"Finite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of reality, "the living, moving element in nature," through the scientific intelligence, but that we must envisage it in intuition. "What is described in concepts," he tells us, "is at rest; hence there can be concepts only of things and of that which is finite and sense-perceived. The notion of movement is not movement itself, and without intuition we should never know what motion is. Freedom, however, can be comprehended only by freedom, activity only by activity." Schelling, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... physical. For tho the former has also its laws, which of their own nature are invariable, it does not conform to them so exactly as the physical world. This is because, on the one hand, particular intelligent beings are of a finite nature, and consequently liable to error; and on the other, their nature requires them to be free agents. Hence they do not steadily conform to their primitive laws; and even, those of their ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... beats in it, and the eyes are enlightened by it; when the things of earth become at once eternal and fixed and of infinite value, and at the same instant of less value than the dust that floats in space; when there no longer appears any distinction between the finite and the eternal, between time and infinity; when the soul for that moment at least finds that rest that is the magnet and the end of all human striving; and that comfort which ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... these pages; but it is possible that my friends may, and also certain savants who are interested; and to them, while I do not apologize for my philosophizing, I humbly explain that they are witnessing the groupings of a finite mind after the infinite, the search for explanations ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... extension, for instance, a line or surface entirely stripped of all other sensible qualities and circumstances that might determine it to any particular existence; it is neither black nor white, nor red, nor hath it any colour at all, or any tangible quality whatsoever and consequently it is of no finite determinate magnitude: for that which bounds or distinguishes one extension from another is some quality or circumstance wherein ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... upon us when we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; which was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us as life itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite to affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the evening midge for its opinion ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... too weighty for the mind to support them without relieving itself by resting a great part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; between religion—making up the deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry—passionate for the instruction of reason; between religion—whose element ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the attention on a few alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter. The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the heart and marrow of his important subjects. His argument with the German and Scotch philosophies is profound and skilful. He is a believer in revelation, in its unfolding a true philosophy of the Infinite; showing how the infinite is contained in the finite, the absolute in the relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body. He always steers clear of the shoals of atheism, and of the dim and chaotic abysses of pantheism. He is often obscure, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... too subtle to be detected by ordinary means. It was enough for me that I heard and understood, and felt the goodness and glory of God. I may say that my first great lessons in true philosophy were obtained in these lectures, where I learned to distinguish between the finite and infinite, ceasing to envy any, while I inclined to worship one. The benevolence of Providence is extended to all its creatures, each receiving it in a mode adapted to its own powers of improvement. My destiny being toward a communion with man—or rather with woman—I ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... perhaps be truly said by Christians that Confucius might have made a religion of his system of ethics, by adding a sixth and supreme relation—that between God and man. This he declined to do, and so left his people without any aspiration toward the Infinite. By setting before them only a finite goal he sapped ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... earlier editions have a period at the end of line 5, and neither Scott himself nor Lockhart changed that punctuation. But, undoubtedly, the first sentence ends with line 11, 'roll'd' in the second line being a part, and not a finite verb. Mr. Rolfe is the first to ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; but as that mode ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... be a modification. Thus, when we say of God that he is good, immense, infinite, there is always a limitation attached to the idea of God,—a limitation necessary to our nature. For God is not good in the way we understand goodness or greatness; but our finite minds need some expression ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... tore through my throat. No hurt I did not feel, no death That was not mine; mine each last breath That, crying, met an answering cry From the compassion that was I. All suffering mine, and mine its rod; Mine, pity like the pity of God. Ah, awful weight! Infinity Pressed down upon the finite Me! My anguished spirit, like a bird, Beating against my lips I heard; Yet lay the weight so close about There was no room for it without. And so beneath the weight lay I And suffered death, ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Moreover, no man, no church, no age, sees the whole of truth. Truth is multilateral, but men's minds are unilateral. They are mirrors which reflect, and that imperfectly, the side of the object which is towards them. Therefore even knowledge in any finite mind is partial, consequently imperfect; and consequently needs other knowledge to ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... live far away, but when we attempt to estimate the magnitude of commerce, the mind confesses to itself that the problem is too great. We may multiply the number of ships by their tonnage, but we get, in consequence, an array of figures so great that they cease to have any meaning for the finite mind. The best and most that they can do for us is to make us newly aware that the people who dwell in the jungles of Africa, who roam the pampas of South America, who climb the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, and the Himalayas, all have desires that these ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... "But (for we far have wander'd) let us seek The forward path again; so as the way Be shorten'd with the time. No mortal tongue Nor thought of man hath ever reach'd so far, That of these natures he might count the tribes. What Daniel of their thousands hath reveal'd With finite number infinite conceals. The fountain at whose source these drink their beams, With light supplies them in as many modes, As there are splendours, that it shines on: each According to the virtue ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the annual meeting of the Huntingdon County Hospital, Lord Sandwich referred to the power of spiritual healing, and premising that the finite mind cannot measure the power of the infinite, said he 'looked forward to the day when the spiritual doctrine of healing and the physical discoveries of science will blend in harmonious combination, to the glory of God ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... prophets and sibyls! Never did the always-baffled, always reaespiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite find such expression, except in the sehnsucht of music. They are buried in the volume. They cannot believe that it has not somewhere been revealed, the word of enigma, the link between the human and divine, matter and spirit. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Spain alone; here let the artist sketch the lowly mosque of the Moor, the lofty cathedral of the Christian, in which God is worshipped in a manner as nearly befitting His glory as the power and wealth of finite man can reach; art and nature here offer subjects, from the feudal castle, the vasty Escorial, the rock-built alcazar of imperial Toledo, the sunny towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of Granada: ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really imagine men,—that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... says Balzac, "culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,—two worlds unknown to each other." But one's life always belongs far more to his future than to his past. He is more closely and truly related to that which he shall be than to that which he has been; as the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... introduce an altogether new element, but emphasizes motifs already developed in the earlier dialogues. The effect of these speeches upon Job are threefold: (1) They rebuke his over-accentuated individualism. (2) They reveal the fundamental contrast between the infinite God and finite man. In the light of this revelation Job plainly recognizes his presumption and folly in attempting, with his limited outlook, to comprehend, much less to criticise, the mighty ruler of all the universe. (3) After Job had thus been led out of himself into personal companionship ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... unable to confide it to the care of its own very life, the God conscious of himself and in himself conscious of it, I had been for months offering the sacrifices of despair and indignation, arose in spectral hideousness before me. I saw that I, a child of the infinite, had been worshipping the finite—and therein dragging down the infinite towards the fate of the finite. I do not mean that in Mary Osborne I had been worshipping the finite. It was the eternal, the lovely, the true that in her I had been worshipping: in myself I had been worshipping the ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Sirius than in a pebble, nor anything more worthy of admiration and astonishment in his remoteness than in the length of Oxford Street. The true sublime is in the self-negation of the martyr, and it became doubly magnificent in the case of Michael, who was willing not merely to give up a finite existence for something other than himself—to be shot and so end, or to be burnt with a hope of following glory—but to submit for ever to separation and torment, if only he might shield his child from God's displeasure. It may be objected that such a resolution is impossible. ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... answer, that I am not, according to my understanding of the question. I do not like to deal in abstractions. It seldom leads to any useful ends. There are few universal truths. I do not now remember any single moral truth universally acknowledged. We have no assurance that it is given to our finite understanding to comprehend abstract moral truth. Apart from revelation and the inspired writings, what ideas should we have even of God, salvation, and immortality? Let the heathen answer. Justice itself is impalpable as an abstraction, and abstract liberty the merest phantasy that ever amused ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... could he have been an eagle and not have pride? His contention was that it was finer for a finite mortal speck of life to feel Godlike, than for a god to feel godlike; and so it was that he exalted what he deemed his mortality. He was fond of quoting a fragment from a certain poem. He had never seen the whole poem, and he ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... that he can subdue the North. He disclaims the open threat, but his conduct still implies it. How little that Senator knows himself or the strength of the cause which he persecutes! He is but a mortal man; against him is an immortal principle. With finite power he wrestles with the infinite, and he must fall. Against him are stronger battalions than any marshalled by mortal arm—the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human heart; against him is nature in all her subtle forces; against him is God. Let ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... reason—the Son of Man, for He alone was perfectly human; He was the Absolute, for He was the content of Ideals; the Eternal, for He had lain always in nature's potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the Infinite, for all finite things fell short of Him who was ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... more we see of Nature, the more we find there is to understand. And the more we understand Nature and commune with her, the more Beauty do we find there is to see. So to arrive at a complete understanding of Nature and see all her Beauty is beyond the capacity of us finite men. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... man, in a rage, upbraided her with being a blinded fool, and asked her whether she did not know that the world was finite and limited, whilst what the convent contained ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... mean that the totality of matter is finite?—that it can be viewed, spiritually, from the outside,—even from such a distance as to appear infinitely small? If so, can there be infinite power, either material or spiritual? If the universe is spherical because its molecules are, can the molecules compose any other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... mightily by the past. Patrick Henry spoke with great wisdom when he declared to the Continental Congress, "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided and that is the lamp of experience." Mankind is finite. It has the limits of all things finite. The processes of government are subject to the same limitations, and, lacking imperfections, would be something more than human. It is always easy to discover flaws, and, pointing them out, to criticize. It is not so easy to suggest substantial ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Countess, with an icy look. "Do you not comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures? Our feelings seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on earth they are limited by the strength of our physical being. There are some feeble, mean natures which may receive ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... according to the poet, are to be found in stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,—the monuments of consecutive ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... east, would come again the red discoloring curtain over these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and growing harsh certainties of dawn. My resolve I knew would take up with me again. This was a rest for me, an interlude, but to-morrow I should be William Leadford once more, ill-nourished, ill-dressed, ill-equipped and clumsy, a thief and shamed, a wound ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... knowledge begins with the outside of things as it were, it is evident that the stronger the light of the understanding, the further can it penetrate into the heart of things. Now the natural light of our understanding is of finite power; wherefore it can reach to a certain fixed point. Consequently man needs a supernatural light in order to penetrate further still so as to know what it cannot know by its natural light: and this supernatural light ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... or else He had no right to say to a great, troubled, sinning world, 'Come unto me.' The idea of a million people going at once, with their sorrows and burdens, to one mere man, or an angel, or any finite creature! And just think how many millions there are! If the Bible is for all, this invitation is for all. He couldn't have changed since then, could He? He can't be different in heaven from what He ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of Mind; that Mind is supreme, eternal, absolute, one, manifold, subtle, living, immanent in all things, permanent, flowing, self-manifesting; that the universe is the result of mind; that nature is the symbol of mind; that finite minds live and act through concurrence with infinite mind. His second is the connection of the individual intellect with the primal mind and its ability to draw thence wisdom, will, virtue, prudence, heroism, all ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... spiritual Omniscience we may not, in our finite intelligence, fully cognize, because full cognition would preclude the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... mountain peaks and the stars. For the desert must ever remain an unsolved enigma, never to be reduced to a formula, never to be explained by any human standards; now whispering to man of the mysteries of the soul and revealing to him more of the infinite than his finite senses may grasp; and now mocking him with illusions, her beautiful mirages wrought of airbeams and sunlight, and transforming him into a beast of greed with her haunting intimations of hidden and ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... and ever will be, foolishness. The speculations and metaphysics of theologians, I verily believe, have done more harm than good,—from Athanasius to Jonathan Edwards,—whenever they have brought the aid of finite reason to support the ultimate truths declared by an infinite and almighty mind. Moses does not reason, nor speculate, nor refine; he affirms, and appeals to the law written on the heart,—to the consciousness of mankind. What he declares to be duties are not even ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... exclusion. To their remonstrances Cosimo replied in four memorable sayings: 'Better the State spoiled than the State not ours.' 'Governments cannot be carried on with paternosters.' 'An ell of scarlet makes a burgher.' 'I aim at finite ends.' These maxims represent the whole man,—first, in his egotism, eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin; secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends; thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fine clothes suffice ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... realize more than he had ever done before the littleness of his life, its colorless egotism, the barrenness of its routine. Like a flash it stood glaringly out before him. Stripped of all its intellectual furbishing, the chill selfishness of the creed he had adopted struck home to his heart. A finite life, with a finite goal—annihilation! Had it really ever satisfied him? Could it satisfy anyone? A great weariness crept in upon him. Epicureanism could have been carried no further than he had carried it. He had steeped his senses in the most refined and ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of cold and steady storm, an inward conflict between a mother's long-suffering and the limitations of our nature, for our human affections are bounded by our humanity, and the infinite has no place in finite creatures. Sorrow endured in silence had at last produced an indefinable morbid something in this woman. Doubtless mental anguish had reacted on the physical frame, and some disease, perhaps an aneurism, was undermining Julie's life. Deep-seated ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... to look to the end of eternity? Have you endeavored to comprehend its duration? Alas! it is something beyond the conception of the finite mind. Look into it as far as you can and no less of it lies beyond the end of your vision. Eternity is something never begun and something that will never end. It is a circle which has no end of beginning and ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... the evidence she sought, and an intense longing to see those from whom she had been so cruelly separated all these years, mingled with a fearful apprehension lest this knowledge might have come too late, when those whose affection she would claim, might have already passed beyond the limits of finite, human love, into the love infinite and eternal. And deep in her heart burned indignation, fierce and strong, against the one who had wrought all this wretchedness,—carrying additional sorrow to a home already ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... united, but in the course of discussing the attributes of the Diety, the existence of the Diety Himself became argued away, or, what was worse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the human disputants. "For," said my host, "since a finite being like an An cannot possibly define the Infinite, so, when he endeavours to realise an idea of the Divinity, he only reduces the Divinity into an An like himself." During the later ages, therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden, have been so discouraged ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and Varuna, you mount your chariot which, at the dawning of the dawn is golden-colored and has iron poles at the setting of the sun; from thence you see Aditi and Diti—that is, what is yonder and what is here, what is infinite and what is finite, what is ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... his wife Minuit felt a deeper sense of his responsibility to time, and the finite uses of it expanded to a cheerful conception of the infinite. The country round was generally settled by a religious people, and the many meeting-houses of different sects had his equal confidence and sympathy. Pursuing his craft with unwearied diligence, and delighting the homestead with ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at rest, it is never satisfied with any comprehended truth, but ever proceeds on and on towards that truth which is not comprehended. So also the will which follows the apprehension, we see that it is never satisfied with anything finite. In consequence of this, the essence of the soul is always referred to the source of its substance and entity. Then as to the natural powers, by means of which it is turned to the protection and government of matter, to which it allies itself, and by ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... not this ship our world, penned in as we were on every side, and separated from all else by an ocean inexorable and illimitable as space, and were not we likewise looking forward to a fiery doom—our finite, perhaps final, day ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... to understand the Infinite," retorts a theist to our Martian. "What manner of reasoning is this," asks our Martian, "that denies my finite mind the right to question the 'proofs' of the existence of an Infinite, when these same 'proofs' are derived by finite minds? The theist cannot infer God from the cosmic process until he can discover some feature of it which is ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... antecedent mind; and no matter without antecedent substance. Where does power come from? Can you tell? If you are a Theist you can. If you are an Atheist you can't. Unbelievers say the Infinite One, if there be such, can not be revealed to man. This conclusion is rested upon the assumption that the finite can not comprehend the infinite. This is regarded as a complete overthrow of revealed religion. Can nothing be revealed to me unless I can comprehend it? Can I know nothing without comprehending it? I know load-stone, but do I comprehend it? I know electricity, ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... thumbed brown book. She turned the pages thoughtfully, and read aloud, presumably for the benefit of the cats: "In a symbol there is concealment yet revelation, the infinite is made to blend with the finite, to stand visible, and as it were attainable there." The Child sighed, "We had better go to the Recluse," she said. ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... from the union of one with the diverse is generated the Universe. Hence the progression from ascent to descent, from spirit to that which we call matter; from the cause to the origin, and the process of metaphysics, which, from the finite world of sense rises to the intelligent, passing through the intermediate numbers of infinite substance to active being and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... "a deceiver" who knows that He is not? Assumption of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of a God who is honorable and candid according to our finite conception of honor ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... at the last day Heaven and earth shall roll away? Yes, as my landscape passed through death, Lay like a corpse, and with new breath Became instinct with fire and light— So shall it roll up in my sight, Pass from the realm of finite sense, Become a thing of spirit, whence I shall pass too, its child in faith Of dreams it gave me, which nor death Nor change can wreck, but still reveal In change a Something vast, more real Than sunsets, meadows, green-wood trees, Or even faery presences. A Something which the earth ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... human mind is that all its perceptions are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity. The same limitation therefore applies to the world as it appears to our reasoning intellect, and in the world of science there is no infinity, and conceptions such as God and the immortality of the ego are ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... whereby a thing endeavours to persist in its own being, involves no finite time, but an ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... things unseen, not subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory: no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect of being final or otherwise than finite. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... needs of the multitude that appealed to Jesus. "Man's Unhappiness, as I construe," says Teufelsdroeckh in "Sartor Resartus", "comes of his Greatness, it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack happy?" We read in a passage, which it is true, is largely symbolic, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... outgrown divine legislation, and who have the hardihood to trample upon the laws of nature. But in vain. When God made our first parents, he made them male and female, and it will not be difficult to believe in the impossibility of the finite being able to undo the work of the Infinite. Each has his and her place, and nothing goes continuously right if husband and wife change places. Keep the positions assigned them by the laws of God and nature, and all ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... it is an irrevelant enquiry, to ask, Are Time and Space finite or infinite? Many philosophers have put the question, and even answered it. They say Time has no beginning and no end, and Space has no boundaries; or, as otherwise expressed,—Time and Space are Infinite: an answer of such vagueness ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... necessary that we should limit the mode of intuition in space and time to the sensuous faculty of man. It may well be that all finite thinking beings must necessarily in this respect agree with man (though as to this we cannot decide), but sensibility does not on account of this universality cease to be sensibility, for this very reason, that it is a deduced (intuitus derivativus), ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... with my large faith unto gloom allied, Sprang up a shadow sunshine could not quell, And the voice said, Would'st haste to go outside This continent of being, it were well: Where finite, growing toward the Infinite, Gathers its robe of glory out of dust, And looking down the radiances white, Sees all God's purposes about us, just. Canst thou, Elhadra, reach out of the grave, And draw the golden waters of love's well? His years are chrisms of brightness in time's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... recognized in all the varieties, he finds the root of sacrificial observances in the yearning of the believer for abiding communion with the supernatural Power to which he feels himself akin, the longing of finite man to become one ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... fingers which are attached to bell-pulls. The corpse thus, on coming to itself, may have immediate attendance merely by ringing for it; some one is always there on the watch. But the humanity of this arrangement, though perfect as long as it lasts, is finite in duration. As soon as the seventy-two hours prescribed by law are expired, it is another thing. The body is then legally dead, and must comport itself accordingly. At any rate, it is at its own risk if it behaves otherwise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... sumptuous banquets, with intellectual tournaments, with selfish aims, with foolish presents, with emotions which degenerate into passions Ennui, disappointment, burdensome obligation, ultimate disgust, are the result of what is based on the finite and the worldly, allied with the gifts which come from a selfish heart, with the urbanities which are equally showered on the evil and on the good, with the graces which sometimes conceal the poison of asps. How unsatisfactory and mournful the friendship between ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... with the Assertion of Progress. Failure of Alleged Facts to Sustain the Theory. Does not Account for the Origin of Anything. Wild Assumptions Made by Darwin. Erroneous Assumption of the Tendency of Natural Selection to Improve Breeds. Assumption of Infinite Possibility of Progress in Finite Creatures. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... term "That" is used in the Upanishads to designate the Invisible-Absolute, because no word or name can fully define It. A finite object, like a table or a tree, can be defined; but God, who is infinite and unbounded, cannot be expressed by finite language. Therefore the Rishis or Divine Seers, desirous not to limit the Unlimited, chose the indefinite term "That" to ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... importance of religious study. Quite the contrary. Their doubts arise not from pride, but from humility: not because they do not appreciate divine truth, but on the contrary they doubt whether we can appreciate it sufficiently, and are sceptical whether the infinite can be reduced to the finite. ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... casually across the streets and a drove of low-moaning oxen were being urged along in front of a placid street-car; even the shops seemed only yawning their doors and blinking their windows in the sunshine before retiring into a state of utter and finite coma. ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and hell, Would own, "Thou didst create us!" Naught impedes We voice the other name, man's most of might, Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love Mutely await their working, leave to sight All of the issue as—below—above— Shakespeare's creation rises: one remove, Though dread—this finite from that infinite. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... said, "is above the criminal and the judge, and rules them both. The law is inescapable, for an action is either lawful or unlawful. The law, indeed, may be said to have a life of its own, an existence quite apart from the finite lives of the beings who administer it. The law governs every aspect of human behavior; therefore, to the same extent that humans are lawful beings, the law is human. And being human, the law has its idiosyncrasies, just as a man has his. For a citizen who abides by the law, ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... "The Improbability of the Infinite." It would be a pity for the country to lose such a masterpiece—she has had quite enough trouble already what with one thing and another. For my view of the Infinite is this: that although beyond the Finite, or, as one might say, the Commensurate, there may or ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... authoritative quality Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one Gradations above and below pleasure Gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder Great presumption to be so fond of one's own opinions Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed Greatest ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... scarcely be identified with such a conception. "The majority of men," he says himself, "do not think of God as an infinite and incomprehensible being, and as the sole author from whom all things depend; they go no further than the letters of his name."[34] "The vulgar almost imagine him as a finite thing." The God of Descartes is not merely the creator of the material universe; he is also the father of all truth in the intellectual world. "The metaphysical truths," he says, "styled eternal have been established by God, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... more closely. This conjunction can grow to eternity in nearness to God and does so with the angels. And yet no angel can attain or touch the first degree of the Lord's love and wisdom, for the Lord is infinite and an angel is finite, and between infinite and finite no ratio obtains. Man's state and the state of his elevation and nearness to the Lord cannot be understood without a knowledge of these degrees; they have been specifically treated ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... in the love That's only learned in heaven; thy mind Unclogged of clay, and free to soar, Hath left the realms of doubt behind, And wondrous things which finite thought In vain essayed to solve, appear To thy untasked inquiries, fraught With explanation strangely clear. Thy reason owns no forced control, As held it here in needful thrall; God's mysteries court thy questioning ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... for Annihilation, and think Existence no better than a Curse. In short, he can so exquisitely ravish or torture the Soul through this single Faculty, as might suffice to make up the whole Heaven or Hell of any finite Being. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Again, suppose a system in statistical equilibrium, each part gaining on an average, in a short time, exactly as much as it loses. If the system consists of molecules and ether, as the former have a finite number of degrees of freedom and the latter an infinite number, the unmodified law of equipartition would require that the ether should finally appropriate all energy, leaving none of it to the matter. To escape this conclusion we have Rayleigh's ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... silence almost is a sound, and dreams Take on the semblances of finite things; So potent is the spell that what but seems Elsewhere, is lifted here on Fancy's wings. The little woodland theatre seems to wait, All tremulous with hope and wistful joy, For something that is sure to come at last, Some deep emotion, satisfying, great. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... humanity—such was the eternal plan of God. For the realization of this purpose the Logos, God's image, was to become man, even if the human race should not have fallen. This was necessary because in finite man there is absolutely no similarity with the infinite essence of the non-incarnate Logos. Without the incarnation, therefore, this infinite dissimilarity would have remained forever (esset et maneret simpliciter infinita dissimilitudo inter hominem et Verbum Dei). And ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... made by others on the common stock of enjoyment,—there being a reasonable oversight of older persons, wide-awake to anticipate, prevent, and adjust the rival pretensions which must always arise where there are finite beings with infinite desires, while Reason, whose proper object ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... will agree in case with the subject of the verb. Hence the attribute complement of an infinitive is in the objective case: [I knew it (obj.) to be him]; but the attribute complement of the subject of a finite verb is in the nominative case: [I knew it (nom.) ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... life on the earth is finite and fragmentary, but it is the constant effort of his spirit to bring the scattering details of momentary experience into an enduring harmony with his personality and with that supreme unity of which he is ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... the cause of religion, however much he has vindicated the power of the human intellect and the compass of the human imagination. He has made sensuous that which was entirely spiritual, and has attempted with finite ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... to be conned to tediousness And know my higher gifts unbind The zone that girds the incarnate mind. When the scanty shores are full With Thought's perilous, whirling pool; When frail Nature can no more, Then the Spirit strikes the hour: My servant Death, with solving rite, Pours finite into infinite. Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, Whose streams through Nature circling go? Nail the wild star to its track On the half-climbed zodiac? Light is light which radiates, Blood is blood ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... connected with this world that they knew anything about. How did it happen that the whole modern world should get on its knees in their presence, as though they knew everything about the Infinite, when they knew next to nothing about the finite? Is there any proof that they knew anything about it? Not ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... chair. How finite intelligence could have discovered the innermost secret of his soul seemed little short of miraculous. But the relief of being able to pour out his feelings mastered ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... our heritage. But spirit has come DOWN. As Wordsworth expresses it—"trailing clouds of glory do we come from God." All religions claim for us an immortality, and it is difficult for us to conceive an existence finite at one end and infinite at the other: so if we are to claim our immortality of spirit we should surely recognise our present spirituality which ensures that immortality. However this may be, we may at any rate agree that body comes UP and spirit comes ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... must be the simple actuating principle within him; this being the moral quality which is amiable, or the immediate object of love as distinct from other affections of approbation. Here then is a finite object for our mind to tend towards, to exercise itself upon: a creature, perfect according to his capacity, fixed, steady, equally unmoved by weak pity or more weak fury and resentment; forming the justest scheme of conduct; going on undisturbed in the execution of it, through the several ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... in the gorgeous sunset that made her bosom thrill; and out of the cloud-ranges she tried to form mountains such as there were in Scotland, and palaces of crystal like those she read of in her fairy tales. No human being had ever told her of the mysterious links that reach from the finite to the infinite, out of which, from the buried ashes of dead Superstition, great souls can evoke those mighty spirits, Faith and Knowledge; yet she went to sleep every night believing that she felt, nay, could almost see, an angel standing at the foot of her ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... not destroy a thesis that is solidly founded. Once a truth is clearly established, not all the difficulties in the world can make it an untruth. A difficulty as to the truth revealed argues an imperfect intelligence; it is idle to complain that we are finite. A difficulty regarding the infallible Church should not make her less infallible in our mind, it simply demands a clearing away-Theological difficulties should not surprise a novice in theological matters; they are only misunderstandings ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... stream, and banked it up with philosophical doubts and objections at every interval of the speaker's joyous progress. But the unmitigated Hunt never ceased his overflowing anticipations, nor the saturnine Carlyle his infinite demurs to those finite flourishings. The listeners laughed and applauded by turns; and had now fairly pitted them against each other, as the philosopher of hopefulness and of the unhopeful. The contest continued with ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... of the toilet, as, in that corner of a dark cuddy where I had shared "Zekiel's" bunk with him, I dressed myself with one of my two white shirts, and with the change of raiment which had been tight squeezed in my portmanteau. The old overcoat was the best part of it, as in a finite world it often is. I sold my felt hat to Zekiel, and appeared with a light travelling-cap. I do not know how Fausta liked my metamorphosis. I only know that, like butterflies, for a day or two after they go through theirs, I felt ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... description given of God in verse 4. Nothing in addition to this could be ascribed to Christ. Every attribute with which the Deity himself is invested is here ascribed to Jesus Christ. If our Savior is anything more than this description declares him to be, it is beyond the reach of our finite minds to comprehend. The sacred writers everywhere speak of him as a being worthy of worship and praise; and this fact, taken in connection with the universal proneness of men to take the honor from God and to give it to those who are no gods, is a convincing proof ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... tell. Then and there, to the best of my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, oh if I had but won ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had to come to an end as perfect moments must in this finite world and Alan and Tony went out of the brilliantly lighted restaurant into white whirls of snow. For a storm had started while they had been inside and was now well in progress. All too soon the cab deposited them at the Hostelry. In the dimly lit hall Alan drew the girl ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... that our own interests and our friendships alike required. Sea power was for us then, as always before in our history, the dominant element in military policy. I have little doubt that we made mistakes over details. That is inherent in human and therefore finite effort. But I believe that we did in the main the best we could for the fulfilment of our only purpose, which was to preserve the peace of the world and avoid contributing to its disturbance, and also to prepare ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. "Ever not quite" must be the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... all his thoughts;" nor has he any disposition to claim the help of God upon the terms upon which it is offered. The Satanic method for life prompts him to become a god by a process of self-help and development of the finite resources. ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer |
