"Spiritual being" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which will work rightly if only it is left alone and not tampered with. There is the same provision in us as in them of unconscious instincts and appetites for carrying on the lower life which is necessary as the platform of the higher spiritual being, to set it free, as it were, for the pursuit of its legitimate ends—all those higher and wider interests in life which are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of God." And the teaching of Christ is: ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... senses, whose effects we feel at every moment, which we see act, move, communicate, motion, and constantly bring living beings into existence, than to attribute the formation of things to an unknown force, to a spiritual being, who can not draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and of putting anything in motion? Nothing is plainer ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... fiery shame seemed to dart through my spiritual being as I heard this, and I made no answer. Some fairy-like little creatures, the children of the Saturnites, as I supposed, here came running towards us and knelt down, reverently clasping their hands in prayer. They then gathered ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... observed the distinction which metaphysicians have recently made. They employ the term psychical to indicate the relation of the human soul to sense, appetite, propensity, etc., and psychological, as indicating the ultimates of spiritual being. In this manner we use the word psychical as describing the relationship of the soul to animal experiences and being, and psychological as referring to the spiritual potencies of the soul. The distinction being introduced, we continue its use ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... "GOD formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." {35d} This breath of GOD could be nothing less than the spirit, which came from GOD Himself. It is that higher endowment by which man is a spiritual being, and therefore has an affinity to GOD. It is that which makes him GOD-like, even by nature, at least by his nature as it was before the fall. But even the fall did not utterly dissolve that nature; man still remained ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... three- fold agency of evil, relatively to man, ascribed to certain spirits in the elder Scriptures, namely: 1, of misleading (as in the case of the Israelitish king seduced into a fatal battle by a falsehood originating with a spiritual being); 2, of temptation; 3, of calumnious accusation directed against absent parties. It is not absolutely an untenable hypothesis, that these functions of malignity to man, as at first sight they appear, may be in fact reconcilable with the general functions of a being not malignant, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... impressions registered on the brain these could no more survive the dissolution of the brain than impressions on wax could survive the melting of the wax. Surely my memory, my irresistible conviction of personal identity with my past makes it abundantly clear that "I" am a mysterious unchanging spiritual being behind ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... a sense-being implies standing outside of it, and judging it according to outer impressions. Intuitive cognition of a spiritual being implies being at one with it; uniting oneself with the inner nature of that being. Step by step, the occult student ascends toward such cognition. Imagination leads him no longer to consider phenomena as the external ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... unreserved than could ever be between mortal beings, even between mother and daughter. And when she who was sleeping there, blind, deaf, and senseless, should awake again, up there, with eyes clearer than those of men below, and the ears and senses of a spiritual being to see and hear and judge all she had known and done, all she had felt and made others feel—then, she told herself, her mother might perhaps blame her and punish her more than she had ever done on earth, but she would also clasp her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... total of the finite—the universe meaning the totality of individual things in general (without reference to their nature as extended or cogitative); rest and motion, the totality of material being; the absolutely infinite understanding, the totality of spiritual being or the ideas. Individual spirits together constitute, as it were, the infinite intellect; our mind is a part of the divine understanding, yet not in such a sense that the whole consists of the parts, but that the part exists only through the whole. When we say, the human mind perceives this or ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... it except this sudden terrible demoralization of his physical and spiritual being! While he peered out into the valley, toward the black patch of cedars and pinyons that hid the cabins, moments and moments passed, and in them he was gripped with cold ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... necessary, in order to get a true conception of what we really are (that we are spiritual beings, being neither male nor female) that we get away from the illusion of sex, and not be in bondage to it. But the man must look upon the woman as a spiritual being and not think of her only for what her material form stands for. If he does he is under an illusion, being in bondage to her body, which becomes a barrier to realizing the Divine within, and if the woman looks upon the material form of the man as being ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... chap, x, de Ente Spirituali, in which the Will is described, begins as follows: "Now shall ye mark that the Spirits rule their subjects. And I have shown intelligibly how the Ens Spirituale, or Spiritual Being, rules so mightily the body that many disorders may be ascribed to it. Therefore unto these ye should not apply ordinary medicine, but heal the spirit—therein ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a Spiritual Being. Man expresses himself mentally and manifests himself physically. The One Life animates all that exists. Harmony of existence depends upon the polarities of the three aspects of life. The mind is at ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... falsehood, a headache would suffice to bring her afresh under the influence of the hideous system she had been taught, and wake in her all kinds of deranging doubts and consciousnesses. Subjugated so long to the untrue, she required to be for a time, until her spiritual being should be somewhat individualized, under the genial influences of one who was not afraid to believe, one who knew the master. Nor was there danger to either so long as he sought no end of his own, so long as he desired only His will, so long as he could ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... that is incorrect language. No brain can ideate or form ideas; an idea is an intellectual or mind image, not a brain image; it is an abstract and universal image, and matter cannot represent but what is concrete and individual. Only a simple and spiritual being, the rational soul, can form ideas. Nevertheless our soul, in its present state of substantial union with our body, is extrinsically dependent on the body; to form ideas it needs to have the sensible object presented to it by a phantasm or brain-picture. Now, a child born blind and deaf, and thus ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual being of Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a lion and as ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... to contradict the very idea of truth, and to be subversive of all moral values. If truth has no independent validity, if it is not something to be sought for itself, irrespective of the inclinations and interests of man, then its pursuit can bring no real enrichment to our spiritual being. It remains something alien and external, a mere arbitrary appendix of the self. It is not the essence and standard of human life. If its sole test is what is advantageous or pleasant it sinks into a merely utilitarian opinion or selfish ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... merely of using a phrase of rhetoric, nor even to hear himself talk; for this he never did. But that great incarnation of spiritual insight and power knew of the great spiritual laws and forces under which we live, and also that supreme fact of the universe, that man is a spiritual being, born to have dominion, and that, by recognizing the true self and by bringing it into complete and perfect harmony with the higher spiritual laws and forces under which he lives, he can touch these laws and forces so that they will ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... greater than he knows, and vastly greater than the world will ever know. It belongs not to the material plane of existence but to the plane of eternal reality. This larger self is in all probability a perfect and eternal spiritual being integral to the being of God. His surface self, his Philistine self, is the incarnation of some portion of that true eternal self which is one with God. The dividing line between the surface self and the other self is not the definite demarcation it appears to be. To the higher self ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the thoughtful and the learned, you find reference made to "faith," as where, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is said to be "the evidence of things not seen," the same idea comes out, and Faith, the real Faith, is only this intense conviction which grows out of the inner spiritual being of man, the Self, the Spirit, which justifies to the intellect, to the senses, that there is God, that God truly exists. And this is so strongly felt in the East that no one there wants to argue about the existence of God; it ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... rest of our species, whereby we stand aloof and separate from the crowd, convey no moral—nor even mental—infallibility: nay, they have in themselves a peculiar danger, whereas that gift which is common to us all as brethren, the animating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil the spiritual being of all is rooted, cannot make us vain; we cannot pride ourselves on that, for it is ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... folk-leader. Yet there is an underlying unity of thought and purpose in all his work which makes each part of it merely a branch of the whole. This underlying unity is his clear conception of the spiritual and of man as a spiritual being who can attain his fullest development only through the widest possible realization of the spiritual in all his divine and human relationships. In every part of his work Grundtvig, therefore, invariably seeks to discover the spiritual realities. The mere form of a thing, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... them. He began to write: he had acquired the faculty of vigourous expression by means of such emotions as were tinged with a mystical voluptuousness which was the other pole to his inner, secret and spiritual being. The double strain upon his energies, which daily work and nightly study with mental productiveness involved, acted injuriously upon his health, and after a year he became so delicate that he could carry on neither one ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Possibly they ignore the fact that commercial and political cannibalism, profitably practised upon foreign races, creeps back nearer home; that the cultivation of unwholesome appetites has its final reckoning with the stomach which has been made to serve it. For, after all, man is a spiritual being, and not a mere living money-bag jumping from profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of human races in ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... after righteousness is only one of the manifestations of it; the need itself is that of existence not self-existent for the consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent. It is the man's need of God. A moral, that is, a human, a spiritual being, must either be God, or one with God. This truth begins to reveal itself when the man begins to feel that he cannot cast out the thing he hates, cannot be the thing he loves. That he hates thus, that he loves thus, is because God is in him, but he finds he has not enough of God. His awaking strength ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... the beautiful speaker, but self-indulgence, the incessant pursuit of worldly and selfish objects for forty years, and the habits of a life into which the thought of God and the dread hereafter never entered, had encased his spiritual being in a sort of brazen armor, through which no ordinary blow of conscience could penetrate. Still he had fearful glimpses of recent events, and his soul, hanging as it was over the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... empires, open and close epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new truth to this degree,—made it for him an inevitable assumption—then there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and is a soul of eloquence in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... worshipped the vault of heaven itself, maintains that they got past the early mode of thought which considers every natural object as animated, before the dawn of history, and became pure theists, believers in a supreme spiritual being. Confucius he considers to have held a lower religious position than his countrymen had already attained to. He also regards the worship of spirits and of ancestors as a later perversion and degradation of the original religion of one god. In these positions he is followed by Professor Giles, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... lost in God? Well, to be thus lost in God is to be saved from corruption and from the dust of the grave; but to be lost in the dust of the grave and in the ceaseless changes of matter is to be lost to God and to spiritual being. Let me be with God rather than lost amid ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... ignore the practical side of life. So broad is the line which they draw between the "wise" and "foolish", that they would deny to Plato himself the possession of wisdom. They take no account of the thousand circumstances which go to form our happiness. To a spiritual being, virtue might be the chief good; but in actual life our physical is closely bound up with our mental enjoyment, and pain is one of those stern facts before which all theories are powerless. Again, by their fondness for paradox, they reduce all offences to ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... they could meet, no point on which they could come in contact! To one God is, and must be, a person, an individual, who, however spiritual, eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent, is yet as much a person as a man having a will, with purposes, affections, feelings, sentiments, as indeed every spiritual being must have—a being who can be feared, revered, admired, loved. Religion to these men is worship of this person, obedience to his will because it is his, faith in him, love of him. The god of the evolutionists, on the other hand, is, if Nature, a mere manifestation or result; if a law, a mere ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... like nearly all the natives of Northern Asia, are addicted to Shamanism. The shaman combines the double function of priest and doctor, ministering to the physical and spiritual being at the same time. When a man is taken sick he is supposed to be attacked by an evil spirit and the shaman is called to practice exorcism. There is a distinct spirit for every disease and he must be propitiated in a particular manner. While practicing his profession ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... occasionally manifested at such an early period of human history as to be far in advance of any of the few practical applications which have since grown out of them), are evidently essential to the perfect development of man as a spiritual being, but are utterly inconceivable as having been produced through the action of a law which looks only, and can look only, to the immediate material welfare of the individual ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... mediation of the doctrine of creation. Motion proves a mover, and to avoid an infinite regress we must posit an unmoved mover, that is, a first mover who is not himself moved at the same time. An unmoved mover cannot be corporeal, hence he is the spiritual being whom we call God. Ibn Daud does not make use of creation to prove the existence of God, but neither does he posit eternal motion as Aristotle does. And the result is that he has no valid proof that this ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... being determined through the given situation) and freedom (the determination to the act) are united in actual life as something which is exactly so, and cannot become anything else as final. The essence of the spiritual being stands always over against this unavoidable limitation as that which is in itself infinite, which is beyond all history, because the absolute spirit, in and for itself, has no history. That which one calls his history is only ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... hundreds of thousands of years, and to fall back to the lowest savagery—even the savages known to us use art in fashioning their arms, clothing and shelter, to the time when man was a mere animal. Civilised man is not only an animal, but an intellectual and spiritual being, and it is as natural for him to clothe himself as for a cow to eat grass. Our intellect has been made to wait on our animal nature, whilst our spiritual has lagged far behind. Animal food and all else of a stimulating character, ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... apparently, is made of baptism save that Mrs. Eddy says our baptism is a purification from all error. In her account of the Last Supper the cup is mostly dwelt upon and that only as showing forth the bitter experience of Jesus. The bread "is the great truth of spiritual being, healing the sick" and the breaking of it the "explaining" it to others. More is made of what is called the last spiritual breakfast with the Disciples by Lake Galilee than of the Last Supper in the upper room. "This spiritual meeting with our Lord in ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... respects different from other people. He could be most tender in outward action, but he never threw such action away. He knew swine under the cleverest disguise. I speak of outward acts of tenderness. As for his spirit, it was always arousing mine, or any one's, and acting towards one's spiritual being invisibly and silently, but with gentle earnestness. He evinced by it either a sternly sweet dignity of tolerance, or an approbation generous as a broad meadow, or a sadly glanced, adverse comment that lashed one's inner consciousness with remorse. He was meditative, as ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... renunciation being part of the outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... know, in this height-guarded place Whereto the speed of our desire hath brought us; Here in this safety crowning, like a fort Built upon topmost peaks, the height of beauty,— We know to be glad of life as we were gods Timelessly glad of deity; yea, to enjoy Fleshly, spiritual Being till the swift Torrent of glee (as hurled star-dust can change Dim earthly weather to a moment like the sun,) Doth startle life to self-adoring godhead,— Divine body of Power and divine Burning soul of ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... should probably be taken as hypothetical. 'Even supposing that it has come to this,' says he, 'that I had been separated from my body, and that along with the body there had also been "consumed" (as is the meaning of the original word) some portion of my spiritual being, even then, though there were only a thin thread of personality left, enough to call "me" and no more, so to speak, I should cling with that to God, and I know that then I should have enough, for "God is the Rock of my heart, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... seeks to do is to illuminate our whole spiritual being, as the sun illuminates our physical being, and bring us into such union and sympathy, such oneness of thought, desire, affection, and purpose with God, that we shall, by a kind of spiritual instinct, know at all times the mind ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... signs of material progress. For, that which merely gives us a stronger grasp of the world around us, and sends us along the level of nature, is not the most genuine element of progress; but that which elevates our moral plane and enriches the great deep of our spiritual being. The steamship and telegraph are not absolute tokens of this progress, but the moral earnestness and the Christian charity that work through them are; and these must spring up in hearts that are not merely adjusted to the world, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... of the lower races are in no small measure based on the evidence of visions and dreams, regarded as actual intercourse with spiritual being. From the earliest stages of culture we find religion in close alliance with ecstatic physical conditions. These are brought on by various means of interference with the healthy action of body and mind, and it is scarcely ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... infirmities—that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in the equinoctial storms,—all this monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... age, Helen?" he answered her. "Can immortality regard time? Can that which began never and shall never end consider a few wretched years of its incarnate life? Do you not perceive that it is my diviner nature—my spiritual being, that burns and pants to ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... enjoy liberty in this life, and that he should educate himself in the best schools of art, science, and literature. Therefore one has a right to seek, in this infinitely great world of ours, for such things as will best educate his natural and spiritual being. If the theatre can supply part of this demand, let him go, as a student, and drink into his soul through the senses of sight and hearing. If the dance can elevate him somewhat in demeanor and classical grace, ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,—that of stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,—he seems to want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life. In fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... considering the case of persons who have reached a very high degree of development; who have succeeded in so completely uniting the subjective and objective portions of their spiritual being into a perfect whole that they can never again be severed; and who are therefore able to function with their whole consciousness on the spiritual plane. Such persons will doubtless be well aware that they have attained this degree ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... His goodness, but it is only in the presence of the soul—His greatest work—that we realize the awful power of the Creator; it is only when threading the secret avenues of our own intellectual and spiritual being that we are brought into actual communion with God, and bow in adoration before Him who 'doeth all things well.' Therefore, I maintain that he whose meditations run most in this channel is not only the happiest, but the purest man; that his views ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... powers as the operating causes. The belief in talismans at first sight seems to have little to do with that in a supernatural realm; but, as we have seen, the talisman was always a silent invocation of the powers of some spiritual being with which it was symbolically connected, and whose sign was engraved thereon. And, as Dr T. WITTON DAVIES well remarks with regard to "sympathetic magic": "Even this could not, at the start, be anything other than a symbolic ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... questions? Because I cannot be sure whether the Pentateuch was written, as long supposed, by Moses—or whether the fourth Gospel comes as it stands from the beloved apostle—am I less in need of the divine teaching which both these Scriptures contain? Surely not. That I am a spiritual being, and have spiritual needs craving to be satisfied, and that God is a spiritual power above me, of whom Christ is the revelation, are facts which I may know or may not know, quite irrespective of such matters. The one class of facts are intellectual and literary. The other are ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... "the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth as wavelets ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... in eating a dead enemy they consume his spiritual being, and so inherit his soul, his strength and his bravery, which they hold are specially lodged in the brain. This accounts for the fact that the brain figures in their feasts as the choicest delicacy, and is offered to the ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... apparently drawn himself, his eyes quite wild, and his whole person in extraordinary disorder, would have caused the ancient heathens to take him for a sibyl full of enthusiasm, and must appear to us rather the consequence of some convulsion than of a conversation with a spiritual being. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... simplicity of the infant is held up by Christ as the model of imitation for His followers. Then, in the rewards and punishments of the future state of the Mahometans, how gross are all the ideas, how unlike the promises of a divine and spiritual being; their paradise is a mere earthly garden of sensual pleasure, and their Houris represent the ladies of their own harems rather than glorified angelic natures. How different is the Christian heaven, how sublime in its idea, indefinite, yet well suited ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... nature, has always tended to be determinist. Indeed, free will has been advocated rather as an explanation of the presence of evil (our waywardness as in opposition to the will of God) than as the privilege and necessary endowment of a spiritual being, and so the really orthodox religious mind has been forced to seek salvation in self-surrender and has found consolation in reliance on the "grace" or "active good will" of God. Thus many theologians in an attempt to reconcile this with human freedom speak mystically, nevertheless confidently, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... ourselves atoms, undesignedly combining to form some vaster being, though we are utterly incapable of perceiving that any such being exists, or of realising the scheme or scope of our own combination? And this, too, not a spiritual being, which, without matter, or what we think matter of some sort, is as complete nonsense to us as though men bade us love and lean upon an intelligent vacuum, but a being with what is virtually flesh and blood and bones; with organs, senses, dimensions, in some way analogous to our own, into some ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... but Napoleon's men fled with me. Compelled by I know not what fatal astral attraction, perhaps the subtle affinity of the creature for the creator, the spectral shells, moved by some mysterious mechanics of spiritual being, pursued me with fatuous fury. I sought refuge, first, in my laboratory, but, even as I approached, a lurid glare foretold me of its destruction. As I drew nearer, the whole ghost-factory was seen to be in flames; every moment ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... decorous; the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the soul and God: these were principles which Tasso accepted without having properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual being. What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to use Dante's words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his genius. It is in the Aminta, in the episodes of the Gerusalemme, in a small ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... is not a material Being, from which Material Beings are created. It is a Spiritual Being—a Being whose Substance is akin to that which we call "Mind," only raised to Infinity and Absolute Perfection and Power. And this is the only way it can "create"—by creating a Thought-Form in Its Mental, or Spiritual Substance. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... a monist in his theology; but there is room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man and the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positive content of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets his imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order. The earth-soul he passionately believes in; ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the means of doing so in the use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by escaping from his body, and the sooner ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... government for the good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a child—for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual existence. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... wife, for although she had called him her lover before, his devotion, while impassioned enough, had been too distant and wholly reverential to be called a wooing. But the night of their betrothal his love had caught from her lips a fire that was of earth, and it was no longer as a semi-spiritual being that he worshipped her, but as a woman whom it was no sacrilege to kiss a thousand times a day, not upon her hand, her sleeve, or the hem of her dress, but full upon ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... really a son of God. If he believes and thinks that he is a mere material being, then he lives the limited life of a material being, and is never able to rise above it. But if, on the contrary, he thinks and believes that he is a spiritual being, then he finds that he possesses all the powers of a ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... his whole spiritual being was made simply of two elements: of love, which is a white flame in a man like Drennen; of jealousy, which is a black shadow. He had been on his way to her, his mind made up that he would not sleep without telling her of his love. The sight of Garcia had halted him. Garcia's ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... totally distinct in its essence from that of Protestantism. The devotion of Protestants is scriptural and reasonable; that of Roman Catholics poetical and affectionate. The Protestant considers God as a spiritual being, and, as such, incomprehensible, the only object of worship, the only fountain of grace and pardon. The Roman Catholic represents the Eternal in material forms, accessible only through the indirect medium of intercession, and addresses ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... circumstances, withdrew rather grimly into himself. He looked out at things from beneath knit brows; he held his elbows close to his sides, his fists clenched, his whole spiritual being self-contained and apart, watchful for enmity in what he felt but could not understand. But to this, his normal habit, now was added a sullenness almost equally instinctive. In some way he felt himself aggrieved by the girl's presence. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... for it. I had been many, many months—perhaps more than a year—on that terrible little sand-spit, and on the night I am describing I went to bed as usual, feeling very despondent. As I lay asleep in my hammock, I dreamed a beautiful dream. Some spiritual being seemed to come and bend over me, smiling pityingly. So extraordinarily vivid was the apparition, that I suddenly woke, tumbled out of my hammock, and went outside on a vague search. In a few minutes, however, I laughed at my own folly and turned ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... and individual life, accepting the highest dictates of the enlightened moral consciousness as the laws of the universe. But this means that the individual must secure increasing insight into the immutable and eternal laws of spiritual being and must identify his personal interests, his very self with those laws, with the Heart of the. Universe, with God himself. Only so will he become completely autonomous, self-regulative. Only thus will the individual become ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... these confidences and listened to them as if there had been no question about her, with emotion, sympathy, and possibly unconscious delight. I saw tears gathering in her eyes, her breast heaved as if her whole spiritual being went out to me with open arms saying: "Come to me; you have suffered enough and deserve some happiness." And I reply with my eyes: "I do not ask, do not remind you of anything; I am altogether at ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... enclose a space; but we can comprehend how they cannot. We have only to form the corresponding image, to see the manner in which the two attributes coexist in one object. But when I say that I believe in the existence of a spiritual being who sees without eyes, I cannot conceive the manner in which seeing coexists with the absence of the bodily organ of sight. We believe that the true distinction between knowledge and belief may ultimately be referred to the presence ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... is a spiritual being? It is what, with the aid of the imagination, one would naturally suppose (l'on vaudra supposer). Indeed, it is only by means of opposing that which is material that we can form the idea of spirit; but as ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... imputing their trespasses unto them,' lie the germs of all moral progress. And in proportion as we believe that—not with the cold belief of our understandings, but with the loving affiance of our hearts and our whole spiritual being—in proportion as we believe that, in that proportion shall we grow in 'knowledge,' shall we grow in 'righteousness,' in the 'image of Him that created us.' The Gospel is the great means of this change, because it is the great means ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... line of mathematics; we can weigh them in the balance of reason. But when we turn in upon ourselves we meet a universe ten thousand times more wonderful and glorious, yet wrapt in the deep mystery of spiritual being. It is practical irreverence not to look upon our relations with religious respect. Of all these relations, the one between man and woman takes the most direct held of our practical life and enters most largely ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Funny how a guy could feel so all of a sudden! Funny, if he really should love old Jude, with her fiery temper and more fiery tongue. And if this were love, love was not so comfortable a feeling, after all. It was a profound uneasiness, that uprooted every settled habit of his spiritual being. It was, he told himself, before he fell asleep, a funny ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... the language both of Locke and Bonnet on this particular point amounts to a dangerous and very unnecessary concession. Were it meant merely to affirm that God could so unite a thinking spiritual being with a material organism, as to make the two mutually dependent and subservient, this is no more than is admitted by all the advocates of Immaterialism, and it is actually exhibited in the constitution of human nature. But if it were ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... tried before to perfect yourself and become better, and nothing has come of it?" whispered the voice of the tempter within. "What is the use of trying any more? Are you the only one?—All are alike, such is life," whispered the voice. But the free spiritual being, which alone is true, alone powerful, alone eternal, had already awakened in Nekhludoff, and he could not but believe it. Enormous though the distance was between what he wished to be and what he was, nothing appeared insurmountable to the newly-awakened ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... mysticism are distinct from what is still a subject of derision under the name of transcendental phenomena, as they are wholly philosophical and interior, not to be appreciated by the senses, a secret experience within the depths and heights of our spiritual being, an institution which believes in God and immortality, and by the fact of immortality in the subsistence of an intimate relation between the spirit and God, will not look suspiciously on mysticism when it comes to ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... exposed. It was a solemn and touching occasion. Two and two, the captain at our head, and the officers following with the ship's company, we all marched up together to the church. Thoughtless and careless about our spiritual being as we generally were, I believe very few among us did not feel our hearts swell with gratitude to the Great Being who had so mercifully watched over and preserved us from the dangers to which we had been exposed, ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the spirits of still-born children or very young infants take flight, when they die, and enter the bodies of birds. A delightful thought—especially for the mother. For as Kingsley says of St. Francis, "perfectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming kindred lovingly, with creatures ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... that stood abruptly opposed to each other, were, indeed, mutually exclusive. It was a duel between "the Eternal" on the one side, and Zeus on the other—between the Creator of the universe, the invisible spiritual Being who had, in a miraculous way, revealed religious and ethical ideals to mankind, and the deity who resided upon Olympus, who personified the highest force of nature, consumed vast quantities of nectar and ambrosia, and led a pretty ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... sickness, and death, rested the anathema of priesthood and the senses; yet this demonstration is the foundation of Christian Science. His physical sufferings, which came from the testimony of the senses, were over when he resumed his individual spiritual being, after showing [10] us the way to escape from the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... communicated with the souls of the defunct. They were polygamists, but had a horror of adultery. Divorce was at once granted by the chiefs on proof of infidelity. They were cannibals. In each island there was a chief, regarded as a semi-spiritual being, to whom the natives were profoundly obedient. Huts were found used as astrological schools, where also the winds and currents were studied. They made cloth of plantain-fibre—hatchets with stone heads. Between sunset and sunrise they slept. When war was declared between two villages or tribes, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... it allures and yet forbids hope of attainment. The seeker after wisdom must have a high purpose, a strong soul, and the purest love of truth. He cannot live in the senses alone, nor in the mind, nor in the heart alone, but the spiritual being, which is himself, yearns for whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is fair, and so he finds himself akin to the infinite God and to all that he has made. When his thought is carried out to atoms weaving the garment ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... God. And here I would not be misunderstood. For though God, as the Author of all spiritual being, may be said to be the indirect cause of all spiritual action, since, if he had not created it, the action could not have resulted, yet He has created the soul to act upon its own promptings, and entirely independent of Himself, holding it, at the same time, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... while Christianity neither despises nor affects to desire sorrow, it clearly recognizes its great and beneficial mission. In one word, it shows its disciplinary character, and thus practically interprets the mystery of evil. It regards man as a spiritual being, thrown upon the theatre of this mortal life not merely for enjoyment, but for training,—for the development of spiritual affinities, and the attainment of spiritual ends. It thus reveals a weaning, subduing, elevating ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... interests fill his life so that these things do not even occur to him. Give a man a great work to do and you will save him from a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things. Do not allow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you from that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy and beauty of the ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... is freely spoken of, but his self-consciousness, in the strictest sense, is not allowed. Hence God is really deprived by them of all plan, aim, love, and favor. He is a spiritual being, but he is not a spirit. He is spirit, yet not a real, thinking, self-conscious, willing spirit. He is not a personality or individuality. "A person," these men appear to say, "must have a place to stand upon, and surely we would not say this of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of association, but he can no more explain it than Newton could explain the laws of attraction and repulsion which pervade the world of matter. We do not know, we cannot know, what the conditions of our spiritual being are. The state of mind induced by prayer may, in accordance with some mental law, be essential to certain modes of spiritual energy, specially conducive to the highest of all moral or spiritual results: taken in this sense, prayer may ask, not the suspension, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Ahura-Mazda and Angro-mainyus resulting in the victory of the good principle over the bad. The old dualism of force and matter, beneficent and destructive powers of nature, light and darkness, becomes in Parsism moral. The deity, no longer identified with nature, becomes a personal, spiritual being, the creator of mankind; and the end of the world's development is conceived as the triumph of the good. Hence the high rank which the doctrine of Zarathustra and its further development holds in the history ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... as his conception of God as a spirit demands and the latter part of the verse proves, his sublime teaching is that man, the end and culmination of the entire work of creation, is like his Creator, a spiritual being, endowed with a mind and a will, and as God's viceregent, is divinely commanded to rule over ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... of the Eternal Pilgrim, the inner Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he commences his new pilgrimage—for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the past, during which he gained the powers which enable him to tread the present one—he is a spiritual Being, but one who has already passed out of the passive condition of pure Spirit, and who by previous experience of matter in past ages has evolved intellect, the self-conscious mind. But this evolution by experience is far from being complete, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... a book and a subject so well fitted to draw out the highest mode of that grandeur, which can connect itself with the external, (a grandeur capable of drawing down a spiritual being to earth, but not of raising an earthly being to heaven,) I would wish to contribute my own brief word of homage to this grandeur by recalling from a fading remembrance of twenty-five years back a short bravura of John Paul Richter. I call it a bravura, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... are grieving the Holy Spirit of God. For simply: because that Spirit is the Spirit of God, He is a Holy Spirit, who tries to make you—O man and not animal—holy; a moral, and spiritual, and good being. Because you are a moral and spiritual being, God's Spirit exercises over you a moral power which He does not exercise over the plants and animals. He works not merely on your body and your brain: but on your heart and immortal soul. But if you choose to be immoral, when He is trying to keep you moral; if you choose to be carnal like ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... add another word upon this interference, or, rather, entrance of woman into the sphere of politics. As a spiritual being, her duties are like those of man; but, inasmuch as she is different from man, man can not discharge them; and if there be any truth in holding (as our institutions do), that the voice of the whole is the nearest approach ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... world, promise me that you will live up to the ideal of this noble home—that you will develop your brain and your intuition, that you will be forceful and filled with common sense. I would like to have moulded your spiritual being, and brought you to the highest, but it is not for me, perhaps, in this life—another will come. See that ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... seeing eye.' 'If the eye were not sunlike,' says the great German thinker, 'how could it see the sun?' If there were not in me that which corresponds to Jesus Christ, He would be no Light of the World, and no light to me. My reason, my affection, my conscience, my will, the whole of my spiritual being, answer to Him, as the eye does to the light, and for everything that is in Christ there is in humanity something that is receptive of, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... who more lived and moved, and had his spiritual being in the affections; a sensitive nature wooed into life by the kindness of the faintest breath, but killingly crushed by the footsteps of the thoughtless or the cruel. For such a one, life is well deserving of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... animism, then, as set forth in his great work, Primitive Culture, is that "the belief in spiritual beings" will do as a definition of religion taken at its least; which for him means the same thing as taken at its earliest. Now what is a "spiritual being"? Clearly everything turns on that. Dr. Tylor's general treatment of the subject seems to lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm. A phantasm (as the etymology of the word shows) is essentially an appearance. In a dream or hallucination one sees figures, more or less dim, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett |
