Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The (ultimate) material of which the universe is composed.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word world-stuff.

Examples

  • The footprints of absence, formed by the subject's anxious self-circling (literally "wondering what you are"), ignore the substance around which the circles are made, the very world-stuff of which Dasein is only the ized reflection.

    'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' as an Ambient Poem; a Study of a Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth 2001

  • Yet since continuity prevails throughout, the atoms which constitute the world-stuff must be supposed to have

    EVOLUTIONISM THOMAS A. GOUDGE 1968

  • She gives without stint to all the peoples of the earth her world-stuff to be worked over into human flesh, and animal fibre.

    Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul Anna Bishop Scofield

  • The seeds, the germs of life that were expressed in such ways in the beginnings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly modified degree and the misunderstood phases of nature's ministry are the results of the out-working of these primitive elements still inhering in the world-stuff of which human bodies are made.

    Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul Anna Bishop Scofield

  • It is, perhaps, a slight deviation from the earlier religious standpoint of the Jews, which looks to a direct and deliberate creation of the world-stuff, rather than to the informing of space by spirit, and regards the world as separate from God, and not as a manifestation of His being.

    Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria Norman Bentwich 1927

  • What was it in Margarita that drew that old, primitive passion, that ancient world-stuff out of its decorous grave, all planted with orchids and maiden-hair, that woke it with a rough shout in us and offered us at the same time its natural gratification -- a fierce fight and a certain victory?

    Margarita's Soul The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon 1918

  • We know that in the intuitive judgment which affixes these relative valuations there must be the three elements of mortal subjective vision, of immortal objective vision, and of the original "world-stuff" out of which all visions are made.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

  • The world-stuff, or the objective mystery, out of which the eternal vision has been created is now seen to be the very flesh and blood of a vast company of living organisms; and it has become impossible to contemplate anything in the world without the emotion of malice or the emotion of love.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

  • The fact that man's apex-thought reveals the presence of an unending procession of living souls, each of whose creative energy moulds this mystery to its own vision, does not remove the unfathomableness of the world-stuff whereof they mould it.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

  • There is always the primordial objective mystery outside the complex vision; that objective mystery, or world-stuff, or world-clay, out of which, in its process of half-creation and half-discovery, the complex vision evokes the universe.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.