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More "Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... branches, he gave me a list of the requisite books, which were in French, and consisted of Francoeur's pure "Mathematics," and his "Elements of Mechanics," La Croix's "Algebra," and his large work on the "Differential and Integral Calculus," together with his work on "Finite Differences and Series," Biot's "Analytical Geometry and Astronomy," Poisson's "Treatise on Mechanics," La Grange's "Theory of Analytical Functions," Euler's "Algebra," Euler's "Isoperimetrical Problems" (in Latin), Clairault's "Figure of the Earth," Monge's "Application of Analysis to Geometry," ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... diverse is generated the Universe. Hence the progression from ascent to descent, from spirit to that which we call matter; from the cause to the origin, and the process of metaphysics, which, from the finite world of sense rises to the intelligent, passing through the intermediate numbers of infinite substance to active being ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... known properties, but properties yet undiscovered, it is not optional but imperative to recognize this difference as the foundation of a specific distinction; while, on the contrary, differences that are merely finite and determinate, like those designated by the words white, black, or red, may be disregarded if the purpose for which the classification is made does not require attention to those particular properties. The differences, however, are made by nature, in both cases; while the recognition of those ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the retina should remain unaltered. Such a central anaesthesia would just as well account for the phenomena which have been enumerated. The three luminous images could be supposed to remain unmodified for a finite interval as positive after-images, and as such first to appear in consciousness. Inasmuch as 'the arc of eye movements was 4.7 deg.' only, the time would be too brief to make possible any reliable judgment as to whether the three holes were seen during or just after the eye-movement. With this point ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... describe, when judged from its lapses than from its constancy. When the infidel admits God is great, he means only: "I am lazy—it is easier to talk than live." Ruskin also says: "Suppose I like the finite curves best, who shall say I'm right or wrong? No one. It is simply a question of experience." You may not be able to experience a symphony, even after twenty performances. Initial coherence today may be dullness tomorrow probably because formal or outward unity depends so much on repetition, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... of certain and definite properties to be differences in the accidents of things. In conformity with this distinction—and it is a true one—any class, e.g. negro as opposed to white man, may, according as physiology shall show the differences to be infinite or finite, be discovered to be a distinct kind or species (though not according to the naturalist's construction of species, as including all descended from the same stock), or merely a subdivision of the kind ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... makes Eucken's positive idealism specially valuable is his application of it to religion. Religion has been in all ages the mighty uplifting power in human life. It stands for a negation of the finite and fleeting, and an affirmation of the spiritual and the eternal. This is specially true of the Christian religion. Christianity is the supreme type of religion because it best answers the question, 'What can religion do for life?' ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... "But (for we far have wander'd) let us seek The forward path again; so as the way Be shorten'd with the time. No mortal tongue Nor thought of man hath ever reach'd so far, That of these natures he might count the tribes. What Daniel of their thousands hath reveal'd With finite number infinite conceals. The fountain at whose source these drink their beams, With light supplies them in as many modes, As there are splendours, that it shines on: each According to the virtue it conceives, Differing in love and sweet affection. Look then how lofty and how huge in breadth ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... thy freedom, thy resemblance lies To thy Creator. Nature, which, tide-wise, Is flood and ebb, bounds not sky flight for thee. Lo! as the sun arises from the sea, Startling all beauty God-ward, thou dost rise With mind to God in heaven, from finite ties, And there, in freedom, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... clever enough—if he is not narrow, insolent, and unbalanced—he will usually contrive while pleasing himself to please the public, or a public. It is his business to do so. If he does not do so he proves himself incompetent. He is merely mumbling to himself. Just as the finite connotes the infinite, so an artist connotes a public. The artist who says he doesn't care a fig for the public is a liar. He may have many admirable virtues, but he is a liar. The tragedy of all the smaller literary periodicals in France is that the breach ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... the hail streams down. With what profound truth all this destructive power is represented as coming from the brightness of God—that "glory" which in its own nature is light, but in its contact with finite and sinful creatures must needs become darkness, rent asunder by lightning! What lessons as to the root and the essential nature of all punitive acts of God cluster round such words! and how calm and blessed the faith ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... mean that the totality of matter is finite?—that it can be viewed, spiritually, from the outside,—even from such a distance as to appear infinitely small? If so, can there be infinite power, either material or spiritual? If the universe is spherical because its molecules are, can the molecules ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... wickedness. It has undertaken to create in the world a moral force capable of controlling and humanizing material forces. To this doctrine, which rests upon man as its centre and which was essentially human, German thought opposes itself as the infinite opposes the finite, the absolute the relative, the whole the part. The disciples of the Greeks had at their disposition no light except that of human reason; the German genius possesses a transcendent reason which pierces the mysteries of the absolute, of ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... contrary. Their doubts arise not from pride, but from humility: not because they do not appreciate divine truth, but on the contrary they doubt whether we can appreciate it sufficiently, and are sceptical whether the infinite can be reduced to the finite. ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown earth, and green wheat, and old grass faded from russet to lavender, with the gray woods worming their way through ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... to our minds for ever. This one idea, expanded in the breast of the laborer, is a germ of elevation more fruitful than all science, no matter how extensive or profound, which treats only of outward finite things. It places him in the first rank of human beings. You hear of great theologians. He only deserves the name, be his condition what it may, who has, by thought and obedience, purified and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... reached the last possible analysis; but we do not stop here, but by the assumption of attributes we again reach the highest possible synthesis. This must be the method of the divine activity, successive differentiation and integration, the closing in of a mighty circle of infinity, embracing all the finite, but never losing the essential characteristic of ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... and weight of each planet quickly by measuring its attractive power. He did not realize that he had cut out for himself work that would require many men and several centuries to cover, but surely he was on the right scent—a finite man keen upon the secrets ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily. The white light of publicity is too white. We are weighed upon by too many things. It is as if the wisdom of the infinite were struggling to beat itself into finite and cup-big minds. ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... tired brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, found ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is a solid, sympathetic, and now and then glorified, and yet dumb, highway between God and man. Her beauty belongs to the Spirit that she does not know, and it speaks to the Spirit that is older than her child. She is a mute, unconscious sacrament between the infinite reason and the finite, a path for the lightning that plays backward and forward between the soul of man and the soul of God. The great primal fact in the human environment is that man is the interpreter of nature. In this character of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... it is the earth which is in motion, while the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sun rise one finds it impossible to believe the sun not to be really rising, so the body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems otherwise to finite sense; but we shall never understand this while we admit that soul is in body, or mind in matter, and that man is included in non-intelligence. Soul is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man coexists with and reflects Soul, for the All-in-all is the Altogether, and the Altogether embraces ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... yet when we come to live in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-shore is a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the shore as for the limited vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, 'We have seen the horizon line'; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after hour, so great ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... both contrasts there is that sense of futility and failure, of alienation and misunderstanding—that element of underlying pathos, in short, which so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite of resemblance—of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which all ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... appeared, from time to time, to whom the things seen were but a passing phantom, the things unseen the only true and eternal realities; who, tormented alike by the awfulness of the infinite unknown, and by the petty cares and low passions of the finite mortal life which they knew but too well, had determined to renounce the latter, that they might give themselves up to solving the riddle of the former; and be at peace; and free, at least, from the tyranny of their own selves. Eight hundred years before St. Antony fled into ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... he employ? The advocates of the XV. Amendment put words into our mouths, and they must answer for them if they seem too extravagant. There is nothing under the sun that will so arouse man or woman as the fact that another, as needy, as finite as himself, sets stakes in the path of his progress, and says, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." It is this assumption of men, most grievous to be borne, that has compelled woman to ask that the stakes be removed, and she be permitted to go ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... cut down the number of elective offices, focus the attention on a few alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter. The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because "logic" requires ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... they arrive at that belief by finding something which transcends them and which they cannot understand; i.e. by an intellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense of disappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a common road, to belief in gods. Mr. Mueller's omission, moreover, from his definition, of the practical side of religion, of the element of worship, is a fatal objection to it. Belief ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... into the sky and a cold air rustled in the trees. "Of course, of course," he muttered, for he could see himself and her in the dawn together, united again and tasting again in a kiss infinity. In her kiss he had tasted that unity, that binding together of the mortal to the immortal, of the finite to the infinite, which Paracelsus—He tried to recall the words, "He who tastes a crust of bread has tasted of the universe, even to the furthest star." She had always been his universe, and he had always believed that she had come out of the star-shine ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... down to a calm and placid contentment with our lot. We begin to see what results are possible to us, and there are signs that our chrysalis condition is finite after all, and that some reward for our toil will be ours ere long. The days of our worst poverty and difficulty lie behind us, and ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... that I had perpetrated. I had been comparing life with life, that is, the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite. The process was vain. It was like comparing force with force, matter with matter, nothing with nothing. It was like saying in mathematics that A equals A, or O equals O. Thus the only answer ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... conceptions possible of Divine Truth before another soul who may have an immeasurably larger vision than you have. Oh, the pitiableness of man's colossal conceit, the arrogance of his ignorance. As if the God of the Universe were so small that one paltry, finite man could contain in his pint measure of a mind all the ocean of His power, knowledge, and love. Let your small and wretched worries go. Have a little larger faith in the Love of the Infinite One. Tenderly love and trust those whose welfare you seek, and ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... irony of life will perhaps never be understood in its casual aspect by the finite mind of man. The 'why' and 'wherefore' and the 'how' of it is only to be understood by that All-wise intelligence which can scan the future as well as the present, and see the far far-reaching ramifications of those schemes of final development to ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy. Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was "powerfully affected" only by that "which is conversant with or turns upon infinity," and man is to him a being with such a relationship to infinity ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... however, there is no absolute destitution, and as long as the provisions last I do not think that there will be. So long as flour and meat last, everyone with more or less trouble will get his share. As the amount of both these articles is, however, finite, one of these days we shall hear that they are exhausted. The proprietors have been deprived of their power to sue for rents, consequently a family requires but little ready money to rub on from hand to mouth. My landlord every week presents me ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... didst create us!" Naught impedes We voice the other name, man's most of might, Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love Mutely await their working, leave to sight All of the issue as—below—above— Shakespeare's creation rises: one remove, Though dread—this finite from that infinite. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... gets up speed, glows again. If the brake be screwed up tight, the lamp once more becomes dark. The explanation is simple. Owing to the coefficient of self-induction of the dynamo machine being considerable, it takes a finite time for the current to obtain an appreciable intensity, but the lamp having no self-induction, the current at once passes through it, and causes it to glow. Secondly, the electrical inertia of the dynamo being overcome, it must draw a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... all the freshness of its primal grace, stretching out its arms from a new-born world towards the infinite Creator, had expressed, with extraordinary pathos, the weakness, the failure, almost the non-existence of what is finite. "I Am Who Am" thundered Almighty Power, and how little, how helpless, ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... inversion which tries to make the assumed infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an invented god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his researches was arrested for napping on his own paepae partly clothed. The parson ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... whereby a thing endeavours to persist in its own being, involves no finite time, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... utterance of some human being in the very last extremity of both physical and mental anguish, the protest of a lost soul being wrenched violently out of its sinful human tenement, cries of such utter, unimaginable despair as the finite mind of man is unable to find a cause for. Yet, despite the agony of horror that froze my blood, I instinctively thrust my helm hard down and flattened in the sheets fore and aft; for the thought came to me that, perchance, a ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... never failed to urge her to seek for that strength from on high which will always be granted when asked for with a believing heart; and to place her reliance on Him who orders all for the best, though man, with his finite powers of mind, often fails to ...
— The Two Shipmates • William H. G. Kingston
... full value and strength. Whether we glance back and compare his performance with the efforts of his predecessors, or look forward along the course which modern research is disclosing, we shall honour most in him not the rounded merit of finite accomplishment, but the creative power by which he inaugurated a line of discovery endless in variety and extension. Let us attempt thus to see his work in true perspective between the past from ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... as due to the formation in the copper, of a pole of the opposite kind to that approximated, surrounded by a diffuse polarity of the same kind (82.); neither is it essential that the plate should acquire and lose its state in a finite time; nor on the other hand does it seem necessary that any repulsive force should be admitted as the ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... they believe it Giving is an ambitious and authoritative quality Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one Gradations above and below pleasure Gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder Great presumption to be so ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... noble and the reward is great." Quite right. It would be no greater miracle that brought us into another world to live forever with our dearest than that which has brought us into this one to live a lifetime with them. Both are equally incomprehensible to finite beings. Let us therefore comfort ourselves with everlasting hope, "as with enchantments," as Plato recommends, never forgetting, however, that we all have our duties here and that the kingdom of heaven is within us. It also ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. "What is described in concepts," he tells us, "is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity." Schelling, who is a poet as well as a philosopher, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... its objects are not things of reflection, association, discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it. Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space, but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to be, or ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and a gentleman, but a determined foe to loose thinking (especially in Cambridge men), courteously acknowledged the gift, but took occasion to remind his brother of Helleston that Reflection was a retrospective process; that Man, as a finite creature, could but anticipate events before they happened; and that if the parishioners of Helleston wished to reflect on the New Century they would have to wait until January 1901, or something more than a ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Occasionally the brethren failed to live in unity. They were human. But, at all times, back of them were the serenity and judgment and resources of the Church and with them went the engendered confidence that all would be well, whatever befell of finite sort. It has been said that faith removes mountains. The faith that came with these pioneers was well backed and carried with it brawn ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... over, that all is not lost. This very creature that we pursue, he take hundreds of years to get so far as London. And yet in one day, when we know of the disposal of him we drive him out. He is finite, though he is powerful to do much harm and suffers not as we do. But we are strong, each in our purpose, and we are all more strong together. Take heart afresh, dear husband of Madam Mina. This battle is but begun and in the end we shall win. So sure as that God sits on high to watch ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... years to 4, and so on, shall as soon reach eternity as he that adds 400,000,000 of years, and so on; or, if he please, doubles the increase as often as he will: the remaining abyss being still as far beyond the end of all these progressions as it is from the length of a day or an hour. For nothing finite bears any proportion to infinite; and therefore our ideas, which are all finite, cannot bear any. Thus it is also in our idea of extension, when we increase it by addition, as well as when we diminish it by division, and would enlarge our thoughts to infinite space. After ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... contempt; the feeling of his own imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it reveals to him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can satisfy his desires ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... impersonal thought, as some have maintained? Is it just the sum of all forms of consciousness—our consciousnesses being organs or phases of the Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker strictly personal, carrying on a thought-world by the power of his will and calling into existence finite thinkers in his own image? Assuming that the world is the expression of the thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in the forces of nature and creates men in his own image, the further question arises as to the character of that Thinker. While returning the heartiest thanks to the idealist for ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... on their toes and fingers which are attached to bell-pulls. The corpse thus, on coming to itself, may have immediate attendance merely by ringing for it; some one is always there on the watch. But the humanity of this arrangement, though perfect as long as it lasts, is finite in duration. As soon as the seventy-two hours prescribed by law are expired, it is another thing. The body is then legally dead, and must comport itself accordingly. At any rate, it is at its own risk if it behaves otherwise than as a corpse, and gives itself any airs of vitality. This is appalling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... much. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... all that, there is a Beyond, and he who has once caught a glance of it, is like a man who has gazed at the sun—wherever he looks, everywhere he sees the image of the sun. Speak to him of finite things, and he will tell you that the Finite is impossible and meaningless without the Infinite. Speak to him of death, and he will call it birth; speak to him of time, and he will call it the mere shadow of eternity. To us the senses ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... less pray to Him—because it is simply impossible. And that is quite scientific and philosophical, is it not? For all the great men are agreed now that the conditioned can know nothing of the unconditioned, and the finite can know nothing of the infinite. It is quite absurd to try, you know; and it is equally absurd to say anything about Him. You can't call Him Providence, because, as the universe is governed by fixed laws, there is nothing for him to provide; and we have no business to ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... proving that the quantity of heat which two portions of the same body could be made to give out, by rubbing them together, was practically illimitable. This result brought philosophers face to face with the contradiction of supposing that a finite body could contain an infinite quantity of another body; but it was not until 1843, that clear and unquestionable experimental proof was given of the fact that there is a definite relation between mechanical ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... originally an object, but an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... our 'little lives are rounded with a sleep;' that we are but atoms in the boundless abysses of space and time; that the phenomenal world is but a transitory veil, to be valued only as its contemplation arouses or disciplines our deepest emotions. Capacity for passing from the finite to the infinite, for interpreting the high instincts before which ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... gave us the word Deity, which we apply to God. So, as Professor Max Muller tells us, the descendants of the ancient Aryans, "when they search for a name for what is most exalted and yet most dear to every one of us, when they wish to express both awe and love, the infinite and the finite, they can do but what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as near as near can be; they can but combine the self-same words and utter once more the primeval Aryan prayer, ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... unfathomable homogeneous Unity, which is incarnated in them and produces the modifications necessary for the development of its powers, in other words, for the accomplishment of their evolution. As this evolution takes place in the finite—for the Infinite can effect its "sacrifice," i.e. its incarnation,[52] only by limiting itself—it is progressive, proceeding from the simple to the complex. Each incarnate, divine "fragment"[53] at first develops the simpler qualities ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... when generalized and reduced to a system is not unmanageably large. They present themselves as a finite body of dogma which may be mastered within a reasonable time. It is a great mistake to be frightened by the ever-increasing number of reports. The reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up pretty much the whole body of the law, and ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... will not say, imagine, what she should have felt at that moment in Griselda's place.—How intoxicating to human vanity, to be possessed of such powers of enchantment!—How difficult to refrain from their exercise!—How impossible to believe in their finite duration! ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... religion, and itself a proof of its divinity, is its complete adaptability to every condition of life and to every degree of intelligence. Its essentials are as readily grasped by the clodhopper as by the profoundest scholar whose years are spent in delving into the mysteries of science. No finite mind can fathom the mysteries of life, of death, of sleep, of the beginning, the end, of eternity, of the real nature of the soul and of God, how He came into existence; nor, indeed, shall we ever comprehend in all their fullness the simplest phenomena ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... public life, I certainly must say, every year shows me more and more that the idea of Christian politics cannot be realised in the state according to its present conditions of existence. For purposes sufficient, I believe, but partial and finite, I am more than content to be where I am. But the perfect freedom of the new covenant can only, it seems to me, be breathed in other air; and the day may come when God may grant to me the application ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... these two points of view Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment.[124] He substituted the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... St. Helena that all biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte hitherto published have ended, and perhaps it is just as well that these entertaining works, prepared by purely finite minds, should end there. It is well for an historian not to tell more than he knows, a principle which has guided our pen from the inception of this work to this point, and which must continue to the bitter end. We shall be relentless and truthful ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... love of real business in art—treating him, indeed, as though he were Hotei, the Japanese god of enjoyment—giving him as much colour, as much dramatic action, and as little perspective as is possible to man's finite capacity in this line. Some generous art critics have even gone so far indeed as to credit an entire artistic movement, that of pre-Raphaelism, with a benevolent desire to accommodate art to the New Hero's peculiar ideas ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... and measured. Yet you will easily find a man in whom the latter so abounds as not only to shut him out from others, but to absorb all the vital resource generated in his own bosom, leaving to the pure personality nothing. The finite nature fares sumptuously every day; the other is a heavenly Lazarus sitting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... If one could only have been left to do his own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that, besides the vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc)—besides, these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe), there were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap of ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... among a certain class of critics that the artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... be admitted to be very doubtful; we cannot in any certain way apply to the Universe, which is not a finite system, a proposition demonstrated, and that not unreservedly, in the sharply limited case of a finite system. Herbert Spencer, moreover, in his book on First Principles, brings out with much force ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... me that I heard and understood, and felt the goodness and glory of God. I may say that my first great lessons in true philosophy were obtained in these lectures, where I learned to distinguish between the finite and infinite, ceasing to envy any, while I inclined to worship one. The benevolence of Providence is extended to all its creatures, each receiving it in a mode adapted to its own powers of improvement. ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... that awful thing Thought tries in vain to scan; How far beyond the loftiest powers Of little, finite man! ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... crucified—Huxley!" and the cardinal threw up his hands. "Did ever a man die the easier because he had grovelled at the knees of Huxley? What did Huxley preach? The doctrine of despair. He was the Pope of protoplasm. He beat his wings against the bars of the unknowable. He set his finite mind the task of solving the infinite. A mere creature, he sought to fathom the mind of his creator. Read the lines upon his tomb, written by his wife—what do they teach? Nothing but 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' If a man follows Huxley, then is he ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... would follow from that doctrine) either finite duration or absence of omniscience (on ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the visible creation, abroad on this beautiful earth, above on the glorious universe studded with shining orbs, without number numberless, what can I make of them? Nothing absolutely nothing—yet they are all creatures like myself. But—if I try—audaciously try—to strain my finite faculties, in the futile attempt to take in what is infinite—if I aspiringly, but hopelessly, grapple with the idea of the immensity of space, for instance, which my reason yet tells me must of necessity be boundless—do I not fall fluttering to the earth again, like an owl flying against the noontide ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... existence is to be found. This he places in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, who, as God incarnate, furnishes the "evidence" which "is common to Understanding and Sensation," and thus translates the "Infinite" and "Ineffable" into terms of the finite and comprehensible. In this paradox Christian theology has ever since been content to rest as one of the fundamental ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... opposing him, and imagines that he has but to go on in his own way to grasp all worlds and the secrets of their being. At this juncture, so often arrived at by many, a kind of super-sureness sets in, persuading the finite nature that it has reached the infinite. The whole mental organisation of the man thrilled with an awful consciousness of power. He said within himself "I hold the lives of ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... any restoration of this mechanical energy without more than an equivalent dissipation is impossible," the universe, as known to us, must be in the condition of a machine gradually running down; and in particular that the world we live on has been within a finite time unfit for human habitation, and must again become so within a finite future. This thought seems such a commonplace to-day that it is difficult to realize how startling it appeared half a century ago. A generation ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... through long and subtle argument, the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned, and come short ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... secure, he learns that as long as he proves obedient his happiness will continue, but that, having been created as free as the angels, he can choose his lot. When Adam asks in regard to heavenly things, Raphael wonders how he can relate, in terms intelligible to finite mind, things which, even angels fail to conceive in their entirety and which it may not be lawful to reveal. Still, knowing he can vouchsafe a brief outline of all that has hitherto occurred, Raphael describes how the Almighty, after creating the Son, bade the angels bow down and worship ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... material thing, though of space absolute, if I may use the term, we have no notion at all; and of infinite space the notion is the same—no notion at all; and yet we conceive it in a sense, though I know not how, and we believe that space is infinite, and we cannot conceive it to be finite. ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... my large faith unto gloom allied, Sprang up a shadow sunshine could not quell, And the voice said, Would'st haste to go outside This continent of being, it were well: Where finite, growing toward the Infinite, Gathers its robe of glory out of dust, And looking down the radiances white, Sees all God's purposes about us, just. Canst thou, Elhadra, reach out of the grave, And draw the golden waters of love's well? ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... I say, there are relations between the finite and the Infinite, between my mind and the Infinite mind, between my weakness and the Infinite power. And why should conscious Omnipresence in our conception localize it? Presence is not limited to contact. I am present here in my room; I am present in the field where I sit down. Why, with the whole ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... beautiful, or in no relation to the beautiful, or a specific class in various degrees opposed to the beautiful. And the negative may be a negation of fact or of thought (ou and me). Lastly, there are certain ideas, such as 'beginning,' 'becoming,' 'the finite,' 'the abstract,' in which the negative cannot be separated from the positive, and 'Being' and ...
— Sophist • Plato
... ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this in common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their general effect is one of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... are capable of inflicting on the one side, and enduring on the other; even when an enemy has killed the body and ceased then, because he has no more that he can do, it is still a measurable thing. Love in a finite being's heart may swell high over it, and exult in bestowing forgiveness on the murderer with the victim's dying breath. In the beginning of the Gospel a vivid example of that very thing stands recorded: "Lord," said Stephen with fainting heart and failing breath, "Lord, lay not this sin ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... concentration of wealth is irresistible. However small the amount of capital, if permitted to grow at any rate of increase it will ultimately absorb everything. Any finite quantity permitted any finite rate of increase, will, in finite time, gather all that ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... still more tremendous WHY—namely, WHY, is there a Law of Universal Necessity?—but they are satisfied with the result of their reasonings, if not wholly, yet in part, and seldom try to search beyond that great vague vast Necessity, lest their finite brains should reel into madness worse than death. Recognizing, therefore, that in this cultivated age a wall of scepticism and cynicism is gradually being built up by intellectual thinkers of every nation against all that treats of the Supernatural and Unseen, I am aware that my narration ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... be mixed up in something miraculous. He was too humble to expect anything to be revealed to himself personally, but he had great hopes of the saintly Lady Fulda; and certainly, if concessions are to be wrung from the Infinite to the Finite by perfect holiness of life and mind, she should have obtained some. She had become deeply read in that kind of lore under Father Ricardo's direction, and had meditated so much about occurrences of the kind that it ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... strong hands were quivering; they hovered above the signs on the rocks. The mystic letters, the inspired words, where were they? Grope as he might, he could not find them. Alas! doubt and denial had climbed the mountain—the awful limitations of the more finite human creature—and his inspiration and the finer enthusiasms of the truth ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... their coats and shells behind them and rise into the atmosphere, as flies in a summer day. When man measures the works of the Divine Mind by his own feeble combinations, he must wander in gross error; the infinite can never be understood by the finite. ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... will contain only so much positive truth as the human mind is capable of receiving; whether that truth is attained by the exercise of reason, or communicated by revelation. It must necessarily be both limited and alloyed, to bring it within the competence of finite human intelligence. Being finite, we can form no correct or adequate idea of the Infinite; being material, we can form no clear conception of the Spiritual. We do believe in and know the infinity of Space and Time, and the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... existing terrestrial order, a great deal can be discovered, and to do so is one of the principal tasks of geological science. The first steps in the production of that order lie buried in the profound and unsearchable depths of a past so prolonged as to present itself to our finite minds as almost in eternity. The last steps are in the prophetic future, and can be but dimly guessed at. Between the remote past and the distant future, we have, however, a long period which is fairly open to inspection; and in saying a "long" period, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... the tranquil soul That tolerates the indignities of Time And, from the centre of Eternity All finite motions over-ruling, lives In ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... wider as one advances toward it until, finally, he stands out in the open with the world before him. There is no end to life, and none to human development, at least none that can be conceived of by the finite mind of man. ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... about by the diffusion of a more philosophic temper, and the use of a logic that shall refuse to exclude the facts of human nature from fair treatment, that shall embrace and account for all the questions involved, and that shall decline to receive as truth errors of finite science because found in an inspired book. We welcome this volume as an example of the right spirit and tendency in these grave discussions, and shall look eagerly for the promised ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... almost is a sound, and dreams Take on the semblances of finite things; So potent is the spell that what but seems Elsewhere, is lifted here on Fancy's wings. The little woodland theatre seems to wait, All tremulous with hope and wistful joy, For something that is sure to come at last, Some deep emotion, satisfying, great. It grows a living presence, bold ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... another side. The universe is so wonderful, so intricate, that it is impossible to trace the transformation of its forces, and when they seem to disappear the disappearance may be an illusion. Moreover, "waste" is a word which is applicable only to finite resources. If the resources are infinite it ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... which the tangled skein of life denies us. Some find it in hobbies where the mind is at peace in watching processes that are controllable and results that with patience are assured. But in the midst of this infinity I know no finite world so complete and satisfying as that I enter when I take down the chessmen and marshal my knights and squires on the chequered field. It is then I am truly happy. I have closed the door on the infinite and inexplicable and have come into a kingdom where justice ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... motive of the design undergoes constant variation, no piece exactly duplicating its neighbor, or with the intricate interlacing patterns of Arabic decoration, and you will have a striking illustration of the Greek love for the finite and comprehensible. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... 303. "We finite ones with infinite souls are born only for sorrows and joy and it might almost be said that the best of us receive joy ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'; our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... for finite offences." I will never believe it. How divines can reconcile this monstrous tenet with the spirit of their Theology! They have palpably failed in the proof, for to put the question thus:—If he being infinite—have a care, Woodvil, the latitude of doubting suits not with the humility ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... really necessary to forsake the finite to reach the infinite— whatever that term may be taken to mean? Do we not often better realise the infinity of the sky by looking at it through the twigs ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... circumscribed within the limits of experience, transcend and govern it—principles which are universal in the midst of particular phenomena—necessary, though mingled with things contingent—to our eyes infinite and absolute, even when appearing in us the relative and finite beings that we are.[507] These first or fundamental principles Plato ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... was the main category of the Greeks, the absolute form which embraced all their finite forms. It moulded their literature, as it did their sculpture, architecture, and the action of their gymnasts and orators. They therefore delighted only in the highest orders and purest specimens of literature, refused ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... addresses, the primary, unmodified, forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of love, and fear, and wonder, of enthusiasm, poetry—religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate 'motives,' as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment. Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as moralists, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... state of being, rather, of whose nature at that time he had not, and could not have had, the faintest fore-feeling, the most shadowy conception. It had been a season of great trouble, but the gain had been infinitely greater; for now were the bonds of the finite broken, he had burst the shell of the mortal, and was of those over whom the second death hath no power. The agony of the second birth was past, and he was a child again—only a child, he knew, but a child of the kingdom; and the world, and all that ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... statement, let us first take the opposite for granted—that the world is finite and limited in space; it follows that it must exist in a void space, which is not limited. We should therefore meet not only with a relation of things in space, but also a relation of things to space. Now, as the world is an absolute whole, out of and beyond which ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... at intervals of every few years, and war itself is only one of a series of catastrophes and calamities that splash the human chronicle with innocent blood. They give it up, sorrowfully, and find a thin consolation in learned formulae about the impossibility of a finite mind understanding an infinite mind, and so on: which give, as I say, thin consolation, for one may at least see that an infinite benevolence ought not to act worse than a moderate ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... but abstract unity; and then, when the idea takes its religious form, where only the substance, the One, is possessed of true reality, there is a tendency to forget that it is precisely in presence of this unity that individual and finite things are effaced, and to continue to place these in a material fashion side by side with this unity. They will not admit the teaching of the Eleatics, who, when they say "There is only One," add expressly that non-entity is not. All that is ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... wanted my help, a matter that might well have influenced my opinion on the facts, had he been other than he was. But it would have taken a 'finished and finite clod' to resist the attraction of the man and the enterprise; and I take no credit whatever for deciding to follow him, right or wrong. So, when I stated my difficulties, I knew very well that we ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... regard, an error in spite of which his philosophical works still remain the crowded repositories of true wisdom, seems to have arisen, in considerable part, from a defect of imagination. Knowledge is to be viewed in two aspects: one, that of its relation to the finite capacities of the human mind; the other, its relation to the infinity of Nature, that is, to the infinity of the subjects of knowledge. Bacon regarded it chiefly from the first point of view,—and, so far as we are aware, there is nowhere in his works any recognition of the fact, that each advance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... bottom; and hence their life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of sensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, are wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization. But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious development. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness, self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted, petty, idolatrous; a contrast ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... all forms of seeming prosperity wherewith Fate can curse a man, the worst was the curse of Xerxes. To be called "god" when one is finite and mortal; to have no friends, but only a hundred million slaves; to be denied the joys of honest wish and desire because there were none left unsatisfied; to have one's hastiest word proclaimed as an edict of deity; never to be suffered to confess a mistake, cost what the blunder might, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... there is no reason to suppose that the universe as a whole is "running down." Some writers have maintained this, but their argument implies that we know a great deal more about the universe than we actually do. The scientific man does not know whether the universe is finite or infinite, temporal or eternal; and he declines to speculate where there are no facts to guide him. He knows only that the great gaseous nebulae promise myriads of worlds in the future, and he concedes the possibility that new nebulae ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily. The white light of publicity is too white. We are weighed upon by too many things. It is as if the wisdom of the infinite were struggling to beat itself into finite and ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... tells us that the supreme Life cannot be finite, temporal. But the sensible signs of the supreme Life according to our faulty perception are temporal and point to an end. The Universe that we perceive is not a perpetuum mobile. The laws of motion that we know all come to a standstill. As ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the reasoning, but as they've worked it out, nothing can go faster than light. As you approach that velocity, the mass keeps increasing, and with it the amount of energy required for a new increase in speed. At the speed of light, the mass would be infinite, and hence no finite energy could get ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... petitio principii, by the free use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most outrageous violation of our reason. We have wriggled into it by holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing, both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered, both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat contradiction ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... distinct creations are just as intelligible, and just as little difficult to understand, as one." The answer to these cavils is two-fold. In the first place, all human inquiry must stop somewhere; all our knowledge and all our investigation cannot take us beyond the limits set by the finite and restricted character of our faculties, or destroy the endless unknown, which accompanies, like its shadow, the endless procession of phenomena. So far as I can venture to offer an opinion on such a matter, the purpose of our being in existence, the highest object that human beings ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... untruth, between death and deathlessness. Yet this measureless gulf is bridged in a moment when the self revealing one reveals himself in the soul. There the miracle happens, for there is the meeting-ground of the finite and infinite. Father, completely sweep away all my sins! [Footnote: Vishvanideva savitar duratani parasuva.] For in sin man takes part with the finite against the infinite that is in him. It is the defeat of his soul by his self. ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... expect to understand the Infinite," retorts a theist to our Martian. "What manner of reasoning is this," asks our Martian, "that denies my finite mind the right to question the 'proofs' of the existence of an Infinite, when these same 'proofs' are derived by finite minds? The theist cannot infer God from the cosmic process until he can discover some feature of it which is ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... evidence of the beginning, or end, of so vast a scheme lies within the reach of our philosophical inquiries, or even of our speculations, appears to be inconsistent with a just estimate of the relations which subsist between the finite powers of man and the attributes of an infinite ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... own, "Thou didst create us!" Naught impedes We voice the other name, man's most of might, Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love Mutely await their working, leave to sight All of the issue as—below—above— Shakespeare's creation rises: one remove, Though dread—this finite from that infinite. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Free Agents to do and feel those Sentiments which are Right. The identification of this law with His will constitutes the Holiness of the Infinite God. Voluntary and disinterested obedience to this law constitutes the Virtue of all finite creatures. Virtue is capable of infinite growth, of endless approach to the Divine nature and to perfect conformity with the law. God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and all worlds for rational free agents. The Moral Law, therefore, not only reigns throughout ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sky, it was no less marvellous, and more lovely; it was a closer binding together of the gentle earth and the awful withdrawing heavens. These were a region of endless hopes, and ever recurrent despairs: that his beloved, an earthly finite thing, should rise there, was added joy, and gave a mighty hope with respect to the unknown and appalling. But from the sky, he was sent back to the earth in further pursuit; for, whence came the rain, his books told him, but from the sea? That sea he had read of, though never yet ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... great question, involving so many points—such as the following of the spirit and the letter, the law of duty and the compulsion of love, which, as she spoke, seemed opening out so widely and awfully that she herself involuntarily shrank from it, and wondered that poor finite creatures should, ever presume to squabble about it ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... higher beings; they arrive at that belief by finding something which transcends them and which they cannot understand; i.e. by an intellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense of disappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a common road, to belief in gods. Mr. Mueller's omission, moreover, from his definition, of the practical side of religion, of the element of worship, is a fatal objection to it. Belief and worship are inseparable sides of religion, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the three arguments, 'that the just does not aim at excess,' has a real meaning, though wrapped up in an enigmatical form. That the good is of the nature of the finite is a peculiarly Hellenic sentiment, which may be compared with the language of those modern writers who speak of virtue as fitness, and of freedom as obedience to law. The mathematical or logical notion of limit easily passes into an ethical one, and even finds a mythological ...
— The Republic • Plato
... let us seek The forward path again; so as the way Be shorten'd with the time. No mortal tongue Nor thought of man hath ever reach'd so far, That of these natures he might count the tribes. What Daniel of their thousands hath reveal'd With finite number infinite conceals. The fountain at whose source these drink their beams, With light supplies them in as many modes, As there are splendours, that it shines on: each According to the virtue it conceives, Differing in love and sweet affection. Look then how lofty and ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... man's supreme happiness, relative and absolute: one is to depict nature at her best, untouched by sin, and to show man free from every defect and blemish, in the full perfection of his being. Naturally the imagery in this case is the imagery born of finite human experiences. The other method describes, as we said, not scenes of happiness but transcendent conditions of the soul as it is brought into ultimate communion with Supreme Goodness—the finite possessing and ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... "the living, moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. "What is described in concepts," he tells us, "is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity." Schelling, who is a poet as well as a philosopher, comes to regard this ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... question! which shuts the gates of consciousness upon us when we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; which was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us as life itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite to affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the evening midge for its opinion of the ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... goes on his way pondering inwardly what kind of place there might be, in any possible scheme of another world, for so absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, as the breath of the infinite world came about him, he clung all [242] the faster to the beloved finite things still in contact with him; he had successfully hidden from ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and doth exalt the poor! And with an equal hand maintains The boundless worlds which He sustains, And scatters all our finite sense At thought of His omnipotence, Clouded awhile, to be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... It is contended that we have these primary intuitions, and that with these the conception of a self-existent Creator is perfectly harmonious. On the other hand, the notion of a self-existent universe—that there is no real distinction between the finite and the infinite—that the universe and ourselves are one and the same things with the infinite and the self-existent; these assertions, in addition to being ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... philosophy, and does not expect to state final conditions to men whose minds are finite. Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... inflation side of this campaign. Men who have not learned the elementary principles of the science of political economy, who have not mastered the definitions, as we say, in geometry, could say nothing intelligible to the finite understanding. The speeches were as "incoherent" as the New York World proved the platform to be. They all contained doctrines, however, in perpendicular antagonism to the financial doctrines of the St. Louis convention. When the inflationists learn what ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... experienceth the stages of infancy, youth, manhood, and old age, even so shall it, in due time, pass on to another body, and in other incarnations shall it again live, and move and play its part. * * * These bodies, which act as enveloping coverings for the souls occupying them, are but finite things—things of the moment—and not the Real Man at all. They perish as all finite things perish—let them perish. He who in his ignorance thinketh: 'I slay' or 'I am slain,' babbleth like an infant lacking knowledge. Of a truth none can slay—none can be slain. Take unto thy ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... impressions: for him she has a voice of the most delicate articulation; all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... no one else. For if the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... him of his heavenly origin, and stimulating him to rise again to the level whence he fell. For it has glimpses of the divine Image within or behind the material veil; and its constant impulse is to tear aside the veil and grasp the image. The world, let us say, is a gross and finite translation of an infinite and perfect Word; and imagination is the intuition of that perfection, born in the human heart, and destined forever to draw mankind into closer ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'; our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... qualities are not of a nature to be comprehended by finite minds. The natural consequence must be, that divine qualities are not made to occupy finite minds. But religion tells us, that the poor finite mind of man ought never to lose sight of an inconceivable being, whose qualities he can never comprehend. Thus, we see, religion is the art of turning ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... requisite books, which were in French, and consisted of Francoeur's pure "Mathematics," and his "Elements of Mechanics," La Croix's "Algebra," and his large work on the "Differential and Integral Calculus," together with his work on "Finite Differences and Series," Biot's "Analytical Geometry and Astronomy," Poisson's "Treatise on Mechanics," La Grange's "Theory of Analytical Functions," Euler's "Algebra," Euler's "Isoperimetrical Problems" (in Latin), Clairault's "Figure of the Earth," Monge's "Application of Analysis to ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... wonder why these flurries come, but I suppose it is to let a man pick up some sound stocks at a reasonable rate, if he has the money by him. Perhaps they are also sent to teach humility to those who might else become purse-proud. We are but finite creatures, Sneed, here to-day and gone to-morrow. How foolish a thing is pride! And that reminds me that if your two daughters should happen to think as I do on the uncertainty of riches, I wish you would ask ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... peace and death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space, necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external influences and ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... repose, you steep yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate from it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it at last perhaps you understand the infinite; you understand where is the bourne to which the finite flows with all its greatness, as the great Nile flows from beyond Victoria Nyanza ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... assumption among a certain class of critics that the artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... cause and author. For as a man, who fired a mine, is answerable for all the consequences whether the train he employed be long or short; so wherever a continued chain of necessary causes is fixed, that Being, either finite or infinite, who produces the first, is likewise the author of all the rest, and must both bear the blame and acquire the praise which belong to them. Our clear and unalterable ideas of morality establish this rule, upon unquestionable reasons, when we examine the consequences of any human ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... inventors of new sources of wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this in common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their general effect is one of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... flower Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks The moon in heaven, yet hath power To tell the soul the thing it seeks. And pack, as by some wizard's art, The whole within the finite part. ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... produce phenomena between them, owing to each intercepting the action of the medium of space on the other, in proportion to the angles mutually presented by their bulks,—that two such bodies so acted upon by an universal medium must necessarily fall together, owing to the difference between the finite pressure on their near sides, and the infinite pressure on their outsides,—that a stone falls to the earth, because, with regard to it, the earth intercepts an angle of 180 deg. of the medium of space on its near or under side; while, with regard ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by staccato plaints, and the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... manner as we related in describing the city of Santisimo Nombre de Jesus in the island of Sugbu. It is now carried with much less pomp than formerly, for all things are declining; and as affairs had their beginning, so they must have their middle and their end, for they are perishable and finite, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... tried to surpass the other in appealing to the New Hero's love of real business in art—treating him, indeed, as though he were Hotei, the Japanese god of enjoyment—giving him as much colour, as much dramatic action, and as little perspective as is possible to man's finite capacity in this line. Some generous art critics have even gone so far indeed as to credit an entire artistic movement, that of pre-Raphaelism, with a benevolent desire to accommodate art to the New Hero's peculiar ideas upon perspective. But this is a 'soft impeachment' born of that ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... childe thereby. The child also to loue and obeie his parentes. The huge and monsterous vices, are by his vertuous doctrine defaced and extirpated: his Fables in effect contain the mightie volumes and bookes of all Philosophers, in morall preceptes, & the in- [Sidenote: The content of al Lawes.] finite monume[n]tes of lawes stablished. If I should not speake of his commendacion, the fruictes of his vertue would shewe his commendacions: but that praise surmounteth all fame of [Sidenote: A true praise ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... road, all meet in the Sanscrit path, which was the original parting of the ways. Now the patteran which I have drawn, like the Koua of the Chinese or the mystical Swastika of the Buddhists, embraces the long line of life, or of the infinite and the short, or broken lines of the finite, and, therefore, as an ancient magical Eastern sign, would be most appropriately inscribed as a sikker-paskero dromescro—or hand post—to show the wandering Rommany how to proceed ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... of words and sentences and pictures to express two or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing up from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own personal overcoming, and that ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed, in talking to my class, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our root F,—F being any finite constant—" ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... "Who says that finite things, both corporeal and spiritual, or at least spiritual things, are emanations of the divine substance; or that the divine essence, by manifestation or development of ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... palpably clothed with fire. They mastered me, not I them. Terror was in their beauty. I was like Moses before the Bush that burned. I adored the splendour I saw. Then I was in danger of being content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. To be satisfied—that was the peril. Now I see the natural world as it is, without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it. Is that well? ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the Rev. Judson Baxter, the present incumbent; and he was voted to be as near perfection as a minister can be in this finite world. His young wife had a small income of her own, a distinct and unusual advantage, and the subscription committee hoped that they might not be eternally driving over the country to get somebody's fifty cents that had been over-due for eight months, but might take their ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... surpassed all count and reckoning, dish followed dish, till I began to fancy that the cook either expected I would honour his highness's entertainment as Caesar did the supper of Cicero, or supposed that the party were not finite beings. During the course of this amazing service, the principal singers and musicians of the seraglio arrived, and sung and played several pieces of very sweet Turkish music. Among others was a song composed by the late unfortunate Sultan Selim, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... already working in us. It is always "in His light" that "we see light." The doctrine has been felt to be a necessary postulate by most philosophers who hold that knowledge of God is possible to man. For instance, Krause says, "From finite reason as finite we might possibly explain the thought of itself, but not the thought of something that is outside finite reasonable beings, far less the absolute idea, in its contents infinite, of God. To become aware of God in knowledge we require certainly to make ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... question of the substitution of one analogy or symbol for another, the more elegant is not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite inadequacy of even the noblest conceivable finite symbolism to bring God down to our level, need we pride ourselves much for being on a mountain whose height is perceptible from the plain but ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... It has some charming views, from the great pro- menade of the Peyrou; but its position is not strikingly fair. Beyond this it contains a good museum and the long facades of its school, but these are its only de- finite treasures. Its cathedral struck me as quite the weakest I had seen, and I remember no other monu- ment that made up for it. The place has neither the gayety of a modern nor the solemnity of an ancient town, and it is agreeable as certain women are agree- able who ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... relation to the beautiful, or a specific class in various degrees opposed to the beautiful. And the negative may be a negation of fact or of thought (ou and me). Lastly, there are certain ideas, such as 'beginning,' 'becoming,' 'the finite,' 'the abstract,' in which the negative cannot be separated from the positive, and 'Being' and ...
— Sophist • Plato
... which broods over its best achievements, the attainment of all its desires. That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could be conscious ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... on a few alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter. The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because "logic" ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of God is a conception so wonderful, so sublime, that none but Himself can fathom its depths. Human intelligence is too finite to penetrate or comprehend a system so complex, and yet so uniform. The mind of man can only form a just idea of a cause when the effect has been made manifest to his understanding. There might have been a reason for the death of ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst much smoke and din, showed his English readers ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... can subdue the North. He disclaims the open threat, but his conduct still implies it. How little that Senator knows himself or the strength of the cause which he persecutes! He is but a mortal man; against him is an immortal principle. With finite power he wrestles with the infinite, and he must fall. Against him are stronger battalions than any marshalled by mortal arm—the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human heart; against him is nature in all her subtle forces; against ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... any finite mind to fix the degree of criminality of any human act or of any human life. The Infinite One alone can know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, and how much to our brothers or our fathers. We all participate in one another's sins. There is a community ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... expressing their mutual relations. Sense-awareness discloses fact with factors which are the entities for thought. The separate distinction of an entity in thought is not a metaphysical assertion, but a method of procedure necessary for the finite expression of individual propositions. Apart from entities there could be no finite truths; they are the means by which the infinitude of irrelevance is kept out ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... shrank from that which a holy God must hate, that which He hated—SIN. He was about to be made sin and He knew no sin. What suffering this produced in the Holy One of God to take all upon Himself and to stand in the sinner's place before a holy sin-hating God, our poor finite ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... figure, with all the freshness of its primal grace, stretching out its arms from a new-born world towards the infinite Creator, had expressed, with extraordinary pathos, the weakness, the failure, almost the non-existence of what is finite. "I Am Who Am" thundered Almighty Power, and how little, how ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... of larvae that leave their coats and shells behind them and rise into the atmosphere, as flies in a summer day. When man measures the works of the Divine Mind by his own feeble combinations, he must wander in gross error; the infinite can never be understood by the finite. ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... as near as the finite intellect can get to it, I should say," replied Redgrave. "But I don't think metaphysics are much in our line. If you've finished we may as well go and have a look ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... seem, heretics among even the Buddhists, who, instead of adopting the nonsense of the priests in this physical department, originate a nonsense equally great of their own. The error of concluding that the worlds of the universe are finite in number, say the sacred books, is the heresy antawada; the error of concluding that the world itself is infinite is the heresy anantawada; the error of concluding that the world is finite vertically but infinite horizontally is the heresy anantanantawada; and the error of concluding the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... purely physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained—attained to some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, or at least it seemed to him to upset, the powerful arguments of Spinoza. The finite and the infinite, two incompatible elements according to that remarkable man, were here united, the one in the other. No matter what power he gave to the divisibility and mobility of matter he could not help recognizing ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... on the subject in the Dundee Evening Telegraph, Mr. Robertson observes: "If our finite minds were more capable of comprehension, what a glorious view of the grandeur of the Deity would be displayed to us in the contemplation of the centre and source of light and heat to the solar system. ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... of the universe as reflected in the mirror of man's consciousness; that music, as speaking the most spiritual language of any of the art-family, is burdened with the most pressing responsibility as the interpreter between the finite and the infinite; that all its forms must be measured by the earnestness and success with which they teach and suggest what is best in aspiration and truest in thought; that music, when wedded to the highest form of poetry (the drama), produces the consummate art-result, and sacrifices to ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... embracing adherents from every rank of philosophic, scientific, religious and social life, which, moreover, reveals its own attributes to the child and the philosopher alike, and provides the missing link between a finite material world and a world of infinite spiritual possibilities by proving ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... thank Heaven for; or Bobus with his cash-accounts and larders dropping fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony-chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunky species? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of infinite value to you; or only of finite,—measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pudding, it has brought you to? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages; and will never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-talent has already got itself voted for!'—We here ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... contemplation clothed in form thee who art formless; I have in praise described thee who art ineffable; and in visiting shrines I have ignored thine omnipresence."[121] Beautiful expressions indeed, confessions that finite language and definite acts are inadequate to the Infinite, nay, contradictions of the Infinite, expressions fit to be recited in prayer by any man of any creed who feels that God is a Spirit and omnipresent! But in a Christian prayer such expressions would only form a ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... he values is that, as Mr Upton[15] has well expressed it, "there is a certain self-revelation of the eternal and infinite One to the finite soul, and therefore an indestructible basis for religious ideas and beliefs as distinguished from what is called scientific knowledge. . . . This immanent universal principle does not pertain to, and is not the property of any individual mind, but belongs to that uncreated and eternal nature of ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... and his crisis; but, all the time he hoped, he was conscious of a sneaking fear lest she would not. Scott loved to talk things out, and Catie, when she was not too busy otherwise, was a good listener. Nevertheless, her comprehensions were concrete and very, very finite. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... solves it by computing a long series of numbers following some given law. In this manner it calculates astronomical, logarithmic, and navigation tables, as well as tables of the powers and products of numbers. It can integrate, too, innumerable equations of finite differences; and, in addition to these functions, it does its work cheaply and quickly; it corrects whatever errors are accidentally committed, and it prints ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... words that their bliss is not secure, he learns that as long as he proves obedient his happiness will continue, but that, having been created as free as the angels, he can choose his lot. When Adam asks in regard to heavenly things, Raphael wonders how he can relate, in terms intelligible to finite mind, things which, even angels fail to conceive in their entirety and which it may not be lawful to reveal. Still, knowing he can vouchsafe a brief outline of all that has hitherto occurred, Raphael describes how the Almighty, after creating ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... all is still, no flutter and no song, Is safe. But if my soul begin to act Without some waking to the eternal fact That my dear life is hid with Christ in God— I think and move a creature of earth's clod, Stand on the finite, act upon ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... the present extent of human knowledge, it is not only finite, and therefore in its own nature capable of increase, but so narrow, that almost every understanding may, by a diligent application of its powers, hope to enlarge it. It is, however, not necessary that a man should forbear to write, till he has discovered ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... "but" is translated by sino after a negative unless a finite verb follows. Therefore, "Not to buy but to sell" is translated "No comprar ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. If I did not have faith, I should go crazy. If I thought that the direction of the affairs of this disordered world depended upon our finite intelligence, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity; but it is my faith that no body of men however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great world enterprise, which after all ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... that we are not men without him! that we can be one with our self-existent creator! that we are not cut off from the original Infinite! that in him we must share infinitude, or be enslaved by the finite! The very patent of our royalty is, that not for a moment can we live our true life without the eternal life present in and with our spirits. Without him at our unknown root, we cease to be. True, a dog ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... the image and likeness of God, we must of necessity find in him a finite organization corresponding with the infinite organization of the Creator. In the Infinite Divine Trinity there are the Divine Goodness or Love, the Divine Truth or Wisdom, and the Divine Operation or the manifestation of the other two in and upon the universe: in other words, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... its finite means, cannot hope to record the infinite variety and complexity of Nature, and so contents itself with a partial statement, addressing this to the imagination for the full and perfect meaning. This inadequation, ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... ourselves, or inferred as existing in others, are, according to Pantheism, only facets of an infinite Unity, which is "altogether one" in a sense inapplicable to anything else. Because that Unity is not merely the aggregate of all the finite objects which we observe or infer, but is a living whole, expressing itself in infinite variety. Of that infinite variety our gleams of consciousness are infinitesimal parts, but not parts in a sense involving any ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... hand, I try to give you a bird's-eye view-saying, here is plain, and there follows upland, and yonder succeed mountains and hills-you lose the sense of breadth and space and the toil of many days. The feeling of onward outward extending distance is gone; and that impression so indispensable to finite understanding-"here am I, and what is beyond is to be measured by the length of my legs and the toil of my days." You will not stop long enough on my plains to realize their physical extent nor their influence ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the USSR and absent a hostile Russian superpower, there is no external threat to the existence or survival of the United States as a nation and there will not be such an immediate threat for some time to come. This means that there is a finite window of opportunity when there is no external adversary threatening the total existence of American society; that our forces are far superior to any possible military adversary choosing to confront ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... station, no age is exempt from his fatal shafts. When death comes to the aged as the end of a fully completed life we regard it as natural. But when death comes to the young, the gifted, and the promising, we with our finite vision look upon it as sad and mysterious. We are constantly ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... question being whether one and the same religious need is to be recognized in all the varieties, he finds the root of sacrificial observances in the yearning of the believer for abiding communion with the supernatural Power to which he feels himself akin, the longing of finite man to become one with the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... concepts. They too, his thoughts and his ideas, were dark and invisible, as electric vibrations are invisible no matter how many words they may purport. If I, as a word-user, must translate his deep conscious vibrations into finite words, that is my own business. I do but make a translation of the man. He would speak in music. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... most constant laws, and never ceases, and they must always go onward and upward, unspeakably blessed by the consciences they made their rule in life, till in purity and power they shall equal or exceed the angels of their Lord in heaven. "But you men of finite understanding will ask, as I myself should have asked, How, by the law of hydrostatics, can liquids flow on a plane? Remember that, though these divisions are astronomical or geometrical planes, their surfaces undulate; but the moving cause is this: At the centre of ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Amiens, where the motive of the design undergoes constant variation, no piece exactly duplicating its neighbor, or with the intricate interlacing patterns of Arabic decoration, and you will have a striking illustration of the Greek love for the finite and comprehensible. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... reaction always proceeds, at least in homogeneous systems, to a certain equilibrium, and as the chemical resistance now has finite values this equilibrium will always finally be reached after a longer or shorter time. Finally, at very high temperatures the chemical resistance is in every case very small, and the equilibrium is almost instantaneously reached; at the same time, the affinity of the reaction, as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... they were fully capable of crying "Hosannah!" to-day, and "Crucify him! crucify him!" to-morrow. Human nature is not different from what it was thousands of years ago. It is no better and no worse. Unregenerate man is out of harmony with his Maker; and being possessed of a finite mind, he can never be right, do right, nor keep right until he places ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... more value than many a mighty king's treasure; and everything was on so vast a scale that man shuddered to feel his own littleness, and the mind sought some new standard of measurement by which to realize such unwonted proportions. The finite here seemed to pass into the infinite; and as the spectator gazed up, with his head thrown back, at the capitals of the lofty columns and the remote height of the ceiling, his sight failed him before he had succeeded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... call a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be limited by another (or others) of the same nature—e.g. a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body enveloping it; but body is not limited by ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... possible that my friends may, and also certain savants who are interested; and to them, while I do not apologize for my philosophizing, I humbly explain that they are witnessing the groupings of a finite mind after the infinite, the search for ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to redemption, and they were strongly influenced by Irenaeus. The party of Arius, on the other hand, was influenced by metaphysical interests as to the relation of being to creation and the contrast between the finite and the infinite. It may be said, in general, that until the council of Chalcedon, and possibly even after that, the main interest that kept alive theological discussion was intimately connected with vital problems of religious life of the times. After that the scholastic period ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... fancies. There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that gods were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and conscious of his own powers as an active cause, projected ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; between religion—making up the deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry—passionate for the instruction of reason; between religion—whose element is infinitude, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... constitute the corresponding individual body; and whether it terminates with the end of the corporeal series, or goes on after the existence of the body has ended. And, in both cases, there arises the further question, whether the excess of duration of the mental series over that of the body, is finite or infinite. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... course," he muttered, for he could see himself and her in the dawn together, united again and tasting again in a kiss infinity. In her kiss he had tasted that unity, that binding together of the mortal to the immortal, of the finite to the infinite, which Paracelsus—He tried to recall the words, "He who tastes a crust of bread has tasted of the universe, even to the furthest star." She had always been his universe, and he had always believed that she ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... identification, used even as ably as Dr. Rydberg uses it, will not pick every mythologic lock, though it undoubtedly has opened many hitherto closed. The truth is that man is a finite animal; that he has a limited number of types of legend; that these legends, as long as they live and exist, are excessively prehensile; that, like the opossum, they can swing from tree to tree without falling; as one tree dies ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... egotism, the barrenness of its routine. Like a flash it stood glaringly out before him. Stripped of all its intellectual furbishing, the chill selfishness of the creed he had adopted struck home to his heart. A finite life, with a finite goal—annihilation! Had it really ever satisfied him? Could it satisfy anyone? A great weariness crept in upon him. Epicureanism could have been carried no further than he had carried it. He had steeped his senses in the most refined and voluptuous pleasures civilization ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to live in, Renault's hospital,—an atmosphere of intense activity, mental and physical, with a spirit of some large, unexpressed truth, a passionate faith, that raised the immediate finite and petty task to a step in the glorious ranks of eternity. The personality of Renault alone kept this atmosphere from becoming hectic and sentimental. He held this ship that he steered so steadily in ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... ministers; else why those factious quarrels, controversies, and battles amongst themselves, when they were all united in the same design, the service and honour of their common master? But being instructed only in the general, and zealous of the main design, and as finite beings not admitted into the secrets of government, the last resorts of Providence, or capable of discovering the final purposes of God (who can work good out of evil as He pleases, and irresistibly sways all manner of events on earth, directing them finally for the best to His creation ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... mutability!—life in the making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification means loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... soul of the earth and in planetary souls and stellar souls. He quotes with approval on this point the writings of Gustav Theodor Fechner, the Leipzig chemist. He is also prepared to find a place in his pluralistic world for at least one quite personal and quite finite god. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... pervades cosmic space may express itself. There is something of the spirit of Pythagoras in what one of the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: "It is said that human nature is something small and limited, and that God is infinite, and it is asked how the finite can embrace the infinite. But who dares to say that the infinity of the Godhead is limited by the boundary of the flesh, as though by a vessel? For not even during our lifetime is the spiritual nature confined within the boundaries of the flesh. The mass of the body, it is true, is ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... Mind, finite and infinite, is eternally creative and creating in the organization of formless matter and material forces into ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... the Middle Ages often discussed such subjects as these: whether the finite can comprehend the infinite at any point, since the infinite can have no finite points; whether God can make a wheel revolve and be stationary at the same time; whether all children in a state of innocence are masculine. Such debates made remarkable theologians ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy. Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was "powerfully affected" only by that "which is conversant with or turns upon infinity," and man is to him a being with such a relationship to ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... 'On Wollaston's Argument from the Limitation of the Atmosphere as to the finite Divisibility of Matter.' — 'Trans. of the Royal Society of Edinb.', vol. xvi., p. 1, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... not infinite in all his attributes? He is partly infinite, and partly finite!—infinite in knowledge and power, but in love, in forgiveness, in all those things which are the most beautiful, the most divine, the most Christ-like, he is finite, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... far too strange to suggest itself offhand, as it would have been doing had the doctor connected the fact that Sally's mother went out to India to be married with this meeting of two lovers at a simmering railway-station, name not known. The idea of the impossible per se is probably the one a finite intelligence most readily admits, and is always cordially welcome in intellectual difficulties—a universal resolution of logical discords. In the case of these two men, at that moment, neither was capable of knowing the actual truth had he been told it, whatever the evidence; still less of catching ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Balzac, "culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,—two worlds unknown to each other." But one's life always belongs far more to his future than to his past. He is more closely and truly related to that which he shall be than to that which he has been; as the flower, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... mergings of worlds within worlds, And unutterabilities And room-rent, And other tremendously alarming phenomena, Which stab me, Rip me most outrageously; (Without a semblance, mind you, of respect for the Hague Convention's rules governing soul-slitting.) Aye, as with the poniard of the Finite pricking the rainbow-bubble of the Infinite! (Some figure, that!) (Some little rush of syllables, that!)— And make me—(are you still whirling at my coat-tails, reader?) Make me—ahem, where was I?—oh, yes—make me, In a sudden, overwhelming ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... mine, the mountains mine, — All forests, stintless stars, As much of noon as I could take Between my finite eyes. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... with an icy look. "Do you not comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures? Our feelings seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on earth they are limited by the strength of our physical being. There are some feeble, mean natures which may receive ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... mortal doomed. How can he exercise Wrath without end on Man, whom death must end? Can he make deathless death? That were to make Strange contradiction, which to God himself Impossible is held; as argument Of weakness, not of power. Will he draw out, For anger's sake, finite to infinite, In punished Man, to satisfy his rigour, Satisfied never? That were to extend His sentence beyond dust and Nature's law; By which all causes else, according still To the reception of their matter, act; Not to the extent of their own sphere. But say ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... understood solely through the nature of man, it would follow that he would not be able to die, but would always necessarily exist; this would be the necessary consequence of a cause whose power was either finite or infinite; namely, either of man's power only, inasmuch as he would be capable of removing from himself all changes which could spring from external causes; or of the infinite power of Nature, whereby all individual things would be so ordered, that man should ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... an irrevelant enquiry, to ask, Are Time and Space finite or infinite? Many philosophers have put the question, and even answered it. They say Time has no beginning and no end, and Space has no boundaries; or, as otherwise expressed,—Time and Space are Infinite: ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... by ordinary means. It was enough for me that I heard and understood, and felt the goodness and glory of God. I may say that my first great lessons in true philosophy were obtained in these lectures, where I learned to distinguish between the finite and infinite, ceasing to envy any, while I inclined to worship one. The benevolence of Providence is extended to all its creatures, each receiving it in a mode adapted to its own powers of improvement. My destiny being toward a communion ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... Quantity — N. quantity, magnitude; size &c (dimensions) 192; amplitude, magnitude, mass, amount, sum, quantum, measure, substance, strength, force. [Science of quantity.] mathematics, mathesis^. [Logic.] category, general conception, universal predicament. [Definite or finite quantity.] armful, handful, mouthful, spoonful, capful; stock, batch, lot, dose; yaffle^. V. quantify, measure, fix, estimate, determine, quantitate, enumerate. Adj. quantitative, some, any, aught, more ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... soared through Differential, Deeply drunk of Finite Boole;[3] Though its breath is pestilential, ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... it entirely depended on a symbolical expression of the infinite,—which is not vastness, nor immensity, nor perfection, but whatever cannot be circumscribed within the limits of actual sensuous being. In the ancient art, on the contrary, every thing was finite and material. Accordingly, sculpture was not attempted by the Gothic races till the ancient specimens were discovered, whilst painting and architecture were of native growth amongst them. In the earliest specimens of the paintings of modern ages, as in those ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... a people without prejudices, a people with altogether neutral vision, is so unthinkable in any civilization of which it is useful to think, that no scheme of education could be based upon that ideal. Prejudice can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them, and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will depend on whether those prejudices ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... and social conditions of life. Freedom and deathless courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages. In the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible, upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and Illusion, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... This he places in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, who, as God incarnate, furnishes the "evidence" which "is common to Understanding and Sensation," and thus translates the "Infinite" and "Ineffable" into terms of the finite and comprehensible. In this paradox Christian theology has ever since been content to rest as one of the fundamental ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... accounted for without considering them as due to the formation in the copper, of a pole of the opposite kind to that approximated, surrounded by a diffuse polarity of the same kind (82.); neither is it essential that the plate should acquire and lose its state in a finite time; nor on the other hand does it seem necessary that any repulsive force should be admitted as the cause of ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... offer weigh at all in the balance. Indeed there is no balance. The man who makes terms with his conscience is essentially non-religious; the religious man knows that it will profit him nothing if he gain all this finite world and lose his stake in the ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the Passion Play forces home—a question which never even comes to the mind of those who are accustomed from childhood to regard this Jew as mysteriously Divine, not so much man as God, cut off from us and our daily littleness by the immeasurable abyss that yawns between the finite and the infinite. This greatest of all the miracles, the coming of Christendom into being, has become so much a matter of course that we marvel as little at it as we do at the sunrise—which also in its way is a wonder ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. "Ever not quite" must be the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
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