"Figment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glance at her. He had been inclined to regard Dean's suspicion that she was in love with the younger Hoff as the mere figment of jealousy, but where two young persons of the opposite sex are thrown together, there is always the possibility of romance. Jane colored a little under his searching glance, yet what he read in her face seemed to satisfy his ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... Himself to obedient love by a true coming. 'We will come and make our mansion with him.' And that coming is a fact of a higher order, and not to be confounded either with the mere divine Omnipresence, by which God is everywhere, nor to be reduced to a figment of our own imaginations, or a strong way of promising increased perception on our part of Christ's fullness. That great central Sun, if I might use so violent a figure, draws nearer and nearer and nearer to the planets ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... amuse himself for days together by pulling to pieces art, science, philosophy, to find their hidden wheels: so he came by a sort of Pyrrhonism, in which everything that was became only a figment of the mind, a castle in the air, which had not even the excuse of the geometric symbols, of being necessary to the mind. Christophe would rage against his pulling the ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... unworthy of disputation. As for Miss Reid, we will take an affidavit that neither in miniature nor at large did she excel the celebrated Rosalba; and with regard to Mrs. Lennox, we consider her to be a mere figment, like Narcissa, Miss Tabitha Bramble, or any hero or heroine depicted by the historian of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... aright, and gain thereby a knowledge of our Spiritual Environment, which alone can bring us into sympathy with the Great Reality. Without this "Knowledge of God," we can see by analogy on the Organic Plane that Everlasting Life is impossible—we are as weeds and shall be rooted out. This is no figment of the imagination, it seems to be the only conclusion we can come to if Nature is the work of Nature's God, and Man is made in the image (spiritual) of that God. Herbert Spencer came to the same conclusion when defining everlasting existence. ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... regularly beating heart and sound lungs. He further pointed out that the personality of Katie in appearance and character differed considerably from that of the medium, and that it was impossible to regard the materialized form as but a phantasm of the living. A stupendous discovery or a pitiful figment of a lunatic brain! But no flash of lightning rent the halls of learning; Sir William Crookes' researches into radiant matter could safely be accepted as workable intellectual ground, but not ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... blended in the world that discrimination is impossible. Still the man who argues thus is bound to assign some grounds for his melancholy scepticism; and to show further that the destruction of the figment is too dearly bought by the assertion of the truth. Therefore, I might be content to say that, in such cases, the innocence of the plain speaker ought to be assumed until his guilt is demonstrated. If we had always waited to clear away shams till we were ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... eyes. Ewbert found him terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not forsake ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... children, strive to set up an independent place of worship, or to join any already established body of Christians, anathemas are hurled at their heads, and they are told that they are guilty of the heinous crime of schism—schism, in the sense they give it, a figment of sacerdotalism, priestcraft, and imposture. But does the crime of schism not exist? Ay, it does; but it is schism from the true Church of Christ, the Church of which He is the head corner-stone, the beautified in Heaven, ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... exacting in these matters as, by your own confession, it appears you are, then Mr. Lewes must necessarily inform you that he does not deal in the article; probably he will add that therefore it must be non-essential. I should fear he might even stigmatise imagination as a figment, and delicacy ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Are you, now? I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... the apostolic office is far more reasonable and accordant with Scripture than a figment about unexampled powers and authority in the Church. It accounts for the qualifications as stated in the same address of Peter's, which merely secure the validity of their testimony. The one thing that must be found in an apostle was that he should have been in familiar ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... shop-walker will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry. If you want virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, of self-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a class of gentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in the head, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is the teaching of the classics now discredited among you? Not because it is not as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left to understand its value. The tradesmen who govern you feel instinctively that ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... treatise on the art of lying. Never was such cunning exhibited. Never was the father of lies invoked with such skill as by the German leaders. In their sight truth is contemptible, kindness is weakness, honour is a figment. ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... annuity may be presumed to have made inquiries, but no echo of these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be right in thinking him a figment ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... dream, golden dream; somnambulism. conception, Vorstellung[Ger], excogitation[obs3], "a fine frenzy"; cloudland[obs3], dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; "thick coming fancies" [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey[obs3], whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest[obs3], geste[obs3], extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... An Idol, or meer Figment of the brain, my be Personated; as were the Gods of the Heathen; which by such Officers as the State appointed, were Personated, and held Possessions, and other Goods, and Rights, which men from time to time dedicated, and consecrated unto them. But idols cannot ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... doubtful authenticity. We who have witnessed widespread atrocities are subjected to a critical process as cold as if we were advancing a new program of social reform. I begin to wonder if anything took place in Flanders. Isn't the wreck of Termonde, where I thought I spent two days, perhaps a figment of the fancy? Was the bayoneted girl child of Alost a pleasant dream creation? My people are busy and indifferent, generous and neutral, but yonder several races are living at a deeper level. In a time when beliefs are ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... but is perhaps worth recollecting at the start, that no man or woman lacks individuality altogether, even if it cannot be regarded in a particular case as a high individuality. No one is a mere item. That useful figment of the statistician has no real existence under the sun. We need to supplement the books of abstract theory with much sympathetic insight directed towards men and women in their concrete selfhood. Said a Vedda cave-dweller to Dr. Seligmann (it is the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... so, perhaps he might have reflected, like Aristarchus before him, that it seems absurd for our earth to hold the giant sun in thraldom; then perhaps his imagination would have reached out to the heliocentric doctrine, and the cobweb hypothesis of epicycles, with that yet more intangible figment of the perfect circle, might have ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... natural aptitudes are pushed beyond the usual limit, we find famous examples that history has cherished, and that we love to recall. There is Pascal, mastering at the age of twelve years the greater part of Plane Geometry without any instruction, and not a figment of Calculus, drawing on the floor of his chamber all the figures in the first book of Euclid, estimating accurately the mathematical relations of them all—that is, reconstructing for himself a part of descriptive Geometry; the herdsman Mangia ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... for Mrs. Gamp, but to Mrs. Gamp herself we are indebted for Mrs. Harris. That most mythical of all imaginary beings is certainly quite unique; she is strictly, as one may say, sui generis in the whole world of fiction. A figment born from a figment; one fancy evolved from another; the shadow of a shadow. If only in remembrance of that one daring adumbration from Mrs. Gamp'sinner consciousness, that purely supposititious entity "which her name, I'll not deceive you, is Harris," one would say that Mr. Mould, the undertaker, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of the exiled Theodomir. The paper stuffed in the candle-stick in a reckless moment had been but the ingenious figment of a man's brain for the entertainment of an hour. The old chief and Sho-caw with their broken tale to Philip had but tangled the net the more. As the blood of the Indian mother had driven Diane ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... room—before a back-window that gave on the whitewashed wall—a man was rapidly putting his signature to a number of papers. But Mr. Slosson had ignored the existence of this man, treating him apparently as a figment of the disordered brain ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... honour!" replied Caleb; "it fits an auld carle like me weel eneugh to tell lees for the credit of the family, but it wadna beseem the like o' your honour's sell; besides, young folk are no judicious: they cannot make the maist of a bit figment. Now this fire—for a fire it sall be, if I suld burn the auld stable to make it mair feasible—this fire, besides that it will be an excuse for asking ony thing we want through the country, or doun at the haven—this fire will settle mony things on an honourable footing for ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... end of the fifth book Plato introduces the figment of contingent matter, which has exercised so great an influence both on the Ethics and Theology of the modern world, and which occurs here for the first time in the history of philosophy. He did not remark that the degrees ...
— The Republic • Plato
... details as to these, armaments, and as to the exact designs of Spain against his country, by the ostentatious statements of the; Spanish ambassador in Paris himself, the English, envoy was still inclined to believe that these statements were a figment, expressly intended to deceive. Yet he was aware that Lord Westmoreland, Lord Paget, Sir Charles Paget, Morgan, and other English refugees, were constantly meeting with Mendoza, that they were told to get themselves in readiness, and to go down—as well appointed as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... What a figment of the imagination this boasted impregnability of the Bank of England was the sequel will show. And as for those masters of finance, those earthly Joves of the financial world who sat serene above the clouds, "the ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Smith-Oldwick was not only an English gentleman and an officer in name, he was also what these implied—a brave man; but when he realized that the sweet picture he had looked upon was but the figment of a dream, and that in reality he still lay where he had fallen at the foot of the grating with a lion standing over him licking his face, the tears sprang to his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Never, he thought, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the Major, taking me kindly by the hand, and leading me close up to her ladyship. "Look at her, Lady Chillington," he added; "scan her features thoroughly, and tell me then that the likeness of which I speak is nothing more than a figment of ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... one above in order to draw me under that face. Everything had been so vague that all these alternatives were conceivable. But my own mind was quite and finally determined now that my adventure with the stranger on the shore had been no figment of my fancy, and I felt sure moreover that they had made up their minds about me and decided to act. How and why they had come to such a definite conclusion despite all my efforts to mislead them, beat me at first ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the figment of a disordered, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Germanic Confederation in the Treaty of Pressburg sounded the death-knell of an Empire which Voltaire with equal wit and truth had described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. In the new age of trenchant realities how could that venerable figment survive—where the election of the Emperor was a sham, his coronation a mere parade of tattered robes before a crowd of landless Serenities, and where the Diet was largely concerned with regulating the claims of the envoys of princes to sit on seats of red cloth or on the less honourable ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... silence, though it seemed to her strange that at a moment when she was for once not thinking of Peregrine, her imagination should conjure him up, and there was a strong feeling within her that it was something external that had flitted across the shadow, not a mere figment of her brain, though the notion was evidently accepted, and she could hear a muttering of Mrs. Labadie that this was the consequence of employing young wenches with ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that this late comer was, himself, the "wolf's head" whom they were to chase down for a rich reward, incongruously hunting amidst his own hue and cry. Or, Seymour again doubted, had he merely constructed a figment of a scheme from his own imaginings and these attenuations of suggestion? For there seemed, after all, scant communication between the two, and this was even less when the moon was unveiled, the shifting shimmer of the ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... speakers of the South; it is so clearly and so unequivocally set forth, that he who runs may read. Why, then, is it overlooked by Dr. Wayland? Why is he pleased to imagine that he is combating Southern principles, when, in reality, he is merely combating the monstrous figment, the distorted conception of his own brain,—namely, the right of one man to sacrifice the happiness of multitudes to his own will and pleasure? Is it because facts do not lie within the province of the moral philosopher? Is it because fiction alone is worthy of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... wholly free from the pernicious influence of human holiness. They ever seek to bring their own works and merits before God. I know for myself what pains are inflicted by this godless wisdom, this figment of righteousness, and what effort must be made before the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... declining the cardinalate, if indeed the offer were not a figment of his own brain, Laud would have been diplomatic enough not to allow his reasons to transpire, and probably the Pope never knew them. The importance of the statement lies for posterity entirely in the anti-Roman tendency which he expressed in his diary. For ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... complex than that of electricity, because, as expressed in us, it is the law of conscious individuality; but it is none the less a purely natural law, and follows the universal rule, and therefore we may dismiss from our minds, as a baseless figment, the fear of any Divine power treasuring up anger against us on account of bygones, if we are sincerely seeking to do what is right now. The new causes which we put in motion now will produce their proper effect as surely as the old causes did; ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of the children is the story of answered prayer. If any of us were tempted to doubt whether, after all, prayer is a genuine transaction, and answers to prayer no figment of the imagination—but something as real as the tangible things about us—we have only to look at some of our children. It would require more faith to believe that what we call the Answer came by chance or by the ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don't think I did that. I was a great ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... agnostic? had he a right to act? Away with such nonsense, and let Zero perish! ran his thoughts. And then again: had he not promised, had he not shaken hands and broken bread? and that with open eyes? and if so, how could he take action, and not forfeit honour? But honour? what was honour? A figment, which, in the hot pursuit of crime, he ought to dash aside. Ay, but crime? A figment, too, which his enfranchised intellect discarded. All day, he wandered in the parks, a prey to whirling thoughts; all night, patrolled the city; and at the peep of day he sat down by the wayside ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... able, under dire reiterated pinches, to do for them; but it was "rum," for final solitary brooding, that he hadn't appeared to see his way definitely to undertake the support of a family till the last scrap of his little low-browed, high-toned business, and the last figment of "property" in the old tiled and timbered shell that housed it, had been sacrificed to creditors mustering six ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... battling for his manhood. It seemed to Peter that his gasp was almost one of relief at discovering that his eyes had not deceived him, that the face he had seen was that of a real person, instead of the figment of a disordered mind. ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... effecting it. What I inferred (if so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first ed.: "And she is to sleep with Christabel!" as leading up too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present. But the whole thing was a figment. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,— sheer nonsense! What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... certainly no ground for presenting the evil one as having horns, tail, and hoofs. This is only to bring into ridicule what is an exceedingly serious fact. A careful consideration of all the scriptures here given will assure the student that Satan is not a figment of the ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... Nescience is not destroyed will remain in Bondage!—You now argue on the assumption of a special avidy for each soul. But what about the distinction of souls implied therein? Is that distinction essential to the nature of the soul, or is it the figment of Nescience? The former alternative is excluded, as it is admitted that the soul essentially is pure, non-differenced intelligence; and because on that alternative the assumption of avidy to account for the distinction of souls would be purposeless. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... older, perhaps. Perhaps it is merely that I am fashioned of baser stuff than—-say, Achille Cazaio or de Soyecourt. Or perhaps it is that this overmastering, all-engulfing love is a mere figment of the poet, an age-long superstition as zealously preserved as that of the inscrutability of women, by men who don't believe a syllable of the nonsense they are transmitting. Ysoude is dead; and I love my young French ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... relief-map. I could not bear to look at it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication, like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... us nothing concerning Kado the Striver, but it is most unlikely that he is a mere figment of popular imagination. What history does record, however, is that the wicked Duchess and her host of mercenary Normans were forced to flee, and that her place was taken by a more just ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... hoped that his first impression would prove to be a mere figment of his imagination; but now there was no doubting. There, sprawled in an ugly, inhuman heap on the floor, head resting against the cushioned seat of the cab, was the figure of a man. There was no doubt that he was dead. Even Spike, young, ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... the true way of salvation. People who lay no claims to reason for themselves are not able to prove by reason this their assertion; and if they hawk about something superior to reason, it is a mere figment, and far below reason, as their general method of life sufficiently shows. But there is no need to dwell upon such persons. I will merely add that we can only judge of a man by his works. If a man abounds in the fruits of the Spirit, charity, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... I wish to treat is this, "The Ideal Teacher." And I may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination. This is the essential feature of any ideal. The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics. We take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination a paragon, ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... from thy merits. We perchance Do wrong thee, Isis; for that coward, History, Who binds in death his object's jaw and then Besmuts her name, hath crossed his focus in Another age, and paled his spreading figment from Our sight. Thou art so far back toward The primal autocrat whose wish, hyena-like, Was his religion, that, appearing as thou dost On an horizon new flushed in the first Uncertain ray of Altruism, thou seem'st More ghost than human. Yet thou lovest, loving ghost, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... proof that an abnormal being is actually present was that devised by the ghost of Sir Richard of Coldinghame in the ballad, and by the Beresford ghost, who threw a heavy curtain over the bed-pole. Unluckily, Sir Richard is a poetical figment, and the Beresford ghost is a myth, like William Tell: he may be traced back through various mediaeval authorities almost to the date of the Norman Conquest. We have examined the story in a little book of folklore, Etudes Traditionistes. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... careful survey of the whole ground, our belief is that no such persons as Professor Teufelsdroeckh or Counsellor Heuschrecke ever existed; that the six Paper-bags, with their China-ink inscriptions and multifarious contents, are a mere figment of the brain; that the 'present Editor' is the only person who has ever written upon the Philosophy of Clothes; and that the Sartor Resartus is the only treatise that has yet appeared upon that subject;—in ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of the Ridiculous,' and he invariably asks for the lines that produced the fatal effect on your servant. He visited most of the bookstores in New York city to find them, and nothing but your own word, I am sure, will ever convince him that the 'wretched man' is but a figment of your imagination. I tried to satisfy him by saying you did not dare to publish the lines lest they should produce a similar effect on the typesetters, editors, and the readers of the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... you came from the sea!" he exclaimed. "And the purple rolling moors! How well I remember them, and longed to write of them. But only these latitudes drive my pen. Indeed, I once tried to write about the heather—the purple twilight—no figment of the poetical fancy, that. The atmosphere at that ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... late touched by culture's day! Are these our Heroes pictured each by each? We fondly deemed that where our English speech Sounded, there English hearts, of mould humane. Justice would strengthen, cruelty restrain. And is it all a figment of false pride? Such horrors do our vaunting annals hide Beneath a world of words, like flowers that wave In tropic swamps o'er a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... may scarcely be a thought, or emotion, or even an idea: it may simply be a mood. Words so often become our masters instead of our servants, and we are apt to think that if a thing cannot be reduced to a verbal formula it is an airy nothing, a figment of the imagination. So it may be, but it is none the less real. We have thought of ourselves as material individuals for so long that it is difficult for us to use other than material standards in our estimate of immaterial things: hence our confusion. We can feel a thousand things far too ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... accordingly, proves abortive over the whole 27,000 square leagues of territory; it is simply a legal figment, an artificial grouping together of neighbors who do not find themselves bound and incorporated together by neighborhood; in order that their society might become viable and stimulating would require both commune ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... political significance of those old restrictions and barriers against which his early zeal had tilted. Certainly in the ideal state the rights and obligations of the different classes would be more evenly adjusted. But the ideal state was a figment of the brain. The real one, as Crescenti had long ago pointed out, was the gradual and heterogeneous product of remote social conditions, wherein every seeming inconsistency had its roots in some bygone need, and the character of each class, with its ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... seemed improbable the fate of any uncle or cousin, in the absence of more immediate kindred, should be mystically forecast to him. He was perfectly well at the time of the apparition, and it could not have been the figment of a disordered digestion, as the lusty hunger which willingly appeased itself with the coffee of the St. Johnswort Inn sufficiently testified. Yet, in spite of all this, an occurrence so out of the course of events must have ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... you shall have read Iola's letter you will see it is more than a figment of my imagination that has made me so loth to have our children know the paralyzing ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... foundation in fact, for Oliver had wronged him more than once, and was ready to wrong him again should a suitable opportunity occur; but the notion that at present occupied his mind, respecting the payment of the two thousand pounds, was largely a figment of his disordered brain. Oliver had certainly questioned within himself whether he should be called upon to pay this sum, and as Francis seemed to have completely disappeared, he began to think that he might evade his promise to do so; but he ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... may be an impossible figment, but the antagonistic tendencies which the fable adumbrates have existed in every society which was ever established, and, to all appearance, must strive for the victory in all that will be. Historians point to the greed and ambition of rulers, to the reckless ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... history is incomplete, that they have been robbed of their full meed of vindictive satisfaction, I must refer back to an earlier paragraph. And to those who may say, Here is a dangerous departure from the formula for such tales, there is only one honest retort. Felicity isn't a figment of fancy. Felicity's ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... Captain Luniac and poor old Ormonde and people talk when they're 'in love'. Love! It's just sentimental idealizing and the worship of what does not exist and therefore cannot last. You love me, don't you, Dammy, not an impossible figment of a heated imagination? This will last, dear.... If you'd idealized me into something unearthly and impossible you'd have tired of me in six months or less. You'd have hated me when you saw the reality, and found yourself tied ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... of education is not a figment of fancy but a reality whose verification can be attested by a thousand examples. We have only to look about us to see people who are living among things that are unbeautiful and who might be living in beautiful worlds had ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... activity, because man in his nature is a social being. Art does not exist in isolation because man does not exist in isolation. His very faculties are in their nature social always and whether for good or for evil. The individual in isolation is a figment of man's mind, and so is ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... wage-workers in New York, based on the minutest personal inquiry and observation. No work of fiction has ever presented more startling pictures, and, indeed, if they occurred in a novel would at once be stamped as a figment of the brain.... Altogether, Mrs. Campbell's book is a notable contribution to the labor literature of the day, and will undoubtedly enlist sympathy for the cause of the oppressed working-women whose stories ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... absolution as a mystical gift conveyed to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, in our lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin: just so far as we do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, we drive ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... and Pilar had closed their eyes till now, presented itself that afternoon in incontestably lively form before them. Dispelled was the artificial fabric of their dream of a love that was as old as life itself—dispelled the poetic figment that they were in the honeymoon of a young pure union of the heart! These three children told a tale of Pilar in which Wilhelm bore no part, and the chapters of that story bore different names, as did ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the wall, I stared at his personage with a dreadful fixity, for I counted him the figment of a disarranged mind. But palpably he remained before me, fanning himself complacently, and watching me with every mark of kindly interest. Evidently perceiving that I was fully alive to my surroundings, the Chinaman addressed a remark to me in ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which posterity peeps in upon the company,—Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade, dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and Wordsworth,—and sees them discharging the severer offices of the whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? This is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration round them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall be loved,' who does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of Victor Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual type? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is resignation, renunciation, and doing-without ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... method of approaching the great social problems. The value of the method may remain, however inaccurate may be the assumptions of facts. The 'tendency,' if interpreted to mean that people are always multiplying too rapidly, may be a figment. If it is taken as calling attention to one essential factor in the case, it is a most important guide to investigation. This brings out another vital point. The bearing of the doctrine upon the political as well as upon the economical views of the Utilitarians ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... months the shadow had brooded over him. Sometimes it seemed to lift and dissolve into unsubstantiality, only to come back more baleful than before. And the moment when he had about persuaded himself that it was but a figment of the imagination, it had sprung into being and crushed him. But he was ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... existence. On the other hand, there was this strange, wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing, it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living, of which the legends and the Homeric pictures preserved but the ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... the secretary that some of the bank presidents had discouraged resumption or treated it as a figment. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... foreign control. The Prince of Wales has never affected any artistic sympathies. For this we are thankful: we have nothing to reproach him with except the unfortunate "Roll-call" incident. Royalty is to-day but a social figment—it has long ago ceased to control our politics. Would that Royalty would take another step and abandon its influence ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Ptarth watched the shadow behind the monolith at the opening to the avenue opposite her. She hoped that it might be but the figment of ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... about the Lakes of Nile such Animals, as are called Pygmies, do live. And, as if he had foreseen, that the abundance of Fables that Ctesias (whom he saith is not to be believed) and the Indian Historians had invented about them, would make the whole Story to appear as a Figment, and render it doubtful, whether there were ever such Creatures as Pygmies in Nature; he more zealously asserts the Being of them, and assures us, That this is no Fable, but ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... Asher gulped. "And how—how did you get down here? Tell me!" He took a step toward Lee Wong, intending to lay his hand on the Chinaman, to make sure he was live flesh and blood, and not a figment of his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... great-grandfather may be regarded as having made a bargain, which he did not really make, with the great-grandfather of George III.; but simply because rebellion does more harm than good. The forms of government are abstractions, not names of realities, and their 'mixture' is a pure figment. King, Lords, and Commons are not really incarnations of power, wisdom, and goodness. Their combination forms a system the merits of which must in the last resort be judged by its working. 'It is the principle ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Berenger; 'have you not heard that it was a mere figment, and that I could scarce have wedded Lucy safely, even had this matter gone as you wish? This is the luckiest chance that could have ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... worthy of a man from dreamland. Every detail mentioned is false. Every essential detail is omitted. In the first place, the disinterested inventor, from whose behaviour our author reasons, is purely a figment of his own clerical brain. Inventors in actual life, as every one knows who has had occasion to deal with them, are generally distinguished by an insane desire for money, by the wildest over-estimates of the wealth which their inventions will ultimately bring them, or ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... feel slightly dangerous. Maybe he was a famous gangster. He wasn't sure. Maybe all this about being an FBI agent was just a figment of his imagination. Blows on the head did funny things. "I'll drill everybody full of holes," he said in a harsh, underworld sort of voice, but it didn't sound very convincing. Sam approached him gently and fished out his wallet with great ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... impalpable shade quite impossible of realization—a bloodless thing, as you said, and quite unnatural —a sickly figment of the imagination. I was ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the turn of the wheel might bring good luck, but it was impossible it could strand him in worse case. For the sentimental side of it—separation, long absence—well, the droop of the cynical corners of the mouth became more emphasized at the recollection of that faded old figment, "home, sweet home," and glowing aspirations after the so-called holy and pure joys of the family circle; whereas the reality, a sort of Punch and Judy show at best. No, there was no sentimental side to ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... in the morning choir, when every little throat seems strained in emulation, if the mocking-bird breathes forth in one of its mad, bewildered, and bewildering extravaganzas, the other birds pause almost invariably, and remain silent until his song is done. This, I assure you, is no figment of the imagination, or illusion of an excited fancy; it is just as substantial a fact as any other one in natural history. Whether the other birds stop from envy, as has been said, or from awe, cannot be so well ascertained, but I believe it is from the sentiment of awe, for as I certainly ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... to become godly and be saved. The reason is, these people, when they hear the Gospel, hurriedly formulate by their own powers a thought in their heart which asserts: I believe. This thought they regard as genuine faith. However, as their faith is but a human figment and idea that never reaches the bottom of the heart, it is inert and effects no improvement. Genuine faith, however, is a divine work in us by which we are changed and born anew of God. (John 1, 13.) It slays the old Adam, and makes us entirely ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... herself on a stool in the corner with her plate on her lap, she set him an example. Apart from her weary attitude, and the droop of her head, he might have deemed the scene in which they had taken part a figment of his brain. But round them was the gloom of ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... discovery. This mysterious and occult connection between Adwaita philosophy and Arabian commerce is pointed out in p. 212 of his book, and it may have some bearing on the present question, if it is anything more than a figment of his fancy. The only reason given by him in support of his theory is, however, in my humble opinion, worthless. The Hindus had a Prominent example of a grand religious movement under the guidance of a single teacher in the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... true, among the foremost and withal the most mischievous of the old theories which will fall, will be that figment of the imagination—the Nebular Hypothesis.[14] How strangely, and how strongly, has that hypothesis maintained its ground, even after nebulous masses have been resolved into clusters of stars. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, there could ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... is an inventor like the novelist—as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a character—the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of every man who writes his life. Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment of another man’s brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick? But a poet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work may be, is occupied during his entire life in painting his own portrait. And if it ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... as too wild an hypothesis—and, confounded as I was, I did deny it—there remained but to conclude that I had myself passed into an abnormal state of mind; in short, that I was very ill and delirious: and even then, mine was the strangest figment with which delirium ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of it, and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties, friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in it, and could be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart, memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen to give allegiance to. Isadora ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the manner in which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Harley Street in a state of the wildest confusion and dismay. Mrs. Rushton was dead; that, at all events, was no figment of sudden insanity, and incredible, impossible rumors were flying from mouth to mouth with bewildering rapidity and incoherence. The name of Mademoiselle de Tourville was repeated in every variety of abhorrent emphasis; but it was not till I obtained an interview with Mrs. Rushton's ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... the realm dealt with the succession question as statesmen and not as lawyers. A later age imagined that the French barons brought forward a text of the law of the Salian Pranks, as a complete answer to Edward's claim from the juridical point of view. But the famous Salic law was a figment, forged by the next generation of lawyers who were eager to give a complete refutation of the elaborate legal pleadings of the partisans of the English claim. No authentic Salic law dealt with the question of the succession ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... again this woman who had wrought him such signal injury, who had put upon him such insufferable indignity. Surely he could feel naught for her but the rancor she had earned! From the beginning, she had been all siren, all deceit. She was but the semblance, the figment, of his foolish dream, and why should the dream move him still, shattered as it was by the torturing realities of the truth? Why must he needs bring tribute to her powers, flatter her ascendency in his life, by faltering before her casual presence? He rallied all his forces. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... on't," said the personage who first appeared on the scene.—"Sir, I will hear no more on it. Besides being a most false and impudent figment, as I can testify—it is Scandaalum Magnaatum, sir—Scandaalum Magnaatum" he reiterated with a broad accentuation of the first vowel, well known in the colleges of Edinburgh and Glasgow, which we can only express in print by doubling the said ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... sensations and ideas. In order to exist for us, things have to be perceived by the mind; therefore, everything, in order to exist, must exist in the mind of God. But when Berkeley had proved that matter was figment, David Hume, born in 1711, came forward and showed that mind was also an illusion. You know nothing of matter, said Berkeley; you have only perceptions and the ideas based thereon. You know nothing of mind, replied Hume; you have only ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... charming sport it would have been then and there! How would her friends and courtiers have laughed! How they would have admired the queen in her original costume, which might well have been thought to belong to the realm of dreams and fantasies! A tri-colored cockade—a figment of the brain—a tri- colored sash—a merry dream! The lilies rule over France, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... it that tried to force its way above the threshold of his bruised and wavering memory? Words? Words of love? And lips pressed to his? No, it must be but a figment of his ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Argolis, Under an arch of great stones, Where my eyes were sightless, groping, I touched this figment ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... Mademoiselle Trebizond at the piano with the vision of the mind, her soul enrapt, her features transfigured. She was a figment of the emotions. And the Princess and I listened, she with a little dubitating look of perplexity, paying me no heed now, and I singularly moved. I walked down the corridor, past where Princess Alix stood, and as I went by I could have put ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... in the following monstrous figment:—that the fruit of Herod's incestuous connexion with Herodias had been a daughter, who was also named Herodias; and that she,—the King's own daughter,—was the immodest one[48] who came in and danced before him, 'his lords, high ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... forth their exertions. What, then, have they to do with the censures and reproaches which the Princeton professor deals around? Let those who have leisure and good nature protect the man of straw he is so hot against. The abolitionists have other business. It is not the figment of some sickly brain; but that system of oppression which in theory is corrupting, and in practice destroying both Church and State;—it is this that they feel pledged to do battle upon, till by the just judgment of Almighty ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... possible to see his lordship, and acquit him of gusto in the task. It was plain he gloried in the exercise of his trained faculties, in the clear sight which pierced at once into the joint of fact, in the rude, unvarnished gibes with which he demolished every figment of defence. He took his ease and jested, unbending in that solemn place with some of the freedom of the tavern; and the rag of man with the flannel round his neck was ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... order in his own meals and receive newspapers and periodicals. But he was hurt at an unfriendly suggestion on the part of the authorities that Pitezel had not died by his own hand, and that Edward Hatch was but a figment of his rich imagination. He would like to have been released on bail, but in the same unfriendly spirit was informed that, if he were, he would be detained on a charge of murder. And so the months dragged on. Holmes, studious, patient, injured, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... what is it? As historical fact, that story about Adam and Eve eating an apple and thereby bringing down God's curse upon the whole innocent human race is but a figment of little minds, and an insult to divine intelligence. But, as symbolizing the dire penalty we pay for a belief in the reality of both good and evil—ah, that is a note just beginning to be sounded in the world at large. And it may account for the presence ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... I wonder if the missing book is a figment of her imagination," he thought; but in this he wronged her, for that little red-edged copy of Keble's Christian Year was ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Being creating all bodies; of a partless Being acting upon all parts; and of a passionless Being generating and regulating all passions. Universalists consider the general course of nature, though strangely unheeded, does proclaim with 'most miraculous organ,' that dogmatisers about any such 'figment of imagination' would, in a rational community, be viewed with the same feelings of compassion, which, even in these irrational days, ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler. There is no permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and the robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again,—not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... terrible as the forest which Dante traversed on his way to the world of pain. Every advance step they made was upon the enemy's territory. And one has only to read the writings of the two Mathers to perceive that that enemy was to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment of a poetical fancy, but a living, active reality, alternating between the sublimest possibilities of evil and the lowest details of mean mischief; now a "tricksy spirit," disturbing the good-wife's platters or soiling her newwashed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... fact they buried him) —That he was dead and then restored to life By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: {100} —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise", and he did rise. "Such cases are diurnal", thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume, Instead of giving way to time and health, Should eat itself into the life of life, As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and all! For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine, proportioned, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... to the others. She was ashamed and mortified and she felt indeed that the whole world had turned against her. Mr. Campbell was cold to her. Miss Helen Campbell hardly civil Mary and Elinor looked at her askance. There was not a word of truth in it, of course; it was just a figment of Nancy's morbid imaginings. Miss Campbell was bored to extinction with the continued rain. Mr. Campbell was preoccupied because of business engagements of great importance, and Mary and Elinor, if the truth must be told, were intensely homesick; and who would not have been with ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will receive the attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for changing the essential principle of our self-governing system is a figment which its contrivers laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against the invader? We are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... were seeking a basis were trivial in comparison with those which our author hurtles out after a glance at M. Quetelet. "A continuous average of so many murders a year; then so many must happen; then somebody must commit them; then free-will is a figment, and society is the source of all action ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... who flew before Nero in the circus; but he, I admit, had a bad fall, as Seutonius recounts. That character of Lucian's, who employed an eagle's wing and a vulture's in his flight, I take to be a mere figment of the satirist's imagination. But what do you make of Simon Magus? He, I cannot doubt, had invented a machine in which, like myself, he made use of steam or naphtha. This may be gathered from ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... much energy would be needed for such a purpose, and much less has anybody indicated a way in which the required energy could be artificially developed, or cunningly filched from the stores of nature. It is, then, purely an assumption, an interesting figment of the mind, that certain curious disturbances in the electrical state of the air and the earth, affecting delicate electric instruments, possessing a marked periodicity in brief intervals of time, and not yet otherwise accounted ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... one on earth but Iris Wayne, yet that insubstantial grey shadow which seemed to speak was only another ghost, a figment of his overwrought brain. He wished—how he wished—that these ghosts would leave him, would return to the haunted place whence they came and allow him to sink once more into the blessed oblivion from which they called him with ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... think thereon at all," said Ebbo, gloomily. "It is a figment of the old serpent to hinder us from snatching ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... often has the actor led the child of his imagination to the footlights, only to realise that he has brought into the world a weakling or a deformity which may not live! And how often he has sat through the long night brooding over the corpse of this dear figment of his fancy! It has lately become customary with many actor-managers to avoid these pangs of childbirth. They have determinedly declined the responsibility they owe to the poet and the public, and have instead dazzled the eye with a succession of such ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... telephonically contacted the Butte Office and asked if the FBI was checking on the flying discs reported to have been seen by many citizens. He advised that so many had reported having seen them that it undoubtedly was not a figment of the imagination. He said that these discs had been seen on July 1, 1947, in the vicinity of Trail Creek near Sun Valley, Idaho, by ...
— Federal Bureau of Investigation FOIA Documents - Unidentified Flying Objects • United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
... with Psalm 139:8, and also Psalm 16:10; and yet the first passage may only imply the omnipresence of God, and the second, the resurrection of the incorruptible body of Christ from the grave. The descent of Christ into the place of torment is a figment, a monkish fable, in which Bible incidents and heathen myths are woven together to delude a credulous and ignorant laity. The formulary designated the Apostles' creed, has, beyond question, a high claim to antiquity, but none whatever to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... cents in her purse. A professor of the University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... the garden, looking behind at every third step to make sure that the gentleman was still following, that he was not merely a figment of his own sleepy senses. Their direction was straight toward the parapet where, on an historic wash-day, the signorina had sat beside a row of dangling stockings. She was sitting there now, dressed ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... Tayoga. You merely see an idle figment of a brain that does not yet fully know my friend, the great young Onondaga. But I see him, and I see him clearly. I behold a tall, strong figure, head slightly bent against the rain, eyes that see in the dark as well as yours see in the brightest sunlight, feet that move surely and steadily ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... personal claims which cannot be sustained. And whatever may be Christ's merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of God manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. At every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of Matthew Arnold. The one writer regards the "myth" as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen Christ whose ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden |
