is of this reflex nature, has yet to be determined by the great metaphysician. But even if knowledge can know itself, how does the knowledge of what we know imply the knowledge of what we do not know? Besides, knowledge is an abstraction only, and will not inform us of any particular subject, such as medicine, ...
— Charmides • Plato
... and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries. "J'etais," she says, "un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions a man usage, qui toute experience faite, devinrent ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... faction fights are ephemeral, and need not trouble us here. The Old Vitalist, who was essentially a Materialist, has evolved into the New Vitalist, who is, as every genuine scientist must be, finally a metaphysician. And as the New Vitalist turns from the disputes of his youth to the future of his science, he will cease to boggle at the name Vitalist, or at the inevitable, ancient, popular, and quite correct use of ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... manifests itself in the domain of tangible external facts. No help for it, therefore; even the most stiff-necked and obdurate of these fellows must condescend to look up a little, if only to get a sight, be it no farther than the knees, of those august figures" (p.327). Do you, Master Metaphysician, perhaps intend to instruct the social democrats in the art of getting kicks? The willingness to bestow them may be met with everywhere, and you are perfectly justified in promising to those who happen to be kicked ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... relatively innocent. The Greeks found that the mind could carry on an absorbing game with itself. We all engage in reveries and fantasies of a homely, everyday type, concerned with our desires or resentments, but the fantasy of the metaphysician busies itself with conceptions, abstractions, distinctions, hypotheses, postulates, and logical inferences. Having made certain postulates or hypotheses, he finds new conclusions, which he follows in a seemingly convincing ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... opticians, that, in the operations of vision, we never get beyond the eye itself, or the representations that are depicted therein. We see nothing, they tell us, but what is delineated within the eye. Now, the way in which a plain man should meet this statement, is this—he should ask the metaphysician what eye he refers to. Do you allude, sir, to an eye which belongs to my visible body, and forms a small part of the same; or do you allude to an eye which does not belong to my visible body, and which constitutes no portion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... we are justified in saying that we stand on the ground of indisputable fact. It is no mere hypothesis of science, still less a figment of the metaphysician's imagination, or an outpouring of a poet's inspiration, that Permanence is the indispensable postulate of the commonest facts of material existence. We have no explanation to give as to the method of such action as has been described on the part of the invisible ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... felt by him as complimentary. The tremendous philippic of Junius Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age, is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could recall, who, with a kind of exulting indignation, thought he had discovered ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... order of the manifestation of phenomena, the real Inscrutable, the mysterious Unknowable, escapes us still; this is the nature of phenomenal manifestation, "the secret of the Power manifested in Existence."[104-2] At this point the physicist trips and falls; and here, too, the metaphysician stumbles. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... he, "is the prince of swimming-masters. He is more at home in the water than on land, and knows more about swimming than a fish. He will calculate you the specific gravity of the heaviest German metaphysician at a glance, and is capable of floating even the works of Monsieur Thiers, if ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... exercise to try to fix the mind on the primitive man divested of all the attributes he has acquired in his struggles with the other mammalian fauna. Fix the mind on an orange, the ordinary occupation of the metaphysician: take from it (without eating it) odor, color, weight, form, substance, and peel; then let the mind still dwell on it as an orange. The experiment is perfectly successful; only, at the end of it, you haven't any mind. Better still, consider ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... COLLIER, ARTHUR, an English metaphysician, born in Wilts; studied Descartes and Malebranche, and who, anticipating Berkeley, published a "Demonstration of the Non-Existence and the Impossibility of an External World" ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... utmost depths of the searching intellect with the utmost sensibility to the powers and purposes of Art: whilst, as a creator in Art, he had pretensions which neither Plato nor Schelling could make. His powers as a Psychologist (not as a Metaphysician) seem to me absolutely unrivalled on earth. And had his health been better, so as to have sustained the natural cheerfulness towards which his nature tended, had his pecuniary embarrassments been even moderately lightened in their pressure, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... library. It was said abroad that "a Scotchman had lavished away the king's money in buying old black-letter books." A pretty specimen of lavishing away royal money, truly! There is also another thing, connected with these invaluable (I speak as a bibliomaniac—and, perhaps, as a metaphysician may think—as a fool! but let it pass!) with these invaluable purchases:—his Majesty, in his directions to Mr. Nicol, forbade any competition with those purchasers who wanted books of science and belles-lettres ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... required more time to defend a tragedy by a great collection of authorities, than to write it; and I am supposing the same number of pages in the tragedy and in the defence. Heinsius perhaps bestowed more time in defending his Herodes infanticida against Balzac, than a Spanish (or a Scotch) metaphysician bestows on a large volume of controversy, where he takes all from his own stock." I am somewhat concerned in the truth of this principle. There are articles in the present work occupying but a few pages, which could never have been produced had not more ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... fondness for epigram—for terse, paradoxical statement—is exemplified even in the best writers, as, for example, Blaise Pascal. La Bruyere (1645-1696), a genial philosopher, wrote in a most attractive style a work entitled The Characters of Our Age. The metaphysician Malebranche (1638-1715) taught that we know through our spiritual union with God, or that we see all things in God. A disciple of Des Cartes, he did not strictly follow his master. Fenelon (1651-1715), illustrious for his piety as well as for his versatile authorship, wrote on religious ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... universal human faculty; Carlyle nicknames it the sixth sense. Who made it? God or the devil? Is it flesh or spirit? a difficult question; because tamed animals grow to possess it in a high degree; and our metaphysician does not yet allow them spirit. But, whichever it be, it cannot be for bad: only bad when misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the faculty which judges between good and evil. Else why has God put His love of praise into the heart of every child which is born into the world, and entwined it ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... speculative intellect were equally stirred. The youth was already longing to write a philosophical treatise. The two elements of his nature thus roused to action led him along a 'strange diagonal.' He would be at once a painter and a metaphysician. Some eight years of artistic labour convinced him that he could not be a Titian or a Raphael, and he declined to be a mere Hazlitt junior. His metaphysical studies, on the contrary, convinced him that he might be a Hume or a Berkeley; but unluckily they convinced himself alone. The tiny volume ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... science of existing plants, and to that zoology which is the science of existing animals? Nay, I reply, but it is not all. I refer to this classifying principle because, while it exists in relation to all other sciences as a principle—to use the words of the metaphysician just quoted—"given to us by nature,"—as a principle of the mind within,—it exists in Palaeontological science as a principle of nature itself,—as a principle palpably external to the mind. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... that 1s. 5d. a day for a charwoman, a messenger and an accountant, to say nothing of a metaphysician, all rolled into one, is low pay. In London you would have to give such a being at ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... own radiance, will sweep doubt away forever. Being then in the light and knowing it, the lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it, will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence. It is for the sake of such vision as God would give that you are denied such vision as you would have. The Father of our spirits is not content that we should know Him as we now know each other. There is a better, closer, nearer than any human ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... of Marino, whom he supposes to be at the head of them. Marino abounds in puerile conceits; but they are not far-fetched, like those of Donne and Cowley; they generally lie on the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a poetical Heraclitus. But Johnson had caught the cant of the age, in which it was usual to designate almost any thing absurd or extravagant by ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... presence, which shone at the heart of the pillar, and dwelt afterwards between the cherubim, but probably we must attach a loftier meaning to it here, and rather think of what we should call the uncreated and infinite divine essence. Only do not let us make Moses talk like a metaphysician or a theological professor. Rather we should hear in his cry the voice of a soul thrilled through and through with the astounding consciousness of God's favour, blessed with love-gifts in answered prayers, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in the world was conducted by a number of unhampered men in small Greek cities, who knew no language but their own and had scarcely a technical term. The true metaphysician is after all only a person who says, "Now let us take a thought for a moment before we fall into a discussion of the broad questions of life, lest we rush hastily into impossible and needless conflict. What is the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells |
