"Materialistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gradation throughout organic Nature may, of course, be interpreted upon other assumptions than those of Darwins hypothesis—certainly upon quite other than those of a materialistic philosophy, with which we ourselves have no sympathy. Still we conceive it not only possible, but probable, that this gradation, as it has its natural ground, may yet have its scientific explanation. In any case, there is no need to deny that the general facts correspond well ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... surprised no Whipple to read that we had become intolerant, materialistic, unaesthetic. Nor was it any wonder that we were "in no mood to brook religious or social dissension." With such a Constitution fraudulently foisted upon us by the money-loving fathers of the Revolution, it was presumably not to ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... calls him its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of society which is known as the materialistic conception of history. Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism "scientific"—had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... ran out into a desert, the river of progressive hopes, fed only from springs of materialistic philosophy, has done so here. At least the Greeks had their immortality and the Hebrews their coming Kingdom of God, but a modern materialist, with all his talk of progress, has neither the one nor the other, nor anything to take their ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Loisel. He had seen the good man's lips tremble at some materialistic words he had once used in their many talks, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it—just as social reformers should study John Graham Brooks's "American Syndicalism." From Professor Simkhovitch's book we Americans should learn: First, to discard crude thinking; second, to realize that the orthodox or so-called scientific or purely economic or materialistic socialism of the type preached by Marx is an exploded theory; and, third, that many of the men who call themselves Socialists to-day are in reality merely radical social reformers, with whom on many points good citizens can and ought to work in hearty general agreement, and whom in many practical ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... had first heard of Atherton's "eugenic marriage," I had instinctively felt a prejudice against the very idea of such cold, calculating, materialistic, scientific mating, as if one of the last fixed points were disappearing in the chaos of the social ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... metaphysical systems corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising concretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of nature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in the last instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind to that habit ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a 'Saviour God'. Even more perverse are the arguments which are used to prove that the centre of St. Paul's religion was a gross and materialistic sacramental magic. The apostle, whose antipathy to ritual in every shape is stamped upon all his writings, who thanks God that he baptized very few of the Corinthians, who declares that 'Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the Gospel', is ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... He will do well to pick a spot where a dense growth of pines shelters him from the wind and a steep ledge makes for him fireplace and chimney at once. Then it does not matter if the snow is deep on the ground and the air filled with flying flakes; his hearth may soon glow with comfort. Even from a materialistic point of view the ancients did well to worship fire. Out of it was to come more or less directly all the material progress of ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... testimony. The oldest man living at that time could not remember having seen a man who had ever spoken to a prophet. It seemed as unlikely, to adopt the phrase of another, that another prophet should arise in that formal, materialistic age, as that another cathedral should be added to the splendid remains of Gothic glory which tell us of those bygone days when there were ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... what you ask for? Do you remember what I told you of myself? I am hard, materialistic; I have lost faith in romance, the skeleton is present with me all over life. And my health is not good. I crave for money. I should marry to be rich. I should not worship you. I should be a burden, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... know that it is the will of God? Because the facts prove it so, is the ultimate answer of all religious systems with one exception; so here we are back again at the old race-experience as the criterion of truth. Therefore the theological argument is nothing but the materialistic argument disguised. It is in our more or less conscious acceptance of the materialistic argument, under any of its many disguises, that the limitation of life is to be found—not in the Law of Life itself; and if we are to bring into manifestation the infinite ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... gathered for centuries, of the marked power of this agent upon the lower animals, and of its worth as a mental, and therefore as a physical tonic and stimulant, for human beings. A chief reason for this neglect has been ascribed to the materialistic views which have prevailed ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Chapter IV. The Distribution and Vitality of Seeds. Chapter V. Plant Migration and Interglacial Periods. Chapter VI. Distribution and Permanence of Species. Chapter VII. What Is Life? Its Various Theories. Chapter VIII. Materialistic Theories of Life Refuted. Chapter IX. Force-Correlation, Differentiation and Other Life Theories. Chapter X. Darwinism Considered ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... we have brought upon the scene a materialistic curate. We took the curate as we took the husband. He is not an eminent ecclesiastic, but an ordinary priest, a country curate. And as we have insulted no one, expressed no thought or sentiment that could be injurious to a husband, so we ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... women's trains very pleasant, Master Harry!" says the materialistic Gumbo, who was also very little affected by some further home news which his master read, viz., that The Lovely Sally, Virginia ship, had been taken in sight of port ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would be much too right and good a thing to be a likely one); but its straws of talk mark which way the wind blows perhaps more early than those of any other journal—and look at the question it puts in that page, "Whether political economy be the sordid and materialistic science some account it, or almost the noblest on which thought can be employed?" Might not you as well have determined that question a little while ago, friend Public? and known what political economy was, before you talked so ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... the new creed should know one another, as surely the disciples of a common school ought to do. Armed, therefore, with a ticket, I proceeded, via the North London Railway, to the scene of action. It was not what we materialistic people should call a fine August day. It was cold and dull, and tried hard to rain; but it was far more in keeping with the character of the meeting than what Father Newman calls the "garish day" one looks for in mid-August. In the words of the circle the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds its ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... revolt. And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in that sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But the warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as fate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that argument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and the slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory, so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... atrophied by the indifference of the people, and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining a permanent hold upon the wandering minds and shallow feelings of a race whose deepest instincts ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... purely materialistic terms," she objected. "There is such a thing as moral courage, and moral courage is ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... authors, thorough men of science as they are, though their mode of dealing with the question may not be such as we can well adopt. While upholding the doctrine of evolution, and all the so-called "materialistic" views of modern science, they not only regard the hypothesis of a future life as admissible, but they even go so far as to propound a physical theory as to the nature of existence after death. Let us see what this ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... also imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. But, in truth, our criticism, I think, applies ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... the materialistic principle which governs psychology. According to Herbert Spencer, the mind is at first, as it were, an indifferent day, on which external impressions "rain," leaving traces more or less profound. "Experiences" are, according to him and the English empiricists, the constructive factors ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the only true and perfect standard by which to test the value of things, and so corrects the one-sided, materialistic ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... stimulus which comes from the need of self-exertion. He had an acute, active mind. Abundance of intellect and fire flashed from his dark eyes, and we have seen that he was not without good and generous traits. But in his spiritual life he had become materialistic and sceptical. His associates were brilliant, but fast men; and for him also the wine-cup ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... narrow and exclusive dogmas were grafted on this doctrine. Thus, the theory of "class struggle" transformed itself into the absolute negation of all community interests between the diverse social strata. The "materialistic"—or rather "economic"—point of view, according to which the products of spiritual activity in the history of humanity lose all independence, being only the consequences of economic organization, generated scorn for all idealism; and the proletariat character of the socialistic movement impelled ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Division of the Hegelian School to the Materialistic Controversy 2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann 3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time (a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena (b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit (c) The Special ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... grandmother thereafter took to inspecting her clothes. In such self-torture Anna did not, as might have been supposed, find any mystic pleasure: she had little imagination, she would never have understood the poetry of saints like Francis of Assisi or Teresa. Her piety was sad and materialistic. When she tormented herself, it was not in any hope of advantage to be gained in the next world, but came only from a cruel boredom which rebounded against herself, so that she only found in it ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... not be entitled to assume that from the opposite, the purely materialistic, standpoint war is entirely precluded. The individual who holds such views will certainly regard it with disfavour, since it may cost him life and prosperity. The State, however, as such can also come from the materialistic ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... time, but more clearly now, will finally come into full vision. The materialists under the leadership of Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, went far in the right direction, but in trying to go to the very fountainhead of life, they came to a door which they could not open and which no materialistic key will ever open." ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... author, and a political significance to almost every literary work. At the close of this abnormal condition of things, the poets of the transition school began their labors; untrammelled by the court and the town, they invoked the muse in green fields and by babbling brooks; from materialistic philosophy in verse they appealed through the senses to the hearts of men; and appreciation and popularity rewarded and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... with love and enthusiasm upon this great, crude, seething, materialistic American world. The question is, Did he master it? Is he adequate to absorb and digest it? Does he make man-stuff of it? Is it plastic in his hands? Does he stamp it with his own image? I do not ask, Does he work it up into what are called artistic forms? Does he make it the ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... other or lower extreme, there are perhaps one-tenth who are so-called "rotters," the men who set the evil standards of the camp and whose conduct is almost altogether selfish and materialistic. Between these two extremes are the great majority, or four-fifths, whom it is so difficult to classify. It is our conviction that these men "are not saved, but ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... only one of many who, to a degree which in these less earnest or at least more materialistic times appears incredible, had determined to trample the world under their feet. He awoke next morning with an unabated purpose and at an early hour set resolutely about its execution. He bade a brave farewell to Pepeeta, exhorted her to seek with him ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... old resident, and has a Boer wife. He speaks the language, and his professional business is with the Boers exclusively. He told me that the ancient Boer families in the great region of which this village is the commercial center are falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip of the usurer—getting hopelessly in debt—and are losing their high place and retiring to second and lower. The Boer's farm does not go to another ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... verse, inspired by the Celtic myths and traditions which still lingered in Brittany and England. The spirit of these poems was very different from that of the Chansons de Geste. The latter were the typical offspring of the French genius—positive, definite, materialistic; the former were impregnated with all the dreaminess, the mystery, and the romantic spirituality of the Celt. The legends upon which they were based revolved for the most part round the history of King Arthur and his knights; they told of the strange adventures of Lancelot, of the marvellous quest ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... one thing would justify it. But there will be others—do not doubt it—I wish merely to point out the sublimity of this didactic book which, for me, has wings like celestial poetry and which has carried me above and far away from the materialistic abjectness of my time. The technique of tactics and the science of war are beyond my province. I am not, like the author, erudite on maneuvers and the battle field. But despite my ignorance of things exclusively military, I have felt the ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... admit that the real force with which we have to reckon is the demand for justice and for equality as somehow implied by justice. It is easy to browbeat a poor man who wants bread and cheese for himself and his family, by calling his demands materialistic, and advising him to turn his mind to the future state, where he will have the best of Dives. It is equally easy to ascribe the demands to mere envy and selfishness, or to those evil-minded agitators who, for their own wicked purposes, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and universal execration. To-day, M. Leroux is fulfilling a mission of salvation, for which, whatever he may say, he will be rewarded. Like those gloomy invalids who are always talking of their approaching death, and who faint when the doctor's opinion confirms their pretence, our materialistic society is agitated and loses countenance while listening to this startling decree of the philosopher, "Thou shalt die!" Honor then to M. Leroux, who has revealed to us the cowardice of the Epicureans; to M. Leroux, who renders new philosophical solutions necessary! Honor to ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Towards the close of 1819, a prey to suspicion, she must needs sacrifice her happiness for the time being, so she made a weary journey with her husband into Scotland. She made her lover effeminate and materialistic, advising with him about everything. He returned from the Indies in 1827, when she quickly brought about his engagement ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... etc., it was gradually driven, by force of logic, to distinguish Being from Seeming, and to see that while the latter was dependent on the thinking subject, the former could not be anything material. This result was reached by both the materialistic and spiritualistic schools, and was only carried one step further by the Sophists, who maintained that even the being of things depended on the thinker. This necessarily led to skepticism, individualism, and disruption of the old social ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... large numbers of subordinates whose lives are also worthless and without any productive value. It is because of them that the life of a courtesan seems to offer golden prizes to some, and the hope of reaping such prizes deludes many. Because this is a materialistic age their money gives them powers to which they have no moral right, and no more wholesome thing could happen to the whole community than that the necessary changes should be worked out which would make such ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... nineteenth century, and still repeated with mechanical certainty in every secularist mission-hall, is likely to undergo a complete revision in the near future. The antagonism between dogmatic religion and materialistic science will never be removed. But the signs are apparent everywhere that religion is shedding its adherence to outer forms and entering into the freedom of the living spirit, whilst science is turning to problems which used to lie within the domain of unexplored religion. Religion will become ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive geological periods of life—sensation—instinct—the intelligence of the higher mammalia bordering on reason—and lastly the improvable reason of Man himself, presents ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... not, they were excusable in thinking it true. It looked like truth. I did not myself conclude from what I had seen, that it was true, but I was satisfied that there was more in this wonderful universe than could be accounted for on the coarse materialistic principles of Atheism. My skepticism was not destroyed, but it was shaken and confounded. And now, when I look back on these things, it seems strange that it was not entirely swept away. But believing and disbelieving are habits, and they are subject to the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of Mr. Wallace has, indeed, not found acceptance among scientists. Naturally not. If a materialistic conception of the universe is to prevail, if evolution in some form is to be accepted, we must have a universe of chance, not of a plan which spans the remotest star and the soul of the new-born infant in one tremendous arc. But it is highly instructive to observe how the scientists in 1903 ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... and hears his admonition that he'd better hurry up, as the live uncle is coming in sight. The thrill with which you read of the ghost in Ellis Parker Butler's The Late John Wiggins, who deposits his wooden leg with the family he is haunting, on the plea that it is too materialistic to be worn with ease, and therefore they must take care of it for him, doesn't altogether leave you even when you discover that the late John is a fraud, has never been a ghost nor used a wooden leg. But a terrifying leg-acy while you do believe ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... We of this materialistic world of barter and sale give little time to the consideration of the Hereafter. There are occasions with most of us when the unanswerable Why and Whence obtrudes itself on our vision, but it is a fleeting impression which vanishes with the rising of the sun on ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle. The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A single incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of the cot-bed and groped his way ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Fruites—which was published in 1591, several months preceding the original composition of Love's Labour's Lost—and also with his "Address to the Reader," a similitude will be found that certainly passes coincidence. A comparison of Parolles' and Falstaff's opportunist and materialistic philosophy with Florio's outlook on life as we find it unconsciously exhibited in his Second Fruites, reveals a characteristic unity that plainly displays intentional parody on ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... of things you never saw, and you scoff at people who believe in other things that you think they never saw and that don't come under what you label scientific. You talk about paradoxes—why, your scientist, who thinks he is the most skeptical, the most materialistic aggregation of atoms ever gathered at the exact mathematical centre of Missouri, has more blind faith than a dervish, and more credulity, more superstition, than a cross-eyed smoke beating it past a country graveyard in the dark of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... things, a substance that in its own general and omnipresent nature is without the special marks that distinguish these tangible things from one another. And in so far the philosophy of Anaximander is materialistic. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... light is but a presentiment, and the soul, when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether the light is not a dream, and the gulf of darkness reality. This doubt, and the still harsh tyranny of the materialistic philosophy, divide our soul sharply from that of the Primitives. Our soul rings cracked when we seek to play upon it, as does a costly vase, long buried in the earth, which is found to have a flaw when it ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... for a moment the workings of the mind on the physical plane: they are familiar. There is, however, one important point about them. In the materialistic science of the last century you had very widely spread, amongst scientific men, the view that thought was only the result of certain kinds of vibration in certain kinds of matter. I need not dwell on that. But you are aware that both in England, and more ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... towns. These are the sure nesting-places of monopoly, and therefore, of all the fantastic extremes of wealth which make puppets of our politicians and set before the youth of the nation snobbish and materialistic ideals. This policy, be it remembered, does not ask, as the socialists do, for all forests, all mines, or all the water-power. It asks that the hand of government control be kept firmly upon such portions of these resources as are susceptible ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... the most naive form of the mystery story. It may contain a certain element of the supernatural—be tinged with mysticism—but its motive and the revelation thereof must be frankly materialistic—of the earth, earthy. In this respect it is very closely allied to the detective story. The model riddle story should be utterly mundane in motive—told in direct terms. Here again the genius of that great modern master asserts itself, and in "The Oblong Box" we have an early model ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... aspect of the country. To "reconstruct the map" of a county, by wire-fencing it into squares of 100 acres each, after grubbing up all the hedges and hedge-trees, would doubtless add seven and a quarter per cent. to the agricultural production of the shire, and gratify many a Gradgrind of materialistic economy; but who would know England after such a transformation? One would be prone to reiterate Patrick's exclamation of surprise, when he first shouldered a gun and tested the freedom of the forest in America. Seeing a small bird in the top of a ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... There they engaged in trade and undoubtedly grew rich, taking on largely the complexion of that opulent Hellenic city. Later the Jewish colony was enlarged by the apostates who fled from Judea when the Maccabean rulers gained the ascendancy. The corrupt and materialistic atmosphere of Antioch doubtless explains why its Jewish citizens apparently contributed little to the development of the thought and faith of later Judaism. Similar colonies were found throughout the great commercial cities of Asia Minor. In many of these cities—for ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... who has no ample foundation of economics cannot study the subject by reference reading on the problems of economics. To learn the meaning of value he would read the psychological explanations of the Austrian schools and the materialistic conceptions of the classical writers. He would then find himself in a state of confusion, owing to what seemed to him to be a superfluity of explanations of value. When one understands one point of view, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Revelation, once acknowledged as such, was always sacred ground to him; and though he often appears to reduce all evidence to the external witness of the senses, there is something essentially opposed to materialistic notions, in his feeling that there is that which we do not know simply by reason of our want of a new and different sense, by which, if we had it, we might know our souls as we know a triangle.[476] Locke would have heartily ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... deal, and though since he had written the "Apology for Atheism" he had not changed his mind as to his metaphysical tenets, nevertheless the study of the German philosophy, and especially of Spinoza's, had produced on him a revolution of ideas. From a materialistic atheism, which denies the existence of God in every thing, he had gone over to a kind of mystic pantheism, which supposes God to be everywhere and in every thing. This species of pantheism is in reality but a disguised atheism, but ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... The materialistic craving in Polly for a good meal was so different from Eleanor's dreams of romance for her friend that the two elder Brewsters felt relieved to hear the exclamation. Soon afterwards, the riders drew rein at the porch ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the external phenomena of nature which were perceptible to one or more of his five senses; his first theogony was a natural one and one taken directly from nature. In ideation the primal bases of thought must have been founded, ab initio, upon sensual perceptions; hence, must have been materialistic and natural. Spencer, on the contrary, maintains that in man, "the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... swift trade currents that swirl at morning, rush through the noon, glide past the evening and rest for a time in the semi-calm of midnight. Chicago has begun to set the pace of a nervous nation's progress. It is a city whose growth has proved a fatal example to many an overweaning town. Materialistic, it holds no theory that points not to great results; adventurous, it has small patience with methods that slowness alone has stamped as legitimate. Worshiping a deification of real estate, and with a rude aristocracy building upon the blood ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... no more notion of what he is undergoing than a deal table would have, and pulls him back roughly from his Paradise to the sordid details of Life, putting all his airy fancies to flight, perhaps, by the process. But neither this materialistic world, nor all the fools that inhabit it, can ever really rob the Artist of the joy—in which "no stranger intermeddleth"—of the Realm of fancy which is his own domain, inherited by right of his genius. Though he may pass through Life unappreciated and unsuccessful, let ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... shade less material than the third, for if the latter is the summerland of the spiritualists, the former is the material heaven of the more ignorantly orthodox; while the first or highest level appears to be the special home of those who during life have devoted themselves to materialistic but intellectual pursuits, following them not for the sake of benefiting their fellow men, but either from motives of selfish ambition or simply for the sake of intellectual exercise. All these people are perfectly happy. Later on they will reach a stage when they ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... failing chief. The blood from my heart rushed to my head to revive it; the muscles of my limbs communicated to the fibres of the brain their galvanic tension. Nerves turned into imagination, flesh into life. Nothing has developed my materialistic beliefs like this decarnation of which I had such a sensible, or ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... the words: "Everything flows"; of Empedocles, who found his explanation of the world in the combination of the four elements, since become traditional, earth, water, fire, and air; of Democritus, who developed a materialistic atomism which reminds one strongly of the doctrine of atoms as it has appeared in modern science; of Anaxagoras, who traced the system of things to the setting in order of an infinite multiplicity of different elements,—"seeds of things,"—which ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... here; no real explanation can be given, and none seems to have been attempted by Buddhist writers. To be consistent, Gautama, in denying the existence of God and of the soul as an entity, should have taught the materialistic doctrine of annihilation. This, however, he could not do in the face of that deep-rooted idea of transmigration which had taken entire possession of the Hindu mind. Gautama was compelled therefore to ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Science and Philosophy.—The revival of the freedom of thought of the Greeks brought an antagonism to the logic and the materialistic views of the times. It set itself firmly against tradition of whatsoever sort. The body of man had not been considered with care until anatomy began to be studied in the period of the Italian renaissance. The visionary notions of the world which the people had accepted for a ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses, to take advantage of each other, to triumph in success regardless of others' failures. And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which still have sway among us—the ideals of wealth and luxury and display—of which the horrors of war are the sure and certain obverse. As long as we foster these things in our private life, so long will they lead in our public ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... deed, from self to humanity—this is the moving thought of Goethe's completed Faust. The keynote is struck in the "Prologue in Heaven." Faust, so we hear, the daring idealist, the servant of God, is to be tempted by Mephisto, the despiser of reason, the materialistic scoffer. But we also hear, and we hear it from God's own lips, that the tempter will not succeed. God allows the devil free play, because he knows that he will frustrate his own ends. Faust will be led astray—"man errs while he strives"; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of Europe, the rank materialism which is invading our very temples of worship. God, Truth, Virtue, with them, is no longer esteemed for its own worth, but for what it can yield of the necessities and luxuries of life. And with these cynical materialistic abominations they would be supreme even in the East; they would extinguish with their dominating spirit of trade every noble virtue of the soul. And yet, they make presumption of introducing civilisation by benevolent assimilation, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... "Heaven forbid! I'm quite sure Mr. Breakspeare wouldn't take my words in that sense. I am all for zeal and hopefulness. The curse of our age is pessimism, a result and a cause of the materialistic spirit. Science, which really involves an infinite hope, has been misinterpreted by Socialists in the most foolish way, until we get a miserable languid fatalism, leading to decadence and despair. The essential of progress is Faith, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... believe it? I am not unreasonable at all. I hate the attitude of mind of denying the truth of the experience of others, just because one has not felt it oneself. Here, it seems to me, there are two explanations, and my scepticism inclines to what is, I suppose, the materialistic one. I am very suspicious of experiences which one is told to take on trust, and which can't be intellectually expressed. It's the sort of theory that the clergy fall back upon, what they call spiritual truth, which ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and useless, by way of Switzerland. To him human beings are merchandise to be sold upon the hoof like cattle. No spiritual values enter into the bargain. When the body is exhausted it is sent to the knacker's, as though it belonged to a worn-out horse. The entire attitude is materialistic and degrading. Evian-les-Bains, the once gay gambling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the knacker's shop for French civilians exhausted by their German servitude. The Hun shoves them across the border at the rate of about 1,300 a day. From the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... were profoundly impressed, and, indeed, so was I. I felt that at last, I should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies, which had hitherto avoided my materialistic gaze. It was an enchanting moment, for there appeared, just then, to ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... stricken Belgium to-day, and look upon her sorrows, and her smitten fields, and her ruined cities, and her desolate homes, we can firmly and confidently proclaim that the breath of that divinely planted aspiration, her passion of freedom, will prove to be mightier than all the materialistic strength and all the prodigious armaments which seem to have laid her low. It is a reality which cannot ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... belong to this category; it is, therefore, incorrect to call him a forerunner of Darwin. Schelling and Hegel held the same idea; Hegel expressly rejected the conception of a real evolution in time as coarse and materialistic. "Nature," he says, "is to be considered as a system of stages, the one necessarily arising from the other, and being the nearest truth of that from which it proceeds; but not in such a way that the one is naturally generated by the other; on the contrary [their connection ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... Economy which emanate from philosophy, and may be reduced to one supreme principle; that of liberty and responsibility. The domain of Political Economy is the labor of generations. But we reject with all our strength, the materialistic doctrine which, inexplicably confusing matters, endeavors to assimilate ideas so distinct as intelligence and things; and which would descend so low as to employ the dynamometer to measure the creative force of man and its results, and which sees only figures where ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... for chestnuts or grapes. Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. I said, "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like 'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody?" Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl, understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew. Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were like misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood. Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other beings—we knew not why. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the lead in several escapades which have been written into Oxford history. There is in the makeup of the best type of college undergraduate a wonderful spirit of adventure, an unprejudiced view of life, an almost Quixotic feeling for romance, a disdain of sordid or materialistic motives, which together make the years spent at a great university the most golden of the average man's career. These characteristics Davis was fortunate enough to retain through all the years of his life. The same spirit ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abelard but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For a time he was victorious. Abelard was silenced and the mysticism of the Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... relatively to one another. In the example of the wall, it consists in a new collocation of two things relatively to each other—the wall and the paint. In the example of the molding influences on the human mind, its being a collocation at all is only conjectural; for, even on the materialistic hypothesis, it would remain to be proved that the increased facility with which the brain sums up a column of figures when it has been long trained to calculation, is the result of a permanent new arrangement ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its own uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness, prurience, preachiness, and weedy flabbiness ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... takes it for granted that everybody is as grossly materialistic as himself,—care not whether the sky above their heads is blue or black so long as the soil beneath their feet is fertile; whether the landscape be pleasant or forbidding so long as it will yield them creature comforts. Perhaps he is very nearly right. The fact that millions will make their ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... consciousness which make such a distinction necessary. His whole system is, in fact, a pertinent illustration of Hamilton's remark, that "the phenomena of matter" [and of mind, he might add, treated by materialistic methods], "taken by themselves (you will observe the qualification, taken by themselves), so far from warranting any inference to the existence of a God, would, on the contrary, ground even an argument to his ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... organization, and, feeling that such an act required some justification, he prepared the following written declaration: "The minority[R] [i. e., his opponents] have substituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealistic interpretation of events for the materialistic. Simple will power, instead of the true relations of things, has become the motive force of revolution. While we say to the working people: 'You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and wars between nations not only to change existing ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... This materialistic conception of life, however, has already become obsolete among the more advanced biologists as a result of the wonderful discoveries of modern science, which are fast bridging the chasm between the material and the spiritual realms ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... therefore it is necessary for the continuance of mind in a future state to have some sort of material vehicle also, which the ether is supposed to supply. "The essential weakness of such a theory as this," says Fiske, "lies in the fact that it is thoroughly materialistic in character. We have reason for thinking it probable that ether and ordinary matter are alike composed of vortex rings in a quasi-frictionless fluid; but whatever be the fate of this subtle hypothesis, we may be sure ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the trouble is that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment of intellectual carelessness back to the idea of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... been so much alike in possessing disagreeable traits that he felt that Alida was the only peculiar one among them. He never thought of instituting comparisons between her and his former wife, yet he did so unconsciously. Mrs. Holcroft had been too much like himself, matter of fact, materialistic, kind, and good. Devoid of imagination, uneducated in mind, her thoughts had not ranged far from what she touched and saw. She touched them with something of their own heaviness, she saw them as objects—just what they were—and was incapable of obtaining from them ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... aware of the immense social danger in the desire for riches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothing and the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialistic enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian simplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all for the intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in which twenty ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... mingled freely with these materialistic Romeos, who preferred the comforting cuisine to the fiery and seductive cocktails of "The Opera" ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... against a possible misapprehension. In eliminating the materialistic point of view in individualism—narrow individual development for personal gain—we have not thrown aside the goal of development suggested by Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Advanced educational thought has that prominently in mind—the discovery of the child's ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... that this condition is the inevitable result of separating education from contemporary life. Education becomes unreal and far fetched, while industry becomes ruthless and materialistic. In spite of the severity of the indictment, one much more severe and well deserved might have been brought against us. He might have accused us not only of wasting, but of misusing and of trampling ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... Ruach: lit. breath (spiritus) which in the animal kingdom is the surest sign of life. See vol. v. 29. Nothing can be more rigidly materialistic than the called Mosaic ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... opinion of the delegates clearly favored the renomination of Mr. Lincoln. It was an exhibition not only of American common sense, but of sentiment. The American people and the public bodies which represent them are indeed practical and materialistic to the last degree, but those gravely err who ignore a very different side of their character. No people and no public bodies are more capable of yielding to deep feeling. So it was now proven. It was felt that not to renominate ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... out the main outlines of the 'Classical Political Economy': the system which to his disciples appeared to be as clear, consistent, and demonstrable as Euclid; and which was denounced by their opponents as mechanical, materialistic, fatalistic, and degrading. After triumphing for a season, it has been of late years often treated with contempt, and sometimes banished to the limbo of extinct logomachies. It is condemned as 'abstract.' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like ROBINSON CRUSOE? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights the world in ROBINSON, but the romantic and philosophic interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of delighting us when it is applied, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... picture; moreover it was one of the strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of certain artists seemed able to convey poetical suggestion, even when the poetical quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as moonshine, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical apprehension of beautiful ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he owns—the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the democratizer—is banished because it jars too much on the desire for communion. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... elsewhere, there are similar regulations. Also the corps of under-officers is subject to hampering regulations with regard to marriage, and require besides the consent of their superior officers. These are very drastic proofs of the purely materialistic conception that the State has ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... named Herman, rebel soul. His brow was like a loaf of bread, his eyes Turned from his father's blue to gray, his nose Was like his mother's, skin was dark like hers. His shapely body, hands and feet belonged To some patrician face, not to Marat's. And his was like Marat's, fanatical, Materialistic, fierce, as it might guide A reptile's crawl, but yet he crawled to peaks Loving the hues of mists, but not the mists His father loved. And being a rebel soul He thought the world all wrong. A nothingness Moving as malice marred the life of man. 'Twas man's great work to fight this Giant ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... modern, diminishing of the more mediaeval elements; but, despite growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were mediaeval; opposed to the open-air life, the physical training and the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human beings ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Religion that does not enter intimately into everyday life and enrich the baffling experiences of daily labor with great spiritual interpretations, gives little of value to country people. The rural home awakens to its opportunities only when it is invigorated by vital spiritual inspiration. A materialistic philosophy of life will eat the heart out of the country and leave it in despair. Country people seldom have wide choice; they must either penetrate common experience with the eye of confident idealism, or ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... because Kapila, in the Svetsvatara text, is referred to as a competent person. For from this it would follow that, as Brihaspati is, in Sruti and Smriti, mentioned as a pattern of consummate wisdom, Scripture should be interpreted in agreement with the openly materialistic and atheistic Smriti composed by that authority. But, it may here be said, the Vednta-texts should after all be interpreted in agreement with Kapila's Smriti, for the reason that Kapila had through the power of his concentrated ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Manicheeism—the double Principle of good and evil. Henceforth for Augustin there exists only one Principle, unique and incorruptible—the Good, which is God. But his view of this divine substance is still quite materialistic, to such an extent is he governed by his senses. In his thought, it is corporeal, spatial, and infinite. He pictures it as a kind of limitless sea, wherein is a huge sponge bathing the world that it pervades throughout.... He was at this point, when one of his acquaintances, "a man ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... England was England, she was the Isle of Saints, and throughout the Middle Ages religion was her chief care, in a manner almost incredible in this secular and materialistic age. She not only covered the land with magnificent churches and cathedrals, to the architecture of which we cannot in these days approach, even by imitation, distantly, but she also built huge monasteries, and these monasteries were the cradles, the homes of vast stores of ever-accumulating knowledge. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labour, and sweated ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the classes representing commercial prosperity, social prominence, and academic culture. In these classes, throughout the North, there was a general apathy as to slavery. The temper of the time was materialistic. There was indeed enough anti-slavery sentiment, stirred by the 7th of March speech and the Fugitive Slave law, to change the balance of power in Massachusetts politics. The Democrats and the Free Soilers made a coalition, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... place in the travelers. For a mob of four millions of people was changed into a well-organized nation. The explanation given is fully as remarkable as the trip, and the transformation. It must strike very strangely on the cold, matter-of-fact ears of this materialistic world we dwell in. It is this: that the Lord God Himself actually went with them in person, and lived with them, and took immediate charge of everything. He had promised Moses, their leader, that He would do this. Just how definite or indefinite a thing that ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... Meanwhile to strengthen our position, we may draw additional support from each of the three great stages reached in the progress of Chinese religion: namely, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Dr. Edkins describes them as the moral, materialistic, and metaphysical systems, standing at the three corners of a great triangle. [167] The god of Confucianism is Shang-ti or Shang-te. And with the universal anthropomorphism "Shang-te is the great father of gods and men: Shang-te is a gigantic ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the element of the absurd. The philosophy of the complex vision, though far more sympathetic to much that is called "materialism" than to much that is called "idealism," certainly cannot itself be regarded as materialistic. And it cannot be so regarded because its central assumption and implication is the concrete basis of personality which we call the "soul." And the "soul," when we think of it as something real, must inevitably ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... This entirely materialistic conception of happiness which, it is certain, the Puerto Rican peasant still entertains, is now giving way slowly but surely before the new influences that are being brought to bear on himself and on his surroundings. The touch of education is dispelling ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... metempsychosis as a result of the soul of an ancestor passing into a woman and being reborn as her next child. Add to this that the soul is often thought of as a tiny animal, and we see how a point d'appui for the more materialistic belief was afforded. The insect or worms of the rebirth stories may have been once forms of the soul. It is easy also to see how, a theory of conception by swallowing various objects being already in existence, it might be thought possible ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... I've said to you. And another thing, women are all more materialistic than men. We make something immense out of love, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... has always been encouraged by our Holy Mother Church, because it strengthens our faith and stimulates us to be more devout in the practice of our religion. The materialistic tone and trend of most modern literature, however, makes the reading and dissemination of Catholic books all the more urgent and necessary ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... difficulties of the thoughts and arguments themselves. Locke on the Human Understanding is a work that has probably been often recommended to you. Perhaps, if you keep steadily in view the danger of his materialistic, unpoetic, and therefore untrue philosophy, the book may do you more good than harm; it will furnish you with useful exercise for your thinking powers; and you will see it so often quoted as authority, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... in motion, matter in motion may nevertheless itself be the result of an unknown mind. This, indeed, is the position virtually adopted by Locke in his celebrated controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. Having been taken to task by this divine for the materialistic tendency of his writings, Locke defends himself by denying the necessary character of the deduction which we are now considering. For example, he insists, 'I see no contradiction in it that the first eternal thinking being should, if he pleased, ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... century towards Jesuitical and Jansenist quarrels was brought about less by philosophy than by Law's financial speculations. Thus the overthrow of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century can be explained from the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only in so far as this theoretical movement is itself explicable by the practical shape of the French life of that time. This life was directed to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly interests, to the secular world. It was inevitable ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... bowed by trouble, bewildered, ready to give up the struggle—his little sister now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power—the men he had met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the honor of women—Mel Iden, strangest and saddest of mysteries—a girl who had been noble, aloof, proud, with a heart ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... down the book. "O Lord! If we allowed ourselves nowadays to use such materialistic comparisons and make use of such homely terms in speaking of Thy supremely adorable Body, what a clamour would arise from the 'respectable' among the worshippers and the blessed legion of the good women who have comfortable praying-chairs and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... of a single mind. Unwelcome material things may be escaped by spiritual growth, by rising to a realm above them, and not by denying their existence on their own plane. So that our system is neither materialistic, nor idealistic in the extreme sense, but rather intuitional and spiritual, holding that matter is the manifestation of spirit as a whole, a reflection or externalization of spirit, and, like spirit, everywhere obedient to law. The ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... would have depicted them seated on some couch of food, their arms circling each other's waists, and their lips exchanging an idyllic kiss. In this conception he saw a manifesto proclaiming the positivism of art—modern art, experimental and materialistic. And it seemed to him also that it would be a smart satire on the school which wishes every painting to embody an "idea," a slap for the old traditions and all they represented. But during a couple of years he began study after ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... restored health, freshness of coloring, and mature roundness of outline. He was unconsciously touched with a man's admiration for her without losing his boyish yearnings and half-filial affection; in her new materialistic womanhood his youthful imagination had lifted her to a queen and goddess. There was all this appeal in his still boyish eyes,—eyes that had never yet known shame or fear in the expression of their emotions; there was all this in ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought. Every one has a right to deduce what theory he can from his own experience. The one thing that we have no sort of right to do is to enforce that theory upon people whose experience ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... tracts, though perhaps the beauty-spots of the State are the northwestern counties. Altogether, I am clear, (now, and from what I have seen and learn'd since,) that Missouri, in climate, soil, relative situation, wheat, grass, mines, railroads, and every important materialistic respect, stands in the front rank of the Union. Of Missouri averaged politically and socially I have heard all sorts of talk, some pretty severe—but I should have no fear myself of getting along safely and comfortably anywhere among the Missourians. They raise a good deal of tobacco. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the mere question of political preponderancy as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing moral degradation on the part of the Nonslaveholding States,—for Free States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic views of the true value and objects of society and government are professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry, if it cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and subjugate is flattered and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of our own time with the same foes, our professional advocates of "preparedness," our cheerful chemists, our scientific "intellectuals"—all our materialistic thinkers hard- shell and soft-shell,—took the position of Flaubert, just presented; reproached us bitterly for our slack, sentimental pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific spirit of our enemy. There is nothing more instructive ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... mony of the physical senses, reveals man as harmoniously existent in Truth, which is the only basis of health; and thus Science denies all disease, heals the sick, overthrows 120:24 false evidence, and refutes materialistic logic. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... an out-and-out materialistic world—and the Catholic Church. I wonder where you'll fit in. Of one thing I'm sure—Celtic you'll live and Celtic you'll die; so if you don't use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you'll find earth a ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... ground which you take is, I feel sure, impregnable; but the force of your whole argument, which is much what I have tried to work out for years past, only makes me lament the more the folly of the line taken by most of the writers who shrink from the materialistic and atheistic philosophy of Mill and Tyndall—for the latter seems to put himself into the same boat. I believe that the thought of England is, on this subject, taking, or is likely to take, a very healthy turn, which such an article ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... pre-eminent in Egypt, but the cult of this god never appealed to the people as a whole. It was embraced by the Pharaohs, and their high officials, and some of the nobles, and the official priesthood, but the reward which its doctrine offered was not popular with the materialistic Egyptians. A life passed in the Boat of Ra with the gods, being arrayed in light and fed upon light, made no appeal to the ordinary folk since Osiris offered them as a reward a life in the Field of Reeds, and the Field ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... defined, the other day, by a Mahatma as a "psychic resolvent, which eats away all dross and leaves only the pure gold behind." If the candidate has the latent lust for money, or political chicanery, or materialistic scepticism, or vain display, or false speaking, or cruelty, or sensual gratification of any kind the germ is almost sure to sprout; and so, on the other hand, as regards the noble qualities of human nature. The real ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... that strike our senses. All is matter or a function of it. Matter, then, is not an effect, but a cause. It is not caused; it is from eternity and of necessity. The cardinal point in Holbach's philosophy is an inexorable materialistic necessity. Nothing, then, is exempt from the laws of physics and chemistry. Inorganic substance and organic life fall into the same category. Man himself with all his differentiated faculties is but a function ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... touched, and that no human being but Christine knew of the secret place. These things shocked him beyond expression. It was to his mind a visible assertion of the divine prerogative; he had really heard God say to him, "Vengeance is mine." The lesson that in these materialistic days we would reason away, James humbly accepted. His religious feelings were, after all, his deepest feelings, and in those six hours he had so palpably felt the frown of his angry Heavenly Father that he had quite forgotten his poor, puny wrath ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... displayed an increasing tendency toward the drawing of comparisons between the East and the West, with the difference more and more in favour of the latter. Abner felt with growing keenness the formality and insincerity of an old society, its cynical note, its materialistic ideals, the intrenched injustice resulting from accumulated and inherited wealth, the conventions that hampered initiative and froze goodwill. "I shall be glad to get back West ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... would not speak for fifty nights in America at one thousand dollars a night, because he said he could do better: he could stay in London and try to save fifty souls. All honor to the comparative few in every walk of life who, amid the strong materialistic tendencies of our age, still speak and act earnestly, inspired by the hope of rewards other than gold or popular favor. These are our truly great men and women. They labor in their ordinary vocations ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... who travels in either of these three States, to see how poor, and meagre, and narrow a thing life is to all the country people. Even with the best class of townsfolk it lacks very much of the depth and breadth and fruitfulness of our Northern life, while with these others it is hardly less materialistic than that of their own mules and horses. Thus, Charleston has much intelligence, and considerable genuine culture; but go twenty miles away, and you are in the land of the barbarians. So, Raleigh is a city in which there is love of beauty, and interest in education; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... of the respectable and representative opinion of the country was "prejudiced." Halls and assembly rooms in all the cities were closed against Fanny Wright, not only because her doctrines were absolutely infidel and materialistic, but because they were deemed subversive of law, order, and decency. The better portion of society in the United States was of one mind in its estimate of "The Pioneer Woman in the Cause of Woman's ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... at the university as all but the very foremost scholars from the public schools. Mr. Morgan thought his intellect equal to that of his brother Robert, who had taken a double first-class, but of a finer order, being open to those poetical instincts which went for nothing with the materialistic Bobus. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled mind. "I understand your feeling—but you need have no doubt. Human life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age, science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it, shows—very beautifully, I think—how all things work together to fulfill the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road has eased him of his burden and made ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... sphere of biology, zooelogy, and botany. We have, therefore, the right to hold fast the monistic and mechanical view, whether men choose to brand the system as Materialism or not. In this sense, all natural science, with the law of causation at its head, is thoroughly materialistic." (p. 32) ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... going so far as to reject the supernatural and reject the truth of the immediate intervention of God in life, there are multitudes of men and women whose whole life never moves beyond the natural order. They have no materialistic theory; if you ask them, they think that they are, in some sense not very well defined, Christians. But they have no Christian interests, no spiritual activities of any sort. For all practical purposes God and the spiritual order do not exist for them. They are not for the most part ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry |
