"Metaphysics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with Thomas Hearne, will feel his profession ennobled by the name of LEIBNITZ. That extraordinary genius embraced and improved the whole circle of human science; and, after wrestling with Newton and Clark in the sublime regions of geometry and metaphysics, he could descend upon earth to examine the uncouth characters and barbarous Latin of a chronicle or charter." Gibbon: Post. Works, vol. ii., 712. Consult also Mem. de l'Inst., vol. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... declares that such indefinite succession of ages is "virtually infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name," at least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon that idea of the infinite which the human mind can neither put aside nor comprehend."[III-17] And so ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Miranda. 'He must learn to distinguish between music, his own imagination, and a pretty woman. At present he mixes them all up together. It is a sort of transcendental omelette. But I think the pretty woman has more to do with it than metaphysics!' ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the Seven Wise Masters; and we have the beginnings of geometry, metaphysics, and ethics: then the partialists,—deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. At last, comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... English," said Phineas, "I would enter into the metaphysics of the subject with pleasure, but in French it is ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... want to keep abreast of the times in all lines of mental science, new thought, applied psychology and metaphysics, you should subscribe for Mind Power Plus, the pace-making periodical in the field of mental science and ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy—and those be such as are most obvious to the sense—they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics, so that they having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate, to be ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... obsequiousness was shown by the officials and legislators of France, who meekly listened to the Emperor's reproaches for their weakness in the Malet affair, and heard with mild surprise his denunciation against republican idealogy—the cloudy metaphysics to which all the misfortunes of our fair France may be attributed. No tongue dared to utter the retort which must ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the divinity-student,—since we are getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... faith of Christians would seem to have varied with him from time to time, and to have varied also in its formal expression. His mind was too positive, too much occupied in the detail of life, to have time either for brooding meditation or for the metaphysics of religious inquiry; and, at least in 1866, Christianity interested him mainly as one of the most potent shaping forces of human society. The desire to follow out and investigate at first hand certain of its modern manifestations helped to direct the impulse for travel which ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race, and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by—that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his class and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his mother's pastor came to see ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most passionate hymns to ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... court in which the students gather from the adjoining halls after having committed to memory the principles of grammar in prose and verse, the "science of the reading of the Koran," the invention, exposition and ornaments of style, law, medicine, theology, metaphysics and astronomy, as well as the talismanic numbers, and the art of ascertaining by calculation the influences of the angels, the spirits and the heavenly bodies, "the names of the victor and the vanquished, and of the desired object and the person ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... university from its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... not been for the Crusades, something else must have happened to relieve the unbearable tension. The world was longing for a great deed, a deed overstepping the border-line of metaphysics, and its enthusiasm was sufficient guarantee of achievement. In the case of the individual, vanity and boastfulness played no mean part. Thus the Austrian minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein, proposed taking the Cross "not to serve God but to please his mistress." It is quite probable, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the French are certainly inferior to no other nation. They have not, perhaps, so frequently as others, that cool, sound judgment in matters of speculation, which can fit them for unravelling with success the perplexities of metaphysics; but their unparalleled success in mathematical pursuits is the best possible proof of the accuracy and quickness of their reasoning powers, when confined within due bounds. We do not refer to the astonishing ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... jungles, will emancipate the slaves. In the midst he would rush out to a lecture on mineralogy, and come back sighing that it was all about "stones, stones, stones"! The friends read Plato together, and held endless talk of metaphysics, pre-existence, and the sceptical philosophy, on winter walks across country, and all night beside the fire, until Shelley would curl up on the hearthrug and go to sleep. He was happy because he was left to himself. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Crombie and the others cite one or two instances in which physic and metaphysic are used, not very accurately, in the sense of the singular of physics and metaphysics. Several grammarians also quote some examples in which physics, metaphysics, politics, optics, and other similar names of sciences are used with verbs or pronouns of the singular number; but Dr. Crombie justly says the plural construction of such words, "is more common, and more agreeable to analogy."—On Etym. and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... young students of philosophy, is to conclude that the hypotheses which they espouse with so much enthusiasm are new revelations in metaphysics and ethics as well as in physical science—compared with which the Christian cultus of eighteen centuries is now effete and doomed. It is well, therefore, to know that so far from these speculations having risen upon the ruins of Christianity, Christianity rose upon the ruins of these speculations ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics, morals, metaphysics, and language.[22] Of some he had drawn out the plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of view that belong even to the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... face of a receipted wash-bill; who could scarce tell a sloop from a ship, a bill of lading from a sight draft; a hydraulic ram from a he-goat unless they were properly labeled. Yet no question can arise in metaphysics or morals, government or generalship, upon which these great little men do not presume to speak with the authoritative assurance of a Lord Chief Justice—or a six-foot woman addressing a four-foot husband. ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Europe, who are directly or indirectly indebted to the Upanishads, far from realising their debt, maintain that the Brahma of India is a mere abstraction, a negation of all that is in the world. In a word, that the Infinite Being is to be found nowhere except in metaphysics. It may be, that such a doctrine has been and still is prevalent with a section of our countrymen. But this is certainly not in accord with the pervading spirit of the Indian mind. Instead, it is the practice of realising and affirming the presence ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... on the sad journey. After tramping along for a while, he asked permission to put his cloak on my horse. I consented; he thanked me, and then, in a kind of soliloquy, began to praise the power of wealth, and to speak cleverly of metaphysics. Meanwhile, day was dawning; the sun was about to rise, the shadows to spread their splendour—and I was not alone! I looked at my companion—it was the man with the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... wisdom of the wise; when he dealt with civilization itself, its schools, and porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched beneath the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks; when he showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics, the Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of Agrippa, the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 'I don't understand metaphysics, my dear, nor witchcraft. I sometimes believe in the supernatural, and sometimes I don't. Silas Ruthyn is himself alone, and I can't define him, because I don't understand him. Perhaps other souls than human are ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... show in your readiness to exhibit them like a monkey. You ought to be turned inside out on your own stage. You've lumped your brains on a point or two about Land, and Commonland, and the Suffrage, and you pound away upon them, as if you had the key of the difficulty. It's the Scotchman's metaphysics; you know nothing clear, and your working-classes know nothing at all; and you blow them with wind like an over-stuffed cow. What you're driving at is to get hob-nail boots to dance on our heads. Stukely says you should be off over to Ireland. There you'd swim ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... unpractical. If she were truly the Church of Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after all, was the mark of His highest Divinity—namely in His Humanity towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend to men's simplest needs, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He won men's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... accession to the German throne had not seemed probable. His coronation as Charles VI. was, therefore, one cause of the peace. Leopold, born in 1640, and educated by the Jesuits, became Emperor in 1658, and reigned 49 years. He was an adept in metaphysics and theology, as well as in wood-turning, but a feeble and oppressive ruler, whose empire was twice saved for him; by Sobiesld from the Turks, and from the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the entire man, are of no importance whatever, would not be worthy even of mere mention if it were not for the fact that this form of delusion has of late become so common, under the deceptive names of metaphysics, Christian science, and mind-cure, when the theory is simply an attempt to get rid of science and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... across his wide arm-chair, Sat Singleton, and read Voltaire; And when (as well he might) he hit Upon a splendid piece of wit, He cried: "I do declare now, this Upon the whole is not amiss." And spent a good half-hour to show By metaphysics why 'twas so. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... OF PESSIMISM.—On the metaphysics of the pessimists I shall make no comment save that there appears to be here sufficient vagueness to satisfy the most poetical of minds. But the following points in the ethics of pessimism ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of water with carbon dioxide. It attracted attention and was translated into French. This soda-water paper won for Priestley the Copley medal (1773). While thus signally honored he continued publishing views on theology and metaphysics. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... introduction was the more necessary because many of the ancient philosophers, too warmly attached to transcendental metaphysics and sequestered speculations, had affirmed that true philosophers ought not to interest themselves in the management of public affairs. Thus, as M. Villemain observes, it was a maxim of the Epicureans, "Sapiens ne accedat ad rempublicam" ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... argument against your doctrine of Destiny." And then Mr. Beckendorff, taking Vivian by the arm, began walking up and down part of the saloon with him; and in a few minutes, quite forgetting the scene of the discussion, he was involved in metaphysics. This incident created another great sensation, and whispers of "secret mission, Secretary of State, decidedly a son," &c. &c. &c. were in an instant afloat in all parts ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... not, let us at once take a high ground, and say,—Go you to your own employments, and to such dull studies as you fancy; go and bob for triangles, from the Pons Asinorum; go enjoy your dull black draughts of metaphysics; go fumble over history books, and dissert upon Herodotus and Livy; OUR histories are, perhaps, as true as yours; our drink is the brisk sparkling champagne drink, from the presses of Colburn, Bentley and Co.; our walks are over such sunshiny pleasure-grounds ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the world what the world calls the scandale of love, one must have at least the courage of one's passion. In this respect the women of the eighteenth century are better than you: they did not subtilise love in metaphysics [elles n'alambiquaient pas l'amour dans ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... to immolate the betrayer of trust. I have written to him as he never was written to before by an author, I'll be sworn, and I hope you will amplify my wrath, till it has an effect upon him. You tell me always you have much to write about. Write it, but let us drop metaphysics;—on that point we shall never agree. I am dull and drowsy, as usual. I do nothing, and even that nothing ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... gratified listener. He talked well and fluently, with little regard to logical sequence, and with something of the dogmatism natural to one whose opinions had seldom been subjected to scrutiny. He seemed equally at home in the most abstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and in the more practical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and cattle-raising. It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that patient and close observation of the processes of Nature which often places the unlettered ploughman and mechanic on a higher level of available intelligence ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Fleming in our last volume, but were silent on its character. It is purely metaphysical, and metaphysics, at this season, may be "like pork in the dog-days;" but there are certain portions which strike out ideas so forcibly, and illustrate the communia of life with such vigour, as to tempt any lounging reader. Contarini is stated to be Mr. D'Israeli, the younger—Vivian ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... the result of possessing something which the law exerts itself to guard. Should it happen that you possess nothing, and that your education in metaphysics has been grievously neglected, the strong probability is, that your mind will reduce the principle of society to its naked formula: Get, by whatever means, so long as with impunity. On that formula Bob Hewett was brooding; ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... obstacles; but with Wagner the case is different. He also is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning is always deep, but to arrive at that ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... other poems are reproduced in facsimile. Few poets have altered the text of their poems so often, and so often for the better, as Coleridge. He has been blamed for 'writing so little', for deserting poetry for metaphysics and theology; he has been upbraided for winning only to lose the 'prize of his high calling'. Sir Walter Scott, one of his kindlier censors, rebukes him for 'the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... horrible? I had no idea. I'm no judge of what is horrible in theology, or metaphysics, or whatever it is. But I do profess to know when a man has made a hit, whether in theology or anything else; and I perceive quite clearly that your Mr. Holland—well, not your Mr. Holland, has made a distinct hit. What sort of face is that you're making at ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... renders it by "event" and the learned Captain Lockett (Miut Amil) in an awful long note (pp. 195 to 224) by "mode," grammatical or logical. The value of his disquisition is its proving that, as the Arabs borrowed their romance from the Persians, so they took their physics and metaphysics of grammar and syntax; logic and science in general, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for the following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the question of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... view of human "self," or soul, carries one out too far into the sea of transcendental metaphysics to be of any practical use, religiously. We know something of man—this strange compound of soul and body—and we are deeply interested in his history and destiny; the more deeply because we are included in ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute litterature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.' ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... they to do, Philippa?" he asked. "They have each one the same duties to perform—to please their partners and amuse themselves. You would not have a 'hapless lordling' talk about science or metaphysics while ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... stated, was entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which afterwards it disappointed. Again, to cite another great authority, what says the Stagyrite? He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his Metaphysics) describes what he calls [Greek: kleptaen teleion], i.e., a perfect thief; and, as to Mr. Howship, in a work of his on Indigestion, he makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a certain ulcer which he had seen, and which he ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... are described in 6. 4. 24 of the Brihad [A]ranyaka Upanishad which consists both of metaphysics and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... indicate this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry. Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at on his first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens, were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... the Bible is differently interpreted by the different sects who divide the different parts of the earth: Thus the true sons of light, or children of truth, ought to doubt of everything at present, as mysterious or metaphysics: Thus all the decisions of theology and philosophy, teach not to admit that which is not demonstrated as clearly as that 2 and 2 are equal to 4; and on the whole to adore God, and him only; to love him better than yourself; and always to have ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... common philosophy, and logic, and metaphysics, and a lot of those ordinary things, but the girls didn't care anything about those. We were just in ecstasies over differentiations, and molecules, and the professor, and protoplasms, and ascidians. I ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... centre for a practice, they say. But he does not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology and metaphysics and ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... now the frank confession of what one man of the early Twentieth Century has found in life and himself, a confession just as frank as the limitations of his character permit; it is his metaphysics, his religion, his moral standards, his uncertainties and the expedients with which he has met them. On every one of these departments and aspects I write—how shall I put it?—as an amateur. In every section ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... to visit Madame Orio's house, and on that very day I held an argument in metaphysics, in which I contended that any being of whom we had only an abstract idea, could only exist abstractedly, and I was right; but it was a very easy task to give to my thesis an irreligious turn, and I was obliged to recant. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... language. Of the subjects which have whetted the intellectual appetite of the moderns, there is scarcely one, except Physics, which has not been filtered through Roman jurisprudence. The science of pure Metaphysics had, indeed, rather a Greek than a Roman parentage, but Politics, Moral Philosophy, and even Theology, found in Roman law not only a vehicle of expression, but a nidus in which some of their profoundest inquiries were nourished into maturity. For the purpose of accounting for this phenomenon, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Detesting metaphysics, I can not help but put A philosophic moral where I think it ought to hang; I've seen a "boom" for office Grow feeble at the root, Then change into a boomlet—then to a boomerang. In caucus or convention, in village or in town: "Who openeth a jackpot ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... that time: and once, since—first, in our colonial period; next, during our Confederation; lastly, by the "Southern Confederacy" and here, as elsewhere, always in vain. But experience yielded to theory—plain business sense to financial metaphysics. It was determined to issue a new paper which should be "fully secured" and ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest usurpation. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title. I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let them be their amusement in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of Imagination too often characterizes Theology and Metaphysics, and prevents mankind from receiving the instruction from works on these topics that they need. In the early days of man's history, Religion and Philosophy addressed themselves to the Imagination, and then the people listened ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... 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. Elia was no Barmecide host, and the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the evening,—"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Pathfinder of the People. There can, indeed, be no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius were of a different ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... and difficult language of facts;' and 'the interrogation of every nature, in order to obtain the particular contribution of each to the store of knowledge.' Who has described 'the feeble intelligence of all things; given by metaphysics better than the Eleatic Stranger in the words—'The higher ideas can hardly be set forth except through the medium of examples; every man seems to know all things in a kind of dream, and then again nothing when he is awake?' Or where is the value of metaphysical ...
— Statesman • Plato
... Soissons was held while the architects and sculptors were building the west porch of Chartres and the Aquilon at Mont-Saint-Michel. Averroes was born at Cordova in 1126; Omar Khayyam died at Naishapur in 1123. Poetry and metaphysics owned the world, and their quarrel with theology was a private, family dispute. Very soon the tide turned decisively in Abelard's favour. Suger, a political prelate, became minister of the King, and in March, 1122, Abbot of Saint-Denis. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... object of the Ecclesiazusae, or Women in Parliament,, of the Thesmophoriazusae, or Women keeping the Festival of the Thesmophoriae, and of Lysistrata, is to throw ridicule on the relations and the manners of the female sex. In the Clouds he laughs at the metaphysics of the Sophists, in the Wasps at the mania of the Athenians for hearing and determining law-suits; the subject of the Frogs is the decline of the tragic art, and Plutus is an allegory on the unjust ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... were very much like ourselves essentially, but they did not believe that there was nothing in us which should be smothered or strangled. Perhaps some day we shall go back to them, and find that the "Rape of the Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... it is not a subtle book it should not be "dangerous." It is romantic, rather; inspired, you might loosely say. The Index Expurgatorius will of course list it when they learn of it; but foolishly, because while the philosophy, the cosmology, the metaphysics may be advanced (so advanced as to be called hasty and apt to run into the theological barrages), the religion, the mysticism, the "conviction of sin," the vision of the invisibles, the perception of the imponderables, are positive, vivid, sincere, passionate in phrasing and in intention. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... it. Rituals and laws whose meaning had become mere shibboleths two thousand years ago, races whose very mien and aspect (often their language) can only be speculated on: all this reappears, takes precision and certainty. But is not this a mere creation, like that of art or of systematic metaphysics? What struck me as the only certainty among these admirable cogent arguments was that the once tank of Juturna, round whose double springs Rome must have arisen to drink and worship, this sacred and healing water where the Dioscuri watered their steeds after ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... James was reading Scotch metaphysics, and reconciling himself to the concealment of his freer opinions, upon which concealment depended the success of his probation, and his license. But the close of his studies in divinity was now near ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... details of daily conduct, has a tendency to produce an unhealthy self-consciousness. This might, indeed, be true, if the original state of your nature, before the examination began, were a healthy one. "If Adam had always remained in Paradise, there would have been no anatomy and no metaphysics:" as it is not so, we require both. Sin has entered the world, and death by sin; and therefore it is that both soul and body require a care and a minute watchfulness that cannot, in the present state of things, originate either disease or sin. They ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... to it: how could I, or how can I, help it?" The mind of his Majesty shudders, as if looking over the edge of an abyss. He is meditating much whether nothing can be done to save the lost Fritz, at least the soul of him, from this horrible delusion:—hurls forth your fine Duhan, with his metaphysics, to remote Memel, as the first step. And signifies withal, though as yet only historically and in a speculative way, to Finkenstein and Kalkstein themselves, That their method of training up a young soul, to do God's will, and accomplish useful work in this world, does by no means appear to ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... the pegs on which the sheets are belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in silence, enamoured, it may be, of the moon. All these peculiarities, with his caprices, and something inexplicable in the cast of his metaphysics, while they served to awaken interest, contributed little to conciliate esteem. He was often strangely rapt—it may have been from his genius; and, had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged, susceptible of explanation; but, at the time, it threw, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... in his Metaphysics of Ethics to overcome the speculative difficulty in question, it is evident that he is not satisfied with his own solution of it, since he has repeatedly declared, that the practical reason furnishes the only ground on which it ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... connected the Catholic revival with the abandonment of atomism in natural philosophy and of Baconian metaphysics. These were, he thought, the counterpart of individualism in politics and Calvinism in religion. The adherents of mid-Victorian science and philosophy were bewildered by the phenomenon of 'men in the nineteenth century actually expressing a belief in a divine society and a supernatural ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... gave Pallas Athene for a counsellor to Odysseus, and Krishna for a teacher to the young Aryan warrior,—which represent human action, that is, as issuing in part out of the Infinite. A thousand times more philosophical, as well as ten thousand times more inspiring, I say, are the metaphysics of Imagination,—of scriptures and great poems and the live human heart,—than the cut-and-dried sciolisms which explain you a man in five minutes, and make everything in him as obvious as the movements of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... soul"); each has his education completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhaeuser" story. However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Bruennhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in Klingsor's magic garden, has each ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... indefinite perfectibility. He esteemed them for their morality, yet he looked on them as dreamers seeking for the type of a universal constitution, and considering the character of man in the abstract only. The ideologues, according to him, looked for power in institutions; and that he called metaphysics. He had no idea of power except in direct force: All benevolent men who speculate on the amelioration of human society were regarded by Bonaparte as dangerous, because their maxims and principles were diametrically opposed to the harsh and arbitrary system he had adopted. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... which contains the precepts of the priests' religion, is the most difficult book in the world to be understood; it requires a thorough knowledge in natural, civil, ecclesiastical history, law, husbandry, sailing, physic, pharmacy, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and everything else that can be named: And everybody who believes it ought to understand it, and must do so by force of his own freethinking, without any guide ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... as abstruse, if not so continuous, as those of a metaphysician—for boys are not unfrequently more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps, willing to believe—were not by any means confined to such subjects: castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely hours; and for this ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... pet maniac. They were often closeted together in high discourse, and indeed discussed Psychology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy with indefatigable zest, long after common sense would have packed them both off to bed, the donkeys. In fact, they got so thick that Alfred thought it only fair to say one day, "Mind, doctor, all these pleasant fruitful hours we spend together ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... supposed to be a necessary preparation for the career of a statesman. Tycho, however, speedily made it plain to his teachers that though he was an ardent student, yet the things which interested him were the movements of the heavenly bodies and not the subtleties of metaphysics. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... remembered by English friends), made a common home with my mother; and the radiant intelligence, glowing enthusiasm, hearty affectionateness, and genial merriment of these bright-witted sisters charmed him. Sometimes they probed with penetrating questions the mystical metaphysics of the preceding day's sermon. Then, deeply stirred, and all on fire with truths dawning on his vision, he would rise from his chair and slowly pace the room, in a half soliloquy, half rejoinder. At these times of high-wrought ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... interest in it. A love of sumptuous, large-paper editions was indeed one of the very few luxuries in which from mere personal taste he greatly indulged. Like all men of literary tastes he had his limitations. German was a closed book to him. Theology and metaphysics were conspicuous by their absence. He was certainly not drawn to the mystical, the unintelligible, or the morbid, either in imaginative or speculative literature, and although he was a great lover and great buyer of water-colour pictures, I do not think he ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... thought in his works, and in the works of his disciples. They knew that whenever the problems of man's relation to God, the creation of the world, the origin of evil, and the hope of salvation come to be discussed, the sharpest edge of logical reasoning will turn, and the best defined terms of metaphysics die away into mere music. They knew that the hard and narrow categories of the schoolmen do greater violence to the highest truths of religion than the soft, and vague, and vanishing tones with which they tried to shadow forth in the vulgar language of the people ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... meadow, used ever and again to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of green, pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it an assuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him more effectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysics should be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dream our days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget the infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Above forty years ago, they found an echo in the breast of applauding audiences; and to this hour they are the voice of the people, in defiance of the metaphysics, and the new lights of certain politicians, who would gladly find their private advantage in the disasters of their country; a race of men, "quibus nulla ex ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... understood that the teacher does not look at the voice, he listens to it. Here voice teachers automatically separate themselves from each other. No two things so diametrically opposite as physics and metaphysics can abide ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... his own little garden; and recorded his impressions of romantic scenery in verse of no ordinary merit. To his self-education, however, he owed almost everything. He studied with intensity mathematics, metaphysics, and physiology; before he was nineteen he began to study chemistry, and in four months proposed a new hypothesis on heat and light, to which he won over the experienced Dr. Beddoes. With his associate, Gregory Watt (son of the celebrated James Watt) he collected specimens ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... be found only in about a third of Plato's writings and are not confined to him. The forms which they assume are numerous, and if taken literally, inconsistent with one another. At one time we are in the clouds of mythology, at another among the abstractions of mathematics or metaphysics; we pass imperceptibly from one to the other. Reason and fancy are mingled in the same passage. The ideas are sometimes described as many, coextensive with the universals of sense and also with the first principles of ethics; or again they are absorbed into the single ...
— Meno • Plato
... we ask of those more intimately acquainted with the metaphysics of the Houyhnhnm than we pretend to be? Do the saddle or the rein convey, like metallic tractors, vibrations of the spirit betwixt the two? We know not, but this much is certain, that no servant partakes so much of the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... getting too subtle; it was like sitting in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the Sphinx. He had had about enough of it. He rose, stretching his long limbs, and the action suggested the hideous ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... sovereign Science. She cannot become bankrupt, for she does not promise the absolute, she is simply the progressive conquest of truth. Never has she pretended that she could give the whole truth at one effort, that sort of edifice being precisely the work of metaphysics, of revelation, of faith. The role of Science, on the contrary, is only to destroy error as she gradually advances and increases enlightenment. And thus, far from becoming bankrupt, in her march which nothing stops, she remains the only possible ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Logic, that, in the Scottish philosopher's words, "it is to the schoolmen that the vulgar languages are indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they possess;" and that, as the Frenchman, going still further, but hardly exaggerating, lays it down, "logic, ethics, and metaphysics itself owe to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... ought to have rights. I have the argument and logic here, it is in my own breast and consciousness; and the logic of the schools becomes contemptible beside these. The more you try to argue, the worse you are off. It is not the place for metaphysics, it is the place for affirmation. Woman is the counterpart of man; she has the same divine image, having the same natural and inalienable rights as man. To state the proposition is enough; it contains the argument, and nobody can gainsay it, in an ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... beauty of style either hortatory or narrative. But in the Church of England literary achievement is certainly not restricted to these forms. In the fields of physical science, in the fields of moral philosophy, metaphysics, social and even political philosophy, and perhaps still more in the fields of history, its clergy have won places in the foremost rank. It is notorious that a large proportion of the most serious criticism, of the best periodical writing in England, is ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... (approaching land is like nearing truth in metaphysics), and ere we yet touched the beach, Borabolla declared, that we were already landed. Which paradoxical assertion implied, that the hospitality of Mondoldo was such, that in all directions it radiated far out upon the lagoon, embracing a great circle; so ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Christ, the political and social environment had for the first time produced men such as men would wish to be, at all events for the ideals of Western Europe. To less informed or less critical ages than our own, the absolute contribution of Cicero to ethics and metaphysics seemed comparable to that of the great Greek thinkers; the De Natura Deorum was taken as a workable argument against atheism, and the thin and wire-drawn discussions of the Academics were studied with an ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... fostered by the position. If it be asked what philosophical doctrines were explicitly taught, the answer must be a very short one. English philosophy barely existed. Parr was supposed to know something about metaphysics—apparently because he could write good Latin. But the inference was hasty. Of one book, however, which had a real influence, I must say something, for though it contained little definite philosophy, it showed ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Herbert Spencer as the great exponent of the theory of evolution. He had graduated at Harvard in 1853, and was a profound student of philosophy from that time forward, though I am not aware that he was a writer. When in 1858 Sir William Hamilton's "Lectures on Metaphysics" appeared, he took to them with avidity. In 1859 appeared Darwin's "Origin of Species," and a series of meetings was held by the American Academy, the special order of which was the discussion of this book. Wright ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... ninety-six closely-printed pages, and embraces a list of several thousand volumes. In this list are histories, biographies, travels, adventures, novels, poems, educational works, works on science, art, philosophy, metaphysics—in short, books on every topic familiar to man. In the department of fiction, the success of this house has been remarkable. They have published between four and five hundred novels, in cloth and paper bindings, and the demand for their early publications ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... things. 'I do not like women,' he observed, 'who make men of themselves, any more than I like effeminate men. There is a proper part for every one to play in the world. What does all this flight of imagination mean? What is the result of it? Nothing. It is all sentimental metaphysics and disorder of the mind. I cannot endure that woman; for one reason, that I cannot bear women who make a set at me, and God knows how often she ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... do not intend to go into the metaphysics of the matter. That would perhaps but involve us in deeper mystery. I think the question will be clearer if we take one example. It is that of Saul of Tarsus, on the occasion of his conversion. He was changed in a moment by omnipotent power. So radical was ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... know what to do to save others from drowning. They are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, typewriting, typesetting and practical geometry, so as to draw lines, angles and circles and find their volumes and areas, but algebra, astronomy, grammar, geology, physiology, biology and metaphysics are reserved for the high schools, where every boy and girl is sent when they are fifteen years of age and kept there for three years at the expense of the government. The high school is located in the district reserve as near the ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... notes themselves confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz did not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than what he is described in the book before us.—if his metaphysics were "miserable," if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes,—we can assure M. de Caroil that we should long ago have heard the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of mental action of the lower animals in a clear, simple, and brief form. The author has avoided technicalities, and has also resisted the temptation of the psychologist to indulge in metaphysics. Dr. Weir has relied for evidence on the results of his own independent study of biology at first hand, disregarding the second-hand data used by many of the authors once regarded as standard authorities ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... matters she had come to inquire regarding were really very deep indeed; she had, I found, carefully read Flavel's "Treatise on the Soul of Man"—a volume which, fortunately for my credit, I also had perused; and we were soon deep together in the rather bad metaphysics promulgated on the subject by the Schoolmen, and republished by the divine. It seemed clear, she said, that every human soul was created—not transmitted—created, mayhap, at the time when it began to be; but if so, how, or ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... well acquainted with American university undergraduates, the intellectual maturity of the Russian or Polish student and his eagerness for the discussion of abstract problems in sociology and metaphysics are very impressive. The amount of space given in Russian novels to philosophical introspection and debate is a truthful portrayal of the subtle Russian mind. Russians love to talk; they are strenuous in conversation, and forget their meals and their sleep. I have known some Russians ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... student in Dante's time embraced the seven liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, namely Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astrology. The higher education comprised also Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and Theology. Of the cultural effect of the old education, Professor Huxley spoke in the highest praise on the occasion of his inaugural address as rector of Aberdeen University. "I doubt," he said, "if the curriculum of any modern university ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... rhetorical dogma that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... have been always, let me say, "romantic,"— Eager for color, for beauty, soon discontented With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing: Even before the question grew to problem And drove you bickering into metaphysics, You met on lower planes the same great dragon, Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction, In strange aesthetics . . . You tried, as I remember, One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid, The cruder first, more violent sensations, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... is more illuminating than the painful way in which many people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great battle. But for the affairs ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the Race. The positive psychology of Spencer declares in our own day that the most powerful of human passions, when it makes its first appearance, is absolutely antecedent to all individual experience. Thus do ancient thought and modern—metaphysics and science—accord in recognizing that the first deep sensation of human beauty known to the individual is not ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... creatures; and from the union of one with the diverse is generated the Universe. Hence the progression from ascent to descent, from spirit to that which we call matter; from the cause to the origin, and the process of metaphysics, which, from the finite world of sense rises to the intelligent, passing through the intermediate numbers of infinite substance to active ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been forgotten, ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... system of magic, blended with traditional empiricism. Thus the forms of thought proceeded to act in their own emptiness, with no attempt to fill or substantiate them by the information of the senses, and all the branches of science formed so many sections of logic and metaphysics. And so it continued, even to the time that the Reformation sounded the second trumpet, and the authority of the schools sank with that of the hierarchy, under the intellectual courage and activity which this great revolution had inspired. Power, once awakened, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... produced in him the appearance of a courage which his moral nature never possessed. He had the audacity which results from presumption, not the wholesome strength which comes from the conscious possession of a right purpose. But a truce to our metaphysics. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... that scroll work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel ourselves weakening towards such idleness, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... hunger, and go on with his work till evening. Through years of hardship and drudgery his courage never forsook him; amidst ceaseless labor he strove unremittingly to improve his mind, studying astronomy, history, and metaphysics; and finally, from the humblest circumstances, he rose to occupy a conspicuous place as an author, a philosopher, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... to enjoy the sardonic metaphysics of the case with Putney. He said gravely that he had been talking of the matter with Dr. Morrell, and he had no doubt that there was a taint of insanity in every wrong-doer; some day he believed the law would take cognizance of ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... itself of them? He roused his mind, not to make himself a mediator, but judge and censor of things which he had never studied, nor well understood. Thus in our day, that little which Aristotle can bring, is peculiar for its inventive reasoning, its suggestiveness, its metaphysics, and is useful for other pedants, who work with the same "Sursum corda," who institute new dialectics and modes of forming the reason (judgment?) which are as much viler than those of Aristotle, as may be the philosophy of Aristotle ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... this kind seems to have had no significance for the men of those days; they were blind to all homosexual emotion which had no result in sodomy. Plato found such attraction a subject for sentimental metaphysics, but it was not until nearly our own time that it again became a subject of interest and study. Yet it undoubtedly had profound influence on Michelangelo's art, impelling him to find every kind of human beauty in the male form, and only ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not produce force, it only transmits it. If he maintains that he has nothing to do with anything outside of mechanism, that the invisible and imponderable force lies outside of his domain, he has handed over to metaphysics the fairest and richest portion of his realm. In our fear of being metaphysical we have swung to another extreme, and have lost sight of valuable truth which lay at the bottom of the old vitalistic theories. Cells, tissues, and organs are but channels ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... in the John A. Creighton Medical College, Omaha, Neb., author of Text-Books on Metaphysics, Ethics, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... of idealist metaphysics, which tend to regard the Buddha essence or Nirvana much as Brahman is ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the masses that are brought into collision, the warlike qualities of these masses, the energy and talent of their commanders, the spirit, more or less martial, of nations and epochs,[51]—in a word, every thing that can be called the poetry and metaphysics of war,—will have a ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... the delicate papyri we intrusted the wisdom of our philosophers and the secrets of our religion—all the secrets but one, whereof I will presently speak. Older than the Vedas of Para-Brahm or the Up-Angas of Vyasa, O Melchior; older than the songs of Homer or the metaphysics of Plato, O my Gaspar; older than the sacred books or kings of the people of China, or those of Siddartha, son of the beautiful Maya; older than the Genesis of Mosche the Hebrew—oldest of human records ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... interest with the tyrant Dionysius. He was a great general and statesman, as well as a philosopher. In philosophy he was a Pythagorean; and, like most of that school, a great mathematician; and applied his favourite science not only to music, but also to metaphysics. Aristotle is believed to have borrowed from him his ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... mankind philosophy was the product of subjective reasoning, giving mythologies and metaphysics. When it was discovered that the whole structure of philosophy was without foundation, a new order of procedure was recommended—the Baconian method. Perception must precede reflection; observation must precede reason. This also was a failure. The ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... ourselves in metaphysics," broke in Embro. Then, turning to Courtney, whose direct intelligent gaze seemed to disconcert him, he said, "Now, Julius, you've seen, I daresay, a good many things we have not seen,—have you ever seen or known a case like this we're ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... and books of divinity, of what denomination or class soever; as also all comments on the laws of the land, such as reports, law-cases, decrees, guides for attorneys and young clerks, and, in fine, all the books now in being in this kingdom (whether of divinity, law, physic, metaphysics, logics or politics) except the pure text of the Holy Scriptures, the naked text of the laws, a few books of morality, poetry, music, architecture, agriculture, mathematics, merchandise and history; the author ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... instance, if you would be a perfect Yogi, you must concentrate, concentrate, morning, noon and night, at all times, along that line of endeavour. You must study all the vast literature on Yoga, Psychology, Metaphysics, Mentalism, etc., and form your own synthesis on same. You must think hard and work hard for Yoga. "Genius is the power to bear infinite pain." Nothing ought to be too great a sacrifice, including your own life, for the right understanding and ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... of America is poor indeed unless he has savoured and meditated the delicious contrast of these two cities, separated by so few miles and yet by a whole world of philosophy and metaphysics. But he is a mere tyro of the two who has only made the voyage by the P.R.R. The correct way to go is by the Reading, which makes none of those annoying intermediate stops at Newark, Trenton, and so on, none of that long detour through West Philadelphia, starts you off with a ferry ride ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... law, and that these laws can be represented by numbers. Number or harmony is the principle of the universe, and order holds together the world. Like Anaximander, he passes from the region of physics to metaphysics, and thus opens a new world of speculation. His method was purely deductive, and his science mathematical. "The Infinite of Anaximander became the One of Pythagoras." Assuming that number is the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... average farmer probably knows little and cares less about teleology, metaphysics, or, let us say, forestry. He is a farmer. He makes his living by raising crops. And yet, a better knowledge and practice of forestry will not only make him a better farmer wherever he is located but, in certain locations, this ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... his commentary on the 13th book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, shows in defense of Socrates, Plato, the Parmenideans, and Pythagoreans, that ideas were not introduced by these divine men according to the usual meaning of names, as was the opinion of Chrysippus, Archedemus, and many of the junior Stoics; for ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... continually forming plans and resolutions, but to the day of his death they remained resolutions and plans. He was always just going to do something, but never did it. "Coleridge is dead," wrote Charles Lamb to a friend, "and is said to have left behind him above forty thousand treatises on metaphysics and divinity—not one ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... way. They are chaotic, largely, aroused by some passing occasion, abstract and metaphysical, except when they deal with current politics. He does not come to close quarters with economic facts, but dwells usually in the regions of theory and metaphysics. When he descends from these regions, he is much more at the mercy of current international politics than Marx, much less imbued with the consequences of the belief that it is economic causes that are fundamental. He praised Marx for enunciating this doctrine,[15] but nevertheless ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics, geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too numerous for specification,—and you pass into a sunny region of glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of outward things, where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Aristotle published his books of physics and metaphysics. Of this, Alexander who was now in Asia, got information. That ambitious prince, desirous of being in everything the first man in the world, was dissatisfied that the learning of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... quackery of any of the professors of alchymy. His writings were very numerous, and include nearly five hundred volumes, upon grammar, rhetoric, morals, theology, politics, civil and canon law, physics, metaphysics, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... become, but always is. These, at least, are the wisest definitions of these two terms for us just now; for they are those which were received by the whole Alexandrian school, even by those commentators who say that Aristotle, the inventor of the term Metaphysics, named his treatise so only on account of its following in philosophic ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... at so useless an accomplishment;—of geography, I have seen more land on maps than I should wish to traverse on foot;—of mathematics, enough to give me the headache without clearing the part affected;—of philosophy, astronomy, and metaphysics, more than I can comprehend;[85] and of common sense so little, that I mean to leave a Byronian prize at each of our 'Almae Matres' for the first discovery,—though I rather fear that of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... this observation before he replied to it. His look, at once struck and meditative, said, "A strange phrase; what may it mean?" He turned it over in his mind, with thought deep and slow, as some German pondering metaphysics. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Chemistry, Geology, Geography, Astronomy; Metaphysics, Philology, Theology; Economics, including Taxation and Finance; Politics and General Literature—all occupied by turn, and almost ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... the term as meaning mental or moral philosophy and metaphysics, as opposed to natural philosophy or physics, he takes a very high rank, and it is on this that perhaps his greatest fame rests. (He is the author, you may remember, of the famous ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the slightest difference in the purport of my remarks on the two occasions. What I said here on Wednesday is in exact accordance with the opinion expressed by me in the other house in 1825. Though the gentleman had the metaphysics of Hudibras, though he ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... men. This monotheism was not primarily cosmological nor metaphysical, but ethical. The Jews showed little capacity for abstract reasoning and never pursued their inquiries to the discovery of ultimate principles. Thus they did not develop a systematic cosmology, nor formulate a system of metaphysics. Their religion was pre-eminently "theocratic"; God was thought of as King, enthroned in heaven and supreme. In the beginning as a tribal deity his powers were limited and he was involved in the fortunes of his people. But as the conception of Yahweh was deepened ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... to the deepest metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of speech, it reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those categories by which we conceive the world. It is by virtue of this parallel development that language has its function of expressing experience ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... the mind, facts proved in the psychology laboratory even as chemical facts are demonstrated in the chemical laboratory. Wherein psychology departs from facts which can be proved by actual experience or by accurate tests, it becomes metaphysics, and is beyond the realm of science; for metaphysics deals with the realities of the supermind, or the soul, and its relations to life, and death, and God. Physics, chemistry, biology have all in their day been merely speculative. They were bodies of theory which ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter |
