Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having the nature of goodness; akin to what is good or to the chief good.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Sensitive or responsive to moral excellence.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Sensitive or responsive to moral excellence.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin bonus good + -form.

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Examples

  • Platonists unsatisfactorily attacked him on the principle of their eponymous philosopher, supposing the innate noemata to rule the empirical aisthemata by the aid of what Henry More called a "boniform faculty", which tasted "the sweetness and savour of virtue".

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 4: Clandestinity-Diocesan Chancery 1840-1916 1913

  • The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform soul," -- the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth, -- are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called

    Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works Oliver Wendell Holmes 1851

  • Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates -- fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine,

    Representative Men Ralph Waldo Emerson 1842

  • Fates, — fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; 16 his doctrine of assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine, “what comes from God to us, returns from us to

    Representative Men 2006

  • “Euclid of holiness,” as Emerson calls him, with his “soliform eye and his boniform soul,” ” the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth, ” are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called “Plato: New Readings.”

    Ralph Waldo Emerson Holmes, Oliver W 1891

Comments

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  • (adjective/noun) - (1) Of a good nature or character; from Latin bonus, good, and forma, shape.

    --Edward Lloyd's Encyclopædic Dictionary, 1895

    (2) A faculty by which moral goodness is appreciated; from Latin boniformis.

    --Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1893

    January 16, 2018