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More "Mysticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is not confined within this narrow circle. Fourierism, Saint Simonism, Commonism, agrarianism, anti-rentism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false philanthropy, affected aspirations for a chimerical equality and fraternity; questions relative to luxury, wages, machinery; to the pretended tyranny of capital; to colonies, outlets, population; to emigration, association, imposts, ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... into its operation in tales of vulgar terror. But it is highly interesting to trace its effects on minds of a high order, when its suggestions have been received and interpreted as the visits and communications of superior beings. You have heard, I dare say, my dear Archy, of the mysticism of Schwedenborg. Now that they are explained, the details of his hallucinations are highly gratifying ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... 2: senalado con la cruz 'marked with the cross.' The reference here is doubtless to a birth-mark in the form of a cross, which would indicate a special aptitude for thaumaturgy or occultism. This might take the form of Christian mysticism, as in the case of St. Leo, who is said to have been "marked all over with red crosses" at birth (see Brewer, Dictionary of Miracles, Phila., 1884, p. 425), or the less orthodox form of magic, as ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... for liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of view of religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery rhetoric of that ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... facing the old revolutionary hand, the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had such a weight in the "active" section of every party. She was much more representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric, mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... slowly, soothingly, "that our intentions are constructive. We are simply trying to apply the scientific method to something which has, heretofore, been wrapped in mysticism." ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... lifted his head and sent his heart a-bounding, while the half-holy mysticism that came from the Scottish hills drew his glance upward to the blue ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... who talks mysticism himself by the hour, but snubs it in every one else. "It has trout, at least; and they stand, I suppose, for its soul, as the raisins did for those of Jean Paul's gingerbread bride and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... indifferently, but Domini felt suddenly sure that within him there were depths of imagination, of tenderness, even perhaps of mysticism. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... to present a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, "Is Brand the expression of Ibsen's own nature?" Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and yet he ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... of whatever object became statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were indiscriminately regarded by them as barbarous. But guarded by the bounds of their civilization, as by the circumfluent ocean-stream of their olden tradition, they were prompted in all their movements by the spirit of beauty, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... infinite advantages which would result from a will determined by self-love, if this will at the same time erected itself into a universal law of nature, may certainly serve as a perfectly suitable type of the morally good, but it is not identical with it. The same typic guards also against the mysticism of practical reason, which turns what served only as a symbol into a schema, that is, proposes to provide for the moral concepts actual intuitions, which, however, are not sensible (intuitions of an invisible Kingdom of God), ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... past, and transmitted it to us. Perhaps it is not too much to say, that, but for these monks, not one line of the classics would have reached our day. Surely, then, we can pardon something to those superstitious ages, perhaps even the mysticism of the scholastic philosophy, since, after all, we can find no harm in it, only the mistaking of the possible for the real, and the high aspirings of the human mind after a long-sought and unknown somewhat. I think the name of Martin Luther, the ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... queer vein of gentle cynicism. She 'saw' with extraordinary clearness, as if she had been born in Italy and still carried that clear dry atmosphere about her soul. She loved glow and warmth and colour; such mysticism as she felt was pagan; and she had few aspirations—sufficient to her were things as they showed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this mysticism mean?" cried the Duc de Valognes, impatiently; "why on earth shouldn't they meet like ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Beauty, mysticism and music—music in all things, from the silver flow of the river to the soft notes of the native's tongue, and dominating all, simple faith ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... like Hudibras, who told the clock by algebra, or, like the lady in Dr. Young's Satires, who drank tea by stratagem. Would that all professors had written in the same vein. Then, learning would not have been so mixed up with the mysticism of the cell and the cloister, nor the evils of ignorance have so long retarded the happiness of mankind: for, "learning," observes one of the greatest moralists of his day, "once made popular is no longer learning; it has the appearance of something which we have bestowed upon ourselves, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, "I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... stock apologetic arguments, and used them, his companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they were merely the outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something wholly distinct from intellectual conviction—by moral passion, by love, by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this unstable religious position was subject to the influence of the oriental mysticism at which we have glanced already, is, at any rate, so far as concerns the classical age of Greek philosophy, a matter of conjecture. But the resurrection of a prehistoric and almost forgotten civilization from the buried cities of Crete has brought to light many evidences of frequent intercourse, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... the monastery founded by St. Gall. It is only among the lower clergy that we find the traces of genuine Christian piety and intellectual activity, though frequently branded by obese prelates and obtuse magistrates with the names of mysticism and heresy. The orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in 1208 and 1215, and intended to act as clerical spies and confessors, began to fraternize in many parts of Germany with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry and thirsty after religious ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... little pause, uncomfortable on Channing's part. Mysticism did not often come his way. He decided that the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... perhaps be of the greatest interest to readers of this book. All who have to do with letters have a certain regard for the mysticism which circles around the words, "Entered ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... between them. Elizabeth, for example, although perhaps not so habitually sticky as The Kid, like her didn't seem able to remain clean or tidy for longer than half an hour at a time. Also, Elizabeth believing in Signs, The Kid revered her for her mysticism—about the only person who ever did. She used to beg to be allowed to study her Dream Book, and every evening before bedtime would go into the kitchen and—sitting amid that wild disorder that is necessary to Elizabeth before ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... guise or another, are but the marionettes, which are all dominated by the same mind, moved by the same motive force. The men are all endowed with individualism and independent life and thought. . . . There is a strong tinge of mysticism about the book which is one of its ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... religious morality by the old belief that God, the most powerful of warriors, is polygamous, that he has reserved all maidens for himself, and that men can only take those whom he has left. This belief, although traces of it exist in several metaphors of mysticism, is abandoned to-day, by most civilised peoples. However, it still dominates the education of girls not only among our believers, but even among our free-thinkers, who, as a rule, think freely for the reason that they do ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the riddles of that tower, far less of the early Christianity of the isle of saints, of which these ruins and their wild legend were the only vestiges, nor of the mysticism that planted clusters of churches in sevens as analogous to the seven stars of the Apocalypse. Even the rugged glories of the landscape chiefly addressed themselves to her as good to sketch, her highest ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... horrible that exist in the world. The author of the Madman's Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook, cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading Pickwick or Bleak House as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain Murderer or the terrible tale of Chips. If there was something appalling in ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds. If he describes, as in The Vicar of Tours, the woes of an old priest, he profits by the opportunity to exploit a theory concerning ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... did he mean? He told her to read philosophy. He said she had the eyes of a mystic. She had spent several minutes looking in the mirror trying to see the strange mysticism he saw in her eyes, and ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... Khalid's young mind went leaping from one swing to another, from one carousel or toboggan-chute to the next, without having any special object in view, without knowing why and wherefor. He even entered such mazes of philosophy, such labyrinths of mysticism as put those of the Arabian grammaticasters in the shade. To him, education was a sport, pursued in a free spirit after his own fancy, without method or discipline. For two years and more he did little but ramble thus, drawing meanwhile on his account ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of his inquiries into large notebooks, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively. It may be added that Eeldrop was a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism, and Appleplex a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism; that Eeldrop was learned in theology, and that Appleplex studied ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... the possibly monstrous and the impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... better than one would have thought possible with such opposite characteristics. Clare admired Gwen's intellect, and there were times when Gwen knew that Clare had depths of which she knew nothing. Reason and practical common sense had full sway in the one, imagination and mysticism in the other, and none of these qualities ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... room, then his doubt, his fear, his misery, were as though they had never been, for as Mescal said good-night she would give him one look, swift as a flash, and in it were womanliness and purity, and something beyond his comprehension. Her Indian serenity and mysticism veiled yet suggested some secret, some power by which she might yet escape the iron band of this Mormon rule. Hare could not fathom it. In that good-night glance was a meaning for him alone, if meaning ever shone in woman's eyes, and ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... this, Mr. Lethaby, in his Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, observes: 'We may see embodied in this myth of the centre-stone the result of the general direction of thought; as each people were certainly "the people" first born and best beloved of the gods, so their ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... Nature-worship, incorporated with the later Buddhism in a form derived from the tree temples of primeval days, and built over a receptacle for the cremated ashes of the Buddhist priesthood. A touch of mysticism added by an unfinished statue in the gloom of the shadowy vault, suggests the unknown beauty of the soul which attains Nirvana's supremest height, for the supernal exaltation of purified humanity to Divine ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... much simpler thing than that, and a very much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you know about God?—I put emphasis upon the word 'know'—What do you know about Him, however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear, and hope, and question, about Him? What do you know about Him apart from Jesus Christ? What do you know ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... an unemotional kind; and he is "calm in spirit, restrained in imagination, and keeps his self-control even in the midst of the most disturbing emotions."[119] This discernment is the enemy of anything approaching obscurity of thought or mysticism; and its outcome was that curious book, Problemes et Mysteres—a misleading title, for the spirit of reason reigns there and makes an appeal to young people to protect "the light of a menaced world" against "the mists ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... better instructed in their duties and mission in life, would have become excellent mothers, might have been the light and joy of some hearth which now remains deserted, and who, lost and misled by a false education and a detestable system of morality, fall into wasting mysticism, hysterical ecstasies, a contemplative and useless existence, into degrading practices and shameful superstitions, and instead of being the fruitful animating springs of moral and social progress, become the passive instruments, the unfruitful things of the priest, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... mahayana, hinayana, and madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the simplest vehicle of salvation, corresponding to the first of the three degrees of saintship. Characteristics of it are the preponderance of active moral asceticism, and the absence of speculative mysticism and quietism." E. H., ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... only to the Brahmans. In this dread mystery the spirit of Evil is too visibly the master; I dare not lay the blame to God. Anguish irremediable, what power finds amusement in weaving you? Can Henriette and her mysterious philosopher be right? Does their mysticism contain ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the beauty, romance, or mysticism of the Roman Catholic Faith," said Aubrey, "If it were purified from the accumulated superstition of ages, and freed from intolerance and bigotry, it would perhaps be the grandest form of Christianity in the world. But the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... which is its modern equivalent, is indeed matter of history. But the trick he has here played himself may confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to a different kind of mysticism.] ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... that Isolda died in a state of exaltation akin to the state of being in love; but that does not establish the thesis. Blake, for hours before he died, shouted till the ceiling rang for joy to think that he was soon to be with God: does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in his exegesis of Tristan, will have it that Wagner composed the opera to demonstrate the truth of a very trite and ridiculous lie. The fact is, Wagner's was far more a feeling, emotional, imaginative brain than a thinking one, and in ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... born at Montargis in France, and her maiden name was Jeanne Marie Bouvieres de la Mothe. She married at 16 years of age Jacques Guyon. Left a widow, she devoted herself to a religious mysticism which raised up endless controversies during the succeeding years. She was compelled to leave Geneva because her doctrines were declared to be heretical. She was imprisoned in the Bastile from 1695 to 1702. Her works are contained in ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... Church cut off the extremities and one-sidedness in empiricism and supernaturalism, in rationalism and mysticism, in optimism and pessimism. All these systems represented the human effort to solve the riddle of our life without taking any notice of the Church and her wisdom. And all failed to become the universally ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... is judged by the Yugoslavs, whose otherwise acute discernment has been warped by the unhappy circumstances of the time. Indifferent to the fact that he himself is a compound of physical energy and oriental mysticism, the Yugoslav has become inclined to contemplate merely the physical side of the Italian, and for the most part that portion of it which has to do with war. The Italian long-sightedness and prudence and business capacity are ignored save in so far as they delayed the country's ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... opinions, the outcome, as a rule, of general conceptions, of which every age sees the birth and disappearance; examples in point are the theories which mould literature and the arts—those, for instance, which produced romanticism, naturalism, mysticism, &c. Opinions of this order are as superficial, as a rule, as fashion, and as changeable. They may be compared to the ripples which ceaselessly arise and vanish on the surface of ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the People to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of Shakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in which this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general expression of this sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in the People—the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers—else of all men the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in the end, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... of genius, but genius of a peculiar character. Gleams of intuition into the most secret recesses of the heart, analyses of hidden feelings, flash brilliantly upon us from every leaf, and yet a vague mysticism broods over all. No steady light illumes the pages; scenes and characters float before as if shrouded in mist, or dimmed by distance. The shadowy forms, held only by the heart, shimmer and float before us, draped in starry veils and seen through hues of opal. We are in Dreamland, or in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... pearl of great price in the mysticism of Paul, which presupposes, not the Jesus of modern critics, nor yet the Jesus of the Synoptics, but a splendid heart-uplifting Jesus in the colours of mythology. In this Jesus Paul lived, and had a constant ecstatic joy in the everlasting divine work of creation. He was 'crucified with ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... of Greek Philosophy: it becomes Retrospective, and in Philo the Jew and Apollonius of Tyana leans on Inspiration, Mysticism, Miracles. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... irreverently, mysticism and symbolism on the one side; cast away with utter scorn geometry and legalism on the other; seize hold of God's hand and look full in the face of His creation, and there is nothing He will not enable ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... classic and romantic inspirations is illustrated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed, actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel combination; his classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist—in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... of antiquity there were still wholly unchristian figures, which were more beautiful, harmonious, and pure than those of any Christians: e.g., Proclus. His mysticism and syncretism were things that precisely Christianity cannot reproach him with. In any case, it would be my desire to live together with such people. In comparison with them Christianity looks like some ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of optical illusion, already glanced at, we find still another resemblance between the mysticism of the ancients and moderns. The priestess rendering herself invisible to the bystanders, appears to transcend all the rest of Jamblichus's wonders. Strange to say, even this pretension of the Colophonian prophetess is not without something analogous ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... story is 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... tendency, unless restrained by other demands, is not exempt from danger. We may be carried away by the attraction peculiar to these noble studies, withdraw into antiquity and fall into a species of historical mysticism which ends in the affirmation, that whatever has been is true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. We shall endeavor to avoid the peril pointed out by Mallebranche. "Learned ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... greatest of Byron's works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His Journal is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ignorant of their founders, all the moral creeds of the world proceed from a moral source, i.e. a human will. Brahmanism, Gnosticism, the Sufism of Persia, the Mysteries of Egypt and Greece, Neo-Platonism, the Christian Mysticism of the Middle Ages,—these have, strictly speaking, no founder. Every tendency to the abstract, to the infinite, ignores personality.[133] Individual mystics we know, but never the founder of any such system. The religions in which the moral element is depressed, as those ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... appealed to the lofty-minded and serious; his dry cynicism, savage dislike of civilization, and frank affection for Nature, attracted others. He hit hard, but he never resented rough knocks in return, and no man had seen him out of temper with anything but mysticism and the art bred therefrom. Upon the whole, however, his materialism annoyed more than his ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... lived at a time when prolonged habits of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend a false air of mysticism to love. . . . It is as if the intellect and the will had become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the hamlet for an hour or two, which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill and strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by the sight of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... broken down over some portions of that book. Since I had become acquainted with him I had read others of his writings, especially his book on England, and had found that he improved greatly on acquaintance. I think that he has confined his mysticism to the book above named. In conversation he is very clear, and by no means above the small practical things of the world. He would, I fancy, know as well what interest he ought to receive for his money as though he were no philosopher, and I ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... an athlete, but a lecture which he heard on the subject of the immortality of the soul kindled enthusiasm for philosophical study, the pursuit of which led him to visit Egypt, Phoenicia, Chaldea, and perhaps also India. He was imbued with Eastern mysticism, and held that the air is full of spiritual beings who send dreams to men, and health or disease to mankind and to the lower animals. He did not remain long in Greece, but travelled much, and settled for a considerable time in Crotona, in the South of Italy, where he ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... the mystic who, because he feels God, declines to reason about Him—for a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also for a Nachmanides, a Vital, and a Luria' (M. Joseph, op. cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... aborigines of India and of Egypt, with an average 80 cubic inches of brain, a very large cerebellum, and a cerebrum comparatively small. Their intellect was as characteristically statical as that of the other yellow races, the dynamic impulse manifesting itself only in symbolism, mysticism, and the like. At the head of all stood the white races, Aryans for the most part, but with the Semites—Chaldeans, Phoeniceans, Hebrews, Carthaginians, Arabs—as a subdivision. Ideally, their facial angle was ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... mind was packed all his superstition, his mysticism, and what of weakness it might carry. But face him with any peril or problem and the drawer closed instantaneously leaving a mind that was utterly fearless, incredulous, and ingenious; swept clean of all cobwebs by as fine a skeptic broom as ever ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... degrees of credulity, intelligence, and strength of mind, and when all are prepared, in part at least, for the delusion, what may it not be expected to produce on minds peculiarly suited to yield to its influence, and this, too, when the prodigy takes the captivating form of mysticism and miracles! ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... set before us the life of an ordinary Pythagorean, which may be comprehended in three words, mysticism, travel, and disputation. From the date, however, of his journey to Rome, which succeeded his Grecian tour, it is in some degree connected with the history of the times; and, though for much of what is told us of him ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his only care in art—for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial beauty that alone can strike a responsive thrill ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the world illusion of Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... would seem that he must have leaned toward the scholastic method, now so much out of favor; but certainly he would put his own personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have been called ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... irresistible bait for such as have once tasted of their philosophy." The ideas which the sect cherished were popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated with the luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit of mysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem, appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, and briefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whom Josephus wrote would have been glad to ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... place. Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together. He would not go beyond the Communion-rail. She loved him for that. Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligible—these are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism. The age is an effeminate one, and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... cheese, eggs, and milk. That the influence of fasting and of sober fare upon the perspicacity of the sleeping brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism. Philostratus, in his "Life of Apollonius Tyaneus," represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till they ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... recalled to Michel an old friend whom he had met in all parts of Europe, and whom he had not seen for a long time. He liked him exceedingly for a sort of odd pessimism of aggressive philosophy, a species of mysticism mingled with bitterness, which Labanoff took no pains to conceal. The young Hungarian had, perhaps, among the men of his own age, no other friend in the world than this Russian with odd ideas, whose enigmatical smile puzzled ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... beautiful, to be found in the Gorgias, Philebus, Phaedrus, and Symposium is responsible for this misunderstanding, but it is well to make perfectly clear that the beautiful, of which Plato discourses in those dialogues, has nothing to do with the artistically beautiful, nor with the mysticism of the neo-Platonicians. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Audacity of Thought and Speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own Time and Country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose Practise he ridiculed, and whose Faith amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their Poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar's material, but turning it to a mystical Use more convenient ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... captain probably pleased her, for, if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known hardship and spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the street. 'My friends,' he was saying, 'you have the kingdom of heaven within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... spelling-book. When something was spoken which could not be pictured, and something pictured which could not be spoken, all went well; but mistakes were often made, and a word was used instead of a picture; and thence arose those monsters of symbolical mysticism, which are doubly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... might behold the elevation of the Host and the sacred relics without being exposed to the danger of assassination. The visitor should also notice the inlaid stone pavement, with its frequent repetition of the fleur-de-lis and the three castles. The whole breathes the mysticism of St. Louis; the lightness of the architecture, the height of the apparently unsupported roof, and the magnificence of the decoration, render this the most perfect ecclesiastical ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... important thing in Religion is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual, the Liturgical Chants, and not the Creeds or the Commandments, or discussion upon Creed or Commandment. Creeds change, Morality changes, Mysticism changes, Philosophy changes—but the Word of our God—the Word of Humanity—in gesture, in ritual, in the heart's ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... that with Louise Nast, is important for his Weltschmerz only in its bearing upon the development of his general character. This influence was a twofold one: in the first place his sweetheart was herself inclined to a sort of visionary mysticism, and therefore had an unwholesome influence upon the youth, who had already been carried too far in that direction. She too was a lover of solitude and wrote her letters to him in the stillness of the night, when all others were asleep. ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... man, who entered upon scientific subjects, as it appeared to my ignorance at least, with more assurance than knowledgewas very arbitrary in laying down and asserting his opinions, and mixed the terms of science with a strange jargon of mysticism. A simple youth whispered me that he was an Illumine', and carried on an intercourse ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... eminent French litterateur who at the outset of the agitation on behalf of Dreyfus had immediately promised his help, and had even prepared articles and appeals on behalf of the prisoner of Devil's Island. But this litterateur had of recent years been lapsing into mysticism, and at the behests of the reverend father his confessor, he had abruptly destroyed what he had written, and gone over to the other side to wage desperate warfare upon the cause he had ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... not much time to give to Brother Lewis's salvation—she was so busy in adjusting herself to her new life. Its picturesque details fascinated her—the cap, the brevity of speech, the small mannerisms, the occasional and very reserved mysticism, absorbed her so that she thought very little of her husband. She saw him occasionally on those walks down to the lake, or when, after a day in the fields with the three old Shaker men, Brother Nathan brought him home ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... oblivion. Dryden's satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed attention, and shaped the verses of an age. But the seventeenth century was extraordinarily wealthy in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in metaphysic, and mysticism, in devotional ecstasy, and love-lyric, and romance. The English genius in poetry is essentially metaphysical and romantic. Milton was neither. He could not have excelled in any of these kinds; nor have come near to Suckling, or Crashaw, or Vaughan, or Herrick, or Marvell, in their ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... act on certain vague principles for no well-defined ends, it was bound to become the mockery of diplomatists trained in an older school. Metternich, for instance, called it a "loud sounding nothing"; Castlereagh "a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense," while Canning declared that for his part he wanted no more of "Areopagus and the like of that." What happened on this occasion is what ordinarily happens with well-intentioned idealists ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... room for expansion. Think of him, then, at the age of twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all the characteristic traits of his century and people—the spirit of adventure, the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than a touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... of mysticism in religion has been made popular by the recent canonization of Saint Theresa, the ecstatic nun of Avila. In the ceremonies that celebrated this event there were three prizes awarded for odes to the new saint. Lope de Vega was chairman of the committee of award, and Cervantes was one of the competitors. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... be complaisant over size. Certainly it would be hard to deny it grace and exquisite proportion, in which it resembles an even more beautiful hand, that of the Greek lady, Zoe, wife of the late Archbishop of York, which seems to breathe of Ionian mysticism and elegance. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... towards immorality, we have an illustration of the peculiarly English tendency to unite religious fervour with individualism in Quakerism. In no other European country has any similar movement—that is, a popular movement of individualistic mysticism—ever appeared on ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of Philosophy, shall abolish all the three? It is not in my power to prevent the grand patron of the Reformed Church, if he chooses it, from annulling the Calvinistic sabbath, and establishing the decadi of atheism in all his states. He may even renounce and abjure his favorite mysticism in the Temple of Reason. In these things, at least, he is truly despotic. He has now shaken hands with everything which at first had inspired him with horror. It would be curious indeed to see (what I shall ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not after the simple, elementary manner of the democrats at the opening of the century. In the North, there had come to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had touched democracy with mysticism and had added to it a vague but genuine romance. This new vision of the destiny of the country had the practical effect of making the Northerners identify themselves in their imaginations with all mankind and in creating ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... question, what interest can we, the descendants of the practical brother, heirs to so much historical renown, possibly take in the records of a race so historically characterless, and so sunk in reveries and mysticism? The answer is easy. Those records are written in a language closely allied to the primaeval common tongue of those two branches before they parted, and descending from a period anterior to their separation. It may, or it may not, be the very ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... of this study of Nature Mysticism, and the methods adopted for attaining them, are sufficiently described in the introductory chapter. It may be said, by way of special preface, that the nature mystic here portrayed is essentially a "modern." ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... sources diametrically opposite; and this opposition seems to arise less from the various degrees of intellectual culture, than from the different dispositions of nations, some of which are more inclined to mysticism, and others more governed by the senses, and by external impressions. Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon earth, charging them with the care of ruling nations, and giving them laws, as in the fables of the East; sometimes, as among the Greeks and other nations of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the school of Meyerbeer, but his own sympathies drew him rather towards the serene perfection of Mozart. The pure influence of that mighty master, combined with the strange mingling of sensuousness and mysticism which was the distinguishing trait of his own character, produced a musical personality of high intrinsic interest, and historically of great importance to the development of music. If not the actual founder ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... friend of Dorner was Hans Lassen Martensen, "the greatest theologian of Denmark," and a thinker of the first class, "with high speculative endowments, and a considerable tincture of theosophical mysticism."[1] Martensen's "Christian Ethics" do not ignore God and the Bible as factors in any question of practical morals under discussion. He characterizes the result of such an omission as "a reckoning of an account ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... higher types of Orientals are endowed with an extremely subtle intelligence, so subtle as to be wholly unintelligible to the ordinary Westerner. It is said that Pythagoras and Plato travelled in the East and were initiated into Eastern mysticism. The East possesses many scriptures, and the greater part of the writings of Eastern scholars consist of commentaries on the sacred writings. Among the best known monumental philosophical and literary ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... transcendentalism? Merely sentimentalism With a dash of egotism Somewhat mixed with mysticism. Not at all like Socialism, Nor a bit like Atheism, Hinges not on pessimism, Treats of man's asceticism, Quite opposes anarchism. Can't you name another "Ism?" Yes, ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... If we take Macaulay at the beginning of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was much more a literary than a scientific man. It is ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... hundred years later the amiable Shaftesbury pointed out some honestly gentlemanly traits in the species. To the modern student of biology and anthropology man is neither good nor bad. There is no longer any "mystery of evil". But the mediaeval notion of sin—a term heavy with mysticism and deserving of careful scrutiny by every thoughtful ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger? [Would that this was so:—error, superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of open ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... of a more original type of mind, the effect being much the same as that produced by primitive painting, compared with a more developed stage. His very expression, God or Nature, had a fascinating mysticism about it. The chapter in the book which is devoted to the Natural History of passions, surprised and enriched one by its simple, but profound, explanation of the conditions of the human soul. And although ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... reflects truly enough the stranger medley of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... with all his mysticism was so good a man of business that, as his biographers acquaint us, he was in special request as a trustee, "and now, concerning this roll of thine. Is it possible that the accounts connected with the installation of a few abstemious lovers of wisdom can have swollen ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... mysticism, it seems very much akin to mental abilities which we meet frequently in our ordinary intercourse. Take, for example, the prescience of a skilled business man. Nothing is more inadequate than the rules for success laid down by many a man who has himself succeeded in business. ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... or sentimental echo as had inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier; there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that church, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... with the Druses around Beirut. There was something in the hard independent tribesmen that reminded him of the Ulster Scot. Aloof, unafraid, inimical, independent, with a strain of mysticism in them, they were somehow like the glensmen of Antrim. Fairly friendly with the Moslems, contemptuous of the Latin Christians, impatient of dogma, they might have been the Orangemen of Syria. Their emirs had a great dignity and a great simplicity, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the character of the race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of Valerie, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... we are about to quote opens with an odd echo from a certain school of mysticism with which Isaac about ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Katharine Tynan, Padraic Colum and others. The first fervor gone, a short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new significance, it seemed for a while that the movement would lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the tramp, followed; an interest that was something of a reaction against the influence of Yeats and his mystic otherworldliness. And, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... can be thought of apart, or has a separate name, exists apart as a separate entity, e.g. Nature, Time, qualities, as e.g. Whiteness, and, worst of all, the Substantiae Secundae. Mysticism is this habit of ascribing objective existence to the subjective creations of the mind, and reasoning from them to ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... while, in a way, he represented and, as it were, gave voice to the Rome of Augustus, he did so in a transcendental manner; the Rome which he represents, whether as city or empire, being less a fact than an idea, and already strongly tinged with that mysticism which we regard as essentially mediaeval, and which culminated later without any violent breach of continuity in the conception of a spiritual Rome which was a kingdom of God on earth, and of which the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... all its forms—to renounce the hope of intellectual distinction, and to exalt love above knowledge. Philosophy has been to me much; but it can never be all, never the most; and I have found, and know that I have found, the true good in another quarter. This is mysticism—the mysticism of the Bible—the mysticism of conscious reconciliation and intimacy with the living Persons of the Godhead—a mysticism which is not like that of philosophy, an irregular and incommunicable ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... in harmony with the doctrines proceeding from Jena, and which are also put forth in his manual, The Cell and the Tissue. In that address we read (p. 8): "With the same right, with which, for the good of scientific progress, an energetic protest has been raised against a certain mysticism which attaches to the word Vitality, I beg to give warning against an opposite extreme which is but too apt to lead to onesided and unreal, and hence also, ultimately to false notions of the vital process, ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... the more poetic side of Coleridge's genius. Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy of the author of The Ancient Mariner was more influenced by his poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to dig beneath the surface for problems of life and character, and for "suggestions of the final mystery of existence." I have heard Rossetti say that what came most of all ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... serves the purpose of a sign of predication is called, as we formerly observed, the copula. It is important that there should be no indistinctness in our conception of the nature and office of the copula; for confused notions respecting it are among the causes which have spread mysticism over the field of logic, and perverted its ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St. Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new idols. She longed to follow even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's death for the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a spectator ab extra. He analyzes, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a package out of the bag. It made a slight sound. When he saw the roll of banknotes in his hand, I observed the extraordinary gleam on his face. All the sentiments of love were there, adoration, mysticism, and also brutal love, a sort of supernatural ecstasy and the gross satisfaction that was already tasting immediate joys. Yes, all the loves impressed themselves for a moment on the profound ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... until 1872 that the complete sequence of the Idylls was given to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a realm of pure ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... dependence without a murmur. They had been accustomed, from father to son, to go in and out of the gates of Stone Farm, and do what was required of them, as dutifully as if they had been serfs of the land. As a set-off they allowed all their leaning toward the tragic, all the terrors of life and gloomy mysticism, to center round Stone Farm. They let the devil roam about there, play loo with the men for their souls, and ravish the women; and they took off their caps more respectfully to the Stone Farm people than ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... for the wife of his friend was also growing; and yet, the unhappy husband did not think himself entitled to forbid him the house. Was not his wife the most pure and upright of women? Her very inclination to mysticism and exaggerated devotion, although he sometimes found fault with her for it, was a pledge that she would never yield to anything by which her conscience could be stained. Besides, Termonde's assiduity was accompanied by such evident, such absolute respect, that it afforded ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... doubt not for one moment of His presence and His power. Except for purposes of rhetoric the metaphor that seemed so clever fails. Nor, when once such thoughts have been stirred in us by such a sight, can we do better than repeat Goethe's sublime profession of a philosophic mysticism. This translation I made one morning on the Pasterze Gletscher beneath the spires ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the influence of the East upon Townsend's mind in matters of religion. Though he never became a mystic, and had not naturally the mystic's attitude or even any true understanding of what mysticism is, as a young man he had looked through the half-open door of the Eastern world not merely with wonder and delight but with a great deal of sympathy. He went to Calcutta, or, rather, to one of its suburbs, when he was a boy ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of outline still survived in Theocritus; here both are gone. The atmosphere is loaded with a steam of perfumes, and with still unimpaired ease and perfection of hand there has come in a strain of the quality which of all qualities is the most remote from the Greek spirit, mysticism. Some of Meleager's epigrams are direct and simple, even to coarseness; but in all the best and most characteristic there is this vital difference from purely Greek art, that love has become a religion; the spirit of the East has touched them. It is this that makes Meleager so curiously ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... initials of S. T. P. for the purpose of puzzling the critics, were not a little amused, in the sequel, by the many guesses and conjectures into which we had ensnared some of our readers. We could even enjoy the mysticism, qualified as it was by the poor compliment, that our carefully written Address exhibited no "very prominent trait of absurdity," when we saw it thus noticed in the Edinburgh Review for November 1812:- "An Address by S. T. P. we can make ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... two dreams," said the girl with a shade of mysticism in her tones. "Once I saw you going down The Way, Sandy, with the look on your face that you now have. I stood by the big pine just where the trail ends in The Way, and watched you. Then I dreamed last night that I stood by the big pine again and you were coming up The Way a-waving to ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... thankful for the occasional gleams of tenderness and beauty which the natural force of his imagination and affections must still shed over all his productions,—and to which we shall ever turn with delight, in spite of the affectation and mysticism and prolixity, with which they are so ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... homeliness under a clumsy varnish of French outside civilisation, which the years 1807-13 rubbed off them again with a brush of iron—they were yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the unseen—call it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you will, you cannot make it anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most blessed fact—that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to German family life, and which is ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... This book, "God in History," is written from his most advanced and religious stand-point, and seems to us the best fruit, thus far, of his studies. It is compact, consistent, and not marred by his usual defect,—a certain mysticism or indefiniteness of thought,—but is clear and philosophical to the close. It is not to be looked upon as a complete philosophical history, but rather as a suggestive and introductory treatise on that grandest of all themes, the Progress of the Instinct of God through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... wall of personality and individual consciousness comes in between—that is the New Testament teaching of the relation of the Christian to Christ. Is it your experience, dear brother? Do not be frightened by talking about mysticism. If a Christianity has no mysticism it has no life. There is a wholesome mysticism and there is a morbid one, and the wholesome one is the very nerve of the Gospel as it is presented by Jesus Himself: 'I am the Vine, ye are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... not come to us of cool and rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his head, revealed ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... widely about them; but the Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within the world ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... of Longfellow's touch lies in the broad humanity of his sympathy, which leads him neither to mysticism nor cynicism, and which commends his poetry to the universal heart, his artistic sense is so exquisite that each of his poems is a valuable literary study. In this he has now reached a perfection quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... re-adaptation of the Catholic system to a scientific doctrine was plainly in his mind thirty years before the final execution of the Positive Polity, though it is difficult to believe that he foresaw the religious mysticism in which the task was to land him. A great analysis was to precede a great synthesis, but it was the synthesis on which Comte's vision was centred from the first. Let us first sketch the nature of the analysis. Society is to be reorganised on the base of knowledge. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... seraphic serenity and meekness, set like a seal on the large square mouth, he looked a veritable type of the ecclesiastical cenobites who, since the days of Pachomius at Tabennae, have made their hearts altars of the Triple Vows, and girdled the globe with a cable of scholastic mysticism. The pale, shrunken hand he laid on the black serge that covered his breast, was delicate as a woman's, and checkered with knotted lines where the blood ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... leaving what the phrenologists call the bumps of ideality curiously exposed, and this, taken in conjunction with the yearning of the large prominent eyes, suggested at once a clear, delightful intelligence,—a mind timid, fearing, and doubting, such a one as would seek support in mysticism and dogma, that would rise instantly to a certain point, but to drop as suddenly as if sickened by the too intense light of the cold, pure heaven of reason to the gloom of the sanctuary and the consolations ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Armela, of St. Elizabeth, of the Child Jesus, etc. Reinhard says correctly that sweet memories are frequently nothing more or less than outbursts of hidden passion and attacks of sensual love. Seume is mistaken in his assertion that mysticism lies mainly in weakness of the nerves and colic—it lies a ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... this, the piety of Christ was no inactive contemplation, or retiring mysticism and selfish enjoyment; but thoroughly practical, ever active in works of charity, and tending to regenerate and transform the world into the kingdom of God. 'He went about doing good.' His life is an unbroken series of good works and virtues ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... successfully applied the laws of composition and added a calm tenderness to the gravity of the Florentine school; and through his influence on Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael replaced, as far as it was possible, the pious mysticism that had perished with Angelico." The master's influence on Fra Bartolommeo may be clearly traced in the "Pieta" of S. Chiara, the forerunner of the Frate's own noble work; and it was not far from this very time (1495) that ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... is coloured by mysticism which seeks emblems of the hidden source of harmony in every form of life. Anthropomorphic conceptions are laid aside; ritual is abandoned as savouring of magic; hierocracy as part of an obsolete caste system; metaphysical ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... origin of this consecrated symbol, while discovering that it is based on the sacredness of numbers, and this in turn on the structure and necessary relations of the human body, thus disowning the meaningless mysticism that Joseph de Maistre and his disciples have advocated, let us on the other hand be equally on our guard against accepting the material facts which underlie these beliefs as their deepest foundation and their exhaustive ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... California has evolved with the help of this scenery and climate is a rare brew. The physical background is Anglo-Saxon of course; and it still breaks through in the prevailing Anglo-Saxon type. To this, the Celt has brought his poetry and mysticism. To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, the passion ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Now this is pure mysticism. Regarded literally, it is in direct conflict with the facts. The processes of industry are fairly regular and continuous. At any moment, large quantities of consumers' goods of almost every kind are on the point of completion; at the same moment equally large quantities are ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... Beauty of Strychnine Ingo Housebroken The Hilarity of Hilaire A Casual of the Sea The Last Pipe Time to Light the Furnace My Friend A Poet of Sad Vigils Trivia Prefaces The Skipper A Friend of FitzGerald A Venture in Mysticism An Oxford Landlady "Peacock Pie" The Literary Pawnshop A Morning in Marathon The American House of Lords Cotswold Winds Clouds Unhealthy Confessions of a Smoker Hay ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... limited by her very anxiety to compass them. Even her love of art seemed a form of snobbery. In all these young Mesuriers there was implicit,—partly as a bye-product of the sense of humour, and partly as an unconscious mysticism,—a surprising instinct for allowing the successes of this world their proper value and no more. Even Esther, who was perhaps the most worldly of them all, and whose ambitions were largely social, as became a bonny ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... to imply—for their statements are not very explicit—that Saktism formed part if not of the teaching of the Buddha, at least of the medley of beliefs held by his disciples. But I see no proof that Saktist beliefs—that is to say erotic mysticism founded on the worship of goddesses—were prevalent in Magadha or Kosala before the Christian era. Although Siri, the goddess of luck, is mentioned in the Pitakas, the popular deities whom they bring ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... strength and its weakness; and I feel the same degree of sympathy that I should, if I had a Turkish command,—that is, a sort of sympathetic admiration, not tending towards agreement, but towards cooperation. Their philosophizing is often the highest form of mysticism; and our dear surgeon declares that they are all natural transcendentalists. The white camps seem rough and secular, after this; and I hear our men talk about "a religious army," "a Gospel army," in their prayer-meetings. They are certainly evangelizing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Personality." Then came a series of works by Hudson, including "Psychic Phenomena," then Oliver Lodge's "Survival of Man," "Man and the Universe," and "Life and Matter." Farther along were works by Lowes Dickinson and Professor William James, Bowden's "The Imitation of Buddha" and Inge's "Christian Mysticism." At the end of the shelf, bound in white vellum, was Don Lorenzo Scupoli's "The ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Jesus the divine Man, the master, Christos, restored to the heart of Humanity from the mysticism and miracle of monks and theologies, from the superstitions and ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... state of perfection consisted in the repose and complete inaction of the soul, that life ought to be one of entire passive contemplation, and that good works and active industry were only fitting for those who were toiling in a lower sphere and had not attained to the higher regions of spiritual mysticism. Thus the '[Greek: Aesuchastai]' on Mount Athos contemplated their nose or their navel, and called the effect of their meditations "the divine light," and Molinos pined in his dungeon, and left his works to be castigated by the renowned Bossuet. The pious, devout, and ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... the Physician of Aleppo, who discovered it. This man was the pupil of the learned Rhazes, and the tutor of the equally learned Avicenna, the link, in fact, between them; but his name, for some reason, perhaps because he mixed with his practice a greater degree of mysticism than was approved by the Arabian schools of the next generation, has not come down to us. This man identified the product which had defied Ibn Jasher's tests with a substance even then considered by most to be fabulous, or ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Balzac was a romantic, a realist, a mystic; Flaubert was alternately romantic and realist. Tolstoi was never a romantic, but a realist he was, and he is a mystic. Dostoievski, from whom he absorbed so much, taught him the formulas of his mysticism—though Tolstoi has never felt the life of the soul so profoundly as this predecessor. Ibsen passed through the three stages. Huysmans, never romantic, began as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Felicien Rops could never have been a romantic, though the macabre ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... assassins; and who, further, knows nothing of that wonderful sprig of myrtle:—in short, a Free Mason, speaking generally, is a man who delights in ideals, social equality, secret fraternity, and plays at mysticism; who parades on the Masonic stage and enacts a role he does not understand. The first meaning, that of a builder, is the most correct. Lastly, the imagination is the exercise of mental ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... moving the leaves. It had been vague and shadowy as gossamer, light as the substance of a dream, but it was real to him, nevertheless, and the deep glow of certain triumph permeated his being, body and mind. It was not strange that he had in his nature something of the Indian mysticism that personified the winds and the trees and everything about him. The Manitou of the red man and the ancient Aieroski of the Iroquois were the same as his own God. He could not doubt that he had a message. Down ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... head of a department could fail to understand it. Indeed, to such as live on the uplands of speculation, not only is the process lucid in itself, but it is luciferous, illuminating all the obscure hiding-places of Nature. It is the magic-lantern of creation; it is the key to all mysticism, to the three-card trick, and to the basket-trick; it sheds a glory upon thimble-rigging, a halo upon legerdemain; it even radiates vagabond beams of splendour upon pocket-picking and the cognate arts. It explains how the ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... age, and published poems at ten. Her first effusions appeared in a local paper at Reading, Pa. Being a born poetess, her success as a writer was assured from the first, and her warmth of expression and richness of imagery, combined with a curious quaintness, the outgrowth of the deep vein of mysticism that pervades her nature, soon attracted the attention of the literati of this country, one of the most distinguished of whom, the late George D. Prentice, did not hesitate to pronounce her the most extraordinary woman of America; "for," said he, "if she can't find a word to suit her purpose, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... the question, what interest can we, the descendants of the practical brother, heirs to so much historical renown, possibly take in the records of a race so historically characterless, and so sunk in reveries and mysticism? The answer is easy. Those records are written in a language closely allied to the primaeval common tongue of those two branches before they parted, and descending from a period anterior to their separation. It may, or it may not, be the very tongue itself, but it certainly is not further ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... the theory of evolution, from the earliest scientific writings that have been preserved, those of the Greek philosophers, down to the present time. The author shows how the ruling classes, living on the labor of others, have always supported some form of theology or mysticism, while the working classes have developed the theory of evolution, which is rounded out to its logical completion by the work of Marx, Engels and Dietzgen. The author frankly recognizes that no writer can avoid being influenced by his class environment, ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... its modern equivalent, is indeed matter of history. But the trick he has here played himself may confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to a different kind of mysticism.] ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... care-fraught expression; no reluctant or displeased look, as if the lady would have fain declined; no indeterminate thoughts, no indefinite sensations; no languishment; and above all never more the portentous, the ominous look which often in that entrancing dance exhibits to us the mysticism of the Sybil, without one ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... ‘Thoughts’ on the ‘Mystery of the Death of Christ,’ are in some respects very fine, and might even claim a place beside some of those of her brother. They are equally elevated in tone, and pervaded by the same subtle, penetrating, radiant mysticism, the same rapture of self-sacrificing aspiration, though lacking the glow of inward fire and exquisite charm of style which marked the author of the ‘Pensées.’ Noble-minded and full of genius, she was yet without his depth and power of feeling, or his skill and finish as an author. In 1646 ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... duty of girls is determined in religious morality by the old belief that God, the most powerful of warriors, is polygamous, that he has reserved all maidens for himself, and that men can only take those whom he has left. This belief, although traces of it exist in several metaphors of mysticism, is abandoned to-day, by most civilised peoples. However, it still dominates the education of girls not only among our believers, but even among our free-thinkers, who, as a rule, think freely for the reason that they do not ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... thundered Daniel. Then it dawned upon him that he had said a humorous thing and he laughed. There was merriment as well as mysticism in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is, after all, but one form of religion, which other forms preceded and which others will follow. Religions may disappear, but religious feeling will create new ones even with the help of Science. Pierre thought of that alleged repulse of Science by the present-day awakening of mysticism, the causes of which he had indicated in his book: the discredit into which the idea of liberty has fallen among the people, duped in the last social reorganisation, and the uneasiness of the elite, in despair at the void in which their liberated minds and enlarged intelligences ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... published in 1971, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published by Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, in 1917 under the title Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... writers, Robert Hall was my favorite. I liked many things in the writings of John Angell James; but there were other things, especially in his Anxious Inquirer, that appeared to savor more of mysticism than of Christianity, and that seemed better calculated to perplex and embarrass young disciples of Christ, than to afford ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... secretary's room Shan Tung waited. As McDowell was the iron and steel embodiment of the law, so Shan Tung was the flesh and blood spirit of the mysticism and immutability of his race. His face was the face of an image made of an unemotional living tissue in place of wood or stone, dispassionate, tolerant, patient. What passed in the brain behind his yellow-tinged eyes only Shan Tung knew. It was his secret. And ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... in the cells of Valdemosa that Madame Sand completed her novel of Monastic life, Spiridion, then publishing in the Revue des Deux Mondes. "For heaven's sake not so much mysticism!" prayed the editor of her, now and then; and assuredly those readers for whom George Sand was simply a purveyor of passionate romances, those critics who set her down in their minds as exclusively a glorifier of mutinous emotion and the apologist of lawless love, must have been taken ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... thirteenth year, in Philadelphia, I read with great love Charles Lamb's works and most of the works of Coleridge. Mr. Alcott had read Wordsworth into us in illimitable quantities, so that I soon had a fair all-round knowledge of the Lakers, whom I dearly loved. Now there was a certain soupcon of Mysticism or Transcendentalism and Pantheism in Coleridge, and even in Wordsworth, which my love of rocks and rivers and fairy lore easily enabled ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... same way the Church cut off the extremities and one-sidedness in empiricism and supernaturalism, in rationalism and mysticism, in optimism and pessimism. All these systems represented the human effort to solve the riddle of our life without taking any notice of the Church and her wisdom. And all failed to become the universally accepted truth, but all of them helped the Church unconsciously to her own orientation ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... of Miss Elizabeth Robins' "Woman's Secret" with the virile common sense of that most brilliant young writer, Miss Rebecca West, in her bitter onslaught on feminine limitations in the opening chapters of "The World's Worst Failure." The former is an extravagance of sexual mysticism. Man can never understand women. Women always hide deep and wonderful things away beyond masculine discovery. Men do not even suspect. Some day, perhaps—It is someone peeping from behind a curtain, and inviting men in provocative ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... make a real particular being separate from the Deity. The school of Alexandria, on the contrary, and Philo among the rest, mingling Greek with Jewish and Oriental notions, and abandoning himself to his inclination to mysticism, personified the logos, and represented it a distinct being, created by God, and intermediate between God and man. This is the second logos of Philo, that which acts from the beginning of the world, alone in its kind, creator of the sensible world, formed by God according to the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Society profits from contrasting views, from discussion and struggle. The opposing parties in a real debate understand each other well and are working with the same logic and the same desire for order of thought. This contrast between order and mysticism has still less to do with the difference of knowledge and belief in a higher religious and philosophical sense. There is no real antagonism between science and religion, between experience and philosophical speculation. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance, as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows, as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... "In mysticism there seems to be no reasoning—nothing definite save only an occult and overwhelming restlessness.... Marya may take the veil ... or nurse lepers ... or she may become a famous courtesan.... I do not mean it cruelly. But, in the mystic, the spiritual, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... it a crime against sentiment, to admit of relief from common occupations or indifferent subjects; with a sort of superstitious zeal, she excludes all thoughts but those which relate to one object, and in this spirit of amorous mysticism she actually makes a penance even of love. I am astonished that her heart can endure this variety of self-inflicted torments. What will become of Olivia when she ceases to love and be loved? And what passion ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... which is known only to the Brahmans. In this dread mystery the spirit of Evil is too visibly the master; I dare not lay the blame to God. Anguish irremediable, what power finds amusement in weaving you? Can Henriette and her mysterious philosopher be right? Does their mysticism contain the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... most philosophers have erred in too rigid an exclusion of feeling and imagination. It is impossible to help feeling that his philosophy is largely moulded and created by his feeling for art—and by his oriental mysticism. He can be curiously prosaic at the same time, and this is another proof of the infinite complexity of the mind:—he can be inartistic and unpoetic so that he almost staggers us, as in his unillumining remarks on Landscape Art. Vegetation, according to Schopenhauer's theory, ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... assumed another ghostly phase. All the rugged outlines of half-fallen tepees were silvered and softened. Henry, with that extraordinary sensitiveness of his to nature and the wilderness, felt again the mysticism and unreality of this place, once inhabited by man and now given back to the forest. In another season or two the last remnant of bark would disappear, the footpaths would be grown up with bushes, and the wild ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... would not give up till it was finished, within about three months from the date of its commencement. Recently, I went through this book to prepare it for a new edition, chiefly in order to cut out some of the mysticism and tall writing, for which it is too remarkable, and was pleased to find that it still interested me. But if a writer may be allowed to criticise his own work, it is two books, not one. Also, the hero is a very poor creature. Evidently I was too much occupied with my heroines ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... chiefs, his great General Staff, his enrolled professors, his army chaplains. War has always been, will forever remain, a crime; but Germany organised it as she did everything. She made a code for murder and conflagration, and over it all she poured the boiling oil of an enraged mysticism, made up of Bismarck, of Nietzsche, and of the Bible. In order to crush the world and regenerate it, the Super-Man and Christ were mobilised. The regeneration began in Belgium—a thousand years from now men will tell of it. The affrighted world looked on at the infernal spectacle of the ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... young man, but you have never learned that, and never will. For you the world will continue to wear a noble, awful face. You will never rise above mysticism.... But be happy ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... expositor in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier; there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the Catholic religion, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... lived before Jerusalem was made for ever memorable; surveyed the spoils of Etruscan tombs; and lingered amid the varieties of household things from the barbarous nations of the present hour; and not wholly profitless have the journeys been, even if the scientific mysticism be not mastered, so that there remains in the mind a general impression of the time that has gone by, the great laws that govern the universe, and the humility that becomes man, when he sees his individuality, in relation with the mighty past, ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... will convince him that it is true. I mean a very much simpler thing than that, and a very much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you know about God?—I put emphasis upon the word 'know'—What do you know about Him, however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear, and hope, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... whatever we may attempt to say about things in the world of sense, we can only succeed in saying that they participate in such and such ideas, which, therefore, constitute all their character. Hence it is easy to pass on into a mysticism. We may hope, in a mystic illumination, to see the ideas as we see objects of sense; and we may imagine that the ideas exist in heaven. These mystical developments are very natural, but the basis of the ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... for instance, it is devoid of interest," he continued, ceasing his thoughts for a moment, to listen to the piece of modern music which the choir was just then rendering. "Ah, who will take on himself to proscribe that pert mysticism, those fonts of toilet-water which Gounod invented!... There ought indeed to be astonishing penalties for choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in church. This is, as it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... country entirely separated from Europe, where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... origin not only from unity with the Tribe but from the sense of affiliation to Nature—the sense of "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible universe, a world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of magical activity and the medium of mysticism. The mystical element, the oneness and continuousness comes out very clearly in the notion of Wakonda among the Sioux Indians.... The Omahas regarded all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they were merely the outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something wholly distinct from intellectual conviction—by moral passion, by love, by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what did he turn his attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds. If he describes, as in The Vicar of Tours, the woes of an old priest, he profits ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... be thought of apart, or has a separate name, exists apart as a separate entity, e.g. Nature, Time, qualities, as e.g. Whiteness, and, worst of all, the Substantiae Secundae. Mysticism is this habit of ascribing objective existence to the subjective creations of the mind, and reasoning from ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... occultism, but with all its mysticism and its dealings with the unknowable the book is never dull, the thread of the human story in it is never lost sight of for ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... snugness in which they find themselves, in what should have been expected to remain to them a foreign environment. The residual estrangement of the Jewish soul from everything that is non-Jewish, which our forefathers in the past had figuratively designated with what Jewish mysticism called the "Captivity of the Shekinah," has totally disappeared. The individual Jew of to-day, while sharing in the sublimated consciousness of the race as a whole, does not in any conscious or subliminal way feel himself ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... classed the aborigines of India and of Egypt, with an average 80 cubic inches of brain, a very large cerebellum, and a cerebrum comparatively small. Their intellect was as characteristically statical as that of the other yellow races, the dynamic impulse manifesting itself only in symbolism, mysticism, and the like. At the head of all stood the white races, Aryans for the most part, but with the Semites—Chaldeans, Phoeniceans, Hebrews, Carthaginians, Arabs—as a subdivision. Ideally, their facial angle was 90—the right angle—and their cubic inches of brain ranged from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... message so deeply wrapped in mysticism. Hunsa unhesitatingly declared that the yogi was a messenger from the Dewan, and if they did not take advantage of it they would perhaps have to fare forth on lean stomachs and in disgrace—perhaps would be beaten by the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... upon the perspicacity of the sleeping brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism. Philostratus, in his "Life of Apollonius Tyaneus," represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till they have first inquired ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... the development of Hebrew out of Chaldean and Egyptian conceptions, pp. 44, etc.; also pp. 127 et seq. For the early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, see Champollion; also Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, Archeologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890; and for engravings ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... unemotional kind; and he is "calm in spirit, restrained in imagination, and keeps his self-control even in the midst of the most disturbing emotions."[119] This discernment is the enemy of anything approaching obscurity of thought or mysticism; and its outcome was that curious book, Problemes et Mysteres—a misleading title, for the spirit of reason reigns there and makes an appeal to young people to protect "the light of a menaced world" against "the mists ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His Journal is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... traversed, together with the brilliant picture made by the crowds, put us both in a happy temper. It was not long before Monsignor heard the confession of my ideals. He smiled quickly when I raved of music, but the moment I drifted into the theme of mysticism—the transposition is ever an easy one—I saw his interest leap ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... it his motto. For he, like all truly great statesmen, was so immensely concerned in winning today's battle, that he wasted no time in speculating what tomorrow, or next year, or next century would say about it. Mysticism, the recurrent fad which indicates that its victims neither see clear nor think straight, could not spread its veils over him. The man who visualizes is safe from that intellectual weakness and moral danger. But although Roosevelt felt the sway of the true emotions, he allowed only his intimates ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... it changed it, the changes were extreme. Though the country generally returned to its old life and thought at the Restoration in 1660, much of the new life of the Commonwealth remained: congregations of Independents still met; Quaker ideals survived all persecution; and even the mysticism of Morgan Lloyd permeated the slowly awakening thought of the peasants whom, in his dreams, he saw welcoming ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... word which thus serves the purpose of a sign of predication is called, as we formerly observed, the copula. It is important that there should be no indistinctness in our conception of the nature and office of the copula; for confused notions respecting it are among the causes which have spread mysticism over the field of logic, and perverted ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... MAUPASSANT, PAUL BOURGET, and the rest. They themselves were their own favourite native writers; but their morbid sonnets, their love-lorn elegies, their versified mixtures of passion and a quasi-religious mysticism, were too sacred for print, though they were sometimes adapted to thin and fluttering airs, and sung to sympathisers in private. Most of these gentlemen were "ploughed" in their examination, but the hero of this sketch secured ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... only set before us the life of an ordinary Pythagorean, which may be comprehended in three words, mysticism, travel, and disputation. From the date, however, of his journey to Rome, which succeeded his Grecian tour, it is in some degree connected with the history of the times; and, though for much of what is told us of him we have no better authority than the word of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... excess; keep the quality of the recruit down to the low mental level, and see that the best of all the agricultural science available is in the hands of the elders, and there you have a first-class engine for pioneer work. The tawdry mysticism and the borrowing from Freemasonry serve the low caste Swede and Dane, the Welshman and the Cornish cotter, just as well as a highly ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... consciences by the great mass of the Western Asiatics. Western Asia was a seething-pot, in which were mixed up a score of contradictory creeds, old and new, rational and irrational, Sabaism, Magism, Zoroastrianism, Grecian polytheism, teraphim-worship, Judaism, Chaldae mysticism, Christianity. Artaxerxes conceived it to be his mission to evoke order out of this confusion, to establish in lieu of this extreme diversity an absolute uniformity ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... of Christ was no inactive contemplation, or retiring mysticism and selfish enjoyment; but thoroughly practical, ever active in works of charity, and tending to regenerate and transform the world into the kingdom of God. 'He went about doing good.' His life is an unbroken series of good works and virtues in active exercise, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... worships it as he might God Himself; but Descartes was fundamentally uninterested in such enthusiasms and found them even repellant—as well as unnecessary—to his thought. For More the doctrine of infinity was a proper corollary of Copernican astronomy and neo-Platonism (as well as Cabbalistic mysticism) and therefore a necessity to his whole elaborate and ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... introduction of legends connected with saints into the school curriculum, my chief plea is the element of the unusual which they contain and an appeal to a sense of mysticism and wonder which is a wise antidote to the prosaic and commercial tendencies of today. Though many of the actions of the saints may be the result of a morbid strain of self-sacrifice, at least none of them was engaged in the sole occupation ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... unpoetical reality, who live more in plain notions than in images, and who cultivate their common sense at the expense of their imagination—to such a people that creed will best recommend itself which dreads not investigation, which lays less stress on mysticism than on morals, and which is rather to be understood then to be dwelt upon in meditation. In few words, the Roman Catholic religion will, on the whole, be found more adapted to a nation of artists, the Protestant more fitted ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend a false air of mysticism to love. . . . It is as if the intellect and the will had become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... almost beyond our sympathies, and therefore quite beyond the sphere of human poetry. Perhaps when all is written courageously, I shall have no courage left to publish it. Secondly, because all my tendencies towards mysticism will be called into terrible operation by ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... is devoted to the consideration of preliminary matters, such as Method, or the principles which should guide the student of Theology, and the different theories as to the source and standard of our knowledge of divine things, Rationalism, Mysticism, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Rule of Faith, and the Protestant doctrine on ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... great-uncle, King William IV. of Prussia, who died insane. There are certainly some traits of resemblance between this hapless monarch and the present occupant of the German throne, for in both there exists and has existed the same exaggerated and narrow-minded religious beliefs, bordering on mysticism, and also an all-embracing faith in ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... Graves. "I fully agree with you about that; and there is a great deal of very objectionable nonsense which goes by the name of mysticism, which is ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of that Western faculty, the Russians misapply it. They seem to be impelled by a variety of causes—such as climatic and economic influences, a long course of misgovernment, Byzantinism in religion, and an inherited leaning to Oriental mysticism—to distort their reasoning powers, and far from using them, as was the case with the pre-eminently sane Greek genius, to temper the excesses of the imagination, to employ them rather as an oestrus to lash the imaginative faculties to a state ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... there was more in the truest and deepest chivalry than the mere feats of arms and acts of dauntless daring that so often went by that name. Hazy and indistinct as his ideas were, tinged with much of the mysticism, much of the superstition of the age, they were beginning to assume definite proportions, and to threaten to colour the whole future course of his life; and beneath all the dimness and confusion one settled, leading idea was slowly unfolding itself, and forming a foundation for the superstructure ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Paul, and exactly the same thing he himself did. There was the indescribable misery of the age, and there were the knowledge and theories of that overburdened century, and no answer, no reply to the questions addressed to heaven and eternity; and they went to the fountains of mysticism and secret knowledge to quench the thirst of the soul. There sprung up the visionary Gnostics among the Gentiles, and the Cabalistic Mystics among the Jews. History notices the same rotation continually—idealism, sensualism, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... that question of inductive philosophy very nice. He had read something about it in Macaulay. He liked that Platonic question very much. It bordered upon poetry and mysticism Then St. Augustine! That would be charming. He had always such a love for St. Augustine! But Fenelon? The "dove of Cambrai" versus the "eagle of Meaux!" What a delightful idea! No good housekeeper, at a cheap ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... coloured radiance resembling his visions of the half tones of fairyland. Like a shadow stood the cloaked figure of the girl, who timidly placed her small hand in his great palm, and that touch gave a thrill of reality to the mysticism of the time and the place. He grasped it closely, fearing it might fade away from him as it had done in his dream. She led him silently by another way from that by which he had entered, and together they passed through a small doorway that communicated ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... there were still wholly unchristian figures, which were more beautiful, harmonious, and pure than those of any Christians: e.g., Proclus. His mysticism and syncretism were things that precisely Christianity cannot reproach him with. In any case, it would be my desire to live together with such people. In comparison with them Christianity looks like some crude ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... intended to introduce into the recital somewhat more of mysticism and sublimity than the actual facts warranted. But once launched thereon, his sense of humour could not be denied its full enjoyment in this first telling of the entire tale. Full justice he did to the pathos, but he also shook with mirth over the ludicrous. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... desecrated, its statues and other imagery despoiled, but the edifice was actually doomed to destruction. This fortunately was spared to it, but in the same year (1793) it became a "Temple of Reason," one of those fanatical exploits of a set of madmen who are periodically let loose upon the world. Mysticism, palaverings, and orgies unspeakable took place between its walls, and it only became sanctified again when Napoleon caused it to be reopened as a place of divine worship. Again, three-quarters ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... equivalent in music of tender colour. It never sings out from the orchestra without carrying the imagination for a moment from the scene before one's eyes to the fernem Land. It blends the actual with the dream, and imbues all the drama with a delicious romantic mysticism. I dwell on it because without this prevailing colour and atmosphere the story of Lohengrin is a plain prosaic fairy-tale to amuse children. Further, in the most important musical theme in the opera it ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... some cases they have been messed and meddled in usum vulgi. But their worst enemy recently has been, it may be feared, the irreconcilable opposition of their spirit to what is called the modern spirit—though this latter sometimes takes them up and plays with them in a fashion of maudlin mysticism. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... science, though the two may go together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of "something far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... superfluous. Power: unlimited, absolute power was his goal. With his end achieved he could establish an autocracy, a dynasty of science: whatever he chose. Oh, it was a rich-hued, golden, glowing dream; a dream such as men's souls don't formulate in these stale days—not our kind of men. The Teutonic mysticism—you understand. And it ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to be complaisant over size. Certainly it would be hard to deny it grace and exquisite proportion, in which it resembles an even more beautiful hand, that of the Greek lady, Zoe, wife of the late Archbishop of York, which seems to breathe of Ionian mysticism and elegance. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... revolutionary hand, the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had such a weight in the "active" section of every party. She was much more representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric, mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own mouth. The epigrammatic saying ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... growth of the social forces of production within modern society, and the better knowledge the workers obtain of their true relations to each other and to Nature, loosen the chains of ghost worship and mysticism from their limbs and lessen the power of religion as a political weapon in the hands of the ruling class, while they form, at the same time, the material and intellectual preparation for an intelligently organized society. The matter ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... character, moreover, is perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal mysticism of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... presence of the possibly monstrous and the impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... effects. At the time when Lombroso saw her first, Eusapia was just beginning to be known to scientists, but no one of special note had up to this time (1891) reported upon her. She was known as the wife of a small shop-keeper in Naples, and seemed a decent, matronly person, quite untouched by mysticism. Although not eager to sit for Lombroso and his party of scientists, she finally consented. Among those who took part in these celebrated experiments were Professor Tamburini, an eminent scientist; Dr. Bianchi, the superintendent of the Insane Asylum of Sales; and Dr. Penta, ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... resulting in a sibilant hiss. Like most ritualistic practices this habit has a utilitarian origin: it serves to keep the dust of grooming from entering the lungs. But in process of time it has acquired a touch of mysticism, and is supposed to soothe the horse and sustain the man. Had Hawkins not been absorbed in a localised attention to Tommy's fetlocks he would have observed that his charge had suddenly laid his ears ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... supersensual impressions would be open. The medium would transmit the message to a point far beyond that possible to our psychic judge, and the audience would encourage him by their readiness to grasp the revelations made. The language of mysticism, philosophy, and poetry would be strained to its utmost capacity. Then a sense of incompleteness, of deficiency, of hopeless relativity would overcome the audience. The medium had exerted every spiritual faculty to receive the truth. But the visitor could not convey celestial ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... to the Chief. Asks that he be made the executioner. Uraso's address to the culprits. Their terror. Mysticism. Hypnotic influences. Mesmerism. Constant repetitions. Mystic numbers. The spell on all the natives. The effect of the mesmeric influence on the Chief. The rigid subjects. John the peerless Korino. The threats against the witch doctors. Bringing the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... luck! And also an augury for the future! She was professing in London for the first time in her life; she had not been in the Promenade for five minutes; and lo! the ideal admirer. For he was not young. What a fine omen for her profound mysticism ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... inherits his music from his father, and from his mother his mysticism, is extremely fascinating as a psychological study. Mr. Wills has made a most artistic use of that scientific law of heredity which has already strongly influenced the literature of this century, and to which ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... cause of poetry, shall endeavour to be thankful for the occasional gleams of tenderness and beauty which the natural force of his imagination and affections must still shed over all his productions,—and to which we shall ever turn with delight, in spite of the affectation and mysticism and prolixity, with which they are so ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... increased to 2020. The stories connected with these people are as tragic and wildly romantic as are most of the stories in the history of Louisiana. In fact, this colony from the very first owed not a little of its abandon and its fascination to the mysticism that the Negroes themselves brought from Africa. In the midst of much that is apocryphal one or two events or episodes stand out with distinctness. In 1729, Perier, governor at the time, testified with reference to a small company of Negroes who had been sent against the Indians as follows: ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a very superfluity ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Brand is found to present a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, "Is Brand the expression of Ibsen's own nature?" Yes, and no. He threw ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... demonship^; diablerie [Fr.], bedevilment; witchcraft, witchery; glamor; fetishism, fetichism, feticism^; ghost dance, hoodoo; obi, obiism^; voodoo, voodooism; Shamanism (Esquimaux), vampirism; conjuration; bewitchery, exorcism, enchantment, mysticism, second sight, mesmerism, animal magnetism; od force, odylic force^; electrobiology^, clairvoyance; spiritualism, spirit rapping, table turning. divination &c (prediction) 511; sortilege^, ordeal, sortes Virgilianae^; hocus-pocus &c (deception) 545. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... graduating at Jena in 1813. The winter of that year he spent at Weimar, revelling in the society of Goethe, and also enjoying intercourse with Maier, the profound Orientalist, who indoctrinated him with those views of Indian mysticism which greatly influenced his future philosophic disquisitions. After writing and publishing a few slight treatises Schopenhauer sent forth his great work, "The World as Will and Idea," which has immortalized him. It appeared in 1819. During subsequent ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... as Mr. Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will, tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... replied. 'An angel is not above being taught even by a creature of earth. And in Fan there is one thing lacking, angel though she be, and this I shall point out to her. I can find no mysticism in her: what she knows she knows, and with the unknowable, which may yet be known, she concerns herself not. Who shall say of the seed I scatter that it will not germinate in this fair garden without weeds and tares, and strike root and blossom at last? For ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... him," Omar's Epicurean Audacity of Thought and Speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own Time and Country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose Practise he ridiculed, and whose Faith amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their Poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar's material, but turning it ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism." ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... old things?" he said, startled entirely out of his absurd tact of mysticism. "Why do you hang them ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of Christianity throughout all the Dark Ages is a history of the distrust of inquiry and reason, and the emphasis of blind emotional faith. Mysticism, good and evil spirits, and the interpretation of natural phenomena as manifestations of the Divine will from the first received large emphasis. The worship of saints and relics, and the great development of the sensuous and symbolic, changed the earlier religion into a crude ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Consciousness. Unconscious instruments of the Cosmic law. The true poet and the maker of rhymes. The mission and scope of the poetical temperament. How "temperament" affects expression. No royal road to Illumination. Teaching of Oriental mysticism. Whitman's extraordinary experience. His idea of "Perfections." Lord Tennyson's two distinct states of consciousness; his early boyhood and strange experiences. Facts about his illumination. The after effects. Tennyson's vision of the future. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... more widely about them; but the Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within the world of ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Thoreau and Old Man Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne. There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them rather than explain them—and here, some may say that he is wiser in a more ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... in this dramatic poem, (in which is attempted a picture of the mind of this celebrated character,) but it is dreamy and obscure. Writers would do well to remember, (by way of example,) that though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of Shelley, we love him and have taken him to our hearts as a poet, not because of these characteristics—but in ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... be overcome; it was betrayed both in her glances and in her words. Nathanael's effusions were, in truth, exceedingly tedious. His ill-humour at Clara's cold prosaic temperament continued to increase; Clara could not conceal her distaste of his dark, gloomy, wearying mysticism; and thus both began to be more and more estranged from each other without exactly being aware of it themselves. The image of the ugly Coppelius had, as Nathanael was obliged to confess to himself, faded considerably in his fancy, and it often cost him great pains to present him in vivid colours ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... struggle between Luther and Loyola, separating the ancient from the modern in Flemish architecture, was nowhere better exemplified than in Malines. It has been said that the modern Jesuitism succeeded to the ancient mysticism without displacing it, and the installation of the first in the very sanctuary of the latter has manifested itself in the ornamentation of the ecclesiastical edifices throughout Flanders, and indeed this fact is very evident to the travelers in this region. The people ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... untrustworthy. So striking a phenomenon as the winter thorn would be certain to become an object of heathen devotion;[396] and, as usual, the early preachers would Christianize the local cult, as they Christianized the Druidical figment of a Holy Cup (perhaps also local in its origin), into the sublime mysticism of the Sangreal legend, connected ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violence of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and its quick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous, its materialism and its mysticism, its austerity and its luxury, its resignation to servitude and its instincts of independence, its hunger to rule—all that comes out with singularly vivid touches in the work of Augustin. Not only was he his country's voice, but, as far as he could, he realized its old dream of dominion. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... passionate murmur of his voice and mingled it with the rustling of the Sacred Tree whose restless, shimmering, silver leaves hung above his head. He understood their whisper as he listened. It was the accents of the god to whom he prayed, and all the poetic mysticism of his nature ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... inadequate account. How, it might have been asked, do you explain James Mill? His main purpose, too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery. If, in the attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of reducing morality to a lower level and made it appear as unamiable as sound morality can appear, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Philosophy had here the attraction of a more original type of mind, the effect being much the same as that produced by primitive painting, compared with a more developed stage. His very expression, God or Nature, had a fascinating mysticism about it. The chapter in the book which is devoted to the Natural History of passions, surprised and enriched one by its simple, but profound, explanation of the conditions of the human soul. And although his fight against Superstition's views of life is conducted with a keenness that scouts ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and Theodore Pavie's "Krichna et sa doctrine." ... The same theme has inspired some of the strangest productions of Hindoo art: for examples, see plates 65 and 66 of Moor's "Hindoo Pantheon" (edition of 1861). For accounts of the erotic mysticism connected with the worship of Krishna and the Gopia, the reader may also be referred to authorities cited in Barth's "Religions of India"; De Tassy's "Chants populaires de l'Inde"; and Lamairesse's "Poesies populaires du ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... Catalonia, where he captured three towns from the Spaniards. He afterwards led the French forces in Italy, but after his defeat before Alessandria in 1657 retired to Languedoc, where he devoted himself to study and mysticism until his death. At Clermont Conti had been a fellow student of Moliere's for whom he secured an introduction to the court of Louis XIV., but afterwards, when writing a treatise against the stage entitled Traite de la comedie et des spectacles selon les traditions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... will be pure from lust, from desire of property, from the taking of any life, from the assumption of any supernatural powers. Consider this last, how it disposes once and for all of any desire a monk may have toward mysticism, for this is what he ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... the supreme will of God; his faith soared triumphant over flesh and blood, and his disciples, disdaining the joys and the ties of earth, lived only for eternity. Madame Guyon and Fenelon, less ardent and less austere, discovered in the tender mysticism of pure love that secret of God's which is sought by all pious souls; in the name of divine love, the Quietists renounced all will of their own, just as the Jansenists ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... into the humbler conditions of life. On the whole, Buchanan is at his best in these narrative poems, though he essayed a more ambitious flight in The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic, a study in mysticism, which appeared in 1870. He was a frequent contributor to periodical literature, and obtained notoriety by an article which, under the nom de plume of Thomas Maitland, he contributed to the Contemporary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Christian before Christ, I do not therefore regard him as an unhellenic Greek. Rather, I trace back to him, and so to Greece, the religion and the political philosophy of the Christian Church, and the Christian type of mysticism. If Euripides anticipated to an extraordinary degree the devout agnosticism, the vague pantheism, the humanitarian sentiment of the nineteenth (rather than of the twentieth) century, I do not consider that he was a freak in fifth-century Athens, but that Greece showed ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... an elegant form. The eclectic minds of that curious time could derive equal satisfaction from the brilliant discourses of the reactionary jesuitical De Maistre, the revolutionary odes of Pushkin, and the mysticism of Frau von Krudener. For the majority the vague theosophic doctrines and the projects for a spiritual union of governments and peoples had perhaps the greatest charm, being specially commended by the fact that they enjoyed the protection and sympathy of the Emperor. Pious souls discovered ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... sonship. Pantheism is a theory of God's omnipresence, and may be little more than enthusiastic feeling of God's omnipresence, such as we have in the 139th psalm, "Whither shall I go from Thy presence? and whither shall I flee from Thy spirit?" That Oriental mysticism and loyalty to an idea we can allow for. It is in that aspect that pantheism is in closest contact with the belief of the new educated Hindu. But in brahmanical philosophy, pantheism is nothing else than ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand francs from Mdlle. Bertin, the Queen's milliner; but later to be famous for her literary and religious vagaries, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the strenuous opponent of Abaelard, and the great upholder of mysticism against rationalism in the early scholastic period when the two were not yet reconciled, gave utterance, in the course of his mystical effusions, to some special views of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... peculiar delusions for the trial of the spirit—mysticism in Bunyan's time, Puseyism in our days. Prior to the Reformation, the clergy, called the church, claimed implicit obedience from the laity as essential to salvation, and taught that inquiry was the high road to eternal ruin. After the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... decipher, picked up for a song at second-hand shops or on the book stands installed upon the parapets of the Seine. Only a man holding the key of tongues could get together such volumes. An atmosphere of mysticism, of superhuman insight, of secrets intact for many centuries appeared to emanate from these heaps of dusty volumes with worm-eaten leaves. And mixed with these ancient tomes were others red and conspicuous, pamphlets of socialistic propaganda, leaflets ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... head-lines—that soon sink into platitudinous prose; such robust swinging rhythms, Emerson told Walt that he must have had a "long foreground." It is true. Notwithstanding his catalogues of foreign countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called "mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism—what Coleridge called "the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. His chief asset is an extraordinary sensitiveness ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... friend. You must have been agitated by the intense ecstasy of the women, and you, as a sensible man, not inclined to mysticism, suspected me of fraud, of a hideous fraud. No, no, don't excuse yourself. I understand you. But I wish you would understand me. Out of the mire of superstitions, out of the deep gulf of prejudices and unfounded beliefs, I want to lead their strayed thoughts and place them ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
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