"Metaphysic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... essence might be imperilled by a false but plausible philosophy, and grave practical consequences in the domain of conduct might arise from its spread. For if it is accurate to say that behind every ethic there stands—whether avowed or unavowed—a certain metaphysic, the converse holds true no less; every philosophy, in the exact proportion in which it is ex animo accepted, will tend to produce its ethical counterpart. What we {55} submit in all seriousness ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... to bring happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps toward that height—just as the Athenians did two thousand years ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable tradition—nothing that scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge undermine. Its foundations are the fundamental and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... philosopher and man of science. He has the rare art of making an abstruse subject clear and attractive; he does not give a dry summary of the ideas of the great thinkers, but depicts the living man and relates his way of life to his way of thinking. The result is that in his hands metaphysic becomes as interesting as history did in ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... varied rhetoric used by Augustine in the prose of the Confessions, and gifted with poetic inspiration in such hymns as the Dies Irae or the Stabat Mater—rendered this new vehicle of literary utterance adequate to all the tasks imposed on it by piety and metaphysic. The language of the Confessions and the Dies Irae is not, in fact, a decadent form of Cicero's prose or Virgil's verse, but a development of the Roman speech in accordance with the new conditions introduced by Christianity. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... bore their full share in the fight. It was the Englishman Curzon who condemned the heresies of Amaury of Bene. Another Englishman, Alexander of Hales, issued in his Summa Theologiae the first effective reconciliation of Aristotelian metaphysic with Christian doctrine which his Paris pupils, Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, and Albert the Great, the German, were to work out in detail in the next generation. Hales was the first secular doctor in Europe who in 1222, in the full pride of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic teaches) are, in strict language, made by those outward Senses of ours, how much more, by the Inward Sense, are all Phenomena of the spiritual kind: Dignities, Authorities, Holies, Unholies! Which inward sense, moreover is not ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... principal rules of the Method which the Author has discovered, in the third, certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method; in the fourth, the reasonings by which he establishes the existence of God and of the Human Soul, which are the foundations of his Metaphysic; in the fifth, the order of the Physical questions which he has investigated, and, in particular, the explication of the motion of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to Medicine, as also the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes; ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... individual mind and character. "As a quality of style" says Mr. Pater, "soul is a fact." To resolve how words, like bodies, become transparent when they are inhabited by that luminous reality, is a higher pitch than metaphysic wit can fly. Ardent persuasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakest take on glory. The humblest and most despised of common phrases may be the chosen vessel for the next avatar of the spirit. It is ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... doings of our little country neighbourhood I find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too sad, to be written down. In the words of those whose talk is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possible metaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to work them out. In fifteen miles of moorland I find the materials of all possible physical science, and long that I had time to work out one smallest segment of that great sphere. How can I be richer, if I have lying at ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... sciences, as well as their direction. As for the idea that the living body might be treated by some superhuman calculator in the same mathematical way as our solar system, this has gradually arisen from a metaphysic which has taken a more precise form since the physical discoveries of Galileo, but which, as we shall show, was always the natural metaphysic of the human mind. Its apparent clearness, our impatient desire to find it true, the enthusiasm with which ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... mundane resort he hoped to find some man of good counsel and a shrewd experience in life. In the reading-room he saw many of the country clergy and an Archdeacon; there were three journalists and a writer upon the Higher Metaphysic, playing pool; and at dinner only the raff of ordinary club frequenters showed their commonplace and obliterated countenances. None of these, thought Mr. Rolles, would know more on dangerous topics than he knew himself; none of them were fit to give him guidance in his present ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enlarged his soul in riper years. For Nature gave him strength, and fire, to soar, On Fancy's wing above this vale of tears; Where dark cold-hearted sceptics, creeping, pore Through microscope of metaphysic lore: And much they grope for truth, but never hit. For why? their powers, inadequate before, This art preposterous renders more unfit; Yet deem they darkness light, and their ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... sense and instinct rather than of recognised knowledge. So long as a man has these, and of the same kind as the more powerful body of his fellow-countrymen, he is a man of science though he can hardly read or write. As my great namesake said so well, "He knows what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly." As is usual in cases of great proficiency, these true and thorough knowers do not know that they are scientific, and can seldom give a reason for the faith that is in them. They believe themselves to be ignorant, uncultured men, ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... between the fundamental and the superficial, the permanent and the transient, the indestructible and the destructible. This is the supreme philosophic method which contains all the others and to which all the others are reduced. Upon this metaphysic and by the aid of this dialectic, Plato constructed an extremely pure system of morality which was simply an Imitation of God (as, later on, came the Imitation of Jesus Christ). The whole duty of man was to be as like God as he could. In God exist the ideas of truth, goodness, beauty, greatness, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... modern bards Floating aloft in such peculiar strains, As strike themselves with envy and amaze; For you "bright-harped" Tennyson shall sing; Macaulay chant a more than Roman lay; And Bulwer Lytton, Lytton Bulwer erst, Unseen amidst a metaphysic fog, Howl melancholy homage to the moon; For you once more Montgomery shall rave In all his rapt rabidity of rhyme; Nankeened Cockaigne shall pipe his puny note, And our ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... against the rising storm, saw a bent figure posting through the snow, with haggard face and burning eyes, carrying his load of penal immortality, and seeking in vain for "easeful death." There is a profound metaphysic in such popular fancies. Good and evil are alike eternal. Arthur and Charlemagne and Ogier the Dane are only sleeping and will yet return to save their peoples; and the Wandering Jew staggers blindly through the ages, seeking the rest which ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... are to fill the future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is it ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Dean of St. Paul's, downwards, the clerical singers who have not been markedly professional in their outcome have exhibited an agreeable freedom from monotony. In Donne himself we see the sad perfection of the metaphysic method, mitigated, however, by a few lapses into the lucid and the simple. Pomfret gave us in 'The Choice' the typical poem of the country parson, sounding the praises of rural scenes and lettered ease. In Parnell we have a sample ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... in this extraordinary man—who died at Hanover, 1716, in the midst of his labors and projects—turns mainly on his speculative philosophy. It was only as an incidental pursuit that he occupied himself with metaphysic; yet no philosopher since Aristotle— with whom, though claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he has much in common—has furnished more luminous hints to the elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were those which concern the most inscrutable, but, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... unknown enormities. The sun Would rise as beamless on my darkened days, Night proffer the same torments. Food would fly My lips the same, and the same restless blood Quicken my harassed limbs. Undone! undone! I have no metaphysic faculty To deem ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... Such verse as Bowles, heart honour'd Poet sang, That wakes the Tear, yet steals away the Pang, Then, or with Berkeley, or with Hobbes romance it, Dissecting Truth with metaphysic lancet. Or, drawn from up these dark unfathom'd wells, In wiser folly chink the Cap and Bells. How many tales we told! what jokes we made, Conundrum, Crambo, Rebus, or Charade; nigmas that had driven the Theban mad, And Puns, these best when exquisitely bad; And I, if ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Yankee lady, who could differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite. It is a common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena, the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the residuum of a bad metaphysic, which deforms the system of Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are, or can be conceived, things in themselves (i.e., unrelated to thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... peoples understand, while they do not understand one another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all wise men as his brethren. He believes that religion does not consist either in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, or in vain display, but in worship and justice. The doing of good, there is his service; being submissive to God, there is his doctrine. The Mahometan cries to him—"Have a care if you do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca!" "Woe unto you," says a Recollet, "if you do not ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints; he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his disciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance of Realism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the painter's shell, wherewith he is able to make infinite variety of faces or shapes. An enumeration of them according to popular note. That at the first one would conceive that in the schools by natural philosophy were meant the knowledge of the efficients of things concrete; and by metaphysic the knowledge of the forms of natures simple; which is a good and fit division of knowledge: but upon examination there is no such matter by them intended. That the little inquiry into the production of simple natures sheweth well ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region which—whether above or below—is at least altogether different from that in which science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprove the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... physics, and biology, is in the hands of scientific men; objective methods of research are employed and metaphysic disquisitions find no place in the accepted philosophies; but to a large extent philology remains in the hands of the metaphysicians, and subjective methods of thought are used in the explanation of the phenomena observed. If philology is to be a science it ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to convey. Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most concerns them. As my great namesake said some two hundred years ago, they know "what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly." And they not only know what's what themselves, but can impart to one another any new what's-whatness that they may have acquired, for they are notoriously able to instruct and correct ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... reduce all things to acts, And knew their natures by abstracts; Where entity and quiddity, The ghost of defunct bodies, fly; Where Truth in person does appear, Like words congealed in northern air. He knew what's what, and that's as high As metaphysic ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... all is night. See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head! Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public flame, nor ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... of savage dispositions. Johnson had always a metaphysic passion for one princess or another: first, the rustic Lucy Porter, before he married her nauseous mother; next the handsome, but haughty, Molly Aston; next the sublimated, methodistic Hill Boothby, who read her bible in Hebrew; and lastly, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Catherine of Braganza's Tangier Dowry, let us say, was the morning star of the modern English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of a great number of men who were theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society and morals, each with his special metaphysic of the Sacrament; each with his "system." Such men have always abounded; they abound today. Some of Wycliffe's extravagances resemble what many Protestants happen, later, to have held; others (such ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of the philosophers. Nature, as was known, was in constant motion, but this motion, according to the universally accepted ideas, turned eternally in a circle, and therefore ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale. In the island stories we ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... at the Revival of Learning, the thinker imprisoned in mediaeval dialectics suddenly felt under his feet the firm ground of classic argument, so, in the eighteenth century, philosophy, long suspended in the void of metaphysic, touched earth again and, Antaeus-like, drew fresh life from the contact. It was clear that Professor Vivaldi, whose very name had been unknown to Odo, was an important figure in the learned world, and one uniting the tact and firmness necessary to control those dissensions ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Edouard Le Roy published his 'Qu'est-ce qu'un dogme?' which carried the discussion into the domain of pure philosophy, though the studies of Blondel and Laberthonniere in the psychology of religion may be said to involve a metaphysic closely resembling that of Le Roy. Mr. Tyrrell's able works have a very similar philosophical basis, which is also assumed by the group of Italian priests who have remonstrated with the Pope.[57] M. Loisy protests against the classification ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... advantage our institution, which we draw from foreign examples, if we make so little profit of that we have of our own, which is more familiar to us, and, doubtless, sufficient to instruct us in that whereof we have need. I study myself more than any other subject; 'tis my metaphysic, my physic: ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... proverbial and popular philosophy. The moral and intellectual are always dividing, yet they must be reunited, and in the highest conception of them are inseparable. The thesis of Socrates is not merely a hasty assumption, but may be also deemed an anticipation of some 'metaphysic of the future,' in which the divided elements ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... theory is divided into physic and metaphysic; wherein I desire it may be conceived that I use the word metaphysic in a differing sense from that that is received. And in like manner, I doubt not but it will easily appear to men of judgment, that in this and other particulars, wheresoever my conception and notion may differ from the ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... astral body, and to communicate with one another from distant places. But granting such occult powers in a world of economic strife, what follows? Simply new floods of charlatanism, elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and metaphysic for the deluding and plundering of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... among the Catholics, and it was the rising strength of the German Protestants. Therefore it was the post of danger; and it gave to a theologian the command of a public of laymen. The restoration of history coincided with the euthanasia of metaphysic; when the foremost philosophic genius of the time led over to the historic treatment both of philosophy and religion, and Hamilton, Cousin, Comte, severally converted the science into its history. Many men better ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... is started by those pale lady-faces which light up on a Sunday the gallery of the college chapel. An amiable and modest fancy gives to them all a sweet classic grace. The very atmosphere of these courts, wakened with high metaphysic discourse, seems to lend them a Greek beauty and fineness; and you attach to the prettiest, that your eye can reach, all the charms of some Sciote maiden, and all the learning of her father—the professor. And as you ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... tendency to explain historical facts by transcendental causes survives in more modern theories in which metaphysic is disguised under scientific forms. The historians of the nineteenth century have been so strongly influenced by their philosophical education that most of them, sometimes unconsciously, introduce metaphysical formulae into the construction of history. It will be enough to enumerate these ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... concerned with the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriously concerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or 'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching towards the horrors of a world-war ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... of the system advance as we proceed. {90b} Subtract this questionable factor—the unconscious from Hartmann's 'Biology and Psychology,' and the chapters remain pleasant and instructive reading. But with the third part of his work—the Metaphysic of the Unconscious—our feet are clogged at every step. We are encircled by the merest play of words, the most unsatisfactory demonstrations, and most inconsistent inferences. The theory of final causes has been hitherto employed ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... is the genuine head of many a house, And much divinity[406] without a [Greek: Nous]. Nor could a Barrow work on every block, Nor has one Atterbury spoil'd the flock. See! still thy own, the heavy cannon roll, And metaphysic smokes involve the pole. For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head With all such reading as was never read: 250 For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, goddess, and about it: So spins the silk-worm small its slender store, And labours ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope |
