Attempts at Truth

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Trübner & Company, 1882 - Immortality - 248 pages

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Page 241 - WHY should we faint and fear to live alone, Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die,* Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh...
Page 48 - A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.
Page 10 - The internal sanction of duty, whatever our standard of duty may be, is one and the same— a feeling in our own mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation of duty, which in properly cultivated moral natures rises, in the more serious cases, into shrinking from it as an impossibility. This feeling, when disinterested and connecting itself with the pure idea of duty, and not with some particular form of it, or with any of the merely accessory circumstances, is the essence of conscience...
Page 231 - ... for every fact of consciousness, whether in the domain of sense, of thought, or of emotion, a certain definite molecular condition is set up in the brain...
Page 55 - The gravity, solidity, age, and probity of so great an emperor, who through the whole course of his life, conversed in a familiar manner, with his friends and courtiers, and never affected those extraordinary airs of divinity assumed by Alexander and Demetrius.
Page 239 - God! — Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever.
Page 244 - Back to thy hell ! Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shall possess me, that I know: What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine : The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts...
Page 221 - But the principle or inclination in one case is self-love ; in the other, hatred or love of another. There is then a distinction between the cool principle of self-love, or general desire of our own happiness, as one part of our nature, and one principle of action ; and the particular affections towards particular external objects, as another part of our nature, and another principle of action.
Page 178 - I am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things ™ ; since those immediate objects of perception, which, according to you, are only appearances of things, I take to be the real things themselves.
Page 241 - Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine — all things in nature are different to each — the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other — you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.

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