"Anthropomorphic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the difficulty of achieving an idea of God adequate for our new universe will not be met by any such intellectual shift of emphasis as we have suggested. Not anthropomorphic theology so much as ecclesiasticism is the major burden on their thinking about deity. Two conceptions of the Church are in conflict to-day in modern Protestantism, and one of the most crucial problems of America's religious life ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... to be attained by these Nature Cults. Stimulation of Fertility, Animal and Vegetable. Principle of Life ultimately conceived of in anthropomorphic form. This process already advanced in Rig-Veda. Greek Mythology preserves intermediate stage. The Eniautos Daimon. Tammuz—earliest known representative of Dying God. Character of the worship. Origin of the name. Lament for Tammuz. His death affects not only Vegetable ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... will be as well to glance at the views which she sets forth in her previous illuminating treatise entitled Themis. The former is in reality a continuation of the latter work. The view heretofore generally entertained as regards the anthropomorphic gods of Greece has been that the conception of the deity preceded the adoption of the ritual. Moreover, one school of anthropologists ably represented by Professor Ridgeway, has maintained that the phenomena ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... creates a multitude of spirits or gods in his own likeness to explain the succession of phenomena in nature of whose true causes he is ignorant; in short he personifies the phenomena as powerful anthropomorphic spirits, and believing himself to be more or less dependent on their good will he woos their favour by prayer and sacrifice. This personification of the various aspects of external nature is one of the most fruitful sources of polytheism. The spirits and gods created by this train of thought ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... centered about the proper interpretation of the anthropomorphic passages in the Koran and the doctrine of the divine attributes. When the Koran speaks of God's eyes, ears, hands, feet; of his seeing, hearing, sitting, standing, walking, being angry, smiling, and so on, must those phrases be understood literally? If so God ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... third stage a wide gulf is placed between man and the lower animals. The animal gods are dethroned, and the powers and phenomena of nature are personified and deified. Let us call this stage physitheism. The gods are strictly anthropomorphic, having the form as well as the mental, moral, and social attributes of men. Thus we have a god of the sun, a god of the moon, a god of the air, a god of dawn, and a deity ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... toward landscape setting was disclosed by Rousseau in the "Nouvelle Heloise" and developed by his numerous followers in early nineteenth-century romance. The writers who advocated a "return to nature" spelled nature with a capital N and considered it usually as an anthropomorphic presence. As a result of this, when they developed a natural background for their stories, they established a sympathetic interchange of mood between the characters and the landscape, and imagined (to use the famous ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... he said, "contains all the original elements of poetry. Firstly, the anthropomorphic element; the sailor imagines his bowline as if it had life. Secondly, the humorous element, for the bowline is all tail. Thirdly, the reflective element; the monotonous motion makes him think of home,—of his wife or sweetheart,—and he ends the second line ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... to the fact of a distinction between nature and spirit. But attention has now to be directed to the necessity of emphasising the reality of spirit. The nature of spirit is revealed most clearly in the life and content of human consciousness. No anthropomorphic standard from without can come to our aid to establish the existence of spirit. The standard is to be found within the consciousness itself. A distinction has to be made between nature and spirit. However much they resemble each other in the beginnings of life, spirit has ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... it may be said that all knowledge is anthropomorphic; and in this respect there is no difference between the physics, which speaks of energy as the essence of things, and the poetry, which speaks of love as the ultimate principle of reality. Between such scientific and idealistic explanations there is not even the difference ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... a position intermediate between Hellenism and Hinduism, agrees with the latter in recognizing the essential evil of the cosmos; but differs from both in its intensely anthropomorphic personification of the two antagonistic principles, to the one of which it ascribes all the good; and, to the other, all ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... at least before I answered your letter. Don't thunder at me—I'm stumbling about, trying to get somewhere. I've read some William James and some John Fiske, and I realize this—that I did more or less think God was a very large, stately old man. An "anthropomorphic deity." Fiske says that is the God of the lower peoples; that was my God. Also I realize this—that, somehow, some God, the God if I can get to Him, might help might be my only chance. What do you think? Is this any better? Is it any ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... understands how anthropomorphic he is.' No study, however comprehensive, enables him to overstep human limits, or conceive a concrete being, even the highest, from a wholly impersonal point of view. His own self always remains an encumbering ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Southern scenery to bear a mortal interpretation accounts for the anthropomorphic deities of classical days. I often think it does. Even we moderns are unaccountably moved by its varying facets which act sometimes as an aphrodisiac, and sometimes by their very perfection, their discouraging spell, their insolent beauty, suggest the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of our intellectual and moral limitations is applied in The Sun to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. Our spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. Let us not strive to pass beyond ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... who held to the belief in an anthropomorphic personal God who was benevolent, omniscient, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh. But if Jahveh was thus supposed to differ only in degree from the undoubtedly zoomorphic or anthropomorphic "gods of the nations," why is it to be assumed that he also was not thought of as having a human shape? It is possible for those who forget that the time of the great prophetic writers is at least as remote from that of Saul as our ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... connection with the various ways in which various minds function, is the fact that when in these days we seek to visualize, in some pictorial manner, our ultimate view of life, the images which are called up are geometrical or chemical rather than anthropomorphic. It is probable that even the most rational and logical among us as soon as he begins to philosophize at all is compelled by the necessity of things to form in the mind some vague pictorial representation answering to his conception of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of various kinds, ultimately collected and edited by Confucius, and now known as the Odes. From these Odes it is abundantly clear that the Chinese people continued to hold, more clearly and more firmly than ever, a deep-seated belief in the existence of an anthropomorphic and personal God, whose one care was the welfare of the ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... people in England who really believe in God are the Peculiar People. Perhaps that is why they are called peculiar. See how belief in an anthropomorphic God divides allegiance and disturbs civil order as ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... a Revelation appears to be the only one in 16 accordance with man's position, and also adequate Words as a medium of Revelation must be limited by 18 ideas already existing, which ideas are also limited by experience Anthropomorphic notions of God; the Infinite and 19 Absolute Ideas as a medium of Revelation; ideas and perceptions 20 distinguished, etc. Perception as a medium of Revelation; not in itself 22 adequate 3.—Conditions under which a Revelation may be expected 26 to be recorded, etc. ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... idol ate and drank the offerings. Others distinguished between the idol and the god, regarding the latter as only occasionally visiting the shrine where he was worshipped. Even these last, however, held gross anthropomorphic views, since they considered the god to descend from heaven in order to hold commerce with the chief priestess. Such notions were encouraged by the priests, who furnished the inner shrine in the temple of Bel ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... in general the Methodist teacher had little sympathy with the more educated of his fellow-countrymen. To an ordinarily cultivated mind there was something extremely repulsive in his tears and groans and amorous ejaculations, in the coarse and anthropomorphic familiarity and the unwavering dogmatism with which he dealt with the most sacred subjects, in the narrowness of his theory of life and his utter insensibility to many of the influences that expand and embellish it, in the mingled credulity and self-confidence with ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the people, but the Trinity personifying the cosmic powers of the universe as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, became publicly known in some irregular manner in the Turanian days. This idea was still further materialized and degraded by the Semites into a strictly anthropomorphic Trinity consisting of father, mother ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... followed by the restoration of science, the establishment of colleges, schools, libraries, throughout the dominions of the Arabians. Those conquerors, pressing forward rapidly in their intellectual development, rejected the anthropomorphic ideas of the nature of God remaining in their popular belief, and accepted other more philosophical ones, akin to those that had long previously been attained to in India. The result of this was a second conflict, that respecting ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... main it is actually antagonistic to them. Two contradictory codes have been circulated under one cover, and the result is dire confusion. The one is a scheme depending upon a special tribal God, intensely anthropomorphic and filled with rage, jealousy and revenge. The conception pervades every book of the Old Testament. Even in the psalms, which are perhaps the most spiritual and beautiful section, the psalmist, amid much that is noble, ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... must offer a guess, it is that Greeks, and Indians of India, inherited a very ordinary savage idea. The gods in savage myths are usually beasts. As beasts they beget anthropomorphic offspring. This is the regular rule in totemism. In savage myths we are not told 'a god' (Apollo, or Zeus, or Poseidon) 'put on beast shape and begat human sons and daughters' (Helen, the Telmisseis, and so on). The god in savage myths was a beast ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... women and "men who were not men" practiced all manner of abominations in honour of the Demon (Venus). Here the Phrygian symbolism of Kybele and Attis (Atys) had become the Syrian Ba'al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian Dionaea and Adonis, the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater lights. The site, Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from Bayrut to the Cedars, is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty, fitting frame-work for the loves of goddess and demigod: and the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... there is a considerable number of people in any community that are greatly taken with this improved anthropomorphic view of wild nature now current among us. Such a view tickles the fancy and touches the emotions. It makes the wild creatures so much more interesting. Shall we deny anything to a bird or beast that makes it more interesting, and more worthy ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... I don't think we can insist on it as being a levee," he said, "where one is expected to come and make one's bow and pay formal compliments. That idea is an old anthropomorphic one, of course. It is superstitious—it is almost debasing to think of God demanding praise as a duty incumbent on us. 'To thee all angels cry aloud'—I confess I don't like the idea of heaven as a place of ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson |
