The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular PhilosophyLongmans, Green, and Company, 1896 - 332 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
A. R. Wallace absolutely abstract actually appears believe better casuistic chance character conceiving conception concrete consciousness course demands determinism deterministic divine Edmund Gurney emotional empiricism empiricist environment escape essence eternal ethical evidence evil existence experience fact faith feel genius give gnosticism Grant Allen heart Hegel hegelian human hypothesis ideal identity indeterminism individual infinite intellectual judgment kind living logical matter means mediumship ment mental mind monism mood moral moral universe nature of things negation ness never notion object option outward passion pessimism phenomena philosopher physical point of view possible practical principle prove pure question rational reason reflex action regret relations religion religious result rience scepticism scientific seems sense simply sort space subjectivism suppose telepathy theism theoretic theory thinker thou thought tion true truth ultimate unity universe whole word
Popular passages
Page 62 - These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The 'scientific proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the fainthearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry...
Page 150 - With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead, And there of the Last Harvest sowed the Seed; And the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
Page 144 - Unshatter'd; then full-current thro' full man ; And last in kindly curves, with gentlest fall, By quiet fields, a slowly-dying power, To that last deep where we and thou are still. n. OCT of the deep, my child, out of the deep, From that great deep, before our world begins, Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will — Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, From that true world within the world we see, Whereof our world is but the bounding shore — i )ut of the deep.
Page 25 - There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the "lowest kind of immorality" into which a thinking being can fall.
Page 11 - Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open...
Page 44 - Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!
Page 74 - Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love...
Page 229 - They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between. But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been.
Page 213 - He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha ; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.
Page 30 - The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds.