"Polemics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to refer to two essays of his own, in "Irenics and Polemics" (New York, Christian Literature Co., 1895), for a fuller statement of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... for this question is usually not understood at all by those critics who presume to answer the question off-hand in a spasm of polemics. It is interesting, as an evidence of the shallowness of most contemporary dramatic criticism, to read over, in the course of Mr. Shaw's nimble essay on The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the collection which the author has made of the adverse notices of Ghosts ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... exist. The x Club was doing its work. Most of those to whom he would naturally have written he met constantly. Two letters to Professor Haeckel give pieces of his experience. One suggests the limits of aggressive polemics, as to which I remember his once saying that he himself had only twice been the aggressor in controversy, without waiting to be personally attacked; once where he found his opponent was engaged in a flanking movement; the other when a man of great public reputation ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... It has bought up the last page of nearly every Paris journal which owns the patronage and confidence of the advertising public of the French capital. At the end of the same dark passages are the rooms specially used for the editors and writers. In France, journals are bought for their polemics, and not for their news: many of them have fallen considerably, however, from the high estate which they held in public opinion previous to the last revolution. There are men who wrote in them to advocate and enforce principles, but in the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... could scarcely avoid engaging in it.[2] Nelson valued the name of Protestant next only to that of Catholic, and was therefore drawn almost necessarily into taking some part in the last great dispute with Rome.[3] But polemics would be deprived of their gall of bitterness if combatants joined in the strife with as much charity and generosity of feeling as ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... religious striving, the hidden aim of the wars and persecutions, the polemics and martyrdoms, which have so busied and bloodied the world. This satisfies the rational postulates of religion. Does some one say that it does not stimulate its emotional elements, that it does not supply the impulses of action which ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... violent dispute was the consequence. Much abuse passed between them, whilst I stood by, shrugged my shoulders, and said tipotas. {21} At last, as they were leaving the house, I said, "Who would have thought, gentlemen, that the polemics of the Greek and Latin churches were so closely connected with the comparative merits of Seville, Utrera, and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... that is, through the nation (I, 202). Adam Smith's theory of labor would be correct if it considered the entire national life of a people itself as one huge piece of labor. (II, 265). And so, Mueller directs his polemics against Adam Smith's premise of a merely mercantile world-market. (II, 290). Similarly, the protective tariff theoreticians, Ganieh, Theorie de l'Economie politique (1822), II, 198 ff. and Fr. List, Nationales System der politischen Oek. (1842), I, 240 ff. Colton, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, and yet never change his nature." He never changed his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in his comments on his art—the essays and prefaces in the composition of which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a poet of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Laissez-faire, says the professor, when it often means bind and gag that the strongest may work his will. It is a plea for the survival of the fittest—for the strongest male to take possession of the herd by a process of extermination. If we examine this battle cry of political polemics, we find that it is based upon the conception of the divine right of property, and the preoccupation by older or more favored or more alert or richer men or nations, of territory, of the forces of nature, of machinery, of all the functions of what we call civilization. Some of these men, who ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... baronet's wife was a vigorous adherent of the Church of England, wherein she saw the hope of the country and of mankind. But her orthodoxy discriminated; ever combative, she threw herself into the religious polemics of the time, and not only came to be on very ill terms with her own parish clergyman, but fell foul of the bishop of the diocese, who seemed to her to treat with insufficient consideration certain ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... in the midst of poverty and privation, Jonathan Edwards wrote the treatise on the Freedom of the Will, the greatest of all existing polemics. A portion of the old parsonage remains in the village, and there are still shown marks and scratches on the wall, made by him, as it is said, in the night, to recall by daylight the abstruse meditations of his ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... their opinions by observations extremely pertinent. It was hardly to be expected that the champions should not seek to enlist partisans. "What do you yourself think?" they asked, each of his neighbor. These polemics kept Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... waste in following Marx, either through his exposition of his battle theory, his explanations of the other movements of the Symphony, or his polemics against previous writers. His programme seems to us little, if at all, better than those which he controverts. Instead of this, we venture to offer our own to the reader's common sense, which, if it does not satisfy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... her answers. The sweetness of her disposition had made her submit with complacency, and even pleasure, to the course of reading prescribed by her father, although it not only comprehended several heavy folios of history, but certain gigantic tomes in high-church polemics. In heraldry he was fortunately contented to give her only such a slight tincture as might be acquired by perusal of the two folio volumes of Nisbet. Rose was indeed the very apple of her father's eye. Her constant liveliness, her attention to all those little observances ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... thus at some length from one of his many polemics to show the absolute and fearless sincerity of the man, mistaken though he may have ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... 