Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
Unhappily, the opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected to homeopathic dilution. It assumes to be prophetical, and its utterances are oracular.
He disallowed all prophecy, divination, and oracular inspiration, by which the public around him believed that the gods were perpetually communicating special revelations to individuals, and for which Sokrates had felt so peculiarly thankful.
For this reason, among others, friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony between men and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality lies precisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding, but is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the dark. As man's body differs from woman's in sex and strength, so his mind differs from hers in quality and function: they can co-operate but can never fuse. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organised like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or less than friendship: less, because there is no intellectual parity; more, because (even when the relation remains wholly dispassionate, as in respect to old ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular about a woman's mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and puts it out of the question to judge what she says by masculine standards. She has a kind of sibylline intuition and the right to be irrationally
I thought I perceived in the scene that was passing before us, an exhibition that is not uncommon on our earth, of cunning knavery imposing on ignorance and credulity; and I expressed my opinion to the Brahmin; but he assured me that the class of persons in the moon, who were resorted to on account of their supposed powers of divination, was very different from the similar class in Asia or Europe, and that oracular art was here regularly studied and professed as a branch of philosophy.
It was in this spirit that the Catholics dealt with the oracles of heathendom. Mr. Lecky is hardly correct when he says that nothing analogous to the ancient oracles was incorporated with Christianity. There is the notable case of the god Sosthenion, whom Constantine identified with the archangel Michael, and whose oracular functions were continued in a precisely similar manner by the latter.
He was smoking a cigar, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and had that confident oracular air which marked him as the leading politician, general authority, and universal anecdote-relater, of the place.
I saw that the Oxonian was at the bottom of all this oracular mystery, and was disposed to amuse himself with the general, whose tender approaches to the widow have attracted the notice of the wag.
"We were woefully ignorant when we began, a few weeks ago," commented Beth, glancing with pride at her latest editorial, which she thought had caught the oracular tone of the big city newspapers. "And we're not expert journalists, even yet," added Louise, with a sigh. "We've improved, to be sure; but I imagine there is still lots of room for improvement."
Dee passed six years on the continent, proceeding from the court of one prince or potent nobleman to another, listened to for a time by each, each regarding his oracular communications with astonishment and alarm, and at length irresolutely casting him off, when he found little or no difficulty in running a like career with another.
It was remembered that this Delphian god had promised the Lacedaemonians, in reply to their application immediately before the war, that he would assist them whether invoked or uninvoked; and the disorder now raging was ascribed to the intervention of their irresistible ally; while the elderly men further called to mind an oracular verse sung in the time of their youth: "The Dorian war will come, and pestilence along with it."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking