"Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... endeavour, whereby a thing endeavours to persist in its own being, involves no finite ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... 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
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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, poets, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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 |
