United States or Turks and Caicos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then he launched out into the praises of a monastic life, which no noise disturbs, no cares molest, and no danger invades where the heart is weaned from carnal attachments, the grosser appetite subdued and chastised, and the soul wafted to divine regions of philosophy and truth, on the wing of studious contemplation.
A system thus based upon severe mathematical considerations, and taking as its starting-point a vacuum and atoms the former actionless and passionless; which considers the production of new things as only new aggregations, and the decay of the old as separations; which recognizes in compound bodies specific arrangements of atoms to one another; which can rise to the conception that even a single atom may constitute a world such a system may commend itself to our attention for its results, but surely not to our approval, when we find it carrying us to the conclusions that even mathematical cognition is a mere semblance; that the soul is only a finely-constituted form fitted into the grosser bodily frame; that even for reason itself there is an absolute impossibility of all certainty; that scepticism is to be indulged in to that degree that we may doubt whether, when a cone has been cut asunder, its two surfaces are alike; that the final result of human inquiry is the absolute demonstration that man is incapable of knowledge; that, even if the truth be in his possession, he can never be certain of it; that the world is an illusive phantasm, and that there is no God.
If men lived more in the society of women they would be astonished to find how much purer and higher-toned their nature would become; how the mental assimilation was refining their wilder dispositions, their grosser passions. If such was your experience, you would tell me in one year that men and women do not mingle enough."
He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of innovation to its power.
Noting the vast increase in his family, he would then say: "Let us go and make a world upon which my family of spirits may live in bodies of grosser matter, and so gain valuable experience." At the word of command, thereupon spoken by Brigham, the elements would come together in a new world.
Her father looked at her, and his brow got sad; but there was no longer the darkness of resentment or indignation there; so true is it that suffering chastens the heart into its noblest affections, and purges it of the gloomier and grosser passions.
But though the philosophy founded on the hypothesis of a state of nature has fallen low in general esteem, in so far as it is looked upon under its coarser and more palpable aspect, it does not follow that in its subtler disguises it has lost plausibility, popularity, or power. I believe, as I have said, that it is still the great antagonist of the Historical Method; and whenever (religious objections apart) any mind is seen to resist or contemn that mode of investigation, it will generally be found under the influence of a prejudice or vicious bias traceable to a conscious or unconscious reliance on a non-historic, natural, condition of society or the individual. It is chiefly, however, by allying themselves with political and social tendencies that the doctrines of Nature and her law have preserved their energy. Some of these tendencies they have stimulated, others they have actually created, to a great number they have given expression and form. They visibly enter largely into the ideas which constantly radiate from France over the civilised world, and thus become part of the general body of thought by which its civilisation is modified. The value of the influence which they thus exercise over the fortunes of the race is of course one of the points which our age debates most warmly, and it is beside the purpose of this treatise to discuss it. Looking back, however, to the period at which the theory of the state of nature acquired the maximum of political importance, there are few who will deny that it helped most powerfully to bring about the grosser disappointments of which the first French Revolution was fertile. It gave birth, or intense stimulus, to the vices of mental habit all but universal at the time, disdain of positive law, impatience of experience, and the preference of
He was even famous for his dancing, and had composed an intelligent and philosophical treatise upon the value of that amusement, as an agent of civilisation, and as a counteractor of the grosser pleasures of the table to which Upper and Nether Germans were too much addicted.
From under her half-fallen lids shot gleams of fire that transfixed any upon whom they fell; from her supple body shaken at times with the power of its own dynamic force her hearers caught the grosser infection of physical excitement; they swayed with her as blown by the wind; they ceased to breathe in her periods; they groaned as the intensity of her fervor pressed upon them for response that they could not shape in words; they wept, they shouted, they prophesied, and over them swept ever the witchery of her wonderful voice, preaching impiety the worship of Seraiah!
Surely, though we place hell under earth, the devil's walk and purlieu is about it: men speak too popularly who place it in those flaming mountains, which to grosser apprehensions represent hell. The heart of man is the place the devils dwell in. I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.
Word Of The Day