"Metaphysics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... produce force, it only transmits it. If he maintains that he has nothing to do with anything outside of mechanism, that the invisible and imponderable force lies outside of his domain, he has handed over to metaphysics the fairest and richest portion of his realm. In our fear of being metaphysical we have swung to another extreme, and have lost sight of valuable truth which lay at the bottom of the old vitalistic theories. Cells, tissues, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... stop writing metaphysics this morning it will be to arrange some drawings for a young lady to copy. They are leaves of the best illuminated MSS. I have, and I am going to spend my whole afternoon in explaining to her what she is to aim at ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... those isolated "psychic flashes." The horses, in comparison with the other animals, are here in the state of a man whose subliminal consciousness had gained the upper hand. That man would lead a higher existence, in an almost immaterial atmosphere, of which the phenomena of metaphysics, sparks falling from a region which we shall perhaps one day reach, sometimes give us an uncertain and fleeting glimpse. Our intelligence, which is really lethargy and which keeps us imprisoned in a little hollow of space and time, would there be replaced by intuition, or rather ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... foolish, trivial, noxious to the mind, enervators of intellect, fathers of idleness, and what not, let us at once take a high ground, and say,—Go you to your own employments, and to such dull studies as you fancy; go and bob for triangles, from the Pons Asinorum; go enjoy your dull black draughts of metaphysics; go fumble over history books, and dissert upon Herodotus and Livy; OUR histories are, perhaps, as true as yours; our drink is the brisk sparkling champagne drink, from the presses of Colburn, Bentley and Co.; our walks are over such sunshiny ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Jeanne, who had regained something of her former vivacity, asked us in less than a quarter of an hour one dozen questions, to answer which would have required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne solemnly ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... thought, seat of thought; sensorium[obs3], sensory; head, headpiece; pate, noddle[obs3], noggin, skull, scull, pericranium[Med], cerebrum, cranium, brainpan[obs3], sconce, upper story. [in computers] central processing unit, CPU; arithmetic and logical unit, ALU. [Science of mind] metaphysics; psychics, psychology; ideology; mental philosophy, moral philosophy; philosophy of the mind; pneumatology[obs3], phrenology; craniology[Med], cranioscopy[Med]. ideality, idealism; transcendentalism, spiritualism; immateriality &c. 317; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... somewhere and somehow; but you have to endow it with a fictitious immortality. An anvil you feel safer about, but then you have to use it somewhere, and account for its surplus, if there is any. Any one with a turn for metaphysics would be at home in Ordnance; Aristotle would ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... the myths of civilised races, is even now to some degree part of the living creed of savages. Civilised myths, then, they urge, are survivals from a parallel state of belief once prevalent among the ancestors of even the Aryan race. But how did this mental condition, this early sort of false metaphysics, come into existence? We have no direct historical information on the subject. If I were obliged to offer an hypothesis, it would be that early men, conscious of personality, will, and life—conscious that force, when ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... among the Platonic writings, are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First Alcibiades. Of these, the Lesser Hippias and the Funeral Oration are cited by Aristotle; the first in the Metaphysics, the latter in the Rhetoric. Neither of them are expressly attributed to Plato, but in his citation of both of them he seems to be referring to passages in the extant dialogues. From the mention of 'Hippias' in the singular ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... metaphysics is to be found in 'An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding,' forming part of a volume of Essays which Hume published somewhat late in life, and which he desired might 'alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.' To a formal, though necessarily rapid, examination ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... this he inferred the existence of two distinct natures in man, the mental and the physical, and the existence of certain ideas which he called innate in the mind, and serving to connect it with the spiritual and invisible. Besides these new views in metaphysics, Descartes made valuable contributions to mathematical and physical science; and though his philosophy is now generally discarded, it is not forgotten that he opened the way for Locke, Newton, and Leibnitz, and that his system was in reality the base of all those that superseded it. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... confederation. The Austrian government was therefore obliged to speak against the Poles, at the very time that it was acting in their cause, and to say to her subjects of Gallicia: "I forbid you to be of the opinion which I support." What metaphysics! they would be found very intricate, if fear did ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... scientific man is distinguished specially from a metaphysician. The one investigates the phenomena of matter, the other studies the phenomena of mind, according to the old distinction between physics and metaphysics. Science, therefore, is the ordered knowledge of the phenomena which we recognize through the senses. A scientific fact is a fact perceived by the senses. Scientific evidence is evidence addressed to the senses. At one of the meetings of the Victoria Institute, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... observing that the Oath referred, not to his executive actions, but only to his assent to an act of the Legislature, a matter even then taken for granted. The remark, far from soothing the King, elicited the shrewd retort, "None of your Scotch metaphysics, Mr. Dundas! None ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... seems like "a flight of the alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation. "The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged into that which it forever seeks but which having found it cannot utter. But the type of metaphysics through which most of the great mystics of history have done their thinking and have made their formulations is still further responsible for the excessive negativity ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... distance,—no jordan;—in fact, all the old gentry are gone, and the nouveaux riches, when they have the inclination, do not know how to live. Biscuit, not half cuit; everything animal and vegetable smeared with butter and lard. Poverty stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniard and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other nations,—England and France especially. We hug our lousy cloak around us, take another chaw of tub-backer, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... so naturally painted, that he hardly deserves to be the hero of a farce. Although exceedingly soft, he is a well-bred fool—though somewhat fat (for the actor is Mr. David Rees); he is not altogether inelegant. The gentleman who does the theatrical metaphysics in the Morning Herald has described him as a capital specimen of "physical obesity and moral teunity,"[3]—which we quote to save ourselves trouble, for the force of description can no further go. Prudence is also inimitable—a march-of-intellect young lady without brains, who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry. Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?—there ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... was the elder by two years he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge before Lamb had finished his course, but he came back to London now and then, to meet his schoolmate in a smoky little room of the Salutation and discuss metaphysics and poetry to the accompaniment of egg-hot, Welsh rabbits, and tobacco. Those golden hours in the old tavern left their impress deep in Lamb's sensitive nature, and when he came to dedicate his works to Coleridge he hoped that some of the sonnets, carelessly regarded ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... the world what the world calls the scandale of love, one must have at least the courage of one's passion. In this respect the women of the eighteenth century are better than you: they did not subtilise love in metaphysics [elles n'alambiquaient pas ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor of philosophy at Annecy, and a distinguished mathematician, Father Baranzan, who had raised some questions about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be done with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledgment of the interest which his writings had excited, and insisting on the paramount necessity, above everything, of the observation of facts and of natural history, out of which philosophy may be built. But the most comprehensive ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... spontaneous generation leads back to the hypothesis of spontaneity: what is there in much-derided metaphysics more contradictory? ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Historians: Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. Miscellaneous Prose: Johnson, Goldsmith, "Junius," Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, and Burke, Criticism: Burke, Reynolds, Campbell, Kames. Political Economy: Adam Smith. Ethics: Paley, Smith, Tucker. Metaphysics: Reid. Theological and Religious Writers: Campbell, Paley, Watson, Newton, Hannah More, and Wilberforce. Poetry: Comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan; Minor Poets; Later Poems; Beattie's Minstrel; Cowper and Burns. 5. The Nineteenth Century. The Poets: Campbell, Southey, Scott, Byron; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category of Jewish Messiah to the categories of the Fourth Gospel. And if, in our generation, a conservative scholar like the late Dr. Sanday pleaded for the necessity ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... dark and mysterious hints which were given out, of some GREAT WORK at which he was now laboring, which the world, (he said it with a presentiment of triumph) would be compelled to own. But, as I remarked, his appearance did not belie him. Whoever might doubt his metaphysics, his legs were unquestionably the very longest, by the assistance of which he had lately won a foot-race on the Union course for a hundred dollars, to enable him to pursue his studies for the ministry. 'Accoutred as he was,' on one fine day in the month of May, he had wandered ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... objection of the classical to the romantic school. Jeffrey's brightness of intellect may justify Carlyle's comparison of him to Voltaire,—only a Voltaire qualified by dislike to men who were 'dreadfully in earnest.' Jeffrey was a philosophical sceptic; he interpreted Dugald Stewart as meaning that metaphysics, being all nonsense, we must make shift with common-sense; and he wrote a dissertation upon taste, to prove that there are no rules about taste whatever. He was too genuine a sceptic to sacrifice peace to the hopeless search for truth. One of the most striking passages in ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Pattison (Satires of Pope, p. 158) points out Warburton's 'want of penetration in that subject [metaphysics] which he considered more peculiarly his own.' He said of 'the late Mr. Baxter' (Andrew Baxter, not Richard Baxter), that 'a few pages of his reasoning have not only more sense and substance than all the elegant discourses of Dr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... so in my life," he replied. "Why, I've been splendidly entertained by a little black princess, who called herself your waiting maid, and discoursed most eloquently of METAPHYSICS ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... all knowledge of causes, whether efficient or final. But this goal cannot be reached, it seems, by a sudden or abrupt transition from the Theological to the Atheistic creed. There must be an intermediate stage,—the era, in short, of Metaphysics,—during which the process of Criticism will operate as a solvent on all previous beliefs, and by producing Skepticism, in the first instance, in regard to all other systems, will tend at length to concentrate the attention ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the whole of her experience. But the phrasing is perhaps too high and absolute; and the decline and fall of Mr Balfour are a terrible example to those of us who, being young, might otherwise take metaphysics too solemnly. It will, therefore, at this stage be enough to repeat that, in contemplating the discontent and unrest which constitute the Irish difficulty, Great Britain is contemplating the work of her own hands, the creation of her ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... his own see; and several literary, charitable, and pious institutions at Manilla look up to him as their patron and head; among others may be mentioned the University of Santo Tomas, having chairs for students of Latin, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, canon ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... did not speculate on the creation of things or the end of them. He was not troubled to account for the origin of man, nor did he seek to know about his hereafter. He meddled neither with physics nor metaphysics [2]. [Sidebar] Subjects on which Confucius did not treat.— That he was unreligious, unspiritual, and open to the charge of insincerity. The testimony of the Analects about the subjects of his teaching is the following:— 'His frequent themes of discourse were the Book 1 Mencius, II. Pt. I. ii. ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... friends by sympathy can join, And absent kings be honour'd in their coin; May they do both, who are so curb'd? but we Whom no such abstracts torture, that can see And pay each other a full self-return, May laugh, though all such metaphysics burn. 'Tis a kind soul in magnets, that atones Such two hard things as iron are and stones, And in their dumb compliance we learn more Of love, than ever books could speak before. For though attraction hath got all the name, As ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute litterature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.' ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... blushes at his alliance with Thomas Hearne, will feel his profession ennobled by the name of LEIBNITZ. That extraordinary genius embraced and improved the whole circle of human science; and, after wrestling with Newton and Clark in the sublime regions of geometry and metaphysics, he could descend upon earth to examine the uncouth characters and barbarous Latin of a chronicle or charter." Gibbon: Post. Works, vol. ii., 712. Consult also Mem. de ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... obstacles; but with Wagner the case is different. He also is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning is always deep, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... dramatic effect applied to narrative and to rhetorical exhibition, and beyond any other mode of description give the force of reality. Speech, when highly cultivated, is better adapted to generalization and abstraction; therefore to logic and metaphysics. The latter must ever henceforth, be the superior in formulating thoughts. Some of the enthusiasts in signs have contended that this unfavorable distinction is not from any inherent incapability, but because their employment has not been continued unto perfection, and that if they had ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... produce an unhealthy self-consciousness. This might, indeed, be true, if the original state of your nature, before the examination began, were a healthy one. "If Adam had always remained in Paradise, there would have been no anatomy and no metaphysics:" as it is not so, we require both. Sin has entered the world, and death by sin; and therefore it is that both soul and body require a care and a minute watchfulness that cannot, in the present state of things, originate either disease or sin. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... content. The things that occupy the mind of the peasant farmer are not the same that fill the mind of the university don, but if the respective environments of the two types had been reversed the professor might have thought about manure and the farmer about metaphysics. And this holds good also of nations and races. Consider, for instance, the German people who before the rise of Bismarck were looked upon as a nation of peaceful peasants and Gelerhten, "ces bons Allemands," in contemporary ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... malignancy, maritime, manna, manslaughter, masterly, market-day-folks, maid-price, mealy, meekly, mercifully, merchant-like, memorial, mercenary, mention, memorandums, mercurial, metropolis, miserably, mindful, meridian, medal, metaphysics, ministration, mimic, misapply, misgovernment, misquote, misconstruction, monstrously, monster-like, monstrosity, mutable, moneyed, monopoly, mortise, mortised, muniments, to moderate, and mother-wit These words, and five thousand more equally excellent, which have remained part of the language ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Pathfinder of the People. There can, indeed, be no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius were of a different order, it was of as rare and high an ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the reviewer declares that such indefinite succession of ages is "virtually infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name,"—at least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific, but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... smoking, and one-tenth to what he is reading, we are reminded of the commercial traveler who "wanted to make the show of a library at home, so he wrote to a book merchant in London, saying: 'Send me six feet of theology, and about as much metaphysics, and near a yard of civil law in old folio.'" Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but Dr. James Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers, favors a dreamy, imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... holds, and be governed by our own laws. Thus all combined, yet all were separate; all served, yet all were free. Such a government could not exist in a dark age. Our ancestors may not indeed have been deep in the metaphysics of the schools; they may not have shone in the fine arts; but much knowledge of human nature, much practical wisdom must have existed amongst them, when this admirable constitution was formed; and I believe it is a decided truth, though certainly an ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... to separate me from it is to disband it. If I abdicate to-day, in two days' time you will no longer have an army. These poor fellows do not understand all your subtleties. Is it believed that axioms in metaphysics, declarations of right, harangues from the tribune, will put a stop to the disbanding of an army? To reject me when I landed at Cannes I can conceive possible; to abandon me now is what I do not understand. It is not when the enemy is at twenty-five leagues' distance that any ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... was possible to rouse to tremendous heights if the right psychological key was found to fit its particular lock, and he believed he possessed the key which fitted the deeply-buried and long-hidden thing in Dirty Fingers' remarkable brain. Because he believed in this metaphysics which he had not read out of Aristotle, he had faith that Fingers would prove his salvation. He felt growing in him stronger than ever a strange kind of elation. He felt better physically than last night. The few minutes of strenuous action in which he had half killed Mercer had been a pretty good ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... leaving the door open when they quit an apartment. Doubts, indeed, may be entertained as to the values arbitrarily put on the respective items in the account: but to venture into this remote part of the inquiry would be to plunge us into the depths of metaphysics. Even supposing we were to make the matter as clear as the sun at noonday, there would still be sceptics. On shewing the above arithmetical calculation, for example, to an English lady, who has for a number of years studied Scotch character and manners, she, with a degree of bluntness that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... vainly begging for pardon for them or some alleviation of their sentence, and this judge or this prosecutor is so hardened in his hypocrisy that he and his fellows and his wife and his household are all fully convinced that he may be a most exemplary man. According to the metaphysics of hypocrisy it is held that he is doing a work of public utility. And this man who has ruined hundreds, thousands of men, who curse him and are driven to desperation by his action, goes to mass, a smile of shining ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... still good-looking and well-dressed—above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks—of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of: books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious—but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... father knows it all without reading it and likes to be talked to about it, we have been living a good deal in the great events of that period, and we find it a relief to turn from the mazy though deeply interesting flood of metaphysics which this age pours upon the world, to facts and events which also have their philosophy, and ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... inquiry: What are the facts which are the objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. Its place is in another and a perfectly distinct department of science, to which the name metaphysics more particularly belongs: that portion of mental philosophy which attempts to determine what part of the furniture of the mind belongs to it originally, and what part is constructed out of materials furnished to it from without. To this science appertain the great and ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of the sale at Vienna, and the Mohawk set up his carriage, on the difference in the value of markets! Thus, you see, in order to run a fair race, the horses must start even, carry equal weights, and, after all, one commonly wins. Your metaphysics are no better than so much philosophical gold leaf, which a cunning reasoner beats out into a sheet as large as the broadest American lake, to make dunces believe the earth can be transmuted into the precious material; while a plain practical man puts the value ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... "That'll be at its best in about a week." We apologized for the cider being a little warmish from standing (discreetly hidden) under our desk. Douce man, he said: "I think cider, like ale, ought not to be drunk too cold. I like it just this way." He stood for a moment, filled with theology and metaphysics. "By gracious," he said, "it makes all the other stuff taste like poison." Still he stood for a brief instant, transfixed with complete bliss. It was apparent to us that his mind was busy with apple orchards and autumn sunshine. Perhaps he was wondering whether he could make ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of strength or inspiration from the Bible would be by way of reaction; but it is not so. However he may have hated the "accursed Book of God," his wife tells in her note on "The Revolt of Islam" that Shelley "debated whether he should devote himself to poetry or metaphysics," and, resolving on the former, he "educated himself for it, engaging himself in the study of the poets of Greece, England, and Italy. To these, may be added," she goes on, "a constant perusal of ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... ETHICS OF PESSIMISM.—On the metaphysics of the pessimists I shall make no comment save that there appears to be here sufficient vagueness to satisfy the most poetical of minds. But the following points in the ethics of pessimism ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... position, the fair one, as well as the disorder of her mind would permit, entered into a refined disquisition, full of all the metaphysics of gallantry, which proved that love—genuine love—is an aethereal essence, a union of souls, regulated by none of those formal principles, and founded upon none of those vulgar moral qualities on which friendship, and the other connexions of society, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... Scripture, yet is an opinion of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions of a man's life, and would serve as an hypothesis to solve many doubts, whereof common philosophy affordeth no solution. Now, if you demand my opinion and metaphysics of their natures, I confess them very shallow, most of them in a negative way, like that of God; or in a comparative, between ourselves and fellow-creatures; for there is in this universe a stair, or manifest scale of creatures, ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... having made creatures capable of hungering and thirsting for him, he must be capable of speaking a word to guide them in their feeling after him. And if he is a grand God, a God worthy of being God, yea (his metaphysics even may show the seeker), if he is a God capable of being God, he will speak the clearest grandest word of guidance which he can utter intelligible to his creatures. For us, that word must simply be the gathering of all the expressions of his visible works into an infinite human face, ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... scattered grey hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings. He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible and with a greater flow of animal spirits than Southey. He mentioned that he never wrote down as he composed, but composed walking, riding, or in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... ancient chronicle of the Cid was written in Arabic, a little before the Cid's death, by two of his pages, who were Mnssulmans. The medical science of the Moors for six centuries enlightened Europe, and their metaphysics were adopted in nearly all ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... coming drug certainly did not wane in the time. I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... now the frank confession of what one man of the early Twentieth Century has found in life and himself, a confession just as frank as the limitations of his character permit; it is his metaphysics, his religion, his moral standards, his uncertainties and the expedients with which he has met them. On every one of these departments and aspects I write—how shall I put it?—as an amateur. In every section of my subject there are men not only of far ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... imagination deeply tinged with German ideality and speculation. Often, when others slept, this man, who appeared so resolute, hard, and uncompromising in the performance of duties, and who was understood by but few, would read deeply in metaphysics and romantic poetry. Therefore, the men and women who dwelt in his imagination were not such as he had much to do with in real life. Indeed, he had come to regard the world of reality and that of fancy as entirely distinct, and to ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... aware that I am talking metaphysics. I can imagine that if the present occasion be taken rightly, and used well, all that is good in her may be raised to a height unmeasured but by God; while all that is evil and dark may, by His blessing, fade and ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Diderot, D'Alembert. Can they not weigh against Locke and Newton, and even more than Locke and Newton, since their store of knowledge and learning was at hand to be added to their own, and among them are those who singly possessed equal science in mathematics as in metaphysics? It is not impossible, perhaps not improbable, from his course of learning and inquiries, that if Dr. Priestley had not from his first initiation into science been dedicated for what is called the immediate service of ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... concentration is meant the directing of all your energies along a special line of achievement. For instance, if you would be a perfect Yogi, you must concentrate, concentrate, morning, noon and night, at all times, along that line of endeavour. You must study all the vast literature on Yoga, Psychology, Metaphysics, Mentalism, etc., and form your own synthesis on same. You must think hard and work hard for Yoga. "Genius is the power to bear infinite pain." Nothing ought to be too great a sacrifice, including your own life, for the right understanding ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... first. It was the opinion of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and literature,—an opinion expressed to me since the death of Tazewell,—that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any other living man. This is but an echo of his general ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... when times were hard, Coleridge's wife worked here making pencils, while her archangel husband (a little damaged) went with Wordsworth to study metaphysics at Gottingen. When Coleridge came back and heard what his wife had done, he reproved her—gently but firmly. Mrs. Ajax in a pencil-factory wearing a check apron ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In similar manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by Romanes. He had understood ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... undergraduate's deity. The fellows, who form the general body from which the other college-officers are chosen, are the aggregate of those four or five bachelor scholars per annum, who pass the best examination in classics, mathematics, and metaphysics. The eight oldest fellows at any time in residence, together with the master, have the government of the college vested in them. The dean is the presiding officer in chapel: his business is to pull up the absentees—no ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... danger of dissolution in these United States. [Loud and repeated cheers.] We shall live, and not die. We shall live as united Americans; and those who have supposed that they could sever us, that they could rend one American heart from another, and that speculation and hypothesis, that secession and metaphysics, could tear us asunder, will find themselves dreadfully ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... codification, struggling in vain to give a positive and firm structure to the doomed empire. Their influence appears to have been considerable. Just as the old heterodox philosophy was being stifled by the dry and colorless metaphysics of the conservatives, it was awakened to new life by the painters, who gave it a stirring interpretation ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... there an Oxford scholarship, and proceeded in course to the Western University. With all his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient in consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study, worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek, and took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London house was disastrously wound up; Mr Herrick must begin the world again as a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish his ambitions ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... that in all humility, that the duties of mounting guard and the service of the king have caused me to neglect study a little. I should find myself, therefore, more at my ease, FACILUS NATANS, in a subject of my own choice, which would be to these hard theological questions what morals are to metaphysics ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fishing, and collecting, and painting birds and fishes; he had his own little garden; and recorded his impressions of romantic scenery in verse of no ordinary merit. To his self-education, however, he owed almost everything. He studied with intensity mathematics, metaphysics, and physiology; before he was nineteen he began to study chemistry, and in four months proposed a new hypothesis on heat and light, to which he won over the experienced Dr. Beddoes. With his associate, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... Bible among them; the cosey rocking-chair that always stood by the fire, and a plant or two in the south window. He came in, stamping off the snow; Muff crawled behind the stove, and gave himself up to a fit of metaphysics. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of their science as "the morphology of common opinion." Contemporary investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with introspection; their labors have become merely physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the study ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... not only in their talk about each other, but in what they said of different people in their relation to themselves. But Staniford's pleasure in the metaphysics of reciprocal appreciation, his wonder at the quickness with which she divined characters he painfully analyzed, was not greater than his joy in the pretty hitch of the shoulder with which she tucked her handkerchief into the back pocket of ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... reproduces.[82-1] This acute and extraordinary analysis of the origin and laws of organic life, clothed under the ancient belief in the action of the winds, reveals a depth of thought for which we were hardly prepared, and is perhaps the single instance of anything like metaphysics among the red race. It is clearly visible in the earlier portions of the legends of the Quiches, and is the more surely of native origin as it has been quite lost ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... and dominion. Farewell." And Aristotle, soothing this passion for preeminence, speaks, in his excuse for himself, of these doctrines, as in fact both published and not published: as indeed, to say the truth, his books on metaphysics are written in a style which makes them useless for ordinary teaching, and instructive only, in the way of memoranda, for those who have been already conversant in ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the other room, and selected a book for perusal; it chanced to be a work on metaphysics, and after poring over its abstruse pages for some time, she became drowsy, and finally fell into a dreamy sleep. In her fitful slumbers, she was visited by a dream or vision of extraordinary vividness, ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... ought to seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for the following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the question of honeymoons ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... whose head stood Robert Grosseteste, afterward Bishop of Lincoln. Bacon conceived a veneration for Grosseteste, and even for Adam de Marisco his disciple, and turning toward mathematics rather than toward metaphysics he eagerly applied himself, when he went to Paris, to astrology and alchemy, which were the progenitors of the modern exact sciences. In the thirteenth century a young man like Bacon could hardly stand alone, and Bacon joined the Franciscans, but before many ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... cannot be made a misdemeanor without opening the door too widely to complete arbitrariness. The State cannot prevent a responsible adult from disposing of his own body, without introducing religion and metaphysics into legislation; but the State can require those who practice prostitution not to molest the public. It has, therefore, the right to punish solicitation in the streets by fine or imprisonment, especially ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... of two hundred and ninety-six closely-printed pages, and embraces a list of several thousand volumes. In this list are histories, biographies, travels, adventures, novels, poems, educational works, works on science, art, philosophy, metaphysics—in short, books on every topic familiar to man. In the department of fiction, the success of this house has been remarkable. They have published between four and five hundred novels, in cloth and paper bindings, and the demand for their early publications of ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... not aim at any short cuts by which man may know himself or his neighbor. It seeks to analyze the fundamentals of personality, avoiding metaphysics as the plague. It does not define character or seek to separate it from mind and personality. Written by a neurologist, a physician in the active practice of his profession, it cannot fail to bear more of the imprint of medicine, of neurology, than of psychology and philosophy. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... these evils. It is true that an acquaintance with a number of dead languages, with Roman and Grecian antiquities, with the subtleties of metaphysics, with pagan mythology, and with politics and poetry, may coexist with these superstitions, as was true in the case of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, who believed in ghosts and in the second sight. However important in other respects these departments of an extensive and varied education may ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... porch, which we had to do on account of Oswald smoking the very worst cigars he was able to find in all the world, they would get gabby about all things in the world being simply nothing, which is known to us scientists as metaphysics. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... clear intimation of his own declining position. His opposition to the church authorities, and his efforts at re-invigorating the faith of the country, had led him into doubtful statements on the nature of the eucharist; he had entangled himself in dubious metaphysics on a subject on which no middle course is really possible; and being summoned to answer for his language before a synod in London, he had thrown himself again for protection on the Duke of Lancaster. The duke (not ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... as the clairvoyant does in the midst of his previsions, so as to mislead and bewilder, while inspiring and intoxicating the hearer or reader. He recorded, in regard to himself, that "history and particular facts lost all interest" in his mind after his first launch into metaphysics; and he remained through life incapable of discerning reality from inborn images. Wordsworth took alarm at the first experience of such a tendency in himself, and relates that he used to catch at the trees and palings by the roadside to satisfy himself of existences out of himself; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Further, the Philosopher says at the beginning of his Metaphysics (i. 2) that speculative science is sought for its own sake. Now it cannot be said that each speculative science is the last end. Therefore man does not desire all, whatsoever he desires, for the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... surgeon. English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's Letters, and more by theology. After I had read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my infidel vanity ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... altogether negative. The new movement extended itself to Metaphysics, and under the leadership of Descartes a resolute effort was made to reform ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... to the metaphysics of individualism, just as the conception of national and international federalism corresponds to the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... light spring-cart with capital horse. He was a tradesman of the village, and, like the rest of the world here, wore the convenient and cleanly blue cotton trousers and blue blouse of the country. The third spare seat was occupied by a neighbouring notary, the two men discussing metaphysics, literature, and the origin of ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... be lighter without that scroll work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel ourselves weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops. ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... limitations as he may impose; but to surrender any portion of his sovereignty to another is to annihilate the whole. The Senator from Delaware (Mr. Clayton) calls this metaphysical reasoning, which he says he cannot comprehend. If by metaphysics he means that scholastic refinement which makes distinctions without difference, no one can hold it in more utter contempt than I do; but if, on the contrary, he means the power of analysis and combination—that power which reduces the most complex idea into its elements, which traces causes ...
— Remarks of Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina on the bill to prevent the interference of certain federal officers in elections: delivered in the Senate of the United States February 22, 1839 • John C. Calhoun
... work selected for illustration. To treat these problems satisfactorily it will be necessary for me to go far beyond the limits of music and dramatic art, and to enter rather fully into questions of psychology and metaphysics, which I fear may discourage some readers, but which cannot be shirked by those who wish to form a judgment based upon a more solid foundation than their own personal taste. The mistake made by nearly all writers on Wagner hitherto has been ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... transcendental neophytes had to encounter sceptical gainsayers as determined as themselves. Of this latter class the most remarkable were Herder and Wieland. Herder, then a clergyman of Weimar, seems never to have comprehended what he fought against so keenly: he denounced and condemned the Kantean metaphysics, because he found them heterodox. The young divines came back from the University of Jena with their minds well nigh delirious; full of strange doctrines, which they explained to the examinators of the Weimar Consistorium in phrases that excited no idea in the heads of these reverend persons, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the rebel States, for four years a separate power and without representation in Congress, were all the time here in the Union, is a good deal less ingenious and respectable than the metaphysics of Berkeley, which proved that neither the world nor any human being was in existence. If this theory were simply ridiculous it could be forgiven; but its effect is deeply injurious to the stability of the nation. I cannot doubt that the late confederate States ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... theologically. Pantheism, or the essential identity of God with the universe, and his indwelling in every creature, angelic, human, brute, or inorganic, seems to have been the belief of most Ranters that could manage to rise to a metaphysics—with which belief was conjoined also a rejection of all essential distinction between good and evil, and a rejection of all Scripture as mere dead letter; but from a so-called "Carol of the Ranters" I infer that Atheism, or at least Mortalism or Materialism (see Vol. III. p. 156-157), ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... was pleased. He had been trained for the profession of medicine, but coming into possession of a fortune, had not found it necessary to practise, and had been devoting his time for some years past to Art and Metaphysics. I always enjoyed talking to him, though the position he had come to hold was one which I found it very difficult to understand, and I am not sure that I have been able ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... lose ourselves in metaphysics," broke in Embro. Then, turning to Courtney, whose direct intelligent gaze seemed to disconcert him, he said, "Now, Julius, you've seen, I daresay, a good many things we have not seen,—have you ever seen or known a case like this we're ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... every conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian piles, coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the New World, before being finally assimilated, need ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of the world, that had always been a horror to his mind, became more horrible beneath the stimulus of futile thought. But whisky was the mighty cure. He was the gentleman who gained notoriety on a memorable occasion by exclaiming, "Metaphysics be damned; let us drink!" Omar and other bards have expressed the same conclusion in more dulcet wise. But Gourlay's was equally sincere. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the sad journey. After tramping along for a while, he asked permission to put his cloak on my horse. I consented; he thanked me, and then, in a kind of soliloquy, began to praise the power of wealth, and to speak cleverly of metaphysics. Meanwhile, day was dawning; the sun was about to rise, the shadows to spread their splendour—and I was not alone! I looked at my companion—it was the man with ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the error is voluntary; when a man clings to it simply because he loves it; when he hugs a delusion to his heart, this shows not mental but moral obliquity; it is not insanity but self-deception, and it is by no means of rare occurrence. In a well-reasoned article on "The Metaphysics of Insanity," written by Mr. James M. Wilcox and printed in the "American Catholic Quarterly Review" for January, 1878, some very severe and no less true strictures are made upon the readiness of a vast multitude of people to practise this wilful self-deception. "Self," he writes ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... signification; so that he is elaborately enforcing upon us we know not what. That the Spirit of God meant in the New Testament God in the heart, had long been to me a sufficient explanation: and who by logic or metaphysics will carry us ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... from Kant. No weapons, even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained and made to move either ejus ductu or ejus auspiciis. Not one of the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the purposes ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... some times conciliatory, it always remained independent of faith. But while Greece thus freed herself from the fetters of a superannuated mythology, and openly and boldly constructed those systems of metaphysics by means of which she claimed to solve the enigmas of the universe, her religion lost its vitality and dried up because it lacked the strengthening nourishment of reflection. It became a thing devoid of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... foregoing facts every candid reader must admit that to an Indian an expression like "Love hath weaned my heart from low desires," or Werther's "She is sacred to me; all desire is silent in her presence," would be as incomprehensible as Hegel's metaphysics; that, in other words, mental purity, one of the most essential and characteristic ingredients of romantic love, is always absent in the Indian's infatuation. The late Professor Brinton tried to come to the rescue ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Herbert Spencer as the great exponent of the theory of evolution. He had graduated at Harvard in 1853, and was a profound student of philosophy from that time forward, though I am not aware that he was a writer. When in 1858 Sir William Hamilton's "Lectures on Metaphysics" appeared, he took to them with avidity. In 1859 appeared Darwin's "Origin of Species," and a series of meetings was held by the American Academy, the special order of which was the discussion of this book. Wright and myself, not yet members, were invited to be present. To judge ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... acceptance, there should be no other, but that approximation should be higher: that metaphysics is super-evil: that the scientific spirit is ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... not only as to the end of life, which was the main point of division, but as to all questions on all subjects. The Stoic did not differ merely in his ethics from the Epicurean; he differed also in his theology and his physics and his metaphysics. Aristotle, as Shakespeare knew, thought young men "unfit to hear moral philosophy". And yet it was a question—or rather the question—of moral philosophy, the answer to which decided the young man's opinions on all other points. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... the sardonic metaphysics of the case with Putney. He said gravely that he had been talking of the matter with Dr. Morrell, and he had no doubt that there was a taint of insanity in every wrong-doer; some day he believed the law would ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... purposes. They are in later times considered to differ only in a few points of minor importance. So far as the sutras are concerned the Nyaya sutras lay particular stress on the cultivation of logic as an art, while the Vais'e@sika sutras deal mostly with metaphysics and physics. In addition to these six systems, the Tantras had also philosophies of their own, which however may generally be looked upon largely as modifications of the Sa@mkhya and Vedanta systems, though their own ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... that the same ritual, the same doctrines, the same aspirations are held to be sufficient both for men and women. The tendency everywhere is to obliterate distinctions, and if a woman be herself she is looked upon unkindly. She rarely understands our metaphysics, and she gazes on the expounder of the mystery of the Logos with enigmatic eyes which reveal the enchantment of another divinity. The ancients were wiser than we in this, for they had Aphrodite and Hera and many another form of the Mighty Mother who bestowed on women their peculiar graces ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... not attempt to rationalize its symbolism, a dogmatic religion must always contain within the circle of its creed many profound and illuminating secrets. The false and ephemeral portion of a dogmatic religion is its metaphysical aspect, because the whole science of metaphysics is an ambiguity from the start, since it is a projection of one isolated attribute of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... eventually take cognizance of mental crime and no longer apply legal rulings wholly to physical 105:18 offences, these words of Judge Parmenter of Boston will become historic: "I see no reason why metaphysics is not as important to medicine as ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... I had no idea. I'm no judge of what is horrible in theology, or metaphysics, or whatever it is. But I do profess to know when a man has made a hit, whether in theology or anything else; and I perceive quite clearly that your Mr. Holland—well, not your Mr. Holland, has made ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... poet who is not also a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One seeks truth for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract, intellectual beauty, in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and metaphysics are alike a disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... is my fair kinswoman's bower—her boudoir, her retiring-room, or whatever else you like to call it—where she sits brooding in silence, watching the stars and the moon sometimes, ye ken, or reading romances and works on philosophy, metaphysics, astrology, and other subjects far too deep for my poor brain," said Lawrence, as he entered ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand, Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... had so many good friends in the philosophic circle, anticipated the well-known phrase of a writer of our own day. "The author of the System of Nature," he said, "is the Abbe Terrai of metaphysics: he makes deductions, suspensions of payment, and causes the very Bankruptcy of knowledge, of pleasure, and of the human mind. But you will tell me that, after all, there were too many rotten securities; that the account was too heavily ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... else you learn, You must with zeal to metaphysics turn! There see that you profoundly comprehend, What doth the limit of man's brain transcend; For that which is or is not in the head A sounding phrase will serve you in good stead. But before all strive this half year From one fix'd order ne'er ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... essay pointed out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the philosophic Atheist ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... to your taste?' broke in Bazarov. 'No, brother. If you've made up your mind to mow down everything, don't spare your own legs. But we've talked enough metaphysics. "Nature breathes the silence ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... because you have confounded your weak reader with a crooked parenthesis in the midst of the paragraph, and also by deferring to spit your intended venom at Christ, till again you had puzzled him, with your mathematics and metaphysics, &c., putting in another page, betwixt the beginning and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil, Ovid, and Statius—keen and subtle as a schoolman—as much an idolater of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance—his eye is yet ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge; for to penetrate this inward or spiritual ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... exercised result in beautiful tone and artistic singing. It must also be understood that the teacher does not look at the voice, he listens to it. Here voice teachers automatically separate themselves from each other. No two things so diametrically opposite as physics and metaphysics can abide peaceably in the ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... altogether too comfortable to be morose, my cynicism was of a good-natured character. Then I made merry over my own mishaps and misadventures. Then I reflected, in a lofty, philosophic frame of mind, upon the faithlessness of woman, and, passing from this into metaphysics, I soon boozed off into a gentle, a peaceful, and a very consoling doze. When I awoke, it was morning, and I ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... walked closer to a sidewalk group of professors engaged in scientific discussion. If my motive in joining them was racial pride, I regret it. I cannot deny my keen interest in evidence that India can play a leading part in physics, and not metaphysics alone. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... these memories are of people who are passed away like the snow in harvest; and now, with the sharp-sickle reapers of full shocks of the fattening wheat of metaphysics, and fair novelists Ruth-like in the fields of barley, or more mischievously coming through the rye,—what will the public, so vigorously sustained by these, care to hear of the lovely writers of old days, quaint creatures that they were?—Merry Miss Mitford, actually living ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... de la verite.—COUSIN, Fragments Litteraires, 1843, 95, on Degerando. No branch of philosophical doctrine, indeed, can be fairly investigated or apprehended apart from its history. All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas.— CLIFFE LESLIE, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, 1879, 149. The history of philosophy must be rational and philosophic. It ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the professorship of metaphysics becoming vacant, he received the appointment. The emoluments of this office, though small, supplied his necessities, and, not long after, on obtaining a more lucrative station in the University, he ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... high literary position. Curiously enough, their poetry is, as a rule, more distinguished for strength than for beauty; they seem to love to grapple with the big intellectual problems of modern life; science, philosophy and metaphysics form a large portion of their ordinary subject-matter; they leave the triviality of triolets to men, and try to read the writing on the wall, and to solve the last secret of the Sphinx. Hence Robert Browning, not Keats, is their idol; Sordello moves them more than the Ode on a Grecian Urn; and all ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Christendom is unique. There is the fascinating tale of the union of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology, and its results, so fertile, so vigorous, so intensely interesting as logical processes, so critical as problems of thought. For the historian there is a story of almost unmatched attraction; the story of how a people was kept together in power, in ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... Parr. He was also an excellent Latinist, and had a profound acquaintance with geometry, and the other branches of mathematical science. For knowledge of the various eastern tongues he was no unequal match for Lee, of Cambridge; while his acquirements in natural philosophy, political economy, and metaphysics, were such as would have fairly entitled him to prelect on these subjects in any university in Europe. Besides this, he had an exquisite poetical genius; and, in his very first contest, succeeded in carrying off the prize of poetry, to the utter discomfiture ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... constantly after system, and the instrument on which his effort relied was the speculative reason. He embodied in an extreme form the spirit of his age. Nothing could be less like the spirit of ours. To many people now alive metaphysics means a body of wild and meaningless assertions resting on spurious argument. A professor of metaphysics may nowadays be held to deal handsomely with the duties of his chair if he is prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, though it be only for the purpose of ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... employed on his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, which was his first work. When this was finished, the difficulty was to find a bookseller who would take it. The booksellers of Paris are shy of every author at his beginning, and metaphysics, not much then in vogue, were no very inviting subject. I spoke to Diderot of Condillac and his work, and I 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, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... are antecedents for Plato and Aristotle in Greece, there are antecedents for the Vednta and Snkhya philosophies in India, and that each had its own independent growth. It is true, that when we first meet in Indian philosophy with our old friends, the four or five elements, the atoms, our metaphysics, our logic, our syllogism, we are startled; but we soon discover that, given the human mind and human language, and the world by which we are surrounded, the different systems of philosophy of Thales and Hegel, of Vysa ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I have already said that I spoke neither ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... attempt standard works, and it must not allow any such miserable preconceived opinions to grow up in his mind as that his understanding is totally unable to comprehend works like Fichte's "Science of Knowledge," the "Metaphysics" of Aristotle, or Hegel's "Phenomenology." No science suffers so much as Philosophy from this false popular opinion, which understands neither itself nor its authority. The youth must learn how to learn ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Philosophy. Metaphysics. Special topics. Mind and body. Philosophic systems. Mental faculties, psychology. Logic, dialectics. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... run a machine; Daisy cannot. Julia gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night; Daisy does neither. Nobody ever waits for Julia; everybody waits for Daisy. Julia reads scientific works and dotes on metaphysics; Daisy does not know the meaning of the word. In short, Julia is a strong, high-toned, energetic, independent woman, while Daisy is—a little innocent, confiding girl, whom I would rather have without brains than all the Boston ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... gather the clusters of grapes as they read. After supper they sat on the portico, from which they looked through a leafy archway formed by the meeting of the branches of magnificent trees, and discussed literature and metaphysics. ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... before that time: and once, since—first, in our colonial period; next, during our Confederation; lastly, by the "Southern Confederacy" and here, as elsewhere, always in vain. But experience yielded to theory—plain business sense to financial metaphysics. It was determined to issue a new paper which should be "fully secured" and ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... he derived from the use of it would be. Justice Burton dissented on the basis of the Sullivan Case. In Rutkin v. United States,[49] decided in 1952, a sharply divided Court cuts loose from the metaphysics of the Wilcox case and holds that Congress has the power under Amendment XVI to tax as income ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Langar, Handel, school days at Shrewsbury, Cambridge, Christianity, literature, New Zealand, sheep-farming, philosophy, painting, money, evolution, morality, Italy, speculation, photography, music, natural history, archaeology, botany, religion, book-keeping, psychology, metaphysics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Sicily, architecture, ethics, the Sonnets of Shakespeare. I thought of publishing the books just as they stand, but too many of the entries are of no general interest and too many are ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... that these novels are very well for a philosopher to have produced—they are admirable and complete in themselves, and would not lead you to suppose that the author, who is so entirely at home in human character and dramatic situation, had ever dabbled in logic or metaphysics. The first of these, particularly, is a master-piece, both as to invention and execution. The romantic and chivalrous principle of the love of personal fame is embodied in the finest possible manner ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the whole, and with allowances ... oh, that absurdity about metaphysics apart from poetry!—'Can such things be' in one of the best reviews of the day? Mr. Kenyon was here on Sunday and talking of the poems with real living tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. But I will tell you. 'Luria' is to climb to the place ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... of life and the world, and soon introduced metaphysics, from whence the word was to emanate which should solve all mysteries. He developed his theme with great distinctness, and led ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso |