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 Michelet once said, by some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... proved, that whereas some few monarchs of my acquaintance cannot be quite sure of their spelling, I could, at a pinch, make myself fairly well understood by the general public, as a skilled writer of polemics against myself!—as well as against the Secretary of State. This, so far as I personally am concerned, has been the humorous side of my little drama of disguise!—for sometimes I have had serious thoughts of appearing as a rival to our friend, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of his semiclerical character, influenced him through every relation of life. His nearest friends, whilst their pride in him increased, fell off to a more respectful distance; and his deportment, so far from being that of a good-humored Bobadil of polemics and pedantry upon all known and unknown subjects, became silent and solemn, chequered only during the moments of family conviviality by an excessive flow of that pleasant and still incomprehensible learning for the possession of which he had so honestly earned ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... however, to remark, that their mistake was not so much one of substance as of form, and consisted in presenting in a systematic shape, and as the scientific treatment of a great philosophical question, what should have passed for that which it really was, the mere polemics of the day. Although the actions of rulers are by no means wholly determined by their selfish interests, it is chiefly as a security against those selfish interests that constitutional checks are required; and for that purpose such checks, in England, and the other ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Abarbanel and Joseph Delmedigo, are hardly scientific; they occupy themselves with external facts to the neglect of underlying ideas. On the whole, Ha-Meassef was an engine of propaganda and polemics rather than a literary production, though the campaign carried on in its pages against strait-laced orthodoxy and the Rabbis did not reach the degree of bitterness which was to characterize later periods—moderation that was ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... followers of the Lutheran opinion. At the same time Bucer, who presided over the flourishing church of Strasburg, was engaged in framing yet another explication of this important rite, by which he vainly hoped to accommodate the consciences of all these zealous and acute polemics. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... negotiations, an orator whose discourses on many great public occasions attracted the attention of Europe, a soldier whose bravery was to be attested afterwards on many a well-fought field, a theologian so skilful in the polemics of divinity, that, as it will hereafter appear, he was more than a match for a bench of bishops upon their own ground, and a scholar so accomplished, that, besides speaking and writing the classical and several modern languages with facility, he had also translated for ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... determination of the motives of the actions, the only method is to compare the actions, firstly, with the declarations of those who performed them; secondly, with the interpretation of those who witnessed their performance. There is often a doubt remaining: this is the field of party polemics; every one attributes noble motives to the actions of his own party and discreditable motives to those of the opposite party. But actions described without any indication of motive ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... longer the same, but the polemic and apologetic writings of those days, called forth by the discussions between Rabbanites and Karaites and by the constant attacks of Christianity, are still of uncommon interest. Specimens of the former kind are the polemics of Moses of Shavli, which caused consternation in the camp of the Karaites. Of the apologetic writings should be mentioned the reply, in Polish, of Jacob Nahman of Belzyc to Martin Chekhovic (Lublin, 1581), and the Hizzuk Emunah of the Karaite Isaac ben Abraham of Troki. In ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... extension of new powers to women. On the one hand, the inspiration of scripture, on the other, the admission of women to Harvard, is at stake, and it is these that lend the peculiar animus and animation to the discussion. In both polemics, arguments are not accepted because they are demonstrated, but enlisted because they are useful; ranged with others recruited from the most distant quarters, with nothing in common but the regiment into which ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... a general rule I consider that it is not the business of the Neue Zeitschrift to go in for polemics, yet it seems to me that the little notice that Hanslick has put in No. 49 of the Vienna Presse, Saturday, the 18th February, is of such a kind that ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... earnest by sober and tolerant people, and that they may not be stated in their real force without giving occasion for the remark that this is reviving the old cruel war against Rome, and rekindling a fierce style of polemics which is now out of date? And how is Dr. Pusey to state these objections if, when he goes into them, not in a vague declamatory way, but showing his respect and seriousness by his guarded and full and definite manner of proof, he is to be met by the charge ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... any osteria will convince you. To one man the oil is a delight: he will soak himself in it till his thought swims viscid in his pate. To another it is abhorrent: straightway he calls for his German vinegar and drowns the native flavour in floods as bitter as polemics. Your wine too! Overweak for water, says one, who consumes a stout fiaschone and spends a stertorous afternoon in headache and cursing at the generous home-grown. Frizzante! cries your next ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... unmolested under parole that he would make no attempt to escape. In company with a Jesuit missionary he gathered about him a number of native boys and conducted a practical school on the German plan, at the same time indulging in religious polemics with his Jesuit acquaintances by correspondence and working fitfully on some compositions which were never completed, noteworthy among them being a study in English ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... his eyes absolutely lose its importance if a transition from species to species under the influence of conditions of life were admitted. His disciples (Littre, Robin) continued to direct against Darwin the polemics which their master had employed against Lamarck. Stuart Mill, who, in the theory of knowledge, represented the empirical or positivistic movement in philosophy—like his English forerunners from Locke to Hume—founded his theory of knowledge ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... the depths of your own soul, if you've got the moral eyesight to look through mud," declaimed Mr. Niles, refusing to descend from polemics to plain business, "and you'll see what is the matter. You have made yourself the voice by which this district has spoken in the halls of state for fifty years, and that voice is not the voice of the people!" He stood on tiptoe ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... varying in distance from 20 to 100 miles; so that the subjugation of Ireland would compel us to guard with ships and soldiers a new line of coast, certainly amounting, with all its sinuosities, to more than 700 miles—an addition of polemics, in our present state of hostility with all the world, which must highly gratify the vigorists and give them an ample opportunity of displaying that foolish energy upon which their claims to distinction are founded. Such is the country which the Chancellor of the Exchequer ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... elements and what was of native origin. He summarized the principles of the ancient religion, reasserted and illuminated with amazing learning and voluminous commentary the archaic documents, expounded and defended the ancient cosmogony, and in the usual style of Japanese polemics preached anew the doctrines of Shint[o]. With wonderful naivete and enthusiasm, Motooeri taught that Japan was the first part of the earth created, and that it is therefore The Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits. The stars were created from ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... ancient book of Breshith Rabba. Several even of the modern commentators, e.g., Jarchi, have retained this explanation, although a strong doctrinal interest, to which others yielded, tempted them to give another interpretation to this passage, which occupied so prominent a place in the polemics of the Christians. (Compare the passage in Raim. Martini Pug. Fid. ed. Carpzov; Jac. Alting's Shiloh, Franc. 1660, 4to [also in the opp. t. v.]; Schoettgen, hor. Hebr. ii. p. 146; and, most completely, in ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... aesthetics, grammar, rhetoric, history, philology, mathematics, arithmetic, astronomy, anatomy, geography, stenography, physiology, architecture, and hundreds more in similar domains; the subdivisions and ramifications of theology as exegesis, hermeneutics, apologetics, polemics, dogmatics, ethics, homiletics, etc., ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... fuller explanations. Vasubandhu then expanded his verses into a prose commentary, but meanwhile his views had undergone a change and when he disapproved of any Vaibhashika doctrine, he criticized it. This enlarged edition by no means pleased the brethren of Kashmir and called forth polemics. He also wrote a controversial work against ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... pith of the papyrus, and long rows of workmen and workwomen gum the strips together. No hand, no head is permitted to rest. In the Museum the brains of the great thinkers and investigators are toiling. Here, too, reality asserts its rights. The time for chimeras and wretched polemics is over. Now it is observing, fathoming, turning to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who read this narrative are beginning to have an idea that this fourteen-year-old boy was by way of becoming a prig they may be relieved by the knowledge that when the youngster was not taking a hand in polemics in the smithy or the cobbler's cottage he was often enough leading the boys of the village into some kind of mischief. One old inhabitant came to have the fixed belief that David was the origin of pretty well all ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... rest of the battery. But, should they think otherwise, it would occasion no surprise were I to receive a proposition to spare the powder for some more profitable adventure. Honour, forsooth! the miscreants are too well grounded in polemics to mistake the point of honour in a pursuit like ours. But we chatter of trifles, when it is time to think of serious things. Mr Wilder, we will ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... until one day he said something that leaped and tingled through our very being? This is the power that a minister ought to have with every soul with whom he comes in contact: his word should quickly touch a vital spot. No one to-day cares much for mere oratory, literary discussion, polemics, or cursory exegesis; "marked ability in writing and in public speaking" means that grip on reality which makes people ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... little things, and above the mass of peasants who lived and obeyed and died, there was just one little culture to which all must needs conform. Literature was universal within the limits of its language. Where differences of view arose there were violent controversies, polemics, and persecutions, until one or other rendering had won its ascendency. But this new world into which we are passing will, for several generations at least, albeit it will be freely inter-communicating and like a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... versed in theology, the disputes of the Montanists against the Catholic Church, the polemics against the gnostics, left him cold. Despite Tertullian's curious, concise style full of ambiguous terms, resting on participles, clashing with oppositions, bristling with puns and witticisms, dappled with vocables ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... needed at this juncture, was not so much a fiery defender of the faith, or a scholar to taunt the heretics in finely-pointed sarcasm with their want of learning, as a saint, demonstrating in his own life the beauty of holiness, while laying aside polemics, he expounded the philosophy of Catholic doctrine. The need for reform was patent to all; many, like the zealous Carmelite provincial, were already putting their hands to the plough. The movement had been set on foot, but it lacked an apostle to lead and govern it. Such a ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... century has been for realities—realities which live however and move. Passion, in short, an element unknown in Voltaire's philosophy, has been brought into play. Here a diatribe against Voltaire, and as for Rousseau, his characters are polemics and systems masquerading. Julie and Claire are entelechies—informing spirit awaiting ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... political, social, and religious conditions; to adjust matters on the Home Mission field, in order to restrict and stop destructive competitive church-work; to discourage, ignore, and abandon public polemics among Lutherans; to prepare a statement defining the essentials of a catholic spirit as viewed by the Lutheran Church. With the exception of the Synodical Conference (always wary of entangling and unionistic alliances), practically all of the Lutheran synods in America are ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... was herself slipping into a morbid state. A mother collecting Doctors! It is a most fascinating kind of connoisseurship, grows on one like Drink; like Polemics; like Melodrama; like ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... age, will take here and there a vivid touch to illustrate his theories or brighten his narrative. They will retain, too, a certain importance as autobiography. But fortunately the great mass of the work which Victor Hugo has left behind him can be separated from the polemics of his troubled age and fiery temper. It is not in any sense a peaceful literature. Conflict is its very inspiration. The struggle of human misery with all the confusing and overbearing forces of life; of poverty with the requirements and oppressions of wealth; of the small ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... to be regretted that almost every circumstance in the life of St. Patrick has been made a field for polemics. Dr. Todd, of whom one might have hoped better things, has almost destroyed the interest of his otherwise valuable work by this fault. He cannot allow that St. Patrick's mother was a relative of St. Martin of Tours, obviously ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... been the philosophic tradition in this country since Hobbes. We so far agree with Mr. Stephen that we believe Englishmen, in general, to practise a great deal more of empiricism than they avow. But Mill proposed to demonstrate and declare it as a weapon in polemics and an engine of action, and it was here, probably, that the main body of Englishmen deserted him. They were not ready to cut themselves off from theology and from all ideas that transcend experience, and they demurred to the paramount jurisdiction of logic in temporal affairs. To ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... believes. He was certainly persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition. Milton saw and visited him under the restraint of that scientific body in his own house. Yet Galileo did more by his disclosures of the stars towards elevating our ideas of the Creator, than all the so-called saints and polemics that screamed at one another in the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... respect, America has surely furnished her quota. Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Rush are no mean names, to which, without shame, I may append those of Jefferson and Adams, as politicians; while I am told that the works of President Edwards of Rhode Island are a text-book in polemics in many European colleges.' ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... controverted topics between denominations were presented by chosen champions before applauding audiences. Ministers fired hot shot at one another's pulpits; churches were often as militant as mendicant, and all those polemics were excused as contending most earnestly for the faith. Both sides found their ammunition in the same Bible. When I was a student in the Princeton Seminary, a classmate from Kentucky gave me a little hymn-book ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... however, by his original contributions to knowledge that Huxley's name is best known to readers outside of technical science, but rather by his labors in popularisation and in polemics. He was one of the foremost and most effective champions of Darwinism, and no scientist has been more conspicuous in the battle between the doctrine of evolution and the older religious orthodoxy. Outside of this particular ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... in guarding our own, both on land and sea. Perhaps no Continental or American critic has ever yet dispraised a poetical fellow-countryman merely for urging the duties of national union and national defence. A critic, however, writes thus of Tennyson: "When our poet descends into the arena of party polemics, in such things as Riflemen, Form! Hands all Round, . . . The Fleet, and other topical pieces dear to the Jingo soul, it is not poetry but journalism." I doubt whether the desirableness of the existence of a volunteer force and of a fleet really is within the arena of PARTY polemics. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... arose out of the excess of partisan zeal which Dr. Sterne developed in that year, and which his nephew very likely did not, in his opinion, sufficiently share. But this is quite consistent with the younger man's having up to that time assisted the elder in his party polemics. He certainly speaks in his "Letters" of his having "employed his brains for an ungrateful person," and the remark is made in a way and in a connexion which seems to imply that the services rendered to his uncle were mainly literary. If so, his declaration that he "would ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... permit the least remark to be leveled at absolute kings, does not show the least mercy toward a citizen-king. The Temps is really the shrewdest and cleverest journal in the world! It attains its object with a few mild words much more readily than others with the most blustering polemics. Its crafty hint is well understood, and I know of at least one liberal writer who no longer considers it honorable to use, under the permission of the censorship, such inimical language of a citizen-king as would not be allowed when applied to an absolute monarch. But ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... young man, unskilled in polemics and unpractised in the art of advocacy, no match for one of mature age, ripe experience, and stored learning; but if an enthusiasm for mercy, a belief that human life itself is not fitly bought by the torturing ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... disparagement of this education, an unanimous and yet calm repudiation of the statement at once follows, as if classical education were a kind of witchcraft, blessing its followers, and demonstrating itself to them by this blessing. There is no attempt at polemics . "We have been through it all." "We know it has done ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... notes on Philosophy, Morals and Polemics, have been included in this section as occur as independent texts in the original MSS. Several moral reflections have already been given in Vol. I, in section "Allegorical representations, Mottoes and Emblems". ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... from the influences and connections which had done such harm. Lausanne in Switzerland was the place selected for his exile, in which it was resolved he should spend some years in wholesome reflections on the error he had committed in yielding to the fascinations of Roman Catholic polemics. No time was lost: Gibbon had been received into the Church on the 8th of June, 1753, and on the 30th of the same month he had reached his destination. He was placed under the care of a M. Pavillard, a Calvinist minister, who had two duties laid upon him, a general one, to superintend ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... also much engaged with debating clubs, often walking six or seven miles to attend them. One of these clubs held its meetings at an old store-house in New Salem, and the first speech young Lincoln ever made was made there. He used to call the exercising "practicing polemics." As these clubs were composed principally of men of no education whatever, some of their "polemics" are remembered as the most laughable of farces. Lincoln's favorite newspaper at this time was the "Louisville Journal." He received it regularly by ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... "The most powerful, closely reasoned, and eloquent speech made last night by Mr. Bingham, the Member for Pillham, will, we feel certain, produce as great an effect on the country as it did in the House of Commons. We welcome it, not only on account of its value as a contribution to the polemics of the Irish Question, but as a positive proof of what has already been suspected, that the Unionist party has in Mr. Bingham a young statesman of a very high order indeed, and one whom remarkable and rapid success at the Bar has not hampered, as is ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... up his mind to put himself before the public, and talked of his plans to his friends. In order to keep in practice in speaking he walked seven or eight miles to debating clubs. "Practicing polemics," was ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... excuses for the very outrage which it lashes: thinking of this, we do not marvel that he has furrowed for himself so deep a groove in so many hearts. Nor, on the other hand, is it difficult to see, even from so genial a book as this, whence polemics are not so much banished as where there is no niche for them, should they apply, why it is that he is so fiercely opposed. When a man like Mr. Beecher encounters that which excites his moral disapprobation, there is no possibility ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... have been very deep, for he had only lately quitted the student's bench himself. His duties forced him to learn what he did not know. In teaching he taught himself. It was at this time that he did most of the reading which afterwards added substance to his polemics and treatises. He tells us himself that he read in those days all that he could lay hands on. He is very proud of having read by himself and understood without any assistance from a master, the Ten Categories of Aristotle, which was considered one of the most abstruse ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the translation and publication of his prose works have identified him with the political history of England, and the discovery in 1823, of his Treatise on Christian Doctrine, has established him as one of the greatest religious polemics in an age when every theological sect was closely allied to a political party, and thus rendered the strife of contending factions more bitter and relentless. Thus it is that the name of John Milton, as an author, is fitly ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Lange, Zeller, and Puenjer) a demoniacal pleasure in bringing to light absurdities in the doctrines of faith, with absolute confidence in the infallibility of conscience an entirely pessimistic view of human morality. His strength lies in criticism and polemics, his work in the latter (aside from his hostility to fanaticism and the persecution of those differing in faith) being directed chiefly against optimism and the deistic religion of reason, which holds the Christian ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... solution of this problem in speculative mathematics, Casanova engaged with M. Opiz in a heated technical discussion between the 16th September and 1st November 1790. Casanova sought vainly to convince Opiz of the correctness of his solution. Finally, M. Opiz, tired of the polemics, announced that he was leaving on a six-weeks tour of inspection and that he would not be able to occupy himself with the duplication of the cube for some time to come. On the 1st November, Casanova wished him a pleasant journey and advised ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Caricaturists were employed on both sides of the question, and by pictures as well as words the war of polemics was vigorously carried on. In one instance, the head of Luther is represented as the Devil's Bagpipe; he blows into his ear, and uses his nose as a chanter. Cocleus, in one of his tracts, represents Luther as a monster with seven heads, indicative of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in which the material welfare of a family had been so perilously near destruction was to the two notaries nothing more than a matter of professional polemics. ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... the possibility of changing it for something still more useful. Both friend and foe will join in the conviction that objective truth is always the best guarantee for subjective success; and thus both will pass beyond the purely utilitarian apologetics or polemics to the questions as to the objective reality of the contents ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... years throughout Christendom: they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew God. But in this book, be it noted, the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to indicate only the Trinitarians ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... vigorous power of adoption and assimilation. No improvements of the new philosophy were even attempted. Wherein it was defective and indistinct, defective and indistinct it remained. The system was not thought out to its end and independently adopted. Polemics, ontology, ethics, theology, marvels, heroes—all were enthusiastically adopted on faith. It is to be added that the new system was superior to the old, and so much of discrimination was shown."[AD] And somewhat earlier he likewise asserts that "There is not an original and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... — N. {ant. 477} reasoning ratiocination rationalism; dialectics, induction, generalization. discussion, comment; ventilation; inquiry &c 461. argumentation, controversy, debate; polemics, wrangling; contention &c 720; logomachy^; disputation, disceptation^; paper war. art of reasoning, logic. process of reasoning, train of reasoning, chain of reasoning; deduction, induction, abduction; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... had no distinct vision of the benefit that would accrue to him from this change of courses. But Mr. Barton, being aware that Miss Fodge had touched on a delicate subject in alluding to the roast goose, was determined to witness no more polemics between her and Mr. Spratt, so, saying good morning to the latter, he hastily ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the argument from Scripture had died out with slavery polemics. You forget that every Eve has not an Adam. On what ground do you ask a single woman to occupy an inferior position? I admit that the married may sometimes do so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... summary of the internal evidences attesting the genuineness of these letters, to the headings omitted (2, 3) on the Theological Polemics and the Ecclesiastical Conditions. That summary is ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... receive my Zurich friends in my new home, which was so much more conveniently situated than my former one; only I quite spoilt all my hospitality for a long time by my fanatical agitation for a water diet and my polemics against the evils of wine and other intoxicating drinks. I adopted what seemed almost a new kind of religion: when I was driven into a corner by Sulzer and Herwegh, the latter of whom prided himself on his knowledge of chemistry and physiology, about the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... 28th, wrote: "The copyright of my article belongs to the Editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, without whose permission I can do nothing. As I shall be in Paris before long I will ask him for it should your polemics seem to me to require ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Inquirer, favor an early embargo for purely material reasons. It is to be expected that this question will be one of the first to come up at the opening of the approaching session of Congress, when the Press polemics of the opponents of the embargo, with the arriere pensee of protecting England's interests and those of her Allies, should ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... the Reformation opened the way for a critical treatment of the history of dogma.[17] But even in Protestant Churches, at first, historical investigations remained under the ban of the confessional system of doctrine and were used only for polemics.[18] Church history itself up to the 18th century was not regarded as a theological discipline in the strict sense of the word, and the history of dogma existed only within the sphere of dogmatics ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... professors, assailed it with a disbelief as prosaic as their belief, but intellectually more honest. His interpretation of the Bible is unscientific, if you will, but it is nearer to the truth of history than the conventional belief of his day. If his polemics seem rough and superfluous to us, it is only because his direct frontal attacks forced on the work of Biblical criticism, and long ago compelled the abandonment of most of the positions which he assailed. In spite of its grave faults of taste and temper and manner, The ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... had been so misguided as to offer it; they did not come to hear him "preach" in the full sense of the word,—they came to hear him "say things,"- -witty observations on the particular fad of the hour—sharp polemics on the political situation—or what was still more charming, neat remarks in the style of Rochefoucauld or Montaigne, which covered and found excuses for vice while seemingly condemning viciousness. There is nothing perhaps so satisfactory to persons ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... vast mass of information, under the following general title. Scarce Tracts: Old and New Testaments (including almost all the first English editions of the New Testament, which are now of the rarest occurrence): Commentators: Ecclesiastical History: Polemics: Devotions, Catholic and Calvinistical: Enthusiasm: Monastical History: Lives of Saints: Fathers: Missionaries: Martyrs: Modern Divines and Persons of eminent piety: Free Thinkers: Old English Primers: Meditations: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... plough-handles, and making the most of the fair weather. The cloudless sky and the auspicious forecast of fine days still to come did more to prove to the farmer the existence of an all-wise, overruling Providence than all the polemics of the world might accomplish. The furrows multiplied everywhere save in Nehemiah's own fields, where he often stood so long in the turn-row that the old horse would desist from twisting his head backward in surprise, and start at ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... philosophical researches, scientific inventions, sketches of society, biographical memoirs, essays on fine arts, and miscellaneous articles on drama, music and literary intelligence." Thus Jerdan followed his friend Canning's advice by avoiding "politics and polemics" and by aiming to present "a clear and instructive picture of the moral and literary improvement of the times, and a complete and authentic chronological literary record for general reference." He secured the services of Crabbe, Barry Cornwall, Maginn, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... that this theory, born of the laboratory, made a tremendous commotion in the outside world. Its application to the welfare and progress of humanity gave it supreme interest, and polemics unnumbered were launched in its favor and in its condemnation. Eager search was made throughout the fields of botany and zoology for new evidence pro or con. But the definitive answer came finally from the same field of exploration in which the theory had ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived, calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art, and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon itself as the guardian of the national tradition, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... breezy polemics for the dreary fifties—a fine bit of moral courage too for the University professor ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... light of this friendly council I perceived my danger, and set about to avoid the fault of mixing my fiction with my polemics. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... problem of clearing the field of unwholesome and injurious belief lies not in writing polemics against them but in filling the minds of the people with unquestioned truth. As the rural mind is directed to the consideration of topics of vital importance these things that have crept in and disturbed social order and dissipated precious energies in fruitless discussion will disappear through ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... temperament. We appeal to his remarkable dependence upon external prompting for his compositions; to the rapidity of his work under excitement, and his long intervals of unproductiveness; to the heat and fury of his polemics; to the simplicity with which, fortunately for us, he inscribes small particulars of his own life side by side with weightiest utterances on Church and State; to the amazing precipitancy of his marriage and its rupture; to ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... mysteries, the mere polemics sent forth a cry of his impiety; the philosopher was branded with Atheism;—one of those artful calumnies, of which, after a man has washed himself clean, the stain will be found ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... what then is WRITING? Ye tons of invoices, groaning shelves of incalculable legers, parchment abhorrences of rare Charles Lamb, we think not now of you; dreary piles of unhealthy-looking law-books, hypochondriacal heaps of medical experiences, plodding folios of industrious polemics, slow elaborations of learned dullness, we spare your native dust; letters unnumbered, in all stages of cacography, both physical and metaphysical, alack! most of you must slip through the meshes of our definition yet unwove; poor deciduous leaves of the forest, that, at your best, serve ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... seeking an explanation of this myth of Pele, the volcano god and Kama-pua'a, who, on occasion, was a sea-monster, there is no necessity to hark back to the old polemics of Asia. Why not account for this remarkable myth as the statement in terms of passion familiar to all Hawaiians of those impressive natural phenomena that were daily going on before them? The spectacle of the smoking ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... more sharply defined division. Instead of dogmatic controversy dying away it is becoming more general; "heterodoxy" is being hunted with a keener zest than for years, and doctrinal disputation has become well-nigh as virulent as the polemics of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... personal losses of a few passengers and seamen. The liberality of the hand is here unrestrained by religious antipathies. Bigotry assumes the character of ill temper and puffing. Two parrots in Philadelphia trained to polemics were set over against each other, one crying all day, "there can be no church without a prelate;" the other, "there can be a church without a prelate;" the passengers were divided in opinion, but laughing walked on. ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... productions. It was during this period that he collected his miscellaneous writings, entitled "Gleanings from Past Years." A little more than a year had elapsed when he again entered the political arena. "He threw aside polemics and criticisms, he forgot for awhile Homer and the Pope," and "rushed from his library at Hawarden, forgetting alike ancient Greece and modern Rome," as he flung himself with impassioned energy and youthful vigor ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... any better than he makes himself. Still, the question is pertinent whether violent polemics can ever be engaged in by Christians with a good conscience. Luther has asserted that, while he hurled his terrible denunciations against the adversaries of the truth, his heart was disposed to friendship and peace with them. (16, 1718 f.) Is a state of mind like ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... information, to range before him the succession of foreign occupations of the Nile Valley and to assess their significance. It may be worth while to repeat the process, in order to give an example of the bearing of history upon modern polemics, though I propose to discuss this matter more fully in ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... how Marx and Engels, in their polemics against the anarchists, explained most thoroughly their views on the relation of the revolution to the State. Engels, when editing in 1891, Marx's Criticism of the Gotha Program, wrote that 'we'—that is, Engels ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here. I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. But unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... who believed in that thing and thus mediately in the thing itself) was constantly attacked by the learned assailants of popery,—it naturally happened that many unlearned readers of these protestant polemics caught at a phrase which was so much bandied between the two parties: the spirit of the context sufficiently explained to them that it was used by protestants as a term of reproach, and indicated a faith that was an erroneous faith by being too easy—too submissive—and ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... with admiration. She was struck by what seemed to her a nobleness of sentiment which elevated his theme above the level of commonplace polemics. She was pleased to notice, in the attentive silence of his intelligent listeners, that they shared the effect produced on herself. In fact, Graham Vane was a born orator, and his studies had been those of a political thinker. In common talk he was but the accomplished ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from her, there are things as to which she has no message to the world. The Minor Prophets of science are never tired of advising theologians to keep their hands off science. The Major Prophets are too busy to occupy themselves with such polemics. But the theologian is abundantly in his right in saying to the scientific writer "Hands off morals!" for with morality science has nothing to do. Let us at any rate avoid that form of kultur which consists in bending Natural History ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... sessions in 1618-1619, pronounced those dogmas by which the Arminians were excluded from the Dutch church, it established a standard of orthodoxy. In proportion as the synod gained the favor of the people, the Bible came into use, but more to serve the cause of polemics than of edification. Hugo Grotius, Erasmus, and other exegetical writers who had manifested independence in their interpretation of the Scriptures, were regarded with great suspicion and distrust. The door for the entrance of scholasticism was thrown wide open. To ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Nobility; 1522, attended the Diet at Worms and refused to recant; in seclusion at the Wartburg translated the New Testament, which was published that same year; 1525, married Katharina Bora, a nun, having previously renounced monasticism; 1534, published the complete German Bible. Aside from the polemics, tractates, epistles, commentaries, and sermons, whereby he provoked, defended, and organized the Protestant revolt, Luther wrote a few short poems, mostly hymns for worship, also fables and aphorisms. But his great work was ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... published in 1869, is the story of a young nobleman who was almost enticed to enter the Roman Catholic Church. The descriptions of society are either very much overwrought or ironical; but his knowledge of State craft and Church craft renders the book of great value to the history of religious polemics. His father, Isaac d'Israeli, is favorably known as the author of The Curiosities of Literature, The Amenities of Literature, and The ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the Gospel is not a syllogism; It is not casuistry, it is not polemics, or the science of squabble. It is blood-red fact; it is warm-hearted invitation; it is leaping, bounding, flying good news; it is efflorescent with all light; it is rubescent with all glow; it is arborescent with all sweet shade. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... We Dead Awaken. He returned to Norway in July 1891, for a stay of indefinite length; but the restless wanderer over Europe was destined to leave his home no more.... He had not returned, however, to throw himself, as of old, into the battle of the passing day. Polemics are entirely absent from the poetry of his old age. He leaves the State and Society at peace. He who had departed as the creator of Falk [in Love's Comedy] now, on his return, gazes into the secret places of human nature and the wonder ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... readers will deal like searchers for truth, not like polemics, with these documents, and with the history of these times. But, above all, let them not approach the subject unless it be in a spirit enlightened by philosophy and warmed by charity. Thus studied, this time, which has been the armoury of faction, may become the temple of reconciliation. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... only of the church, but of the palace, for Gregory VII., the popes and the Latin communion. The style of Cinnamus and Nicetas is still more vehement. Yet how calm is the voice of history compared with that of polemics!] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... nothing more than a series of pious or polemical remarks upon the physical world viewed religiously, whereas the word "Natural" properly comprehends man and society, and all that is involved therein, as the great Protestant writer, Dr. Butler, shows us. Nor, in the third place, do I mean by Theology polemics of any kind; for instance, what are called "the Evidences of Religion," or "the Christian Evidences;" for, though these constitute a science supplemental to Theology and are necessary in their place, they are not Theology itself, unless an army is ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... French School.[184] It is a whole length; and is well known to you from the wonderful print of it by Drevet. The representation is worthy of the original; for Bossuet was one of the last of the really great men of France. He had a fine capacity and fine scholarship: and was as adroit in polemics as Richelieu was in politics. He resembled somewhat our Horsley in his pulpit eloquence,—and was almost as pugnacious and overbearing in controversy. He excelled in quickness of perception, strength of argument, and vehemence ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the boat were almost all New Englanders, seeking their fortunes. They had brought with them their habits of calculation, their cautious manners, their love of polemics. It grieved me to hear these immigrants who were to be the fathers of a new race, all, from the old man down to the little girl, talking not of what they should do, but of what they should get in the new scene. It was to them a prospect, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... invoked indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Dryden and Pope were professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Contrast the mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Polemics, I must try to set you right upon one or two points. In the first place, I do not identify you with the blasphemies of Cain no more than I do myself with the impieties of my Mokanna,—all I wish and implore is that you, who are such a powerful ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... may be discerned, we cannot clearly see how the present volume either makes the problems more intelligible, or points the way to feasible solutions. Though he tries, in perfect good faith, to be the dispassionate student, he often comes very close to the polemics of the hour. The truth is that scientific lawyers have seldom been very favourable to popular government; and when the scientific lawyer is doubled with the Indian bureaucrat, we are pretty sure beforehand that in such a tribunal it will go hard with democracy. That the author extremely ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... British officers. But the trouble was certainly intensified by the fact—as contemporary naval literature shows—that by Nelson's success and death the memorandum became consecrated into a kind of sacred document, which it was almost sacrilege to discuss. The violent polemics of such men as James, the naval chronicler, made it appear profanity so much as to consider whether Nelson's attack differed in the least from his intended plan, and anyone who ventured to examine the question in the light of general principles was likely to ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... when he could not produce. And now Tolstoy tells us that Uncle Tom's Cabin is greater than Shakespeare. Is it any wonder Turgenieff remonstrated with him? Is it any wonder if, after reading one of his latter-day tracts, we are reminded of The Washerwoman of Finchley Common, that classic in the polemics of sniffling piety? The truth is that Tolstoy, a wonderful artist in plastic portraiture, consciously or unconsciously fashioned the Tolstoy legend, as did Richard Wagner the Wagner legend, Victor Hugo the Hugo legend. Men of genius and imagination are nearly all play-actors ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... whether these be new stimuli to variation, or only acting as their selectors or censors), and moreover secures separation from the original stock and thus eliminates or lessens the reactionary dangers of panmixia. Darwin accepted Wagner's theory as "advantageous." Through the heated polemics of the more ardent selectionists Wagner's theory came to grow into an alternative instead of a help to the theory of selectional evolution. Separation is now rightly considered a most important factor by modern ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and dressed, and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree, and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable amount of academical eclat. He had occupied himself too much with high church matters, and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with high churchmanship, to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first. He was not a double first, nor even a first class man; but he revenged ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope |
