"Conception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... descriptions of the "wild people" which were being published. In a "Report", ascribed to Gen. Oglethorpe, it is stated that "nothing is lacking for their conversion to the Christian faith except a knowledge of their language, for they already have an admirable conception of 'morals', and their conduct agrees perfectly therewith. They have a horror of adultery, and disapprove of polygamy. Thieving is unknown to them. Murder is considered an abominable crime, and no one may be killed except an enemy, when they esteem ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... or his commentators; and the duty of the critic was to consider whether the author had infringed or conformed to the established rules, and to pass sentence accordingly. I will not say that the modern critic has abandoned altogether that conception of his duty. He seems to me not infrequently to place himself on the judgment-seat with a touch of his old confidence, and to sentence poor authors with sufficient airs of infallibility. Sometimes, indeed, the reflection that he is representing ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... preconceived prejudice against the ordinary feminine member of "The Profession" had, during his intercourse with Cap'n Abe's niece, been lulled to sleep. Miss Louder and Miss Noyes more nearly embodied his conception of actresses—nice enough young women, perhaps, but ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... desire by a few Scriptural texts and a few suggestions to deepen the reader's conception of the state of holiness. Everything in the realm of Christianity, or the kingdom of God, from heaven to earth is holy. Let us here give you a brief Bible lesson, kindly asking you ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... et Inferno; or A Treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, and of the wonderful Things therein heard and seen. London, 1758, 4to. "By this work the reader may attain to some conception of the heavenly kingdom, and may learn therein that all social virtues, and all the tender affections that give consistence and harmony to society, and do honour to humanity, find place and exercise in the utmost purity in those delectable ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... which is a most sumptuous, beautiful and thoughtful shrine, yet owing to the darkness of the church is almost invisible. Guides, it is true, will emerge from the gloom and hold lighted tapers to it, but a right conception of it is impossible. The famous miraculous picture over the altar is notable rather for its properties than for its intrinsic beauty; it is the panels of the altar, which contain Orcagna's most exquisite work, representing scenes in the life of the Virgin, with emblematical ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... increasingly apparent that what men have hitherto attributed to the gods are nothing but the ideals they value and grope for in themselves. The ideal of the freethinker, the conception that places the supreme worth of human life in the expanding horizon of man's usefulness to man, is forever menaced by the supernaturalism of the theist which manifests itself in the multifarious religious sects that are the most active and constant menace to civilization ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... operations or its influence on her own fame. The original idea of exhibiting the great natural laws of society by a series of pictures of selected social action was a fortunate one; and her tales initiated a multitude of minds into the conception of what political economy is, and how it concerns everybody living in society. Beyond this there is no merit of a high order in the work. It popularised in a fresh form some doctrines and many truths ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... I discovered that it was a monkey. He kept jumping about from branch to branch, very much astonished at finding himself floating down the river. He was evidently longing to get back to his woods, but how to manage it was beyond his conception. I pointed him out to Duppo. "He do," he said, nodding his head. It was a great question, however, whether we should reach the floating island. Even when close to it the current might sweep us off in another direction. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... sooner than you have commanded; for while I was making the basin, I thought there ought to be a saltcellar to match it; therefore I have already designed one, and if it is your pleasure, I will at once exhibit my conception." The King turned with a lively movement of surprise and pleasure to the lords in his company—they were the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the Cardinal of Ferrara—exclaiming as he did so: "Upon my word, this is ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... under my direction to labour to the very utmost of their strength for the salvation of others without the hope of earthly reward. Of the practical common sense, the resource, the readiness for every form of usefulness of those Officers and Soldiers, the world has no conception. Still less is it capable of understanding the height and depth of their self-sacrificing devotion ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... interest to notice that this European conception of town-citizenship coincided with an exceptional artistic and economic development strongly subjected both to Latin and Germanic influences. While in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Ghent became the centre of ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... growing age. The youth was never weary of listening to the tales of his sire's youthful adventures; and had not yet in the smallest degree lost the conviction, that his father was the greatest man in the world. The grandest triumph possible to his conception was, to return to his father, laden with the spoils of one of the hated giants. But they both were in some dread, lest the thought of the loneliness of these two might occur to them, in the moment when decision was most necessary, and disturb, in some degree, the self-possession ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... contribution to the literature of the day. It possesses originality in its conception and is a work of unusual ability. Its interest is sustained to the close, and it is an advance even on the previous work of this talented author. Like all Mr. Crawford's work, this novel is crisp, clear, and vigorous, and ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... are the things that I have said in this article, I fear that my average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception of Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far as my observation goes, I have seen nothing to indicate that the rural population of Japan is not now as happy as the rural population in ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... goes, on "the state of mind." Conditions determine events, but conditions are plastic to thought. On them one may stamp the impress. If he persist in regarding himself as a victim to fate and his life as a sacrifice and burnt offering, he can very soon work this conception into actuality. He can—indeed he will, and he inevitably must—become that which he continually sees himself, in mental vision. But if he will take his stand, with poise and serenity, on spiritual truth; if he will amend ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... able to agree with him in many important points, but as to others I should like to express some hesitation, and to ask consideration for some views which do not coincide with his. At the outset, I am entirely at one with him as to that unifying conception of nature as a whole which we designate in a single word as Monism. By this we unambiguously express our conviction that there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable world is constituted, and has been developed, in ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... personal character, and as responsible to the students of the human mind and body, that since this story has been in progress he has received the most startling confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like that which he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... globes of ivory, the moons borrow from their brightness, and a belly dimpled as it were a brocaded cloth of the finest Egyptian linen, with creases like folded scrolls, leading to a waist slender past conception, over buttocks like a hill of sand, that force her to sit, when she would fain stand, and awaken her, when she would sleep, even as saith ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... investigation, but Gwen's prudence was never at home when wanted. She ought not to have accepted the housekeeper's suggestion that she could satisfy herself by an autopsy. The comfort of this couch, warm or cold, was already leagues above its occupant's wildest conception of luxury. What must her ladyship do but say:—"Yes, thank you, Masham, I'll feel for myself." And there, if that young hussy, Lupin, hadn't sent the hot bottle right down to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... diabolism—worse even than poisoning the wells from which an enemy must drink. The explanation with which I have satisfied myself is that some careless or stupid practitioner took the vaccinating lymph from diseased human bodies, and thus infected all with the blood venom, without any conception of what he was doing. The low standard of medical education in the South ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... with his belt, his nebulous sword, and his four corner stars of the first magnitude, are sources of delight which never tire. Even the optical delusion, by which the motion of the earth from west to east appears to the eye as the movement of the whole firmament from east to west, swells the conception of ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... change from one definite substance to another, which is clear, suggestive, and consistent, because it is an approximately accurate description of the facts discovered by careful and penetrative investigations. This presentment of the change has been substituted for the alchemical conception, which was an attempt to express what introspection and reasoning on the results of superficial investigations, guided by specious analogies, suggested ought ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... judiciously, as a fisherman weights his set line. If his tale becomes unreal it is only when he knows the author is ready to hear the author in person. If the Erewhon of his first visit does not fit his new conception he ruthlessly changes it. One misses the satiric tours de force of the first "Erewhon." There is nothing so brilliant as the chapters on disease and machines which for fifty years since life has been illustrating. But "Erewhon Revisited" is a finished ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... or under the control of France. Such it is now conceded is the character of the wrongs we suffered—wrongs in many cases so flagrant that even their authors never denied our right to reparation. Of the extent of these injuries some conception may be formed from the fact that after the burning of a large amount at sea and the necessary deterioration in other cases by long detention the American property so seized and sacrificed at forced sales, excluding what was adjudged to privateers before or without condemnation, brought ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is, at once, natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... whole, it seems to us, that though Mr Mill will consent to worship only a God of perfect goodness, he has thrown no new light on the grave problem—frankly stated though imperfectly solved, by Mr Mansel—how such a conception of God is to be reconciled with the extent of evil and suffering actually pervading human life and animal life throughout the earth. We are compelled to say, respecting Mr Mill's treatment of this subject—what ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... Willmott was carrying on an equally impassioned but much slower monologue on his conception of the character of Cyrano de Bergerac, which he said he intended to produce. "Cyrano," he said, "has been maligned by Coquelin. Coquelin is a great artist, but he did not understand Cyrano. Cyrano ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... A definite conception of the truth of this proposition will, I think, be more readily attained by the presentation of the steps which led me to ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... his anger and some slight fear evoked by that last bold menace. But notwithstanding that he menaced boldly the heart of Sakr-el-Bahr was surcharged with anxiety. He had conceived a plan; but between the conception and its execution he realized that ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... us as it did to Tennyson, because of "its divine intensity," or it may affect us as it did Charles Eliot Norton by "its powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards," showing that righteousness is inexorable; or it may interest us because of its solid realism, its pure strength of conception, its surpassing beauty, its vivid imaginative power, its perfection of diction "without superfluousness, without defect." Whatever be the reason of our interest in Dante, the study of his Divine Comedy ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... fullest extent, those adaptations to purpose which are so striking in the organic world, and which Teleology has done good service in keeping before our minds, without being false to the fundamental principles of a scientific conception of the universe. The apparently diverging teachings of the Teleologist and of the Morphologist are reconciled by ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things (Rom. i. 21-23). He invented idolatry, and all those "gay religions full of pomp and gold," in order to blunt the edge of that sharp spiritual conception of God which was continually cutting and lacerating his wicked and sensual heart. Hiding himself amidst the columns of his idolatrous temples, and under the smoke of his idolatrous incense, he thought like Adam to escape from the view and inspection ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... was added. As time went on doubts increased regarding the true shape of the earth. Early peoples had thought it a great flat expanse, with the blue sky propped over it like a dome or cover. This conception was giving way. The wise men who watched the sky at night, who saw the sweeping circles of the fixed stars and the wandering path of the strange luminous bodies called planets, began to suspect a mighty secret,—that the observing eye saw only ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... processes, and it is on the possibility of doing this by automatic machinery that England's great textile industries depend. The use of highly developed machinery for spinning cotton, wool, and flax has grown to be so much a part of our conception of modern life, as contrasted with the times of our grandfathers, as often to lead to the feeling that a complete and universal change has occurred in all the textile industries. This is, however, not the case. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... Averrhoes, who died in 1198 A.D., was the last of the great Arabian physicians who, by rational conception of medicine, attempted to stem the flood of superstition that was overwhelming medicine. For a time he succeeded; but at last the Moslem theologians prevailed, and he was degraded and banished to a town inhabited only by the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... unremunerative, it becomes a serious matter. The loading down of a woman or a girl with precious stones, gold, silver, or cheaper metal, adds anything but attractiveness to the person. It gives them a gross conception of personal attractiveness as well as a monetary value to beauty, which degrades the ideals of the country. When a woman's ears and nose, the crown of her head, her neck, arms, hands, waist, ankles, and toes are made to sparkle with the wealth of the family, and to bear down ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... intermeddling with the machinery of nature, even in what concerns our own persons. I shall not return here to the subject of ethics. In Chapter XV, I have sufficiently shown how false is our present sexual morality, and I have proved in Chapter XIV the absolute necessity of measures to regulate conception in order to realize an efficacious ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... The divine Dante was nothing better than a beggar, houseless, homeless, friendless, wandering through Italy while he composed his immortal cantos. Milton, who in his blindness "looked where angels fear to tread," was steeped in poverty while writing his sublime conception, "Paradise Lost." Shakespeare was glad to hold and water the horses of patrons outside the White Horse Theatre for a few pennies in order to buy bread. Burns burst forth in never-dying song while guiding the ploughshare. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... be seen how the conception of "usufruct" is to be imported into the relations of sovereign States, and, more especially, what are to be the relations of the usufructuary to States other than the State under which he holds. It is, of course, quite possible to adapt the terms ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... nineteenth century the boulevard from the Place de la Madeleine to the Rue Cambon was almost deserted by day and dangerous by night—a vast waste, the proceeds of the confiscated lands of the Filles de la Conception. From the Boulevard Montmartre to the Boulevard St. Martin followed lines of private hotels, villas, gardens and convent walls. A great mound which separated the Boulevard St. Martin from the Boulevard du Temple was not cleared away until 1853. From 1760 to 1862 the Boulevard du Temple ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... he consulted, as a Matriarch, a wonderful and heroic elderly woman around whom all the hopes of an embittered patriotism were legitimately centred. Unfortunately, "the progress of knowledge," as Hazlitt would say, exposed the falsity of this conception. A closer inspection of the documents, and further analysis of the condition of Norway in 1528, destroyed the fair illusion, and showed Ibsen in the light of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... And his conception of an "unending melody," an unbroken flow of music intended to give cohesion and homogeneity to his music-dramas, was a direct consequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give unity to their operatic ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... a clear conception of a single Mongul family, you must imagine, first, a rather small, short, thick-set man, with long black hair, a flat face, and a dark olive complexion. His wife, if her face were not so flat and her nose so broad, ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... I have endeavoured to indicate to you the extent of the subject-matter of the inquiry upon which we are engaged; and having thus acquired some conception of the past and present phenomena of organic nature, I must now turn to that which constitutes the great problem which we have set before ourselves;—I mean, the question of what knowledge we have of the causes of these ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... having no soul to be saved, yet lingered and listened outside the prayer echoing church? Only old Duncan had got farther: though he saw not a glimmer of the glory, he yet asserted his part and lot in it, by the aiding of his fellows to that of which he lacked the very conception himself. He was a doorkeeper in the house, yea, by faith the blind man became even a priest in the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... conception of the war was merely the natural struggle of the one party with the other for power, using as their means the rude arguments of the time. He still maintained his loyalty to King Henry, and when the Duke of York, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to fulfil Luther's prophecy. In 1549 he began publicly to propound a doctrine in which he abandoned the forensic conception of justification by imputation of the merits of Christ, and returned to the Roman view of justification by infusion i.e., by infusion of the eternal essential righteousness of the divine nature of Christ. According to his own statement, he had harbored these views ever since about 1522. ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look steadily at the shifting ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to him: his Aunt Anfisa had often used it as an answer to his questions, and he had invested in this brief word a conception of a power, similar to the power of God. He glanced at the speakers: one of them was a gray little old man, with a kind face; the other was younger, with big, weary eyes and with a little black wedge-shaped beard. His big gristly nose and his yellow, sunken ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... art," she said dreamily, "conception, gestation, travail, birth. It does not matter whether the thing born is a poem, a picture, a statue, a sonata, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... the bright day to greyness, heedless of the sophisticated-looking people who passed her on the wide Fifth Avenue pavement. It had risen in her mind the day before, planted first by Mrs. Burrage's note; and then, as we know, she had vaguely entertained the conception, asking Verena whether she would make the visit if it were again to be pressed upon them. It had been pressed, certainly, and the terms of the problem were now so much sharper that they seemed cruel. What had been in her own mind was that if Verena should ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... the former gained their knowledge more in the form of their own thoughts—in the form of ideas. The Christ Initiates occupied a middle position. While having a direct revelation, they acquired the capacity for clothing their Mysteries in a human form of conception. The Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars Initiates were obliged to express themselves more in symbols; the Christ, Venus, Mercury, and Vulcan Initiates were able to impart their knowledge ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... be found many scenes truly terrific in their conception, yet so softened down, and the mind so much relieved, by the intermixture of beautiful description, or pathetic incident, that the impression of the whole never becomes too strong, never degenerates into horror, but pleasurable emotion is ever the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... was still in its swaddling clothes. Its birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the pronunciamiento of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole troops the connection between Spain and Mexico was severed forever, and the colonel of these troops became the Emperor ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... into a correspondence with her, and so to compromise her! All this, which her husband's mind had so easily conceived, was not only impossible to her, but so horrible that she could not refrain from disgust at her husband's conception. The letter had been left with him, but she remembered every word of it. She was sure that it was an honest letter, meaning no more than had been said,—simply intending to explain to her that he would not willingly have stood in the way of a friend whom he had loved, by interfering with ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... those who have been in the country, and have fallen in with this animal in its wild and savage state, can have any idea of the appalling effect of a lion's roar. What is heard in a menagerie is weak, and can give but a faint conception of it. In the darkness of the night, it is almost impossible to tell from what quarter the sound proceeds; this arises from the habit which the animal has of placing his mouth close to the ground ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... knowledge, may have set forth certain assertions that are more or less equivalent to this fundamental truth. It is to Ptolemy we must give credit, however, not only for announcing this doctrine, but for demonstrating it by clear and logical argument. We cannot easily project our minds back to the conception of an intellectual state in which this truth was unfamiliar. It may, however, be well imagined that, to one who thought the earth was a flat plain of indefinite extent, it would be nothing less than an intellectual convulsion for him to be forced to believe that he stood upon a spherical earth, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... cooperate in any proposal which would relieve the existing situation in Russia. It seems to us that such a commission as you propose, purely humanitarian in its purpose, would offer a practical means of carrying out the beneficent results which you have in view and could not either in its conception or its operation be considered as having in view any other aim than "the humanitarian purpose ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... Mr. Traddles to bear with me in entering into these details. Without them, Mr. T. would indeed find it difficult to form the faintest conception ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... AN IDEAL.—Justice has constituted one of the basic ideals of the English-speaking peoples since the days of Magna Charta. "To no one will we sell, and to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice," declared that great document. This conception was later glorified into an ideal which, after having persisted for four centuries in England, was brought to the New World by the English colonists. The first ten amendments to the Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights contained in the constitutions of the several ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... course of this debate we have listened to some senators, as they conjured up before our eyes once more all the horrors of the Rebellion, the wickedness of its conception, how terrible its incidents were, and how harrowing its consequences. Sir, I admit it all; I will not combat the correctness of the picture; and yet if I differ with the gentlemen who drew it, it is because, had the conception ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... touch only what is shown to me—the chief objects of interest, carvings on the wall, or a curious architectural feature, exhibited like the family album. Therefore a house with which I am not familiar has for me, at first, no general effect or harmony of detail. It is not a complete conception, but a collection of object-impressions which, as they come to me, are disconnected and isolated. But my mind is full of associations, sensations, theories, and with them it constructs the house. The process reminds me of the building of Solomon's temple, where was neither saw, nor hammer, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... vague scent of orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood. Just then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious life for me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet, a genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Booddhists regard the destruction of a fruit tree as quite an act of sacrilege, and their sacred books pronounce a heavy malediction on those who wantonly commit so great a crime. One who has tasted the fruits of the tropics only at a distance from the soil that produces them can form no conception of the real flavor of plums and grapes that never felt the frosty atmosphere of our northern clime; of oranges plucked ripe from the fragrant stem and eaten fresh while the morning dew still glitters on their golden-tinted cheeks; of the rare, rosy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Exposition - a mood of triumphant rejoicing. The proud bearing of the equestrian group, the wide sweep of water when the fountain is in play, the sportive movement of the figures in the basin, all express the joy of achievement. In the conception of the sculptor, A. Stirling Calder, this was fitting tribute to the completion of the Panama Canal ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... being the instrument of God's action, and because that image can keep us from being persons in whom the Spirit of God can be incarnate. Such an examination calls for that sort of rethinking of our conception of the ministry that the Reverend Mr. Gates called for in our first chapter. The conception of the ministry held by both ministers and laymen will naturally reflect their conception or image of the church. Here both the ordained ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... arisen in modern times is neither to be traced for its origin to Greece or Rome, nor found to be evolved from Anglo-Saxon times. The early democracies of Athens and Sparta were confined to small states, and were based on a slave population without civic rights. There was not even a conception that slaves might or should take part in politics, and the slaves vastly outnumbered the citizens. Modern democracy does not tolerate slavery, it will not admit the permanent exclusion of any body of people from enfranchisement; though it finds it hard to ignore differences ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... which the members, instead of preying upon one another and seeking to put one another down, after the fashion of this world, should live together as brothers, seeking one another's elevation and spiritual growth." It was essentially socialistic in its conception and execution and, although professedly altruistic in its nature, was in reality a visionary scheme which reflected but little credit upon the judgment of either its originators or its patrons. Its company was composed of "members" and "scholars," to whom may be ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... beneficial, but in 1763 what had hitherto been mere morbid melancholy became something very near the dreaded insanity. "I was struck, " he says, "not long after my settlement in the Temple, with such dejection of spirits as none but they who have felt the same can have the least conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair." His residence at the Temple extended in all through eleven years. The year above mentioned, the last of that term, found the poet in straitened circumstances. The twin offices ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... autumn day in Chicago! Before it had proceeded very far I knew that there was a sufficient creative imagination on the shore of Lake Michigan to carry through any municipal enterprise, however vast, to a generous and final conclusion. The conception of those boulevards discloses a tremendous audacity and faith. And as you roll along the macadam, threading at intervals a wide-stretching park, you are overwhelmed—at least I was—by the completeness of the scheme's execution ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... undertaking—an interest springing apparently from an interest in the personage himself. The man of wonderments and measurements we have smuggled into the scene would have gathered that Miss Dosson's attention was founded on a conception of Mr. Flack's intrinsic brilliancy. Would his own impression have justified that?—would he have found such a conception contagious? I forbear to ridicule the thought, for that would saddle me with the care of showing what right our officious observer might have had ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race. This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at least shun ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... ironmonger's son, was not born to save the world, and if the great Dr. Johnson could say what he did, with how little ought not a humble Cowfold tradesman to be satisfied! We all of us have too vast a conception of the duty which Providence has imposed upon us; and one great service which modern geology and astronomy have rendered is the abatement of the fever by which earnest people are so often consumed. But George's meditations all through that ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... THE ENLARGED CONCEPTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION. The new ideas as to the purpose and functions of the State promulgated by English and French eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete expression in the American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... this word, Paul says. Its origin and conception is not with man. It is not the edict of the Roman emperor, nor the command of the high-priest at Jerusalem. It is the Word of the God of heaven. In it he speaks. He will have the message preached by poor human beings as a power unto happiness and salvation, both in name and reality. Such the Law ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... the federal system the word means less than this; and the conception, usually vaguely expressed, is that the relations of England, Scotland, and Ireland, should be something like those of the communities which make up (to quote instances commonly given) the German Empire, the Swiss ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... because it seemed to his own musings to shed a flood of light upon deep truths, which may not prove unwelcome nor unuseful to the doubting minds of many. It is true that in this, as in most other human efforts, the realization of idea in concrete falls far short of its abstract conception in the mind: there, all was clear, quick, and easy; here, the necessity of words, and the constraints of an unwilling perseverance, clog alike the wings of fancy and the feet of sober argument: insomuch that the difference is felt to be quite humiliating ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... had long since descended. Her anxieties were only for her daughter, her hopes only for the world beyond the grave. The latter was a man of peace, who, having found in the ordinances of his church everything to aid and nothing to retard his spiritual development, had no conception of the nature of the puritanical opposition to its government and rites. Through neither could Dorothy come to any true idea of the questions which agitated the politics of both church and state. To her, the king was ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... power of the Hebrew race. He was the youngest of a family of five, two daughters and three sons. An older brother who outlived him a short time, was the Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell, who wrote besides a novel, The New Priest in Conception Bay, which contains a delightful study of a Yankee, some poems, and a story ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... and was essentially a theological conception. But there was no small gap between this and the notion that spirits act in supernatural ways in our every-day world. And there was nothing more inconsistent in failing to bridge this gap than in the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... at the time, as very extraordinary, and the last one as very startling. A bank founded on the revenue and credit of the government, and managed and administered by the executive, was a conception which I had supposed no man holding the chief executive power in his own hands would venture ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Like David, he has an abundance of bushy hair crowning his handsome head; his straight brows and set mouth show the same determination of character. He stands for love which is determined to win, for love which conquers every obstacle, for love which is unerring in aim. It is a much nobler conception than the mere passing fancy of which the old myth speaks. Michelangelo was one ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... and vivid illustrations of this conception of headache is the remedy adopted for generations past, in this all too familiar and distressing condition, by the Irish peasantry. It consists of a band or strip of tough cloth, or better, of twisted or ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... attempt to translate this word, but I will give the reader a recipe. Take the notions "fanciful," "dreamy," and "enthusiastic" (in their poetic sense), mix them well, and you have a conception of schwarmerisck.] ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the oak-trees, a process which yields a quick monetary return—these few kinds of forestry, however, which are favorable to the parceling off of the woodland into small estates, quite destroy the conception of the forest as we understand it. An oak-forest like the above, which, as soon as the trees begin to grow really strong and sturdy, stretches forth toward the wanderer only slim, bark-stripped trunks with withered remnants of leaves, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... paint in the truth? No. You are talking as the man. As an artist you were wise to stick to your first conception. It had the heat of inspiration. But I think you can paint me better than you have done, in these sketches. Come, I will give you a sitting. Get your brushes. No, no, I'll sit for nothing else than for these scenes as ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... in the minds of this race between the repression and control of emotion and their ideal of virile dignity. Reticence is impossible to them. The Italian man, it is true, has been often described as eminently reticent; and the northern popular conception represents him as apt to seek the attainment of his object by the concealment of it. Nor is that representation an erroneous one. But the two statements are in no wise inconsistent. The Italian man is by nature, habit, and training an ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... In the course of natural development, Cecily, whilst still a girl, threw for ever behind her all superstitions and harassing doubts; she was in the true sense "emancipated"—a word Edward Spence was accustomed to use jestingly. And this was Mallard's conception ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... conflict with Blackstone, not a very powerful representative of the opposite principle. Blackstone, in fact, had tried to base his defence of that eminently empirical product, the British Constitution, upon some show of a philosophical groundwork. He had used the vague conception of a 'social contract,' frequently invoked for the same purpose at the revolution of 1688, and to eke out his arguments applied the ancient commonplaces about monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. He thus tried to invest the constitution with the sanctity derived from this mysterious 'contract,' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... from the ground, a terrible sense of acute bodily pain gradually crept over him, as he found himself hurried along at a rapid pace. Where he was going, who had him in charge, what he had done, whether he was in this or some other world, were matters of which he had no more conception than the dead charger he had ridden. Pain, pain, nothing but intense pain, absorbed the whole of his faculties. Gradually his full consciousness returned. He remembered the fierce onset of the enemy, his fall from ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... I could only show you what a contempt I have for you!" She was almost beside herself with anger, passion—I know not what. She shrank back from me, drew in a long breath, and fell upon the floor as if a gust of wind had blown her over; and then I began to have a dim conception of the power that moved and breathed in the personality of this woman. She fell, gave a long, shivering sigh, and, to all appearance, lay before ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... division being represented by the symbol of some god, as the Scorpion, the Ram, the Twins, etc. "Changes in the heavens . . . portended changes on earth. The Biblical expression 'hosts of heaven' for the starry universe admirably reflects the conception held by the Babylonian astrologers. Moon, planets and stars constituted an army in constant activity, executing military manoeuvres which were the result of deliberation and which had in view a ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... gods no longer live in houses and sleep in four- post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. Nobody knows exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there is neither rain nor hail nor snow, ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... Some conception of the haste and disorder with which the court left the capital on that memorable August morning may be gleaned from the fact that her sister was also overlooked and with a eunuch fled on foot in the wake of the departing court. She was overtaken by Prince Chuang who was returning in his chair from ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... blackness you are appalled by the awful darkness, and the stillness so intense is like that of some vast primeval forest at midnight. The ceiling is so low at one place you can touch it with your hands. With rock above and on both sides of you and water beneath, you think you have a faint conception of Hades. You hear no sound but the gentle splash of the water struck by the oars, or the labored and rapid breathing of the more ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... April 14th. The conception of a God gives an altogether new colour to worldliness and vice. Worldliness it changes into heathenism, vice into blasphemy. The carnal mind, the mind which is turned away from God, which will not correspond with God—this is not moral only but spiritual Death. And Sin, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... three years previously an eccentric merchant named Johns Hopkins had died, leaving the larger part of his fortune to found a college or university in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins was not an educated man himself and his conception of a new college did not extend beyond creating something in the nature of a Yale or Harvard in Maryland. By a lucky chance, however, a Yale graduate who was then the President of the University of California, Daniel Coit Gilman, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Our repast concluded, and Mr Treherne, again taking leave of me until dinner-time, I set out at once for the attic of my unhappy bread-stealer. What was the object of my visit? I had given him a sovereign. What did I intend further to do for him? I had, in truth, no clear conception of my purpose. The man was ill, friendless, without employment, and had "the incumbrances," wife and children, as the sick and unemployed invariably do have; but although these facts, coming before a man, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... at the mercy of the Opposition, and in more than one important or even impending question might at any time be outvoted in the House of Commons. None the less, however, was Peel resolved to stand by his sovereign, who appeared to be in a difficulty. The same sense of public duty, according to his conception of public duty, which guided him at every great crisis of his political career decided his action in this instance. He set himself to the work of forming an Administration in which he proposed to take under his own charge the functions of {238} Prime Minister ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... for a minute and then drew closer together as if seeking protection from some unseen menace. They had some vague conception of what had taken place here in this lonely little cottage. The elderly and already nervous professor, reading the tragedy of his sons' death, all alone perhaps, with no one to comfort or restrain him, had lost his mind, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... one who is so fond as you are of making distinctions, to see to it that they are just and valid. It is of immense moment that one who builds so much on words should rest his structure on the solid foundation of a correct and exact conception of them. Words are often things, and sometimes things of tremendous consequence, and none more so than those which enter into the grounding principles, of politics. No theoretical error but works practical mischief. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Ancient One is symbolized and concealed under the conception of the Unity, for He himself is One, ...
— Hebrew Literature
... more and more. All this is independent of its paternity. But if I am asked about that, I should only answer on my own judgment (not a good one in such a matter, as I have told you) that it is decidedly by Gainsborough, and in his best way of conception. My argument would be of the Johnsonian kind: if it is not by G., who the devil is it by? There are some perhaps feeble touches here and there in the tree in the centre, though not in those autumnal leaves that shoot into the sky to the right: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came—has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is no staying of the hand for pity, could not have been merely a wide, sunny expanse with no dark places. Nevertheless, we are again puzzled, when we attempt to realise the personality of a man whose imagination could soar to the mystical and philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which is full of religious poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar Birotteau" to invest prosaic and even sordid details with absolute verisimilitude, or in the "Contes Drolatiques" would ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... taught His disciples how to pray He began His immortal prayer not with "Great God of the universe," or "Creator of all things," but "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven" (Matthew 6:9). Here was a new conception of God. ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... certainly,—still, if the expression of the highest thoughts in the most beautiful forms be the true aim of Art, Scheffer must rank among the very first painters of his age. Delaroche may surpass him in strength and vigor of conception, and in thorough modelling and execution; but Scheffer has taken a deeper hold of the feelings, and has risen into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the nights, I never can forget the ideal beauty of the last three before we reached Bermuda. I had had no conception of what starlight can be and what stars can look like. These hanging lamps of the vast heavens seemed so strangely different from the stars that "twinkle, twinkle," as the nursery book has it, through our misty skies at home. ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... definitely conveyed by defined forms or thoughts: the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite;—hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past—in ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... from his pocket a pair of handcuffs, bright and shining manacles of which the untutored Indian had no conception of the use, but whose brightness attracted him. Ojeda told him they were bracelets, which the King of Spain had graciously sent him as a present, in recognition of his fame as a warrior of skill and courage. The poor Indian probably understood all this very imperfectly, but he ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... apparatus for converting chemical energy directly into electric energy. This is as broad a definition as can well be given. The general conception of a battery includes the action of electrolysis, a solution in the battery acting upon one of two conducting electrodes immersed in such fluid, which dissolves one of them only, or one more than the other. The best way to obtain a fundamental idea of a battery is to start with the simplest. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... gradually his plans took shape in the solitude of the woods with no one to counsel. Had the boy known what distance lay between him and his goal he would have grown faint-hearted, but he had no conception of what his undertaking meant. So he laid his plans with good courage, which plans, of course, included the taking of his dog. For three or four days Steve took an extra share of corn pone and bacon, Mirandy not noticing in her shiftless ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... visited San Jose, one of the most romantically, beautiful towns in California, which would require the subtle gift of genius, a touch of poetic fire, and, above all, the fullness and richness of descriptive power, to enable me to give any adequate conception of its charms. It was almost a fairy realm, with its fields of waving grain, then golden with the glow of the harvest season; trees laden with fruitage, and vineyards drooping with their ripe, ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... just two ideas which are associated in the popular imagination with the first thought of the Isle of Man. The one is that Manxmen have three legs, and the other that Manx cats have no tails. But whatever the popular conception, or misconception, of Man and its people, I shall assume that what you ask from me is that simple knowledge of simple things which has come to me by the accident of my parentage. I must confess to you at the outset that I am not much of a hand at grave history. Facts and figures ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... me this thought about Paul: "What makes St. Paul so interesting is his conception of the dimensions ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... ledge and Kenkenes sat down on it, leaning on one hand across Rachel's way. She paused near him. Even in the dark he could see the light in her eyes, and the joy of anticipation was in her voice. As yet he did not know whether she talked of the Israelitish conception of supernal life, or of a belief in a ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... squalls and heavy showers compelled the vessel to put off again as soon as it had succeeded in nearing the land. His experience on this coast D'Urville thus describes:—"One who has not had, as we have, a practical acquaintance with these seas, is unable to form any adequate conception of these incredible rains. Moreover, to obtain a just estimate of the cares and anxieties which a voyage like ours entails, there must be a liability to the call of duties similar to those which we had to discharge. It was very seldom that our horizon lay much beyond the distance of 200 yards, and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... has many virtues, but the most important of them all is his casualness. And he is so sincere and natural in it. He has no conception of the dramatic possibilities of a situation—something to be profoundly thankful for in the commander of an escadrille de chasse. Situations are dramatic enough, tense enough, without one's taking thought of the fact. He might have stood there, watch in hand, counting off the seconds. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... to the county jail. Often, he wandered restlessly near it, looking at the door with strange, mournful eyes; and if by chance the culprit passed out before him, under the guardianship of the terrible, red-faced constable,—Everett's earliest and latest conception of the Devil,—how wistfully he would gaze at him, and what a world of thought and puzzled speculation would float through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... own life in the future and his death; a vision of which she was ignorant, and which had come to Piero in the little church adjoining the asylum where his wife lay dying. What did that sealed envelope contain? Surely something he himself had written; but what? A confession, probably of his sins. The conception of such an action, the manner in which it had been carried out, would be in harmony with his innate mysticism, with the predominance in him of imagination over reason, with his intellectual physiognomy. Three years had passed since the day at Vena ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... majestic conception. But, after all, the practical question at issue is—how much of the old shall we retain and how much must be discarded? Unfortunately for himself and his cause, Burke was now urging his countrymen to support two military ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the author only wishes to state that it lays the axe on every conception of morality, religion and social order which we esteem. In the place of existing conditions, it would erect a mob tyranny more degrading to the individual than Czarism or Republicanism. The mines of Siberia and the tinned-meat ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith |
