"Metaphysically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is physical in its lower branches; metaphysical only in its highest and last analysis. The study of the Monad is metaphysical from start to finish. The two studies are apt to be confused, because metaphysically they are often joined for study, the teacher taking it for granted that the pupil fully understands the simple and easy physics of the problem ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... and intrinsic dignity, is well intitled to be considered as a component part of the intellectual structure of our being. And although, in strict application, and rigid expression, thought and speech always are, and always must be, regarded as two things metaphysically distinct,—yet there only can we find these two elements in disunion, where one or both have been employed imperfectly or amiss. Nay, such is the effect of the original unity or identity that, in their most extensive varieties of application, they can never be totally disunited, ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or negligent of their duty. The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes, and in proportion as they are metaphysically true they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. But this sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... regimen of truancy; not to fail in pleasing, if it be possible, the great world's implacable palate, therefore to eschew dilution of good liquor; and yet to render up in fair array the fitting tale of pages: well, if I may not metaphysically draw upon internal resources, I can at least externally and physically resort to yonder—desk; (drawer would have savoured of the Punic, which Scipio and I blot out with equal hate;) for therein lie perdus divers poeticals I fain would see in print; yea, start not at "poeticals," carp ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to paint the unheard-of delights which these two creatures—made by heaven in a joyous moment—found, it is perhaps necessary to translate metaphysically the extraordinary and almost fantastic impressions of the young man. That which persons in the social position of De Marsay, living as he lived, are best able to recognize is a girl's innocence. But, strange phenomenon! The girl of the golden eyes might ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... phraseology means neither more nor less than what is commonly called comparing the facts with one another and determining in what they agree. Nor has the technical expression even the advantage of being metaphysically correct. The facts are not connected, except in a merely metaphorical acceptation of the term. The ideas of the facts may become connected, that is, we may be led to think of them together; but this consequence is no more than what may be produced by any casual ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... art, makes the great distinction between the Roman and Venetian schools. I have formerly observed that perfect form is produced by leaving out particularities, and retaining only general ideas. I shall now endeavour to show that this principle, which I have proved to be metaphysically just, extends itself to every part of the art; that it gives what is called the grand style to invention, to composition, to expression, and even to colouring ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... degrading customs never exist, in conjunction with a pure religious system. The outlines of social institutions are metaphysically coincident with the limits of piety; and the refinement of morals depends upon the purity of faith. We may thus determine the prevailing spirit of a national religion, by observation of domestic manners and habits; and, among ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism, and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Others. These have regard to the only Aim or End of others that a man can make a duty of, viz., their Happiness; for their Perfection can be promoted only by themselves. Duties to others as men are metaphysically deducible; and application to special conditions of men is to be made empirically. They include (a) Duties of LOVE, involving Merit or Desert (i.e., return from the objects of them) in the performance: (1) Beneficence, (2) Gratitude, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... consistent with progress, they will be strong and enduring. Divorces 65:9 should warn the age of some fundamental error in the marriage state. The union of the sexes suffers fearful discord. To gain Christian Science and its 65:12 harmony, life should be more metaphysically regarded. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good,—in compromises sometimes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... charity boy? Why should a tall life-guardsman have something in him essentially absurd? Why are short breeches more ridiculous than long? What is there particularly jocose about a pump, and wherefore does a long nose always provoke the beholder to laughter? These points may be metaphysically elucidated by those who list. It is probable that Mr. Cruikshank could not give an accurate definition of that which is ridiculous in these objects, but his instinct has told him that fun lurks in them, and cold must be the heart ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world,—Locke ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it is inevitable. When she looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import, does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has no preachment to offer and utters no rubbish ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Metaphysically the human ego to the Buddhist is only a collection of five skandhas (form, sensations, ideas, faculties of mind, and reason) that vanishes when the collection is dispersed, but the factors of the collection re-form again, and the new ego is the result of their re-formation. The Northern Buddhists, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the means of drawing any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion"; but that, on the other hand, the statesman, who does not take account of circumstances, infinite and infinitely combined, "is not erroneous, but stark mad—he is metaphysically mad" (On the Petition of the Unitarians). There is, or ought to be, no logical difference between the evidence required by a statesman and that appealed to by a philosopher; and since, as we have seen, the combination of principles with circumstances cannot, in solving problems ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... FRENCH WORKS OF EVIDENCE.—In the middle of the seventeenth century we meet with Pascal and Huet; both of them, metaphysically speaking, sceptics, who disbelieved in the possibility of finding truth apart from revelation;(1084) and with whom therefore the object of evidences was to silence doubt rather than to remove it. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... enough, in both of his carefully prepared arguments, specifically rejects all intention of dealing "metaphysically" with this theme, in spite of the fact that every movement toward a fuller recognition of creative energy is nothing less than metaphysics, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10 |
