Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
You may think that I am subtilizing my impressions on purpose, but you may take it from a man who has lived a rough, a very rough life, that it is the subtleties of personalities, and contacts, and events, that count for interest and memory—and pretty well nothing else. This—you see—is the last evening of that part of my life in which I did not know that woman.
By subtilizing, the modern theologian becomes as little intelligible to himself as to others. Ask him what he means by a spirit? He will answer, that it is an unknown substance, which is perfectly simple, which has nothing tangible, nothing in common with matter. In good faith, is there any mortal who can form the least idea of such a substance?
It was inevitable that in their time the English romanticists should treat, as Senor Valdes says, "the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them, as Walter Scott and his kind did;" that they should "devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst.
The savage, when he speaks of a spirit, affixes, at least, some idea to the word; he means thereby an agent, like the air, the breeze, the breath, that invisibly produces discernible effects. By subtilizing every thing, the modern theologian becomes as unintelligible to himself as to others. Ask him, what he understands by a spirit?
Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the progress of consumption? When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed to me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will.
Beside it relieved me from a multitude of labours and cares, for, as I proceeded, Thomas Aquinas and his subtilizing competitors were thrown by in contempt. I had learned divinity by inspiration, and soon believed myself fit for a reformer.
And because that reality must weigh more heavily on him than her, she was trying to defend him too, against himself, to force on him, against himself, her own subtilizing, justifying view. But his subtlety was a match for hers. "Your cousin once did me the honour to say I was one-seventh part a poet, and upon my honour I prefer his estimate to yours." "What is mine?" "That I'm nothing but a poet.
It seemed to be forgotten that a language with all its construction visible is a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that its images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certain spiritualizing and subtilizing effect of alien derivations is a privilege and an advantage incalculable that to possess that half of the language within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead tongue, without the death.
Thus by dint of reasoning, by force of subtilizing, the word spirit no longer presents any one image upon which the mind can fix itself; when they are desirous to speak of it, it becomes impossible to understand them, seeing that each visionary paints it after his own manner; and in the portrait he forms, consults only his own temperament, follows nothing but his own imagination, adopts nothing but his own peculiar reveries; the only point in which they are at all in unison, is in assigning to it inconceivable qualities, which they naturally enough believe are best suited to the incomprehensible beings they have delineated: from the incompatible heap of these qualities, generally resulted a whole, whose existence they thus rendered impossible.
John is attested to have declared this, "not even as shaded over, but on the contrary as placed in full view." Stranger still. Whitaker could scarcely have read the Greek. That this is his meaning, consult Plotinus. Ib. 9. p. 107. "Seest thou not," adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being into power, and dividing the Logos into two.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking