"Deism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marginal notes from his subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most vital questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views, or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: "If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end." In the face of that "rhinoceros laugh" there was an end of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... (1754), he did not fully accept Maupertuis's materialistic thesis. Lange has shown that at a very early period in the movement the most consistent materialism was ready and developed, while such leaders of the movement as Voltaire and Diderot still leaned either on deism, or on a mixture of deism and scepticism.[214] The philosophy of D'Alembert's Dream is definite enough, and far enough removed ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... speaking of religion, declared it was the "only solid basis of public liberty and happiness." General Washington said it was "one of the great pillars of human happiness, and the firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens." What could we gain by exchanging it for Deism, or Atheism, or Ingersollism? Infidelity proposes to break down the altars of prayer, take away our Bibles and our days of worship, shut up the doors against all our Sunday-schools and turn more than a million of children into the ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... been a radical change in your originally sound and inspired ideas, and which clearly indicates to me that a discussion and exchange of basic concept would be fruitless. I'm rather hurt that you question my integrity with the statement about the "slick, calculating, career-minded cult of Ph. Deism." Moreover, I would appreciate, if possible, the return ...
— On Handling the Data • M. I. Mayfield
... was a Man went into one of these thinking Engines, but he came wiser out than he was before; and I am persuaded, it would be a more effectual Cure to our Deism, Atheism, Scepticism, and all other Scisms, than ever the Italian's Engine, for Curing the Gout ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... they were about to separate, White said, "What must I do? You are the only friend to whom I can apply in this agonizing state, and you are about to leave me. My literary associates are all inclined to deism. I have no one with whom I ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... exact sciences, expounded Leibnitz, translated Newton, gave valuable aid to Voltaire in introducing English thought into France, and was one of the first women among the nobility to accept the principles of philosophic deism. "I confess that she is tyrannical," said Voltaire; "one must talk about metaphysics, when the temptation is to talk of love. Ovid was formerly my master; it is now the turn of Locke." She has been clearly but by no means pleasantly painted ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Berger, and all, Knights of the Round-Table. And we live in great harmony and brotherhood, as queer a life as anybody leads, and as queer a set as may be found anywhere. In his more serious intervals, he talks philosophy and deism, and preaches obedience to the law of reason and morality; which law he says (and I believe him) he has so well observed, that, notwithstanding his residence in dissolute countries, he has never yet been sinful. He wishes me, eight or nine weeks hence, to accompany ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a large detail of circumstances, the first day of our acquaintance. There was at that time in Paris a certain lady (whose name, then well known in the grand and gay world, I must beg leave to conceal) who had imbibed the principles of deism, and valued herself much upon being an avowed advocate for them. The major, with his usual frankness, (though I doubt not with that politeness of manners which was so habitual to him, and which he retained throughout his whole life,) answered ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... impossible to represent the doctrines of the church of England as deductions from any abstract philosophy. But the traditions were not regarded as having any mysterious authority. Abstract philosophy might lead to deism or infidelity. Paley and his like rejected such philosophy in the spirit of Locke or even Hume. But it was always possible to treat a tradition like any other statement of fact. It could be proved by appropriate evidence. The ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... duration, that of a generation. In the course of it we see the crowd at first monarchical become very revolutionary, then very imperialist, and again very monarchical. In the matter of religion it gravitates in the same lapse of time from Catholicism to atheism, then towards deism, and then returns to the most pronounced forms of Catholicism. These changes take place not only amongst the masses, but also amongst those who direct them. We observe with astonishment the prominent men of the Convention, the sworn enemies of kings, men who ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Autobiography, and its details have been carefully supplemented by his latest editor, Mr. Lee. His literary activity was various and considerable. His greatest work—a treatise which has been rashly called the foundation of English deism, but which rather expresses the vague and not wholly unorthodox doubt expressed earlier by Montaigne, and by contemporaries of Herbert's own, such as La Mothe le Vayer—was written in Latin, and has never been translated into English. He ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to whom the strange and intense story of the Gospel appears at first in something as wild and marvelous as some of their own relations; and who are, at any rate, firmly fixed in their heathenish rites and devotions to a subtil system of deism, and the invocation of gods of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him, said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in France!"—a prophecy, possibly, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... poet, historian, critic, and brilliant converser, all in one. In religion, a scoffer not only at superstition, but at all beliefs and rites which imply revelation, he still clung to the belief in a personal God. His creed was deism, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was, like Voltaire, a deist in his creed; but in religion, as in all his mental action, there was a vein of sentiment. By the fascination of his style, he was able, in his various writings, including his autobiographical Confessions, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... you will, for his "deism" meant no more to him than a distant blue sky giving the world space and perspective and free air; but a materialism that renders men kind and courteous, urbane and sweet-tempered, honest and clear-headed, is better than a spirituality that leads to ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... February 1746. Chubb is interesting mainly as showing that the rationalism of the intellectual classes had taken considerable hold upon the popular mind. Though he acquired little renown in England he was regarded by Voltaire and others as among the most logical of the deist school (see DEISM). His principal works are A Discourse Concerning Reason (1731), The True Gospel of Jesus Christ (1739), and Posthumous Works, 2 vols. (1748), the last containing "The Author's Farewell ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... only 'M. Loke' whom he felt himself obliged to touch so gingerly; the remarkable movement towards Deism, which was then beginning in England, Voltaire only dared to allude to in a hardly perceivable hint. He just mentions, almost in a parenthesis, the names of Shaftesbury, Collins, and Toland, and then quickly passes on. In this connexion, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... may be the true antiquity of this nation, whether their mythology be a corruption of the pure deism we find in their books, or their deism a refinement from gross idolatry; whether their religious and moral precepts have been engrafted on the elegant philosophy of the Nyya and Mimns, or this philosophy been refined on the plainer text of the Veda; the Hindu is ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum." Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old and familiar as Saint Augustine to the twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... through Christian history one can see these two conceptions complementing each other, each balancing the other's eccentricities. The Greek idea runs out toward pantheism in Spinoza and Hegel. The Biblical idea runs out toward deism in Duns Scotus and Calvin. In the eighteenth century an extreme form of deism held the field and God, as personal will, was conceived as the Creator, who in a dim and distant past had made all things. In the nineteenth century the thought of God swung back to terms of immanence, and God, who ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... selling his library to help them. The Life of Philip Skelton, by Samuel Burdy, first published in 1792, still makes entertaining and interesting reading. Richardson met Skelton when he visited London in 1748 to publish Ophiomaches, or Deism Revealed. On David Hume's recommendation Andrew Millar published the work; and Richardson also seems to have played some part in getting the book accepted (Forster MSS, XV, ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... Deism maintains that God, while the Creator of the world, yet sustains no further relations to it. He made it just as the clock-maker makes a self-winding clock: makes it and then leaves it to run itself without any interference on His part. Such teaching as this finds ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... because he does so, kindles into the most fearful wrath and dooms him and all his posterity to temporal, spiritual, and eternal death. Such is the doctrine which is advanced, in order to secure the omnipotence of God, and to exalt his sovereignty. But is it not a great leading feature of deism itself, that it exalts the power of God at the expense of his infinite moral perfections? So we have understood the matter; and hence, it seems to us, that Christian divines should be more guarded in handling ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... becomes that, and that is something else. The harmonious, the suave, the well bred waft the bright particular being into a peculiar and reserved parterre of paradise, where bloom at once the graces of Panthism, the simplicity of Deism, and the pathos of Catholicism; where he can sip elegances and spiritualities from flowerets of every faith!' Fancy my crass ignorance, when I assure you that I actually laughed over that verbal syllabub, thinking it intended as a famous bit ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the beginning of this century, and falls back to the middle ages and Gregory VII.; then, suddenly becoming a progressive Christian and a democrat, he gradually leans towards rationalism, and finally falls into deism. At present, everybody waits at the trap-door. As for me, though I would not swear to it, I am inclined to think that M. Lamennais, already taken with scepticism, will die in a state of indifference. He owes to individual reason and methodical doubt this ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... eighteenth century. Johnson and Goldsmith continued the traditions of social and polite literature which had been established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and a whole host of apologists carried on the battle against deism and infidelity. Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of scepticism with a new array of deadlier engines and more abundant ammunition, had betaken himself placidly to the composition of history. What is remarkable in Burke's first performance is his discernment of the important ...
— Burke • John Morley
... and Constitution of Nature, cannot be adequately appreciated unless taken in connexion with the circumstances of the period at which it appeared. It was intended as a defence against the great tide of deistical speculation (see DEISM), which in the apprehension of many good men seemed likely to sweep away the restraints of religion and make way for a general reign of licence. Butler did not enter the lists in the ordinary way. Most of the literature evoked by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the real religion of the eighteenth century. Its religion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as in Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and atmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. It had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as that a politician should be poor, and should ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... still more particularly, one would suppose, to French women, could be little delightful; and yet no lady's toilette was complete without his attendance. At the Opera, his broad, unmeaning face was usually seen entre deux jolis minois: the ladies in France gave the ton, and the ton was deism."-E. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the so-called English Deists about the Christian religion contain the first, and to some extent a very significant free-spirited attempt at a critical view of the history of dogma (see Lechler, History of English Deism, 1841). But the criticism is an abstract rarely a historical one. Some very learned works bearing on the history of dogma were written in England against the position of the Deists especially by Lardner; see also at an earlier ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack |
