"Cosmogony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... philosophical concepts of ancient India, concerning religion and cosmogony, are to some extent familiar and appreciated in these countries, its psychology, intimately related with its religion and metaphysics, is comparatively unknown. In Europe the greatest intellects have been occupied by speculations upon the laws and aspects of physical ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... itself in various forms, thus giving rise to the perpetual flux and change of the phenomenal world. This Divine Desire, this "love for everything that lives and breathes," is found in many systems, and especially in the Vedic and Phoenician Cosmogony. In the Rig Veda (x. 129), it is that Kama or Desire "which first arose in It (the Unknown Deity)," elsewhere identified with Agni or Fire. In the fragments of Phoenician Cosmogony, recovered from Sanchuniathon, it is called Pothos ([Greek: pothos]) ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... COSMOGONY. By C. W. Goodwin, M. A. The assumption is made that the Mosaic account of creation is irreconcilable with the real creation of the earth. We do wrong in elevating that narrative above its proper position, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... poetry is in its outlines not unlike that of Hesiod, but develops the ruder ideas at greater length. In the shortest (but probably not the earliest) form of the cosmogony, the beginning of all things is found in the watery abyss. Two abysmal powers (Tiamat and Apsu), represented as female and male, mingle their waters, and from them proceed the gods. The list of deities (as in the Greek cosmogony) seems to represent ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... time the church believed and taught that every word in the Bible was absolutely true. Since his day it has been proven false in its cosmogony, false in its astronomy, false in its chronology and geology, false in its history, so far as the Old Testament is concerned, false in almost everything. There are but few, if any, scientific men, who apprehend that the Bible ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so constituted a rude literature, we might trace the development of Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, it presents in one work theology, cosmogony, history, biography, law, ethics, poetry; down to its present heterogeneous development, in which its separated divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to defy complete classification. Or we might trace out the evolution of Science; beginning with the era in ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Zoo," he grumbled. "Mother Failing will buy elephants." And he proceeded to criticize his benefactress. Rickie, keenly alive to bad taste, tried to stop him, and gained instead a criticism of religion. Stephen overthrew the Mosaic cosmogony. He pointed out the discrepancies in the Gospels. He levelled his wit against the most beautiful spire in the world, now rising against the southern sky. Between whiles he went for a gallop. After a time Rickie stopped listening, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... summary of doctrines regularly digested, in which, a man could not mistake his way. It is a most venerable, but most multifarious, collection of the records of the divine economy: a collection of an infinite variety,—of cosmogony, theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, legislation, ethics, carried through different books, by different authors, at different ages, for different ends and purposes. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the mere ideal character of which the philosopher is well aware, and which yet become necessary from the necessity of assuming a beginning; the original fluidity of the planet is the chief. Under some form or other it is expressed or implied in every system of cosmogony and even of geology, from Moses to Thales, and from Thales to Werner. This assumption originates in the same law of mind that gave rise to the prima materia of the Peripatetic school. In order to comprehend and ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the opinions of the Americans, and if any hold that the religious spirit which I admire is the very thing most amiss in America, and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the human race is to believe in some blind cosmogony, or to assert with Cabanis the secretion of thought by the brain, I can only reply that those who hold this language have never been in America, and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation. When they return ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... intention to attempt a discussion of the theogony of the deities nor the cosmogony of the world. My simple duty is to enlighten the world concerning a heretofore unknown portion of the universe, as it was seen and described by the old Norseman, ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... heart.' And perhaps few readers will have adequately appreciated the prodigious change effected in the theatre of the human spirit, by the transition, sudden as the explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, from the caprice of a fleshly god, in one hour man mounted to a justice that knew no shadow of change; from cruelty, mounted to a love which was inexhaustible; from gleams of essential evil, to a holiness that could not be fathomed; ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... The Mosaic cosmogony is, in this sense, catastrophic, because it assumes the operation of extra-natural power. The doctrine of violent upheavals, debacles, and cataclysms in general, is catastrophic, so far as it assumes that these were brought about by causes ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear; were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination—we should not have advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of a fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many passages, by deep poetic feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings with "cosmogony." It is a description of a way of thinking, a system of nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be extremely prevalent in "the modern mind," from which he himself extracts much comfort and fortification, and which he believes to be destined ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... dating back of the origin of the Jaina religion again, agrees with the pretensions of the Buddhists, who recognise twenty-five Buddhas who taught the same system one after the other. Even with Brahmanism, it seems to be in some distant manner connected, for the latter teaches in its cosmogony, the successive appearance of Demiurges, and wise men—the fourteen Manus, who, at various periods helped to complete the work of creation and proclaimed the Brahmanical law. These Brahmanical ideas may possibly have given rise to the doctrines of the twenty-five ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... of the theologians who in their own organs of the press venture to criticise science. These may hold their ground when they confine themselves to the geology of long past periods and to general cosmogony: for it is the tug of Greek against Greek; and both sides deal much in what is grand when called hypothesis, petty when called supposition. And very often they are not conspicuous when they venture upon things within knowledge; {317} ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... miraculous the basis of its dogma, nor installed the supernatural as a permanent factor in the progress of events. Its miracles, from the time of the Middle Ages, are but a poetic detail, a legendary recital, a picturesque decoration; and its cosmogony, borrowed in haste from Babylon by the last compiler of the Bible, with the stories of the apple and the serpent, over which so many Christian generations have labored, never greatly disturbed the imagination of the rabbis, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Shint[o], but directly fostered by and properly a part of it, as soon as we read the account of the creation of the world, an contained in the national "Book of Ancient Traditions," the "Kojiki." Several of the opening paragraphs of this sacred book of Shint[o] are phallic myths explaining cosmogony. Yet the myths and the cult are older than the writing and are phases of primitive Japanese faith. The mystery of fatherhood is to the primitive man the mystery of creation also. To him neither the thought nor the word was at hand to put difference and transcendental ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... in all other respects, the prison scene depicted by Goldsmith one hundred years ago, would have answered very well for New-York in 1821—albeit we discerned not among them the shrewd features of a Jenkinson, and heard nothing of the cosmogony either of Sanchoniathon ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... labor of over eight years has been expended, is one for which scholars will be profoundly grateful. It brings together from innumerable sources a vast amount of information, relative to the period covered, never before put in systematic form. The chapters on the mythology and cosmogony of the Norsemen, on the superstitions, slavery, graves, finds, weapons, occupations, feasts, warfare, etc., are intensely interesting. The text is accompanied by nearly ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... instructions, a black parcel with certain unstable chemicals and a curious arrangement of detonators therein, a black parcel destined ultimately to shatter nearly every landmark of Mr. Britling's and Lady Frensham's cosmogony.... ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Northern cosmogony was not unlike the Greek, for the people imagined that the earth, Mana-heim, was entirely surrounded by the sea, at the bottom of which lay coiled the huge Midgard snake, biting its own tail; and it was perfectly ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... of Aryan, transmitted in a modified form to all successive generations, denotes dominion and valour; the Brahmanic cosmogony, and the epithet of apes, given to all other races in the epic of Valmiki, bear witness to the same fact; it is shown in the slavery imposed on conquered peoples, in the hatred of foreigners felt by all the Hellenic tribes; in the omnipotence of Rome, the haughtiness of the Germanic orders; in the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... four-and-sixty mechanical arts; the Ved-Angas, revealed by inspired saints, and devoted to astronomy, grammar, prosody, pronunciation, charms and incantations, religious rites and ceremonies; the Up-Angas, written by the sage Vyasa, and given to cosmogony, chronology, and geography; therein also are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, heroic poems, designed for the perpetuation of our gods and demi-gods. Such, O brethren, are the Great Shastras, or books of sacred ordinances. They are dead to me now; yet through all time they will serve to illustrate ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... "articles" and "confessions" venture to intrude there in the innermost sanctuary of man's spiritual being and dictate to him what he shall hold or not hold of a reality about which he alone is conscious? What has the conflict about the Hebrew cosmogony, of Genesis, baptismal regeneration, or the validity of orders to do with that serene peace in which religion alone can dwell? It were profanity surely to intrude such strife of words in a sanctuary ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Mosaic cosmogony is its unbroken wholeness or unity.... Be it invention or inspiration, it is the invention or the inspiration of one mind. Other cosmogonies, though bearing unmistakable evidence of their descent from the Mosaic, have had successive ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Roman histories, Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics, legends, fragments of legends—in the New World as in the Old—all tell the same story. Not the story without an end, but the story without a beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on—what? No man knows. I do not know. I only assert deliberately; waiting, as Napoleon says, till the world come round to me, that ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... The cosmogony from which such an idea was derived was simple enough. I give, of course, no theological opinion on its correctness: but as professor of Modern History, I am bound to set before you opinions which had the most enormous influence on the history of early Europe. Unless you keep ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... look of attention. "My dear Vivaldi," said this gentleman, laying down a fossil, and fixing his gaze on Odo while he addressed the Professor, "why use such superannuated formulas in introducing a neophyte to a study designed to subvert the very foundations of the Mosaic cosmogony? I take it the Cavaliere is one of us, since he is here this evening: why, then, permit him to stray even for a moment in the labyrinth of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... corresponds with that of the most ancient Hindoo system, and displays a degree of wisdom unparalleled by any of the peoples belonging to the early historic ages. According to their cosmogony, the evolutionary or creative processes involved twelve vast periods of time. At the end of the first period appeared the planets and the earth, in the second the firmament was made, in the third the waters were brought forth, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... hand at a primitive specimen of wheat; or she may, in fact, have survived some gunpowder plot about this time; so that the meteoric appearance may be a kind congratulating feu-de-joye, on the anniversary of the happy event. What it is that the 'cosmogony man' in the 'Vicar of Wakefield' would have thought of such novelties, whether he would have favored us with his usual opinion upon such topics, viz., that anarchon ara kai ateleutaion to pan, or have sported a new one exclusively for this occasion, may be doubtful. What it ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... happiness in learning that the dealings of God—that is, the creative and originative power behind the universe—are at all events not whimsical, however unintelligible they may be. No one at all events is now required to reconcile with his religious faith a detailed belief in the Mosaic cosmogony, or to accept the fact that a Hebrew prophet was enabled to summon bears from a wood to tear to pieces some unhappy boys who found food for mirth in his personal appearance. That is a pure gain. But side by side with this entirely wholesome process, there are ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... subjects by some of their leading representatives. Naturally, as many of them were Churchmen, conversation often turned on the bearing of modern science, of geology especially if Sedgwick were of the party, upon Mosaic cosmogony, or Biblical ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses' Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to science."—"And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless ages, than when ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... useful, you say, then it has to become routine; then the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached to it. So with bridges: e.g. Pontifex; Dervorguilla, our Ballici saint that built a bridge; the devil that will hinder the building of bridges; cf. the Porphyry Bridge in the Malay cosmogony; Amershickel, Brueckengebildung im kult-Historischer. Passenmayer; Durat, Le pont antique, etude sur les origines Toscanes; Mr Dacre's The Command of Bridges in Warfare; Bridges and Empire, by Captain Hole, U.S.A. You may say all this; I shall not reply. If the heat ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... been printed in the original language. There is a fine manuscript of it in the British Museum, with an illuminated portrait of Brunetto in his study prefixed. Mus. Brit. MSS. 17, E. 1. Tesor. It is divided into four books, the first, on Cosmogony and Theology, the second, a translation of Aristotle's Ethics; the third on Virtues and Vices; the fourth, on Rhetoric. For an interesting memoir relating to this work, see Hist. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, tom. vii. 296. His Tesoretto, one of the earliest productions of Italian ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... extraneous to him. External to Brahma rises the Trimurti, that is to say, Brahma (masculine) the power which creates, Vishnu the power which preserves, and Siva the power which destroys: theogony here commences at the same time with cosmogony. The three divinities of the Trimurti govern the phenomena of the universe and influence all nature. The real God of India is by himself without power; real efficacious power is attributed only to three divinities who exist ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... probable mythological tradition, it is meet that we inquire no further into it." Since the time of St. Augustine the Scriptures had been made the great and final authority in all matters of science, and theologians had deduced from them schemes of chronology and cosmogony which had proved to be stumbling-blocks to the advance of ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... obliged for your long letter, which has interested me much; but before coming to the volcanic cosmogony I must say that I cannot gather your verdict as judge and jury (and not as advocate) on the continental extensions of late authors (489/1. See "Life and Letters," II., page 74; Letter to Lyell, June 25th, 1856: also letters in the sections of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... ye immortal gods! what is theogony? O, thou too, mortal man! what is philanthropy? O, world! which was and is, what is cosmogony? Some people have accused me of misanthropy; And yet I know no more than the mahogany That forms this desk, of what they mean; lykanthropy I comprehend, for without transformation Men become wolves on any ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... mythology, "were either all of them derived from chaos, love itself likewise being generated out of it; or else love was supposed to be distinct from chaos, and the active principle of the universe, from whence, together with chaos, all the theogony and cosmogony was derived."[162] Hence it is evident the poets did not teach the existence of a multiplicity of unmade, self-existent, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... a liar of the first magnitude," Judith said. "It has misled man ever since he first climbed down from the trees. It was common sense that inspired Ptolemy's theory of cosmogony. It was common sense that inspired the ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... subject-matter for poetry. The change has some advantages. Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly defined, and even the visible arts have not yet been able to translate into any symbols of beauty the discoveries of modern science. At the Arts and Crafts Exhibition we find the cosmogony of Moses, not the cosmogony of Darwin. To Mr. Burne-Jones Man is still a fallen angel, not a greater ape. Poverty and misery, upon the other hand, are terribly concrete things. We find their incarnation everywhere ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... skull in the Jewish cemetery at Venice, were struck by the same thought: the skull is only a modified vertebra. Oken founded upon this idea and kindred analogies his profound philosophy of the system of animals and plants which comes very near to the evolution {35} theory, and in his cosmogony traces all organisms to a protoplasm in such a way as to bring him in this respect also very near to Darwinism. Goethe, in his metamorphosis of plants, develops ideas in which, in all seriousness, he makes a concrete application of his ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... from the chains of pious custom and evangelical prejudice, will, within her sphere, be supreme. The mind will investigate without reverence and publish its conclusions without fear. Agassiz will no longer hesitate to declare the Mosaic cosmogony utterly inconsistent with the demonstrated truths of geology, and will cease pretending any reverence for the Jewish scriptures. The moment science succeeds in rendering the church powerless for evil, the real thinkers will be outspoken. The ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... live ten years longer, you will see that it is not over with me. I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing; and—it may seem odd enough to say—I do not think it was my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something,—the times and Fortune permitting,—that 'like the cosmogony of the world will puzzle the philosophers of all ages.'" He then adds this but too true and sad prognostic:—"But I doubt whether my ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... double-volumed work to their subscribers, they would insist upon the dilution of the genius of Oliver or Daniel into the adequate number of pages ere they risked paper and print. O public! O dear, ingenuous public! Think how you might have ceased to delight in even the cosmogony-man, if his part had been a hundred times rehearsed in your ears; or what the matchless Lady Blarney and the incomparable Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love, as old Primrose says, to repeat the whole name) might have become, as the "light ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... The British Empire and the German Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Even the cosmogony of the Babylonians has been influenced by their surroundings. The world, it was believed, originated in a watery chaos, like that in which the first settlers had found the Babylonian plain. The earth not only rested on the waters, but the waters themselves, dark and unregulated, were the beginning ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... doing their best to master the teachings; the second degree was of Mathematici, wherein were taught geometry and music, the nature of number, form, colour, and sound; the third degree was of Physici, who mastered cosmogony and metaphysics. This led up to the true Mysteries. Candidates for the School must be "of an unblemished reputation and ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world like a ball in our hands. How cheap ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a question of history or of cosmogony, or whether he was handling a test-tube or a blow-pipe; what he was about I did not feel sure; but I took it for granted that it was some crucial question or other he was at work on, some point bearing on the thought of the time. For the Master, I have observed, is pretty sagacious ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... are promontories in his dominions. Almost all the ancient Scandinavian manuscripts are Icelandic; the negotiations between the Courts of the North were conducted by Icelandic diplomatists; the earliest topographical survey with which we are acquainted was Icelandic; the cosmogony of the Odin religion was formulated, and its doctrinal traditions and ritual reduced to a system, by Icelandic archaeologists; and the first historical composition ever written by any European in the vernacular, was the product of Icelandic ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Ages, and all its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the madness of an ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... no lack of human influence acting from without. Chaldea, which the peculiar Semitic shepherds crossed in their pilgrimage, presented them with notions from its rich mythology and cosmogony. The natives of Syria and Canaan, among whom in the course of time the Abrahamites settled, imparted to them many of their religious views and customs. Nevertheless, the kernel of their pure original theory remained intact. The patriarchal mode of life, admirable in its simplicity, continued ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... however, that it is not over with me—I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other—the times and fortune permitting—that, 'like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages.' But I doubt whether my constitution will hold out. I have, at intervals, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Buddhism an agent of civilisation Its features in Ceylon The various forms elsewhere Points that distinguish it from Brahmanism Buddhist theory of human perfection Its treatment of caste Its respect for other religions Anecdote, illustrative of (note) Its cosmogony Its doctrine of "necessity" Transmigration Illustration from Lucan (note) The priesthood and its attributes Buddhist morals Prohibition to take life Form of worship Brahmanical corruptions Failure of Buddhism as a sustaining faith Its moral influence over the people Demon-worship ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... pleased with both. His manner to Maria was full of gentleness, and Bertha's quick eyes detected his intellect. He stood an excellent examination from her and Miss Fennimore upon the worn channel of Niagara, which had so often been used as a knockdown argument against Miss Charlecote's cosmogony; and his bright terse powers of description gave them, as they agreed, a better idea of his woods than any travels ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... during their forced residence in Babylon, whether under Assyrian or Persian government. At least 'Satan' is first discovered unmistakably in a personal form in the poem of Job, a work pronounced by critics to have been composed after the restoration. In the Mosaic cosmogony and legislation, the writer introduces not, expressly or impliedly, the existence of an evil principle, unless the serpent of the Paradisaic account, which has been rather arbitrarily so metamorphosed, represents it;[10] while the expressions ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... large earthenware vessels (a custom still observed among other tribes on the Upper Amazons), and that, as to their marriages, the young men earned their brides by valiant deeds in war. He also states that they possessed a cosmogony in which the belief that the sun was a fixed body, with the earth revolving around it, was a prominent feature. He says, moreover, that they believed in a Creator of all things; a future state of rewards and punishments, and so forth. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either believe ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... criticism have raised the veil of the Mosaic cosmogony and revealed to us the physical origin of man. We see that, instead of being created out of the dust of the earth by Divine fiat, he has in all probability been evolved out of it by a process of development through a series of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... once only, did Laplace launch forward, like Kepler, like Descartes, like Leibnitz, like Buffon, into the region of conjectures. But then his conception was nothing less than a complete cosmogony. All the planets revolve around the sun, from west to east, and in planes only slightly inclined to each other. The satellites revolve around their respective primaries in the same direction. Both planets and satellites, having a rotary motion, turn also upon their axes from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... do. And as he dreamed of the infinite world and its infinite wonders, the enchanters he might meet, the jewels he might find, the adventures be might essay, he held that he must succeed in all, with hope and wit and a strong arm; and forgot altogether that, mixed up with the cosmogony of an infinite flat plain called the Earth, there was joined also the belief in a flat roof above called Heaven, on which (seen at times in visions through clouds and stars) sat saints, angels, and archangels, forevermore harping on their golden harps, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... broad frieze, folding itself back at each end upon the side wall of the portico, and interrupted in the middle to give access to the Museum. The portion on the left contains a whole poem of mythologic cosmogony, treated with that philosophy and that erudition which the Germans carry into compositions of this kind; the right, purely anthropologie, represents the birth, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... of this intellectual delirium tremens that probably ever came under the notice of any reader is found in a professed apology for the Scriptures, recently published, under the pompous and bombastic title of "COSMOGONY, OR THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION."—A volume of such puerile trash, such rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, and crazy drivelling[A] as this, was never before vomited from the press of any land, and beside it the "REVELATIONS" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... everybody concerned if she could be induced to hold her tongue and let things take their course. So is what we call the law of gravitation a disagreeable thing; all the same, we know that if we fall off a house-roof we shall break our necks. In the Scandinavian cosmogony Wotan holds sway only by treaties, bargains struck with the powers that only sustain him so long as he sticks to his word, and are capable of thrusting him down if he breaks his word. Even omnipotence may be bought too dearly, and Wotan is not destined ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... room for doubting that religions are going; the nineteenth century has given them their death blow. But religions—all religions—have a double composition. They contain in the first place a primitive cosmogony, a rude attempt at explaining nature, and they furthermore contain a statement of the public morality born and developed within the mass of the people. But when we throw religions overboard or store them among our public ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... extraordinary freaks of Nature, which even science is unable to throw any light on—phenomena that are every now and then exhibited to us, as if only to show our ignorance of the workings of the invisible Power around us guiding the movements and physical cosmogony of our sphere; but Jorrocks, who was a thorough seaman, believing in portents, and thinking that everything unusual at sea was sent for a purpose, and "meant something," ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... any particular object in view. Whatever was remarkable about birds in natural history, in mythology, in the doctrine of divination, in the fables of Aesop, or even in proverbial expressions, has been ingeniously drawn to his purpose by the poet; who even goes back to cosmogony, and shows that at first the raven-winged Night laid a wind-egg, out of which the lovely Eros, with golden pinions (without doubt a bird), soared aloft, and thereupon gave birth to all things. Two fugitives of the human race fall into the domain ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... compiled from the philosophies of the world and set down with the proper interrogation point at the end of them to represent the invariable musings of deep thinkers on high places. And when the philosopher takes the elevator down his mind is broader, his heart is at peace, and his conception of the cosmogony of creation is as wide as the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... the effective causes of the facts taught; and I added these words—"How far the principles of the doctrine of universal evolution ought to be at once introduced into our schools, and in what succession its most important branches ought to be taught in the different classes—cosmogony, geology, the phylogenesis of animals and plants, and anthropology—this we must leave to practical teachers to settle. But we believe that an extensive reform of instruction in this direction is inevitable, and will be crowned by the fairest results." I purposely avoided any ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... persons, and whenever facts seize strongly hold of the imagination, (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them they must and will do so,) invention glides into the images as they form in us; it must, as it ever has, from the first legends of a cosmogony, to the written life of the great man who died last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot relate facts as they are, they must first pass through ourselves, and we are more ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... this idea of an eternal eddy or whirl Democritus developed a cosmogony. The lighter atoms he imagined flew to the outmost rim of the eddy, there constituting the heavenly fires and the heavenly aether. The heavier atoms gathered at the centre, forming successively air and water and the solid earth. Not that there was only one such {78} system or world, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Divine artificer and director. The second point, which is perhaps of still greater weight with the believer, is that where revelation (which is his ultimate standard of appeal) has touched upon the subject of creation, its statements are not merely a literary fancy, an imaginary cosmogony, false in its facts though enshrining Divine truth, but are as ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, as though it were upon an easel before me. 'You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the architecture ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Little Dipper, Great Bear, Southern Cross, Orion's belt, Cassiopea's chair, Pleiades. colures[obs3], equator, ecliptic, orbit. [Science of heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology[obs3]; cosmology, cosmography[obs3], cosmogony; eidouranion[obs3], orrery; geodesy &c. (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer[obs3]; astronomer; observatory; planetarium. Adj. cosmic, cosmical[obs3]; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious|, terraqueous[obs3], terrene, terreous|, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... work of Gravina, and in the Pisa frescoes in Didron's Iconographie, Paris, 1843, p. 598. For an exact statement of the resemblances which have settled the question among the most eminent scholars in favour of the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 304,306; also Franz Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 35-46; also George Smith's Chaldean Genesis, especially the German translation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... poetry in our language. Popular (in the common use of the word) Milton has not been, and cannot be. But the world he created has taken possession of the public mind. Huxley complains that the false cosmogony, which will not yield, to the conclusions of scientific research, is derived from the seventh, book of Paradise Lost, rather than, from Genesis. This success Milton owes partly to his selection ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... studying the work of Hippocrates, it is necessary to consider the distinguishing features of the various schools of Greek philosophy. Renouard shows that the principles of the various schools of medical belief depended upon the three great Greek schools of Cosmogony. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... invoked Assur rather than the other gods. Assur was the personification of the old capital of the country and of the nation itself, and though the scribes found an etymology for the name in that of An-sar, the primaeval god of Sumerian cosmogony, the fact was always remembered. Assur was purely Semitic in his attributes, and, like Yahveh of Israel or Chemosh of Moab, was wifeless and childless. It is true that a learned scribe now and then found a wife for him ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... interesting, and fortunately it has been related by Lecky himself. When he entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1856, "Mill was in the zenith of his fame and influence"; Hugh Miller was attempting to reconcile the recent discoveries of geology with the Mosaic cosmogony. "In poetry," wrote Lecky, "Tennyson and Longfellow reigned, I think with an approach to equality which has not continued." In government the orthodox political economists furnished the theory and the Manchester school the practice. All this intellectual ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... poetry, because of its marked originality and its high ethical tone. "Mallet, and his version of the Edda, is all the poem is based upon," says Arnold.[20] It is the poet's divinely implanted instinct that gathers from the few chapters of an old book a knowledge wonderfully full and deep of the cosmogony and eschatology of the northern nations of Europe. "Balder Dead" tells the familiar story of the whitest of the gods, but it also contains the essence of Old Icelandic religion; indeed there is no single short work in ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... reason was the contemporary attitude of the churches to Darwinism. He tells us as a matter of fact that in 1850, nine years before the appearance of The Origin of Species, he had "long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony which had been impressed on his childish understanding as divine truth." In the chapter he contributed to the Life of Darwin he wrote that in his opinion "the doctrine of evolution does not even come into contact with theism, considered as a philosophical ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the path of the blameless naturalist everywhere blocked by "Moses": the believer in revelation was generally held to be forced to a choice between revealed cosmogony and the scientific account of origins. It is not clear how far the change in Biblical interpretation is due to natural science, and how far to the vital movements of theological study which have been quite independent of the controversy about ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... I wish to mention here. The nomenclature which has survived from the earlier state is supposed to be deeply and occultly symbolic and the mythic narratives to be deeply and occultly allegoric. In this way search is made for some profoundly metaphysic cosmogony; some ancient beginning of the mythology is sought in which mystery is ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... doctrine, and receive a tenth of the produce of our lands. The scripture is not one summary of doctrine regularly digested, in which a man cannot mistake his way; it is a most venerable but multivarious collection of the records of divine economy; a collection of an infinite variety of cosmogony, theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, legislation, ethics, carried through different books by different authors at different ages, for different ends and purposes. It is necessary to sort out what is intended for example, what only as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... originated. Now, to understand his position correctly we must show his relationship to the two greatest of modern evolutionists—Darwin and Spencer. As a philosopher, however, Nietzsche does not stand or fall by his objections to the Darwinian or Spencerian cosmogony. He never laid claim to a very profound knowledge of biology, and his criticism is far more valuable as the attitude of a fresh mind than as that of a specialist towards the question. Moreover, in his objections many difficulties are raised which are not settled by an appeal to either of the men ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... claimed to be the real issue of Kant's thought. He asserts that from the point of view of the thing in itself we can never explain knowledge. We may be as skilful as possible in placing one thing behind another in the relation of cause to effect. It is, however, an unending series. It is like the cosmogony of the Eastern people which fabled that the earth rests upon the back of an elephant. The elephant stands upon a tortoise. The question is, upon what does the tortoise stand? So here, we may say, in the conclusive manner in which men have always said, that God made the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... others. This is manifest in Augustin's case at least. He must have astonished the good Alypius when he got to Rome by acknowledging that he hardly believed in Manicheeism any longer. And he set forth his doubts about their masters' cosmogony and physical science, his suspicions touching the hidden immorality of the sect. As for himself, the controversies, which were the Manichees' strong point, did not dazzle him any longer. At Carthage, but lately, he had heard a Catholic, a certain Helpidius, oppose to them arguments from Scripture, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... "the first-fruits of them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the rest ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... ventured to add, that the desperate attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... literature; it certainly suited his genius and his purpose. As we know, Milton—who had once met the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory—viewed Copernican astronomy with evident sympathy, even in Paradise Lost itself dismissing the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of Paradise Lost is built. Hence a source of worry to the modern critic who is disposed to conclude that Milton chose the worse way in place of the better out of timidity or ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... 7: Po. Literally night; the period in cosmogony when darkness and chaos reigned, before the affairs on earth had become settled under the rule of the gods. Here the word is used to indicate a period of remote mythologic antiquity. The use of the word Po in the following ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... entites, the three persons in God; then, starting directly from heat, light, and electro-magnetism,—which, according to the author, are the three original fluids, the three primary external manifestations of Will, Intelligence, and Love,—you have a materialistic and atheistic cosmogony. On the contrary, are you wedded to spiritualism? With the theory of the immateriality of the body, you are able to see everywhere nothing but spirits. Finally, if you incline to pantheism, you will be satisfied ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... greater puzzle still. What makers or builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full? Of course, he sees it now. A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely new guess might become an integral part of his tribe's creed. That would be their cosmogony. And if, a generation or two after, another savage genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it to himself in a form suited to his ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... own part we have at most a general idea as to what exactly the Church does teach or may teach with regard to the interpretation of the Scripture. That she has so far acquiesced in the larger interpretation of Genesiacal cosmogony, that now the literal six-day theory would be very unsafe, forbids us to judge any present interpretation of other parts by the number, noise, or notoriety of its adherents. The universality of the Deluge is by ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... shrine is not visible, for a slab of stone which is placed over it lies on a level with the plaza, and is securely luted in place with adobe. There are similar subterranean prayer crypts in other Tusayan villages. They represent the traditional opening, or sipapu, through which, in Pueblo cosmogony, races crawled to the surface of the earth from an underworld. In Awatobi also there is a similar shrine, for the deposit of prayer-offerings, almost in the middle of a plaza bounded on three sides by the mission, the spur of many-storied houses, and the wall with ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... ancient history have agreed not to throw away the cosmogony and the hierology of Greece. It is part of Grecian history that the creed of the people was filled with a love of embodied fancies, so graceful and luxuriant. No less are the revel rout of Valhalla part of the virtual history of the Scandinavian ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... deals with the worn-out and obsolete ideas of the past, and will give children false religious and scientific notions. But one does not rule out Paradise Lost because Milton's cosmogony is so purely fanciful, nor Dante because of his equally fantastic structure of the Inferno. Neither children nor older readers are ever led astray by these purely incidental backgrounds against which and by means of which the human interest ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of mental resistance not unlike the resistance of Lewes. Challis perceived, however dimly, that life would hold no further pleasure for him if he accepted that theory of origin, evolution, and final adjustment; he found in this cosmogony no place for his own idealism; and he feared to be convinced even by that fraction of the whole argument which ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... science makes the "history of creation" its highest and most difficult and most comprehensible problem, it must deal with "the coming into being of the form of natural bodies." Let us look for a minute at Kant's Cosmogony, or, as Haeckel says,[27] Kant's Cosmological Gas Theory: "This wonderful theory," says Haeckel, "harmonizes with all the general series of phenomena at present known to us, and stands in no irreconcilable contradiction ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... respects the same, the principal difference being that the Chronicles is much more tinctured with Chinese philosophy, and the myths concerning the creation especially show the influence of that dual system which had been introduced to give a philosophical aspect to the Japanese cosmogony. ...
— Japan • David Murray
... Planets. The Nebular Theories. The Fiction of Homogeneous Matter. The Contradictory Theories. The Perpetual Motion Machine. Contrary to Facts of Astronomy. Contradicted by Astronomers. Impossibility of any Cosmogony. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... great discovery since the Revival we owe to men who, by their very desire for truth, were forced into opposition to the tremendous power of the Church, which always insisted that people should 'just trust,' and take the mixture of cosmogony and Greek philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by this same Church as the last word on science, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... then agree that we should attempt a world-cosmogony? That the nations should be as brothers, and concern themselves with one another's famines, one another's revolutions, one another's frontiers? But why this curious insistence on the nation as a unit? Why select nationality, ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... their way to the end of it, who should be the leaders of public opinion and not the skirmishing harassers of its march. It would be well if some of our public men would consider that Providence has saved their modesty the trial of an experiment in cosmogony, and that their task is the difficult, no doubt, but much simpler and less ambitious one, of bringing back the confused material which lies ready to their hand, always with a divinely implanted instinct of order in it, to as near an agreement ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... spelt differently in separated archipelagos, was the father of the Tahitian cosmogony. His wife was Hina, the earth, and his son, Oro, was ruler of the world. Tane, the Huahine god, was a brother of Oro, and his equal, but there were islands which disputed this equality, and shed blood to disprove it, as the sects of Christianity have since the peaceful Jesus died by the demands ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of a Nebular Cosmogony was first suggested by some observations of the elder Herschell on those cloud-like appearances which may be discerned in various parts of the heavens by the aid of the telescope, or even, in some cases, by the naked eye. It assumed a more definite ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... fancy-department of apothecaries' shops, and then again to some obscure matters of "Zones," "Interiors," "Magnetic Relations," and the like. The central revelation, if I remember rightly, had to do with a sort of putty, by which, according to the Stellato cosmogony, Chaos had been stuck together into a Universe. This adhesive composition was known as "Detached Vitalized Electricity." And having got upon this sounding title, which conveyed no meaning whatever to the "undeveloped" understanding, Stellato was profuse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... strong, nor the prophecy to the wise. The Spirit bloweth where He listeth, and sends on his errands—those who deny Him, rebel against Him—profligates, madmen, and hysterical Rousseaus, hysterical Shelleys, uttering words like the east wind. He uses strange tools in His cosmogony: but He does not use them in vain. By bad men if not by good, by fools if not by wise, God's work is done, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and Merciful Father. After the introduction the book, if we look into the book itself, is divided into ten parts with the recurring formula, "These are the generations of." This book cannot be overestimated from a religious standpoint. The fact of a Creator is the fundamental teaching of its cosmogony. God, one God, is here clearly distinguished from a host of heathen gods. He is over and above matter, everything in the universe is subject to Him. Again in this book we have the early history of the human race shown in large ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... probably never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book. Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points of view, many subjects, of which these are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in chief Joshua's sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, "He spreadeth out the north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing," the blood's innate vitality—"which ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... account of creation is not a very definite one; portions of it are too vulgar for refined ears, but in it is to be found a story of a once great flood, which seems to be common to the cosmogony of all tribes. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Extinct Civilizations of the East it was shown that the cosmogony of the Chaldeans closely resembles that of the Hebrews and the Phenicians, and that the account of the deluge in Genesis exactly reproduces the much earlier one found on one of ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... this miserable house! You—to be sure, what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was his companion ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... view regarding the origin of the species, the earth may be said to have been created for men, and men to have been created out of the earth. By her nurture and tuition they grow up and flourish, and, folded in her bosom, they sleep the sleep of death. The idea of the earth-mother is in every cosmogony. Nothing is more beautiful in the range of mythology than the conception of Demeter with Persephone, impersonating the maternal earth, rejoicing in the perpetual return of her daughter in spring, and mourning over her departure in winter to Hades" ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... had no cosmogony or theories. The Chaldeans had both. There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and of the punishment that overtook them. There was also a story of an emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead of his son. The story, like the others, must have ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... by Observation and Inquiry.—The Greek mind had settled down to the fact that there was absolute knowledge of truth, and that cosmogony had established the method of creation; that theogony had accounted for the creation of gods, heroes, and men, and that theology had foretold their relations. A blind faith had accepted what the imagination had pictured. But ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... of "Progress of the Intellect." We suspect, from the reviewals of it which appear in the journals, that it is of the German free thinking class of philosophical histories. It embraces dissertations on Intellectual Religion, Ancient Cosmogony, the Metaphysical Idea of God, the Moral Notion of God, the Theory of Mediation, Hebrew Theory of Retribution and Immortality, the Messianic Theory prevailing in the days of Jesus, Christian Forms and Reforms, and Speculative Christianity. And these dissertations are written with an eloquence ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Kanaloa, Ku and Lono, who were worshiped throughout Polynesia, originally belonged to this class, as is shown by the cosmogony of the New Zealand Maoris. Among these four Kane held the primacy. The souls of great chiefs went to his ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... misleading of words is that of "aborigines." Its use dates from the time when the cosmogony was thought to be young and life to be of very recent appearance. Its usual meaning seems to be derived from the supposition that nations disseminated themselves like colonists from a common centre about four thousand years, say 120 ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... that the composition is much older than the papyrus [Footnote: About B.C. 300.] in which it is found, and the variant readings which occur in each make it certain that the Egyptian scribes had difficulty in understanding what they were writing. It may be said that this version of the cosmogony is incomplete because it does not account for the origin of any of the gods except those who belong to the cycle of Osiris, and this objection is a valid one; but in this place we are only concerned to shew that R[a], the Sun-god, was evolved from the primeval abyss of ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... projecting upwards in the line of the sun's path, and which bears the name of the Zodiacal Light, has been thought a residuum or last remnant of the concentrating matter of our system, and thus may be supposed to indicate the comparative recentness of the principal events of our cosmogony. Supposing the surmise and inference to be correct, and they may be held as so far supported by more familiar evidence, we might with the more confidence speak of our system as not amongst the elder born of Heaven, but one whose various phenomena, physical and moral, as yet lay undeveloped, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... the zodiac, Charles's wain, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Great Bear, Southern Cross, Orion's belt, Cassiopea's chair, Pleiades. colures^, equator, ecliptic, orbit. [Science of heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology^; cosmology, cosmography^, cosmogony; eidouranion^, orrery; geodesy &c (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer^; astronomer; observatory; planetarium. Adj. cosmic, cosmical^; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious^, terraqueous^, terrene, terreous^, telluric, earthly, geotic^, under the sun; sublunary^, subastral^. solar, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the first chapter of Genesis and the Mosaic cosmogony, and I am done," says Prof. Le ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... be added upon the subject of the Chaldaean cosmogony. Although the only knowledge that we possess on this point is derived from Berosus, and therefore we cannot be sure that we have really the belief of the ancient people, yet, judging from internal evidence of character, we may safely ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... that in spite of the honour paid to the stars in the Chinese cosmogony, the only star specially alluded to in Japanese myth is Kagase, who is represented as the last of the rebellious Kami on the occasion of the subjugation of Izumo by order of the Sun goddess and the Great-Producing Kami. So far as the Records and the Chronicles ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Asvamedha the parts of the sacrificed steed correspond to the elements of the visible creation. (Cf. Brhadaranyaka—Upanisad I, i.) A primitive vedic cosmogony makes the world arise from the parts of the body of a giant. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the lightning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination at the fall of the rebel angels and of man. Huxley says that the cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due rather to the account in Paradise ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... time of victory to all the propensities of corrupt nature, which they took to be the express will of Frigga manifested in their unbridled passions. Such was Scandinavian mythology in its reality. Modern investigators, principally in Germany and France, find in the Edda a complete system of cosmogony and of a religion almost inspired, so beautiful do they make it. At least they have made it appear as profound a philosophy as that of old Hindostan and far-off Thibet. By grouping around those three great divinities, which are supposed to be emblematical ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... being so niggardly of it in my instance, may be added to the account of your injustice. I see you go upon the old Christian principle of heaping coals of fire upon people's heads, which is the highest refinement upon vengeance. I see, moreover, that according to your system of cosmogony, the difference is but accidental between the race of kings and that of the first Baron of Lixmore: that ex-lawyers come like other men from Adam, and ex-ministers from somebody who started up out of the ground before him, in some more elevated ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Timaeus that reveals to us how the Platonic cosmogony is connected with the Mysteries. At the very beginning of this dialogue there is mention of an initiation. Solon is initiated by an Egyptian priest into the formation of the worlds, and the way in which eternal truths are symbolically ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like! His quiet days require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven—or is it nine?—crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a wretchedly straitened space. A most unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the author of Quiet Days in Spain all days may seem quiet, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... century, nothing seemed more clear than that Virgil was right; and that men were justified in talking of Tartarus, Styx, and Phlegethon as indisputable Christian entities. Etna, Stromboli, Hecla, were (according to this cosmogony) in like wise mouths of hell; and there were not wanting holy hermits, who had heard, from within those craters, shrieks, and clanking chains, and the howls of demons tormenting the souls of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... Circa 2022, Junius XXIV—Professor Apsox Zalpha, eminent professor of cosmogony, and Exmud R. Zmorro, leading news analyst of seven worlds, have entered the Metropolita Neuropsychiatorium for a routine checkup. They emphatically denied that it was connected in any way with a lecture ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... know. If we would really live in the fifteenth century, how many things we must forget: knowledge, methods, all those acquisitions which make moderns of us. We must forget that the earth is round, and that the stars are suns, and not lamps suspended from a crystal vault; we must forget the cosmogony of Laplace, and believe in the science of Saint Thomas, of Dante, and of those cosmographers of the Middle Age who teach the Creation in seven days and the foundation of kingdoms by the sons of Priam, after the destruction of Great Troy. Such and such a historian or paleographer is powerless ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... In the cosmogony of the heavens, the planet earth may well be likened to a territory that has possibilities, but which needs cultivation; encouragement; work; to bring out its possibilities and make it a ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... evils, which overspread the earth, is in accordance with the history of the introduction of evil into the world, Gen. iii. The celebrated Vossius shows, with great ingenuity, the similitude there is between the history of Moses and the fable of Bacchus. The cosmogony of the ancient Phoenicians is evidently similar to the account of creation given by Moses, and a like assertion may be made respecting the ancient Greek philosophy. Travel north, south, east and west, and you find the period employed in creation used as a measure of time, though ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... difficulties encountered by physiologists in believing the whole human race to have proceeded in about 6000 years from a single Adam and Eve; and that the longevity (not miraculous, but ordinary) attributed to the patriarchs was another stumbling-block. The geological difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony were also at that time exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... from Egyptian Ideas, identifies in Water, or Air, or Fire, the First Principle.—Emerging from the Stage of Sorcery, it founds Psychology, Biology, Cosmogony, Astronomy, and ends in doubting whether there ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the holy energies of Christian enthusiasm, which might else have changed the face of the earth. It has arrayed faith against reason, by the necessity it has imposed of reconciling every new discovery with the cosmogony of Genesis, or the metaphysics of Romans; putting asunder those whom God hath joined together, in the needless ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... this day. Matter little, indeed! Why, you foolish youngster, ceremony is everything in life. To understand Precedence aright is to know the secrets of nature. The order of Precedence is the order of Creation. It is, in fact, a very cosmogony. Oh, a noble ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... term. His ideas of the existence of a Deity are vague, at best; and the lines of separation between it and necromancy, medical magic, and demonology are too faintly separated to allow him to speak with discrimination. The best reply, as to his religious views, his mythology, his cosmogony, and his general views as to the mode and manifestations of the government and providences of God, are to be found in his myths and legends. When he assembles his lodge-circle, to hear stories, in seasons ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... manifestation of the idea,—the idea which we do not know, which does not exist, as long as it is not reflected, like light, which would be nothing if the sun existed by itself in an infinite void,—and brushing aside all a priori reasoning upon theogony and cosmogony, all inquiry into substance, cause, the me and the not-me, we confine ourselves to searching for the LAWS of being and to following the order of their appearance as far as ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Vafthrudnir, for the purpose of proving his knowledge. They propose questions relative to the Cosmogony of the Northern creed, on the conditions that the baffled party forfeit his head. The ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... superficial opuscule of Lucian on the dea Syria, we find scarcely any reliable information in the Greek or Latin writers. The work by Philo of Byblos is a euhemeristic interpretation of an alleged Phoenician cosmogony, and a composition of little merit. Neither have we the original texts of the Semitic liturgies, as we have for Egypt. Whatever we have learned we owe especially to the inscriptions, and while these furnish highly valuable indications as to the date ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... this; but that is not the case. It is a political homily personified, a walking common-place we have to encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man was to insist on your hearing him go through the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges every time you meet, or like the story of the Cosmogony in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is a tine played on a barrel-organ. It is a common vehicle of discourse into which they get and are set down when they please, without any pain or trouble to themselves. Neither is it professional pedantry ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... themselves and the rest of the universe with a god, and they do it in this fashion. It is shown to the satisfaction of the evolutionists, and also of very many who have no respect for their theory, that the Mosaic cosmogony—that is, the account in Genesis of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, and all the visible universe—has never been proved, and is incapable of proof, and that it holds its place in popular belief solely because of its supposed connection ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... true that, the miracle of life set a-going, there had been no further intervention on the part of the Creator, then the very head-and-corner stone of the Christian faith, the Bible itself, was shaken. More, much more would have to go than the Mosaic cosmogony of the first chapter of Genesis. Just as the Elohistic account of creation had been stretched to fit the changed views of geologists, so the greater part of the scriptural narratives stood in need of a wider interpretation. The fable ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... have already spoken in no very high terms. There is another tradition, however, resting upon unimpeachable evidence, which relates the occurrence of a series of destructions and regenerations of the world, and recalls in the most striking manner the Indian cosmogony; and, when added to the argument from the similarity of the systems of astronomical notation of Mexico and Asia, goes far towards proving a more or less remote connection between the inhabitants of ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... straightway lost to the outer world! No human need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the purchasable. It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of trade, the cosmogony of commerce in petto. The style was brief, pithy, pregnant; the illustrations—oh, wonder of wonders!—unfailingly apt to the text. He who sat by the Damascus Road of old marveling as the caravans rolled dustily past bearing "emeralds and wheat, honey and oil and balm, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in the sea; then terrestrial animals; and finally man. Naturalists, who utterly reject the Scriptures as a divine revelation, speak with the highest admiration of the Mosaic account of the creation, as compared with any other cosmogony of the ancient world. While there is in general an ascending series in these living forms, each was ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge |
