Word Finder - sentiments

definition

A general thought, feeling, or sense.

example

The sentiment emerged that we were acting too soon.

definition

Feelings, especially tender feelings, as apart from reason or judgment, or of a weak or foolish kind.

The object of the Wealth of Nations is surely in no sense psychological, as is that of the Moral Sentiments.

Dean dittoed her sentiments.

Conceivably these sentiments of Columbanus never wholly died out in.

The disciplined philosopher, who had devoted himself to the task of comprehending the organism of the state, had no patience with feebler or more mercurial minds who recklessly laid hands on established ordinances, and set them aside where they contravened humanitarian sentiments.

Thus, in man, do sentiments of love and mutual sympathy become instinctive and, when transmitted by inheritance, innate.

A third great group rises out of the sentiments and affections of man, or the moral energies which he sees working in human life.

Coleridge had imbibed his sentiments, and joined the ranks of his partisans.

Another feature of his works was the large number of excellent sentiments expressed in a brief proverbial form; the Pythagoreans claimed him as a member of their school, who had forsaken the study of philosophy for the writing of comedy.

More than the fourth, this book bears the marks of age, both in the milder tone of the sentiments expressed, and in the feebler power of composition exhibited.

To us, therefore, they are valuable not only for their eloquence, but still more as giving us our clearest insight into Livy's own sentiments, his lofty sense of the greatness of Rome, his appreciation of Roman courage and firmness, and his reverence for the simple virtues of older times.

They are of great variety, and many of them are very interesting, both on account of the devices which they accompany and the sentiments which they express.

But when the ill-will of the Vienna government became patent, and the sentiments of the king doubtful, he resigned together with Batthyany, but without ceasing to be a member of the diet.

Lord Palmerston never was a Whig, still less a Radical; he was a statesman of the old English aristocratic type, liberal in his sentiments, favourable to the march of progress, but entirely opposed to the claims of democratic government.

In 1848 she addressed the AntiSabbath Convention in Boston, and with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she had first met in London in 1840, called a convention "to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women," which met at Seneca Falls and passed a "Declaration of Sentiments," modelled on the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps our knowledge of Johnson's sentiments regarding the Scots in general, and of his expressions regarding Hume and Smith in particular, may lessen our surprise at this vehemence.

The peculiarly disjointed and fragmentary condition of the sentiments expressed by Pascal aggravates the appearance of universal doubt which is present in the Pensees, just as the completely unfinished condition of the work, from the literary point of view, constantly causes slighter or graver doubts as to the actual meaning which the author wished to express.

Even the churches offered little opposition to the excesses of persons in authority, and in many instances the clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, acquired an unenviable notoriety for their readiness to overlook or condone actions which outraged the higher sentiments of humanity.

There was sometimes a lack of discrimination between the parties essentially loyal, representing agrarian or labour discontent, and those of their leaders whose purposes and sentiments were doubtful.

Of the two conflicting sentiments, the favour of the young, gaining as years passed away, naturally prevailed; sophistry ceased to be novel, and attendance in the lecture-rooms of the sophists came to be thought not less necessary for the youth than attendance in the elementary schools for the boy.

The sentiments and passions which his eloquence aroused were, however, watchfully utilized by a more extreme party.

In 1850 he was made bishop of Mainz, by order of the Vatican, in preference to the celebrated Professor Leopold Schmidt, of Giessen, whose Liberal sentiments were not agreeable to the Papal party.

It is doubtless a sense of filial obligation coupled with sentiments of piety and reverence that gave rise to this practice of offering gifts of food and drink to the deceased ancestors.

As to its style, the Christian Year is calm and grave in tone, and subdued in colour, as beseems its subjects and sentiments.

While a candidate for president in 1844, he opposed in the "Raleigh letter" the annexation of Texas on many grounds except that of its increasing the slave power, thus displeasing both the men of anti-slavery and those of pro-slavery sentiments.

On the 8th of December 1837 a meeting was held at Faneuil Hall to express the sentiments of the people on the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, for defending his press from a proslavery mob.

And how can he have appeared to you seeing that your sentiments are opposed to his teaching?

Similarly, logic, so far as it is an art of thought or a doctrine of fallacies, and ethics, so far as it is occupied with a natural history of impulses and moral sentiments, do neither of them belong, except by courtesy, to the philosophic province.

The true state of the case may easily be collected from his next publications - The Sentiments of a Church of England Man, and On the Reasonableness of a Test (1708).

Chapelain's Sentiments de l'Acaddmie francaise sur la tragi-comddie du Cid (1638), when its arbitration was demanded by Richelieu, and not openly repudiated by Corneille, was virtually unimportant; but it is worth remembering that no less a writer than Georges de Scudery, in his Observations sur le Cid (1637), gravely and apparently sincerely asserted and maintained of this great play that the subject was utterly bad, that all the rules of dramatic composition were violated, that the action was badly conducted, the versification constantly faulty, and the beauties as a rule stolen!

But its authorship, as well as the sentiments accompanying it, created a favourable view of Mr Hofmeyr's attitude.

To that convention, with one-third of its membership composed of Friends, Whittier was a delegate, and was appointed one of the committee that drafted the famous Declaration of Sentiments.

Rousseau wrote, " It is good composition when the objects represented are not there solely as they are, but when they contain under a natural appearance the sentiments which they have stirred in our souls..

In the early part of 1918 the desire for autonomy and the favourable attitude of Kurdistan to Great Britain was becoming apparent; at Sairt, in central Kurdistan, the Kurds actually expelled the Kurdish garrison, while leaders throughout the country contrived to get into touch with the British and assure them of their friendly sentiments and desire for autonomy and final independence of Turkey.

The extension of British influence, the protection of British interests, were almost universally advocated; and the few statesmen who repeated in the nineties the sentiments which would have been generally accepted in the sixties, were regarded as Little Englanders.

So much iniquity and so much disorder may well have struck deep on one whose two chief political sentiments were a passion for order and a passion for justice.

Patriotism, again, and the sense of civic duty, the most elevated of all social sentiments in the Graeco-Roman civilization, tended, under the influence of Christianity, either to expand itself into universal philanthropy, or to concentrate 1 E.g.

With the generation of moralists that followed, the consideration of abstract rational principles falls into the background, and its place is taken by introspective study of the human mind, observation of the actual play of its various impulses and sentiments.

The old theory that referred this approval entirely to self-love, is, he holds, easy to disprove by " crucial experiments " on the play of our moral sentiments; rejecting this, he finds the required explanation in the sympathetic pleasure that attends our perception of the conduciveness of virtue to the interests of human beings other than ourselves.

On this point Hume contents himself with the vague remark that " there are a numerous set of passions and sentiments, of which thinking rational beings are by the original constitution of nature the only proper objects."

It is therefore hardly surprising that his theory should leave the specific quality of the moral sentiments a fact still needing to be explained.

An original and ingenious solution of this problem was offered by his contemporary Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

From the sentiments of propriety and admiration we proceed to the sense of merit and demerit.

Here a more complex phenomenon presents itself for analysis; we have to distinguish in the sense of merit - (1) a direct sympathy with the sentiments of the agent, and (2) an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions.

It might either fall back on the moral principles commonly accepted, and, affirming their objective validity, endeavour to exhibit them as a coherent and complete set of ultimate ethical truths; or it might take the utility or conduciveness to pleasure, to which Hume had referred for the origin of most sentiments, as an ultimate end and standard by which these sentiments might be judged and corrected.

In this treatise, as in Paley's, we find " every man's own satisfaction, the spring that actuates all his motives," connected with " general good, the root whereout all our rules of conduct and sentiments of honour are to branch," by means of natural theology demonstrating the " unniggardly goodness of the author of nature."

The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume's way or in Adani Smith's; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses.

As regards moral sentiments generally, the view suggested by Mill is more definitely given by the chief living representative of the associationist school, Alexander Bain; by whom the distinctive characteristics of conscience are traced to " education under government or authority," though prudence, disinterested sympathy and other emotions combine to swell the mass of feeling vaguely denoted by the term moral.

The chief argument against this theory has been based on the early period at which these sentiments are manifested by children, which hardly allows time for association to produce the effects ascribed to it.

Thus we have a new zoological factor in the history of the moral sentiments; which, though in no way opposed to the older psychological theory of their formation through coalescence of more primitive feelings, must yet be conceived as controlling and modifying the effects of the law of association by preventing the formation of sentiments other than those tending to the preservation of human life.

He holds, indeed, that the two are inseparable, and that the more altruistic any man's sentiments and habits of action can be made, the greater will be the happiness enjoyed by himself as well as by others.