"Philosophic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it), revoked all manumissions, thus ordaining perpetual slavery on all that were or might become slaves. The heathen lack of pity noticed in Alfred's preface to "Gregory's Handbook" is illustrated here by contrast with the philosophic humanity of the Civil Law, and the sympathy of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the divine Spirit—is not, indeed, the thing which has stiffened Judaism into Rabbinism; but neither is it tradition proper; it is reason working upon revelation, and moulding it into a new system. Such tradition serves but to show the inability of genuine Judaism to assimilate philosophic thought. Rationalizing should not be ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... Lucretia, Cato's wife Marcia, with Julia and Cornelia there; And sole apart retir'd, the Soldan fierce. Then when a little more I rais'd my brow, I spied the master of the sapient throng, Seated amid the philosophic train. Him all admire, all pay him rev'rence due. There Socrates and Plato both I mark'd, Nearest to him in rank; Democritus, Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, With Heraclitus, and Empedocles, And Anaxagoras, and Thales sage, Zeno, and Dioscorides well read In nature's ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... made by Mayhew upon his contemporaries was invariably such as to command respect for his intellectual capacity. Considering his deep, philosophic mind, says one critic, if his lines had been cast in more serious places, he might have been a sociologist, the equal of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. There is proof enough of this in that wonderful encyclopaedic work of "London ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Nietzsche. That his thought has been perverted by his interpreters there is no doubt. They have taken this eagle who gazed unblinded at the sun and exhibited him to the young people in all sorts of philosophic roles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... A distinguished servant of the Government, James Otis, the King's Advocate, resigned his office in order that he might be at liberty to denounce the Writs of Assistance. {85} Otis may have been technically wrong in resisting the Writs of Assistance, but it can scarcely be questioned that as a philosophic politician, who was devoted to the interests of his countrymen, he was ethically in the right. Otis was thirty-six years old; he was known to his compatriots as a graduate of Harvard, an able lawyer, a zealous student ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... two centuries. He it was who won the battle of Fehrbellin, June 18, 1675, at the expense of the Swedes, who were still living on the mighty reputation won under Gustavus Adolphus, almost half a century earlier, and maintained by the splendid soldiers trained in his school. The calm and philosophic Ranke warms into something like eloquence when summing up the work of the Great Elector. "Frederick William," he says, "cannot be placed in the same category with those few great men who have discovered new conditions for the development of the human race; but he may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... to starboard. The rush of bodies and the sea that was coming along the port runway between the cabin and the rail, turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they went, vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Syria, the cradle of the Nazarene, and Mesopotamia, one of his strongholds, although both were backed by all the remaining power of the Byzantine empire. Northwestern Africa, which had rejected the idolatro-philosophic system of pagan and imperial Rome, and had accepted, after lukewarm fashion, the Arian Christianity imported by the Vandals, and the "Nicene mystery of the Trinity," hailed with enthusiasm the doctrines of the Koran and has never ceased ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the witnesses for the truth, he might have seen that they were partakers of a higher wisdom than his own; but the tenacity with which they adhered to their principles, only mortified his self-conceit, and roused his indignation. It is remarkable that this philosophic Emperor was the most systematic and heartless of all the persecutors who had ever yet oppressed the Church. When Nero lighted up his gardens with the flames which issued from the bodies of the dying Christians, he wished to transfer to them the odium of the burning of Rome, and he acted ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Society) were again given publicity in full in his celebrated volume on natural philosophy, consisting in part of his lectures before the Royal Institution, published in 1807; but even then they failed to bring conviction to the philosophic world. Indeed, they did not even arouse a controversial spirit, as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... our branches there meets a club of men who would be termed anarchists by some people. The branch librarian assures me that the brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly milder since they have met in the library. It is getting to be literary, academic, philosophic. Nourished in a saloon, with a little injudicious repression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... art I know, To make men happy, and to keep them so." (Plain truth, dear Murray, needs no flowers of speech, So take it in the very words of Creech.) This vault of air, this congregated ball, Self-centred sun, and stars that rise and fall, There are, my friend! whose philosophic eyes Look through, and trust the ruler with his skies, To him commit the hour, the day, the year, And view this dreadful all without a fear. Admire we, then, what earth's low entrails hold, } Arabian shores, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... all nations in that it sets forth their great ideal of Divine power intervening to rescue man by becoming one with him. This is the conception presented to us, whether we apprehend it in the most literally material sense, or as the ideal presentation of the deepest philosophic study of mental laws, or in whatever variety of ways we may combine these two extremes. The ultimate idea impressed upon the mind must always be the same: it is that there is a Divine warrant for knowing ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... himself on the end of a quiet bench in Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and $140 in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, light-hearted, ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bowed head sat at the other end ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... felt any thing at all, were Mrs. Tracy, vexed at her dishabille, and mortified at so cool a reception of, what she hoped, her still unsullied beauties; and Charles, poor fellow, who ran up to his studious retreat, and soothed his grief, as best he might, with philosophic fancies: it was so cold, so heartless, so unkind a greeting. Romantic youth! how should the father have ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... were less applicable to the close than to the opening of the tale, and were dropped before publication. The hero is a great chemist, a lecturer at an old foundation, a man of studious philosophic habits, haunted with recollections of the past "o'er which his melancholy sits on brood," thinking his knowledge of the present a worthier substitute, and at last parting with that portion of himself which he thinks he can ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... want of space should prevent us from giving extracts from this most eloquent and philosophic work. Its glory is, that, breaking through the formulae of creeds and the external signs of religious faith, it has the courage to listen to the voice of God all along the devious course of human history,—hearing that mysterious tone, not alone in the chants of the Hebrews or the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... by Colonel P——, who rigorously eliminates every line even distantly hinting at politics or social life, or which may appear to him "subversive." Thanks to this system, I for some time read nothing but scientific and philosophic works, for which classes of reading I am too young and but ill-prepared. Gradually, however, these works take hold upon me; they appeal to my pride, and I struggle to vanquish the difficulties of understanding these vast systems which rule the world, of which I know so little. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... many of the future ministers of Scotland under his hands, all vying with one another as to who should be the best philosopher and the most eloquent preacher. Trochrig was both an eloquent preacher and a philosophic principal and a spiritually- minded man, but he was no worse to read Lady Boyd's demand for a true minister, and I hope he read her letter and gave his students her name in his pastoral theology class. 'Lady Boyd on the broad road of perdition!' some of his students would exclaim. 'Why, ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... politics. It presented to my mind no other idea than is contained in the word jockeyship. When, therefore, I turned my thoughts towards matters of government, I had to form a system for myself, that accorded with the moral and philosophic principles in which I had been educated. I saw, or at least I thought I saw, a vast scene opening itself to the world in the affairs of America; and it appeared to me, that unless the Americans changed the plan they were then pursuing, with respect to the government of England, and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... and contradictory personalities, all strong but by no means all noble, which by a freak of fate were united in one man under one name, to make him by turns a hero, a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan. The Buddhist monks of the far East believe today that a man's individual self is often beset, possessed and dominated by all kinds of fragmentary personalities that altogether hide his real nature, which may in reality be better or ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... fast disappearing type of gentleman, and I knew that for him this was possible through an extraordinary suppleness of mind, fineness of tact and feeling, and a philosophic broadness ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... material manifestation, carried to the logical extreme of specialization; while at the same time, as the embodiment of the original polarity of Spirit and Substance, this Personality, however unique, is absolutely universal; so that the Bible sets Jesus Christ before us as the answer to the philosophic problem of how to specialize the universal, while at the same time ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... by his comrades when they turned out at daybreak. Joe had seen to this. He had put them off with an invention of his fertile imagination which satisfied them. Then, having hurried through his own immediate morning duties, he waited, with that philosophic patience which he applied now in his declining years to all the greater issues of his life, for ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—living and ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... enjoys detective stories, and there are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to most modern books. A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive. But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted one thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged. "That," says Sherlock Holmes, "is the advantage of being a ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... had been absent from Fareham from four or five o'clock in the morning till nearly three in the afternoon. As to the strange story she had further told, he (Mr. Cowper) was neither superstitious nor philosophic, but the jury would decide whether conscience and the sense of an awful secret were not sufficient to conjure up such phantoms, if they were not indeed spiritual, occurring as they did in the very places and at the very times when the spirit of the unhappy young man, thus summarily dismissed from ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would exercise their common sense they would no longer be rebellious as they had been. And it is true at the present time. I think if we can succeed in inducing those who differ from us to reason—I mean to exercise that regulating power which the common mind as well as the philosophic mind possesses, if they would exercise their common sense, the battle would be fought and the victory would be won. Sometimes circumstances unexpectedly bring men to their senses in these matters. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of what is called 'the world,' the world that lives in St. James' Street and Pall Mall, that looks out of a club window, and surveys mankind as Lucretius from his philosophic tower; the world of the Georges and the Jemmys; of Mr. Cassilis and Mr. Melton; of the Milfords and the Fitz-Herons, the Berners and the Egertons, the Mr. Ormsbys and the Alfred Mountchesneys, the Duke and Duchess of Bellamont were ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... among those of great men which prove to be disappointments. In reading them one is not inclined to ask as of Schopenhauer's letters, why a philosophic genius of such depth should be laden with thousands of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... order that they may establish a true scale of comparative values and a right relationship between those things that come from the outside and, meeting those that come from within, establish that plexus of interacting force we call life. As for the source of philosophic truth, Friar Bacon put it well when he said "All the wisdom of philosophy is created by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that illumines the minds of men in all wisdom." It is a whimsical juxtaposition, but the first pastor of the Puritans ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... no attention until time proved their truth. His good sense, full of acuteness, had early persuaded him of the perfect vacuity of the greater part of political orations, of theological discussions, of philosophic digressions. He began early to practice the favorite maxim of a man of great distinction, whom we have often heard repeat a remark dictated by the misanthropic wisdom of age, which was then startling to our inexperienced impetuosity, but which has since frequently ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... All the other advantages that I have enumerated, had they been yet wanting, might have been acquired; had they been forfeited, might have been reconquered; had they been even irretrievably lost, might, by a philosophic effort, have been dispensed with; compensations might have been found for any of them, many equivalents, or if not, consolations at least, for their absence. But now it remains to speak of other blessings too mighty to be valued, not merely ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... inheritance. Sec. 7. Some merits of competition. Sec. 8. Wide acceptance of competition. Sec. 9. "Economic harmonies" and discords. Sec. 10. Competition modified by charitable distribution. Sec. 11. Competition modified by authoritative distribution. Sec. 12. Meanings of socialism. Sec. 13. Philosophic socialism. Sec. 14. Socialism in action. Sec. 15. Origin of the radical socialist party. Sec. 16. The two pillars of "scientific" socialism. Sec. 17. Aspects of the materialistic philosophy of history. Sec. 18. Utopian nature of "scientific" socialism. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... be, taken seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such comedies one laughs with the heroes, and not at them. The humour which steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were the predestined ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... his own eyes the most important phenomena of the Ice age on this continent from Maine to Alaska. In the work itself, elementary description is combined with a broad, scientific, and philosophic method, without abandoning for a moment the purely scientific character. Professor Wright has contrived to give the whole a philosophical direction which lends interest and inspiration to it, and which in the chapters ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... secondary sources; interesting, as presenting to the ordinary English reader, in language freed as far as possible from technicality and abstruseness, the great thoughts of the greatest men of antiquity on questions of permanent significance and value. There has been no attempt to shirk the really philosophic problems which these men tried in their day to solve; but I have endeavoured to show, by a sympathetic treatment of them, that these problems were no mere wars of words, but that in fact the philosophers of twenty-four centuries ago were dealing with exactly similar difficulties as to the bases ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... of science, a student of and writer on sociology and biology. He lectured on art and had a knowledge of the art of the world which few men in Europe rivalled. He wrote a philosophic novel, La Porte de l'Amour et de la Mort, which has run through several editions. He published a book on Michelangelo's poetry. At the same time he was a scientific engineer. When war broke out Petrucci was on his way home from Italy, where he had been engaged, I believe, on some ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... we must not pass without noticing: they are equally attractive both by their beauty and associations. They are two plants of Stanhopea tigrina, exhibited by Her Majesty, and a fine specimen of Acincta Humboldtii, named in honour of the philosophic traveller. They are all worthy of the associations they call up; they grow in open baskets, and the flowers are produced from below, directly opposite the leaves. The ordinary law of flowering-plants is ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... Hilaire's remarks are, it will be observed, little but an echo of the philosophic doubts of the describer and discoverer of the remains. As to the critique upon Schmerling's figures, I find that the side view given by the latter is really about 3/10ths of an inch shorter than the original, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... was unperturbed. "Perhaps that's just as well," she returned, with a philosophic shrug. "The surprise will be all the pleasanter, I mean. For of course it's going to sell tremendously; especially if you can get ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the Spiritualist Movement is replete with most interesting records of phenomena of bewildering variety, but during the past twenty years the demand for literature on this absorbing subject has taken a more philosophic turn. The phenomena are admittedly real. The philosophy is the subject of debate, hence these early records are fast going out of print and becoming ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... which some say is the only one worthy of a philosopher; and one of these two different modes of life both now and formerly seem to have been chosen by all those who were the most virtuous men; I mean the public or philosophic. And yet it is of no little consequence on which side the truth lies; for a man of sense must naturally incline to the better choice; both as an individual and a citizen. Some think that a tyrannic government over those near us is the greatest injustice; but that a political one is not unjust: but ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... lonely Mayme. She was reading—she wrote the Bonnie Lassie—all the books that the Dominie had listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort. "Why grow up a Boob," wrote the philosophic Mayme, "when the lil old world is full of wise guys just ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... or more on earth I've been: Witness those histories of nations dead, Which for our age I have illustrated In philosophic volumes, scene by scene. And thou, mere mite, seeing my sun serene Eclipsed, wilt argue that I had no head To live by.—Why not try the sun instead, If nought in fate unfathomed thou hast seen? If wise men, whom the world rebukes, combined With tyrant wolves, brute ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... the observation of our adventurers that the slaves of the Arab sheik and his followers were mostly pure negroes from the south, while those of the black chieftain,—as proclaimed by the color of their skin,—showed a Shemitic or Japhetic origin. The philosophic Colin could perceive in this a silent evidence ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... up higher than a house. On the top of the mound, against the sky line, stood up the brown skeleton of some broken fence or breakwater. With the grey and watery dawn crawling up behind it, the fence really seemed to say to our philosophic adventurers that they had come at last to the other ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... little else to learn. It must not, indeed, be forgot that there is a nobleness of conception, which goes beyond anything in the mere exhibition, even of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophic wisdom or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom, and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression now is cold and forbidding.... I look at her, and feel ashamed that I am happier than she. The absence of what my philosophic colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... stick on the stream. I'm sure it isn't, and never was, to mother's mind; and, as to father—" And here he stopped and pondered, as if trying to solve a mystery, and in a style that would have been pronounced philosophic, had he been a college professor—scratched his head. Then, with his ragged sleeve, he wiped the sweat from his brow, leaving a streak of black that made that part of his face present quite a different appearance from what it did, reader, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... they form a gradational series from orthodox Judaism, on the extreme left, to Paganism, whether philosophic or popular, on the extreme right; and it will further be observed that, while Justin's conception of Christianity is very broad, he rigorously excludes two classes of persons who, in his time, called themselves ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... on my career. I had four preferences: first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic, economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and last, and least, fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second, third, and fourth choices simultaneously. Heavens, how I ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... need while the second satisfies it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the first view under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be guilty. Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had shown the concept of the absolute to MEAN nothing but the holiday giver, the banisher of cosmic fear. One's objective deliverance, when one says 'the absolute ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Papinian and Ulpian. The science of the laws is the slow growth of time and experience, and the advantage both of method and materials is naturally assumed by the most recent authors. The civilians of the reign of the Antonines had studied the works of their predecessors: their philosophic spirit had mitigated the rigor of antiquity, simplified the forms of proceeding, and emerged from the jealousy and prejudice of the rival sects. The choice of the authorities that compose the Pandects depended ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... philosophic ideas are wholly wanting in Voiture's works, but I am of the same opinion as the coadjutor—he is a poet, a true poet." Aramis spoke so as to be heard ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is Mrs. Gamp's wise maxim. Great is Mankind's number now, but "take 'em as they come, and as they go," Like the philosophic Sairey; and though the sum total vary, Other things may vary likewise, things we dream not, much less know, Don't you think, my RAVENSTEIN, our state ten centuries hence or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... Belles Lettres I have no pretensions; Moral Philosophy I have studied, and think it a most important department, when kept upon its true principles, both theological and philosophic. Being, however, fifty years old, and having a feeble constitution, I do not think it would be prudent in ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... you should ask such a thing, Marcolina. Though your philosophic views, and (if the term be appropriate) your religious views, seem to me by no means irrefutable, at least they must be firmly established in your soul—if you believe that there ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... philosopher, (in that age these words were almost synonymous,) was Eustathius the Cappadocian, the disciple of Jamblichus, and the friend of St. Basil. Eunapius (in Vit. Aedesii, p. 44-47) fondly attributes to this philosophic ambassador the glory of enchanting the Barbarian king by the persuasive charms of reason and eloquence. See Tillemont, Hist. des Empereurs, tom. iv. p. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Why yonder steeple wants a spire, The grey old fellow, Poet Joe,[1] The philosophic cause will show. Once on a time a western blast, At least twelve inches overcast, Reckoning roof, weathercock, and all, Which came with a prodigious fall; And, tumbling topsy-turvy round, Lit with its bottom ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... afternoon and the afternoon to night, 'and it is certainly new. A stratus of tepid cloud a thousand miles long and a thousand miles deep, and a man in a dug-out paddling through! Sisyphus was nothing to this.' But he made himself comfortable in a philosophic way, and went to the only place left to ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... impetus which the derivative hypothesis has given to systematic natural history, and reads the declaration of a master in this department (the President of the Linnean Society) that Mr. Darwin "has in this nineteenth century brought about as great a revolution in the philosophic study of organic Nature as that which was effected in the previous century by the immortal Swede," it sounds oddly to hear from Dr. Dawson that "it obliterates the fine perception of differences from the mind of the naturalist, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... which harmonized with all experiment and observation, and still retain the old conception of the aetherial medium; or, to accept the newer conception of that medium, and to reject some of the ideas included in the old conception? From a purely philosophic standpoint, there can only be one reply, which would be in favour of the newer conception, by which our philosophy would be brought ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... Malay Archipelago until he could embody in it the more generally important results derived from the detailed study of certain portions of his collections. Thus it was not until seven years later (1869) that this complete sketch of his travels "from the point of view of the philosophic naturalist" appeared. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the most ungrateful of men. But why mention the telegram? What matters is whether your vision arose from seeing the telegram or seeing the telegraph boy? The philosophic truth is the same. ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... doing the trailing, while a large brindled bloodhound and two half-breeds between collie and bull stayed behind Goff, running so close to his horse's heels that they continually bumped into them, which he accepted with philosophic composure. Then the dogs proceeded literally to climb the tree, which was a many-forked pinon; one of the half-breeds, named Tony, got up certainly sixteen feet, until the lynx, which looked like a huge and exceedingly malevolent pussy-cat, made vicious ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... storm its portals in exultant hosts, battering them wide enough for thousands to charge through abreast. The heroic instinct of humanity with its high contempt of death is wiser and truer, never let us doubt, than superstitious terrors or philosophic doubts. It testifies to a conviction, deeper than reason, that man is greater than his seeming self; to an underlying consciousness that his mortal life is but an accident of his real existence, the fashion of a day, to be lightly worn and gayly ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... polyglot Testament in one hand and a phrase-book in the other, he groped his way among the speakers of eleven European languages. The first of these guides is hardly applicable to the purposes of the philosophic traveller, and even the second is designed more expressly for the tourist than for the expert in life. But he pressed interpreters into his service—whenever he could get their services for nothing—and by one means and another filled many note-books ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... excite rather than to subdue the vague appetite for the mysterious and the horrible which such a case, under any circumstances, is sure to awaken—but apart from this there is nothing to deter a philosophic mind from further inquiries regarding it. It is a matter entirely for testimony. [So it is.] Under this view we shall take steps to procure from some of the most intelligent and influential citizens of New York all the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... infinite Power and infinite Mind, and that morality is a fact because that Power is moral also. To quote Whittier's well-known lines, which express the essential truth of theism in words of exceeding simplicity combined with philosophic depth:— ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... honoured the toast, I scooted back with the glass, leaving him wiping the beads off his beard-bristles. He was in his philosophic mood when I rejoined ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... say, are full and plain. And every needful point of truth contain: All who can read interpreters may be: 110 Thus, though your several Churches disagree, Yet every saint has to himself alone The secret of this philosophic stone. These principles your jarring sects unite, When differing doctors and disciples fight. Though Luther, Zuinglius, Calvin, holy chiefs, Have made a battle royal of beliefs; Or, like wild horses, several ways have ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the concrete result of Winterborne's thoughts during the past week or two. The want of success with his evening party he had accepted in as philosophic a mood as he was capable of; but there had been enthusiasm enough left in him one day at Sherton Abbas market to purchase this old mare, which had belonged to a neighboring parson with several daughters, and was offered him to carry either a gentleman or a lady, and to do odd jobs ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... giving much has gained an appalling control over the minute details of human intercourse. I am no philosophic adviser to the rich; it is as the champion of the poor man that I detest socialism and all its works, for in the end it only leads backward to slavery. Every vote the workingman gives to a policy of wider state control is another link for the chains that are ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... of the salient qualities of his ancestors. The rustic luxuriance, manly vigour, careless and adventurous disposition of the first Jefferson; the refined intellect, delicate sensibility, dry humour, and gentle tenderness of the second; and the amiable, philosophic, and drifting temperament of the third, reappear in this descendant. But more than any of his ancestors, and more than most of his contemporaries, the present Jefferson is an originator in the art of acting.... Joseph ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... was the whole of the ancient world—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor. In Rome they lived on the memories of the past of Greece, and the greatest Roman, Cicero, when he wished to discuss some philosophic theme, always commenced by citing the opinions of the ancient Greeks on the subject; he also closed in the same way, for he had no original opinion of his own on any subject, such as the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... so far," answered the philosophic Tom, coolly; "but it's got to be done somehow. If the worst comes to the worst, I can always run home for help, while you two stay here and keep his ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... amazingly over the abominable roads and through the more abominable rain. There was but little singing, however, "Homeward Bound" being as yet far from fait accompli. Besides, we had not been in singing mood, as a general thing, these many days—marching along usually with a quiet, dogged, philosophic endurance of discomfort. ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... experts or great examinations to which such risks of tyranny could be trusted. They are not very precise about this either; indeed, the great difficulty I have throughout in considering what are the Eugenist's proposals is that they do not seem to know themselves. Some philosophic attitude which I cannot myself connect with human reason seems to make them actually proud of the dimness of their definitions and the uncompleteness of their plans. The Eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence, so common in private ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... never entirely to have lost sight of them in the midst of the busiest occupations. But the times were times for action, rather than for contemplation. The country was to be defended, and to be saved, before it could be enjoyed. Philosophic leisure and literary pursuits, and even the objects of professional attention, wher all necessarily postponed to the urgent calls of the public service. The exigency of the country made the same demand on Mr. Jefferson that it made on others who had the ability and ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... life by a perchance, and he was constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence. It was around his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French Academy remained unsuccessful. "He has too many enemies," said Louis XV. "his election shall not be sanctioned." Diderot did not offer himself; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Noreen chooses for his points, are nouns, names of things, and vary rarely verbal forms, words of action and doing. But it is simply a fact that all the potency of language is in the verb, and almost all there is of language, in a philosophic sense, lies there. The verb is the bridge of communication and action upon external things, just as is language itself, going out of man. And it is also noteworthy that the recognition of this position of the verb, together with these other ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... will designate as Mr. W. That Mr. W. was imposed upon, kept in ignorance, and deluded, in every possible way; yet, that all this while, the ruffian—HEEP—was professing unbounded gratitude to, and unbounded friendship for, that much-abused gentleman. This was bad enough; but, as the philosophic Dane observes, with that universal applicability which distinguishes the illustrious ornament of the Elizabethan Era, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... of my father-in-law, the venerable Symmachus, ought alone to have shielded me from the suspicion of such a crime. But alas! it was my very love for Philosophy that exposed me to this accusation, and they thought that I was of kin to sorcerers because I was steeped in philosophic teachings". ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of these rooms, which were perhaps twelve feet by fifteen feet, were cells; the third was occupied by the jailer's family. The family were now also occupying the front cell,—a cheerful room commanding a view of the village street and of the bay. A prisoner of a philosophic turn of mind, who had committed some crime of sufficient magnitude to make him willing to retire from the world for a season and rest, might ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... work than his previous writings on religion. In this book he raises the well known difficulties with belief in miracles and brings a great deal of real learning and logic to bear on the question. The entire work is in a reasonable and philosophic spirit. His conclusion is that "une vraie religion doit avoir au dfaut de bonnes raisons, des preuves sensibles, capables de faire impression sur tout ceux qui la cherchent de bonne foi. Ce ne sont pas les miracles." The ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... thought—is a tendency which, in education also, has caused divisions and the accumulation of methods. As external consequences of the same internal change, these processes have necessarily been more or less simultaneous. The decline of authority, whether papal, philosophic, kingly, or tutorial, is essentially one phenomenon; in each of its aspects a leaning towards free action is seen alike in the working out of the change itself, and in the new forms of theory and practice to which the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... explained for the unclassical. At the siege of Dyrrachium, Marcus Cassius Scaeva caught 120 darts on his shield; Horatius Cocles is the hero of the bridge (see Macaulay's Lays); C. Mucius Scaevola held his hand in the fire to illustrate to Porsenna Roman fearlessness; Cato is Cato Uticensis, the philosophic suicide; "high Atilius" will be more easily recognised as the M. Atilius Regulus who defied the Carthaginians; Fabricius Luscinus refused not only the presents of Pyrrhus, but all reward of the State, and lived in ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... disorder. He had no illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would never inherit the earth. Tacitus pours scorn on the philosophic opponents of the Principate, who while refusing to serve the emperor and pretending to hope for the restoration of the republic, could contribute nothing more useful than an ostentatious suicide. His ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... view-point of Historical Politics this word has a different connotation. Consider, for example, the political literature that appears under such headlines as "Constitutional History" or the "History of Constitutional Government." Here Constitution means not abstract philosophic principles of Government, but concrete political phenomena, that is, political facts. Our constitutional historians do not as a rule deal directly with the ultimate principles of government; but they are concerned rather with their progressive phenomenal manifestations in ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... of a disembodied and individual being which, for want of more intelligence of its nature, we call a "spirit," I have no more doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence. If, to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot help it. I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage of my convictions, and take the consequences; and I am of the opinion that, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... from the great streams of knowledge; and he may confess that it was with pardonable feelings of gratification that he discovered in 1853, by the acquisition of the two first volumes of the Cosmos, that the philosophic mind of Humboldt had also pondered deeply on the planetary peculiarities of size, density, distance, inclination of axes and eccentricities of orbits, without eliciting ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... and philosophic men of letters, M. de la Motte and the Abbe Terrason, congratulated each other, that they, at least, were free from this strange infatuation. A few days afterwards, as the worthy Abbe was coming out of the Hotel de Soissons, whither he had gone to buy shares in the Mississippi, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... at once the least Meredithian and the best of all Meredith's books. Meredith, though to a much less degree than George Eliot, is one of those pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-ethical writers, who influence a generation or two and then stem to become antiquated ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... Philosophic heads must occupy themselves one day with the collective account of antiquity and make up its balance-sheet. If we have this, antiquity will be overcome. All the shortcomings which now vex us have their roots in antiquity, so that we cannot ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... recognize the benevolent spirit of the great and good LAFAYETTE, to whom the hearts of the people of Baltimore are bound by so many indissoluble and grateful associations. History affords no brighter example of cool and philosophic expression of matured thought, and of determined yet temperate action. The omen is most propitious, and a people so actuated must enjoy ages of that liberty they have so dearly yet so nobly achieved. That this brilliant omen may be carried out into happy reality, through ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... the philosophic view of things," I said. "Why not take the good the gods provide? As a soldier, you would be in fetters—whatever your rank—to say nothing of the bullet that might cut short your career. And yet this life of the brain ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... say rather than what he has to tell that we care for nowadays. In one manner or other the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations. Mr. James gratifies this philosophic desire. If he sometimes forbears to tell us what he thinks of the last state of his people, it is perhaps because that does not interest him, and a large-minded criticism might well insist that it was childish to demand ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The 'History of the Conflict between Religion and Science' is a fitting sequel to the 'History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,' and will add to its author's already high reputation as a philosophic historian."—N. Y. Tribune. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... of special importance. By certain sacramental formulas, often found written on papyrus, the gods could be constrained, and made, like mediaeval devils, the slaves of the magician. Examples will occur later. This idea was alien to the Greek mind, at least to the philosophic Greek mind. The Egyptians, like Michael Scott, had books of dread, and an old Egyptian romance turns on the evils which arose, as to William of Deloraine, from the possession of such a volume. {63} Half- understood strings of Hebrew, Syriac, and other 'barbarous' words ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... English drawing-room. Here, now, came some one who made it clear that, no matter how pessimistic it appeared on the surface, this music was, at its core an essentially masculine music; it kicked desperately against the pricks of existence; what failed it was only the last philosophic calm. He could not, of course, know that various small things had combined to throw the player into one of his most prodigal moods: the rescue and taming of the cat, the passage-at-arms with Avery, her stimulating forbiddal, and, last and best, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... philosophy vanished as suddenly as the inordinate admiration of the French pseudo-classical literature. When the great Revolution broke out in Paris the fashionable philosophic literature in St. Petersburg disappeared. Men who talked about political freedom and the rights of man, without thinking for a moment of limiting the autocratic power or of emancipating their serfs, were naturally surprised and frightened on discovering what ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... and enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the pleasure of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we were Japanese and had seen a fox in the morning, but at all events in what we call a philosophic spirit. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... wisdom of the Egyptians. Combining the doctrines these books contained with ideas borrowed from Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Christianity, and also with certain additions of his own, he elaborated a philosophic system which he proceeded to teach. Cubricus then changed his name to Mani or Manes and proclaimed himself the Paraclete promised by Jesus Christ. His followers were divided into two classes—the outer circle of hearers or combatants, and the inner ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... That event they may well have looked forward to and welcomed with joy. James was the son of Mary of Scotland, for whom many of them had made such deep personal sacrifices and on whose account all had been made to suffer. He was known to be a man of moderate spirit, easy good-nature, and philosophic breadth of mind. Circumstances, by relieving England from the fear of invasion from Spain, and by establishing the Protestant succession, might be considered to have left the way open for the admission of a more generous and tolerant treatment of the Catholic minority. ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... man listened to the story of his wife's adventures his mind went back to the scene in Ju Penrose's saloon, and the denial he had flung so heatedly at that philosophic cynic. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... pseudo-dormant consciousness), as having been proven, Newbold says: "Of all the theories developed from the point of independence, Mr. Myers' is the most comprehensive in its scope, is kept in most constant touch with what the author regards as facts, and displays the greatest philosophic insight."[101] According to the theory of duplex personality, many instincts, desires, and emotions have been crowded out of the active consciousness and have been relegated to the pseudo-dormant consciousness. This has been brought about by a ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate: perchance, of an American Missionary. My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (TANT BIEN QUE MAL) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it; ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... depreciate the results of English speculation in general. On the contrary, we find that Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are treated with great respect. They occupy well-marked positions in the progress of philosophic thought. Their names are written in large letters on the chief stations through which the train of human reasoning passed before it arrived at Kant and Hegel. Locke's philosophy took for a time complete possession of the German mind, and called forth some of the most important and decisive ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... figure of a philosophic, serious adult look, which passed and repassed sedately along the street, making a turn of about sixty paces on each side of the gate of the hotel. The man was about fifty-two, had a small cane under his arm, was dressed in a dark drab-colored coat, waistcoat, and breeches, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... protect the oppressed, Christian atrocities took the place of Moslem atrocities, and history turned a page backward into the dark annals of violence and crime. And not alone in despotic Russia, but in Germany, the seat of modern philosophic thought and culture, the rage of Anti-Semitism broke out and spread with fatal ease and potency. In Berlin itself tumults and riots were threatened. We in America could scarcely comprehend the situation or credit the reports, and for a while we shut our eyes ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... saw above one voyage Luce, and credit me after another, her Hull will serve again, a right good Merchant: she plaies, and sings too, dances and discourses, comes very near Essays, a pretty Poet, begins to piddle with Philosophic, a subtil Chymick Wench, and can extract the Spirit of mens Estates, she has the light before her, and cannot miss her choice for me, 'tis reason ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... disposed to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors;' the 'ingenious youth alike instructed in every school to reject and despise the religion of the multitude;' the philosophic class who 'look with indulgence on the errors of the vulgar, diligently practice the ceremonies of their fathers, and devoutly frequent the temples of their gods;' the 'magistrates who know and value the advantages ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic communion, we said, "Well, have you met your namesake since you came to his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the cattle-steamer, as he said he was going ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... philosophic observer of maturing symptoms transpiring continuously in the affairs of mankind; the fate of those nations of earth that in their strength and arrogance mock the Master, furnish a striking corroborative vindication of the Negro's faith in the promises of the Lord; the glory and ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... such meaning in writers belonging to the pure classical period. When baptized into new meaning by the adoption of Christianity, these words, in common with many others, transmigrated into new and philosophic functions. But originally they tended towards no such acceptations, nor could have done so; seeing that the ancients had no avenue opened to them through which the profound idea of sin would have been even dimly intelligible. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind." ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... cry of the deeper faith that only that which is true and righteous is divine, so all earnest doubt, thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud and comes out in the light and joy of higher convictions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and materialistic idols and brings us to the one Eternal Power, the ever-living Spirit, manifested in all, that Spirit whose name is truth, whose word ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... him, sunk his head lower and lower, and wished that the earth would swallow him up. He was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... the next thing was to grapple with it; and my mind was fully occupied during the sermon. There was really nothing unfair or unbrotherly in my attitude. A philosophic affection such as mine own, which clashed with nothing, was (I held) permissible; but the volcanic passions in which Edward indulged about once a quarter were a serious interference with business. To make ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buddhist describes, at different plateaux, the heavens and hells, the gods and demons, of the ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott |
