"Microcosm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... colourless. Not infrequently it is set with needles or hairs, like a cactus. Often we find a mass of foreign bodies—stone, sand, fragments of mussel-shells, etc.—worked into the mantle. This has earned for the Ascidia the name of "the microcosm." ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... Lawyer Clippurse at the Hall occasioned much speculation in that portion of the world to which Waverley-Honour formed the centre: but the more judicious politicians of this microcosm augured yet worse consequences to Richard Waverley from a movement which shortly followed his apostasy. This was no less than an excursion of the Baronet in his coach-and-six, with four attendants in rich liveries, to ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... playgoer, as indeed in almost every other capacity, Pepys presents himself to readers of his naive diary as the incarnation, or the microcosm, of the average man. No other writer has pictured with the same lifelike precision and simplicity the average playgoer's sensations of pleasure or pain. Of the play and its performers Pepys records exactly what he thinks or feels. He usually takes a more lively interest in the acting and in ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the Count. "This citadel is a microcosm of what the world might be, if men were reasonable. Not all men! A great proportion must be good enough to remain what they are. We could not live without those whose business it is to bring the reasonableness of the few into its proper relief. Were it otherwise, there would ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... seen that feeling born of flame Crimson the cheek at mention of a name? The rapturous touch of some divine surprise Flash deep suffusion of celestial dyes: When hands clasped hands, and lips to lips were pressed And the heart's secret was at once confessed? The Microcosm: ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... scientific learning, inventive ingenuity, and mechanical skill, tributary always to the genius of the art, have worked together for centuries to apply this principle, until the instrument which embodies it in its highest potency is become a veritable microcosm of music. It is the visible sign of culture in every gentle household; the indispensable companion of the composer and teacher; the intermediary between all the various branches of music. Into the study of the orchestral conductor it brings a translation of all the multitudinous voices ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... and distend it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us—an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then we ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... medical practice prevailed in the Old World during the greater part of the seventeenth century. The first held to the old methods of Galen: its theory was that the body, the microcosm, like the macrocosm, was made up of the four elements—fire, air, water, earth; having respectively the qualities hot, dry, moist, cold. The body was to be preserved in health by keeping each of these qualities in its natural proportion; heat, by the proper temperature; moisture, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... earth; minerals and metals live, as animals and plants live; all pass through corruption towards perfection." In another aspect the saying meant "the human being is the world in miniature; as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm; to know oneself is to know all ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... amongst us. Much of his time is spent in sighs, burdened with unutterable grief, and long drawn through the funnel. He amuses himself, too, with repeating all the whispers, the moans, and the louder utterances or tempestuous howls of the wind; so that the stove becomes a microcosm of the aerial world. Occasionally there are strange combinations of sounds,—voices talking almost articulately within the hollow chest of iron,—insomuch that fancy beguiles me with the idea that my firewood must have grown in that infernal forest of lamentable trees which ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... other, and yet felt a certain comradeship, colder than that of a regiment, which itself is less hearty than that of seminaries. As a man advances in life he grows more selfish; egoism develops, and relaxes all the secondary bonds of affection. A government office is, in short, a microcosm of society, with its oddities and hatreds, its envy and its cupidity, its determination to push on, no matter who goes under, its frivolous gossip which gives so many wounds, ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... recesses of which the young explorer was straightway lost to the outer world! No human need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the purchasable. It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of trade, the cosmogony of commerce in petto. The style was brief, pithy, pregnant; the illustrations—oh, wonder of wonders!—unfailingly apt to the text. He who sat by the Damascus Road of old marveling as the caravans rolled dustily past bearing ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... harmony, like some grand overture by Bach or Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the Spheres'—those eternal laws against which man, that tiny microcosm, so ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... express substances under ceremonies." But it must be always remembered that the ceremony is not the substance. It is but the outer garment which covers and perhaps adorns it, as clothing does the human figure. But divest man of that outward apparel, and you still have the microcosm, the wondrous creation, with all his nerves, and bones, and muscles, and, above all, with his brain, and thoughts, and feelings. And so take from Masonry these external ceremonies, and you still have remaining its philosophy and science. ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even—for that is the seat of sympathy—he forthwith sets about reforming—the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers—and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it—that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... There was so much yet to do. New Zion had long since moved and hummed, and whizzed, the neighbouring towns had in a measure begun to dance to his piping, but it must be a long while yet ere his name was to London and to the world what it was already to Coalchester,—that mere microcosm ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Plutarch, call the East the face, the North the right side, and the South the left side of the world, because there the heart is placed. They continually compare the universe to a man; and hence the celebrated microcosm of the Alchymists. We observe, by the bye, that the Alchymists, Cabalists, Free-masons, Magnetisers, Martinists, and every other such sort of visionaries, are but the mistaken disciples of this ancient school: we say mistaken, because, in spite of their pretensions, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... into sin. You must seek faith in order to be good, or else your faith will become false. Christ commanded His disciples to preach the Gospel to all the world, and your wise men call a man a little world, a microcosm. So then preach to yourself, O man, woman, and child. Three parts the world has in you also. Preach first of all to your knowledge, and say to it: If you draw near this truth, you will have much faith; wherefore do you hesitate to use it? To your will, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... circumstances, then, I cannot but regard it as fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient Microcosm: a biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the Kosmos, its untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its profound and hearty intention to go on existing as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and second great belief is, that the Universe, the macrocosm, cannot be apprehended at all except as its rays converge upon the eye, brain, soul of Man, the microcosm: on you, on me, on the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focuses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass—and he is not shrivelled up! Other creatures, he notes, share in his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not in his percipience ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... very strange. The city had now become not only the centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into four huge quarters—Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern—besides Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices, seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... divine chaos.' for the benefit of inquiring minds with a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a condition of grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties, and emotions of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up in the epithet 'microcosm.' his own nature could be appropriately described only by that of 'microchaos.' In which opinion the professor ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... satisfied conformation to a life of marble floors and artificial light she found such settled existence as made her feel at home in this town, with its eighteen strata called floors. She, too, at least during the best hours of the day, lived in the Zodiac Building's microcosm. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... point in the teaching of Lodowick Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm, the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would have been well-nigh persuaded ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Balliol when Froude was at Oriel, died in the second year of Froude's professorship, after seeing many of his pupils famous in the world. He had lived through the great period of transition in which Oxford passed from a monastery to a microcosm. The Act of 1854 had opened the University to Dissenters, reserving fellowships and scholarships, all places of honour and emolument, for members of the Established Church. The Act of 1871 removed the test of churchmanship for all such places, and for the higher ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... perpetually recurring phrase in the literature of theosophy, and naturally so, for it is a succinct statement of a fundamental and far-reaching truth. The scientist recognizes it now and then and here and there, but the occultist trusts it always and utterly. To him the microcosm and the macrocosm are one and the same in essence, and the forth-going impulse which calls a universe into being and the indrawing impulse which extinguishes it again, each lasting millions of years, are echoed and repeated in the inflow and outflow of the breath ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the cloven hairy feet of a goat? The union of melodious, celestial Freewill and Reason, with foul Irrationality and Lust; in which, nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear and half-mad panic Awe; as for mortals there well might! And is not man a microcosm, or epitomized mirror of that same Universe; or, rather, is not that Universe even Himself, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, "the waste fantasy of his own dream?" No wonder that man, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the schoolfellow at Eton of Canning and Frere; and with John Smith and those two youths, wrote the 'Microcosm.' Sydney, on the other hand, was placed on the Foundation, at Winchester, which was then a stern place of instruction for a gay, spirited, hungry boy. Courtenay, his younger brother, went with him, but ran away twice. To owe one's education ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,—all this tends to make it so. More material still is what passes within the microcosm, and I am not yet well. Not that I am worse, for I am continually better. But—but, in short, not to [175] speak too gravely, if a man feels as if one of the snakes of Medusa's head were certainly in his brain,—I have seen a horrible picture of the Medusa to-day by Leonardo da Vinci,—he cannot ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... bloom and decay; the poplars shed their leaves, and nourish by imperceptible degrees the fibres of the moss; some hardy grasses take root; and at length a scanty greensward appears. By such means slowly, in the microcosm of the dunes, have been evolved out of the changing sands places fit for men to live in, until now along the strip which guards the coast of Flanders there are green glades gay with flowers, and shady dells, and gardens sheltered from the wind, plots of pasture-land, cottages ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... creating God in his." But what else can we do? It follows from what has already been said that we know nothing and can know nothing of God except as we read Him in the universe, and we can only interpret the universe in terms of our own consciousness. In other words, man is a microcosm of the universe. What the universe may be in reality we do not know,—though I am not so sure as some people seem to be that appearance and reality do not correspond,—we can only know it in so far as it produces sense images on our brain and enters into our individual consciousness. The limits ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the first place that men as a rule are most strongly attached to the localities and the people with whom they are first brought closely in contact. Here in the family is the first true microcosm, the first community in which the individual is developed by association with his fellows. On the value of this earliest social training there are hardly two opinions, and we need not dwell upon ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... of astrology, which professed to interpret the events of human existence by the movements of the stars, the moon was one of the primary planets. As man was looked upon in the light of a microcosm, or world in miniature, so the several parts of his constitution were viewed as but a reproduction in brief of the great parts of the vast organism. Creation was a living, intelligent being, whose two eyes were the sun and the moon, whose body was the earth, whose intellect was ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... vain I no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday; For plated wares of Sheffield stamp We gave the old Aladdin's lamp; 'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went 51 That undesigned abandonment, That wise, unquestioning content, Which could erect its microcosm Out of a weed's neglected blossom, Could call up Arthur and his peers By a low moss's clump of spears, Or, in its shingle trireme launched, Where Charles in some green inlet-branched, Could venture for the golden fleece 60 And dragon-watched Hesperides, Or, from its ripple-shattered ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and his ivory leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew of all races and temperaments—the civilized, the barbarous, and the savage—in their ship, which is a microcosm, hints that creep in of the white whale whose nature is inimical to man and arouses passions deeper than gain or revenge—all this prepares the reader for something more than incident. From the mood of Defoe one passes, by jerks and reversions, to the atmosphere of "The ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... amuses itself—I mean the microcosm on board the steamer: people, ladies not excepted, play cards, drink coffee, and smoke. There is a good opportunity of studying the latest Parisian fashions, as worn by Roumanian belles; they know how to dress, do ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... know 'tis yours; and yet methinks, Auditus, you should have some challenge to it; But that your title, Tactus, is so good, Gustus, I would swear the coronet were yours: What, will you all go brawl about a trifle? View but the pleasant coast of Microcosm, Is't not great pity to be rent with wars? Is't not a shame to stain with brinish tears The smiling cheeks of ever-cheerful peace? Is't not far better to live quietly, Than broil in fury of dissension? Give me the crown, ye shall not disagree, If I can please you. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... undergone in the interval, as complete a representation of the man will be afforded as could be taken from any period of his career. Of the larger life whereof it is part, the Lausanne life is indeed a perfect microcosm, wanting only the London streets. This was his chief present want, as will shortly be perceived: but as yet the reader does not feel it, and he sees otherwise in all respects at his best the great observer and humourist; interested in everything that commended itself to a thoroughly earnest and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... nothing but will, which, properly speaking, is the thing in itself. Every human being discovers that he himself is this will, and that the world exists only for him does so in relation to his consciousness. Thus each human being is himself in a double aspect the whole world, the microcosm. And that which he realizes as his own real being exhausts the being of the whole world, the macrocosm. So, like man, the world is through and through will, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... flame has all the qualities of fire. The I AM in the individual is none other than the I AM in the universal. It is the same Power working in the smaller sphere of which the individual is the centre. This is the great truth which the ancients set forth under the figure of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, the lesser I AM reproducing the precise image of the greater, and of which the Bible tells us when it speaks of man as the image ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... can no longer be evaded. We must map out the microcosm, and allot to each sovereign power its quota of the surface. The great European states which have assumed within the century the supreme direction of human affairs are assigned a prominent central position ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... North's firm fortitude! Let him find for thee the secret tether That binds the Noble and Mean together. And teach thy pulses of youth and pleasure To love by rule, and hate by measure! I'd like, myself, such a one to see: Sir Microcosm his name ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... dusk the whispering lovers in the Campus, or the romping hide-and-seek of lads and lasses at the corners of the streets or squares, just as you may watch them to-day on spring or winter evenings amongst the lower arches of the Colosseum;—it is a microcosm, a cameo, of that old-world life. Horace knew, and feared not to say, that in his poems, in his Odes especially, he bequeathed a deathless legacy to mankind, while setting up a lasting monument to himself. One thing he could not know, that when ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... mean that we should abide here, whether with or against our inclinations?" said the dwarf. "Were it not that I am laid under charge to remain here, by one who hath the best right to command this poor microcosm, I would show thee that bolts and bars are unavailing restraints on such ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... home with a wounded heart, which all the smiles of Philippa could not heal—for Hoffland was his rival. Denis went home with a happy heart, for Lucy had smiled on him. Sir Asinus was miserable—boy Bathurst was happy. The ball at the Raleigh was a true microcosm, where John smiled and James sighed, and all played on, and went away miserable ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... and a family at supper, kind German folk, the old people, the younger married couple, and the grandchildren, and a big dog vociferously taking care of them. A lighted glimpse, a few hearty words of direction, and we were out in the night again; for though, indeed, this was Dutch Hollow, its simple microcosm did not include an hotel. For that we must walk on another half-mile or so. O those country half-miles! So on we went again, and soon a lighted stoop flashed on our right. At last! I mounted the steps ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... known among philosophers by the appellation of the microcosm, or epitome of the world: the resemblance between the great and little world might, by a rational observer, be detailed to many particulars; and to many more by a fanciful speculatist. I know not in which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the basis of every "cycle of life" is found the egg or germ, that strange microcosm which appears to contain within itself the entire organism from which it proceeds and which seems capable of manifesting it in its entirety. The first embryologic discovery we make as the result of this study—a discovery of the utmost importance—is that germs are one in essence, and ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... be fatal to the living inhabitants of the planets. Then will begin the greatest of cosmic events: a drama that has doubtless been played numbers of times already on the stage of the universe: the last stand of the wonderful microcosm against the brute force of the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... mediating element through its double function of supporting the activity of the three lower planets by means of its heat and of conveying to the earth, through its light, the forces of the three higher planets. In the human microcosm the Sun-forces accomplish a corresponding task by means of the influences which radiate from the heart through the body along the paths ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands. It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... still wandering, the day wore away, till he found himself in one of the lanes that surround that glittering Microcosm of the vices, the frivolities, the hollow show, and the real beggary of the gay City—the gardens and the galleries of the Palais Royal. Surprised at the lateness of the hour, it was then on the stroke of ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more from Symonds: "Dante brought the universe into his Divine Comedy. 'But the soul of man, too, is a universe', and of this inner microcosm Petrarch was the poet and genius. It remained for Boccaccio to treat of daily life with an art as distinct and dazzling as theirs. From Dante's Beatrice, through Petrarch's Laura, to Boccaccio's La ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that lie before us are perhaps the most wonderful and the most fascinating of all the fields of science. As the chapters of the preceding book carried us out into a macrocosm of inconceivable magnitude, our present studies are to reveal a microcosm of equally inconceivable smallness. As the studies of the physicist attempted to reveal the very nature of matter and of energy, we have now to seek the solution of the yet more inscrutable problems ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and 'barbarous' ground a quarter that should be 'polite', congruous in tone with the smooth river beyond it—this was the irresistible problem the Brothers set themselves and slowly, coolly, perfectly solved. So long as the Adelphi remains to us, a microcosm of the eighteenth century is ours. If there is any ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... much earnestness upon this truth, not only because of its enormous importance in its bearing upon our subject, but also because no one has hitherto considered it in that relation.' It was also pointed out that the coherence and correspondence of the macrocosm of the universe with the microcosm of the human mind can be accounted for by the fact that the human mind is only one of the products of general evolution, its subjective relations necessarily reflecting those external relations of which ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... for the stores. There wasn't in Sally's case, certainly, because it was Sunday; but there was tribulation awaiting her as soon as she could recollect her overdue analysis of the Major's concealed facts. She had put it off till leisure should come; and now that she was only looking at a microcosm of the garden seen through the window, and reflected upside down in the tea-urn, she had surely met with leisure. Her mind went back tentatively on the points of the old man's reminiscences, as she looked at her ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... who enjoyed immunities from labor, and from whom a majority of the rulers are chosen,—were listlessly regarding the promenaders from the street-corners or the doors of their bibulous temples. A slight premonitory thrill runs through the city. The busy life of this restless microcosm is arrested. The shopkeeper pauses as he elevates the goods to bring them into a favorable light, and the glib professional recommendation sticks on his tongue. In the drinking-saloon the glass is checked half-way ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... you, once on a time that you 'knew nothing of me'? whereat you demurred—but I meant what I said, and knew it was so. To be grand in a simile, for every poor speck of a Vesuvius or a Stromboli in my microcosm there are huge layers of ice and pits of black cold water—and I make the most of my two or three fire-eyes, because I know by experience, alas, how these tend to extinction—and the ice grows and grows—still this last is true part of me, most characteristic part, best part perhaps, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... through their long aisles,—like incense mingling with the exhalations of a crypt. He stopped now and then to part the heavy fronds down to their roots in the dank moss, seeing again, as he had told the editor, the weird SECOND twilight through their miniature stems, and the microcosm of life that filled it. But, even while paying this tribute to the accuracy of the unknown poetess, he was, like his predecessor, haunted more strongly by the atmosphere and melody of her verse. Its spell was upon him, too. Unlike Mr. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... a blessing; and man's best work, of every kind, is done in the friction of life, not in ease and quiet. Man is, further, a being composed of cells, tissues, and organs, which were successively developed for him by the lower animal kingdoms. The old view, that man was the microcosm, had in it a certain amount of every important truth. We need to be continually reminded of our indebtedness in a thousand ways to the lowest and most insignificant forms ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... ripened, his outlook became more adequate to the infinite complexity and variety of the phenomena with which he has to deal. And throughout, both in the lower and in the higher stages of intellectual development, the same truth unchangingly asserts itself, that man is a microcosm. His reason proves it by finding itself in the macrocosm. And what holds good of the imperfect and recently developed rational faculties holds good even more substantially of the fundamental instincts and emotions, and of intuitions ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... disease, to each part of the body, its particular workman; for that part was more properly and with less confusion cared for, seeing the person looked to nothing else. Ours are not aware that he who provides for all, provides for nothing; and that the entire government of this microcosm is more than they are able to undertake. Whilst they were afraid of stopping a dysentery, lest they should put the patient into a fever, they killed me a friend, —[Estienne de la Boetie.]—who was worth more than the whole of them. They counterpoise ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind them of this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, the more humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosm the more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... that it evolutes out, but the life principle, the soul of these bodies, giving and receiving it back in our little solar system, as the "Universal Life-giver," the ONE LIFE gives and receives it in the Infinitude and Eternity; that the Solar System is as much the Microcosm of the One Macrocosm, as man is the former when compared with his own ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... almost a technical term to-day, susceptible, one would have said, of refinements of difference infinitely more various than anything that could have existed more than two hundred years ago; yet one cannot but feel that this observer would have been fully equal to drawing our microcosm as well as his own. Earle's is a penetrating observation which is always fresh—so fresh that no archaism of phrase in him, and no cheery optimism in ourselves, can disguise the fact that it is our weaknesses he is probing, our motives he ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... to some being in the external world. At a certain stage of his development the occult student comes to a realization of this relation of his own being to the great cosmos, and this stage of development may in the occult sense be termed a becoming aware of the relationship of the little world, the microcosm—that is, man himself—to the great world, the macrocosm. And when the occult student has struggled through to such cognition, he may then go through a new experience; he begins to feel himself united, as it were, with the entire cosmic structure, although he remains fully ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... says, relatively to a particular phenomenon, "whether it is in the body, or out of the body." Be it however where or what it may, it is this which constitutes the great essence of, and gives value to, our existence; and all the wonders of our microcosm would without it be a form only, destined immediately to perish, and of no greater account than as a clod of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... some hitherto untranslated novelettes by Turgenev which seem to me to rank among his masterpieces. In each of them he has compressed a whole life cycle into a brief series of significant incidents and made them the microcosm of a larger human world. This is one of the most important ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of Wales is the Bismarck of London society: he is also its microcosm. All its idiosyncrasies are reflected in the person of His Royal Highness. Its hopes, its fears, its aspirations, its solicitudes, its susceptibilities, its philosophy, its way of looking at life and of appraising character—of each of these is the Heir-Apparent the ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. It may seem an audacious proposal thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm, and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends; but I venture to think that the great intellectual difference between the ancient times with which we have been occupied and our day, lies in the solid foundation we have ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... The notion that you can represent the mind of the nation on a basis of functions is the merest moonshine. The most you can hope for is to get a body of 700 men and women who will form a sort of microcosm of the more intelligent mind of the nation, and trust to it to control your Government. Such a body will consist of men who follow various trades. But the conditions under which they are chosen ought to be such as to impress upon them the duty of thinking of the national interest as a whole in ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... chief proportion of foreign beasts, were indeed the very reason why, in the lesser towns of the empire, the sports of the amphitheatre were comparatively humane and rare; and in this, as in other respects, Pompeii was but the miniature, the microcosm of Rome. Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle, with which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare—a vast theatre, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings, from fifteen to eighteen thousand ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the school as an organism, a social microcosm, a little society within the great human society, having its resemblances to, and its differences from, the family and the nation, is one that the new development of "child-study" seems bound to promote and advance. Rank paternalism has made its exit from the great ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... as man is, and must be, the comprehensive end of all creatures, and the microcosm, he is counselled in the Revelation to buy gold that is thoroughly fired, or rather pure fire, that he may become rich and like the sun; as, on the contrary, he becomes poor, when he abuses the arsenical ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... of the rooms Constance found a certain old philosopher, whom I will call David Mandeville. There was something about this man that always charmed those who had sense enough to be discontented with the ordinary inhabitants of the Microcosm,—Society. The expression of his countenance was different from that of others: there was a breathing goodness in his face—an expansion of mind on his forehead. You perceived at once that he did not live among triflers, nor agitate himself with trifles. Serenity beamed from his look—but ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not so much on this direct pathway to God through the soul as upon the symbolic character of the world of Nature as a visible revelation of an invisible Universe, and upon the idea that man is a microcosm, a little world, reproducing in epitome, point for point, though in miniature, the great world, or macrocosm. On this line of thought, everything is double. The things that are seen are parables of other things which are not seen. They are like printed words which mean something ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... had come to see that, as had been told him long before, the kingdoms of this world were already passing into the hands of a higher dominion—and this was the significance of this microcosm of those kingdoms that now lay ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... appeared with his pills, and cured his lordship, as per advertisement, &c. &c.. Numberless instances might be adduced to show that when a nation is in great want, the relief is at hand; just as in the Pantomime (that microcosm) where when CLOWN wants anything—a warming-pan, a pump-handle, a goose, or a lady's tippet—a fellow comes sauntering out from behind the side-scenes with the very ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are two primary classes of idea about government in the modern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity of the common man. We may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideas and wishes about the state and the world, or we may suppose that he isn't. We may believe that the common man can govern, or we may believe that he can't. We may think further along the first line that he is so wise and good and right that we only have to get ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... thou art at once the sweetest blossom that ever perfumed the bowers of Paradise, and the most poignant thorn that grows in the empoisoned shadows of everlasting Pain! But for thee, mad sorceress, every individual life were a microcosm, complete within itself. We would live but our own life, suffer our own pangs, and dying, descend without a sigh to ever dreamless sleep; but thy soft fingers do sweep the human harpsichord, the ego doth "pass in music out of sight"; the single note of life is blended ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... confrere; his potations are not deep, nor is he quick to quarrel. Then let him race on the Neutral Ground; let him hunt with the Calpe pack; and let him back his fancy for the big event at Epsom. Those are his chief excitements at Gib, and help to give a fillip to life in that circumscribed microcosm, pending the anxiously expected morn when the route will come, or, mayhap, the call to active service, in one of those petty wars which are constantly breaking the monotony ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... disproportionate to the child's stature, so far from his organs of prehension, so much above his horizontal line of vision, so much ampler than his immediate surroundings, that there is, between him and all these big things, a gap to be filled only by a microcosm of playthings which give him his first object-lessons. In proof of which let him see a lady richly dressed, he hardly notices her; let him see a doll in similar attire, he will be ravished with ecstasy. As if to show that it was the disproportion ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... that the Jennings School was a perfect microcosm, as the scientists would say, of the human race—the serious very few, toiling more or less successfully toward a definite goal; the many, compelled to do something, and imagining themselves serious ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... had nothing to do; and like the rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously introspective. Those honourable saintly combats of the past with external enemies and plagues and stormy seasons were transplanted from without into the microcosm within, taking the shape of hallucinations and demon-temptations. They were no longer actors, but sufferers; automata, who attained a degree of inanity which would have made their old Byzantine prototypes burst ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... speak to thee. Though folly's microcosm, man, it seems, Himself to be a perfect whole esteems: Part of the part am I, which at the first was all, A part of darkness, which gave birth to light, Proud light, who now his mother would enthrall, Contesting space and ancient rank with night. Yet he succeedeth ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... most satisfactory development, playing out in classical microcosm the massive behavior of total man. For, as everyone knew, had men ever been able to settle their differences, had man been able to get along peacefully with himself, he might have developed no ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... restore her purity or save her from her wrong done against herself. It is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with great intensity. Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination. For once in James Lee's Wife (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity James Lee), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We sit at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing or walking, we love to take brains easy. If this delightful chatterbox had been taken down shorthand and printed, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... antithesis of God and the world, needed a mediator who was, and yet was not God, as well as world. From this contrast, however, it further followed that we can only think of a world-formation by the Logos, not of a world-creation.[113] Within this world man is regarded as a microcosm, that is, as a being of Divine nature according to his spirit, who belongs to the heavenly world, while the adhering body is a prison which holds men captive in the fetters of sense, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... hard world, and when his brother writers were poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities, idiosyncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore. It is quite true: London is a microcosm, an endless and bottomless Babylon; which, perhaps, no man has ever known so well as did Charles Dickens. This was his library: here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human nature, which some are inclined ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... object she had in view, that of compassing her ends, she could also be as frigid as an icicle, when it likewise so suited her purpose. "Respectability" and "position" were her gods:—the "world"—her world!—her microcosm. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... body, but from understanding and will; therefore by the natural man and the spiritual man is meant that man's understanding and will are either natural or spiritual. The natural man in respect to his understanding and will is like the natural world, and may be called a world or microcosm; and the spiritual man in respect to his understanding and will is like the spiritual world, and may be called a spiritual world or heaven. From which it is evident that as the natural man is in a kind of image a natural world, so he loves those ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... himself in all his best array; But in the midst of all his bravery Death rounds him in the ear, "Friend, thou must die." Or like a shadow in a sunny day, Which in a moment vanishes away; Or like a smile or spark,—such is the span Of life allowed this microcosm, Man. Cease then vain man to boast; for this is true, Thy brightest glory's as the morning dew, Which disappears when first the rising sun Displays his ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... 1840's, where Lola found herself cast adrift, was a curious microcosm and full of contrasts. A mixture of unabashed blackguardism and cloistered prudery; of double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... our social environment which should not be omitted was the prevalence of a Southern flavor. In our microcosm, this reflected the general sentiment of the world outside, then slowly freeing itself from the spirit of compromise which had dominated the statesmanship of two generations in their efforts to reconcile the incompatible. There were certainly strong Northern men in plenty, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... ideas are judged from internal events. It is our microcosm opposed to the macrocosm. It is the individual opposed to the social. Looking at an external object, we remain in communion with our fellows, for we receive, or think we receive, identical sensations. At all events, we receive corresponding sensations. On ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... Juan saw that microcosm on stilts, Yclept the Great World; for it is the least, Although the highest: but as swords have hilts By which their power of mischief is increased, When man in battle or in quarrel tilts, Thus ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the reflections which the fact of it awoke in me. There are other reflections connected with Yva and the marvel of her love and its various manifestations which arise also. But these I keep to myself. They concern the wonder of woman's heart, which is a microcosm of the hopes and fears and desires and despairs of this humanity of ours whereof from age to age ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... wrought upon by her fury and the suggestion of Don Inocencio. The scene where they work him up to rebellion and assassination is a compendium of the history of intolerance; as the mean little conceited city of Orbajosas is the microcosm of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... of arteries and veins, of capillaries and nerves; of the blood, with the millions of millions of blood corpuscles, each a microcosm in itself. ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... solar system is concerned in what is being done at this particular point of space. But, in a certain measure, and for the special end I am pursuing, I may admit that things happen as if the group water-kettle-stove were an independent microcosm. That is my first affirmation. Now, when I say that this microcosm will always behave in the same way, that the heat will necessarily, at the end of a certain time, cause the boiling of the water, I admit that it is sufficient that a certain number of elements ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... made, imperfect as this confessedly is, to connect under one point of view these several grand classes of facts. We cannot fathom the marvellous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... called Rest. They boarded the first car and were soon speeding on through Dismal Tunnel. It was a welcome moment when the car emerged from the darkness into the light of day and took its winding course upward toward the microcosm of schools, which, as seen from this side of the mountain, also presented a ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... and Contagious Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes within us; Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the Divel has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... prophet of nationalism that this man compels our particular attention. The prophecy is embodied in a play entitled "The Comet, a Play of Our Times," brought out as far back as 1908. The play is a microcosm of American life. The chief character is a college president, and he it is that is chosen to expound the true nature of nationalism and to give voice and utterance to the principle of self-determination. ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... them alive? There, I will not puzzle you with too much at once; you will know more about all that some day. Only remember now, that there is nothing wonderful in the world outside you but has its counterpart of something just as wonderful, and perhaps more wonderful, inside you. Man is the microcosm, the little world, said the philosophers of old; and philosophers nowadays are beginning to see that their old guess is actual ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... Considering what is implied by the human brain with its countless millions of cells, its complexities of minute structure, its innumerable chemical compositions, and the condensed forces in its microscopic and ultramicroscopic elements—the whole a sort of microcosm of cosmic forces to which no conceivable compound of electric batteries is comparable; considering, again, that from an electric station waves of energy radiate through the viewless air to be caught up by a fit ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... professors?—of such it may truly be said, that their wisdom is foolishness—for none truly wise ever felt, in the researches of man, any ground of arrogance, while pursuits of philosophy serve only to teach humility!—But to what purpose tend such observations? Every man is his own microcosm, and his case, in his own view, is that of no other man! Pride will always find food in self-love, which in spite of exhortations, it will devour with ravenous appetite! If men were immortal, how intolerable ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, of the Universe and of the individual soul as a perfect compendium thereof. All the great cosmic processes are to be ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... wilderness—indeed it is everything else. It is a great world, containing a thousand little worlds in its bosom; and pop yourself down in it in any quarter you will, you are sure to find yourself in the centre of some peculiar microcosm distinguished from all others by features more ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... life of Athens. Nursed by the sea, and filled with the love of enterprise and freedom which that element inspires, both peoples sought wider spheres for their commerce, and homes more spacious and wealthy than their narrow cradles offered; but, above all, they longed to found a microcosm of Athens or England, with as little control from the mother-land as ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... respectability of this wood could not be disputed, and it had a sort of natural dignity that harmonized with the father's solid taste—though the mother might have preferred something lighter and brighter. And a microcosm of mahogany might, after all, be worth living for when loftier illusions had ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... He seemed the true microcosm, or little world to himself: standing in no need of levying contributions upon the surrounding universe. Conjecture was lost in speculating as to who he was, and what was his business. The sailors, who are always curious with regard ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... of the new revelation was poured, has never quite disappeared from the Church, and in times of excitement and upheaval it tends to reassert itself. The maturest Greek philosophy regards eternity as the divine mode of existence, while mortals are born, live, and die in time. Man is a microcosm, in touch with every rung of the ladder of existence; and he is potentially a 'participator' in the divine mode of existence, which he can make his own by living, so far as may be, in detachment from the vain ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... in the social and political history of the State. It bred in Illinois statesmen a disposition to compromise for the sake of political harmony and economic progress, a passionate attachment to the Union as the sine qua non of State unity, and a glowing nationalism. Illinois was in short a microcosm: the larger problems of the nation ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... to be held by her own free consent, in perfect contentment, the whole of our contention falls to the ground—for our policy in Ireland is only in microcosm our policy of Empire; and Germany will be able to point the finger of scorn and ridicule at us, and prove thereby to France and Russia that, tyrants at home, we only used them to fight a battle we dared ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... idea, of the localization of the Spirit through the "Word," should be fully realized as the energizing principle on the scale of the Macrocosm or "Great World," because, as we shall find later on, the same principle acts in the same way on the scale of the Microcosm or "Small World," which is the individual man. This is why these things have a personal interest for us, otherwise they would not be worth troubling about. But a mistake to be avoided at this point, is that of ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... upon a mind formed and upon principles developed: how infinitely more powerful must the influence of such communion be upon a youthful heart, ardent, innocent, and unpractised! As Vivian was not to figure in the microcosm of a public school, a place for which, from his temper, he was almost better fitted than any young genius whom the playing fields of Eton or the hills of Winton can remember, there was some difficulty in fixing ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... not a poet or a genius, was thinking, and thinking only of Maltravers.... His image was "the broken mirror" multiplied in a thousand faithful fragments over everything fair and soft in that lovely microcosm before her. But they were both alike in one thing—they were not with the Future, they were sensible of the Present—the sense of the actual life, the enjoyment of the breathing time was strong within them. Such ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The newspaper tells the small community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues of male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the occurrences and comments of the ever-stirring microcosm. The fact that the Italian teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten years before was circulated and made the most of,—turned over and over like a cake, until it was thoroughly done on both sides and all through. It was a very small cake, but better than nothing. ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... food we eat is valuable or otherwise as a life sustainer, in proportion to the amount of life it contains. We are so complex in our organization that, we require a great variety of the different elements to sustain all the active functions and powers within us. Man, being a microcosm, or a miniature universe, must sustain that universe, by taking into the system the various elements, which combine to make up the Infinite Universe of God. Animal flesh is necessary to certain organized forms, both animal and ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... produce blood poisons enough by our irrational diet and modes of living? The human body is a microcosm—a world in minature—and as such, exists in constant ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... gardens and to give to sleep none of the balmy nights in this gay capital, where the night was illuminated like the day, and some new pleasure or delight always led along the sparkling hours. Any day the Garden of the Tuileries was a microcosm repaying study. There idle Paris sunned itself; through it the promenaders flowed from the Rue de Rivoli gate by the palace to the entrance on the Place de la Concorde, out to the Champs-Elysees and back again; here in the north grove gathered thousands to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... God henceforth as embodied in all living forms; as dwelling in them; as being that power in them whereby they have learnt to fashion themselves, each one according to its ideas of its own convenience, and to make itself not only a microcosm, or little world, but a little unwritten history of the universe from its own point of view into the bargain? From everlasting, in time past, only in so far as life has lasted; invisible, only in ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... entirely the chaste spirituality of the Greek line was lost in the round and lusty curves which are the inevitable footprints of Sensual Life, scarcely needs further amplification. I have referred to the Ionic capital of the Erechtheum as containing a microcosm of Attic Art, as presenting a fair epitome of the thought and love which Hellenic artists offered in the worship of their gods. Turn now to the Roman Ionic, as developed in any one of the most familiar examples ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... "There goes my English microcosm, all my new English friends with whom I was going to pass the rest of my life, peaceful and contented, as a village surgeon. Pretty dream, two years long! Truly man hath no sure abiding place here. I will go ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... this sensible world, which is called the macrocosm—that is, the long world—enters into our soul, which is called the microcosm—that is, the little world—through the gates of the five senses, as regards the apprehension, delectation, and distinction of these sensible things; which is manifest in this way:—In the sensible world some things are generant, others are generated, and others direct both these. Generant are the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... light, even if it is partial and uncertain, on the complex struggle of human will and purpose, not yet finished, which, concentrated in the persons of four individuals in a manner never paralleled, made them, in the first months of 1919, the microcosm of mankind. ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... almost unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost. Once more I was limited to the humiliating cage of a body, not easily accommodative to the Spirit. Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Forest proper, the local war-chant, 'Yaller for iver, an' Blue in the river!' was shouted everywhere. But the constituency, 'a microcosm of England, industrial and agricultural,' as Sir Charles had called it, had districts where support of the 'working man's candidate' could only be whispered; where closed hands were furtively opened to show ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the world are made to form one universe. He believed that by virtue of an inward energy monads develop themselves spontaneously, each being independent of every other. In short, each monad is a kind of deity in itself—a microcosm representing all the great features of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to- gether, and makes good the method of God and nature, that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incom- patible distances by some middle and participating natures. That we are the breath and similitude of God, it is indisputable, and upon record of Holy Scripture: but to call ourselves a microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a pleasant trope of rhetorick, till my near judgment and second thoughts told me there was a real truth therein. For, first we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures which only are, and have a dull kind of being, not yet privileged ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... Truth! I am the Truth!" we hear the God-drunk gnostic cry "The microcosm abides in ME; Eternal ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... to the part it plays. Death being the penalty, it may not blunder. Behold, among acres of similar growth, a trivial collection of rough, short weeds of the sea—grey, green and mud-coloured. This microcosm glides and stops. The movement is barely perceptible; the intervals of rest long and frequent. An untimely slide as the chance gaze of the observer is directed to the spot, betrays that here is the centre of independent ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the first remove from the tohu va-vohu was when the Spirit of God brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic. It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round restlessly by a ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... explain himself, nor did I make any remark on his reply. Our silence endured for some miles, till the country with open fields, or shady woods and parks, presented pleasant objects to our view. After some observations on the scenery and seats, Raymond said: "Philosophers have called man a microcosm of nature, and find a reflection in the internal mind for all this machinery visibly at work around us. This theory has often been a source of amusement to me; and many an idle hour have I spent, exercising my ingenuity ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... facts are strongly against Huxley's view, for Darwin's attention was "thoroughly aroused{10}" by comparing the birds shot by himself and by others on board. The case must have struck him at once,—without waiting for accurate determinations,—as a microcosm ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... being is a microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... never occurs to one to think of the limitation of conditions or material. So with his life, the shortness of man's 'term' is never felt; one could win no completer effect with eternity than he with every day. Hurry and false starts seem unknown in his round, and his little home is a microcosm ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... consideration, that in all the countries which he had visited, which are sufficiently civilized to boast of cooks, these artists, toiling in their fiery element, have a privilege to be testy and impatient. He therefore retreated from the torrid region of Mrs. Dods's microcosm, and employed his time in the usual devices of loiterers, partly by walking for an appetite, partly by observing the progress of his watch towards three o'clock, when he had happily succeeded in getting an employment more serious. His table, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists; and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy Scriptures: first, in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of certain parasites not unknown in civilization. Benumbed with, frost, the insects lose their hold and fall into the snow, to the great comfort of those who nursed and fed them. The body of a Koriak, considered as a microcosm, is ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... his or her life as a single cell—a fertilised egg-cell, a treasure-house of all the ages. For in this living microcosm, only a small fraction (1/125) of an inch in diameter, there is condensed—who can imagine how?—all the natural inheritance of man, all the legacy of his parentage, of his ancestry, of his long pre-human pedigree. Darwin called the pinhead brain of the ant ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... vengeance. It was therefore not surprising that, when my turn came, I did to others as I had been done by. Jackson had no excuse for his treatment of me, whereas, I had every excuse for retaliation. He did know better, I did not. I followed the ways of the world in the petty microcosm in which I had been placed. I knew not of mercy, of forgiveness, charity, or goodwill. I knew not that there was a God; I only knew that might was right, and the most pleasurable sensation which I felt, ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... other groups put together, and are contained in the first volume of this issue. They form a fairly complete survey of English history from the time of Elizabeth to the later years of the reign of George III, and are fitly introduced by the Essay on Hallam's History, which forms a kind of summary or microcosm of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... domain of a new and unfamiliar caste system and so offended its etiquette. An unconscious theological bias was also present which confounds ignorance with faith. It is forgotten that He, who surrounded us with this ever-evolving mystery of creation, the ineffable wonder that lies hidden in the microcosm of the dust particle, enclosing within the intricacies of its atomic form all the mystery of the cosmos, has also implanted in us the desire to question and understand. To the theological bias was added the misgivings about the inherent bent of the Indian mind ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Sea" originated. This book is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley |
