"Freewill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... foes) Too mean to praise, too fearful to oppose, In sullen silence sit; thy friends (some few, Who, friends to thee, are friends to Honour too) 300 Plaud thy brave bearing, and the Commonweal Expects her safety from thy stubborn zeal. A place amongst the rest the Muses claim, And bring this freewill-offering to thy fame; To prove their virtue, make thy virtues known, And, holding up thy fame, secure their own. From his youth upwards to the present day, When vices, more than years, have mark'd him gray; When ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses. And the same civilization, the chivalric European civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century, produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad novels in the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... but they did enjoin upon masters the duty of kindness to slaves. Many of them were not cultivated men, but they laid the foundation for a better civilization in a stern and righteous social life which flowered in the next generation. "The only burning issues were sprinkling versus immersion, freewill versus predestination," and over these questions the churches fought with energy. Divided though they were on many points, they agreed in resisting the forces of modern thought that were making ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... please. I can scarcely blame them. I had entered their home under certain conditions in view of learning a profession; they gradually made me their servant—it was praiseworthy economy on their part. What I had at first done of my own freewill and from a wish to please, at last became my daily task, which I was rigidly required to fulfil. Compelled to rise long before any one else in the house, I was expected to have everything in order by the time the others made ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... other two sects he says little here, and what he says is superficial. He places the differentiation in their contrasted doctrines of fate and immortality. The Pharisees ascribe all to fate, but yet allow freewill—a Hellenizing version of the saying ascribed to Rabbi Akiba, "All is foreseen, but freedom of will is given"[1]—and they say all souls are immortal, but those of the good only pass into other bodies, while those of the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... country, and each of them, as every observant man well knows, manifests a predilection for some special occupation. Thus the Jews take to trade, the Germans to agriculture, the Norwegians to lumbering, the French to catering and the Irish to politics. Make a Freewill Baptist or a Buddhist of an Irishman and you do not change his nature—he'll turn up at the next political convention just the same. And the man who's too good to take a hand in practical politics; ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a vast deal talked in the present day about Freewill. We like to feel that we are independent agents and are ready to overlook the fact that our surroundings and circumstances and the hundred and one subtle and mysterious workings of the fate we can none of us escape, control our actions and ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... Vendale for the first time that something curious in the man, which he had never before been able to define, was definable as a certain subtle essence of mockery that eluded touch or analysis. He felt convinced that Marguerite was in some sort a prisoner as to her freewill—though she held her own against those two combined, by the force of her character, which was nevertheless inadequate to her release. To feel convinced of this, was not to feel less disposed to love her than he had always been. In a word, he was ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... to a similarity, as between the master and the servant. For, although the servant cannot render the same benefit to the master that is conferred on him, yet he ought to render the best that he can, with so much solicitude and freewill that that which is dissimilar in itself may become similar through the evidence of good-will, which proves the friendship, confirms and preserves it. Wherefore I, considering myself lower than that ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... discriminates intuitively between truth and error. Yes, even in mathematical truth I think there is an element of morality. If a man could believe that two and two are five, he would appear to me a worse man, morally, for so believing. So then, conscience rather than freewill is the highest quality of the soul, because it deals with questions ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... predestination is shown to be too strong even for royal opposition. It does not follow that the pre-arrangement of marriages implies that the pair cannot fall in love of their own accord. On the contrary, just the right two eventually come together; for once freewill and destiny need present no incompatibility. The combination, here shadowed, of a predestined and yet true-love marriage, is ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... of the streets of Paris, had noticed that nothing is more propitious to revery than following a pretty woman without knowing whither she is going. There was in this voluntary abdication of his freewill, in this fancy submitting itself to another fancy, which suspects it not, a mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, something indescribable, intermediate between slavery and liberty, which pleased Gringoire,—a ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... father talked and ruminated by intervals,—a text, a word of cheer to the wasted mother, incidents of old days, memories of early revivals. In 1828, he had hailed Dylkes, the "Leatherwood God," as the real Messiah. Then he had been successively a Freewill Baptist, a Winebrennerian, a Universalist, a Disciple, and finally an eloquent and moving preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now he was a wild-eyed old dreamer with a high, narrow forehead depressed ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... the month of November, also, the Irish commons claimed the right of framing all money-bills, which hitherto had been sent over to them by the English cabinet. They rejected the one sent over this year, and although they voted a more liberal supply of their own freewill, the lord-lieutenant would not recognise the newly-claimed right. He called it a violation of the law, and an encroachment upon the king's prerogative. He entered his protest against it, and he then suddenly prorogued parliament before it had done any business. Thus his majesty was surrounded ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it met with disapproval in the writings of Pelagius. Nevertheless a Capuchin named Louis Pereir of Dole, about the year 1630, wrote a book expressly to revive it, at least in relation to free actions. Some moderns incline thereto, and M. Bernier supports it in a little book on freedom and freewill. But one cannot say in relation to God what 'to conserve' is, without reverting to the general opinion. Also it must be taken into account that the action of God in conserving should have some reference to that which is conserved, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... another a-ranting; one again runs after the baptism, and another after the Independency: here is one for Freewill, and another for Presbytery; and yet possibly most of all these sects run quite the wrong way, and yet every one is for his life, his soul, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... "through which language is settled and unsettled, combines in one the two opposite elements of necessity and freewill. Though the individual seems to be the prime mover in producing new words and new grammatical forms, he is so only after his individuality has been merged in the common action of the family, tribe, or nation to which he belongs. He can do nothing by himself, and the first impulse to a new formation ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... to offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord, a burnt offering, and a meat offering, a sacrifice, and drink offerings, every thing upon his day: 38. Beside the sabbaths of the Lord, and beside your gifts, and beside all your vows, and beside all your freewill offerings, which ye give unto the Lord. 39. Also in the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the Lord seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath. 40. And ye ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... commandments and expounded to us what was therein of admonitions and precepts and made clear to us and manifest the way of righteousness and explained to us what it behoved us to do and what to leave undone. Now we are endowed with Freewill and he who acteth within these lawful limits winneth his wish and prospereth, while whoso transgresseth these legal bounds and doeth other than that which these precepts enjoin, resisteth the Lord and is ruined in both Abodes. This ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with the local cure; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... day of Thine array." The army is being mustered.[U] They are not mercenaries, nor pressed men. They flock gladly to the standard, like the warriors celebrated of old in Deborah's chant of victory, who "willingly offered themselves." The word of our psalm might be translated "freewill offerings," and the whole clause carries us into the very heart of that great truth, that glad consecration and grateful self-surrender is the one bond which knits us to the Captain of our salvation who gave Himself for us, to the meek Monarch whose crown is of thorns and His sceptre ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... and trees, some naturally feeble and sickly, [162] others healthy and strong and apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue is generated in the world of choice and men's freewill concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of some of our countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with more than stoical disdain everything written ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... State, or Law, and the progressive term, Person, or Freewill, are in relations of reciprocal support and mutual reproduction, there alone is freedom, there alone public order. We were able to command this truth from the height of our general proposition, and closer inspection shows those anticipations to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... farms, and there were not so many of them that the farms crowded upon one another, though the population increased rapidly. Each of them delighted in the cultivation of his private "conscience"; and, in the absence of wars and oppressions, they argued one with another on points of theology, fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute. They were far from indifferent to learning, but they liked nothing quite so well as manhood and integrity. The Connecticut Yankee impressed his character on American history, and wherever ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... they are selected by man for his pleasure, or by what we call Natural Selection in the struggle for life, and under changing conditions. I do not wish to say that God did not foresee everything which would ensue; but here comes very nearly the same sort of wretched imbroglio as between freewill and preordained necessity. I doubt whether I have made what I think clear; but certainly A. Gray's notion of the courses of variation having been led like a stream of water by gravity, seems to me to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... themselves the liberty which our soldiers and our sailors are fighting by land and by sea to maintain and to extend for others. There is no question of compulsion or bribery. What we want we believe you are ready and eager to give as the free-will offering of a ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told, that he—and not perverse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher principle, than the apprehension of setting ill patterns ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... relations to each other, and are more than usually sensitive about the recognition of their achievements by their brethren—a state of things which, while it cultivates a very nice sense of honor, leads occasionally to encounters in which free-will seems for the moment to get the better of law. The differences of the scientific world, too, are complicated by the theological bearing of a good deal of scientific discovery and discussion, and many a scientific ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... grand idea could not be contented with creatures perfect ONLY by his gift, so far as that should reach, and having no willing causal share in the perfection, that is, partaking not at all of God's individuality and free-will and choice of good; then suppose that suffering were the only way through which the individual could be set, in separate and self-individuality, so far apart from God, that it might WILL, and so become a partaker of his singleness and freedom;—and ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... hour; I must hang upon that dear voice. I must feel that angel-presence ever beside me. When will you meet me? I implore you to answer. After our next meeting I am resolved to claim you, by force or by free-will, to be my wife. To wait longer, O my Enrica, is good neither for you nor for me. My love! my love! you must be mine—mine—mine! Come to me—come quickly. ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... with thoughts of possible fulfilment, Commenced no movement, left all time uncertain, And only kept the road, the access open? By the great God of Heaven! it was not 10 My serious meaning, it was ne'er resolve. I but amused myself with thinking of it. The free-will tempted me, the power to do Or not to do it.—Was it criminal To make the fancy minister to hope, 15 To fill the air with pretty toys of air, And clutch fantastic sceptres moving t'ward me? Was not the will kept free? Beheld I not The road of duty close beside me—but One little ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Bergson's "apologia" for free-will is therefore rendered ineffective by reason of the fact that it does not really leave the individual free. The only "free" thing is the aboriginal "spirit," pouring forth in its "durational" stream, and moulding bodies and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... and not in vain. It is difficult for any nation to carry on a great war unless it is supported by the people. In Turkey and throughout the scattered dominions of the Sultan, religion and patriotism and warlike ardor combined to make men arise by their own free-will, and endure fatigue, danger, hunger, and privation for their country and their faith. The public dangers were great; for Russia was at the height of her power and prestige, and the Czar was known to have a determined will, not to be bent by difficulties ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... temperament (for which he is not responsible), and with opportunity—another element of luck—it follows logically that man is the sport of the gods. Hardy is unable, like other determinists, to escape the dilemma of free-will versus predestination, and that other crux, the imputation of personality to the workings of so-called natural laws. Indeed curiously, in his gigantic poem-cycle, "the Dynasts," the culmination of his life-work, he seems to hint at a ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... language, betrays a legal parentage. Few things in the history of speculation are more impressive than the fact that no Greek-speaking people has ever felt itself seriously perplexed by the great question of Free-will and Necessity. I do not pretend to offer any summary explanation of this, but it does not seem an irrelevant suggestion that neither the Greeks, nor any society speaking and thinking in their language, ever showed ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... such thing as free-will in this world, I believe," exclaimed I, throwing myself back in an easy-chair; "however, as you do not very often play the tyrant, you shall have your own way this time. Harry, the chestnuts did their work to admiration; Lawless ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... are elect, he says. How? Not of themselves, but according to God's purpose: for we should be unable to raise ourselves to heaven, or create faith within ourselves. God will not permit all men to enter heaven; those who are his own he will receive with all readiness. The human doctrine of free-will, and of our own ability, is futile. The matter does not lie in our wills, but in the will ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... assumed by the theologian, as from the universality of natural causation assumed by the man of science. The angels in 'Paradise Lost' would have found the task of enlightening Adam upon the mysteries of "Fate, Foreknowledge, and Free-will," not a whit more difficult, if their pupil had been educated in a "Real-schule" and trained in every laboratory of a modern university. In respect of the great problems of Philosophy, the post-Darwinian generation is, in one sense, exactly ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... warmest admirers of Sir William Hamilton hesitate to apply the doctrine of the unconditioned to Cause and Free-will. See "Mansel's Prolegom.," Note C, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he would release her! She had no power to leave him of her own free-will. A certain compelling something in Mr. Gryce always forced her to do just as he wished—to answer his questions, stay when he stopped, follow when he beckoned. She resented in feeling, but she obeyed in fact; and he valued her obedience more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... Haven Orthodox Creed. Swedenborgians, Or, The New Jerusalem Church. Fighting Quakers. Harmonists. Dorrelites. Osgoodites. Rogerenes. Whippers. Wilkinsonians. Aquarians. Baxterians. Miller's Views on the Second Coming of Christ. Come-Outers. Jumpers. Baptists. Anabaptists. Free-Will Baptists. Seventh-Day Baptists, Or Sabbatarians, Six-Principle Baptists. Quaker Baptists, Or Keithians. Pedobaptists. Anti-Pedobaptists. Unitarians. Brownists. Puritans. Bourignonists. Jews. Indian Religions. Deists. Atheists. Pantheists. Mahometans. ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Papa, as in my happy days you taught me to call you, to implore your interest with my Papa, to engage him to dispense with a command, which, if insisted upon, will deprive me of my free-will, and make me miserable for my ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... standing before him, and he laughed. Quoth the Khalif, 'Dost thou laugh in derision of me or art thou mad?' 'Neither, by Allah, O Commander of the Faithful,' answered Mesrour, 'by thy kinship to the Prince of Apostles, I did it not of my free-will; but I went out yesterday to walk and coming to the bank of the Tigris, saw there the folk collected about a man named Ibn el Caribi, who was making them laugh; and but now I recalled what he said, and laughter ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... highest happiness. Then, in order a little to lighten his difficulties as to the permission of evil by the All-wise and Almighty One, she enters into a discussion of the relation between Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free-will, but this discussion, a thorny and difficult one, is not ended when the book comes to an abrupt conclusion, being probably interrupted by the arrival of the messengers of Theodoric, who brought the warrant ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... I meant.' He seemed trying to steady himself. 'I'm damned if I'd ever give up my free-will to anybody, and I wouldn't like even the woman who was my mate to do it either. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... was right!' said the Moor Maiden. 'No Gottmar but is fickle and inconstant. Well it is for thee, youth, that thou art here of thy own free-will, and didst not tarry for my summons. Thou hast kept thy promise badly, and thou wilt keep it so again, if I give thee no monitor to aid thee. Take this, and carry it, henceforward, in thy bosom; it will protect thee from harm, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... him many different kinds of people, with various sorts and shades of belief. Some were Free-Will and some were Hard-Shell, some were High-Church and reminded one of a Masonic Lodge working at 32 deg., while others were Low-Church and omitted crossing themselves frequently while putting down a new carpet ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the restoration of the blessings of peace, that I now recommend that the second Thursday in April next, be set apart as a day on which the people of every religious denomination may in their solemn assemblies unite their hearts and their voices, in a free-will offering, to their Heavenly Benefactor, of their homage of thanksgiving and ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... intervention of any creative intelligence, Divine initiative, nor human free-will; by denying the law-giving Intellect, it denies all intelligent Providential law; and the philosophy of the squirrel in its cage, which men term Pantheism at the present day, by confounding the subject and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... with the conscience as a moral capacity is the power of self-determination, or as it is popularly called—free-will. If conscience is the manifestation of man as knowing, will is more especially his manifestation as a being who acts. The subject which we now approach presents at once a problem and a task. The nature of freedom has been keenly debated from the earliest times, and the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... experience, holds true in moral actions. No wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognised in their full reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and the free-will theory be ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... these gifts would most assuredly have existed in Cain, to whom belonged the birthright and the promise of the blessed seed. But in that very same condition are all men! Unless nature be helped by the Spirit of God, it cannot maintain itself. Why, then, do we absurdly boast of free-will? Now follows ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... own. Nay, more; he is not even a creature of the highest type. If he is not a sinner, (Scripture forbids at least that theory, though some Arians came very near it), his virtue is, like our own, a constant struggle of free-will, not the fixed habit which is the perfection and annulment of free-will. And now that his human soul is useless, we may as well simplify the incarnation into an assumption of human flesh and nothing more. The Holy ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... professedly addressed to Pope. "I write," he says (fragment 65), "to you and for you, and you would think yourself little obliged to me if I took the pains of explaining in prose what you would not think it necessary to explain in verse,"—that is, the free-will puzzle. The manuscripts seen by Mallet may probably have been a commonplace book in which Bolingbroke had set down some of these fragments, by way of instructing Pope, and preparing for his own more systematic work. No reader ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... extraordinary tenacity, and, spite of the course of Herbert Spencer that I had put him through, he retained his unshaken faith in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I remember very well the arguments we used to have on the vexed question of 'Free-will,' and being myself more or less of a fatalist, it annoyed me that I never could in the very slightest degree shake his convictions on that point. Moreover, when I plagued him too much with Herbert Spencer, he had a way of retaliating, ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... all the warmth of youth, "Oh, my friend, my protector, my master! resume the authority you desire to lay aside at the very time when I most need it; hitherto my weakness has given you this power. I now place it in your hands of my own free-will, and it will be all the more sacred in my eyes. Protect me from all the foes which are attacking me, and above all from the traitors within the citadel; watch over your work, that it may still be worthy of you. I mean to obey your laws, I shall ever do ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... moral actions. No wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognized in their full reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and that the free-will theory be thrown aside as ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the shoe of naval service pinched him most sorely; for though upon the whole life on board a man-of-war was not many shades worse than life aboard a trader, it yet introduced into his already sadly circumscribed vista of happiness the additional element of absolute loss of free-will, and the additional dangers of being shot as an enemy or hanged as a deserter. These additional things, the littles that yet meant so much, bred in him a hatred of the service so implacable that nothing less drastic than the warrant ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... enthusaism peculiar to the cause of liberty with which it was attacked! Remember that generous humanity that taught the oppressed, groaning under the weight of insulted rights, to save the lives of oppressors! Extinguish the mean prejudices of nations, and let your numbers be collected and sent as a free-will offering to the national assembly! But is it possible to forget that your own parliament is venal? Your ministers hypocritical? Your clergy legal oppressors? The reigning family extravagant? The crown of a certain great personage becoming every day too weighty for the head that wears ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... wondering at such a new thing; and when any boat came ashore to talk with them, saying, 'tayno, tayno,' which means good. But they were all ready to run when they seemed in danger, so that of the men only two could be taken by force or free-will. There were taken more than twenty women of the captives, and of their free-will came other women, born in other islands, who were stolen away and taken by force. Certain captive boys came to us. In ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... doctrine, so evidently based on reason, everything is linked and held together: the foreknowledge of God and the agreement thereof with man's free-will. This problem, hitherto impossible to solve, no longer offers any difficulty, if by it is meant that God, knowing before birth, by reason of his previous deeds, what there is in the heart of man, brings man to life and removes him ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... to be an accountable being, not a collection of animated atoms associated by chance, which, when the vital spark was extinguished, would crumble into dust without record or responsibility. He knew he was a sinner by choice, who had abused his free-will; not a passive vessel of wrath, pre-destined to destruction. No inflating ebullition of enthusiasm told him he was become one of those favourites of Heaven who cannot forfeit salvation. He therefore clung to this wretched life, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... world, theory and action follow close upon each other, and practical evils easily give birth to opposite systems. In the realms of free-will, the regularity of natural progress is preserved by the conflict of extremes. The impulse of the reaction carries men from one extremity towards another. The pursuit of a remote and ideal object, which captivates the imagination by its splendour ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... every thirsty soul that drains This Anodyne of Thought its rim contains— Free-will the can, Necessity the must, Pour off the must, and, see, ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a mixed religious element—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Free-will Baptist—deeply interested in Sabbath schools and class-meetings, open to all who wished to enjoy them. An organization was proposed. The proposition came from the Methodist element, but I did not deem it wise to organize from any one denomination, as divergent ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... to the validity of the marriage by English law, at least, in spite of the decree from Rome, which, as he pointed out to his grandson, was wholly contingent on the absence of subsequent consent, since the parties had come to an age for free-will. Had he known of this, the re-marriage, he said, he should certainly have been less supine. Why ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of his own free-will, set off boldly in the direction the child had pointed. There was nothing wonderful in this, nor in its bringing them safe to the other side of the dangerous morass; for the instinct of these animals in traversing bogs is one of the most curious parts of their nature, and is a fact generally established. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... a sect of heretics, dwelling originally in the dominions of the Marquis of Monferrato, toward the borders betwixt France, Italy, and Spain: men condemned by the Church, and holding certain evil opinions touching the holy doctrine of grace of condignity, and free-will, and the like. Yet some of them, I must confess, lead not ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... in fact, also asserted, and they could do it with even more justice than their opponents, that by them the ancient doctrine of the Church was defended against the false doctrine recently introduced concerning absolute predestination, and against the denial of free-will tenets, wholly unknown to the ancient Church" (Vol. IV., p. 306). The concluding words are almost identical with those of Mosheim, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... according to the course of nature, or otherwise, have left off bearing and bringing forth children;—and that, in consequence of the said Walter Shandy having so left off business, he shall in despight, and against the free-will, consent, and good-liking of the said Elizabeth Mollineux,—make a departure from the city of London, in order to retire to, and dwell upon, his estate at Shandy Hall, in the county of..., or at any other country-seat, castle, hall, mansion-house, messuage or grainge-house, now purchased, or ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... moralized employer, acting as the providence of his workpeople, we look to find rather in a reconstituted and moralized State. We all share this hope in our degree, The Times as well as the Daily News, and we do not expect the new spirit to operate simply through the free-will and private capacity and initiative of individuals. The joint stock company ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... fettered by its own previous decrees, as some rigorous doctrines of predestination insist, but is free to recall and alter these, should the human characters and wills with which it works in history themselves change. There is a Divine as well as a human Free-will. "God's dealing with men is moral; He treats them as their moral conduct permits Him ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Jewish theology never shrank from inconsistency. It accepted at once God's foreknowledge and man's free-will. So it described the knowledge of God as far above man's reach; yet it felt God near, sympathetic, a Father and Friend. The liturgy of the Synagogue has been well termed a 'precipitate' of all the Jewish teaching as to God. He is the Great, the Mighty, the Awful, the ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... but automata, worked by springs, moved by the stronger impulse, and unable to choose for ourselves which impulse that shall be? Even now, in decreeing my own destruction, do I exercise free-will, or am I the sport of hereditary tendencies, of mistaken views of honour, of a seeming self-sacrifice, which, perhaps, is but selfishness in disguise? I blight my unfortunate father's old age; I destroy the last of an ancient house; but ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... last trump summoning sinners to their long and black account; and Maister Wiggie thrust in his arm in his desperation, in a whirlwind of passion, claughting hold of my hand like a vice to drag me out head-foremost. Even in my sleep, howsoever, it appears that I like free-will, and ken that there are no slaves in our blessed country; so I tried with all my might to pull against him, and gave his arm such a drive back, that he seemed to bleach over on his side, and raised a hullaballoo of a yell, that not only wakened me, but made me start ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... which strings of Flowers are hanged, and so it is wrapped in branched Silk, some part covered, and some not; before which the People bow down and worship; each one presenting him with an Offering according to his free will. These free-will Offerings being received from the People, the Priest takes his painted stick on his Shoulder, having a Cloth tied about his mouth to keep his breath from defiling this pure piece of Wood, and gets up upon an Elephant all covered with white Cloth, upon which he rides with all the Triumph that King ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... Massachusetts, when the wants of nature were satisfied they began seriously to turn their attention to the introduction of those customs and observances which had been the principal care of their fore fathers. There was certainly a great variety of opinions on the subject of grace and free-will among the tenantry of Marmaduke; and, when we take into consideration the variety of the religious instruction which they received, it can easily be seen that it could ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... lance—were the rewards which the companions claimed from the liberality of their chief. The rude plenty of his hospitable board was the only pay that he could bestow, or they would accept. War, rapine, and the free-will offerings of his friends, supplied the materials of this munificence. [53] This institution, however it might accidentally weaken the several republics, invigorated the general character of the Germans, and even ripened amongst them all the virtues of which barbarians are susceptible; the faith ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... our existing Government is not the less sacred to me because it was not sealed with blood. I honor it the more because it was the free-will offering of men who chose to live together. It rooted in fraternity, and fraternity supported its trunk and all its branches. Every bud and leaflet depends entirely on the nurture it receives from fraternity as the root of the tree. When that is ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... which the actors represent Man, Sin, Voluptuousness, etc., Understanding, and the Five Senses. The Senses are corrupted by the influence of Sin, and figuratively changed into wild beasts. Man, accompanied by Understanding and Penance, demands their liberation and encounters no resistance; but his free-will is afterwards seduced by the Evil Power, and his allies reclaim him with difficulty. Yet the plan of the apologue is embellished with many ingenious conceits and artifices, and conformed in the leading circumstances ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... room as his excitement returned. "You and I are nobody. We had better go and live in an inn. That man is honest. I hate him, but he is honest. Why do you stand there staring at me? Were you not the first to say that if we are impostors we should give up everything of our own free-will? And now you seem to think that I will fight the suit! That is your logic! That is all the consistency you have acquired in your travels! Go and tell your wife that you are nobody, that I am nobody! Go and tell her to give you a title, a name for men to call you by! ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... us elsewhere [35] that, "when analyzed by science, spiritualism leads straight to materialism;" free-will "can be annihilated by the simple mechanical expedient of looking at a black wafer stuck on a white wall;" that if "Smith falls into a trance and believes himself to be Jones, he really is Jones, and Smith has become a stranger to him while the trance lasts.... I ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the comparative littleness of man, leading to and bound up with the impotence of the will, human dependence, the necessity of Divine grace,—Augustinian in spirit, but going beyond Augustine in the subtlety of metaphysical distinctions and dissertations on free-will election, and predestination,—unfathomable, but exceedingly attractive subjects to the divines of the seventeenth century, creating a metaphysical divinity, a theology of the brain rather than of the heart, a brilliant series of logical and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... consequences of man's own actions. Furthermore, the cause is not a blind impersonal power outside of the individual, it is not Fate but man himself. What a lofty utterance! We hear from the supreme tribunal the final decision in regard to individual free-will and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Celeste. We are all trustees of the New Coventry Academy; and there has lately been "a good deal of feeling" because the Sandemanian trustees did not regularly attend the exhibitions. It has been intimated, indeed, that the Sandemanians are leaning towards Free-Will, and that we have, therefore, neglected these semiannual exhibitions, while there is no doubt that Auchmuty last year went to Commencement at Waterville. Now the head master at New Coventry is a real good fellow, who knows a Sanskrit root when he sees it, and often cracks etymologies ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... honourable surnames "The Great'' and "Doctor Universahs.'' It must, however, be admitted that much of his knowledge was ill digested; it even appears that he regarded Plato and Speusippus as Stoics. Albertus is frequently mentioned by Dante, who made his doctrine of free-will the basis of his ethical system. Dante places him with his pupil Aquinas among the great lovers of wisdom (Spiriti Sapienti) in the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this connection, that the woman suffrage organization had not a dollar to pay for newspaper influence, had no advertising to bestow, and that even the notices for meetings were gratuitous. All this advocacy on the part of the papers was purely a free-will offering and represented the honest and courageous sentiments of the editors. It is deemed especially worthy of notice because there was never anything like it in previous suffrage campaigns. Toward the end, when the influence of the opposition began to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... is the union of two contradictories. Thus —— and free-will are opposites; and the truth does not lie between these two, but in a higher reconciling truth which leaves ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... met was more censorious of his own actions, or more obstinate in his defence of any principle or theory he was advocating in argument, no matter how hare-brained it might seem. We used to spend hours arguing over anything, from free-will to the "loose-head." I knew, of course, how much he disliked the class of work (requisitioning of local supplies) he was doing for me, though no one could have worked harder and few have done it better; but the commercialism of it ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... seem. "Down South" envelopes are laboriously addressed with the names of stations and vias here and vias there; and throughout the Territory men move hither and thither by compulsion or free-will giving never a thought to an address; while the Department, knowing the ways of its people, delivers its letters in spite of, not because of, these addresses. It reads only the name of the man that heads the address of his letters and sends the letters to where that man happens to be. Provided ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... extinct; it will yet fill the earth with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Plead it for yourselves and show your faith in it by giving yourselves up to Emanuel, the great high priest of our profession, as free-will offerings in the day of his power, as his progeny, whom he will adorn with the beauties of holiness, as the dew from the womb of the morning, when reflecting the light of the sun refracts the prismatic colors. Say with David, "I am thy servant, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... difference theologically between the Ramaites is the one just mentioned. The adherents of the 'cat-doctrine' teach that God saves man as a cat takes up its kitten, without free-will on the part of the latter. The monkey-doctrinaires teach that man, in order to be saved, must reach out to their God (R[a]ma, who is Vishnu, who, again, is All-god, that is, brahma), and embrace their God ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... wonder how I can get on without an interpreter and not knowing Arabic. I do not believe in man's free-will, and therefore believe all things are from God and preordained. Such being the case, the judgments or decisions I give are fixed to be thus or thus, whether I have exactly hit off all the circumstances or not. This is my ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest,—must appear to us superfluous laws of Nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free-will and predestination. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... severe indictment of the voluntary system of recruiting, although sterner measures at the outset were a political impossibility. The free-will enlistment plan had to be given a thorough test, and its inadequacy demonstrated and repeatedly emphasized before public opinion ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... a freedom from co-action, they repudiate the idea of calling this a freedom of the will. "Lombard at length pronounces," says Calvin, "that we are not therefore possessed of free-will, because we have an equal power to do or to think either good or evil, but only because we are free from constraint. And this liberty is not diminished, although we are corrupt, and slaves of sin, and capable of doing nothing but sin. Then ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... rare and perhaps solitary example of a long-dated prediction of a great historic event which nobody could foresee. It stirs more deeply than any other the enormous problems of fatality, free-will and responsibility. But has it been attested with sufficient rigour for us to rely upon it? That I cannot say. In any case, it has not been sifted by the S.P.R. Next, from the special point of view that interests us for ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose, for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will. That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief, possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the man to the philosopher at all—he may even be ashamed to be associated with such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particular ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... first day, learning what was afoot, they deserted their criminal leader, and are now endeavoring to make restitution. Goebel is helpless. If he says that they first demanded the gold from him, they as strenuously deny it, and their denial must be believed, because they come of their own free-will to the authorities. The merchant, already tainted with treason, having suffered imprisonment, and narrowly escaped hanging, proves on investigation to be up to the neck in this affair. There is no difficulty in learning that his barge ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... according to the custom, as the duty of every day required; and afterwards offered the continual burnt-offering, both of the new moons, and of all the set feasts of the Lord that were consecrated, and of every one that willingly offered a free-will offering unto the Lord." Ezra 3:1-5. About ninety years afterwards, upon the completion of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, about 445 B.C., we find Ezra the priest—"a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had given," Ezra 7:6—on ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... "free-will," is therefore an abstract word, a general word, like beauty, goodness, justice. These terms do not state that all men are always beautiful, good and just; similarly, they are ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... before it really exists. Nothing could be seen, unless it existed in some form, at least potential and latent. Keen perception of the subconscious faculties. Subconscious reasoning from cause to effect. Coming events cast their shadows before. Fate vs. Free-Will. "Time is but a relative mode of regarding things." "Events may, in some sense, exist always, both past and future." Time like a moving-picture reel, containing the future scene at the present moment, though out of sight. ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... which may lead—which I believe does lead—to most unphilosophical conclusions. They are used very much as synonyms; not merely in this passage, but in the mouths of men. Are you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the world- old arguments between necessity and free-will? Whatever may be the rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a passing epithet. But what else does the writer do, who tells us that an inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral as well as in the physical ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the ideas of play and work, which exists so strongly in the imaginations of those school-boys who are driven to their tasks by fear, and who escape from them to that delicious exercise of their free-will ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... thy power shall thy people offer thee free-will offerings with an holy worship: the dew of thy birth is of the ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... keeping something of God's law. Ay, there would be no need of sermons, preachers and prophets to tell men of God's law, and warn them of the misery of breaking it. They would keep the law of their own free-will, by love. For love is the fulfilling of the law; and as St. Augustine says, 'Love you neighbour, and then do what you will—because you will be sure to will what is right.' So truly did our Lord say, that on this one commandment hung all the law ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... my Lord, To come thus was I not constrain'd, but did it On my free-will. My Lord Marke Anthony, Hearing that you prepar'd for Warre, acquainted My greeued eare withall: whereon I begg'd ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, p. 213; Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, p. 107; Morgan, Ancient Society, part iii., chap. iii. "After battle it frequently happens among the native tribes of Australia that the wives of the conquered, of their own free-will, go over to the victors; reminding us of the lioness which, quietly watching the fight between two lions, goes off with the conqueror." Spencer, Principles of ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... will admire the simplicity of mind and heart in the following opinions of Bewick, in his chat with Mr. Dovaston. Paradise, he said, was of every man's own making; all evil caused by the abuse of free-will; happiness equally distributed, and in every one's reach. "Oh!" said he, "this is a bonny world as God made it; but man makes a packhorse of Providence." He held that innumerable things might be converted to our use that we ignorantly neglect, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... Socialists had some excuse for their going out to murder their fellow workers," I said, "and the Germans had to go or get shot, but you are a volunteer. You went to war of your own free-will, and you ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... distance between them increased—"yes, I know that we shall meet again. It is not this voyage which is to be fatal to you or me; but I have a dark foreboding that the next, in which I shall join you, will separate us for ever—in which way, I know not—but it is destined. The priests talk of free-will. Is it free-will which takes him away from me? Would he not rather remain on shore with me? Yes. But he is not permitted, for he must fulfil his destiny. Free-will! Why, if it were not destiny it were tyranny. I feel, and have felt, as if these priests are my enemies; but ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a certain sense of humiliation, which destroys the equality of friendship. Of whatever description the favour may be, it becomes burdensome, if gratitude be expected as a tribute, instead of being accepted as the free-will offering of the heart: 'still paying still to owe' is irksome, even to those who have nothing Satanic in their natures. A person who has received a favour is in a defenceless state with respect to a benefactor; and the benefactor who makes an improper use of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... great party in the French army, as well as among the old republicans of the state: to have interfered against him would have been to kindle high wrath and hatred among all those officers who belonged to the ante-Buonapartean period; and, on the other hand, to oppose the free-will of the Swedes would have appeared extraordinary conduct indeed on the part of a sovereign who studiously represented himself as owing everything to the free-will of the French. Sweden, finally, was still an independent state; and the events of the Peninsula were likely to ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... is no laughing matther, but a serious engagement—and, John Dwyer, I tell you—and you Andy Rooney, that girl must not be married against her own free-will; but if she has no ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... full of important teaching. It commences with instruction concerning the burnt-offering, the sacrifice in performing a vow, and the free-will offering. It was not to be supposed that any one might present his sacrifice to GOD according to his own thought and plan. If it were to be acceptable—a sweet savour unto the LORD—it must be an offering in every respect such as GOD had appointed. We cannot become acceptable to GOD in ways of ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... fantastic horrors, which I dared not speak of. I used to think: 'If there were an earthquake now, I should be dead, and stay here for ever and ever'; and that seemed to me the most appalling thing that could happen. I never thought that one day I should live in one of them of my own free-will, and that in all probability I shall die there. And then it became easier to put up with: it had to. It still revolts me: but I try not to think of it. When I climb the stairs I close my eyes, and stop ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... she slashed and slammed round in an extraordinary manner. She broke a mug and a bowl, and sanded the floor with a general conglomeration of scratches, instead of the neat herring-bone on which she usually prided herself. It was the only way she had to exercise her free-will in its desperate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... not do so. I had acted for the best—so let God who gave me free-will, intelligence, conscience and opportunity, approve the deed or ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... deeper problem than the nature of woman. Troilus and Cressid, the hero sinned against and the sinning heroine, are the VICTIMS OF FATE. Who shall cast a stone against those who are, but like the rest of us, predestined to their deeds and to their doom; since the co-existence of free-will with predestination does not admit of proof? This solution of the conflict may be morally as well as theologically unsound; it certainly is aesthetically faulty; but it is the reverse of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... they are inclin'd to, By damning those they have no mind to: Still so perverse and opposite, As if they worshipped God for spite: The self-same thing they will abhor One way, and long another for: Free-will they one way disavow, Another, nothing else allow: All piety consists therein In them, in other men all sin: Rather than fail, they will defy That which they love most tenderly; Quarrel with minc'd pies and disparage Their best and dearest friend, plum porridge, Fat pig and goose itself oppose, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... beginning of this. In Hilda's manner, in her tone, in her looks, he marked the fierce anger and vengeful feeling which had now taken possession of her. He had witnessed also a greater consideration for himself, arising this time not out of coercion, but from free-will. All this was in his favor. Whether she could ever fully succeed in her thirst for vengeance did not much matter. Indeed, it was better for him that the desire should not be carried out, but that she should remain unsatisfied, for then Lord Chetwynde would only become all the more hateful ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... of the time, the Slavophils often indulged in the wildest exaggerations, condemning everything foreign and praising everything Russian. When in this mood they saw in the history of the West nothing but violence, slavery, and egotism, and in that of their own country free-will, liberty, and peace. The fact that Russia did not possess free political institutions was adduced as a precious fruit of that spirit of Christian resignation and self-sacrifice which places the Russian at such an immeasurable height above the proud, selfish European; and because Russia ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... not confined to Christianity, nor even to Deism, but which meets us quite apart from theology altogether. It is that which, in theological language, is involved in the contest between Calvinism and Arminianism; in philosophical, between free-will and necessity. 'The reconciling,' wrote Lord Lyttelton, 'the prescience of God with the free-will of man, Mr. Locke, after much thought on the subject, freely confessed that he could not do, though he acknowledged both. And what Mr. Locke could not do, in reasoning upon ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... so omnipresent that we treat it as we treat death, or free-will, or fate, or air, or God, or the Devil—taking these things so much as matters of course that, though they are visible enough if we choose to see them, we neglect them normally altogether, without for a moment intending ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Liberty' and 'Free Will.' Liberty, such as I understand it, is situated between these two terms, but not at equal distances from both; if I were obliged to blend it with one of the two, I should select 'Free-Will.'" Nor is Liberty to be reduced to spontaneity. "At most, this would be the case in the animal world where the psychological life is principally that of the affections. But in the case of a man, a thinking being, the free act can be called a synthesis of feelings ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Taking the free-will idea at its face value leads us nowhere in our study of character. If character in its totality is organic, so is will, and it therefore resides in the tissues of our organism and is subject to its laws. In some mental diseases the central ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... crimes unto which OEdipus is unwillingly plunged, and in witnessing the dreadful punishment he sustains, though innocent of all moral or intentional guilt, Corneille has endeavoured to counterbalance the obvious conclusion, by a long tirade upon free-will, which I have subjoined, as it contains some striking ideas.[4] But the doctrine, which it expresses, is contradictory of the whole tenor of the story; and the correct deduction is much more justly summed up by Seneca, in the stoical maxim ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... be done later. Marjorie had given him three things—advice; a pair of beads that had been the property of Mr. Cuthbert Maine, seminary priest, recently executed in Cornwall for his religion; and a kiss—the first deliberate, free-will kiss she had ever given him. The first he was to keep, the second he was to return, the third he was to remember; and these three things, or, rather, his consideration of them, worked upon him as he went. Her advice, ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... course, utterly ineffectual, as they quite expected it would be—indeed it was only made because they wished it to be clearly understood by all hands that they were not leaving the ship of their own free-will—and when the engineer had finished speaking, all that Williams said in ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood |
