"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton-hash,—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given flavor, we might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... interested, finally, in our methods of travel, and then, in logical sequence, with what he could see about him. He watched curiously my loading of the canoe, for I had a three-mile stretch of open water, and the wind was abroad. Deuce's empirical boat wisdom aroused his admiration. He and his son were both at the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... of the great law of universal gravitation to remove this empirical character from Kepler's laws. Newton's grand discovery bound together the three isolated laws of Kepler into one beautiful doctrine. He showed not only that those laws are true, but he showed why they must be true, and why no other laws could have been true. He proved to demonstration in his ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages renewed: Philip prided ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... stimulate; and third, knowledge of the way to bring these two together in a helpful manner. Of the three, I am afraid that university instructors have, in the main, but the first. At any rate, all they know of the other two is of an empirical character and what they have picked up incidentally. There are exceptions, to be sure. Every worthy institution has them, striking exceptions, too, some of them are. A few of our older men have become good teachers thru practise and experiment, and ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... the moral and religious values and is thus removed from pure psychology into ethics. Or we find comparisons which suggestively illuminate the working of the mind without amplifying our psychological understanding. We approach empirical psychology most nearly in verses like these: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of the child, but the word of correction should drive it far from him"; or "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... boast, "the town has become in some sort the refuge of the unfortunate afflicted with carious joints, after they have tried all the means usually recommended by professional men, or have had recourse to empirical nostrums, or when amputation seemed to ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... Aldrovandus, Coiter, and Fabricius. Concerned with description and depiction of the anatomy of the embryo, they established a period of macro-iconography in embryology. The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually eliminated empiricism during the ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... vicar of Rookwood, Dr. Polycarp Small; Dr. Titus Tyrconnel, an emigrant, and empirical professor of medicine, from the sister isle, whose convivial habits had first introduced him to the hall, and afterwards retained him there; and Mr. Codicil Coates, clerk of the peace, attorney-at-law, bailiff, and receiver. We were wrong ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... with a smile, "and, what is more, he is very ignorant. The truth is, he has been brought up in a Shivaite pagoda, like all the real snake-charmers. Shiva is the patron god of snakes, and the Brahmans teach the bunis to produce all kinds of mesmeric tricks by empirical methods, never explaining to them the theoretical principles, but assuring them that Shiva is behind every phenomenon. So that the bunis sincerely ascribe to their god ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually and peaceably. We do not find fault with men for being born ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... de La Mothe. At length two other Presidents came over to my opinion, being thoroughly convinced that succours from Spain at this time were a remedy absolutely necessary to our disease, but a dangerous and empirical medicine, and infallibly mortal to particular persons if it did not pass first ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... self-evident (intuitive) synthetic propositions, i.e. of space and time. The nature of axiomatic certainty is part of the fundamental problem of logic and metaphysics. Those who deny the possibility of all non-empirical knowledge naturally hold that every axiom is ultimately based on observation. For the Euclidian axioms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winking at our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and practical and informative, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... concerning the degeneration consequent on adoption of the parasitic habit. All parasites seem to have descended from free living beasts. One asks 'what is degeneration?' without receiving a very satisfactory answer. After all, such terms must be empirical. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... which is at present finding remarkably wide acceptance. Philosophers are often reproached with an indisposition to agree, and naturally where inquiry is active diversity will obtain. But to-day there appears a strange unanimity as regards the ultimate formula of ethics. The empirical schools state this as the highest form of the struggle for existence; the idealistic, as self-realization. The two are the same so far as they both regard morality as having to do with the development of life in persons. These curious beings, both also acknowledge, can never rest till they attain ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... new yacht out of his private purse, he having some contrivance of his own'. Also, Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685: 'a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping; not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines, and the easier mechanical mathematics.' Also, Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 155: 'the great and almost only pleasure of Mind he seem'd addicted to, was Shipping and Sea-Affairs; which seem'd to be so much his Talent for Knowledge, as well as Inclination, that a War of that ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... Mr. Baring-Gould has made an ingenious and praiseworthy attempt to reduce the entire existing mass of household legends to about fifty story-roots; and his list, though both redundant and defective, is nevertheless, as an empirical classification, very instructive.] ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... gestured helplessly. "No, it isn't possible. Those tapes are coded! There's no way of tampering—" Pederson stopped abruptly, as a great light dawned. "Wait a minute, though. It needn't be the tapes! One thing I've always wondered—would it be possible to negate a given factor beyond all reach of empirical cooerdinates? You know, through ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who has once ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the most complicated escapement made. We mean by this that there are more factors involved in the problem of designing it correctly than in any other known escapement. Most—we had better say all, for there are no exceptions which occur to us—writers on the lever escapement lay down certain empirical rules for delineating the several parts, without giving reasons for this or that course. For illustration, it is an established practice among escapement makers to employ tangential lockings, as we explained and ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... of the physical perfection developed thereby, is a sign that essential mastery has been achieved by the artist—the power, that is to say, of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... which it shall be presented. How, for example, should we define geography? What is the unity in the different so-called divisions of geography,—mathematical geography, physical geography, political geography, commercial geography? Are they purely empirical classifications dependent upon the brute fact that we run across a lot of different facts? Or is there some intrinsic principle through which the material is distributed under these various heads,—something in the interest and attitude of the human ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... have got pretty nearly as far as we can get. To fix these dimensions of the propeller accurately at the present time, and without further knowledge of the action of the screw on the water, was, he thought, impossible. All the rules and formulae are empirical. The best one he knew is given in Table IV., due to Mr. Thom, the head of the Barrow Company's engineering drawing office, and at present acting manager, who has used it for some years in practice. These ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... empirical way must be found in which to acquire the understanding of sound play. My system of teaching differs from the usual ones, in that it sets down at the outset definite elementary principles of chess strategy ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... back with every appearance of affection. They can tell you of all sorts of queer, unknown customs and facts, and can show you all sorts of strange and unusual things. Yet at the last analysis these are also discursions and anecdotes. We gather empirical knowledge: only rarely do we think we get a glimpse of how the delicate machinery moves ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... normal child that does not yet speak perfectly, resembles the diseased adult who, for any cause, no longer has command of language. And to compare these two with each other is the more important, as at present no other empirical way is open to us for investigating the nature of the process of learning to speak; but this way conducts us, fortunately, through pathology, to solid, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... abstract theology were passing out of sight, and that speculation was turning to the historical and scientific problems. Hartley was expounding the association principle which became the main doctrine of the empirical school, and Hume was teaching ethics upon the same basis, and turning from speculation to political history. The main reason of this intellectual indifference was the social condition under which the philosophical theory found no strong current ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... III. Articles that are in any way dangerous or offensive, also patent medicines, nostrums, and empirical preparations whose ingredients are concealed, will not be admitted to the exposition. The director of exhibits, with the approval of the president, has the authority to order the removal of any article he may consider dangerous, detrimental to, or incompatible with the object ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... may call the empirical view of the League. There are those of us in this country, and indeed all over the world, who, profoundly impressed with the horrors of war, hating war from the bottom of their hearts as an evil thing—a company which must ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical and psychical maltreatment, ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Orleans did not suspect the role of the mother of vinegar in the production of this article when they were employing empirical processes that had been established by practice. The vats were often infested by small worms ("vinegar eals") which disputed with the mycoderma for the oxygen, killed it through submersion, and caused the loss of batches that had been under troublesome ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... first applied it felt a glow of joy—for an instructor he was still empirical—rise from the apprehension that living with them would really he to see life. Their sociable strangeness was an intimation of that—their chatter of tongues, their gaiety and good humour, their infinite dawdling (they were always getting ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... decisively rational than his predecessor and therefore more insightful in his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose "integrity," "honor," and biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. "For if you begin with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common sense, I think there can be no reasonable hopes of converting ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... soon. Dibasic acids of the paraffin series of hydrocarbons have the general formula CnH2(COOH)2n; malonic and succinic acids are important members. The isomerism which occurs as soon as the molecule contains a few carbon atoms renders any classification based on empirical molecular formulae somewhat ineffective; on the other hand, a scheme based on molecular structure would involve more detail than it is here possible to give. For further information, the reader is referred to any standard work on organic chemistry. A list of the acids present in fats and oils ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to be said that the empirical and experimental evidence as to the question of constancy is not as extensive as it should be. The experimental conditions are seldom described, and it is only recently that an interest in the matter has been awakened. Much remains to be done. Among other ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... natural, prudential, utilitarian morality interested men. One of the consequences of this theory of the State was a complete alteration in the thought of the relation of State and Church. The nature of the Church itself as an empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the same criticism with the State. Men saw the Church in a new light. As the State was viewed as a kind of contract in men's social interest, so the Church was regarded as ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... desire of justifying myself has weighed upon my heart; it is only a few minutes that this want has affected Robespierre. I request to be heard." Leave was accorded, and he briefly exculpated himself. "Be especially on your guard," he said, as he concluded, and pointed to Robespierre, "against empirical orators, who have incessantly in their mouths the words of liberty, tyranny, conspiracy—always mixing up their own praises with the deceit they impose upon the people. Do justice to such men!" "Order!" cried Freron, Robespierre's friend; "this is insult and sarcasm." The tribune resounded ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Bacon asks, how does the mind acquire | the knowledge of these primary | truths, since, as it is allowed by | Aristotle himself, all knowledge | starts with experience, which | experience is always contingent and | particular? How does the mind go from | the empirical knowledge of facts or | sensible effects (phenomena) to the | knowledge of the very nature of | things? The formal necessity of the | syllogism (or deductive reasoning) | makes the old logic forget the pre- | judicial question of how we set up | first principles. Therefore, any | attempt ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... they are gross feeders;* [Dr. Campbell's definition of the Lepcha's Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew; for, as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.] rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelatinous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish: and they ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... geometry contains only the most inscrutable of philosophic mysteries; and a wise humility persuades them to forego the unexampled enlightenment a mastery of the difficulties would yield. Others, who are devoutly wedded to what they consider the unreservedly empirical character of modern (that is, true) philosophy, avoid the Ethics because they are convinced, on general principles, that only a mind hopelessly lost in the dark night of medieval speculation could conceive of philosophy in such ultra-deductive ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... metallic form, therefore it had been deposited in its siliceous matrix while in a molten state, and many ingenious arguments were adduced in support of this contention. Of late, however, most scientific men, and indeed many purely empirical inquirers (using the word empirical in its strict sense) have come to the conclusion that though the mode in which they were composed was not always identical, all lodes, including auriferous formations, were primarily derived from mineral-impregnated ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... myself that I have, in this way, discovered the cause of—and consequently the mode of removing—all the errors which have hitherto set reason at variance with itself, in the sphere of non-empirical thought. I have not returned an evasive answer to the questions of reason, by alleging the inability and limitation of the faculties of the mind; I have, on the contrary, examined them completely in the light of principles, and, after ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... considered in this chapter is that they are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that 'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and the first rise of his family, we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... years. Two hundred years ago even—not one! In practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course—frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep—but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... already been produced to sustain the allegation that the old system of medicine is unworthy of our confidence; that, with no law upon which to base its principles of treatment, its practice rests upon a chaotic mass of empirical experiences, groundless theories, and ever-changing fancies; that those best acquainted with its principles, and the results of its practice, have the least faith in its usefulness; and that the interests of the suffering, imperiously demand a revolution ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... discernible which may be called the New Buddhism, and has not only new wine but new wineskins. It is democratic, optimistic, empirical or practical; it welcomes women and children; it is hospitable to science and every form of truth. It is catholic in spirit and has little if any of the venom of the old Buddhist controvertists. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... theory of the prevention of crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an indirect and more ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... less thorough and empirical in method than Edison, it would have been sufficient to have made his plans clear to associates or subordinates and hold them responsible for accurate results. No such vicarious treatment would suit him, ready as he has always been to share the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of the Harlowes when in the olden time we should have dreamed of the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to Tristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... future physicians to guide their patients in the selection, combination and preparation of food. Dietetics should be the principal subject of study. It should be approached both from the scientific and from the empirical side. It is not a rigid subject, but one which can be treated in a very elastic way. The scientific part is important, but the practical part, which is the art, is vastly more important. A part of the art of feeding and fasting is scientific, for we ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James, Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who regard classification "as serviceable for the practical ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... into a wider circle. Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's gift of second-sight and prophecy. It was a period when science (though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward, anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as rubbish. These things ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... No empirical science can be carried to perfection by any one nation or in any particular epoch. It can only expand with the progressive developments of the human race itself. Nevertheless, in that science which for three thousand years has been held ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... free city-states—but also through individual faults of their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course; and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet, but lying behind the empirical law that East is East and West ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... "Imperial." The details of the division were never disclosed, when the proportions were originally fixed. The segregation of the services classified as "Imperial" is open to serious objections. The method of computation is empirical and unconstitutional, and if carried to its logical conclusion would now result in depriving Ireland of any share whatever in future Equivalent grants, as her contribution to the services thus classified as "Imperial" is practically a minus quantity, though ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... neighbor asks him to "stop that stove smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It always does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this "always" that the connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely empirical one in the brakeman's mind, bred of habit. But if the passenger had been an acute reasoner ... [and had] singled out of all the numerous points involved in a stove's not smoking the one special point of smoke pouring freely out of the stove-pipe's ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... that can be said is that they are probably no less effective than most of the modern drugs recommended for the same purpose. Concerning a function over which so many fond superstitions still linger in the public mind we may, perhaps, charitably forgive Gilbert for the introduction of an empirical remedy for sterility, which, he assures us, he has often tried and with invariable success, and which enjoys the double advantage of applicability ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... penalty?' You remind me of what I know—that legislation is never perfect. The men for whom laws are now made may be compared to the slave who is being doctored, according to our old image, by the unscientific doctor. For the empirical practitioner, if he chance to meet the educated physician talking to his patient, and entering into the philosophy of his disease, would burst out laughing and say, as doctors delight in doing, 'Foolish fellow, instead ...
— Laws • Plato
... because they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences. But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd beliefs. The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious non-rational inference. The process of inference may go on beyond the point desired by the politician who ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... through a defect in logic, he accepts mechanics as the final explanation of things. And last, it is impossible to pass over, in silence, the rare works of Lord Kelvin, so full, for French readers, of unexpected suggestions, for they show us the entirely practical and empirical value which the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... wars of the past nations have been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of the people. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossed countries and populations to each other as if they had been balls in a game ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... substances. Their virtues must therefore be learnt, either from observing their effects upon insects and quadrupeds; from analogy, deduced from the already known powers of some of their congenera, or from the empirical usages ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... unity with which philosophers start their study of the world. They can never perceive the world in its entire reality. Yet their imagination, with its magnificent allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible, has pointed the way for empirical knowledge. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... order as to admit of being predicted with a precision which to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect. And though an equal degree of regularity had not been discerned in natural phaenomena generally, even the most empirical observation had ascertained so many cases of an uniformity almost complete, that inquiring minds were eagerly on the look-out for further indications pointing in the same direction; and vied with one another in the formation of theories which, though hypothetical and essentially ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... has often been stated that domestic races do not differ from each other in characters of generic value. It can be shown that this statement is not correct; but naturalists differ much in determining what characters are of generic value; all such valuations being at present empirical. When it is explained how genera originate under nature, it will be seen that we have no right to expect often to find a generic amount of difference ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... observation of abnormal social states), a certain peculiarity of verification. We begin by deducing every well-known historical situation from the series of its antecedents. Thus we acquire a body of empirical generalisations as to social phenomena, and then we connect the generalisations with the positive theory of human nature. A sociological demonstration lies in the establishment of an accordance between the conclusions of historical ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... for he at once forms their essence and transcends them. He is the infinite and the vast, yet the smallest of the small, at once here as there, there as here; no characterisation of him is possible, otherwise than by the denial to him of all empirical attributes, relations and definitions. He is independent of all limitations of space, time, and cause which rules all that is objectively presented, and therefore the empirical universe. When Bahva ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the dark. The elimination of selfishness; of condemnation; of fear and anger, and doubt, must have far greater power for universal happiness and well-being than all the systems which theology or science or politics could devise. Indeed, all these systems are sporadic and empirical attempts to express the vague dawning ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... and open, that my errors can be marked and set aside before the mass of knowledge be further infected by them; and it will be easy also for others to continue and carry on my labours. And by these means I suppose that I have established for ever a true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the affairs ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Science, admits that it does not know these fundamental principles; that it reasons, not from underlying causes, but from external symptoms and personal experiences. It is, therefore, self-confessedly full of doubts, errors and confusion; in short, empirical—and necessarily, a failure. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... learn to play on a foreign language as we learn to play on a musical instrument, and we may arrive at the highest perfection in performing on any instrument, without having a notion of thorough bass or the laws of harmony. For practical purposes this purely empirical knowledge is all that is required. But though it would be a mistake to attempt in our elementary schools to replace an empirical by a scientific knowledge of grammar, that empirical knowledge of grammar ought in time to be raised to a real, rational, and satisfying knowledge, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... source. We had thought of getting the theory of the screw-propeller from the marine engineers, and then, by applying our tables of air-pressures to their formulas, of designing air-propellers suitable for our purpose. But so far as we could learn, the marine engineers possessed only empirical formulas, and the exact action of the screw-propeller, after a century of use, was still very obscure. As we were not in a position to undertake a long series of practical experiments to discover a propeller suitable for our machine, it seemed necessary to obtain such a thorough understanding ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... forming root tubercles on his legumes, be it clover or cow peas, and so fixing for their lord the free atmospheric nitrogen contained in the soil. As Macaulay would say, "every school boy knows" now that leguminous root nodules are endotrophic mycorrhiza,—but the Romans did not! Nevertheless their empirical practice of soil improvement with legumes was quite as good as ours. Varro (I, 23) explains the Roman method of green manuring more fully than Cato. Columella (II, 13) insists further that if the hay is saved the stubble of legumes ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... swell. I wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could I acknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logical ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by most as a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a vehicle for ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... may be arrived at, provided, too—and herein lies the difficulty—provided that the premises are also true. These premises may be in themselves general statements—how is their truth established? They may be, and often are, the generalisations of the empirical sciences, and must then possess the same degree of uncertainty that these generalisations possess. Some philosophers have contended that certain general ideas are innate, but few would be found ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... facts are stubborn things, and the hypothesis has frequently to be made over in accordance with newly-observed facts, and theories may or may not be proven correct. The whole subject is as yet in the empirical stage, and the way must be felt from day to day. If the children's librarian lives in a continual rush, what "leisure to grow wise" on her chosen subject does she have? and if she is hurried constantly from one child to another, what chance have the children for learning by contact with the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... it desirable to place all that one may have to say of the education of girls in America on some proved, rational basis, for in no country is the work of education carried on in so purely empirical a way. We are deeply impressed with its necessity; we are eager in our efforts, but we are always in the condition of one "whom too great eagerness bewilders." We are ready to drift in any direction on the subject. We adopt every new idea that presents itself. We recognize our errors ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler. I make no pretence of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject. On the other hand, I have purposely treated the empirical physical foundations of the theory in a "step-motherly" fashion, so that readers unfamiliar with physics may not feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest for the trees. May the book bring some one a few ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... and premature enough, but which nevertheless rescued jurisprudence from that worse and more ignoble condition, not unknown to ourselves, in which nothing like a generalisation is aspired to, and law is regarded as a mere empirical pursuit—it was the fashion to explain the ready and apparently intuitive perception which we have of certain qualities in a Will, by saying that they were natural to it, or, as the phrase would run in full, attached to it by the Law of Nature. Nobody, I imagine, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... developed into the empirical and ideal systems of philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... chapter, indeed, is of genuine historical and literary interest. From the literary point of view, it is a near descendant—collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same English empirical humour of life—of Thomas Overbury's A Wife (1614—only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle's Microcosmographie (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard's Chrestoleros* (1598), in verse. It is an early instance of the ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... application of scientific knowledge to practice. The latter in carrying out its more practical aims requires, if it is to be saved from the narrowness of mere specialisation and from degenerating into empirical methods, the constant co-operation of those whose outlook is not narrowed down to the immediate practical end, but takes in the subject as a whole, and whose chief function is ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... This is the proper method to adopt in teaching authoritatively young men; and the work in fact was intended for students in theology. My own book, on the other hand, was of a directly tentative and empirical character. I wished to build up an Anglican theology out of the stores which already lay cut and hewn upon the ground, the past toil of great divines. To do this could not be the work of one man; much less, could it be at once received ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... The second is an idealistic philosophy (absolute idealism), which inevitably lands in Pantheism. The third is an intuitional or "faith-philosophy," which finally ends in Mysticism. The fourth is a rationalistic or "spiritualistic" philosophy, which yields pure Theism. The last is an empirical philosophy, which derives all religion from instruction, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... before I definitely abandoned all hope of obtaining, by any of the means I found in use, the results for which I was striving. Consequently, from that time to the present my work has necessarily been more or less independent and empirical in its nature, and, while I trust I am neither prejudiced nor intolerant in my attitude towards pianoforte education in its general aspect, I cannot help feeling that a great deal of natural taste is stifled and a great deal of mediocrity created by the persistent and unintelligent study of such ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... summary of all present knowledge of the voice. First, the insight into the singer's vocal operations is considered, which the hearer obtains by attentive listening to the tones produced. This empirical knowledge, as it is generally called, indicates a state of unnecessary throat tension as the cause, or at any rate the accompaniment, of every faulty tone. Further, an outline is given of all scientific knowledge of the voice. The anatomy of the vocal organs, and the acoustic and mechanical ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... lady said, looking at Editha's lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But how dreadful of her! How ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... so small that u and [Delta] may be considered constant. As regards the quantity f(u), or the friction per unit of length, the natural law which regulates it is not known, audit can only be expressed by some empirical formula, which, while according sufficiently nearly with the facts, is suited for calculation. For this purpose the binomial formula, au bu squared, or the simple formula, b1 u squared, is generally ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... afford examples of the development of what I have called secondary mnemonic chains; fresh personalities, more or less complete, alongside the normal state. And I would add that hypnotism is only the name given to a group of empirical methods of ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... understanding the essential nature of pleasure and pain, the fact that what is pleasure to one man is pain to another, rather discredited this as a psychological explanation. I think we may phrase the situation fairly on an empirical basis when we say that seeking arises in instinct but receives its impulse to continuity by some agreeable affective state of satisfaction. Man steers towards pleasure and satisfaction of some type or other, but the force is the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... not an idea of the laws of nature; if they want to cure a man, they have no conception at all of true scientific remedies. If they try anything they must try it upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in this bare, empirical way. What could be more improbable—at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason—than that some mineral springs should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral springs make wounds heal quickly? And yet the chance knowledge ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... are unreliable, but the author's proposed method is equally so. We can determine by experiment limiting percentages of steel which a concrete of given quality can safely carry as reinforcement, and then use empirical formulas based on the stress in the steel and an assumed percentage of its depth in the concrete as a lever arm with more ease and just as much accuracy. The common methods result in designs which are safe enough, but they pretend to determine the stress in concrete; the writer ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... which alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells which is a better argument for the American social and political system than any empirical theories that can ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... disbelief is met by insuperable objections. It excludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to a wholly empirical view; and consequently the relentless solution it announces applies only to a mutilated problem. To assert the cessation of the soul because its physical manifestations through the body have ceased, is certainly to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... say something in the last chapter. The very sacredness of the relation in which two men stand to one another when one of them rescues the other from vice separates that relation from any connection with the work of the social busybody, the professional philanthropist, and the empirical legislator. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... fifth moment either contains the whole of their common intersection or none of it. No further subdivision of the common intersection is possible by means of moments. The 'all or none' principle holds. This is not an a priori truth but an empirical fact of nature. ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... hold that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory was that, if people were left to themselves, and if the restraints imposed by authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation of ordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. But their theory was quite empirical; worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence of the English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... is, as it has been termed, only an experiment; an experiment, my lords, of a very daring kind, which none would hazard but empirical politicians. It is an experiment to discover how far the vices of the populace may be made useful to the government, what taxes may be raised upon poison, and how much the court may be enriched by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat, and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year; be a wit, a bon vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... correspondence at this period between abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... that it should exhibit them embodied before us. What the ideas are, which in this view are essential to the different departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it has gathered ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... positive conclusions" (p. 172). Considering that in times past men have believed in the creation of Matter out of nothing and in its annihilation, he points out that it is to quantitative Chemistry that we owe the empirical ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... But as the empirical personal self, able to move about within the circle of the objective universe, the soul is able to visualize itself pictorially and imaginatively, although not rationally or logically. These two revelations of the situation are simultaneously ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... astrological positions, to any natural signs of whirlwinds, tempests, plagues, famine, or earthquakes, try long to discover some hidden symbolism in it, and confess finally that no man unregenerate to letters, by any a priori or empirical knowledge, could have at all suspected that a bit of dirty parchment, with an ecclesiastical scrawl upon it, would have power to drive the currents of history, inspire great national passions, and impel the wars and direct the ideas of an epoch. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... subdivision and the complexity of group with group, it has to rely on the concrete teaching of history and the practical insight of statesmanship to determine how the lines of autonomy are to be drawn. There is, however, one empirical test which seems generally applicable. Where a weaker nation incorporated with a larger or stronger one can be governed by ordinary law applicable to both parties to the union, and fulfilling all the ordinary principles of liberty, the arrangement may be ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ready for the most practical demonstration. I verily believe that his last moments ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... society itself gives origin. Under the caption "The Inductions of Sociology," are set forth the general facts, structural and functional, gathered from a survey of societies and their changes; in other words, the empirical generalizations that are arrived at by comparing different societies, or successive stages of the same societies. The author then examines the evolution of governments, general and local, as this is determined by natural causes; their several ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... hitherto avoided that dangerous and empirical morality, which cures one vice by means of another. But envy is so base and detestable, so vile in its original, and so pernicious in its effects, that the predominance of almost any other quality is to be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... of a high and satisfactory character, ought to consist of a deduction of causes and effects, shewing us not merely that a thing is so, but why it is as it is, and cannot be otherwise. The rest is merely empirical; and, though the narrowness of human wit may often drive us to this; yet it is essentially of a lower order and description. As it depends for its authority upon an example, or a number of examples, so examples of a contrary nature may continually come ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... distance and even of seeing the future. These phenomena may either be due to pure, spontaneous intuition on the part of the medium, in an hypnotic or waking state, or else produced or facilitated by one of the various empirical methods which apparently see only to arouse the medium's subconscious faculties and to release in some way his subliminal clairvoyance. Among such methods, those most often employed are, as we ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... substance. For the purpose of explaining and understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics, and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... namely, the facts of nature or of the external world. This usage is not universal, nor is it fixed. In Germany, especially, the word Wissenschaft is used of all kinds of ordered knowledge, whether transcendental or empirical. So we are accustomed to speak of mental, moral, social, as well as of natural science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use of the word is very common and very influential. It is important that ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... the violets and browns, iron for the yellows, and lead or tin for the whites. One variety of red contains 30 per cent of bronze, and becomes coated with verdegris if exposed to damp. All this chemistry was empirical, and acquired by instinct. Finding the necessary elements at hand, or being supplied with them from a distance, they made use of them at hazard, and without being too certain of obtaining the effects ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... as we shall show directly, universal reason is not given in individual reason, in other words, the knowledge of social laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from the fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means of deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that universal reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws; universal reason, which exists, reasons, labors, in a separate sphere and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... upon which we are to build, and studying the manners, customs, and moral judgments of all sorts and conditions of men, develop an empirical science of ethics which will be independent ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not the Council already run ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... much time may elapse between sensitizing and printing; but, when the paper is to be printed immediately after sensitizing, I use a larger proportion of citrate of iron and ammonia. Before arriving at the conclusion that these proportions were the best to be used, I made a series of purely empirical experiments, beginning ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... get faith now. The empirical method is the very best way to get it firmly rooted. Experientia docet. "Now we believe, not because of what you say, but because we have seen for ourselves." Did not Judas work with Jesus? Yet it is absurd to contend that Jesus was "unequally yoked with ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... democracy, substitute "Modern Civilisation," which prides itself on redress after the event, agility in getting out of the holes into which it has snouted, and eagerness to snout into fresh ones. It foresees nothing, and avoids less. It is purely empirical, if one may use such ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention to me, they were still worse; for in that case, the vast chasm which ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... penultimate brandy-bottle, coal-on-the-head-piece gift Of who avenged the Old Sea-Rover's smirch. Marchant he treads the all-along of inarable drift On dubiously connivent legs, The facile prey of predatory flies; Panting for further; sworn to lurch Empirical on to the Menelik-buffered, enhavened ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... medical practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not. How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies |
