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Hypothetical   /hˌaɪpəθˈɛtəkəl/  /hˌaɪpəθˈɛtɪkəl/   Listen
Hypothetical

adjective
1.
Based primarily on surmise rather than adequate evidence.  Synonyms: conjectural, divinatory, hypothetic, supposed, suppositional, suppositious, supposititious.  "The supposed reason for his absence" , "Suppositious reconstructions of dead languages" , "Hypothetical situation"



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"Hypothetical" Quotes from Famous Books



... and Julia" poem is omitted. Instead, the final page compresses the last two pages (one full page plus seven lines of text and a four-line footnote) of the 1851 edition into one, using a noticeably smaller font. 1870? New York, Leavitt & Allen. The date is hypothetical, based on librarian's notation. The book is probably a reprint of the 1836 Boston edition, which has the same page count (significantly different from other known editions); 1836 is also a ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... passed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was virtually a theistic faith. "I shall say what I think," he adds—"had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians.... The preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving the dead to bury their dead." Perhaps this hypothetical anticipation is to be classed with the surmise of Cardinal Wiseman (if Father Prout rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of Men and Women in The Rambler) that Browning himself would one ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... went on, "to introduce religion into everything, in the way that English people are so fond of doing. It decreases their pleasures by casting its shadow over purely human and natural joys; and it increases their sorrow and want by teaching them to lean upon some hypothetical Power, instead of trying to do the best that they can for themselves. Also it enervates their reasoning faculties; for nothing is so detrimental to one's intellectual strength as the habit of believing things which one knows to ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems, can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... from two entirely independent investigations naturally inspired confidence; and the Astronomer Royal shortly after suggested the employing of the Northumberland telescope of this observatory in a systematic search after the hypothetical planet; recommending, at the same time, a definite plan of operations. I undertook to make the search,—and commenced observing on July 29. The observations were directed, in the first instance, to the part of the heavens which theory had pointed out as the most probable place of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... quadrivalvis; and as the parasite contained spermatozoa and no ova, the only possible way to escape from the conclusion that it was the male and I. Cumingii the female of the same species, was to invent two hypothetical creatures, of opposite sexes to the Ibla and its parasite, and which, though Cirripedes, would have to be locomotive! I insisted upon this alternative, because if the parasite of I. Cumingii ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... 360 B.C. has been selected for the hypothetical time of this visit, not because of any special virtue in that date, but because Athens was then architecturally almost perfect, her civic and her social life seemed at their best, the democratic constitution held its vigor, and there were few outward signs of the general decadence ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... of established facts. Dr. Salmon specifies one, and that a very far-reaching instance, in which, in the debatable question whether there really was an authoritative revision of the so-called Syrian text at about A.D. 350, Dr. Hort speaks of this Syrian revision as a vera causa, as opposed to a hypothetical possibility. This tendency in a subject so complicated as that of textual criticism must be taken note of by the student, and must introduce some element of hesitation in the acceptance of confidently ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott

... this ruthless if hypothetical murder of an equally hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words. Before she ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... this moment had kept on spinning, rose, and seated herself as usual at the end of the table. We had already emptied some bottles, and I began to relate the hypothetical history of my life in the best humor. "First of all, then, I commend myself to you," said I, "that you may continue the custom you have begun to bestow on me. If you gradually procure me the profit of all the ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... 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, so compelling ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... 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

... the phenomena of nature; and the true conclusion to which it leads is this—that to inquire what the Deity might have done, could have done, or, as we even sometimes presume to speak, ought to have done, or, in hypothetical cases, would have done; and to build any propositions upon such inquiries against evidence of facts, is wholly unwarrantable. It is a mode of reasoning which will not do in natural history, which will not do in natural ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... still 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 ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... understand you," said Latimer, finally, and his voice and his face as he raised it were hard and aggressive, "you are stating a purely hypothetical case. You wish to try me by conditions which do not exist, which cannot exist. What justice is there, what right is there, in asking me to say how I would act under circumstances which are impossible, which lie beyond the limit ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... other. A tradition always is useful when nothing else offers itself, but traditional beliefs are so apt to take the color of new eras that they should be employed only in the last emergency, and then with the understanding that they are of very hypothetical value. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... that any one who will candidly review the claims put forth for alcohol, in that it delays in any of these hypothetical ways, tissue-change, will conclude that it has no such power in a salutary sense, and that it is unwarrantably assumed that to retard tissue metamorphosis (change) is ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... origin suggested by Reichenbach, Berthelot, Mendeleeff, Peckham, and others, made no attempt to account for the exceeding variety in its chemical composition, in its specific gravity, its boiling points, etc., and are all founded on some hypothetical process which differs from any with which we are acquainted; but modern geologists are agreed that, as a rule, the records of the earth's history should be read in accordance with those laws of nature which continue ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... him also study the fine arts as well as he can in America, fitting himself 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 hard-working teachers, its wealth, its varied and wholesome traditions ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... seven inches high! Brazilian bird! When I just remind your Ladyship that the height of the tallest bird to be found in Brazil, and in mentioning this fact, I mention nothing hypothetical, the tallest bird does not stand higher than four feet nine. Chowchowtow! Dr. Spix is a name, accurate traveller, don't remember the passage, most singular bird! Chowchowtow! don't know it by that name. Perhaps your Ladyship is not ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... evolutionists will romance (it can be called nothing else) will do well to read Dr. Haeckel's "History of Creation," only they must be on their guard at every step. The author constantly states as facts (or, perhaps, with an impatient "must have been") the existence of purely hypothetical forms, of which there is no kind of evidence. To such ends does the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... to Delobelle to purchase a theatre and manage it himself. He counted upon Risler for the funds. Opportunely enough, a small theatre on the boulevard happened to be for sale, as a result of the failure of its manager. Delobelle mentioned it to Risler, at first very vaguely, in a wholly hypothetical form—"There would be a good chance to make a fine stroke." Risler listened with his usual phlegm, saying, "Indeed, it would be a good thing for you." And to a more direct suggestion, not daring to answer, "No," he took refuge behind ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... the absurdity of averaging unlike quantities, and accepts the ultimate truth that each child is an individual, differing in needs, capacity, outlook, energy, and enthusiasm from every other child. An arithmetic average can be struck, but when it is applied to children it is a hypothetical and not a real quantity. There is not, and never will be, an average child; hence, a school system planned to meet the needs of the average child fits the needs ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... 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 of ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... suggest to him that Isobel was her most willing and obedient pupil, and that perhaps if he could look into her heart he would find that she did care, and very much more than for the wealth and the hypothetical lord. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... with 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 to the form, and if the latter changes, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... be more discouraging than such an announcement? Here is nothing for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of 'blasted heaths,' or the 'seaboard of Bohemia'; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to meet in and make their speeches. The 'three unities' and the rest of the 'rules' are a burden which the English reader finds himself quite unaccustomed to carry; he grows ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... without any question of their value; these are Imperatives of Fitness. To one real aim, existing necessarily for all rational beings, viz., Happiness, corresponds the Imperative of Prudence (in the narrow sense), being assertory while hypothetical. The categorical Imperative, enjoining a mode of action for itself, and concerned about the form and principle of it, not its nature and result, is the Imperative of Morality. These various kinds of Imperatives, as influencing the will, may be distinguished as ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... sufficiently known by experience of what things they are the causes in the State; how indiscriminately they bring forth fruit, of which good men and wise rightly do repent. If there should be in any place a State, either actual or hypothetical, that wantonly and tyrannically wages war upon the Christian name, and it have conferred upon it that character of which we have spoken, it is possible that this may be considered more tolerable; yet the principles upon which it rests are absolutely such that, of themselves ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... and the peculiar circumstances in which she has been placed. That her real condition differs not much from the result of this reasoning from probability, must, with whatever regret, be confessed by all who take a careful and impartial survey of the actual situation of things among us. But our hypothetical delineation, if just, will have approved itself to the reader's conviction, as we have gone along, by suggesting its archetypes; and we may therefore be spared the painful and invidious task of pointing out, in detail, the several particulars ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... had seen the possibility of such questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other mysteries. As a matter of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... 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 agreed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... 2001 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

... form. Accordingly, I maintain throughout dinner a lofty height of aristocratic elegance that impresses even the impassive Dawson, towards whom it is solely directed. To the amazement and amusement of Salemina (who always takes my cheerful inanities at their face value), I give an hypothetical account of my afternoon engagements, interlarding it so thickly with countesses and marchionesses and lords and honourables that though Dawson has passed soup to duchesses, and scarcely ever handed a plate to anything less ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... perceive their truth. Regarding good and evil as purely relative values, it stands to reason that what may be bad or evil in a given man, relative to a certain environment, may actually be good if not highly virtuous in him relative to a certain other environment. If this hypothetical man represent the ascending line of life—that is to say, if he promise all that which is highest in a Graeco-Roman sense, then it is likely that he will be condemned as wicked if introduced into the society of men representing the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... moment, bring himself at all into a fitting mood for the task? Of him who would decline, without argument, the clergyman would opine that he was simply a reprobate. Of him who would propose to accompany an hypothetical acceptance with certain stipulations, he would say to himself that he was a stiff-necked wrestler against grace, whose condition was worse than that of the reprobate. Men and women, conscious that they will be thus judged, submit to the hypocrisy, ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... themselves to a constituency. This, however, only adds hypocrisy to the other qualities of a ruling caste. Whoever has stood in the lobby of the House of Commons watching members emerge with wandering eye and hypothetical smile, until the constituent is espied, his arm taken, "my dear fellow" whispered in his ear, and his steps guided toward the inner precincts—whoever, observing this, has realized that these are the arts ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell

... evolution does not in any degree explain the mystery of the universe. All it does is to offer us an hypothetical picture—true or false—of the manner in which the changes of organic and inorganic life succeeded one another in their historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere, just as "personalists" have; and it is much more difficult for them to show how ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... experience of mankind. This was a position laid down by Bolingbroke to escape all the historical arguments which some men deduce from alleged miraculous agency in the past, or problematical prophecy in the future. It likewise shows the untenable nature of all analogy, which presumes to trace an hypothetical first cause or personal intelligence, to account for a supposed origin of primeval existence, by which nature was caused, or forms of being first evolved. Although it may be deemed inconsistent with the philosophy of Bolingbroke to ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... my question yet. It's a hypothetical question—yes, hypothetical. I'm sure that's what I want to say. Hypo—hypothetical question. Question; yes, that's right. Now, suppose you'd been a pretty wild young shark, and had kept your mother anxious and miserable, and had drifted into gambling and had gone pretty well ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... 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

... after time 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 ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis

... the whole body of domestic fiction bears witness to their doing; and the fact that no such conjunction took place he could explain only on the ground that it was a borrowed cradle. He did not dislike the little girl. She still remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than a fact; but her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when her tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry accretions enveloping his inner self. But even at such moments—moments which he invited and ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... children seemed so often to be discussing these. Just as, twenty years ago, she and her friends had seemed always to be discussing the Limitations of Personality, the Ethics of Friendship, and the Nature, if any, of God. This last was to Kay and Gerda too hypothetical to be a stimulating theme. It would have sent them to sleep, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... the tree's existence notions borrowed from an alien sphere. Indeed, to assert that there has been any genuine development from the seed up to the finished tree is to use terms in an accommodated, metaphoric, and hypothetical way. Development there certainly has been as estimated by an outsider, an onlooker, but not as perceived by the tree itself. It has not known where it was going. Out of the unknown earth the seed pushes its way into the still ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... that of Sheridan's hypothetical colleagues in office under the Prince Regent in the Cabinet outlined in February 1789, not one now supported him. Fox was not present, being engrossed in Lucretius and the "Poetics" of Aristotle. He, however, informed Lord Holland that he detested the Union and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... This writer, however, (whoever he may have been,) is careful to convince us that individually he entertained no doubt whatever about the genuineness of this part of Scripture, for he says that he writes in order to remove the (hypothetical) objections of others, and to silence their (imaginary) doubts. Nay, he freely quotes the verses as genuine, and declares that they were read in his day on a certain Sunday night in the public Service of the Church.... To represent such ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... you. I will tell you of my misfortunes afterwards; for the present, allow me to prove the facts, explaining rather how things must have fallen out rather than how they did occur. Certain circumstances, known, I suppose to no one but the Almighty, compel me to speak of some things as hypothetical. The wounds I had received must presumably have produced tetanus, or have thrown me into a state analogous to that of a disease called, I believe, catalepsy. Otherwise how is it conceivable that I should have been stripped, as is the custom in time of the war, and thrown into the ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... find the true cause," he said, "you will have to invent a hypothetical one. Your novel cannot stand still forever. Imagine something—a crime, for instance, of which this black fellow is cognizant. A murder—that he peeped in at a keyhole and ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter

... Cas. 815 ff. Chalinus enters disguised as the blushing bride. In Men. 828 ff. Menaechmus Sosicles pretends madness in a clever scene of uproarious humor. In the Mil. (411 ff.) Philocomasium needs only to change clothing to appear in the role of her own hypothetical twin sister, and in 874 ff. and 1216 ff. the meretrix plays matrona. Sagaristio and the daughter of the leno impersonate Persians (Per. 549 ff.), Collabiscus becomes a Spartan (Poen. 578 ff.), Simia as Harpax gets Ballio's money (Ps. 905 ff.), the sycophant is garbed as messenger (Trin. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... and 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 very agony of soul ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... periodically, and threatened to encroach upon his entire jaw. Tormented, at the same time, with the desire of regenerating humanity, he divided his leisure between the study of dentistry, to which he applied himself in order to impede the progress of his hypothetical tyrant, and a voluminous correspondence which he kept up with the Pope, his brother, and the Emperor of the French, his cousin. In the latter occupation he pleaded the interests of humanity, styled himself 'the Prince ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... condition of definite phyllotaxis. If the cone is conical, definite phyllotaxis would be possible among all the scales only when the size of the scales diminishes in equal measure with the gradual diminution of the cone's diameter. Such a hypothetical cone is shown ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw

... from her youth upwards been constantly in the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of circumstances, he answered it with ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... 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 ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... weak in Sea-gulls, courtship among Secondary sexual characters Seminal receptacles of frogs Seminal vesicles functions of Senegal, courtship in Sensibility of genital sphere in women Sensory acuteness in women Sexual cerebral centers, hypothetical Sexual impulse, definition of Sexual incompetence, prevalence of Sexual selection, psychological aspects of Sexual season Shaftesbury's supposed masochism Shoe-fetichism Sicily, courtship in love-bite in Slavery, erotic Slavs, courtship customs of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... his attempt to lead a better life—or at least so he tells me," said Lady Agatha. "Morality does not come easy to Elmer, he says, and I believe him. Elmer's time is largely taken up by inward moral debate as to the right or wrong of particular hypothetical cases which his imagination insists on presenting to ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... the Congress as to France was a promise of countenance and support from the allies in three specified hypothetical cases:—(1) of an attack made by Spain on France; (2) of any outrage on the person of the King or Royal Family of Spain; (3) of any attempt to change the dynasty of that kingdom. Any unforeseen case, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones

... are purely hypothetical, they will serve the good purpose of showing the great influence that the geographical distribution of land and water have on the climate of a country. Of one thing, however, geologists have become more and more impressed of ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... were profoundly indifferent to the Druids, and to that hypothetical race who lived ages before the Druids, and have broken out all over the earth in stony excrescences, as yet vaguely classified. That three-legged granite table, whose origin was lost in the remoteness ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... rhythmically against the side of the box while he thought the matter over from start to hypothetical finish and back again. Meanwhile Andy Green went on with his work and scowled over his well-earned reputation that hampered him now just when he needed the confidence of his fellows in order to save their beloved Flying U from slow annihilation. Perhaps his mental suffering could ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... give-they. These verbal forms he considers as much earlier than any attempts at declension in nouns. No one who has read Curtius' arguments in support of this chronological arrangement would deny their extreme plausibility; but there are grave difficulties which made me hesitate in adopting this hypothetical framework of linguistic chronology. Ishall only mention one, which seemed to me insurmountable. We know that during what we called the First Radical Period the sway of phonetic laws was already so firmly established, that, from that period onward to the present day, we can say, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... All this, however, is hypothetical. Remains the airship of to-day, developed far beyond the promise of five years ago, capable, as has been proved by its achievements both in Britain and in Germany, of undertaking practically any ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... 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 free from dew so long as it continues ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... 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" is really somewhat a misnomer, for an examination of the interior of the lower ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... exclaimed Prudence, more perturbed by this disaster than by the hypothetical murder, "how could ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton

... a company of gold-seekers, hunting about in some exhausted claim, for hypothetical grains, ragged, starving—and all the while in the next gully were lying lumps of gold for the picking up? And that figure fairly represents what people do and suffer who seek for good and do not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... monophysitism is easy. Psychology at the monophysite stage of thought conceives the moments of Christ's consciousness in their mutual externality; they follow each other as do the ticks of a clock. They are discrete elements strung along on a hypothetical ego. Christ's experience is conceived as unilinear. All that He did, suffered and thought is regarded as having taken place on one and the same plane of experience. This psychology has no room for another plane of experience. It has no room for a positive sub-consciousness. ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... also that the Belgian Government took, in agreement with the English General Staff, military precautions against a hypothetical German invasion of Belgium. On the other hand, the Belgian Government never made the slightest attempt to take, in agreement with the German Government, military precautions against an Anglo-French invasion of Belgium, though fully informed that it was ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... for this are still wanting. The diligent Malone has, indeed, made an attempt to arrange the plays of Shakspeare in chronological order; but he himself only gives out the result of his labours for hypothetical, and it could not possibly be attended with complete success, since he excluded from his inquiry a considerable number of pieces which have been ascribed to the poet, though rejected as spurious by all the editors since Rowe, but which, in my opinion, must, if not wholly, at least in great measure ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... of 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 ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... found, but the point is that to put the question indicates that the interrogator is beyond a comprehension of the reply. He is like a congenital blindman, who asks: "Of what use is seeing?" The question was, indeed, propounded in the third section of this paper, but only as the hypothetical question of an outsider, much as an Englishman might ask, "Of what value are the Chinese?" to secure an external, historical justification of their existence. However, if the great majority of Jews ever seriously question the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... expression. The globe of the earth seems to sink from beneath the floating figure, which is just sketched upon the canvass, and has a shadowy indistinctness which to my fancy added to its effect. Guercino's chef-d'oeuvre, the Resurrection of Saint Petronilla, (a saint, I believe, of very hypothetical fame,) is also here; and has been copied in mosaic for St. Peters. A magnificent Rubens, the She Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus; a fine copy of Raffaelle's Triumph of Galatea by Giulo Romano; Domenichino's Saint Barbara, with the same lovely inspired eyes he always gives his female saints, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... science gives an answer, somewhat incomplete it is true, and in part still very hypothetical, but yet deserving of respect so far as it goes. Physical science, more or less unconsciously, has drifted into the view that all natural phenomena ought to be reduced to motions. Light and heat and sound are ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... alleviate the pain of the impression which He desires to make. He says, 'If the world hates,' not 'if the world hate'; and the tense of the original shows that, whilst the form of the statement is hypothetical, the substance of it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... by which the contracts were procured; and to straighten out any irregularities that might arise afterward. His position was almost academic. The matters he fought and decided were so detached from actuality, as far as he was concerned, that they might have been hypothetical cases. When Dick wanted anything specific, Keith instructed Patsy Corrigan to see that the proper officials awarded the contract. If the matter ever came to the courts, Keith furnished the brains and Patsy somehow "saw" the sheriff ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... ours, the extremes of heat and cold being somewhat greater. "In Jupiter we have an illustration of a planet whose axis is almost at right angles to the plane of its orbit, being inclined but about a degree and a half. The hypothetical inhabitants of this majestic planet must therefore have perpetual summer at the equator, eternal winter at the poles, and in the temperate regions everlasting spring. On account of the straightness of the axis, however, even the polar inhabitants—if there are any—are not oppressed ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... training-school; and whenever the young lady was not satisfied with the turn her work was taking, she would wash the displeasing portion out and start afresh. The difference—there are other differences —but the difference we are concerned with between this hypothetical young person of Kensington education and Mr. James, is that the drawing which Mr. James exhibits is not a faithful record of all the difficulties that are met with in painting an orchid. A hundred orchids preceded the orchid on the wall—some were good in colour and failed ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... as the medium of social interaction.—Each science postulates its own medium of interaction. Astronomy and physics assume a hypothetical substance, the ether. Physics has its principles of molar action and reaction; chemistry studies molecular interaction. Biology and medicine direct their research to the physiological interaction of organisms. Psychology is concerned ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... difficulties, as many circumstances, which are likely to modify the result, may escape notice during the experiments. It has been said, that as water is most dense at from 37 to 39 Fahrenheit, this may be presumed to be the mean temperature at the bottom of the sea; but such hypothetical deductions are, perhaps, entitled to little confidence. It may however be safely enough presumed, that the temperature of the sea is kept tolerably uniform on the well-known principle of statics, that the heavier columns of any fluid displace those ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... Prometheus was a prince of a scientific bent, and that he established his observatory on the frosty Caucasus. But, even admitting this, why did Prometheus give the stars animal names? Goguet easily explains this by a hypothetical account of the manners of primitive men. 