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metaphysical
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  • He said he wanted to 'dismiss all this meaningless nonsense which long has dominated metaphysical thought and brought it into disrepute.'†   (source)
  • Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition.†   (source)
  • Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms.†   (source)
  • I discovered that few nu shu documents—whether letters, stories, weavings, or embroideries—have survived, since most were burned at grave sites for metaphysical and practical reasons.†   (source)
  • Beethoven's hero is a lifter of metaphysical weights.†   (source)
  • I'm not sure if the question's rhetorical or if she thinks I have a clue to her metaphysical mystery.†   (source)
  • In this metaphysical reality Thomas has breached, blood also plays a critical role.†   (source)
  • Not the metaphysical…the ones with the god stones and the sacrifices and all the rest of it!†   (source)
  • You mean you don't have the comfort of an excuse, a metaphysical excuse.†   (source)
  • "So Pollack," she said, "founded Infiniface to facilitate this quest, to track research worldwide with an eye toward projects with…well, with metaphysical aspects that the scientists themselves might not recognize.†   (source)
  • My old friend Ork sat shaking his head in dismay, saying nothing, brooding, no doubt, on the dark metaphysical implications.†   (source)
  • He has to metaphysically transport a large mass over a vast distance in a tiny period of time.†   (source)
  • While I was writing a thesis on the influence-upon subsequent metaphysical systems-of Aristotle's theory of the Immovable Mover.†   (source)
  • I am unversed in the metaphysical, have long become estranged from it, and if this can be so, I believe the metaphysical is as much unversed in me.†   (source)
  • What metaphysical rapture could equal it for its substance, its frailty, and its beauty?†   (source)
  • Along with all this, I suppose I'm trying to say that I know how bitterly you resent the years when S. and I were regularly conducting home seminars, and the metaphysical sittings in particular.†   (source)
  • With me the most memorable of dreams, the ones that have achieved that haunting reality so intense as to be seemingly bound up in the metaphysical, have dealt with either sex or death.†   (source)
  • On the water, aboard the Proteus, the crowding, the activities, the tempo, of life in the cities, on the land, are muted, slowed, fictionalized, by the metaphysical distancing a few meters of water can provide.†   (source)
  • But it will not be easy; you have not studied metaphysical geometry—nor many other things.†   (source)
  • Carried away by their fantasy, people accused themselves falsely not only out of terror but out of a morbidly destructive impulse, of their own will, in a state of metaphysical trance, in a passion for self-condemnation which cannot be checked once you give it its head.†   (source)
  • We may be on the threshold of the greatest psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!†   (source)
  • "Let's play metaphysical I Spy," Lacey says.†   (source)
  • Time to get on with the Chautauqua and the second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical one.†   (source)
  • He was no longer talking about a metaphysical trinity but an absolute monism.†   (source)
  • His Quality was a metaphysical entity, not a mystic one.†   (source)
  • After all, Havilland's a class act — kind of metaphysical in this business.†   (source)
  • "Man's metaphysical pretensions," he said, "are preposterous.†   (source)
  • So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into metaphysical truth.†   (source)
  • Have you ever heard of The Metaphysical Contradictions of the Universe, by Dr. Simon Pritchett?†   (source)
  • What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?†   (source)
  • Destructions unnerving, in some metaphysical way unlawful, to Hodge.†   (source)
  • We prefer the safer method of metaphysical geometries—or 'magic' in the vulgar speech.†   (source)
  • "Well, from your essay, it seems as if you are drawn to what I'll call for lack of a better term, metaphysical territory.†   (source)
  • Metaphysical?†   (source)
  • He wondered it if might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence — into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed.†   (source)
  • …(indefatigable cook, joyous eater) had more than once introduced at the end of the evening over Armagnac while he was scrambling around for empty snuffboxes and extra saucers to serve as impromptu ashtrays for his guests: for him it was a metaphysical question, best considered on a full stomach after all the desserts were cleared and the final plate of jasmine caramels was being passed, because — really looking at the end of it, at the end of the night, closing your eyes and waving…†   (source)
  • When there's a lull in the conversation and Ben reaches for the radio knob, I say, "Metaphysical I Spy!"†   (source)
  • I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they — angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health?†   (source)
  • He knew the metaphysical trinity of subject, object and Quality would sooner or later have to be interrelated but he was in no hurry about it.†   (source)
  • Although he'd thought of it purely in philosophical terms up to now as metaphysical, he had all along refused to define it.†   (source)
  • Although there's no logical objection to a metaphysical trinity, a three-headed reality, such trinities are not common or popular.†   (source)
  • When Quality enters the picture as a third metaphysical entity, the preselection of facts is no longer arbitrary.†   (source)
  • He didn't go far enough into the metaphysical implications of what he was saying to arrive at the solution.†   (source)
  • To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular.†   (source)
  • Phaedrus doubted at the time, however, whether mystical Ones and metaphysical monisms were introconvertable since mystical Ones follow no rules and metaphysical monisms do.†   (source)
  • I think, furthermore, that all his metaphysical mountain climbing did absolutely nothing to further either our understanding of what Quality is or of what the Tao is.†   (source)
  • Metaphysical entities are defined.†   (source)
  • Now, armed with his new time-interrelated metaphysical trinity, he had that romantic-classic Quality split, the one which had threatened to ruin him, completely stopped.†   (source)
  • What he neglected to say was that the selection of facts before you "observe" them is "whatever you like" only in a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system!†   (source)
  • His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.†   (source)
  • What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this: _ What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this: _ The Quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.†   (source)
  • But first, to give this other specter his walking papers, I should say the following: Perhaps he would have gone in the direction I'm now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out where I'll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world.†   (source)
  • I mention this because I was talking to a rather pompous Orientalist over the weekend, and at one point, during a very deep, metaphysical lull in the conversation, I told him I had a little brother who once got over an unhappy love affair by trying to translate the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek.†   (source)
  • Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.†   (source)
  • In Kant's language, even Good morning, suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis.†   (source)
  • First (as an unfinished sketch) would have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece)the most frivolous of jokes!†   (source)
  • Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.†   (source)
  • His problem was metaphysical.†   (source)
  • My earliest conjecture—far-fetched even for a scientific ignoramus like myself (even then I was beginning to rue the lilac fin de siecle hours of my college days, with their total immersion in metaphysical poesy and Quality Lit.†   (source)
  • Metaphysical.†   (source)
  • Anything but a metaphysical explanation seemed utterly impossible for the fact that the love partner in her dream should have been a man whom she finally recognized as Walter Durrfeld and that she should have dreamed of him only the night before setting eyes on him for the first time in six years.†   (source)
  • This is a schoolboy problem in metaphysical geometry and the eldest proto-paradox, the one about the irresistible force and the immovable body.†   (source)
  • I thought seriously of creeping up to the flap of her tent and whispering to her that I wanted to ask a few questions about metaphysical geometry and like matters.†   (source)
  • And what, I have asked myself (pursuing George Steiner's speculation upon the existence of some sinister metaphysical time warp), were the activities of old Stingo, buck private in the United States Marine Corps, at the moment when the terrible last dustin a translucent curtain of powdery siftings so thick that, in Sophie's words, "you could taste it on the lips like sand"—of some 2,100 Jews from Athens and the Greek islands billowed across the vista upon which she had earlier fixed…†   (source)
  • She had said she wanted to talk to him, and it was pleasant to think it was really that--pleasant not so much in any sexual way as metaphysically, if that was not too big a word for it: pleasant to think she might innocently tell him the truth.†   (source)
  • But you don't like that word, so all I can say is that after you study higher geometries, metaphysical and conjectural as well as topological and judicial—if you care to make such study—I will gladly answer.†   (source)
  • Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different and a much clearer aspect.†   (source)
  • Not to the crude eye of the homme sensuel Metaphysically it was the Boss, but how was I to know?†   (source)
  • But I will beat you to the metaphysical draw this time.†   (source)
  • Thereupon the old demiurgic sire in the midst of his community became a metaphysical anachronism.†   (source)
  • The architect is a metaphysical priest dealing in basic essentials, who has the courage to face the primal conception of reality as nonreality—since there is nothing and he creates nothingness.†   (source)
  • The key to the modern systems of psychological interpretation therefore is this: the metaphysical realm = the unconscious.†   (source)
  • But what I couldn't stand up under at the moment was this glare, when she went so hot and white in the face with its strong nerve and metaphysical reckless assertion.†   (source)
  • The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims—and his life fully confirms—his metaphysical and mystical interests.†   (source)
  • I became skilled in ignoring these cosmic threats and developed a callousness toward all metaphysical preachments.†   (source)
  • [*1 [She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous obsession, especially with a woman, for women rarely possess men's healthy love of rhetoric.†   (source)
  • They seemed to expect me to clear myself--all, in their ruddiness and size, including the granny who was dissolving from both, losing color and getting small, an old creature in black, wearing pious wig and amulets, who looked to have metaphysical judgmental powers.†   (source)
  • He was as cynical as I was regarding uplift and hope, and we were proud of having escaped what we called the "childhood disease of metaphysical fear."†   (source)
  • The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered.†   (source)
  • Furthermore, the metaphysical pre-existence of the Platonic archetype of the shark is implied in the curious logic of the final dialogue.†   (source)
  • This Jack Burden (of whom the present Jack Burden, Me, is a legal, biological, and perhaps even metaphysical continuator) lived in a slatternly apartment with two other graduate students, one industrious, stupid, unlucky, and alcoholic and the other idle, intelligent, lucky, and alcoholic.†   (source)
  • Correspondingly, the key to open the door the other way is the same equation in reverse: the unconscious = the metaphysical realm.†   (source)
  • Mr. Poindexter reclined in his wheel chair, his transparent hands lying on the wine-colored silk of his dressing gown, his pale-blue eyes fixed on the metaphysical distance, and breathed each breath, saying, "Yes, young man—you have lied to me, of course—but I do not care—care why you want to know—it could not matter now—not to anyone—for they are all dead—Le Moyne Carruthers is dead—he was my friend—my dearest friend—but that was very long ago and I do not clearly recollect his…†   (source)
  • We now must describe it from the second, where it becomes a symbol of the same metaphysical mystery that it was the deed of the hero himself to rediscover and bring to view.†   (source)
  • Where the inherited symbols have been touched by a Lao Tze, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ, or Mohammed—employed by a consummate master of thespirit as a vehicle of the profoundest moral and metaphysical instruction—obviously we are in the presence rather of immense consciousness than of darkness.†   (source)
  • This idea is superbly rendered in another metaphysical genealogy of the Maoris: From the conception the increase, From the increase the thought, From the thought the remembrance, From the remembrance the consciousness, From the consciousness the desire.†   (source)
  • …fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God's Revelation to His children (the Church).†   (source)
  • The sophistication of the humor of the infantile imagery, when inflected in a skillful mythological rendition of metaphysical doctrine, emerges magnificently in one of the best known of the great myths of the Oriental world: the Hindu account of the primordial battle between the titans and the gods for the liquor of immortality.†   (source)
  • Very often, during the analysis and penetration of the secrets of archaic symbol, one can only feel that our generally accepted notion of the history of philosophy is founded on a completely false assumption, namely that abstract and metaphysical thought begins where it first appears in our extant records.†   (source)
  • This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan.†   (source)
  • Herr Naphta removed guilt and merit from the empirical world to the metaphysical.†   (source)
  • Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled from Carol.†   (source)
  • It is at once imaginative and metaphysical,—in short, Greek.†   (source)
  • Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple?†   (source)
  • ] Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.†   (source)
  • One of the merits of the Boosters' Club was that only two persons from each department of business were permitted to join, so that you at once encountered the Ideals of other occupations, and realized the metaphysical oneness of all occupations—plumbing and portrait-painting, medicine and the manufacture of chewing-gum.†   (source)
  • Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.†   (source)
  • The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.†   (source)
  • He had a practical mind and moved uneasily amid the abstract; but he found an unexpected fascination in listening to metaphysical disquisitions; they made him breathless; it was a little like watching a tight-rope dancer doing perilous feats over an abyss; but it was very exciting.†   (source)
  • …one would do well to treasure Mrs. Mudge's words, because even Zenith (and everybody knew that Zenith stood in the van of spiritual and New Thought progress) didn't often have the opportunity to sit at the feet of such an inspiring Optimist and Metaphysical Seer as Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, who had lived the Life of Wider Usefulness through Concentration, and in the Silence found those Secrets of Mental Control and the Inner Key which were immediately going to transform and bring Peace,…†   (source)
  • She taught French, English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the Ablative Absolute.†   (source)
  • But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognize and organize reality—space, time, causality—reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge.†   (source)
  • As for the valley, this winter valley under a deep blanket of snow, to which Hans Castorp likewise directed his metaphysical questions from his splendid lounge chair, its peaks, summits, ridges, and brown-green-reddish forests stood there silent in time, were draped in the web of silently flowing earthly days, now sparkling against the deep blue of the sky, now wrapped in mists, now aglow with the red of the setting sun, now glittering hard as diamonds in a world turned magical by…†   (source)
  • Unless she had now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,—had occasionally obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile panorama, or listening to a concert,—had gone shopping about the city, ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a ribbon,—had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in…†   (source)
  • Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor.†   (source)
  • If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual or possibly an isolated clique.†   (source)
  • He would transfer a question to metaphysical heights, pass on to definitions of space, time, and thought, and, having deduced the refutation he needed, would again descend to the level of the original discussion.†   (source)
  • But I swear I judge her intellectually, simply from the metaphysical point of view; there is a sort of symbolism sprung up between us, a sort of algebra or what not!†   (source)
  • Levin felt that it would be improper to enter upon a metaphysical discussion with the priest, and so he said in reply merely what was a direct answer to the question.†   (source)
  • This was very metaphysical; not more so, however, than several observations Madame Merle had already made.†   (source)
  • I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage.†   (source)
  • It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.†   (source)
  • He was a metaphysical puzzle to me.†   (source)
  • And it must be added that this was, for Newman, an unusually metaphysical flight; but in passing through Milan he had taken a great fancy to the painter.†   (source)
  • You gallop through it in a mackintosh, and presently find yourself in the seat you like best,—a little above or a little below the one on which your goddess sits (it is the same thing to the metaphysical mind, and that is the reason why women are at once worshipped and looked down upon), with a satisfactory confidence that there will be no lady-callers.†   (source)
  • A metaphysical school of the North, impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the word Will.†   (source)
  • Her father liked the metaphysical streak which had unconsciously got into it, so that was allowed to remain though she had her doubts about it.†   (source)
  • Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.†   (source)
  • Newman gave a short laugh, but the old man seemed for the moment not to perceive it; he was gazing away, absently, at some metaphysical image of his implacability.†   (source)
  • Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence.†   (source)
  • By-and-by, when you've got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels," said Amy, who took a strictly practical view of the subject.†   (source)
  • If it is true that one must always have in one's work here below a religion, or at least an ideal, of some sort, Newman found his metaphysical inspiration in a vague acceptance of final responsibility to some illumined feminine brow.†   (source)
  • "Well," said Jo, laughing, "if my people are 'philosophical and metaphysical', it isn't my fault, for I know nothing about such things, except what I hear father say, sometimes.†   (source)
  • So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.†   (source)
  • Some of his reasonings not appearing to me well founded, I wrote a little metaphysical piece in which I made remarks on them.†   (source)
  • …carrying to the equal beam, That poises all above;" and from the attributes of God, his infinite wisdom, goodness and power, concluded that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions, no such things existing, appear'd now not so clever a performance as I once thought it; and I doubted whether some error had not insinuated itself unperceiv'd into my argument, so as to infect all that follow'd, as is common in metaphysical reasonings.†   (source)
  • The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the human.†   (source)
  • Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation…†   (source)
  • Hie thee hither, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear; And chastise with the valor of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round, Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crown'd withal.†   (source)
  • The faculties of the mind itself have never yet been distinguished and defined, with satisfactory precision, by all the efforts of the most acute and metaphysical philosophers.†   (source)
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