"Materialistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... narrow and exclusive dogmas were grafted on this doctrine. Thus, the theory of "class struggle" transformed itself into the absolute negation of all community interests between the diverse social strata. The "materialistic"—or rather "economic"—point of view, according to which the products of spiritual activity in the history of humanity lose all independence, being only the consequences of economic organization, generated scorn for all idealism; and the proletariat character of the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... to establish the Torah and Judaism upon a sure foundation for the man of outside culture. The pursuit of philosophy must have menaced the attachment to Judaism and challenged the authority of the Bible at Alexandria. A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law. Then as now the advanced Jew would mask his self-indulgence under the guise of a banal philosophy, and jeer easily ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the hearts ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... "Oh, I remember perfectly what Watson said, and, moreover, I believe I heard a good many of his thoughts which were not put into words—you can hear thoughts, you know, only it is with such delicacy that the very idea of hearing seems too heavy and materialistic to describe the sensation. Watson said the hat was Henley's, he also said that Henley played these instruments; but the pierrots all wore hats that fitted, well-made hats, and for this reason each of them marked his hat, and the skin at the finger tips of a banjo player always hardens. The dead man ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... the cradle. The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A single incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... due to the venality of the officials, but rather to the spirit of materialistic indifference that was abroad among the orthodox Calvinists, who were alone eligible for public office. Large numbers of those who professed the established faith were in reality either nominal conformists too much immersed in affairs to trouble about religious ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... into the sunlight of the Golden Age. And as he led them through Greek and Roman literature, through the early English poets, through Shakespeare and the King James version, down to John Galsworthy and Rupert Brooke, he brought something that was noble, fine and sweet into their grubby materialistic lives; and at the same time the hand of the clock crept steadily on until he and it reached Chateau-Thierry and half past ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... that when I had first heard of Atherton's "eugenic marriage," I had instinctively felt a prejudice against the very idea of such cold, calculating, materialistic, scientific mating, as if one of the last fixed points were disappearing in the chaos of the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... since the last great prophet had finished his testimony. The oldest man living at that time could not remember having seen a man who had ever spoken to a prophet. It seemed as unlikely, to adopt the phrase of another, that another prophet should arise in that formal, materialistic age, as that another cathedral should be added to the splendid remains of Gothic glory which tell us of those bygone days when there were giants in ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... trivial, sometimes comic; but they are universally diffused, and as well established as universally coincident testimony can establish anything. Now, if there be but one spark of real fire to all this smoke, then the purely materialistic theories of life and of the world must be reconsidered. They seem very well established, but so have many other theories seemed, that are long gone the ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... taken the place of cheap sneering. After all religion is founded upon a philosophy of apparitions. The vision of angels at Mons is no new thing. Catholicism is founded on such visions and no religion worthy of the name is without its story of angels. New aspects of matter have laid many materialistic theories in the dust, the mysterious potencies of matter which the latest science is revealing, the energy of electrons, and radium are giving us a new science of super-sensual physics and with it new vistas ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... to do it without having satisfied himself that he had got hold of a more or less distinctive feature, and this, of course, made matters worse. The distinctive feature was not due to any deep-laid plan for pitchforking mind out of the universe, or as part of a scheme of materialistic philosophy, though it has since been made to play an important part in the attempt to further this; Mr. Darwin was perfectly innocent of any intention of getting rid of mind, and did not, probably, care the toss of sixpence whether the universe was instinct ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... wrongly expressed, we must, I think, admit that the real force with which we have to reckon is the demand for justice and for equality as somehow implied by justice. It is easy to browbeat a poor man who wants bread and cheese for himself and his family, by calling his demands materialistic, and advising him to turn his mind to the future state, where he will have the best of Dives. It is equally easy to ascribe the demands to mere envy and selfishness, or to those evil-minded agitators who, for their own wicked ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... must underlie all physical appearances; and the right to define these principles, so far as they can be known, is willingly conceded to philosophy by the scientists, with the exception of those of materialistic and naturalistic tendencies. This mutual re-approaching of philosophy and natural science is one of the most gratifying, and, to both, most fruitful evidences of the intellectual work of the present generation. ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... child as in some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now be ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Now no materialistic teaching has any right to come in and bar that clear faith and firm conclusion. For by its very saying that it knows nothing about life except in connection with organisation, it acknowledges that there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... hypocrite and voluptuary, is painted against a background of church members and professing Christians scarcely less hypocritical than he. In this book Sinclair Lewis adds a violent stroke to his growing picture of materialistic America. ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... relatively to one another. In the example of the wall, it consists in a new collocation of two things relatively to each other—the wall and the paint. In the example of the molding influences on the human mind, its being a collocation at all is only conjectural; for, even on the materialistic hypothesis, it would remain to be proved that the increased facility with which the brain sums up a column of figures when it has been long trained to calculation, is the result of a permanent new arrangement of some of its material particles. We must, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... tastes, and being possessed of private means, he quitted professional work at the age of thirty-four, and spent his subsequent life in studious retirement. Mr. Myers says that his "cast of mind was strongly materialistic, and it is remarkable that his interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena was from first to last of a purely scientific, as contrasted with an emotional or religious nature."[41] Mrs. Stanhope Speer also kept careful records ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... may observe that this argument differs in several instructive particulars from the anti-materialistic argument of Locke, which we have already had occasion to consider. For while Locke erroneously imagined that the test of inconceivability is of equivalent value wherever it is applied, save only where it conflicts with preconceived ideas ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... gradation throughout organic Nature may, of course, be interpreted upon other assumptions than those of Darwin's hypothesis—certainly upon quite other than those of a materialistic philosophy, with which we ourselves have no sympathy. Still we conceive it not only possible, but probable, that this gradation, as it has its natural ground, may yet have its scientific explanation. In any case, there is ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... this condition is the inevitable result of separating education from contemporary life. Education becomes unreal and far fetched, while industry becomes ruthless and materialistic. In spite of the severity of the indictment, one much more severe and well deserved might have been brought against us. He might have accused us not only of wasting, but of misusing and of trampling under foot the first tender instincts and ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... knows. The Socialists of America have hailed Russian Bolshevism as true Socialism; but, no doubt, as the evil consequences of Lenine's Red rule become more widely known and more universally feared, or if, even on the low ground of materialistic economics, the attempt fails, the slippery Marxians will try to prove that Bolshevism was not Socialism after all, since the Russian government was a dictatorship, with the principles of Socialism ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... philosophy of life—and this philosophy stands in logical and sympathetic relationship to what the western world to-day regards as its most advanced thought. The evolutionary conception of life is the foundation of that philosophy, which, however, has little or nothing in common with the materialistic and dogmatic evolutionism of the last century. The work sprung from that philosophy is full of the new sense of mystery, which makes the men of to-day realize that the one attitude leading nowhere is that of denial. Faith and doubt walk ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... aware of the immense social danger in the desire for riches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothing and the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialistic enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian simplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all for the intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in which ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... despairingly incomplete. The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought. Every one has a right to deduce what theory he can from his own experience. The one thing that we have no sort of right to do is to enforce that theory upon people whose experience does not confirm it. We may invite them to ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... spiritual—while upon all of them was built, and out of all of them radiated, under the control of the average of circumstances, what the vulgar call horse-sense, and a life often bent by temporary but most urgent materialistic and political reasons. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... similar fashion the worship of wealth carries numerous consequences with it, which are well worthy of consideration. But the main point, so far as it affects my present argument, is that it substitutes materialistic objects of endeavour for ethical and spiritual aims. Once more morality is defeated. The ideal is not the supremacy of good, but the supremacy of that range and sphere of material efficiency ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... hall from Sarakoff asking me to come round to the Pyramid Restaurant at eight o'clock to meet a friend of his. It was a crisp clear evening, and I decided to walk. There were two problems on my mind. One was the outlook of Sarakoff, which even I deemed to be too materialistic. The other was the attitude of young ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... chestnuts or grapes. Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. I said, "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like 'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody?" Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl, understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked him, "whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... its dogmas. The value of the dogma does not consist in its truthfulness, and M. Anatole France, who loves truth, does not love dogma. Only, unlike religion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in its dogmas but in its ideal. It is perhaps a too materialistic ideal, and the mind of M. Anatole France may not find in it either comfort or consolation. It is not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but there is something reposeful in the finality of popular conceptions. M. Anatole France, a good prince and a good Republican, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... materialistic world is highlighted with strange events that scientists and historians, unable to explain logically, have dismissed with such labels as "supernatural," "miracle," etc. But there are those among us whose simple faith ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... lives. Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man. The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... limits of experience, and in which the dreams and hopes for which Nature could make no provision might somehow or other be realised and fulfilled. With the development of physical science, the conception of the Supernatural has become discredited, and a materialistic monism has begun to dispute the supremacy of that dualistic philosophy which had reigned without a rival for many hundreds of years. But antagonistic as these philosophies are to one another, they have one conception in common. The popular belief that the world of man's normal experience ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... dealt in the preceding pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds its ethical ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... to be fulfilled much longer in many quarters. The doctrine of a future life has been made so frightful by the preponderance in it of the elements of material torture and sectarian narrowness, that a natural revulsion of generous sentiment joins with the impulse of materialistic science to produce a growing disbelief in any life at all beyond the grave. Nothing else will do so much to renew and extend faith in God and immortality as a noble and beautiful doctrine of God and immortality, freed from disfiguring terror, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... for this copy of your book, The Forest Philosophers of India. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better. Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East. The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a whisper out of your long eternity. ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining a permanent hold upon the wandering minds ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... could not mistake the tendency of saying that, if you look wider, things are all alike, and that we are in the grasp of a higher law than our own will. On that side he only paints over in rainbow colours the grim doctrine which the High Calvinist and the Materialistic Necessarian hold ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... other. Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... interest of Douglas at this point in his career is perfectly clear. To span the continent with States and Territories, to create an ocean-bound republic, has often seemed a gross, materialistic ideal. Has a nation no higher destiny than mere territorial bigness? Must an intensive culture with spiritual aims be sacrificed to a vulgar exploitation of physical resources? Yet the ends which this strenuous ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... of this and that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood. Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other beings—we knew not why. This novel craving for abandonment ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... begins his splendid song, a parable: Eve was well enough off in the Garden of Eden, but when she took a wrong step the Lord sent a shoemaker to save her. The words are in the very spirit of the Middle Ages: a materialistic, naive, literal handling of spiritual things; but the most devout of believers can find no cause of offence. The song opens, as I have mentioned, in the rhythm (4-4 instead of 3-4) of the Sword scene, the harmonies being practically ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... it, my dear professor, as you will—that is the ideal of youth; and, so long as human nature remains what it is, will continue to be so. It is a materialistic ideal—a sordid ideal. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe the world would not move much if the young men started thinking too early. They want to be rich, so they fling themselves frenziedly into the struggle. They build the towns, and make the railway tracks, hew down the forests, ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... this sort will never be properly understood until people accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic: namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect, collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may therefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the principles that ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Fate is extremely faint or just barely traced through the palm, it will be found to indicate a general disbelief in the idea of Fate and Destiny. It is often found on the hands of very materialistic persons, those who rebel against the idea that they are governed in any way by Fate or by any power ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... old Haeckel no God exists, just because for him no wonder exists. He pretends to know everything. Christ means for him nothing and he means for Christ nothing. Every foolish child, believing in God and in this wonderful world, has more wisdom than the materialistic professor from Germany. Christ is getting tired of an old generation. Sadly He calls for a new one—for children. In our distress to-day, I think, we should multiply His voice, calling for Him, for a new generation and ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... dubiously. "There is but one remedy—education. Not sectarian, partisan, worldly education—not instruction in relative truths and the chaff of materialistic speculation—but that sort of education whereby the selfish human mind is lifted in a measure out of itself, out of its petty jealousies and envyings, out of sneaking graft and touting for worldly emolument, and into a sense of the eternal truth that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... practical possibilities of Spiritual Science. At that time (1921) Rudolf Steiner had not yet given his indications for the treatment of children needing special care of soul and body, or for the renewal of the art of acting, or for the conquest of materialistic methods in agricultural practice. Nor did there yet exist the movement for religious renewal Which Dr. Fr. Rittelmeyer later founded, with the help and advice of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the practical counsels of Mme. Campan. Mistress of Charles Grandet before his father's death. Towards the close of 1819, a prey to suspicion, she must needs sacrifice her happiness for the time being, so she made a weary journey with her husband into Scotland. She made her lover effeminate and materialistic, advising with him about everything. He returned from the Indies in 1827, when she quickly brought about his engagement with ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... often the anti-religious ardor of the Encyclopaedists. He had, however, ceased all working connection with that great work since it had been suspended and afterwards resumed at the orders and with the permission of government. The more and more avowed materialistic theories revolted his shrewd and sensible mind; without caring to go to the bottom of his thought and contemplate its consequences, he clung to the notion of Providence as to a waif in the great shipwreck of positive creeds; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Messiahs, and these have mostly asserted their claim on nationalistic pleas. They were to be kings of Israel as well as inaugurators of a new regime of moral and spiritual life. But though this is true without qualification, it is equally true that the philosophers of the Middle Ages tried to remove all materialistic notions from the Messianic idea. It is very difficult to assert nowadays whether Judaism does or does not expect a personal Messiah. A very marked change has undoubtedly come over ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... few of the wise and thoughtful. I should not wonder if "gross and brutal materialism" were the mildest phrase applied to them in certain quarters. And, most undoubtedly, the terms of the propositions are distinctly materialistic. Nevertheless two things are certain; the one, that I hold the statements to be substantially true; the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... study John Graham Brooks's "American Syndicalism." From Professor Simkhovitch's book we Americans should learn: First, to discard crude thinking; second, to realize that the orthodox or so-called scientific or purely economic or materialistic socialism of the type preached by Marx is an exploded theory; and, third, that many of the men who call themselves Socialists to-day are in reality merely radical social reformers, with whom on many points good citizens can and ought to work in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... has no ample foundation of economics cannot study the subject by reference reading on the problems of economics. To learn the meaning of value he would read the psychological explanations of the Austrian schools and the materialistic conceptions of the classical writers. He would then find himself in a state of confusion, owing to what seemed to him to be a superfluity of explanations of value. When one understands one point of view, an added viewpoint ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... occasions they had fine, calm, clear days. The glow of the dying sun on the mountains and glaciers filled even the most materialistic of them with wonder and admiration. These days were sometimes succeeded by calm, clear nights, when, but for the cold, they would have stayed out on the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... a materialistic bent may here object that as the sphere of human knowledge extends it becomes increasingly evident that all the operations in the universe are under the sway of inexorable laws. The issues thus raised are obviously too large to be discussed at any length in the present context. But two observations ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... through the senses; the mind antecedent to experience was a tabula rasa. In other words, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, the character of speculative thought in England was essentially sceptical, critical, and materialistic. Why "materialism" should be more inconsistent with the existence of a Deity, the freedom of the will, or the immortality of the soul, or with any actual or possible system of theology, than "idealism," I must declare myself at a loss to divine. But in the year 1700 all the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 'Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? REALLY, I don't think so much of Jane Austen's England. It was materialistic ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but nevertheless ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... surprised no Whipple to read that we had become intolerant, materialistic, unaesthetic. Nor was it any wonder that we were "in no mood to brook religious or social dissension." With such a Constitution fraudulently foisted upon us by the money-loving fathers of the Revolution, ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... rebel soul. His brow was like a loaf of bread, his eyes Turned from his father's blue to gray, his nose Was like his mother's, skin was dark like hers. His shapely body, hands and feet belonged To some patrician face, not to Marat's. And his was like Marat's, fanatical, Materialistic, fierce, as it might guide A reptile's crawl, but yet he crawled to peaks Loving the hues of mists, but not the mists His father loved. And being a rebel soul He thought the world all wrong. A nothingness Moving as malice marred the life of man. 'Twas man's great work to fight ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Consciousness really is, we must know just what "Mind" really is—and that knowledge is lacking, notwithstanding the many injenious theories evolved in order to explain the mystery. The metaphysicians do not throw much light on the subject, and as for materialistic science, listen to what Huxley says: "How it comes about that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about by the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of Scepticism to know nothing, and to assert nothing in regard to any subject, but at the same time not to affirm that knowledge on all subjects is impossible, and consequently to have the attitude of still seeking. The standpoint of Pyrrhonism was materialistic. We find from the teachings of Sextus that he affirmed the non-existence of the soul,[1] or the ego, and denied absolute existence altogether.[2] The introductory statements of Diogenes regarding Pyrrhonism ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... piqued by that article, and he went to see his patient day after day, in the constant hope of finding a solution of the puzzle that perplexed him. The direction in which he looked for light will be best suggested by remarking what were his peculiar theory and practice. Lefevre was not a materialistic physician; indeed, in the opinion of many of his brethren, he erred on the other side, and was too much inclined to mysticism. It may at least be said that he had an open mind, and a modest estimate of the discoveries of modern medical science. He had perceived while still a young man (he was now ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... at the same time to overcome any unwillingness to accept a psychical explanation for such palpable physical ills. This latter point is of importance in dealing with uneducated persons. For the most part, they are intensely practical and materialistic, and a mere idea does not seem to them to account for paralysis although, of course, such skepticism is usually accompanied by superstitious credulity along other lines. Moreover, by establishing himself as a sort of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... reputation must rest. To my apprehension this "charm" in literature is as necessary to the amelioration and enjoyment of human life as the more solid achievements of scholarship. That Irving should find it in the prosaic and materialistic conditions of the New World as well as in the tradition-laden atmosphere of the Old, is evidence that he possessed genius of a refined and subtle quality if not of ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... cried, like the Afrites of old, 'Shall we make a city where no city is; or render flourishing a city that is dasolate?' They do it too, while, across the water, gentlemen, never forced to suffer one day's physical discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say, 'How grossly materialistic!' ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... accordance with Kapila's Smriti because Kapila, in the Svetsvatara text, is referred to as a competent person. For from this it would follow that, as Brihaspati is, in Sruti and Smriti, mentioned as a pattern of consummate wisdom, Scripture should be interpreted in agreement with the openly materialistic and atheistic Smriti composed by that authority. But, it may here be said, the Vednta-texts should after all be interpreted in agreement with Kapila's Smriti, for the reason that Kapila had through the power of his concentrated meditation (yoga) arrived at an insight into truth.—To ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... The more material organs came to the rescue of their failing chief. The blood from my heart rushed to my head to revive it; the muscles of my limbs communicated to the fibres of the brain their galvanic tension. Nerves turned into imagination, flesh into life. Nothing has developed my materialistic beliefs like this decarnation of which I had such a sensible, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... quickly and so completely that there is no keeping pace with them. "As to Materialism," he writes presently, "surely it is more profoundly materialistic to suppose that mere physical causes operating on the germ can determine minute physical and material changes in the brain, which will in turn make the individuality what it is to be, than to suppose that all brains are what they are in virtue of antecedent ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... less material than the third, for if the latter is the summerland of the spiritualists, the former is the material heaven of the more ignorantly orthodox; while the first or highest level appears to be the special home of those who during life have devoted themselves to materialistic but intellectual pursuits, following them not for the sake of benefiting their fellow men, but either from motives of selfish ambition or simply for the sake of intellectual exercise. All these people are perfectly happy. Later on they will reach a stage when they can appreciate something ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... liberty, that sort of humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is that the English humorist has been slowly driven ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... placid found the maintenance of their ancestral faith too difficult. Natural science was deistic with Locke and Voltaire, it was pantheistic in the antique sense with Shaftesbury, it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes, theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopaedia. It was orthodox with nobody. The miracle as traditionally defined became impossible. At all events it became the millstone around the neck of the apologists. The movement went to an extreme. All ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Atkinson have just published a volume entitled "Letters on Man's Nature and Development," in which they handle very boldly the subjects of Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, Phrenology, &c. It is altogether and avowedly materialistic. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... bribery. To the ambitious military schemes of Gian Galeazzo Visconti succeeded the commercial cynicism of Cosimo de' Medici, who enslaved Florence by astute demoralization.[1] The spirit of the age was materialistic and positive. The Despots held their state by treachery, craft, and corruption. The element of force being virtually eliminated, intelligence at last gained undivided sway; and the ideal statecraft of Machiavelli was realized with more or less completeness in all parts of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... immortality of the soul."[233-1] The tremendous stake that every one of us has on the truth of this dogma makes it quite a satisfaction to be persuaded that no man is willing to live wholly without it. Certainly exceptions are very rare, and most of those which materialistic philosophers have taken such pains to collect, rest on misunderstandings ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... philosophy of Heraclitus, the other the atomic theory of Democritus. Both were in strong reaction against the abstractions of Plato and Aristotle, and would tolerate nothing but concrete reality. The Stoics were quite as materialistic in their own way as the Epicureans. With regard indeed to the nature of the highest god we may, with Senaca represent the difference between the two schools as a question of the senses against the intellect, but we shall see presently that the Stoics regarded the intellect itself ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... supernatural from the external phenomena of nature which were perceptible to one or more of his five senses; his first theogony was a natural one and one taken directly from nature. In ideation the primal bases of thought must have been founded, ab initio, upon sensual perceptions; hence, must have been materialistic and natural. Spencer, on the contrary, maintains that in man, "the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... legendary authorities differ on many material points. Some hold it to be "a rale island sure enough," and that its exploits are due to "jommethry or some other inchantmint," while opponents of this materialistic view are inclined to the opinion that the island is not what it seems to be, that is to say, not "airth an' shtones, like as thim we see, but only a deludherin' show that avil sper'ts, or the divil belike, makes fur to ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... of force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy, was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive theory of politics; ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... obtained it would be probably found that the system tends not only to increase disease, but the volume of sexual immorality and crime. From the most materialistic point of view the system is indefensible; while, looking at it from the moral aspect, it is inconceivable that British people, who spent millions of money to stop the traffic in black slaves, would ever officially countenance a system which enslaves ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... a disagreeable impression on the mind—as disagreeable in its own way as that produced by the Christ of the Minerva. That must be because it is wrong in spiritual conception—brutally materialistic, where it ought to have been noble or graceful. In my opinion, the frank, joyous naturalism of Sansovino's Bacchus (also in the Bargello) possesses more of true Greek inspiration than Michelangelo's. If Michelangelo ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... bear the closest inspection by the dean and chapter, it was a difficult one to meet by argument or admonition. He had taught his grandchild as successfully as he had built the structure of his success. He had made material things the basis of life's philosophy and purpose; and if she was not wholly materialistic, it was because she had drunk deep, for one so young, at the fountains of art, poetry, sculpture and history. For the last she had a passion which was represented by books of biography without number, and all the standard historians were ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with miners' cabins—with all which this implies of dirt floor, never-made beds, tin plates and cups, bacon and beans and black coffee, and nothing of ornament but war pictures from the Eastern illustrated papers tacked to the log walls. That was all hard, cheerless, materialistic desolation, but here was a nest which had aspects to rest the tired eye and refresh that something in one's nature which, after long fasting, recognizes, when confronted by the belongings of art, howsoever cheap and modest they may be, that it has unconsciously been ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... The materialistic craving in Polly for a good meal was so different from Eleanor's dreams of romance for her friend that the two elder Brewsters felt relieved to hear the exclamation. Soon afterwards, the riders drew rein at the porch where Jeb was awaiting ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or adventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental reason which we can never understand, this ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... excited her aversion. He saw her more beautiful than ever in her restored health, freshness of coloring, and mature roundness of outline. He was unconsciously touched with a man's admiration for her without losing his boyish yearnings and half-filial affection; in her new materialistic womanhood his youthful imagination had lifted her to a queen and goddess. There was all this appeal in his still boyish eyes,—eyes that had never yet known shame or fear in the expression of their emotions; ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... every sort of disease kissing those Ikons after filthy ulcerated beggars," Stephen Strong said to Tamara. "But the belief that only good can come to them brings only good. The study of these people makes one less materialistic and full of common sense. One puts more credence ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... morphological thought are to my mind three—the functional or synthetic, the formal or transcendental, and the materialistic or disintegrative. ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... theology, but he did so with some unwillingness and with much reserve. Revelation, once acknowledged as such, was always sacred ground to him; and though he often appears to reduce all evidence to the external witness of the senses, there is something essentially opposed to materialistic notions, in his feeling that there is that which we do not know simply by reason of our want of a new and different sense, by which, if we had it, we might know our souls as we know a triangle.[476] Locke would have heartily disowned the conclusions of many who professed themselves his true ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... heterosexual. I must have loved my father and brother at first, but continual conflicts, incompatible temperaments and mutual misunderstandings and want of sympathy made life at home horrible. I must admit from my earliest childhood I had a certain contempt for my father and brother because I found them so materialistic. I had all my childhood rows with my brother. My father took his part, my mother mine. After I had recovered from my father's sudden death (my first words were after reading the letter: 'Thank God it isn't mother!') I felt ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... best, one should stand directly across the lagoon from the rotunda. In the panel facing East one sees the figure of Art personified. On either side is a group showing the champions of art combating centaurs, that stand for the commonplace, materialistic things of life. In the next panel to the left, facing Southeast, is represented the bridling of the winged horse Pegasus, which to the Greeks symbolized the attainment of poetic inspiration. Here also ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... This materialistic conception of life, however, has already become obsolete among the more advanced biologists as a result of the wonderful discoveries of modern science, which are fast bridging the chasm between the material and the spiritual realms ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Memory, p. 13 (Fr. p. 11).] We may style one the system of science, the other the system of consciousness. Now, Realism and Idealism are both incapable of explaining why there are two such systems at all. Subjective Idealism derives the system of science from that of consciousness, while materialistic Realism derives the system of consciousness from that of science. They have, however, this common meeting-place, that they both regard Perception as speculative in character—for each of them "to perceive" is to "know." Now this ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... anything and only bring needless confusion into people's thoughts. Whom is the crusade against, and what is its object? Where is the enemy and what is there dangerous about him? In the first place, the materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in the narrow journalistic sense; it is not something passing or accidental; it is necessary, inevitable, and beyond the power of man. All that lives on earth is bound to be materialistic. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... something far deeper, and was due to some impulse external to oneself. Certainly to me the feeling was essentially one of revelation, of being suddenly made to see and understand things which before had been dark or unknown. I realised that what I should now call the materialistic hypothesis would not help me to a solution. No "fanciful shapes of a plastic earth" were in my vision. My Ego, whatever it was or was to be, was, I perceived, a spirit and not a creature of flesh-and-blood, and also not a ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... or lower extreme, there are perhaps one-tenth who are so-called "rotters," the men who set the evil standards of the camp and whose conduct is almost altogether selfish and materialistic. Between these two extremes are the great majority, or four-fifths, whom it is so difficult to classify. It is our conviction that these men "are not ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... domestic husband. But there was something spurious about his domesticity, Ursula did not like him any more. Something ugly, blatant in his nature had come out now, making him shift everything over to a sentimental basis. A materialistic unbeliever, he carried it all off by becoming full of human feeling, a warm, attentive host, a generous husband, a model citizen. And he was clever enough to rouse admiration everywhere, and to take in his wife sufficiently. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... student at Jena, had met and become an enthusiastic disciple of Schelling, the father of natural philosophy, a pantheistic colored conception of life, opposed to the narrowly materialistic views of most Rationalists. Lecturing at the university during the years 1802-1803, Steffens aroused a tremendous enthusiasm, both among the students and some of the older intellectuals. "He was a fiery speaker," Grundtvig remarks later, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... remember what I've said to you. And another thing, women are all more materialistic than men. We make something immense out of love, but they are ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the younger poets is to realism and to representing its most materialistic features as beautiful. Against this current of the new poetry Alessandro Rizzi, Guerzoni, and others have uttered a strong protest in poetry ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... all your attention on solving the difficulties of the thoughts and arguments themselves. Locke on the Human Understanding is a work that has probably been often recommended to you. Perhaps, if you keep steadily in view the danger of his materialistic, unpoetic, and therefore untrue philosophy, the book may do you more good than harm; it will furnish you with useful exercise for your thinking powers; and you will see it so often quoted as authority, on one side as truth, on the other as falsehood, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... faithfully describes. His chronicle is often poetry, little as he intended it to be such; nay, it is poetry in her 'humanities' yet more than in her distinctively spiritual province, and better poetry than is to be found in the professed poetry of a materialistic age, when the poet is tempted to take refuge from the monotony of routine life, either amid the sensational accidents to be found on the byeways, not the highways, of life, or in some sickly dreamland that does not dare to ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... city-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annual expenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the Fatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original, most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive landscape, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... environment should be, and of what the society of the Kingdom should be. The reformer is one who changes an existing social environment for approximately this ideal environment of his own thought. When he breaks an idol, it is not the idol itself that he everlastingly hates, it is the materialistic concept of the community. What he wishes in place of the idol is a right conception. No man could break up every idol in the Sandwich Islands. But a man went about implanting a spiritual idea of God, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... and its deadly perils. Chelaship was defined, the other day, by a Mahatma as a "psychic resolvent, which eats away all dross and leaves only the pure gold behind." If the candidate has the latent lust for money, or political chicanery, or materialistic scepticism, or vain display, or false speaking, or cruelty, or sensual gratification of any kind the germ is almost sure to sprout; and so, on the other hand, as regards the noble qualities of human nature. The real man comes out. Is it not the height of folly, then, for any one to leave ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... been encouraged by our Holy Mother Church, because it strengthens our faith and stimulates us to be more devout in the practice of our religion. The materialistic tone and trend of most modern literature, however, makes the reading and dissemination of Catholic books all the more urgent and necessary at ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... belonged to Massachusetts and the nation. Spurgeon would not speak for fifty nights in America at one thousand dollars a night, because he said he could do better: he could stay in London and try to save fifty souls. All honor to the comparative few in every walk of life who, amid the strong materialistic tendencies of our age, still speak and act earnestly, inspired by the hope of rewards other than gold or popular favor. These are our truly great men and women. They labor in their ordinary vocations with no less zeal because they give time and thought ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Gradgrind—it's quite right—anything you can say about Herbert Spencer, vivisectors, materialistic Science or Atheists, applies without correction to me. Begbie away! But now you think better of a modern Utopia? Was ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Chandler of Michigan. He was born in New Hampshire, went West early in life, and was a chief organizer and leader of the Republican party in Michigan. He was a mixture of Yankee shrewdness and Western energy; patriotic, masterful, somewhat coarse-grained and materialistic; and, like many of his associates, better suited for controversy and war than for conciliation and construction. Of a higher type were three men who stood near the head in the Senate,—John Sherman of Ohio, Lyman ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... greater place. Nothing is still, and least of all does Art remain fixed. The whole world is awakening to a new standard of values, for we have at length discovered the impossibility of running civilisation on purely materialistic lines. The inner side of things is becoming manifest, and a measure of spiritual insight is being vouchsafed to us: therefore all those things which minister to the spiritual will be increased in our regard. Of these Music is certainly not the least. "Religion, love, and Music, are they ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... delighted the poets and inspired many fine lines, but history could with difficulty accommodate itself to such a materialistic intervention of a divine being, and sought a less fabulous solution. The legend which appeared most probable to the worthy Herodotus did not even admit that the Lydian king took his own life; it was Cyrus ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... that he married a woman who is also the slave of literature, though of a more imaginative branch of literature, and who can understand him. But then that was inevitable; he could never have cared for a materialistic woman, or a merely domestic woman. He demanded ideas in the woman to whom ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... which shall classify and arrange these, he inevitably plunges into the astral plane. Dr Baraduc of Paris has nearly crossed the barrier, and is well on the way towards photographing astro-mental images, to obtaining pictures of what from the materialistic standpoint would be the results of vibrations in the ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Mark, nor Saint Luke, nor the other Evangelists had emphasized the maddening charms and depravities of the dancer. She remained vague and hidden, mysterious and swooning in the far-off mist of the centuries, not to be grasped by vulgar and materialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanic intellects made visionaries by their neuroticism; rebellious to painters of the flesh, to Rubens who disguised her as a butcher's wife of Flanders; a mystery to all the writers who had never succeeded in portraying the disquieting ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... strength, though they also imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... ebb, and the spiritual impulse at its highest flood tide, they have sent out from their temple soul-stirring vibrations to counteract materialism and to further the development of soul powers. To their activities we owe the gradual spiritualization of our once so materialistic science. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... craft spirit must find its most vigorous expression and its only justification. The very corner stone of schoolcraft is service, and one fundamental lesson that the tyro in schoolcraft must learn, especially in this materialistic age, is that the value of service is not to be measured in dollars and cents. In this respect, teaching resembles art, music, literature, discovery, invention, and pure science; for, if all the workers in all of these branches of human activity got ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... Mithras, Magna Mater and Isis developed into Christian sacraments—the symbol became the thing itself. Baptism the confession of the new life, following the customs of these cults, became initiation; and from the same superstitious origins, the repellent materialistic belief that to eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of a god was to gain immortality: immortality of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... philosophies on the basis of things you never saw, and you scoff at people who believe in other things that you think they never saw and that don't come under what you label scientific. You talk about paradoxes—why, your scientist, who thinks he is the most skeptical, the most materialistic aggregation of atoms ever gathered at the exact mathematical centre of Missouri, has more blind faith than a dervish, and more credulity, more superstition, than a cross-eyed smoke beating it past a country graveyard in the dark ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... intended only for "curious students." In the Preface, Burton and Arbuthnot observe that after a perusal of the Hindoo work the reader will understand the subject upon which it treats, "At all events from a materialistic, realistic and practical point of view. If all science is founded more or less on a stratum of facts, there can be no harm in making known to mankind generally certain matters intimately connected with their private, domestic and social ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... written. In his philosophical work Coleridge introduced the idealistic philosophy of Germany into England. He set himself in line with Berkeley, and squarely against Bentham, Malthus, Mill, and all the materialistic tendencies which were and still are the bane of English philosophy. The Aids to Reflection is Coleridge's most profound work, but is more interesting to the student of religion and philosophy than to ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labour, and sweated ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... my Japanese friends kept asking me my impressions, and one thing I had to say to them was that I had got an impression in many quarters of spiritual dryness. I dared to think that some responsibility for a materialistic outlook must be shared by the admirable officials and experts who moved about among the farmers. They were always talking about crop yields and the amount of money made, and they unconsciously pressed home the idea that rural progress ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... dear sir? In one way I am—yes, I am the world itself, come to pay you a visit. In another sense I am an outcast—almost an outlaw. If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of fate—the retribution that waits ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the book. "O Lord! If we allowed ourselves nowadays to use such materialistic comparisons and make use of such homely terms in speaking of Thy supremely adorable Body, what a clamour would arise from the 'respectable' among the worshippers and the blessed legion of the good women ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... scientific, physiological, experiential explanation of social history in the most magnificent dramas as well as of personal history in its most trivial episodes—on explanation in perfect harmony with the entire trend—which has been described as materialistic—of modern scientific thought.[80] ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... ready to give up the struggle—his little sister now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power—the men he had met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the honor of women—Mel Iden, strangest and saddest of mysteries—a girl who had been noble, aloof, proud, with a heart of golden fire, now disgraced, ruined, the ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... changes in tone and manner rather than in fundamental views. The poets of the period were conservatives. They were shocked by the radicalism of Mandeville, the Nietzsche of his day, who derided the generally accepted moralities as shallow delusions, and who by means of a clever fable supported a materialistic theory which implied that in the struggle for existence ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... not strange that though these barbarians believe in the immortality of the soul yet our materialistic Old Testament never even suggests a future life; and it seems that no Jew believes or ever was ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... all means to conceive of things as he pleases, provided he is an artist. Let us rise to poetic heights to judge an idealist, and then prove to him that his dream is commonplace, ordinary, not mad or magnificent enough. But if we judge a materialistic writer, let us show him wherein the truth of life differs from ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... first, Velasquez struck out what was then a new line in Spanish art. He gave himself up to the materialistic studies, to which the Flemish and Dutch painters were prone, painting diligently 'still life' in every form, taking his living subjects from the streets and way-sides, and keeping a peasant lad as an apprentice, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... may nevertheless itself be the result of an unknown mind. This, indeed, is the position virtually adopted by Locke in his celebrated controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. Having been taken to task by this divine for the materialistic tendency of his writings, Locke defends himself by denying the necessary character of the deduction which we are now considering. For example, he insists, 'I see no contradiction in it that the first eternal thinking being should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... the most materialistic of Easterners, is no exception to his neighbours in the large place which the occult takes in his outlook. For him, the physical world is peopled with spirits good and evil, capable of exercising the most far-reaching influences on the fortunes of men. These spiritual beings ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... to some material principle, such as water, air, etc., it was gradually driven, by force of logic, to distinguish Being from Seeming, and to see that while the latter was dependent on the thinking subject, the former could not be anything material. This result was reached by both the materialistic and spiritualistic schools, and was only carried one step further by the Sophists, who maintained that even the being of things depended on the thinker. This necessarily led to skepticism, individualism, and disruption of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... subordinates whose lives are also worthless and without any productive value. It is because of them that the life of a courtesan seems to offer golden prizes to some, and the hope of reaping such prizes deludes many. Because this is a materialistic age their money gives them powers to which they have no moral right, and no more wholesome thing could happen to the whole community than that the necessary changes should be worked out which would make such noxious drones impossible in the future. ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... universe,—things of which the worth is not relative but absolute. Of these matters I speak cautiously and without authority: for my immediate purpose—to present my conception of the religious character—I need say only that to some the materialistic conception of the universe does not seem to explain those emotions which they feel with supreme certainty and absolute disinterestedness. The fact is, men of science, having got us into the habit of attempting ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the Rev. Mr. Robinson, who delivered a sermon entitled 'Ghost against God, or Ingersoll against Honesty.' Of course he was honest. He apologized for attending an infidel lecture upon the ground that he hated to contribute to the support of a materialistic showman. I am willing to trade fagots for epithets, and the rack for anything that may be said in his sermon. I am willing to trade the instrument of torture with which they could pull the nails from my fingers for anything which the ingenuity ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in a horribly materialistic way," responded Hazard. "I wanted to consult you about making things easier for her, not about ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... persistently represent it as doing so. Indeed, among adherents of it who are friends of mine, there are those who speak of the Materialism of Buechner and his school, with a contempt certainly not less than that felt by Mr. Martineau. To show how anti-materialistic my own view is, I may, perhaps, without impropriety, quote some out of many passages which I have written on the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... his barrel, pouring out his exhortations to fidelity in war and in religion. To-night for the first time I have heard an harangue in a different strain, quite saucy, skeptical, and defiant, appealing to them in a sort of French materialistic style, and claiming some personal experience of warfare. "You don't know notin' about it, boys. You tink you's brave enough; how you tink, if you stan' clar in de open field,—here you, an' dar de Secesh? You's got to hab de right ting inside o' you. You must hab it 'served [preserved] in you, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... king. This strange kingdom, not resting on any basis of earthly power, dispensing with fighting, with all that an army suggests, with force, is the very opposite to Pilate's idea of a state. Rome was materialistic to the core. Her rule rested on brute force. The Empire, the Imperium, was the dominion of the Imperator, that is to say, of the commander-in-chief of the army. It was a military despotism. Nominally the government was ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... were profoundly impressed, and, indeed, so was I. I felt that at last, I should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies, which had hitherto avoided my materialistic gaze. It was an enchanting moment, for there appeared, just then, to be nothing ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... pointed out to him in the street, was one he never forgot; nor in after years did he ever encounter that transfigured contributor without an involuntary recurrence of that old feeling of awe. No subsequent acquaintance with editorial rooms ever led him into materialistic explanations of that enchanted piece of work—a newspaper. The editors might do their best—and succeed surprisingly—in looking like ordinary mortals, you might even know the leader-writers, and, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... and without priest; it was the moral judgment of the world, delegated to the conscience of the just man, and to the arm of the people. This is what was destined to live; this is what has lived. When, at the end of a century of vain expectation, the materialistic hope of a near end of the world was exhausted, the true kingdom of God became apparent. Accommodating explanations threw a veil over the material kingdom, which was then seen to be incapable of realization. The Apocalypse of John, the chief canonical book of the New Testament,[1] being too ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan |
