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Hypothetical   Listen
adjective
Hypothetical, Hypothetic  adj.  Characterized by, or of the nature of, an hypothesis; conditional; assumed without proof, for the purpose of reasoning and deducing proof, or of accounting for some fact or phenomenon. "Causes hypothetical at least, if not real, for the various phenomena of the existence of which our experience informs us."
Hypothetical baptism (Ch. of Eng.), baptism administered to persons in respect to whom it is doubtful whether they have or have not been baptized before.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hypothetical" Quotes from Famous Books



... proposition: e.g. and is an abbreviation of one additional proposition, viz. We must think of the two together; while but is an abbreviation of two additional propositions, viz. We must think of them together, and we must recollect there is a contrast between them. But hypothetical propositions, i.e. both disjunctives and conditionals, are true complex propositions, since with several terms they contain but a single assertion. Thus, in, If the Koran comes from God, Mahomet is God's prophet, we do not assert the truth of ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... themselves. The eminent Wassman says: "There are numerous fossils of apes, the remains of which are buried in the various strata from the lower Eocene to the close of the alluvial epoch, but not one connecting link has been found between their hypothetical ancestral forms and man at the present time. The whole hypothetical pedigree of man is not supported by a single fossil genus or a single fossil species" (all italics ours). Darwin says: "When we descend to details, we can prove that not one species has ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... 'conjectural' history, Ricardo did not mean to state a historical fact. He was not thinking of actual Choctaws or Cherokees. The beaver was exchanged for the deer about the time when the primitive man signed the 'social contract.' He is a hypothetical person used for purposes of illustration and simplification. Ricardo is not really dealing with the question of origins; but he is not the less implying a theory of structure. It did not matter that the 'social contract' was historically a figment; it would serve equally ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... and that subsequently the Attorney General may conclude that it was a violation of the statute, and that which was supposed by the combiners to be innocent then turns out to be a combination in violation of the statute. The answer to this hypothetical case is that when men attempt to amass such stupendous capital as will enable them to suppress competition, control prices and establish a monopoly, they know the purpose of their acts. Men do not ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... great number of proximate compounds, more or less stable, from organic structures. It has invented others which form the basis of long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, demonstrated and hypothetical. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... explanation is entirely hypothetical and may be entirely wrong. But it all hangs together, and if we find any poisonous matter in the sugar, it will be reasonable to assume that we are right. The sugar is the Experimentum Crucis. If you will hand it over to me, we will go up to the laboratory and make a preliminary ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... indicated during life by their peculiar symptoms, and revealed on dissection by the ordinary marks of inflammation; such as affections of the lungs, kidneys, &c. This view of the subject will cease to be regarded as merely hypothetical, when it is recollected, that these symptoms and morbid appearances are occasionally not found; whilst the symptoms referrible to the gastric and duodenic irritation, being the true characteristics of the disease, are always present. Indeed, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... bestowal or denial of baptismal grace in the case of infants, who can have no previous merita de congruo, depends on their hypothetical future merits or demerits as foreseen ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle

... moment of writing these words, a letter from a well known plant breeder is dropped upon my desk. In it he turns down the idea of an hypothetical executive position which most people would regard as promotion. The importance and interest of his work is so great in its own right that he would not think ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... hypothetical case, suppose that misfortune visits the home of John H. Jones, who lives at 79 Liberty Street. A defective flue sets his house on fire and it burns to the ground. By inquiry we find that the house is worth about $4,000 and is ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... south, discovering one of the Austral Group on his way, when, finding no sign of the hypothetical southern Continent, and getting into very dirty weather, he first gained a more northern latitude and favourable winds, and then ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook

... vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... for an appreciation of the great works of architecture, sculpture, and painting in Europe which he will recognize as landmarks of history in their potent influence on the civilization of mankind. Let us suppose that our hypothetical student has marked out on these lines his college course of four years, and his graduate course of three. At the age of twenty-five he will then have received an excellent college education. The university with its learned and ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... was silent for a moment; then she said meditatively, "Oh, don't you think so?", and fell again into a long silence. The Dean did not break it; his thoughts had wandered from the hypothetical lady who was to redeem Quisante to the realities ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... before the Kaiser the figures of the number of ships sunk, their tonnage, the number of submarines operating, the number under construction and the number lost. General von Falkenhayn reported on the military situation and discussed the hypothetical question as to what effect American intervention would have upon the European ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... Ceremonial occasions such as these are worthy of record and meditation only when they surround, and, as it were, frame some incident really material. Such an incident occurred now. My inner mind was still full of my sojourn with the Bartensteins, of the pathetic, whimsical, hypothetical connection between little Elsa and myself, and of the chains that seemed to bind my life in bonds not of my making. These reflections went on in an undercurrent while I was bowing, saluting, grasping hands, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... wants melody. The versification is eccentric to the ear, and the subject (the factory miseries) is scarcely an agreeable one to the fancy. Perhaps altogether you had better not see it, because I know you think me to be deteriorating, and I don't want you to have further hypothetical evidence of so false an opinion. Humbled as I am, I say 'so false an opinion.' Frankly, if not humbly, I believe myself to have gained power since the time of the publication of the 'Seraphim,' and lost nothing except happiness. Frankly, if ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... Indeed, I had already made up my mind, that, in case good fortune should throw any such invaluable record in my way, I would proceed with it in the following simple and satisfactory method. Alter a cursory examination, merely sufficing for an approximative estimate of its length, I would write down a hypothetical inscription based upon antecedent probabilities, and then proceed to extract from the characters engraven on the stone a meaning as nearly as possible conformed to this a priori product of my own ingenuity. The result ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... disturbing conditions of will, life and organic forces are eliminated from the problem; he starts with the clear and distinct idea of extension, figured and moved, and thence by mathematical laws he gives a hypothetical explanation of all things. Such explanation of physical phenomena is the main problem of Descartes, and it goes on encroaching upon territories once supposed proper to the mind. Descartes began with the certainty that we are thinking beings; that region remains ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical, and depending more upon invention than experience: every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... of the system in Johannesburg and Pretoria, and further experience will lead to an even fuller exercise of the privilege of marking preferences. There is no case for a criticism based on such a hypothetical example as that hinted ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys

... the suggestions made are more or less hypothetical, but not a few, I think, are necessary deductions, based on what is most probable to have happened. I am fully aware of numerous omissions, and the inadequacy of this summary; but if the suggestions brought forward shall prove in themselves ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... explanation of his own mind's existence with that of the existence of Mind in the abstract; he must not be allowed to suppose that, by thus hypothetically explaining the existence of known minds, he is thereby establishing a probability in favour of that hypothetical cause, an Unknown Mind. Only if he has some independent reason to infer that such an Unknown Mind exists, could such a probability be made out, and his hypothetical explanation of known mind become of more value than a guess. In other words, although the theistic hypothesis supplies a possible ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... Then he said he could make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods since they were born, he supposed he really couldn't get along without four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to try. I said, go ahead and use four ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... had been said, indeed, that that sagacious animal, the dog, if, in tracking his master, he met three ways, after smelling the two, boldly pursued the third without any such previous investigation; which, if true, would be an instance of a disjunctive hypothetical syllogism. Also Dugald Stewart spoke of the case of a monkey cracking nuts behind a door, which, not being a strict imitation of anything which he could have actually seen, implied an operation of abstraction, by which the clever brute ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... no fringe of a feeling, no suggestion of a desire which does not correspond to definite processes in the brain. The details may and must be material for diverging theories, but the conflict of such hypothetical opinions has nothing to do with the certainty of the underlying conviction that if we knew the whole truth, we should recognize every single mental happening as parallel to physical processes in the nervous system. To explain mental facts ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... the matter indeed difficult, but that you are without fear. You are, on the contrary, full of fear, but you hesitate.' [296] Immo vero, 'oh no; on the contrary.' See Zumpt, S 277. [297] Respecting this form of hypothetical sentences, see Zumpt, S 524, note 1. The verb in the apodosis might be implorabis, without altering the meaning. [298] This statement differs in two points from the current tradition of history. ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... reasoning would be chimerical and without foundation. Every link of the chain would in that case hang upon another; but there would not be any thing fixed to one end of it, capable of sustaining the whole; and consequently there would be no belief nor evidence. And this actually is the case with all hypothetical arguments, or reasonings upon a supposition; there being in them, neither any present impression, nor belief ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... without a message to me; that in clear consciousness the work may be followed up step by step, while in unconsciousness it proceeds likewise, but unknown to us. It is evident that all this is purely hypothetical. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... and the meaning of the scene is obvious and significant, and dramatically rendered. The foreground group is very strongly painted, natural in attitude and gesture, and the figure of a man in striped hose is magnificently modelled. I do not care to touch on so hypothetical a thing as the supposed portraiture in this group, but it is interesting to note, in the old man right of Antichrist, the features familiar to us in the drawings of Leonardo, possibly painted from a study of the same model. Behind is a profile head, ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell

... looked the less resemblance he saw between them, till the objects of his scrutiny grew restive.... Then, ceasing to examine them, an idea came to him. "No! The Public is not this or that class, this or that type; the Public is an hypothetical average human being, endowed with average human qualities—a distillation, in fact, of all the people in this hall, the people in the street outside, the people of this country everywhere." And for a moment he was pleased; but soon he began again to feel uneasy. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... however, and Home Rule seemed to hang upon a snap division, and its hypothetical results possibly hung up for another generation, Sinn Feiners grew stronger and stronger as English opposition to the Parliamentarians grew in strength, and they once more reiterated their old principle that, Home Rule or no Home Rule, much could be done ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... reason? Reason, I say, Reason!" Here the ghost proceeded to analyze reason, cited from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, part II, section I, book 2, chap. 3, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, then went on to construct a hypothetical system of ghosts, piled one syllogism on another, and concluded with the logical proof that there are absolutely no ghosts. Meanwhile the cold sweat ran down my back, my teeth clattered like castanets, and from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... one abounding in difficulty. Unfortunately the opportunity for vague yet damaging testimony on the part of experts, the ease with which any desired opinion can be defended by a slight alteration in the hypothetical facts, and the practical impossibility of exposure, have been seized upon with avidity by a score or more of unscrupulous alienists who are prepared to sell their services to the highest bidder. These men are all the more dangerous because, clever students ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... The subject of inquiry—No attempt hitherto made to verify the different hypothetical explanations of ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley

... miles from neighbors, many miles from a doctor, and without school or church; while great tracts of splendid land lie idle and unimproved, close beside the little towns, held in the tight clasp of a hypothetical ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth, if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, unconnected with matter, possessed an undivided and sovereign dominion over two or more disembodied minds, so as to become the exclusive source of all their subtlest volitions and exercises, the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... the other hand, has with equal justice insisted upon a practically unlimited bank of time, ready to discount any quantity of hypothetical paper. It has kept before our eyes the power of the infinitely little, time being granted, and has compelled us to exhaust known causes before ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... religious man worships and to whom he prays for guidance and for blessings, for actual interference in the life of this world. Such theories impress our visitor as but a feeble attempt at new concepts of the same hypothetical deity, and it seemed to him that we already had sufficient ideas of God to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... to describe the continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly, but it is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate constructions of chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that things and qualities are more easily mistaken for facts than more obviously hypothetical assumptions. Bergson points out that the various things of which this common sense world consists, solid tables, green grass, anger, hope, etc., are not facts: these things, he insists, are only abstractions. They are convenient for enabling us to describe and explain the actual ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen

... Religious conviction gives us a general direction, but it stands aside from many of these entangled struggles in the jungle of conscience. Practice is often easier than a rule. In practice a lawyer will know far more accurately than a hypothetical case can indicate, how far he is bound to see his client through, and how far he may play the keeper of his client's conscience. And nearly every day there happens instances where the most subtle casuistry will fail and the finger of conscience point unhesitatingly. One may have ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... now," said the night editor, "and we'll miss the suburban trains if we hold the paper back any longer. We can't afford to wait for a purely hypothetical story. The chances are all against the fight's having taken place or this ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... the radiant energy most efficient in producing the sensation of light (yellow-green) is about 625 lumens per watt. That is, if energy of this wave-length alone were radiated by a hypothetical light-source, each watt would produce 625 lumens. The luminous efficiency of the most efficient white light is about 265 lumens per watt; in other words, if a hypothetical light-source radiated energy of only the visible wave-lengths and in proportions ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... vibration of the hypothetical ether, or a state of tension of that ether equivalent to either a dynamic or a static condition," etc. 3,263. Vol. III., ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various

... of homemaking problems can take no more practical form than to follow from its hypothetical beginning the ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... dollars, and it may run as high as a hundred thousand. I learn that Mr. Surface thinks, or pretends to think, that this money belongs to him. He is, needless to say, wholly mistaken. I have taken the liberty of consulting a lawyer about it, of course laying it before him as a hypothetical case. I am advised that when Mr. Surface was put through bankruptcy, he must have made a false statement in order to withhold this money. Therefore, that settlement counts for nothing, except to make him punishable for perjury ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... he tells us, "falls naturally into five divisions, or five fundamental sciences, whose order of succession is determined by the necessary or invariable subordination (estimated according to no hypothetical opinions) of their several phenomena; these are, astronomy, mechanics, (la physique,) chemistry, physiology, and lastly, social physics. The first regards the phenomena the most general, the most abstract, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... if a bunch of non-treaty Indians ever got within gunshot of him. I damned Major Lessard earnestly for what I considered his injustice to MacRae, and wondered if he would send his troopers out to look for that hypothetical gold-dust. I didn't see how he could avoid making a bluff at doing so, even if he secretly classed Rutter's story as a fairy-tale, and I promised myself to find out what he was going to do before I started ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... neck and made his teeth snap, lurched heavily to the other side, oscillated critically for a few moments, and muttered: "Brdgtpnd—." It was too much for him; he went down into his pocket, fumbled feebly round, and finally drawing out a paper of purely hypothetical tobacco, conveyed it to his mouth and bit off about two-thirds of it, which he masticated with much apparent benefit to his understanding, offering what was left to me. He then resumed the conversation with the easy familiarity of ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... form of the syllogism is at times so strong an argument that it deserves special mention here, namely, the dilemma. This is a syllogism in which the major premise consists of two or more hypothetical propositions (that is, propositions with an "if" clause) and the minor of a disjunctive proposition (a proposition with two or more clauses ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... taken care to ensure that the general public be kept in ignorance of the existence of such an organization as the Hashishin, but I must assume that this hypothetical third party were well aware that they had Hassan, as well as the authorities, to count with. Granting the existence of such a party, my beautiful acquaintance might be classified as one of ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer

... thing to credit, sir; but one cannot reject all evidence, merely because It happens to be straightforward and not hypothetical." ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... he continued rapidly, "of the lowly place held by women in the East. I can cite notable exceptions, ancient and modern. In fact, a moment's consideration by a hypothetical body of Eastern dynast-makers not of an emperor but of an empress. Finally, there is a persistent tradition throughout the Far East that such a woman will one day rule over the known peoples. I was assured some years ago, by a very learned pundit, that a princess of incalculably ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... financial powers to be exercised by the hypothetical Irish Parliament occupied the Convention and its committees for the greater part of its eight months of existence. In January 1918 Lord Midleton and Mr. Redmond came to an agreement on the subject which proved ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... too. The thought which tranquillized Rostopchin was not a new one. Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... well have been fired by my hypothetical Russian as far as the rifle was concerned; but he would have found it difficult to borrow Sir David's boots, and it seemed unlikely that any stranger would not only have dared to do so, but afterwards have had the audacity ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... what road the thing travels. And if such a nature should be combined with what Butler thinks virtue, it might be doubtful to which of the two the tribute of kind attentions were paid; but now seeing the true case, we know how to interpret this hypothetical case ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... particular old man had been benefited by the law would appeal to practically every one. That is, to explain the operation and advantages of such a law, we give, as one unit, the concrete example of this old man. Actual examples are preferable to hypothetical ones, but the latter may occasionally be used when real cases are not available. Imaginary instances may be introduced by such phrases as, "If, for example," ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... Opposite this hypothetical gate-way stood the Five-cornered tower. The lower part dates, we have seen, from no earlier than the eleventh century. It is referred to as Alt-Nuernberg (old Nuremberg) in the Middle Ages. The title of "Five-cornered" ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... there reached us from Chatto and Windus of London a most entertaining book by Hugh MacColl, entitled "Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet." It was a work of fancy, ingeniously constructed upon scientific principles. It described a hypothetical machine, a flying machine, which was made up of a substance more than half of whose mass had been converted into repelling particles. Such a fabric would leave the earth, pass the limits of its attraction with an accelerating ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... in their hybrids!"—(p. 473.) He tells us that to suppose that each species was created with a tendency "like this, is to make the works of God a mere mockery and deception"; and he satisfies himself that all difficulty is gone when he refers the stripes to his hypothetical thousands on thousands of years removed progenitor. But how is his difficulty really affected? for why is the striping of one species a less real difficulty ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... in that enlarged Mediterranean which at this period, save for a few islands, covered most of south Europe. Of these stratified remains, as well as of the great beds of Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Permian sediments beneath, our hypothetical observer would probably have been regardless; just as today we observe, with an indifference born of our transitoriness, the deposits rapidly gathering wherever river discharge is distributing the sediments over the sea-floor, or the lime-secreting organisms are actively at work. And ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... know about it!" she retorted; and, in view of the hypothetical difficulty and his want of sympathy, she fell into a gloom, from which she roused herself at last by declaring that, if there was nothing else in the flat they took, there should be a light kitchen and a bright, sunny bedroom for Margaret. He expressed the belief that they could easily find such ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... problem respecting its electrical influence would be a matter of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, impossible to suppose that a dense cloud, a sea of vapor, can pass over miles of surface bristling with good conductors, without undergoing and producing some change of electrical condition. Hypothetical cases may be put in which the character of the change could be deduced from the known laws of electrical action. But in actual nature, the elements are too numerous for us to seize. The true electrical condition of neither ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... with Emmet as it she were stating an hypothetical case for his dispassionate consideration. Her apparent coolness filled him with amazement, but he recognised that she had adopted the only attitude that could justify the interview and preserve her own dignity. His emotions were held in suspension; he even felt he had none, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... the disappearance of matter, everything disappears—qualities, thoughts, "ego"—and passes into a latent slate within the germ; along with the return of the form, qualities and attributes gradually reappear without any hypothetical soul whatever having any concern in the matter. So long as the form is in its germ stage, the being is nothing more than a mass of potentialities; when fully developed its faculties reappear, but they remain strictly attached ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... Corinthians, had been incorporated into the formula evolved during the early Christian centuries and known as the Apostles' Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a bone to the theologians. He could ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... his peculiar kind of intellectual piety lacked the imagination of Pascal. He could play, cleverly enough, with hypothetical infidelity, and refute it, so to say, "in his study" with his eye on the little chapel door; but there was a sort of refined shrinking from the jagged edges of reality in his somewhat Byzantine temperament which throws a certain suspicion of special ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... he did put a question; and, upon my word, it did not require an Oedipus or a Sphinx to answer it. Says he, "I asked Sir Elijah Impey." What? a question on the title between the Nabob and his mother? No such thing. He puts an hypothetical question. "Supposing," says he, "a rebellion to exist in that country; will the Nabob be justified in seizing the goods of the rebels?" That is a question decided in a moment; and I must have a malice to Sir Elijah Impey of which I am incapable, to deny the propriety of his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... which an eagle selects her eyry, and built it in such a fashion as if he had intended it, as an Irishman said of the Martello towers, for the sole purpose of puzzling posterity, there was, or conceived themselves to be, descended (for their pedigree was rather hypothetical) an opulent family of knightly rank, in the same county of Derby. The great fief of Castleton, with its adjacent wastes and forests, and all the wonders which they contain, had been forfeited in King John's stormy days, by one William Peveril, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... August 1744, by the Kaiser" (Adelung, iv. 154.)] (when the upshot had come); and the Secret Bohemian Article NOT then made public, nor ever afterwards,—much the contrary; though it was true enough, but inconvenient to confess, especially as it came to nothing. "A hypothetical thing, that," says Friedrich carelessly; "wages moderate enough, and proper to be settled beforehand, though the work was never done." To reach down quite over the Mountains, and have the Elbe for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... to the good itself, and the first unities; that it purifies the eye of the soul; establishes itself in true beings, and, the one principle of all things, and ends at last in that which is no longer hypothetical. The power of dialectic, therefore, being thus great, and the ends of this path so mighty, it must by no means be confounded with arguments which are alone conversant with opinion: for the former is the guardian ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... small rooms in one of the inns of court; he is surrounded with sheets of foolscap folio paper, tied up with a red string; he has more books than one could read in a year, or comprehend in seven; he walks slowly, speaks hesitatingly, and receives fees from those who visit him, for giving "hypothetical answers" ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... the theory above outlined sufficiently explains what seems so mysterious. There can, however, be no question that the feeling among servants generally is unfortunately something like that alluded to above as the imaginary inspiration of a hypothetical society, namely, that employers are oppressive, exacting, and utterly selfish; and there is certainly a tacit understanding that, as between servant and mistress, it is 'diamond cut diamond;' and the habit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... scrutinize severely the teachings of geology. But in doing this we do not concede that there is no other ground upon which such authors may be successfully met. There is no one point in their system which is not hypothetical. It is a system of ifs. There is no proof, in any single instance, that a higher has been developed from a lower species; but the question, in proper shape, is this: Has there been a succession of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various

... of the text and after almost despairing of a plausible solution of its mysteries. And it seems surprising that Apicius has never been suspected before of withholding information essential to the successful practice of his rather hypothetical and empirical formulae. The more we scrutinize them, the more we become convinced that the author has omitted vital directions—same as we did purposely with the two modern examples above. Many of the Apician recipes are dry enumerations of ingredients supposed to belong ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... who was not in the least disturbed. "I've often wondered, and even, putting a hypothetical case, thrashed the matter out with my friends. You would hate me. It's thoroughly human. With me, for instance—I feel non-committal about a man. I decide to injure him. I do so. And then I hate him. Now, if you have any message for Miss Barbara—or ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... the children are not known, and if they were, they would have no authority on that account. The mother never changes her name, the children are named after her, or, at least, are not named after the father. The system of gentes prevails, each gens consisting of a hypothetical female ancestress, and all her descendants through females. These primitive men and women, having no other resort, hit upon this device to hold a band of kin together. Here was the first social tie on ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... that if his manners became him not, he was a fool that taught them him. This does not throw much light on his early education: for it is not clear that the remark applies to that period, and in any case it is purely hypothetical. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... drawn. From my childhood I have been the victim of my constructive imagination, which has led me into many mistakes and some scrapes; because, instead of contenting myself with plain, obvious evidence, I have allowed myself to frame hypothetical interpretations, which, to acts simple in themselves, and explicable on ordinary motives, render the simple-seeming acts portentous. With bitter pangs of self-reproach I have at times discovered that a long and plausible history ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... halls, had proclaimed, just before Sarah Bernhardt's debut at the Palace Theatre, that if her appearances there were successful she might expect an invitation to membership in the White Rats.... These hypothetical instances would seem ridiculous ... but they are not. The Rodin case puts a by no means seldom-recurring phenomenon in the centre of the stage under a calcium light. The ironclad dreadnaughts of the academic world, the reactionary ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... to determine how far the unknown element affects the known, whether, for example, new discoveries may not one day supersede our most elementary notions about nature. To a certain extent all our knowledge is conditional upon what may be known in future ages of the world. We must admit this hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract, in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the philosopher's vocabulary the word ...
— Sophist • Plato

... this fourth Vote then, growls indignant Patriotism:—this vote, and who knows what other votes, and adjournments of voting; and the whole matter still hovering hypothetical! And at every new vote those Jesuit Girondins, even they who voted for Death, would so fain find a loophole! Patriotism must watch and rage. Tyrannical adjournments there have been; one, and now another at midnight on plea of fatigue,—all Friday wasted in hesitation and higgling; in re-counting ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... The first set of names is preferable. 'Categorical' properly means 'predicable' and 'hypothetical' is ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... analytical and, especially experimental, psychology has dealings. They are, on the contrary, the everyday, superficial and often extremely confused views which practical life and its wholly unscientific vocabulary present of those ascertained or hypothetical scientific facts. I have indeed endeavoured (for instance in the analysis of perception as distinguished from sensation) to impart some rudiments of psychology in the course of my aesthetical explanation, and I have avoided, as much as possible, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... the very outset of naval history, the vital truth that the man counts more than the machine. In these later days, when the tendency is to measure naval power merely by counting dreadnoughts, and to settle all hypothetical combats by the proportion of strength at a given point on the game board, it is well to remember that the most overwhelming victories have been won by the skill and audacity of a great leader, which overcame odds that would be reckoned by ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... we merely theorising, and talking of hypothetical goods which might conceivably follow from the adoption of our plan. All that we have written of is within our own experience. Time after time while we were making our experiments did we come across ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... whom, some by fishermen, several by a woman,—the only person in the settlement (and she a native) who could read correctly. One woman (married) was baptized, hypothetically, with her infant. Twenty-one in all were admitted, the majority with hypothetical baptism. Both of the women who came to be married had infants in their arms; one of them had three children. Not one person in the whole settlement could read correctly, except the woman before mentioned; her husband (a native of Bay ...
— Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the "Hawk," 1859 • Edward Feild

... Again, "the former does not belong to pure categoricals," it is simply disjunctive. MR. INGLEBY falls into the same error, and moreover seems not to be aware that a disjunctive proposition is at the same time hypothetical. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various

... A man persuades himself that he will not live long, or that his prospects in this world or the next are gloomy; or he takes views as absurdly far- reaching as those of the spinsters in the old tale, who wept over the hypothetical fate of the child one of them might have had if she had been married. Now, there is a certain melancholy not unbecoming a man; indeed, to be without it is hardly to be human. Here we do find ourselves, indeed, like the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... biscuits soaked with sea-water were distributed at one meal. They were in such a state that they would not have been looked at a second time under ordinary circumstances, but to us on a floating lump of ice, over three hundred miles from land, and that quite hypothetical, and with the unplumbed sea beneath us, they were luxuries indeed. Wild's tent made a pudding of ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... Northern white men and Negro opportunists that the political power of the Negro having long ago been suppressed by unlawful means, his right to vote is a mere paper right, of no real value, and therefore to be lightly yielded for the sake of a hypothetical harmony, is fatally short-sighted. It is precisely the attitude and essentially the argument which would have surrendered to the South in the sixties, and would have left this country to rot in slavery for another generation. White men do not ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.

... repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every State and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... idea. She would test her lover. Love was a very powerful force; she had found it the greatest, grandest, sweetest thing in the world. Tryon had said that he loved her; he had said scarcely anything else for several weeks, surely nothing else worth remembering. She would test his love by a hypothetical question. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... diversities and contradictions, and such strange hypothetical adjustments and re-adjustments of the data and calculations, entirely upset the groundless and extraordinary theory of the base of the pyramid being a standard of linear measurement; or a segment of any particular axis of the earth; ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... could think of nothing of obvious value in the house. My mother's silver—two gravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—had been pawned for some weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day. But my mind was full of hypothetical opportunities. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue, in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first alternative because ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... Satchells' father was in that adventure (or so Satchells says) he probably knew much about the affair from fresh tradition. Colonel Elliot notices this, and says: "The probability of Satchells having obtained information from a hypothetical ballad is really quite an ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang

... it have been thought anything incredible if we had been told that the ancient Persians, who had no idea of any but a monarchical government, had supposed Aristocratia to be a queen of Sparta? But we need not confine ourselves to hypothetical cases; it is positively stated that the Hindoos at this day believe "the honourable East India Company" to be a venerable old lady of high dignity, residing in this country. The Germans, again, of the present day derive their name from a similar mistake: the first tribe of them who ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately

... put another hypothetical state of things. Suppose the executive government of the United States should be held by a President who, like Mr. Buchanan, rejected the right of coercion, so called, and suppose a Congress should exist here entertaining the same political opinions, thus presenting ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke

... disease and in the changing seasons, and the anatomy of the human body were the chief subjects of study. The human cadaver was never dissected, but a knowledge of anatomy was obtained from diagrams which were wholly hypothetical. In early times medical officers were appointed to experiment with medicines upon monkeys, and also to dissect the bodies of monkeys. From these dissections, as well as from the printed diagrams of Chinese books the imperfect knowledge which they had reached was derived. It ...
— Japan • David Murray

... modifications. Scent, of essential importance to many animals, has with man almost ceased to be of any, except in connection with taste, which he has developed to a high degree. Whether or not sight preceded hearing in order of development, it is difficult, in conjecturing the first attempts of man or his hypothetical ancestor at the expression either of percepts or concepts, to connect vocal sounds with any large number of objects, but it is readily conceivable that the characteristics of their forms and movements should have been suggested to the eye—fully ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons, (one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... between the fictitious Mrs. Chump on sea and Mr. Pole, dyspeptic, in his armchair. Arabella took the doctor aside to ask him, if in a hypothetical instance, it would really be dangerous to thwart or irritate her father. She asked the curate if he deemed it wicked to speak falsely to an invalid for the invalid's benefit. The spiritual and bodily doctors ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... construct such mechanisms that we can so take cognizance of molecular movements that vis viva can be taken from them. The mechanisms of M. Lippmann are not, like the celebrated apparatus at one time devised by Maxwell, purely hypothetical. They do not suppose a partition with a hole impossible to be bored through matter where the molecular spaces would be larger than the hole itself. They have finite dimensions. Thus M. Lippmann considers a vase full of oxygen at a constant temperature. ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... methods of resistance was in line with Confederate threats at a moment when the sky looked black. There was indeed much Southern talk of "retiring" into a hypothetical defensible interior which impressed Englishmen, but had no foundation in geographical fact. Meanwhile British attention was eagerly fixed on the Northern advance, and it was at least generally hoped that the projected ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... achieved for the French, Alexander Dalrymple accomplished for the English. His views, however, bordered on the hypothetical, and he believed in the existence ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... enjoined in the Church Catechism, but I lacked the courage to tell her so. Nor do I think I should have effected much even if I had been as brave in rebuke as an archdeacon or a bishop. Besides, I felt that I had accomplished something. Lalage had committed herself to an approval of a hypothetical Miss Battersby. If a governess could be found in the world who would stamp about the floor and shriek that word, or if Miss Battersby would learn the habit of violent profanity, Lalage would quite like her. It was a definite concession. I had a mental vision of the changed Miss ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham

... a trifle hypothetical," Herr Freudenberg muttered. "We had the utmost difficulty in persuading an ex-convict ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Dorado, and of an inland sea, has been neglected. No use either has been made of a map of the Orinoco, three years posterior to that of La Cruz, and traced by Surville from the collection of true or hypothetical materials preserved in the archives of the Despacho universal de Indias. The progress of geography, as manifested on our maps, is much slower than might be supposed from the number of useful results which are found scattered in the works of different ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... introductions of any kind; but let us see what they amount to here. Select for yourself your doctrine, or your ordinance, which you say was introduced, and try to give the history of its introduction. Hypothetical that history will be, of course; but we will not scruple at that;—we will only ask one thing, that it should cut clean between the real facts of the case, though it bring none in its favour; but it will not be able to do even this. The rise of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, of the usage of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... and others have made cultures of beets from wild localities in order to discover a hypothetical common ancestor of all the present cultivated types. These researches point to the B. patula as the probable ancestor, but of course they were not made to decide the question as to whether the origination of the several now existing types ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... collection for the purpose of determining which picture represented with least disputable fidelity the first intention of its painter, and united in its modes of execution the highest reach of achievement with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe that—after hesitating long over hypothetical degrees of blackened shadow and yellowed light, of lost outline and buried detail, of chilled luster, dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force—he would finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly dressed figures in a dimly lighted room—dependent ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... to know what will interest one's readers? That is a difficult question. Clearly it is no use to put up a man of straw, call him the Public, and then try to play down to him or up to him and his alleged and purely hypothetical opinions and tastes. Those who attempt to fawn upon the puppet of their own creation are as likely as not to end by interesting nobody. At any rate, try and please yourself, then at least one person's liking is engaged. That is ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... improbably event, the suspended officer, according to the proposed law, should be restored to his place. The substance of the original Act was gone, but the Senate sought shelter from its record of inconsistency under the small shadow of this distant and hypothetical restoration ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... literary evil, that it has excited my curiosity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured on this project; he claims the honour, and the critics do not deny it, of being the first who published Italian letters. Aretino had the hardihood ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... spirit of the war party, demanded of all the Powers whether, in the event of France withdrawing its ambassador from Madrid, they would do the same, and whether, in case of war, France would receive their moral and material support. Wellington in his reply protested against the framing of hypothetical cases; the other envoys answered Montmorency's questions in the affirmative. The next step was taken by Metternich, who urged that certain definite acts of the Spanish people or Government ought to be specified as rendering war obligatory on France and its allies, and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... and having no vessel-making arts, should undergo a corresponding change of habitat and acquire the art of pottery, they might not reach in a thousand years, if left to themselves, a grade in the art equal to that of the hypothetical Alaskan potters in the first decade. It is, therefore, not the age of the art itself that determines its forms, but the grade and kind of art with which ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes

... said affectionately to himself. "He's playing go to the hotel, I suppose. Perhaps when that imagination of his gets to work at hypothetical bread and butter he'll find the ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond

... of this principle of selection is not hypothetical. It is certain that several of our eminent breeders have, even within a single lifetime, modified to {31} a large extent some breeds of cattle and sheep. In order fully to realise what they have done, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... ever since. But of the intermediate period between the close of the first century and the close of the second, the notices are sparse, the literature is scanty and fragmentary. Hence modern criticism has busied itself with hypothetical reconstructions of Christian history during this interval. It has been maintained that the greater part of the writings of our Canon were unknown and unwritten at the beginning of this period. It has been supposed that there was a complete discontinuity in the career of the Christian ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... efficient. In that case, what should happen? The possibility had to be contemplated by reasonable statesmen, and provided against. But to do so in a public treaty would have been to condemn beforehand the existing system. Therefore a hypothetical arrangement was made for this possible future event in a secret treaty, to which Spain was made a party; whereby it was provided that if the arrangement should break down, and France should have to establish a definite protectorate, the vital part of the north coast ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... telegram from Lord Dufferin, No. 86, received late on the previous night, in which the Sultan asked our advice as to offers of alliance in the event of immediate general war, which had probably been made him by both sides. We replied to it after the Cabinet (No. 68): "We cannot enter into hypothetical engagements or make arrangements in contemplation of war between friendly Powers now at peace. The Sultan must be aware that Germany is the most powerful military nation on the Continent, and that she has no ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric activities in Europe, in that period, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... little further. "And I think," he said, "that I should inform this purely hypothetical friend of mine that the Italian and his patron had their heads mighty close ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... particles into the pores of the hair; and M. Saussure supposes, that his vesicular vapour requires more time to be redissolved, than is necessary to dry the hair of his thermometer. Essais sur l'Hygrom. p. 226. but I suspect there is a less hypothetical way of understanding it; when a colder body is brought into warm and moist air, (as a bottle of spring-water for instance,) a steam is quickly collected on its surface; the contrary occurs when a warmer body is brought into cold and damp air, it continues ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... their minds are fixed upon that distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a year. And if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not enjoy it either; but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical enjoyment at fifty thousand a year. And this is the essence of their tragedy:—they have not learned to ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... necessity which his character imposed upon him, at once of appeasing his aspirations on behalf of mankind, and of satisfying a disciplined and scientific intelligence. He was of too robust an understanding to find adequate gratification in the artificial construction of hypothetical utopias. Conviction was as indispensable as hope; and distinct grounds for the faith that was in him, as essential as the faith itself. The result of this fact of mental constitution, the intellectual conditions ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley

... comprehend these phenomena, without admitting them as the effects of a real and material substance, or very subtile fluid, which, insinuating itself between the particles of bodies, separates them from each other; and, even allowing the existence of this fluid to be hypothetical, we shall see in the sequel, that it explains the phenomena of nature ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... the Old. They simply suggest that after the people of the Mediterranean regions had become well civilized and after those of America were also sufficiently civilized to assimilate new ideas, a stray ship or two was blown by the trade-winds across the Atlantic. That hypothetical voyage was the precursor of the great journey of Columbus. Without the tradewinds this historic discoverer never could have found the West Indies. Suppose that a strong west wind had blown him backward on his course when his men were mutinous. Suppose that he had ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... a little conversation, hypothetical of course, about some friends of ours who found themselves similarly situated, and I regret ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... a girl of another dimension—ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine—the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical Vulcan— splotched with murky, mysterious globii vitonae. There was an ancient quay, and emerging from the ultramarine waters about it a silhouetted metropolis of spires, domes, and minarets. It was 1921, and that generation thus received its first glimpse of the alien landscape of The Blind Spot ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... the breaking strength of a beam is expressed in terms of unit stress by a modulus of rupture, which is a purely hypothetical expression for points beyond the elastic limit. The formulae used in computing this ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory. The {9} undulations of the ether and even its existence are hypothetical, yet every one now admits the undulatory theory of light. The principle of natural selection may be looked at as a mere hypothesis, but rendered in some degree probable by what we positively know of the variability of organic beings in a state of nature,—by ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... understand your apparent confidence in the ability of the hypothetical Omega culture to supply massive aid to us, even if its people should be so inclined," said a straight-backed woman member. "The time seems very short for the mastery of an ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer

... profession. I wouldn't stand in your way any more than I do now. 'Fourth—Freedom,'" he read slowly. "That is easy in one way—hard in another. If you married me,"—She stirred resentfully at this constant reference to their marriage; but he seemed purely hypothetical in tone; "I wouldn't interfere with your freedom any. Not of my own will. But if you ever grew to love me—or if there were children—it would make some difference. Not much. There mightn't be ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... prevalence rate of 2.7%, which represents the cumulative result of the past incarceration experiences of the living adult population, the lifetime likelihood is a hypothetical projection of the future if a birth cohort were to experience a fixed set of rates of first incarceration and mortality ...
— Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974-2001 • Thomas P. Bonczar

... free from prejudice in favour of his country. That he definitely regarded history rather as a moral agency and a lesson for the future than as an irrefutable narrative of the past, I consider highly hypothetical; but it is probable that his mind was not of the type that is most diligent in the close, exhaustive, and logical study so necessary to the historian of today. "Superficial," if we could eliminate the reproach in the word, would perhaps go far toward describing him. He is what we would call ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... visit to the agent. He received a card instructing him to call at the office in order to meet a certain Mr. Gianapolis. Quitting his rooms in Kennington, Mr. Soames, attired in discreet black, set out to make the acquaintance of his hypothetical employer. ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... the most striking and ingenious scientific romances that we have ever read. The writer of it is a bold man; he has undertaken to give a hypothetical history of creation, beginning, as the title-pages say, at the earliest period, and coming down to the present day. It is not quite so authentic as that of Moses, nor is it written with such an air of simplicity and confidence as the narrative of the Jewish historian; but it is much longer, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... he would hike back to the Study, shoot himself in the Arm with a hypothetical Needle, and once more begin picking ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade

... the effort to recover, rested the tips of her gloved fingers upon the edge of the table. Simultaneously (Kirkwood could have sworn) a single word left her lips, a word evidently pitched for the ear of the hypothetical Calendar alone. Then ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... must distinctly be borne in mind that these two forces are also north of the passes: that of Von Bojna being stationed at the elbow where the Germanic line turned from the Carpathians almost due north along the Dunajec-Biala front, or across the neck of our hypothetical jar. The Dukla and Lupkow passes were still in Russian hands; these were the only two that the Germanic offensives of January, February, and March, 1915, had failed to capture; all the others, from Rostoki eastward, were held by the Austrians and Germans. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... orders; and at the proper time, sighting through the periscope as he did so, he pressed the button of a little arrangement which he held, half concealed, in the palm of his hand. There was a soft explosion, a sort of woof!—and a torpedo was on the way to a hypothetical enemy, with only the captain able to see that it reached ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly

... how she still had the courage to rebel. For the first time in her life she had had to obey. For the first time in her life she was of no account. For the first time she had been made conscious of the inferiority of her sex. The training of years had broken down under the experience. The hypothetical status in which she had stood with regard to Aubrey and his friends was not tolerated here, where every moment she was made to feel acutely that she was a woman, forced to submit to everything to which her womanhood exposed her, forced to endure everything that he might put upon her—a chattel, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... from his tree and with one hand on the automatic- loaded water pistol, and the other on the lead-loaded pop gun, he confronted the hypothetical grave! ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... the truth of experience is only a hypothetical truth. If the suppositions which underlie all the intimations of experience—subject, object, time, space and causality—were removed, none of those intimations would contain a word of truth. In other words, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... genteel independence, and this would be a good deal lessened after his death by the lapse of an annuity. But sister Laura was thus provided for well enough, while I had not a shilling in actual money, although plenty of hypothetical thousands and sundry castles in the air. It was the consciousness of the latter kind of property, no doubt, that gave me so free-and-easy an air, and made me so completely the master of my own actions. How I did worry that blessed old woman! how Laura lectured and scolded! how the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various

... his stage line and the hypothetical good will that went with it, and Pinnacle and Lund breathed long and deep and planned trips they had refrained from taking heretofore, and wished Casey luck. Bill Masters laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and made a suggestion so wise ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... probable that they take pleasure in what is best and most nearly related to themselves (and that must be the reason), and that they reward those who love and honour this most highly," etc. The passage is typical both of the hypothetical way of speaking, and of the twist in the direction of Aristotle's own conception of the deity (whose essence is reason); also of the Socratic manner of ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann

... Earth, will be to the extension of the next below the uppermost, as 1. to 999. for as the pressure sustained by the 999. is to the pressure sustain'd by the first, so is the extension of the first to the extension of the 999. so that, from this hypothetical calculation, we shall find the Air to be indefinitely extended: For if we suppose the whole thickness of the Air to be divided, as I just now instanced, into a thousand parts, and each of those under ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... reader require an example a little more within historical range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above prehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in a vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical and a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if we begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the relative ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... comprehend that Nigel intended to leave the Friars sooner than the arrival of the term for which he had deposited the rent. This might imply an expectation of refunding, which, as a Scotch wag said, of all species of funding, jumped least with the old gentleman's humour. He was beginning to enter a hypothetical caveat on this subject, and to quote several reasons why no part of the money once consigned as room-rent, could be repaid back on any pretence, without great hardship to the landlord, when Nigel, growing impatient, told him that the money was his absolutely, and without ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott



Words linked to "Hypothetical" :   possibility, supposed, theoretical, hypothetic, supposititious, theoretic, hypothetical creature, conjectural, hypothetical imperative, theory, hypothesis



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