United States or Guernsey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Honeythunder's loud appeal, but his eye to catch the often ludicrous aspect of honest whimsey. During all the early years of his literary career he flew his flashing darts at all the "isms", and he fell under the doubt and censure of those earnest children of the time whom the gay and clever sceptics derided as apostles of the newness.
But to this author the errors of the fathers seemed capital; worthy, in fact, of forming his principal object; and, knowing their great authority in the Papal church, he anticipated, in the plan of attaching his own views to the false views of the fathers, an opening to a double patronage that of the Protestants, in the first place, as interested in all doctrines seeming to be anti-papal; that of the sceptics, in the second place, as interested in the exposure of whatever had once commanded, but subsequently lost, the superstitious reverence of mankind.
The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles.
As to the dangers of maritime life, we are all agreed that they are greatly overrated; and some sceptics even go so far as to suggest that the skeleton ship, half embedded in the sands, which so impresses visitors in fine weather, is not a genuine wreck at all, but has been placed there by the Town Corporation to delude the public.
On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching in a little restaurant in Soho in company with three or four of my best friends. My best friends are all either bottomless sceptics or quite uncontrollable believers, so our discussion at luncheon turned upon the most ultimate and terrible ideas.
Because he said that evidence alone and the free investigation of evidence led to truth, he has become the ancestor of the sceptics who are persuaded that surrender must be made only to evidence and that evidence cannot be found; and he has become the ancestor of the positivists who believe that evidence certainly exists somewhere, but not in metaphysics or in theodicy, or in knowledge of the soul, of immortality, and of God, branches of knowledge which surpass our means of knowing, which are in fact outside knowledge.
Presently, as the smoke curled upward with its lazy demeanour, the horror that had hung like a thin vapour in the atmosphere seemed to be dissipated. "Now I think we are ourselves again, and can be reasonable," Valentine began. "Don't let us be hysterical. Spiritualists always suffer from hysteria." "The sceptics say, Val." "And probably they are generally right.
One or two who inquired too much felt the weight of his hand, and forthwith the percentage of sceptics decreased marvellously. Clay watched on, non-interferent, hugging himself with amusement, but not daring to let a trace of it be seen.
The angels, with their harps, on clouds, are now presented to the eyes, even of faith, in vain; they are still appreciated on canvas by an old master, but to become one of them is no longer the common aspiration. It is not the sceptics though their influence is getting to be considerable who have wrought this change, but the conditions of modern life.
The experiments of two Frenchmen, Hippolyte L. Fizeau and Leon Foucault, served finally to convince the last lingering sceptics that light is an undulation; and by implication brought heat into the same category, since James David Forbes, the Scotch physicist, had shown in 1837 that radiant heat conforms to the same laws of polarization and double refraction that govern light.
Word Of The Day