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Philosophic   /fˌɪləsˈɑfɪk/   Listen
Philosophic

adjective
1.
Of or relating to philosophy or philosophers.  Synonym: philosophical.  "A considerable knowledge of philosophical terminology"
2.
Characterized by the attitude of a philosopher; meeting trouble with level-headed detachment.  Synonym: philosophical.  "A philosophic attitude toward life"






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"Philosophic" Quotes from Famous Books



... an imperial order which disenchanted him of the world in which he found himself. He looked on the feudalism about him as a brutal anarchy, he looked on the Church itself as the supplanter of a nobler and more philosophic morality. Besides this moral change, the barons had suffered politically from the decrease of their numbers in the House of Lords. The statement which attributes the lessening of the baronage to the Wars of the Roses seems indeed to be an error. Although ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green

... the wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to conclusions on inadequate evidence—a disposition usually due to one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic habit. ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger

... the story of Washington and the men who stood with him: not as a stirring ballad of battle and danger, in which the knights ride valiantly, and are renowned for their mighty strokes at the enemy in arms; not as a philosophic epic, in which the development of a great national idea is displayed, and the struggle of opposing policies is traced to its conclusion; but as a drama of the eternal conflict in the soul of man between self-interest in its Protean forms, and loyalty to the ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke

... will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord. Is it not (we may ask these projectors in politics) the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interest, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice? ...
— The Federalist Papers

... The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they put upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty which ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... intercourse with general medicine or with general society. Mental disorders were moral and legal problems rather than biological, social, and medical problems. Their genesis was wholly misunderstood, and legal, medical, social, religious, and philosophic prejudices went far toward preventing any rational scientific mode of approach to the questions involved or any formulation of investigative procedures that promised to be fruitful. Even to-day the same prejudices are all too inhibitory; but thanks to the unprecedented development ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... circle widening in the waters) from universal suffrage. Universal suffrage is Democracy. Is Democracy better than the aristocratic commonwealth? Look at the Greeks, who knew both forms; are they agreed which is the best? Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristophanes—the Dreamer, the Historian, the Philosophic Man of Action, the penetrating Wit—have no ideals in Democracy. Algernon Sidney, the martyr of liberty, allows no government to the multitude. Brutus died for a republic, but a republic of Patricians! What form of government ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... seeking philosophic explanations for this memory of the unknown, the idea of Heinrich Heine suddenly presented itself, and all became clear. The great poet had often spoken to me of Hamburg, in those plastic words he so ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... There was a philosophic ring about the answer which made up for the uncertainty. The skinner was a fat, good-humoured creature, like all Spaniards intensely curious; and to prepare the way for inquiries, offered ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... later Morley seated himself on the end of a quiet bench in Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and $140 in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, light-hearted, ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bowed head sat at the other end of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... answered Gillow. "Other folks in the Old Country have said the same thing, though they didn't put it so neatly. The fact is, some men, like Thurston, are born to wear themselves out trying to manage things, while I was intended for philosophic contemplation. He's occasionally hard to get on with, but since I came here, I'm willing to acknowledge that men of his species are useful, and I have struck harder ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... of a disembodied and individual being which, for want of more intelligence of its nature, we call a "spirit," I have no more doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence. If, to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot help it. I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage of my convictions, and take the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... wiser!—A benevolent old Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's judgment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to take a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he, objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos; "I have no appetite; I can't eat!"—"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone, "it isn't of the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... cannibals.(2) In India we read the pious Brahmanic attempts to expound decently the myths which made Indra the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin. In Egypt, too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious believers to explain away the stories about their own gods we may infer one fact—the most important to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... by mouth; but to tell one on paper is difficult indeed, so many snares lie in the way. People are afraid to put down what is common on paper, they seek to embellish their narrative, as they think, by philosophic speculations and reflections; they are anxious to shine, and people who are anxious to shine, can never tell a plain story. 'So I went with them to a music booth, where they made me almost drunk with gin, and began to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable. How little we have of this temper in England, and how much we need it! The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... patient with if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence. We must accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist, the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the squarers of the circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the other whimsical visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted his most instructive and entertaining "Budget of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... face as he passes from grave to gay, from lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant; now rattling along in good-natured raillery without broadening into burlesque; now becoming serious and pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets himself go in a very revelry of artistic ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... quite impossible for him to fail in winning the affections of any female he exerted himself to please, and even at the present time that he has lost some of his earlier graces, he is still irresistible as ever; his naturally gay disposition was but ill suited to nourishing grave or philosophic reasoning, but then he was the soul of company, and possessed a fine and delicate wit which ever vented itself in the most brilliant sallies. M. de Cosse like the knights of old, was wholly devoted to his king and his mistress, and would, I am sure, had the occasion required ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... anthropomorphic tendencies, (iii.) the influence of chieftainship, hereditary and otherwise, (iv.) annual sacrifice of the sacred animal and mystical ideas connected therewith, (v.) syncretism, due either to unity of function or to a philosophic unification, (vi.) the desire to do honour to the species in the person of one of its members, and possibly other less easily ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... and so was the whole of the ancient world—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor. In Rome they lived on the memories of the past of Greece, and the greatest Roman, Cicero, when he wished to discuss some philosophic theme, always commenced by citing the opinions of the ancient Greeks on the subject; he also closed in the same way, for he had no original opinion of his own on any subject, such as the nature of the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... Merton's, was to be seen the showy Charles Wilton, with his easy, and even elegant manners, attracting almost as much attention as his vain heart could desire. And the quiet, sensible Walter Gray was there also, looking upon all things with a calm, philosophic mien. ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur

... Honorable Chaffee's undoing—was blonde, slender, notably fresh as yet, being only twenty-six, and as ruthless and unconsciously cruel as only the avaricious and unthinking type—unthinking in the larger philosophic meaning of the word—can be. To grasp the reason for her being, one would have had to see the spiritless South Halstead Street world from which she had sprung—one of those neighborhoods of old, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... broken; a siphon of vichy lay on the floor beside a crushed glass and two or three of the cheap ornaments that had been swept off the mantel and broken on the gaudy tiles of the hearth. He glanced at the woman, who had ceased crying, and stood surveying the wreckage with the calmness, the philosophic nonchalance of a class that comes to look ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... beloved Henriette would often make me spend delightful hours, talking philosophic sentiment. Her logic was better than that of Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations, but she admitted that such lasting felicity could exist only between two beings who lived together, and loved each ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness of the method. Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental movement was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary, philosophic, and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the Orient, to mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched throughout by the French Revolutionary theories, by the Romantic spirit, by the new zeal for science and pseudo-science, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buddhist describes, at different plateaux, the heavens and hells, the gods and demons, of the ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... speak, of a message of ulterior significance, that, if Shakspere and Moliere had died after these plays were produced, nobody would ever have suspected that either youthful playwright had it in him to develop into a philosophic observer of the deeper realities of life. Of course, neither of them was long satisfied with this dexterous display of technical adroitness alone; and, as they grew in years, we find their plays getting richer in meaning and dealing more seriously with the larger problems ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... responsible soul, by the decree of Osiris and the judges of the dead, which Thoth registers: "To him is accorded that his heart may be in its place." Indeed most of the texts of the Per-em-Hru, as we have seen, are dedicated to the preservation of the heart of the dead one. The philosophic student can therefore from this, at once see, the great value of the scarabaeus symbol to the whole religious thought-world of Ancient Egypt. It was the symbol, when returned to the dead, of the regenerated and resurrected life of the dead one to the heavenly regions of the blessed for all ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... beyond all doubt the founder of the philosophy of history. In many of its most important branches, he has carried it to a degree of perfection which has never since been surpassed. He first looked on human affairs with the eye of philosophic observation; he first sought to discover the lasting causes which influence the fate of mankind; he first traced the general laws which in every age determine the rise or decline of nations. Some of his conclusions were hasty; many of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... New Testament. I like to think of that fine old Cambridge professor's name as bound up with patient, self-effacing scholarship and a highly developed spirituality. But I digress. Cast your eye over this little group of foreign writers. Here is Dumas,—Jean Baptiste Dumas,—whose 'Lecons sur la philosophic chimique,' delivered in 1835, were considered worthy of being published thirty years later. The quaint volume that comes next is by Du Maurier, who was French ambassador to the Hague about 1620. The title, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... things. There was often a deep sadness in his utterance; the consecration of an early death was upon him. And so the worship rooted itself and grew. It was to find its lyrical expression in 'Pauline'; its rational and, from the writer's point of view, philosophic justification in the prose essay on ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... had a large party at dinner.... I think, now, as I always have done, that Sir John is by much the highest and finest character I have ever met with; the most gentlemanly and polished mind, combined with the most exalted morality, and the utmost of human attainment. His view of everything is philosophic, and at the same time highly poetical, in short, he combines every quality that is admirable and excellent with the most charming modesty, and Lady Herschel is quite worthy of such a husband, which is the greatest praise I can give her. Their kindness and affection for me has been ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... to a philosophic eye more matter of curious, important and instructive research than the natural history of religion. Some sort of religious service has been found to prevail in all ages and nations, from the most rude and barbarous periods of human society, to those of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... say, poor Joe's no good now; and as for the other, that crack of Welsh's was a rare good one; he will probably die before morning anyhow," replied the sergeant, there being little love lost among the members of this philosophic crew; besides, the more dead, the more plunder for the living. And many of the band were even now following the example of their leader, and roaming over the house, securing at will whatever excited their fancy, the wine-cellar especially not ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... jurisprudence, mathematics, medicine and philosophy, under the approved teachers of the time. The years of his prime fell during the last period of Mahommedan rule in Spain under the Almohades (q.v.). It was Ibn-Tufail (Abubacer), the philosophic vizier of Yusef, who introduced Averroes to that prince, and Avenzoar (Ibn-Zuhr), the greatest of Moslem physicians, was his friend. Averroes, who was versed in the Malekite system of law, was made cadi of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... Nevertheless there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... spring. But the natural difference of the tastes and capacities of men should, in a well-organized State, be sufficient to secure due influence to those who are the natural representatives of man's spiritual interests (whether they be religious, philosophic, or scientific), without tempting them from their proper task of discovering and teaching the truth, to the less appropriate work of determining how much of it comes within "the sphere of practical politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as an independent ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... Special topics. Mind and body. Philosophic systems. Mental faculties, psychology. Logic, dialectics. Ethics. Ancient ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... republic is able to foster the highest forms of genius. You are familiar with the writings of De Tocqueville, and must be aware of the intense sympathy which he felt for your institutions; and this sympathy is all the more valuable from the philosophic candour with which he points out not only your merits, but your defects and dangers. Now if I come here to speak of science in America in a critical and captious spirit, an invisible radiation from my words and manner will enable you ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... scattered links, because the study of genealogy is the ancient form of the very modern inquiries into heredity which interest so many followers of Mr. Francis Galton. It is after all worth knowing who were the ancestors of William Shakespeare, what heroic, chivalric, poetic, philosophic strains went to form the nature of the perfect poet; and it is of mildly sentimental interest to us that we should know whether any of his line is left on the earth. Of sentimental interest, I say, for rarely, if ever, does genius repeat itself, nor do ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes

... as a painted ship manned by a shadowy crew. The inevitable child tumbles on its face and is picked up shrieking by tender parents; energetic youths organize games of skill or discover whales on the horizon, without disturbing one’s philosophic calm. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... naturally, what might be the least solemn form to give it, among recognised and familiar forms. The question thus at once arose: What form so familiar, so recognised among alert readers, as that in which the ingenious and inexhaustible, the charming philosophic "Gyp" casts most of her social studies? Gyp had long struck me as mistress, in her levity, of one of the happiest of forms—the only objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary benightedness on the part of the Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... sufficient capacity for a virtue, which, I think, seems to be moribund among us—the virtue of moral indignation. Men and their actions were not all much of a muchness to him. There was none of the indifferentism of that pseudo-philosophic moderation, which, when a scoundrel or a scoundrelly action is on the tapis, hints that there is much to be said on both sides. Dickens hated a mean action or a mean sentiment as one hates something that is physically loathsome to the sight ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... picturesque elaborations of some of the incidents recorded in the Bible are the best of his poetical compositions. His dramas are delicate creations of sentiment and passion with a relish of the Elizabethan age. J. R. Lowell (b. 1819) unites in his most effective poems a philosophic simplicity with a transcendental suggestiveness. Imagination and philanthropy are the dominant elements in his writings, which are marked by a graceful flow and an earnest tone. His satires contain many sharply-drawn portraits, and his humorous ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... was always prating of liberty, and had the grandest philosophic maxims in his mouth, it must be owned that Mr. St. John sometimes rather acted like a Turkish than a Greek philosopher, and especially fell foul of one unfortunate set of men, the men of letters, with a tyranny a little extraordinary in a ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... a good many things about your way of life in Paris. "Tannhauser", with ballet, and a contest of translators as well as of minstrels, are immediately before you. It will be a tough piece of work for you, and I advise as many walks and cooling baths as possible. Fips should teach you a little philosophic patience during the rehearsals. Frau Burde-Ney told me lately when she was "starring" here, that she intended to go to Paris for a few days, in order to study Isolde with you. She has the necessary stuff ("Wupptich" they say ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... the best statesmen, but we died poor. Having no manual craft, slight bookkeeping, and unlimited capacity for office, we foresaw everything but the humiliation of ourselves, and that we hardly admitted when it had come, so much were we flattered by our philosophic intellects. Our newest amusement is to expound the constitution to them who are doing too well under it, although our fathers, who made it, like Jefferson and Madison, died only yesterday, overwhelmed with debts, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... withhold from any hoary fabric of belief, and any venerated system of government that has cherished a certain order and shed even a ray of the faintest dawn among the violences and the darkness of the race. It was reverence rather than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke's breast against the rapacity of English adventurers in India and the imperial crimes of Hastings. Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled to ...
— Burke • John Morley

... it when we are thirsty," was the philosophic remark of the hunter. "It's made to drink, and we needn't stop so long as any is left; and bein' there ain't any left, I guess we'll stop. I've a mouthful or two of meat left, and we may as well ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne

... loss of a sum of money becomes almost immaterial with a fortune such as you possess, and to one of your philosophic spirit." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... and Magic is a skilful and popular selection of stories or narratives relating to the subject, not a philosophic treatise. We are carried to France, Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, and America, by turns. We have the most remarkable trials for witchcraft in these countries, as well as cases in which supernatural agency was only an ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... Calvinist, deeply religious, and Buckle himself in after years acknowledged that to her he owed his faith in human progress through the dissemination and triumph of truth, as well as his taste for philosophic speculations and his love for poetry. His devotion to her was lifelong. Owing to his feeble health he passed but a few years at school, and did not enter college. Nor did he know much, in the scholar's sense, of books. Till ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... as Scripture do possess. It was to prove in the most objective fashion that the Scripture does not possess those qualities which men had long assigned to it. It was to prove that, as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the qualities which the philosophic forecast, above hinted, required. It was thus actually to restore the Bible to an age in which many reasonable men had lost their faith in it. It was to give a genetic reconstruction of the literature ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... without suspicion of the poison of love. I gazed upon her with extacy. I hung upon every accent of her voice. In her society I appeared mute and absent. But it was not the silence of an uninterested person: it was not the distraction of philosophic thought. I was entirely engaged, my mind was full of the contemplations of her excellence even to bursting. I felt no vacancy, I was conscious to no want, I was ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin

... Christian religion, and an expose of the weakness of infidelity and skepticism, and is considered one of the most ingenious and excellent performances of the kind in the English tongue.] He made this system "the most powerful instrument of philosophic teaching ever known in the history of the human intellect." The philosopher was an enthusiastic lover of Athens, and he looked upon the whole city as his school. There alone he found instruction and occupation, and through its streets he would wander, standing ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... PHILOSOPHIC Sages have generally been careless of their personal appearance. Soap and water has not been their strong point. The exception is DIOGENES, who was seldom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various

... not allow my readers to suppose that these considerations were a matter of indifference to any of the ladies at the Small House. To some women of strong mind, of highly-strung philosophic tendencies, such considerations might have been indifferent. But Mrs Dale was not of this nature, nor were her daughters. The good things of the world were good in their eyes, and they valued the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... Mrs. Smith in a more philosophic tone, and as a terminative speech, 'if there'd been so much trouble to get a husband in my time as there is in these days—when you must make a god-almighty of a man to get en to hae ye—I'd have trod clay for bricks before I'd ever have lowered my ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... the high company he would have the honour of meeting was likely to be dull as well as distinguished; for he had had experience of various dull suppers even in the Rucellai gardens, and especially of the dull philosophic sort, wherein he had not only been called upon to accept an entire scheme of the universe (which would have been easy to him), but to listen to an exposition of the same, from the origin of things to their complete ripeness in the tractate ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... years or more the philosophic world had been wedded to the idea of a special creation of man entirely independent of the creation of the rest of the universe. All conceptions of God, man, and his destiny rested upon the recognition of a separate creation. To deny this meant a reconstruction of much of the religious philosophy ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... I cannot recollect writing the first words of "The Island Pharisees"—but it would be about August, 1901. Like all the stories in "Villa Rubein," and, indeed, most of my tales, the book originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life. In this case it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who died in some "sacred institution" many years ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... stood the test of time. She had never had a doubt of them. They had come later into her life, after the perishing of her great illusion. The shock had humbled her senses and disposed her to reverence for the things of intellect. Dr. Gardner's position, as President of the Scale Literary and Philosophic Society, was as a high rock to which she clung. Mrs. Gardner was dear to her ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... intelligences like Stephen's, could do more than intensify the difficulty and emphasize it. The deus ex machina must appear and solve the preliminary or theoretic difficulties by overriding them. There are some who describe the pioneers of Canadian self-government as philosophic radicals; but they were really not of that school. It was through the absence of any philosophy or rigid ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison

... the moment did not—as became a woman—prevent her being conscious of others; indeed, such formed the chief subject of her absorptions. One might say that they neither of them had philosophy yet were as philosophic a couple as one could meet on this earth of the self-conscious. Daily life to these two was still of simple savour. To be absorbed in life—the queer endless tissue of moments and things felt and done and said and made, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage from philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received Christian system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in the world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the Church. The place was passing through ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... diametrically opposed systems of teaching; one purely moral, the other wholly dogmatic; one expressed in wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses; one clothed in the great language of humanity, the other concealed in obscure, philosophic terminology; and that these should have been kept so distinct as they are in the Synoptics, on the one hand, and the Fourth Gospel on the other. The tradition of Justin Martyr applies solely to the system of the Synoptics, 'Brief and concise were the sentences uttered by Him: ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler

... teachers had adopted the habits and manners of the philosophic school. They assumed the dress of the pompous sophist, and delivered the plain doctrines of the gospel ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... greeted Rynders as his half-brother, and made this expression the catchword of his speech. When Rynders interrupted from time to time, he was silenced with a laugh. He appears to have been a somewhat philosophic scoundrel, with an appreciation of humor that permitted the meeting to proceed to an orderly close. Douglass's speech was the feature of the evening. "That gifted man," said Garrison, in whose Life ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... portion of the Liberal party of France is composed of generous spirits, ardent and absolute, who torture a really elevated ideal; that of a society of manhood, constituted with a sort of philosophic perfection; her own mistress each day and each hour; delegating few of her powers, and yielding none; living, not without laws, but without rulers; and, in short, developing her activity, her well-being, her genius, with that fulness of justice, of independence, ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... and with some degree of earnestness the self-imposed task was undertaken. My plan was faintly to imitate the simple narrative style, the conciseness, the picturesqueness, the eloquence, the poetry, and the philosophic spirit of a history, the most remarkable of any extant—that of the world. As Moses graphically and philosophically has sketched the peopling of the earth; painted the beauties of dawning nature; shown the origin of agriculture and ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... and the monks of monasteries, whose hospitality he enjoyed, and with his fellow-comrades of the road. It is life that interests the author. Here we can get it, and it is like splashing about in a clear pool on a warm summer's day, spontaneous in inspiration, mature in philosophic contemplation. This sort of book gives a man honest pleasure. More, it sets his heart beating in unison with the author, in harmony with the awe and beauty and ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... a suggestion would probably never have originated with her. Her heart was too large and warm for doubts, where love was concerned. She was the very opposite of Godwin in this respect. She had the poetic rather than the philosophic temperament, and when she loved it was with an intensity that made analysis of her feelings and their possible results out of the question. It is true that in her "Rights of Women" she had shown that passion must inevitably lose its first ardor, and that love between man and wife must ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor. [133] The Protestants have dwelt with malicious pleasure on these characters of Antichrist; but to a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues. After a long series of scandal, the apostolic see was reformed and exalted by the austerity and zeal of Gregory VII. That ambitious monk devoted his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... time he had bathed he had developed a sort of philosophic acceptance of the new situation. There would be no exclusive story now, no scoop. The events of the next few hours were for every man to read. He shrugged his shoulders as, partially dressed, he carried his shaving materials into the better ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... writers three have conspicuous merit—Doyle, Winsor, and Fiske. Doyle's volumes manifest a high degree of philosophic perception and are accurate in statement and broad in conclusions. Of his books the volumes on the Puritan colonies are distinctly of a higher order than his volume on the southern colonies. The chief merit ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler

... unproductive, not European. I am well aware that Weininger did not explicitly draw this conclusion; but he rejects spiritual love because it endows the lover with new capacities, the capacities of growth and perfection, and he is therefore in the last resort a representative of philosophic nihilism. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... of opinion in these years of hope and of illusion was that represented in the writings of Gioberti, the depicter of a new and glorious Italy, regenerated not by philosophic republicanism or the sword of a temporal monarch, but by the moral force of a reformed and reforming Papacy. The conception of the Catholic Church as a great Liberal power, strange and fantastic as it ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... Greece which exactly answers to our word "God" as used in the passage cited. Individuals, by dint of piety or of speculation, might approach the conception, and probably many did, both in and out of the philosophic schools. But traditional ritual and myth could scarcely rise to this ideal; and it seems exaggerated to say of the crowded Eleusinian throng of pilgrims that "the race of mankind was lifted on to a higher plane when it came to be taught that only the pure in heart can see God." {78} The black native ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... strolling in philosophic mood down the never-ending King's Road, one November night, debating whether I should drop in at the Chelsea Palace, or have just one more at the "Bells," when I ran into the R.B.A. He is a large man, and running into him ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... alienated from him, and reviled by him. His actual followers were a small and insignificant remnant. Yet Cobbett, like Owen, represented in a crude fashion blind instincts of no small importance in the coming years. And it is especially to be noted that in one direction the philosophic Coleridge and the keen Quarterly Reviewer Southey, and the Socialist Owen and the reactionary Radical Cobbett, were more in agreement than they knew. What alarmed them was the vast social change indicated by the industrial revolution. In one way or another ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... of the greatest minds in the South, and the philosophic prophecies of Jefferson, the conscience and heart of the South did not respond to the dictates of humanity. Cotton and cupidity led captive the reason of the South, and, once more joined to their idols, the slave-holders no longer heard the voice of prudence or justice in the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... a match for the most scientifically trained troops in Europe. As fighters Canadians had at once leaped into front rank. British, Scotch and Irish blood, with British traditions, had proved greater forces than the scientific training and philosophic principles of the Huns. It was a glorious illustration of the axiom "right is greater than might," which the German had in his pride reversed to read "might is right." It was prophetic of what the final issue of a contest based on such divergent ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... along but slowly. I have got to a crossing place, I suppose; the present book, St. Ives, is nothing; it is in no style in particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will read it, that's all I ask; and if they won't, damn them! I like doing it though; and if you ask me why! After that I am on Weir of Hermiston and Heathercat, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Mark the massive forehead, the severe eye, the cool, self-possessed mien of this American. The air of one accustomed to rule. Listen to his philosophic conversation. One of America's greatest statesmen. No doubt he has a certain prospect of becoming President. President! It must be so; and that accounts for the attention paid by the American Embassador. He, of course, wishes to be continued in his office under the next administration. After ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... worshipful sir," answered the Knight, "and the delicate attentions which make my imprisonment sweet, receive my unforgetting gratitude. I, too, whatever unjust suspicion may inflict, will revert to these our religious and philosophic hours, wherein we discussed questions nobler than those which, in the shades of Tusculum, engaged the minds of the great Roman orator and of his friends, with a satisfaction which shall not run out with the sands ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... the author presents as "the Philosophic Cross, or Plan of the Third Temple as prophesied by Ezekiel," we note again, that the crown of the symbolical temple represents the red rose upon a cross, within a radiant circle; beneath this is a mother-eagle with outstretched wings, shielding her little ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... published, and it was a great success. The critics, who already knew something of her literary powers, had with one consent written long and special articles about "Laurels and Thorns," hailing it as a veritable triumph. It was original, and philosophic, and irresistibly pathetic; the style sufficed to mark its author as one of the few novelists whose literary form was irreproachable. Perhaps the praise was here and there extravagant, but it was practically universal. And it was not confined ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... her with a casual remark, she seemed to hear a significant hush among the other girls, followed by an equally significant buzz of whispered comment when the fraternity member moved away again. This atmosphere would have made no impression on a nature either more sturdily philosophic, or more unimaginative than Sylvia's (Judith, for instance, was not in the least affected by the experience), but it came to be a morbid obsession of this strong, healthy, active-minded young creature. It tinged with bitterness and blackness what should have been ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... strike right and left among your sturdy democratic adorers, because they choose to convert their mandibles into quid-grinders, and their [Greek: chasmat' odonton] into ceaseless jet d'eaux of saliva. Reflect that the 'quid' assists in a philosophic investigation of the 'quiddities' of things, and that from this habit alone perhaps we have made such advances in casuistry as to have discovered equity in repudiation, freedom in mobocracy, and the sword ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was one that had been often faced by the undaunted Arethusa. Even as he went down the stairs, he was telling himself ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 13. This delightful philosophic calm is no longer an Anglo-Indian possession; nor can the modern Indian official congratulate himself on his immunity from 'injuries, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... hence has arisen a depreciation of Henry More's theological writings, which yet contain more original, enlarged, and elevating views of the Christian dispensation than I have met with in any other single volume. For More had both the philosophic and the poetic genius, supported by immense erudition. But unfortunately the two did not amalgamate. It was not his good fortune to discover, as in the preceding generation William Shakspeare discovered, a mordaunt' or common base of both, and in which both the poetic ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... not belong among those of great men which prove to be disappointments. In reading them one is not inclined to ask as of Schopenhauer's letters, why a philosophic genius of such depth should be laden with thousands ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... with Professor Rosello, Joe had adopted the philosophic frame of mind that characterizes many public performers, especially those who risk bodily injury in thrilling the public. That is, he was willing to take the chance of accident rather than disappoint an audience. "The show must go on," was the motto, no matter how the performer ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum

... me of his own experiences with unions and he drifted into a philosophic view of the matter. "You and I want to make as much money as possible, don't we?" he said. "Well, the working-men want the same. Can you blame them? We are fighting them and they are fighting us. The world is not a wedding-feast, Levinsky. It ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... "Oh! But you ought to! There's no reason whatever why you shouldn't!" By her silence she contradicted the philosophic nonchalance of her demeanour during the latter part ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... ladder anywhere about. The open traps however which led to them were so thickly festooned with spider webs and dirt, that it did not seem possible that anyone had passed through for a dozen years. Finding no sign of habitation, either human or spiritual, I finally turned back to the house with a philosophic shrug and the reflection that Cat-Eye Mose's nocturnal vagaries were ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster

... was a tall man, with oily black hair and fierce eyebrows, both dyed; aggressively military and reminiscent He had been in a cavalry regiment, where he had come to the philosophic conclusion that all men are dust—except cavalry-men; and he was able to look upon Jamie's prowess—the prowess of an infantryman—from superior heights. He was a great authority upon war, and could tell anyone ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... into forgetfulness: she wanted rather to be taught a certain fortitude—how to live and hold up one's head even while knowing that things were very bad. A brazen indifference—it was not exactly that that she wished to acquire; but were there not some sorts of indifference that were philosophic and noble? Could Lady Davenant not teach them, if she should take the trouble? The girl remembered to have heard that there had been years before some disagreeable occurrences in her family; it ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... Fanaticism, though cruel and bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... the philosophic Sammy. "We'd have had an awful nice day if there'd been nothing to worry us. Wouldn't ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill

... small household was at rest; as she had gone on Christmas Eve to renounce her lover and to bless her rival. This time it was a new confession she went to make, and a confession that involved some shame. There is nothing so hard to confess as inconstancy; and every woman is not so philosophic as Rahel Varnhagen, who declared that to be constant was not always to love the same person, but ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... ironical pessimism of Thomas Hardy is as false as the sentimental optimism of Walter Besant or the miso-androus meliorism of Sarah Grand. What Hall Caine happily calls "the scenic view of life" of Dickens is no more true than the philosophic view of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Each is existence viewing itself through a single medium. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is as false as "Lorna Doone" or "Plain Tales from the Hills." Life, large, chaotic, inexpressible, not to be bound down by a formula, peeps at itself through ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... summary of Cromwell's conduct at Drogheda by a writer of so much research, impartiality, and philosophic liberality as Mr. Lecky deserves ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... of oratory, by exalting mere business (growing originally, perhaps, out of contingencies of finance, or trade, or local police) into a field for the higher understanding; and giving to the mere necessities of our position as a nation the dignity of great problems for civilising wisdom or philosophic philanthropy. Look back to the superb orations of Edmund Burke on questions limited enough in themselves, sometimes merely personal; for instance, that on American Taxation, on the Reforms in our Household or Official Expenditure, or at that from the Bristol hustings ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... enough of it, in a city like Paris. He told his stories well, his vehemently idiomatic English emphasizing his points. He became lyrical in his appreciation of the joys of life. When dessert was on the table and port took the place of champagne he lapsed into a philosophic mood. ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham

... his holiday, he guided Flambeau and Flambeau's boat down to the best fishing spot in the stream, and was back in his own canoe in twenty minutes to join Father Brown in the library and plunge equally politely into the priest's more philosophic pleasures. He seemed to know a great deal both about the fishing and the books, though of these not the most edifying; he spoke five or six languages, though chiefly the slang of each. He had evidently lived in varied cities and very motley societies, for some of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... Pythagorean; but that was merely a nom de guerre, adopted, probably, to excite a stronger interest in the perusal of his productions. Here, however, was a man in whom the principle existed upon what he considered rational and philosophic grounds. He had gotten the philosophical blockhead's crotchet into his head, and carried the principle, in a practical point of view, much further than ever the old fool himself ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... doesn't hold it lightly: he's really in earnest about it. Naturally, when he looks around at the world with that belief in his heart, and sees men and women making blunders which he thinks they don't need to, he becomes too exasperated for silence, and pours out his plays. Sometimes he is philosophic enough to treat his fellows amusedly; sometimes he is serious and exacerbated, in which case he is tiresome. But at heart he is always provoked and astonished at men for the way they fend off the millennium, when ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.

... cry. There is always some excuse ready for evasion. The difficulty is, that every party likes some part of the truth; no party likes it all; but we must have it all, every line of it. We want no popular editions and no philosophic selections—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This must be the rule for everything concerning which a man has a public duty and ought to have a public opinion. There is a dangerous tendency gaining ground of slurring over vital ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... love for others than ourselves and the other high spiritual instincts which are the crown of human nature. The recognition of the extension of infancy as the source from which in our slow evolution comes the brightest thing in the universe belongs to our own time. It is perhaps the climax of our philosophic speculation. What more feeble than the snowflakes! But accumulated and compressed they become the glacier which may carapace an entire zone and determine its configuration into mountain and valley. What more feeble than the feebleness of the babe! And yet ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... Plate IV—The Philosophic or Venus Hand, has a long, thin, muscular palm, with long, knotty fingers; indicates a student of nature and searcher ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... upon the new impetus which the derivative hypothesis has given to systematic natural history, and reads the declaration of a master in this department (the President of the Linnean Society) that Mr. Darwin "has in this nineteenth century brought about as great a revolution in the philosophic study of organic Nature as that which was effected in the previous century by the immortal Swede," it sounds oddly to hear from Dr. Dawson that "it obliterates the fine perception of differences from the mind of the naturalist, . . . . destroys the possibility of a philosophical classification, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... is enough to provoke a saint!" said Bagshaw; and no one attempting to deny the position, with this salvo for his own character of philosophic patience, he indulged himself in the full expression of his vexation and sorrow. After a minute examination, he declared the pie to be "a complete squash," and that nobody could venture to eat it but at the imminent ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various

... WORKS OF BACON. Bacon's philosophic works, The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum, will be best understood in connection with the Instauratio Magna, or The Great Institution of True Philosophy, of which they were parts. The Instauratio ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... The philosophic urchin was deeply engaged in debating this point with himself, and gazing open-mouthed at the Professor, when there suddenly occurred an avalanche so peculiar and destructive that it threw the whole party into the utmost consternation. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... eked out and assisted by instructive minutiae of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... she did not know her own meaning, they endowed her purposes with words. They gave her a new delight in herself, a new sense of power and exhilaration, which has remained with her to this day, surviving all the airy philosophic theories of humanity which thought to supersede the old solid national temper. The English national temper is better fitted for traffic with the world than any mere doctrine can ever be, for it is marked by an immense tolerance. And this, too, Shakespeare ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh

... P——, who rigorously eliminates every line even distantly hinting at politics or social life, or which may appear to him "subversive." Thanks to this system, I for some time read nothing but scientific and philosophic works, for which classes of reading I am too young and but ill-prepared. Gradually, however, these works take hold upon me; they appeal to my pride, and I struggle to vanquish the difficulties of understanding these vast systems which rule the world, of which I know so little. They cause me to reflect, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... a sort of sentimental yielding to these painful emotions. It is therefore entirely a matter of "Gemuet." Pessimism, on the other hand, purports to be a theory of existence, the result of deliberate philosophic argument and investigation, by which its votaries have reached the dispassionate conclusion that there is no real good or pleasure in the world that is not clearly outweighed by evil or pain, and that therefore self-destruction, ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... tell whether I am to account him whom I am next to speak of, as one of our company; for he visits us but seldom, but, when he does, it adds to every man else a new enjoyment of himself. He is a clergyman, a very philosophic man, of general learning, great sanctity of life, and the most exact good breeding. He has the misfortune to be of a very weak constitution, and consequently cannot accept of such cares and business as preferments in his ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others

... Royal Society of London, I ask the Saxon crew of that crazy hulk, where is the dogma of their philosophic god now?... When the Royal Society of London, and the Academy of Sciences of Paris, shall have read this memorandum, how will they appear? Like two cur dogs in the paws of the noblest beast of the forest.... Just as this note ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... commerce is conducted. No reasoning is necessary to show to the man of business, or even to the pleasure-seeker, the importance of approximate certainty as to the time when the mail leaves and when he can receive an answer to his dispatches. He may not be able to give clearly philosophic reasons for it; yet he feels the necessity in his business; and it certainly relieves him of many painful doubts, if nothing more. Uncertainty in commercial operations is always hazardous and costly to the great mass of the people, who as a general thing pay more for whatever ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey

... banner of the 'self-understood,' are therefore straining every nerve to crush down these feelings of youth, to cripple them, to mislead them, or to stop their growth altogether; and the favourite means employed is to paralyse that natural philosophic impulse by the so-called "historical culture." A still recent system,[10] which has won for itself a world-wide scandalous reputation, has discovered the formula for this self-destruction of philosophy; and now, wherever the historical view of things is found, we can see such a naive ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... of organized truth which we now call Science. As by the aid of collected experience and careful inference we to-day endeavor to pass our vision into the dim twilight whence has emerged our civilization, we find abundant hint and even evidence of this truth. To the highest type of philosophic minds it is the usual and the ordinary that demand investigation and explanation. But even to such, no less than to the most naive-minded, the strange and exceptional is of absorbing interest, and it is often through the extraordinary that the philosopher gets the most searching glimpses ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... writing of his book on the Malay Archipelago until he could embody in it the more generally important results derived from the detailed study of certain portions of his collections. Thus it was not until seven years later (1869) that this complete sketch of his travels "from the point of view of the philosophic naturalist" appeared. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... consequence many of the eggs are devoured by lizards. Crows in particular are addicted to young bulbuls, and take full advantage of the simplicity of the parent birds. Probably, three out of four broods never reach maturity. But the bulbul is a philosophic little bird. It never cries over broken eggs. If one clutch is destroyed it ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar

... inevitably rather loosely used in public, in connexion with the authors of a certain class of murderous outrages, and that the same looseness of definition often applies to the professions of "Anarchism'' made by such persons. As stated above, a philosophic Anarchist would repudiate the connexion. And the general public view which regards Anarchist doctrines indiscriminately is to that extent a confusion of terms. But the following resume of the chief modern so-called "Anarchist'' incidents is appended for convenience in stating the facts under the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... writes an essay to show that there is no foundation 'for a philosophy of history in the analogy between the progressive improvement of mankind and that of which individuals are capable,' and he holds (in opposition to Maine) that Carlyle is a 'philosophic historian.' The only direct reference to contemporary politics is characteristic. Fane had argued that 'some elements of socialism' should be 'employed in that reconstruction of society which the spirit of the age demands.' ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... any of those views now-a-days to prevent her from marrying a bishop. You reproached me just now for having become respectable. You were wrong: I hold to our old opinions as strongly as ever. I don't go to church; and I don't pretend I do. I call myself what I am: a Philosophic Radical, standing for liberty and the rights of the individual, as I learnt to do from my master Herbert Spencer. Am I howled at? No: I'm indulged as an old fogey. I'm out of everything, because I've refused to bow ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw

... well as the ethics, of to-day may well be summed up in the one maxim known as the "Golden Rule": "Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you." Or in the philosophic statement of it, given by Kant: "Act so that the maxim of thy conduct shall be fit to ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway

... lived among the Hopi for ten years. He boasts a stone and cement-block home, the only such dwelling owned by a Washo. He has learned to bead baskets and during most of the year earns a reasonable income from this. His seeming adjustment to white culture is confounded when his philosophic position is examined. He can only be termed a mystic who interprets the world in Indian terms. Exposure to such influences as the writings of Kroeber and Huxley has only confirmed his essentially Indian viewpoint. Both his parents were famous Indian doctors and ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs

... chicken broth was brought at nine; He then arose to ham and wine, And, with a philosophic air, Decided on the ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss

... to put this philosophic matter first, before the aesthetic appreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bell has rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe. Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodox compromise: but Meredith has ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... eagerly seized in order to fill the aching void. Men cannot permanently live without some sort of a faith in the Unseen, but they can determine whether it shall be a worthy recognition of a worthy conception of that Unseen, or a debasing superstition. An epoch of materialism in philosophic thought has always been followed by violent reaction, in which quacks and fanatics have reaped rich harvests. If the dark is not peopled with one loved Face, our busy imagination will fill it with a crowd of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation—to put a better face on evil than it normally wears. On first reading these lines the intelligence they conveyed sent a peculiar chill over Butler's sturdy frame. His jaw ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—living ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... were surpassed. Bacon's essays relate, for the most part, to subjects of morals, or domestic and private life; but not unfrequently he touches on the general concerns of nations, and with the same profound observation of the past, and philosophic anticipation of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... and round till I tell you to stop." The philosophic cabman did not regard me as eccentric, for he whipped up his horse cheerfully. When we had slid down the steep incline and got free of the precincts of that hateful station, I breathed more freely and collected ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... The philosophic spirit has turned the thoughts of many of the historians of our times in this direction; but I doubt whether truth has profited by their labours. The rage for systems has got possession of all alike, no one seeks to see things as they are, but only as they agree with ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... figure of a philosophic, serious adult look, which passed and repassed sedately along the street, making a turn of about sixty paces on each side of the gate of the hotel. The man was about fifty-two, had a small cane under his arm, was ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... unapproachable a mystery, but otherwise not throwing any new light upon the darkness of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet indirectly perhaps it does, when brought out into its latent sense by placing it in juxtaposition with paganism. If a philosophic theist, who is also a Christian, or who (not being a Christian,) has yet by his birth and breeding become saturated with Christian ideas and feelings,[Footnote: this case is far from uncommon; and undoubtedly, from ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... almost the only man in Concord who had the courage to call on Hawthorne. Sometimes they even went to walk together. How much satisfaction Hawthorne found in these visits it would be difficult to say, for the very philosophic breadth and extension of Alcott's interest were enough to make Hawthorne feel rather shy of him. Alcott's conversation about books and literature was often very fine, but even this could not have given Hawthorne ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... tunnel which was nearest the trail. It had already been arranged what each man was to do. They were in possession. For the rest they must wait. What they thought at that moment no one knew. Their characteristic appearance had slightly changed. The melancholy and philosophic Demorest was alert and bitter. Barker's changeful face had become fixed and steadfast. Stacy alone wore his "fighting look," which ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... himself a style of transcendent vigor and originality, and who has sung of war, love, and wine, in strains far excelling those of Blondel, Tyrtaeus, Pindar, and the Teian bard. He is now the genuine representative of Gallic poesy in her convivial, her amatory, her warlike and her philosophic mood; and the plenitude of the inspiration that dwelt successively in the souls of all the songsters of ancient France seems to have transmigrated into Beranger and found a fit recipient in his ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... from the body's change, In curious philosophic range, The motion of the mind; And how from thought to thought it flew, Still hoping in each vision new The faery land of bliss to view, But ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston

... not complaining of the trowel, Theophilus," observed Mrs. Clay, "though when it comes to that I don't see why a trowel and a bed of roses is any more philosophic than a ladle ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow



Words linked to "Philosophic" :   philosopher, philosophy, unemotional



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