"Naturalistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can see at once that a method so professedly exact as this may be dangerously out of touch with the human processes of the life of individuals and of societies. Or suppose still further that the biblical student holds a set of scientific assumptions which are extremely naturalistic; that is to say, suppose that he assumes that nothing has ever happened which in any way departs from the natural order. We have only to remind ourselves that the natural order of a particular time is the order as that time conceives it; but it is manifestly hazardous to limit events in the ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... far narrower than that of Aristotle. To Plutarch, imitation meant a naturalistic copy of things as they are. "While poetry is based on imitations ... it does not resign the likeness of the truth, since the charm of imitation is probability."[35] As a result of his naturalism, Plutarch admitted as appropriate poetical material immorality and obscenity ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... monotheistic and had gradually lapsed into ramified forms of polytheism, says in his review of Ebrard's work: "We do not know where to find a more weighty reply to the assumptions and theories of those writers who persist in claiming, according to the approved hypothesis of a merely naturalistic evolution, that the primitive state of mankind was the lowest and most debased form of polytheistic idolatry, and that the higher religions have been developed out of these base rudiments. Dr. Ebrard shows conclusively that the facts all lead ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... beautiful, the exquisite—the fact remains that he triumphs over all his deficiencies, and in very splendid fashion. He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he discovered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of the two naturalistic painters who have shown in any high degree the supreme artistic faculty—that of generalization. However impressive Manet's picture may be; however brilliant Monet's endeavor to reproduce sunlight may seem; however refined and elegant Degas's delicate selection of pictorial material—for ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... notorious novel, a novel which it would be complimentary to describe as naturalistic, the heroine is warned by her director against the works of Anatole France, "Ne lisez jamais du Voltaire... C'est un peche mortel... ni de Renan... ni de l'Anatole France. Voila qui est dangereux." The names are appropriately united; a real, if not precisely an apostolic, succession ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... and discretion of age. Man and woman, we were in full tide, strong, simple, and elemental. Life rioted in our veins; we were a-bubble with the ferment; and it is out of such abundance that Mother Nature has always exacted her progeny. From the strictly emotional and naturalistic viewpoint, I must consider it, even now, the perfect love. But it was decreed that I should develop into an intellectual animal, and be something more than a mere unconscious puppet of the reproductive forces. So head mastered my heart, and I laid the grip of my will over ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of the process of reproduction as is usually known by a precocious youngster of 12 years, but I firmly refused to credit his statements. He adduced the fact of lactation in proof of the correctness of his views, but I had been too thoroughly steeped in supernaturalism to be very amenable to naturalistic evidence of this sort and remained obdurate. But the suggestion stayed with me and perplexed me not a little; when we returned to the farm I began to watch the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural, the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 57-65, 83-99), calling special attention to a series of twelve prints executed in the Netherlands, known as The Infancy of our Lord God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, in which we have "a reproduction of the childhood of the Saviour in the terms of a homely Netherland family life, the naturalistic treatment diversified by the use ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... of literary schools which have given us deformed, superhuman, poetical, pathetic, charming or magnificent pictures of life, a realistic or naturalistic school has arisen, which asserts that it shows us the truth, the whole truth, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... philosophy in its entirety, we see that it was naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, and rationalistic rather than mystical. These gifted men saw no clear indication for the existence of a supreme being; very few of them speak of the deity in the role of Providence and fewer still believed in ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... and sexual instinct, designed for certain natural purposes; that is your philosophical or zooelogical theory about it. What it is, beyond all doubt of any kind, is a divine and sacred and incredible vision." The fact that it is an animal necessity only comes to the naturalistic philosopher after looking abroad, studying its origins and results, constructing an explanation of its existence, more or less natural and conclusive. The fact that it is a spiritual triumph comes to the first ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... clothes-line reins. She was traveling slowly, just as I like to travel; and, as I say, I was impressed by her comfortable appearance. Why would not an equipage like that be just the thing for a naturalistic idler? ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... and executed genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure-painters as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either the naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and harmoniously colored as well as ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... leading portrait painter of the day, had taken pupils, but his powers did not extend to the treatment of landscape, and my sympathies did not go beyond it. I applied to A.B. Durand, then the president of our Academy, the only rival of Cole, though in a purely naturalistic vein, and a painter of real power in a manner quite his own, which borrowed, however, more from the Dutch than from the Italian feeling, to which Cole inclined. Durand was originally an engraver of the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Hayesville. The Western Art Circuit had been started up by a handful of painters and literary men in "the city"; among them, Abner Joyce, notable veritist; Adrian Bond, aesthete, yet not without praiseworthy leanings toward the naturalistic; Stephen Giles, decorator of the mansions of the great, but still not wholly forgetful of his own rustic origins; and one or two of the professors at the Art Academy. All these too believed that it was the mission ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... was ready with any adequate answer to the argument which Butler had brought forward in the previous decade of the century. We do not see that he is aware as yet of there being as valid objections on his own sceptical principles to the alleged data of naturalistic deism, as to the pretensions of a supernatural religion. He ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... no civilization can live long without joy. The expression of French life will change when French life changes; and French naturalism is better at its worst than French unnaturalism at its best. "No one," as Senor Valdes truly says, "can rise from the perusal of a naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape" from the wretched world depicted in it, "and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it. Naturalistic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have befallen a man so situated, the things he would have done, the difficulties he might have avoided had he exercised forethought. Though Defoe had little insight into the complexities of man's inner life, he has not been surpassed in his accumulations of naturalistic outer details. These do not cumber his narrative; they contribute to its purpose and add to its effectiveness. In this selection (Appendix 5) observe how plausible are such homely details as Crusoe's seeing no sign of his comrades "except three of their hats, one cap, and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the famous microscopist, testifies: "In support of all naturalistic conjectures concerning man's origin, there is not at this time the ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... belief brings me to the consideration of another and very different form of what I may call the naturalistic school of interpretation. This theory throws overboard the whole of the elements of the class commonly called supernatural, and even treats the identity of the voyagers as a matter of comparative indifference, but it sees in ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... also to the legend of the fountain of youth, to the mythical and naturalistic ideas of water as the first element and source of all life, and to the drink of the gods (soma, etc.) Compare also the fountain in the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... transported from the lagunes of Venice to the frontier of Bohemia and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of the story becomes less naturalistic; the storyteller loses herself somewhat in subterranean passages and the mazes of adventure generally. She wrote on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new horizons which ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... lace is produced. Its chief characteristics are its superb designs, repeating many of the fine Renaissance patterns, its clear ground, and its use of shading in leaves and flowers, which, while it adds much to the sumptuous effect, is possibly too naturalistic. This lace is a mixture of hand and machine lace, the ground being of the best machine net, the flowers and sprays frequently needle made, the various fillings being composed of a variety of designs, and the shading often being produced in the needle-darning as in modern Ghent and ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... mechanical law. The types of things exist by what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance, and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves to our environment and not our environment to our faculties. Such is the naturalistic point of view ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... had done before him in 'Iphigenie' and 'Faust'. This looked toward opera, toward Romanticism, toward a mixture of types; but it was effective as a mode of portraying states of feeling. The lyric monologue is of course out of tune with the modern naturalistic dogma, but so is Hamlet's soliloquy. And then it must be remembered that the naturalistic dogma was ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the contrary, this is a mere side-issue, to follow which would lead us astray. The reptile-dragon was invented when men had begun to forget what the arch-dragon was; it is the product of a later stage—the materializing stage; that stage when humanity sought to explain, in naturalistic fashion, the obscure traditions of the past. We must delve ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... for its own. But logicians and mathematicians naturally neglect the psychology of their own processes and, accustomed as they are to an irresponsible and constructive use of the intellect, regard as a confused and uninspired intruder the critic who, by a retrospective and naturalistic method, tries to give them a little knowledge ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... rigorism of any degree seem ridiculous and thus provide abundant amusement for himself and for like-minded readers; he could then proceed to undermine all the really important systems of morality of his time by applying more exacting standards than they could meet. Against a naturalistic and sentimental system, like Shaftesbury's, he could argue that it rested on an appraisal of human nature too optimistic to be realistic. Against current Anglican systems of morality, if they retained elements of older rigoristic doctrine he could level the ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... expansions, and is thus two removes later than the original "kernel." [Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. xii.] Now this is the period—the Making of the Shield for Achilles is, at least, in touch with the period—of "the eminently free and naturalistic treatment which we find in the best Mycenaean work, in the dagger blades, in the siege fragment, and notably in the Vaphio cups," (which show long-haired men, not men close-cropped, as in the daggers and siege fragment). [Footnote: Leaf, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... movement—the reaction against romanticism in the novel and lyrism in the theatre. And there is some basis for their bold assertion that they led the way in every other development of the modern French novel. They believed that they had founded the naturalistic school in Germinie Lacerteux, the psychological in Madame Gervaisais, the symbolic in Les Freres Zemganno, and the satanic in La Faustin. It is unnecessary to recognise all these claims in full: to discuss ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... appealed to Indian artists recruited to the colony. Its representational finesse made it an ideal medium for transcribing the Indian scene and the appearance at the court of European miniatures, themselves highly naturalistic, stimulated this character still further. The result was the sudden rise in India, between 1570 and 1605, of a huge new school of painting, exquisitely representational in manner and committed to a new kind of Indian naturalism. Such ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... naturalistic school of fiction, nor the psychological, in so far as the latter is represented by Bourget, has Balzac's influence been a gain. Bourget has borrowed Balzac's furniture, his pompous didacticism, his occasional indecency—in fine, all that is least essential in the elder's assets, without ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... and Scopas, was a contemporary of Alexander the Great. He contributed to advance their style by the peculiar fullness, roundness, and harmonious general effect by which it appears that his works were characterized. His school exhibited a strong naturalistic tendency, a closer imitation of nature, leading to many refinements in detail. It was unquestionably greater in portrait than in ideal works. Pliny thus speaks of his style: "He is considered to have contributed very greatly to the art of the statuary by expressing the details of ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... deliverance, his journey in search of his father, during which he visits the Planets and Hell. The narration is constantly interrupted by incidental adventures. Occasionally they are what would be called to-day very naturalistic, and sometimes ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a new phenomenon in his life, for as long ago as the days when he was an active member of the "Tunnel" he had come in close contact with the Kugler coterie in Berlin, where the so-called Munich school originated, and yet he did not follow his friends in that eclectic movement. So when the naturalistic school of writers began to win enthusiastic support, even though he found himself in the main in sympathy with their announced creed, he did not join them in practice. He felt that what the literature of the Fatherland ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... the Count. "And it is the same with their pictorial art. We blame the Orientals for their chill cult of geometric designs, their purely stylistic decoration, their endless repetitions, as opposed to our variety and love of floral, human, or other naturalistic motives. But by this simple means they attain their end—a direct appeal. Their art, like their music, goes straight to the senses; it is not deflected or disturbed by any intervening medium. Colour plays its part; the sombre, throbbing sounds of these instruments—the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... consequence. It was originally built at the end of the thirteenth century. The arcading round these walls is new, much of it carved under the direction of Lord Grimthorpe by Mr. John Baker. The carving is of a naturalistic character, the vegetable forms being copied direct from the plants and trees of the neighbourhood. The oak ceiling of the south side and the flat ceiling of the centre are by Lord Grimthorpe; that on the north side by Sir ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... last scenes of Romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than this description of them, is in the highest degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in the nature of things so difficult to present on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The very long, the very minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... of the preceding argument II. Spirit superior to nature III. Naturalistic tendency of the fine arts IV. Naturalistic tendency of science and philosophy V. Naturalism in social estimates VI. Self-consciousness burdensome VII. Impossibility of full conscious guidance ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... soul—faith, liberty, virtue, devotion—made their appearance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races. The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic. But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a delicious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite—the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... placing this period directly before the creation of Hamlet, Brandes has succeeded in making the relations to the "dark lady" a crisis in Shakespeare's life. The story, which, as Brandes tells it, has a remarkable similarity to an ultra-modern naturalistic novel, becomes even more piquant since Brandes knows the name of the lady, nay, even of the faithless friend. All this information Brandes has, of course, taken from Thomas Tyler's introduction to the Irving edition of the sonnets (1890), ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... traditions and rites rather than a body of doctrines. The divinities of the two religions became identified, their legends connected, and the Semitic astrology, the result of long continued scientific observations, superimposed itself on the naturalistic myths of the Persians. Ahura Mazda was assimilated to Bel, Anahita to Ishtar, and Mithra to Shamash, the solar god. For that reason Mithra was commonly called Sol invictus in the Roman mysteries, and ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... his mother, to point out to her the essentially faulty structure of Hamlet, and many a duller wit, a decade or two later in his existence, has come to the conclusion that Frederick the Great is far too long. But whatever were Carlyle's faults, his historical method was superbly naturalistic. Have we a historian left us so honestly possessed as he was with the genuine historical instinct, the true enthusiasm to know what happened; or one half so fond of a story for its own sake, or so in love with things, not for what they were, but simply because they were? 'What wonderful things ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... in the naturalistic view of life appears when we try to think of a being as a part of Nature, having his genesis in her material forces, who is yet able to master and direct Nature, reversing her processes and defeating her ends, opposing his will ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... was Shakespeare that inspired Goethe's 'Goetz'; Ossian and the old English and Scotch folk-songs were Herder's theme; and Percy's 'Reliques' stimulated and saved the genius of Buerger. This was the movement which, for lack of a better term, has been called the naturalistic. Literature once more took possession of the whole range of human life and experience, descending from her artificial throne to live with peasant and people. These ardent innovators spurned all ancient rules and conventions, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the characteristic general features of "social" and "living bodies," noting likeness and differences, particularly with reference to complexity of structure, differentiation of function, division of labor, etc., Spencer gives a perfectly naturalistic account of the characteristic identities and differences between societies and animals, between sociological and biological organizations. It is in respect to the division of labor that the analogy between societies and animals goes farthest and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... play dealing with ancient Egypt, the actor-manager exerted his historic imagination, in one scene, in so far as to introduce a shadoof or water-hoist, which was worked as a naturalistic side-action to the main incident. But, unfortunately, it was displayed upon a hillside where no water could ever have reached it; and thus the audience, all unconsciously, was confronted with the remarkable spectacle of a ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... in frigid conceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty, as written in winter within the four walls of a college-chamber. The two idyls breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the fields around Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our language has yet found of the first charm of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset into the fields from his chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... in the annals of history; eighteenth-century atheism, however, is of especial interest, standing as it does at the end of a long period of theological and ecclesiastical disintegration and prophesying a reconstruction of society on a purely rational and naturalistic basis. The anti-theistic movement has been so obscured by the less thoroughgoing tendency of deism and by subsequent romanticism that the real issue in the eighteenth century has been largely lost ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... industrial arts reached a remarkable development; but in Chaldaea, at any rate, a vast amount of knowledge had been accumulated and methodized, in the departments of grammar, mathematics, astronomy, and natural history. Where such traces of the scientific spirit are visible, naturalistic speculation is rarely far off, though, so far as I know, no remains of an Accacian, or Egyptian, philosophy, properly so called, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... created a sensation, and was hailed by Brandes as exactly representing the "naturalism" which he desired to see encouraged; but Skram has written little else of importance. Other writers of reputation in the naturalistic school were Edvard Brandes (b. 1847), and Herman Bang (b. 1858). Peter Nansen (b. 1861) has come into wide notoriety as the author, in particularly beautiful Danish, of a series of stories of a pronouncedly sexual type, among which Maria (1894) has been the most successful. Meanwhile, several ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... schemes were rectilinear, more rarely they were carried out in curves. Sardinia furnishes some fine examples of rectilinear work, while the best of the curved designs are found in Malta, where elaborate conventional and even naturalistic patterns are traced out with wonderful ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... do not find any issue, because for it one needs two things: a great idea and a great talent, and they did not have either of them. Hence the uneasiness increases, and the same authors who arouse against rough pessimism of naturalistic direction fell into pessimism themselves, and by this the principal importance and aim of a reform became weaker. What remains then? The bizarre form. And in this bizarre form, whether it is called symbolism or impressionism, they go in deeper and become more ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... "impossible" stories, voiced by some of your Readers. Stories thus classified, one would infer, are tales dealing with the marvelous and the mysterious in which the author has not attempted to give a naturalistic or scientific explanation of his wonders and mysteries. In other words, he has not rendered them in terms of the test-tube. He has ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various |
