Autobiographic Sketches 1790 1803 Classic Reprint

Author : Thomas De Quincey
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330958971
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (589 download)

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Download or read book Essays on Christianity, Paganism, and Superstition (Classic Reprint) written by Thomas De Quincey and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Essays on Christianity, Paganism, and Superstition The specific virtue of De Quincey's paper is that it tends to counteract this neglect of the physically vast. With a general effect resembling that of Chalmers's Astronomical Discourses, though after another fashion, it impresses once more that lesson of awe and amazement which has been taught to all generations of mortal men more emphatically by the spectacle of the spangled heavens than by anything else, and more emphatically than ever in these later generations, when the fretted roof of the old familiar firmament has been burst, and the universe of worlds and starry systems which we are called upon to conceive has receded into utter boundlessness, and therefore into racking defiance of all conceivability whatever. The very portion of the paper which some will condemn as but a daringly intruded whimsy, out of keeping with the context, - the conversion of one momentary aspect of the Nebula in Orion into a hideous living fiend or phantasm, like Milton's Death, imaginable as tenanting one ill-fated tract of the immeasurable depths of space, - might be justified perhaps on some such principle as that, when the human mind is irremediably baffled in the conception of any physical reality, it has a right to revenge itself by some moral or poetical substitute. At all events, this passage increases the impressiveness of the paper, and is the surest to remain in the memory. But it is certainly an addition which Shakespeare would never have anticipated to his sweeter cosmological inventory of "all things rare That Heavens air in this huge rondure hems." The appended Postscript On the True Relations of the Bible to merely Human Science connects itself naturally enough with the matter of the preceding paper, but is of wider application. It expounds an idea of De Quincey's on the subject of Biblical Inspiration well worthy of more attention from theologians than it has yet received. The idea reappears in a later paper in the present volume. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.