"Cosmogony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raises many objections to the details, if it supplies some degree of confirmation to the fundamental idea of Laplace's cosmogony. The detection of the retrograde movement of Neptune's satellite made it plain that the anomalous conditions of the Uranian world were due to no extraordinary disturbance, but to a systematic variety of arrangement at the outskirts of the solar domain. So that, were a trans-Neptunian ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the skull is only a modified vertebra. Oken founded upon this idea and kindred analogies his profound philosophy of the system of animals and plants which comes very near to the evolution {35} theory, and in his cosmogony traces all organisms to a protoplasm in such a way as to bring him in this respect also very near to Darwinism. Goethe, in his metamorphosis of plants, develops ideas in which, in all seriousness, he ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... in a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... still. What makers or builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full? Of course, he sees it now. A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely new guess might become an integral part of his tribe's creed. That would be their cosmogony. And if, a generation or two after, another savage genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions. It would ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... to describe it he fell into that besetting intellectual sin of India, the systematizing of the imaginary. Ages, continents and worlds are described in detailed statements which bear no relation to facts. Thus, Brahmanic cosmogony usually deals with a period of time called Kalpa. This is a day in the life of Brahma, who lives one hundred years of such days, and it marks the duration of a world which comes into being at its commencement ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... music and poetry, plastic art and fiction. Yet his system, unlike that of Moses, demanded thaumaturgy and metaphysical entities, and these he perforce borrowed from the Jews who had borrowed them from the Babylonians: his soul and spirit, his angels and devils, his cosmogony, his heavens and hells, even the Bridge over the Great Depth are all either Talmudic or Iranian. But there he stopped and would have stopped others. His enemies among the Koraysh were in the habit of reciting certain Persian fabliaux and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... "Vestiges" before I left England in 1846; but, if I did, the book made very little impression upon me, and I was not brought into serious contact with the "Species" question until after 1850. At that time, I had long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony, which had been impressed upon my childish understanding as Divine truth, with all the authority of parents and instructors, and from which it had cost me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was unbiassed in respect of any doctrine which presented ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... say that we have an unchangeable cosmogony, an unchangeable theory of moral retribution, an unchangeable system of dogmatic propositions. Whether we have, or have not, it is not of them that Scripture reminds the Jews, when the heavens and the earth were shaken; when their own nation and worship were ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... it in my instance, may be added to the account of your injustice. I see you go upon the old Christian principle of heaping coals of fire upon people's heads, which is the highest refinement upon vengeance. I see, moreover, that according to your system of cosmogony, the difference is but accidental between the race of kings and that of the first Baron of Lixmore: that ex-lawyers come like other men from Adam, and ex-ministers from somebody who started up out of the ground ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of, "Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth," made to one of the attendants who had been for many years in the army, was nearly the cause of a slight fracas. Mr. H. G. WELLS has sometimes been seen staring open-mouthed at the painting of the Olympian cosmogony which adorns the ceiling and walls of the Grand Staircase, and in the wych-elm bower Sir J. M. BARRIE tells me that he often thinks out the titles of his new plays. It was here, in fact, whilst he was weighing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... ventured to add, that the desperate attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... that I had a sort of cosmogony of my own when I was a mere boy. I used to speculate as to what the world was made of. Partly closing my eyes, I could see what appeared to be little crooked chains of fine bubbles floating in the air, and ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... greatest blunder of the present day, upon the part of scientists, is their attempt to bring into disrepute the cosmogony given in the Bible by a scientific cosmogony, which leaves off as "unknown" the only active world-forming force. They arrogantly assume to be acquainted with the entire history of our planet from the atoms to the globe. Yet ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... of human influence acting from without. Chaldea, which the peculiar Semitic shepherds crossed in their pilgrimage, presented them with notions from its rich mythology and cosmogony. The natives of Syria and Canaan, among whom in the course of time the Abrahamites settled, imparted to them many of their religious views and customs. Nevertheless, the kernel of their pure original theory remained intact. The patriarchal mode of ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... struck by his look of attention. "My dear Vivaldi," said this gentleman, laying down a fossil, and fixing his gaze on Odo while he addressed the Professor, "why use such superannuated formulas in introducing a neophyte to a study designed to subvert the very foundations of the Mosaic cosmogony? I take it the Cavaliere is one of us, since he is here this evening: why, then, permit him to stray even for a moment in ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of civilisation Its features in Ceylon The various forms elsewhere Points that distinguish it from Brahmanism Buddhist theory of human perfection Its treatment of caste Its respect for other religions Anecdote, illustrative of (note) Its cosmogony Its doctrine of "necessity" Transmigration Illustration from Lucan (note) The priesthood and its attributes Buddhist morals Prohibition to take life Form of worship Brahmanical corruptions Failure of Buddhism as a sustaining faith ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... further into it." Since the time of St. Augustine the Scriptures had been made the great and final authority in all matters of science, and theologians had deduced from them schemes of chronology and cosmogony which had proved to be stumbling-blocks to the advance ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Timaeus that reveals to us how the Platonic cosmogony is connected with the Mysteries. At the very beginning of this dialogue there is mention of an initiation. Solon is initiated by an Egyptian priest into the formation of the worlds, and the way in which eternal truths are symbolically expressed in traditional myths. "There ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner |
