self-advancing

Updated: June 8, 2025

It was not for nothing that, in his college days, he had hunted the hypothetical "moral sense" to its lair, and dragged from their concealment the various self-advancing sentiments dissembled under its edifying guise. His strength lay in his precocious insight into the springs of action, and in his refusal to classify them according to the accepted moral and social sanctions.

Edith Wharton - Tales of Men and Ghosts

And what a power there must be in art itself for its own self-advancing, when it has been obliged to shape itself almost solely out of what was open to all, only out of what was the property of every one, and therefore also of the artist!" "There is a conception among old nations which is awful, and may almost seem terrible.

- The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 02 : Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes