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Updated: June 26, 2025
Of spiritual religion, indeed, the lower millions of Chinese have now but little conception; their nearest approach to any supernaturalism is the worship of deceased ancestors, and their religious observances are the grossest formalism. But as a practical system of morals in the days of its early establishment, the religion of Confucius ranks very high among the best developments of Paganism.
"That was a revolt of deep thinkers against a service which has all the mechanical artifice of Romanism without its strong appeal to the heart and the senses dry, empty, rigid a repetition of vain phrases. If I am ever to bow my neck beneath the Church's yoke, let me swallow the warm-blooded errors of Papacy rather than the heartless formalism of English Episcopacy."
They had not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way.
Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in, these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary.
The city had become the vortex of the energy, virility and vice of east and west a glory of marble and gilded cornices, of domes and spires, of costumes, habits, faces, languages of gorgeousness and squalor license, privilege and rigid formalism extravagance and of innumerable gods.
Of course the character is formal, and in some respects even grotesque. But you may trace formalism, if you look closely enough, in every life led by a rule; in everything in fact between the purest spiritual impulse on one side and abandoned sensuality on the other.
It is true, many of the faithful were attracted by Cabbalistic wonders and the strange hope of being saved from a bitter exile by a Messianic Sabbatai Zevi. But these wayward deviations, in reality not so very far removed from orthodox tradition, exhibited only the more clearly the fearsome inner insecurity which a strained formalism in thought and habit bravely attempted to cover.
Thus the administration of justice, whose object is the proper interest of all individuals, had at one time been perverted into an instrument of gain and despotism, owing to the fact that the knowledge of the law was hidden under a learned and foreign language, and the knowledge of legal procedure under an involved formalism.
You can imagine the sort of work I was doing for those exporting people of course, I always intended to draw; do illustrating for magazines; there's a pile of money in it." "Why didn't you? You've got to buckle down if you want to make good," suggested Dean with cold formalism. "I tried, a little, but my stuff's crude. I've got talent, Phil; I can draw but I just don't know how.
It is old-world music, yet it stands nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after Handel's period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic. There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication that the Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth century was coming.
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