Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume 2

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Brown and Taggard, 1860 - English essays
 

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Page 117 - Flowers,' or a baser kind of dust, we shall not predict. We give them in a miscellaneous shape ; overlooking those classifications which, even in the text, are not and could not be very rigidly adhered to. ' Philosophy can bake no bread ; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality.
Page 484 - ... it may be asserted that no good Book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first ; nay that the commonest quality in a true work of Art, if its excellence have any depth and compass, is that at first sight it occasions a certain disappointment; perhaps even, mingled with its undeniable beauty, a certain feeling of aversion.
Page 231 - Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society ; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies. But if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us; how much more must these million...
Page 484 - He loves external Nature with a singular depth ; nay, we might say, he reverences her, and holds unspeakable communings with her : for Nature is no longer dead, hostile Matter, but the veil and mysterious Garment of the Unseen ; as it were, the Voice with which the Deity proclaims himself to man.
Page 212 - The treasures of his mind are of a similar description with the mind itself ; his knowledge is gathered from all the kingdoms of Art, and Science, and Nature, and lies round him in huge unwieldy heaps. His very language is Titanian ; deep, strong, tumultuous, shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand elements, and winding in labyrinthic mazes.
Page 118 - The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (SelbstWdtung) ; this is the real beginning of all Philosophy ; all requisites for being a Disciple of Philosophy point hither. This Act alone corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of transcendental conduct. — ' To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.
Page 457 - Le premier des arts, la musique, qu'imite-t-il? De tous les dons de la Divinite", cependant, c'est le plus magnifique, car il semble, pour ainsi dire, superflu. Le soleil nous e"claire, nous respirons...
Page 23 - Appearance," was never more invisible to any man. He reads History not with the eye of a devout seer, or even of a critic ; but through a pair of mere anti-catholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of Infinitude, with Suns for lamps, and Eternity as a background ; whose author is God, and whose purport and thousand-fold moral lead us up to the
Page 138 - Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age.
Page 135 - Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

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