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Idealistic   Listen
adjective
Idealistic  adj.  Of or pertaining to idealists or their theories.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Idealistic" Quotes from Famous Books



... wonder now if Mr. Donald had been right in his idealistic way of looking at life and labor. She had always thought so until this minute, and many a thrill of pride had she experienced in thinking of her parents and their days of struggling. They had been and ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... There was nothing idealistic in the plan of Lord Robert Cecil, although he was reputed to be an idealist favoring a new international order. An examination of his plan (Appendix) shows it to be a substantial revival of the old and discredited ideas of a century ago. There could be no doubt that ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing

... other. "There are several kinds of logic. This is the enlightened kind. America is all right. It is this country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality. The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices, and that is fatal to our work. You talk of England being our only refuge! So much the worse. Capua! What do we want with refuges? Here you talk, print, plot, and do nothing. I daresay it's very convenient ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... one feels certain enough that amid the jolts and jars and shocks of actual life even the most idealistic of philosophers leave their logic to shift for itself and just drift on as they may in the groove of traditional usages or the track ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... de Lionne went down several degrees. Lieutenant Feraud did not seem to him specially worthy of attention on the part of a woman with a reputation for sensibility and elegance. But there was no saying. At bottom they were all alike—very practical rather than idealistic. Lieutenant D'Hubert, however, did not allow his mind to dwell on these considerations. "By thunder!" he reflected aloud. "The general goes there sometimes. If he happens to find the fellow making eyes at the lady there will be the devil to pay. Our general ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad

... Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Danish England, and the whole meaning of English history is missed in antedating that achievement by several hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evade difficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growth alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in political controversy. Tacitus, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... identifies himself with the form that perishes instead of with the life which is deathless. Hence, opposed to materialism alike in science and philosophy, it builds up a spiritual conception of the universe, and necessarily it is idealistic in its thought, and holds up the importance of the ideal as a guide to all human activity. The ideal, which is thought applied to conduct, that is the keynote of Theosophy and its value in the varied worlds of thought; and the power of thought, the might of thought, the ability that ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... altogether fortunate for Clarence Weston that his mother had been ultra-conservative in her respect for traditions, since he had inherited one side of her nature. Still, in her case, at least, the respect had been idealistic, and the traditions of the highest; and though she had died when he was eighteen she had instilled into him a certain delicacy of sentiment and a simple, chivalrous code that had somewhat hampered him in the rough life he had led ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... decent length of time and to get a decent living for doing so; to be able to arrange the little personal details of one's own life. It is the aggregate of these and many other items of freedom which makes up the great idealistic Freedom. The minor forms of Freedom lubricate the everyday life of ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... conferences. He mentioned his friends, Lord Wycombe, Colonel Wedgwood, Professor Piccoli. Babbitt had always supposed that Doane associated only with the I. W. W., but now he nodded gravely, as one who knew Lord Wycombes by the score, and he got in two references to Sir Gerald Doak. He felt daring and idealistic and cosmopolitan. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... well-feathered nest. For some privileged young people, willing to settle for comfort and conformity, civilization offers the leisure to learn, and an opportunity to test themselves out against a big field of ardent competitors. But for energetic, forward-looking, idealistic young people, the opportunities offered by western civilization are deemed inconsequential, trivial and in the long run, inadequate. For them, the game is not ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... is, like the body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a fit dwelling-place for itself—this explanation is too simple and too idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for electric and chemic ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... to listen to the gorgeous day-dreams of the two, I felt dejectedly that my own most radiant visions were by comparison the offspring of a lifeless and gloomy fancy. There was nothing problematical or idealistic in their ideas of a happy destiny. What they wanted was, in the first place, money; in the second place, money; thirdly and finally, money. I doubt whether Mrs. Lenox ever resigned herself to the sway of fiction or poetry, but I am sure that had she studied Shakespeare she would have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... impressed with my companion's remarkable singleness of purpose. Everything was a pretext for some wildly idealistic rhapsody or reverie. Nothing could be seen or said that did not lead him sooner or later to a glowing discourse on the true, the beautiful, and the good. If my friend was not a genius, he was certainly a monomaniac; and I found as ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James

... which he would be going into Palestine, all had been very nice to him, friendly, and as it were indulgent; so might schoolboys have treated some well-intentioned dreamy master, or business men a harmless idealistic inventor who came visiting their offices. He had even the feeling that they were glad to have him about, just as they were glad to have their mascots and their regimental colours; but of heart-to-heart simple comradeship—it seemed they neither wanted it of him nor expected ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... be correct," admitted Penelope, "though a trifle idealistic for the twentieth century. Most men," she added drily, "Regard coaling up the fire as a damned nuisance rather than a 'history ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... realist—dinglich, as the Germans would say—which may without great violence be translated "material." It is the sacrament most genuinely ex opere operato, for which is substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word. Fundamentally it is concerned with—and I say it with all possible respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the phrase—the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... though in a somewhat idealistic sense, is it with what we may term vital energy. Cells, organisms, even whole races, are subject to degeneration and decay. They cannot acquire higher powers, though they may gradually lose what they already have; ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... these thoughts were sordid, humiliating, and degrading. They were unbidden, but still they came. They came from some dark fountain within herself. She really wanted—her idealistic self wanted—to be all that she knew she looked, a flower in life and thought. But, oh, it was hard, hard for her to be what she wished! Why should it be so ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... it, is but another incidental proof of this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson. I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success—he ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... art, the movement in the direction of realistic art, as opposed to idealistic, is the most marked development of later days. But I believe that there is still a further possibility of development, a combination of prose and poetry, which may be confidently expected ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... than as an ideal of the man he would have wished to be. The poet in "Alastor", Laon in the "Revolt of Islam", Lionel in "Rosalind and Helen", and Prince Athanase, are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life, Shelley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... spoken; but now he began to unburden himself of those opinions, hopes, fancies and idealistic meditations for which I had come so far to see him. In order that there shall be no ambiguity I have arranged for them to be set up in larger type than the rest of the article. After all, any type will suit my own poor setting, but the jewels, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various

... movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement. A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be intrinsically intolerable. To make the matter clear, it is better to take a specific example. Certain of the idealistic vegetarians, such as Mr. Salt, say that the time has now come for eating no meat; by implication they assume that at one time it was right to eat meat, and they suggest (in words that could be quoted) that some day it may be wrong to eat milk and eggs. I do ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... like this... is worth a dozen of the aspiring, idealistic sort, since it has a deal of rough laughter and a dash of ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... Hinayana, or Minor Vehicle, which, as we should expect, is not extensively represented in Japan. The Hinayana is represented by four philosophical schools, in two of which the materialistic element predominates, and in the two other the idealistic; while eschatological questions afford further ground for difference. The points in dispute between these philosophical schools of Buddhism are altogether so subtle and abstruse as to be extremely difficult of comprehension to any not ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... with an ironclad contract. Agents; dealerships; distributors and a general salesmanager, Albert Weener, at the top. Incorporate. Get it all down in black and white and signed by Miss Francis right away. For her own good. An idealistic scientist, a frail woman, protect her from the vultures who'd try to rob her as soon as they saw what the Metamorphizer would do. Such a woman wouldnt have any business sense. I'd see she got a comfortable living out of it and free her from ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... the hunter roams in loneliness, and the night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. The French came to convert the Indians, not to found empire, and the English Loyalists came from the promptings of their convictions. Both streams of settlers came from idealistic motives, but both had to live, and they did it at ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... facts. With regard to our tradition, it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since the seventeenth century have been pouring into this continent a proportion large in number, larger still in influence, has been possessed of motives which in part at least were idealistic. If it was not the desire for religious freedom that urged them, it was the desire for personal freedom; if not political liberty, why then economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the opportunity to raise the standard of life. And of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... philosophy. The Ionic philosophers had sought to find the first principle of all things in the elements, and the Pythagoreans in number, or harmony and law, implying an intelligent creator. The Eleatics, who now arose, went beyond the realm of physics to pure metaphysical inquiries, to an idealistic pantheism, which disregarded the sensible, maintaining that the source of truth is independent of the senses. Here they were ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... where inquiry is active diversity will obtain. But to-day there appears a strange unanimity as regards the ultimate formula of ethics. The empirical schools state this as the highest form of the struggle for existence; the idealistic, as self-realization. The two are the same so far as they both regard morality as having to do with the development of life in persons. These curious beings, both also acknowledge, can never rest till they ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... the eternal laws of nature. The woman, refusing to be a woman, engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the Evil Spirit as a bodily entity, with big horns, fiery eyes, a reddish, protruding tongue, a long tail, and the hoof of a horse. In this latter attribute ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... great work, Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, directed against Hume's Essay on Human Nature. Up to the appearance of the latter work in 1739 R. had been a follower of Berkeley, but the conclusions drawn therein from the idealistic philosophy led him to revise his theories, and to propound what is usually known as the "common sense" philosophy, by which term is meant the beliefs common to rational beings as such. In 1785 he pub. his Essay ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... viewed through the more equable, artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own didactic purposes. Realism? Yes, such as the world has never before seen, and yet at times as idealistic as Shelley. It is not surprising that Mr. John M. Robertson wrote, as far back as 1891: "In that strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in the production of truthful literary ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... sure, when Germans had in the course of centuries grown accustomed to the degradation of being robbed of all political significance, a large section of our people did not feel this insufficiency. Even during the age of our classical literature the patriotic pride of that idealistic generation "was contented with the thought that no other people could follow the bold flights of German genius or soar aloft to the freedom of ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... man jumped up from his chair and faced his father with all the idealistic enthusiasm ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... up by Kathryn—for it was thus that Doctor Eustace Keltridge diagnosed their entrance into matrimony. However, the doctor lacked some knowledge of the determining factors in the case. He had no notion how Kathryn had spread her net before the idealistic young student who was too intent upon his personal problems, as concerned his choice of a profession and his duty to his mother, to heed the matrimonial pitfalls ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... on man's behalf,' says Professor Pringle-Pattison, 'must be based on the objectivity of the values revealed in his experience, and brokenly realised there. Man does not make values any more than he makes reality.' Our contention is that the world of values, which forms the content of idealistic thought and aspiration, is the real world; and in this world we ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... warned him that their marriage would be an incomplete relationship Tollman had inwardly smiled. Of her faithfulness he could be sure and she herself would be his. The rest was a somewhat gossamer and idealistic matter which her youth ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... works abound with rare qualities, forming a harmonious ensemble; they also exhibit great observation and knowledge of humanity, and through all of them runs an incomparable and distinctive charm. He will always be considered the leader of the idealistic school in the nineteenth century. It is now fifteen years since his death, and the judgment of posterity is that he had a great imagination, linked to great analytical power and insight; that his style is neat, pure, and fine, and at the same time brilliant and concise. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... teacher's mind; according to his bias of class, birth, or training; according to whether he has been formed or deformed by some strong personality whose disciple he has become; according to whether he is a radical or a conservative; according to whether he is the dreamy, idealistic type or whether he hankers after concrete facts; according to whether sociology is a primary interest or only an ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... with that broad-gage examination which sees even universities as futile in the endless shift of things; the other with that faith in the balance for right which makes even great personal forces, such as financial magnates, serve an idealistic end. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... plunge into that Serbonian bog—the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic academicians—I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what kind of shoes they are to be,—court pumps or strong walking shoes; and I don't ask the shoemaker to give me ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... satisfaction at the fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping, hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most utilitarian and idealistic public in the world ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... youth of Bolivar was more or less like that of the other boys of his city and station, except that he gave evidence of a certain precocity and nervousness of action and speech which distinguished him as an enthusiastic and somewhat idealistic boy. ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell

... to make young, idealistic physicians become rather disillusioned about treating degenerative conditions because the end result of all their efforts is, in the end, death anyway. The best they can do is to alleviate suffering and to a degree, ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... balcony watching the white forms change across between the overs, the red ball bounce along the grass, the wicket-keeper whip off the bails, the umpire's finger go up. The whole tableau was so unreal, so idealistic. Then the school would come down after lunch with rugs and cushions, and would clamour outside the tuck-shop for ices and ginger beer. Gordon could hardly connect his present existence with the past two years of doubts, uncertainties, wild excitements, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... left to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners. In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... discoveries in medicine. From his Fa'a seclusion he followed these very closely through European publications, for which his slender funds went. He had a curiously opposed nature, quoting with enthusiasm the idealistic philosophers, and descending into such abject materialism as haunting the bishop's palace ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... ladies, here's your chance to prove it! That's what brings me today. As two of the self-respecting, idealistic and womanly women of this community, I have come to urge you ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... looks for no more in a book than that it should satisfy the natural tendencies of his own mind, wants the writer to respond to his predominant taste, and he invariably praises a work or a passage which appeals to his imagination, whether idealistic, gay, licentious, melancholy, dreamy, or positive, as "striking" or ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... reckless bravery, however, would quail a little, I fancy, at the idea of having your most intimate feelings called out from the housetops and discussed in the streets. And remember, please, that Robert is a dreamer—a poet. Of course, in every active expedition there must be some few idealistic, Quixotic souls who have to suffer vicariously for the rest. He is such an one. But that sort of feeling of soreness which comes from the sense of martyrdom is not quite the same as a raw wound on one's own personal score. I do hope I am clear. I try to look on ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... any easier. I'm not at all sure of that. But if so it can't be a very idealistic sentiment. All the warmth of his idealism is concentrated upon a certain 'Americain, Catholique ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... after, Scholars became conversant with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the great tragic poets Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus; and translations for the many of Vergil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca poured forth from the printing-presses of London. The English mind was strongly tempered by the idealistic philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the influence of Latin tragedy and comedy was strongly felt by the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... a very high type. At once strongly realistic and powerfully idealistic."—London ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... upon fertility rather than consistency of mind. He was a disciple of John Quincy Adams, but his tireless energy had in it too much of nervous unrest to allow him to stick to his books as did his master, and there was too wide a gap between his beliefs and his practice. He held as idealistic views as any man of his generation, but he believed so firmly that the right would win that he disliked hastening its victory at the expense of bad feeling. He was shrewd, practical—maliciously practical, many thought. When, in ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... precise, mournfully kind, solemnly considerate. I believe it in my heart to have been wholly otherwise, and I think of Him as one with whom any simple and affectionate person, man, woman, or child, would have been entirely and instantly at ease. Like all idealistic and poetical natures, he had little use, I think, for laughter; those who are deeply interested in life and its issues care more for the beauty than the humour of life. But one sees a flash of humour here and there, as in the story of the unjust judge, and of the children ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... it means twenty dollars per column and mebbe a 'boost.' I can't wait, you can't wait! It's up to us to strike now! If these men knew you have their names they'd hike for Texas or the high seas. Come now! Everybody tells me you're one of these idealistic highbrow rangers who care more for the future of the West than most natural-born Westerners. What's your plan? If you'll yoke up with me we'll run these devils into the earth and win great fame, and you'll be doing the whole country ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... will be shocked if I tell you that I haven't understood—I won't say a single word; I've understood all the words.... But what can be this era of disembodied concord you are looking forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has its plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect. The most idealistic conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were before they can be ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... to the front. It was not the sudden concentration of Germany, it was not the eager formation of France, it was not the heroic sturdiness of Belgium, it was not the accustomedness to active service of the British regulars, it was a gradual transition of an idealistic ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... taunt behind our good uncle's back. At first I too thought there might be something in it. But I was forced to a different view by dint of reflection on the notorious fact that my uncle is far readier in a good cause to "shell out" his dollars and cents than any of his idealistic critics. Reduction of a problem to dollars and cents, I have come to see, is just his means of arriving at definiteness. My uncle wants to do a good business, whether in the gross joys of the flesh or in the benefits of salvation. The Lord's cause, he thinks, ought ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... your Earth to give your inhabitants some idea of the idealistic life lived by your more advanced brothers. I use the term idealistic in a relative way only, for in God's universe the degrees of material progress of His children are ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... idealistic plane on which—and from a good man—I received my first political instruction! And for a long time I connected the dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and quails, in other words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual welfare of any citizen, but with clothing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the wrong, as Anselm did, and he would have considered carefully whether the good to be gained for the cause of the Church from a quarrel with the king would outweigh the evil. Anselm, however, was a man of the idealistic type of mind, who believed that if he accepted as the conditions of his work the evils with which he was surrounded, and consented to use the tools that he found ready to his hand, he had made, as another reformer of ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... awkwardly held out a hand, Isabelle felt the tears come into her eyes. Here was her old Vickers,—the gentle, idealistic soul she had loved, the only being it seemed to her then that ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... a voice said, "Look hard at that, young man! That's the first time you've seen Liberty—and it will be the last till you turn your back on this country again." It was an American fellow-passenger, one of the tall, thin type of American, with pale blue eyes of an idealistic, disappointed expression, and an Indian profile. The other half of America, personated by a small, bumptious, eager, brown-faced man, with a cigar raking at an irritating angle from the corner of his mouth, joined ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... worship is lifted from something material to a spiritual being. The belief in immortality is coterminous with belief in the Deity; the two forms of faith are always found together. The cultured Greek, the mystic Egyptian, the idealistic Indian, the savage who inhabits the forests of Africa, or who formerly dwelt in the forests of America, alike have believed in some land of spirits to which their loved ones have gone and to which they themselves, in turn, will also go. Every age and every time, alike, have borne witness to ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... meaning to the boy who is yearning to reach the flag at the top. But it needs to be said here that the traditional superintendent and teacher will greet this entire plan with a supercilious smile. They will call it visionary, unpractical, and idealistic—then return to their seventy-five per cent regime with the utmost complacency and self-satisfaction. It is ever so with the traditional teacher. He seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his complacent way without ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... the method had its evil effects. For, when applied to any department, it produced a disposition to seize the principle, the idea, of which the concrete is the embodiment; to descend from the type upon the individual. Its method was deductive and idealistic; giving being to abstractions, like the realism of the middle ages. It lost the fact in the principle; it personified the genus. Philosophy became a ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... administration has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims. It I is an effort frankly directed to the increase of American trade upon the axiomatic principle ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... succession of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. As such it was an anachronism. The specific moment in the development of thought at which the Parmenidean Epic was natural has been already described. The Romans of the age of Lucretius had advanced far beyond it. The idealistic metaphysics of the Socratic school, the positive ethics of the Stoics, and the profound materialism of Epicurus, had accustomed the mind to habits of exact and subtle thinking, prolonged from generation to generation ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... in deciding just what sort of a man Alfred Nobel had in mind, and had set aside his forty thousand dollars for when he directed that it should go—to quote from the Will—"To the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency." ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... the English-speaking world knows of German literature of the nineteenth century. Goethe and Schiller found their herald in Carlyle; Fichte's idealistic philosophy helped to mold Emerson's view of life; Amadeus Hoffmann influenced Poe; Uhland and Heine reverberate in Longfellow; Sudermann and Hauptmann appear in the repertory of London and New York theatres—these brief statements ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... statue lie, so to speak, imbedded in the marble block, and whose duty is so to carve it, neither cutting too deep or too shallow, so that the perfect form is revealed. The idea of the disputation is the root-idea of idealistic philosophy. That each man is, as it were, a block of marble in which the ideal man is buried. The purpose of the educator ought to be to cut the form out, perikoptein, as ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalisation does not apply exactly to Mrs Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... disciple of Des Cartes. Your theory is based on the idealistic principle, 'I think, therefore I am.' I confess that I could never be satisfied with mere subjective consciousness on a point which involves the cooperation of another mind. Nothing less than the most positive and luminous testimony of the senses could ever persuade me that two minds could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the external material objects with which those cognitions and volitions are concerned. Neither the specific cognitions nor their objects are real in the true sense of the word, for both are altogether due to Maya. But at the same time we have to reject the idealistic doctrine of certain Bauddha schools according to which nothing whatever truly exists, but certain trains of cognitional acts or ideas to which no external objects correspond; for external things, although not real in the strict sense ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... dreamer, and Rex Slinkard was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter. He had learned early for so young a man what were his special idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... farmer's pocketbook, emphasizing the fact that the order offered a means of protection against corporations and opportunities for cooperative buying and selling. This practical appeal was more effective than the previous idealistic propaganda: two additional Granges were established before the end of the year; a state Grange was constituted early in the next year; and by the end of 1869 there were in Minnesota thirty-seven active Granges. In the spring ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck

... him—ah! how plainly—she was forever out of his reach? Was an idol broken, a dream dissolved, a blossom nipped, or hope murdered, just as much, in the case of this comfortable placid unimaginative elderly farmer as in the case of younger, warmer, more impetuous, more idealistic men? If so, Farmer Wise was as self-contained as the best actor among them and handed Miss Dexter out at the Albion with as gallant, though cautious politeness and sat as far away from her at the hotel tea table and met her in the hall afterwards with ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... American was troubled about his soul. Rooted firmly in the church-going past, he carried the banner of the Lord, Democracy, idealistic, bent on perfecting that old incorrigible Man, he cuts off the right hand that offends him and votes for prohibition and woman suffrage, a Round Head in ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... My poor idealistic father never realized, oh, my Karl, that when one wants a thing one must fight—to the death. Alex was the apple of his eye, but I was much loved by my mother; perhaps she dreamed a dream about me—I know not, but she ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... century than it was in the nineteenth century. But the republican enthusiasm was also much more alive. If their scepticism was cold, and their faith even colder, their practical politics were wildly idealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom of heaven, they were gloriously credulous about the chances of it coming on earth. In the same way the old pagan republican feeling was much more dead in the feudal darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... law, not subject to the whims or affirmations of a single mind. Unwelcome material things may be escaped by spiritual growth, by rising to a realm above them, and not by denying their existence on their own plane. So that our system is neither materialistic, nor idealistic in the extreme sense, but rather intuitional and spiritual, holding that matter is the manifestation of spirit as a whole, a reflection or externalization of spirit, and, like spirit, everywhere obedient to law. The path of liberation is not through denial of matter but through denial of ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston

... hope to run a journal, win public office, successfully advertise a soap or write a popular novel who does not insist upon the idealistic basis of his country. A peculiar sort of ethical rapture has earned the term American.... And the reason is probably at least in part the fact that no land has ever sprung so nakedly as ours from a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the Lion-hearted sailed from England to the Holy Land, not to fight for the national existence, as we to-day speak of it, but to fight for the most unselfish and idealistic aim, for Cross and Christian Freedom, Serbia was already opening a great epoch of physical as well as spiritual strength. Our king Nemanja, the founder of a dynasty which ruled in Serbia for nearly 300 years, had heard ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... especially perhaps as regarded people's external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian. And he was not the only deeply idealistic artist with whom Taine was connected in the bonds of friendship. Although a fundamental element of Taine's nature drew him magnetically to the art that was the expression of strength, tragic or carnal strength, a swelling exuberance of life, there ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... marvellous woman? The Americans puzzle me," he continued. "You are the most practical people on the globe and yet the most idealistic. When I hear of a new religion, I am morally certain that it is ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... in either State whose duty it is to secure the greatest advantage in power and prosperity for the State; commercial, resulting, primarily, from the interchange of goods and the business opportunities of either nation in the other's territory, or from their rivalry in foreign trade; idealistic, the result of comparative development especially in those ideals of political structure which determine the nature of the State and the form of its government. The more obvious of these contacts is the governmental, since the attitude of a people is judged ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... time, I believe, Galdos wrote romantic or idealistic novels, and one of these I have read, and it tired me very much. It was called "Marianela," and it surprised me the more because I was already acquainted with his later work, which is all realistic. But one does not turn realist ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... than to push myself within the charmed circle of the chivalrous. What I wish to do is to make plain that a man abnormally elated may be swayed irresistably by his best instincts, and that while under the spell of an exaltation, idealistic in degree, he may not only be willing, but eager to assume risks and endure hardships which under normal conditions he would assume reluctantly, if at all. In justice to myself, however, I may remark that my plans for reform ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... preceding pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... be said on public grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts at despotism, like that ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... of Kant's distinction of two worlds and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... the way of preparation. We are too much dominated by partisanship to be really patriotic. This is a very broad indictment, but it seems to be justified. Of course, the people like Bryan and Ford, and the women generally, are moved by a philosophy that is too idealistic, and some of them are only moved, I fear, by an intense exaggerated ego. If I would have to name the one curse of the present day, I would say it is the love of notoriety and the assumption by almost everyone that his judgment is as good ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... his hero, Olof becomes the prototype of all idealistic reformers, uncompromising at moments as Ibsen's Brand, but more living than he because more subtly studied in his moods of weakness as well as in ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson

... rather inclined to think it was mainly due to the force and eloquence of a certain picture which confronted me from the opposite wall. A sweet picture—sweet enough and poetic enough to have been conceived by the most idealistic of artists: simple, too—the vision of a young flaxen-haired, blue-eyed coquette, dressed in the costume of the First Empire, standing in a wood-path, looking back over her shoulder at some one following—yet ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green

... egoism" is laid at England's door. She is declared to be the instigator of the present world war. "Upon her alone falls the monstrous guilt and the judgment of history." Such language from two benevolent philosophers, one of them a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Idealistic Literature, seems to suggest a lack of information among the German people, including its most enlightened exponents, of not only their own published "White Paper" dispatches, but also of the events of the last two months. It seems hardly possible ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That's our heritage; that is our song. We sing it still. For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old, as we raise our voices to the God who is the Author of this most tender ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... The contrast between the Greeks and the Romans is marked in almost every particular. The Greeks were an imaginative, subjective, artistic, and idealistic people, with little administrative ability and few practical tendencies. The Romans, on the other hand, were an unimaginative, concrete, practical, and constructive nation. Greece made its great contribution to world civilization in literature and philosophy ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... living death have fallen, their fall has been no farther than this man's. There can be no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's disaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore to his once fervent admirers, an object of hatred to thousands of honest, idealistic musicians. He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lost the position of leadership, of eminence that once he had. Even before the war his operas held the stage only with difficulty. And it is possible that he will outlive his fame. One wonders whether he is not one of the men ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... idealistic monism based on carefully selected facts and depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience of those who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy no reality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only one reality and that is God. For ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... never applied to any village in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question. Goldsmith was a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... that long ago. The trouble is, you're too idealistic, Lee. That's not the same as having ideals. I admire ideals—I might even confess to a few of my own. But you don't stop to figure out just what your ideals are—exactly what ...
— This One Problem • M. C. Pease

... never rose to heights of eloquence. His thorough and practical mind enabled him to study, sift, and give form and substance to the broad political and economic conceptions of more idealistic men. Inheriting the narrow political creed of his father, he can scarcely be blamed if his mind came slowly to advanced positions. Rather shall he not be commended who, with such prepossessions and prejudices, and with such party co-workers, keeps his mind open to conviction? "The resumption ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that she had had a good education and nice tastes. It was the cultivation of the primitive and idealistic mind, which could not rationalise a sense of romance, of the altruistic, by knowledge of life. As she sat behind the post-office counter she read all sorts of books that came her way. When she learned ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... from the experience of all educationists. The first is, that children are naturally receptive and responsive; the second, that adolescents are naturally idealistic. In both stages, the young human creature is full of interests and curiosities asking to be satisfied, of energies demanding expression; and here, in their budding, thrusting life—for which we, by our choice of surroundings and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... lies through the brother. If you would learn to love God—and how indefinite and idealistic that seems to most of us—the lesson is simple, first learn to love His other children, especially the helpless, needy, and wronged. Delights high and spiritual always will be remote until duties near at hand ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... standards from the social point of view. It is evident that moral codes from the social point of view are simply formulations of standards of conduct which groups find it convenient or necessary to impose upon their members. Even morality, in an idealistic sense, seems from a sociological standpoint to be those forms of conduct which conduce to social harmony, to social efficiency, and so to the survival of the group. Groups, however, as we have already pointed out, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... prose as well as verse. When this movement had exhausted itself there came by inevitable reaction a period of materialism, when realism succeeded romanticism and prose fiction largely replaced verse. And now sociological and pseudo-scientific writings threaten the very existence of idealistic literature. And yet through it all there has been no dearth of poets. Browning in England and Campoamor in Spain, like many before them, have given metrical form to the expression of their philosophical views. And other poets, who had an intuitive aversion to science, have taken refuge in ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... psychical research, as I have already pointed out, is supplying us with further evidence for the survival of human personality after bodily death than the innate conviction humanity in general seems to have in this belief, and the many reasons which idealistic philosophy advances in favour of it. The question of the reality of the phenomenon of "materialisation," that is, the bodily appearance of a discarnate spirit, such as is vouched for by spiritists, and which is what, it appears, was aimed at in necromancy (though why the discarnate ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... good. And this he will not do, unless his heart is right. It is in Scott's historical novels that his impartiality is most severely tried and is most apparent; though it is apparent in all his works. Shakespeare was a pure dramatist; nothing but art found a home in that lofty, smooth, idealistic brow. He stands apart not only from the political and religious passions but from the interests of his time, seeming hardly to have any historical surroundings, but to shine like a planet suspended by ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... ability it {129} desires is the ability which will run in harness, an unoriginative industry, a mind plastic to the will of its superiors. The Colonial Office had no fancy for a turbulent, great-hearted, idealistic Howe, with views on Imperial consolidation, who avowedly wanted office as a means of influencing the British public, and if possible of entrance into the Imperial parliament. Colonial secretaries were little likely to choose as their assistant the man who had taught ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... name of the Black Head; it has a sombre shape, it has never been known to smile. It towers above me with a cone-shaped top, a figure of might and dominion. For a dozen years it has checked my tendency to idealistic flights by reminding me of the inexorable laws of Nature. It is true it does not conceal the smiling glacier in front of me, with its ceaseless play of light and shadow, colour and form, but it arrests the fancy ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... painted peasants and little else. One was the artist of whom we shall speak, and the other was Jules Breton. One was realistic, the other idealistic. Both did wonderful work, but Millet painted the peasant, worn, patient steadfast, overwhelmed with toil; Breton, a peasant full of energy, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon

... Island of Manhattan up to where Albany now stands, one vast series of teeming cities with suburb touching suburb. The problem then will be how to feed this multitude. Developments in Russia show that, no matter how idealistic one's theory of government may be, food, in the last analysis, is the thing which makes or breaks ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... marriage, as we have seen, is based on the cultivation of the strong points and the submergence of the weak ones of each partner. Poverty does more to bring out the worst in people and conceal the best than anything else in the world. So, although this type is high-minded, more idealistic in his love than any other type and has fewer of the lower instincts, he makes less of a success of marriage than ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict

... an essay by John Milton Samples, is an eloquent but fantastically idealistic bit of speculation concerning the wonderful future which dreamers picture as arising out of the recent war. To us, there is a sort of pathos in these vain hopes and mirage-like visions of an Utopia which can never be; yet if they can cheer anyone, they are doubtless not altogether futile. Indeed, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... was a restatement of the idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion, nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it was the name given to that ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... the other hand, was difficult to read below the preconscious stage. Science, to him, was a form of power, to be used for "idealistic" purposes. He was perfectly capable of sabotaging the weapons of an enemy if it became necessary, whether that meant ruining a physical instrument or carefully falsifying the results of an experiment. Outwardly, he was a pleasant ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett

... to the sands, and stretched at full length in it, with a large, but not extravagantly fragrant, cigar in his mouth, could spend the sunny hours in the perusal of the works of the English novelists who appealed most strongly to his idealistic Teutonic sensibilities. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson

... in representing time or whether time be an essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day—Herbert ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... human concern is solidly established on a basis of Exact Science, there will still remain a field of indefinite extent, in which the Intuitive application of eternal Principles will furnish an unlimited activity for the Practical, AEsthetic, Imaginative, Idealistic, Artistic, and Religious faculties ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... "Hunger," "The Miracle," and "My Own People." I know of no other American writer who is driven by such inevitable compulsion to express her ideal of what America might be, and it serves to underscore the truth that the chief idealistic contribution to American life comes no longer from the anA|mic Anglo-Saxon puritan, but from the younger elements of our mixed racial culture. Such a flaming passion of mingled indignation and love for America embodies ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... classic in literature. Its effect on the Nations was greater than that of any other message issued by any one country, probably in the history of the world, and while there were critics who regarded some of President Wilson's utterances as too idealistic, time proved that his vision was greater than that of those who criticised him, and within a short time the eyes of the entire world were turned toward Washington, which became the active centre from which the campaign for ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... root in him, something he had never admitted, at which he had always jeered, at which all his pride revolted. In his conversations with Anna Sergyevna he expressed more strongly than ever his calm contempt for everything idealistic; but when he was alone, with indignation he recognised idealism in himself. Then he would set off to the forest and walk with long strides about it, smashing the twigs that came in his way, and cursing under his ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... scientist with an inborn idealistic strain in him. His famous, and to many minds disquieting, declaration, made in his Belfast address over thirty years ago, that in matter itself he saw the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life, stamps him as a scientific materialist. But his conception ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... impatience with the natural order, to a demand for impossible conditions of existence, and to an inaptitude not only for the arbitrary bondage of law but even for the wholesome and necessary bonds of human social life. It is always a hard lesson for the young and idealistic that in order to command Nature we must obey her; it can only be learnt through contact with life and by the attainment of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... this advice shows the genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the mystic's apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities. And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren. But marriage with the world is not to be achieved by an ideal which shrinks from fact, or demands ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... we reckon accurately on women's loyalty to women, but we likewise realized that our appeal touched a certain spiritual, idealistic quality in the western woman voter, a quality which is yearning to find expression in political life. At the idealism of the Woman's Party her whole nature flames into enthusiasm and her response is immediate. She gladly transforms a narrow partisan loyalty into ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... Christian. He remarks that all mediaeval art was religious; the only concession to the secular being found in the illuminations of some of the chivalry romances. Gothic architecture was the expression of Teutonic genius, which is realistic and stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was idealistic and stands for the imagination. In the most perfect art, as in the highest type of religion, reason and imagination are in balance. Hence, the influence of Van Eyck, Memling, and Duerer on Italian painters was wholesome; and the Reformation, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... all their preponderant bias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words of Herbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking of spirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the terms of spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give an idealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialistic interpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despite the fallacious influences of habit to the contrary, that no progress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount of induction ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... principle of order in political society.' 'Of Law', says Hooker,[63] here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes precedence of the party or the trade union because, however idealistic in their policy these latter may be, the State covers all, not merely a section of the community, and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule of law and justice. Put in modern language, one might define the Greek idea of ...
— Progress and History • Various

... the words Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates equally useful words like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid New England had its humorous side. Witness ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... interpreted the Unitarian faith than he has in his poems. Whitman had in him the heart of transcendentalism, and he was informed of its inmost spirit. To the more radical Unitarians his pleas for liberty, his intense individualism, and his idealistic conceptions of nature and man would be acceptable, and, it may be, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... true expression of human nature. The tale, whether it is realistic in emphasizing the familiar, the commonplace, and the present, or romantic in emphasizing the strange, the heroic, and the remote, must be idealistic to interpret truly the facts of life by high ideals. If the tale has this basis of truth the child will gain, through his handling of it, a body of facts. This increases his knowledge and strengthens his intellect. And it is to be remembered ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... Englishmen of high social rank, and that with them the predominant instinct was mercantile, we shall now proceed to point out those conditions to which the planters were subjected that changed them from practical business men to idealistic and ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... of the many obscure tendencies of the age upon the most sensitive and gifted of German minds from which sprang the naturalistic movement. That movement dominated literature for a few years. Then, in Hauptmann's own temper and in his own work, arose a vigorous idealistic reaction which, blending with the severe technique and incorruptible observation of naturalism, went far toward producing—for a second time—a new vision and a new art. The conditions amid which this development ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann



Words linked to "Idealistic" :   idealism, elevated, lofty, noble, ideal, rarified, grand, sublime, exalted, rarefied, noble-minded, high-flown



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