Word Finder - formless

definition

Without form; shapeless.

example

1985: Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters. — Genesis 1:2 (New Jerusalem Bible)

definition

Without the use of forms or templates.

They believed that there were in the beginning no heavenly bodies, air or earth, only water everywhere, over which at first hovered a formless Supreme Being called Pha.

This group of ideas culminated in the Logos of Philo, expressing the world of divine ideas which God first of all creates and which becomes the mediating and formative power between the absolute and transcendent deity and passive formless matter, transmuted thereby into a rational, ordered universe.

Food is scarse, and the music is almost formless with a bleak sadness.

Albert and Aquinas agree in declaring that the principle of individuation is to be found in matter, not, however, in matter as a formless substrate but in determinate matter (materia signata), which is explained to mean matter quantitatively determined in certain respects.

A perfectly formless matter (materia prima) was regarded by him as the universal substratum and common element of all finite existences.

Regarding evil simply as privation, Eckhart does not make it the pivot of his thought, as was afterwards done by Boehme; but his notion of the Godhead as a dark and formless essence is a favourite thesis of theosophy.

It differed from the formless marriage in the absence (1) of affectio maritalis, and therefore (2) of full conjugal rights.

The early Christians had naturally preferred the formless marriage of the Roman law as being free from all taint of pagan idolatry; and the ecclesiastical authorities recognized concubinage also.

It belongs to this view to regard the imperfection of things as devoid of real being, and so incapable of being definitely thought or known; accordingly, we find that Plato has no technical term for that in the concrete sensible world which hinders it from perfectly expressing the abstract ideal world, and which in Aristotle's system is distinguished as absolutely formless matter (An).

Faith is the substantial basis of all Christian morality, but without love - the essential form of all the Christian virtues - it is " formless " (informis).

Not since the early Middle Ages has the Catholic Church seemed so amorphous, formless and anomic.

As is always the case with liberals, they have been plunged to the Left by the first and still formless revolutionary wave.

God is with form and is also formless and He is also above form and formlessness.

The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.

Various consequences follow, leading to earth again becoming a formless void and darkness.

Notwithstanding the elaborate disguise which fear of the powers that were led Descartes to throw over his real opinions, it is impossible to read the Principes de la philosophie without acquiring the conviction that this great philosopher held that the physical world and all things in it, whether living or not living, have originated by a process of evolution, due to the continuous operation of purely physical causes, out of a primitive relatively formless matter.'

Lamarck, Treviranus, Erasmus Dar win, Goethe, and Saint-Hilaire preached to deaf ears, for they advanced the theory that living beings had developed by a slow process of transmutation in successive generations from simpler ancestors, and in the beginning from simplest formless matter, without being able to demonstrate any existing mechanical causes by which such development must necessarily be brought about.

For the lower and imperfect world, which in that system too is conceived and assumed, is the nebulous world of the non-existent and the formless, which is the 1 Cf.

Vast reservoirs of power are created by the spirit of the age, formless, like the tense yearning gained from all things.

He thought that besides proximate matter, or one body as matter of another, there is a primary formless matter beneath all bodies, capable of becoming all in turn, but itself potentially, not actually, substance.

When I next saw her she was a formless heap of cotton, which I should not have recognized at all except for the two bead eyes which looked out at me reproachfully.

Finally, it brought the simplest living matter or formless protoplasm before the mental vision as the startingpoint whence, by the operation of necessary mechanical causes, the highest forms have been evolved, and it rendered unavoidable the conclusion that this earliest living material was itself evolved by gradual processes, the result also of the known and recognized laws of physics and chemistry, from material which we should call not living.