'The earliest peoples,' he says, 'must have used writing for purposes of astronomical science. They would be content to design the constellations of which they wished to speak by the hieroglyphical symbols of their names; ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... 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 exercised ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... and philosophy of marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original. It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir. But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages. At once the newspapers seized these three lines, "played them up yellow," as the slang was in those days, and set the whole world laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young professor of twenty- seven. Photographers snapped him, he was besieged by ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... give of the state of contemporary belief upon the subject of possession. It is impossible not to notice that nearly all the allusions in the play refer to the performance of the youth Richard Mainy. Even Edgar's hypothetical account of his moral failings in the past seems to have been an accurate reproduction of Mainy's conduct in some particulars, as the quotation below will prove;[1] and there appears to be so little necessity for these remarks of Edgar's, that it seems almost possible that there may have been ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... gone and only 25 percent is left. After two more days half of that 25 percent is lost. Thus six days after harvest and a lettuce contains only bout 12 percent of its original nutrition. A two day half-life is only hypothetical. Those types of produce I classify as very perishable probably do have a half-life of from 36 to 48 hours. Moderately perishable produce has a half life of about 72 hours; durable types of produce have half lives of ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... pioneer life, 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 owner far away. ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... only probable. If this question is explained, the assertor of certainty has assumed some objective foundation which is indubitable at least subjectively. Fick represents the establishment of probability as a fraction as follows: "The probability of an incompletely expressed hypothetical judgment is a real fraction proved as a part of the whole universe of conditions upon which the realization of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... 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 ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best Utopian hypothesis, the most promising ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... the repute of many of his modern critics, the charge is doubtless true that his writings are not 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 ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... Question," how entirely I agree with you hat this is the great trial question of the country. And I think it will press upon the country this coming winter is it never has before. It certainly will if the Californias are ceded to us, and the Wilmot Proviso is brought before Congress, not for hypothetical, but for practical, actual decision. If it should be, I entertain the most painful apprehensions for the result. We have lost a host by the death of Silas Wright. A sagacious politician said to ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... the obvious deduction is to set the turbine relief valve to blow off at a higher pressure than the condenser relief valve, even when considering the question with respect to condensing conditions only. In this second hypothetical case, then, with a closed and disabled atmospheric valve, the exhaust must take place through the condenser, until the turbine can be shut down, or the circulating water regained without the ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... a single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then, is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet written any full expression ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... abnormal by nature, others, of this sympathetic artistic temperament, may become so through their sympathies plus their conditions of life." It is possible there may be some element of truth in this view, which my correspondent regarded as purely hypothetical. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... literature except the very highest,—the social class to which the writer does not belong is regarded ab extra. In Punch, for instance, not only are servants always given a conventional set of features, but they are given conventional minds, and the jokes are based on a hypothetical conception of personality. Dickens was a great humorist, and understood the nature of the poor because he had been one of them; but his gentlemen and ladies are lay figures. Thackeray's studies of the flunky are capital; but he studies him qua flunky, as a naturalist ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... is the Kindly Sergeant; Mr. RINGGOLD is the Genial Artist, whose velvet coat suggests that he has recently managed a Starr opera bouffe enterprise; and Mr. STODDART is happy in the congenial character of a Clumsy Trumpeter. If any speculative manager pretends that he has a better hypothetical cast in his eye than the present cast of the Lancers, let him be given to the surgical tormentors to be ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... too, but 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... quite a hypothetical point, though," began Mr Bickers, airily. "I just wanted to ask, supposing one of us becomes aware of a riot in a neighbouring house, during the absence of the master of that house, and ascertains, moreover, that the prefects ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed

... there was sin, error, or mistake, but requests forgiveness for whatsoever there may have been. The character of Rebecca Nurse, and the outrageous treatment she had received from that church, in the method arranged for her excommunication, demanded something more than these hypothetical ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... Poles and Czechs is of vital interest to both peoples concerned, and to Europe as a whole. It is by no means hypothetical, considering that geographically the Poles and Czechs are neighbours, that they speak almost the same language, and that their national spirit, history and traditions bear a close resemblance. The history of Poland offers many strange parallels to that ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek

... he 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 reality preferable ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond

... sea-life, I used to listen to the eccentric and complicated views expressed by a race of seamen long since passed away. Occasionally there were amongst the crew one or two who had the true British hypothetical belief in the demoniacal character of Napoleon, but this was not the general view of the men with whom I sailed; and after the lapse of many years, I often wonder how it came about that such definite partiality in regard ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... after having banished from science hypothetical causes and all the entities admitted by the ancients,—such as the creative power of matter, the horror of a vacuum, the esprit recteur, etc. (p. 22),—admits immediately, as necessary to the comprehension ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... lately an extremely interesting book on celebrated criminal cases, and I was particularly impressed by the way in which circumstantial evidence can be built up out of harmless trifles. Since reading it I have been rather amusing myself by constructing hypothetical cases. For instance"—Scorpa pursed his lips and lowered his eyes, as though trying to invent a fanciful story—"take a transaction such as your letting me have that picture. One could build a very ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... were but a block from the campus. He ushered me into the Physics Building, and thence into his own research laboratory, much like the one I had visited during my courses under him. The device—he called it his "subjunctivisor," since it operated in hypothetical worlds—occupied the entire center table. Most of it was merely a Horsten psychomat, but glittering crystalline and glassy was the prism of Iceland spar, the polarizing agent that was the heart of ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

... illustrate, too, at 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

... to accommodate itself to the working of the ship, might, it was thought, be the occasion of such a strain upon the trunnions as would either break them or bend the piston rod. It is a sufficient reply to these objections to say that they are all hypothetical, and that none of them in practice have been found to exist—to such an extent at least as to occasion any inconvenience; but it is not difficult to show that they are altogether unsubstantial, even without a recourse to ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... June 2d, 1497, in which, after expressing their unabated respect for all the rights and privileges of the admiral, they declared, that whatever shall be found in their previous license repugnant to these shall be null and void. (Doc. Dipl., 113.) The hypothetical form in which this is stated shows that the sovereigns, with an honest desire of keeping their engagements with Columbus, had not a very clear perception in what ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... individual's estate and surroundings, and will, naturally, be accommodated to the exactions merely of the society in which he moves. With the Indian, poverty shapes his habits of life, and he bends to compulsion's decree in the matter. If we consider his hypothetical translation to a higher sphere, the Indian might develop and maintain a course of living which should not, in those ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... has cost me as much thought as any aspect of the arrangements. The trouble is that however honest you are—and your honesty has been tested repeatedly—and however strong your imagination—about half of your training has been devoted to developing it—you can't possibly be sure, answering a hypothetical question, that you are giving the answer you would choose if you knew it was asked ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell

... involved in the conception of the One and Many are preliminary to their final adjustment. The Platonic Ideas are tested by the interrogative method of Socrates; the Eleatic One or Being is tried by the severer and perhaps impossible method of hypothetical consequences, negative and affirmative. In the latter we have an example of the Zenonian or Megarian dialectic, which proceeded, not 'by assailing premises, but conclusions'; this is worked out and improved ...
— Parmenides • Plato

... satisfied the Christian Church 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 ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... for a definite purpose. As I remember, he was even supposed to discover that its purpose was to mark time. It was at least to become clear to his savage mind that this was no chance object, but was the definite product of a designing mind. Having brought this hypothetical savage to these conclusions, the author turned himself to savages nearer home who fail to see design in nature. The book takes up a great many cases of interesting facts in animals and plants as clearly showing evidences of design as did the watch our savage picked up. But the inference we ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... that of magnifying at will the minutest physical particle to any desired size, as through a microscope—though no microscope ever made, or ever likely to be made, possesses even a thousandth part of this psychic magnifying power. By its means the hypothetical molecule and atom postulated by science becomes visible and living realities to the occult student, and on this closer examination he finds them to be much more complex in their structure than the scientific man has yet realized them to be. It also enables him to follow with ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... then, might 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 to return them. ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... picture to ourselves the psychical conditions of primitive men, at a time when the objects of perception and the apprehension of things were presented by an effort of memory to the mind as if they were actual and living things, yet such conditions are not hypothetical but really existed, as any one may ascertain for himself who is able to realize that primitive state of the mind, and we have said enough to show that such was ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... and I was only a poor, half-starved painter, in Great Howland Street, whose landlady was daily abating in her respect, and the butcher daily abating in his punctuality; whose garments were getting threadbare, and his dinners hypothetical, and whose day-dreams of fame and fortune had faded into the dull-gray of penury and disappointment. I was broken-hearted, ill, hungry; so I accepted an invitation from a friend, a rich manufacturer in Birmingham, to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various

... personality of the Absolute as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the less absolute from being self-determined ab intra. For how, he asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will except by conceiving it as se finiens, predetermining itself ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... This hypothetical appreciation probably represents the general opinion current both at home and abroad during the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the War; but it proved to be mistaken from the first. The Free Staters joined the Transvaalers and the allied forces assumed the offensive over a wide area ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it to say here that when I say ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... chairman. He raised his brawny frame slowly, held a Bible in one hand, and started in this fashion—"Well I s'pose I've to say something; but I can't tell what it'll be." This declaration was followed up by a long, wandering mass of talk, full of repetition and hypothetical theology—a mixture of Judaism, Christianity, and Mormonism, and from the whole he endeavoured to distil this "fact" that both Isaiah and St. John had made certain prophetic statements as to the Book of Mormon and its transcription ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... too weary to resist, allowed Mrs. Hawkins to put her to bed and make a cup of tea over the stove, while Miss Mellins, always good-naturedly responsive to any appeal for help, sent down the weak-eyed little girl to deal with hypothetical customers. ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... Astor to Captain Sowle, the commander of the Beaver, were, in some respects, hypothetical, in consequence of the uncertainty resting upon the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... eloquence at this peculiar point, my friend became more loud and powerful than ever—"why, darn me, if maister harns enough with that there bus to put hiron on them 'osses' feet, I'll—be—blowed!" And as he uttered this hypothetical denunciation on himself he spoke very slowly, bringing out every word as it were separately, and lowering himself at his knees at every sound, moving at the same time his right hand up and down. When he had ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... us to assume the operation of higher causes when lower ones are found sufficient to explain the observed effects—this law constitutes the only logical barrier between science and superstition. For it is manifest that it is always possible to give a hypothetical explanation of any phenomenon whatever, by referring it immediately to the intelligence of some supernatural agent; so that the only difference between the logic of science and the logic of superstition consists in science recognising a validity in the law of parsimony which superstition ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes

... hypothetical reader will say, "Why didn't that silly old fool, Allan, think of all these things? Why didn't he remember that he was commanding a pack of savages with whom he had no real acquaintance, among whom there were sure to be traitors, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... 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 ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... generally taken for granted—it must be 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

... surely there might have been, somewhere in the world, some woman who would have understood, and would have asked nothing from him. But he dwelt on that thought but seldom, for it seemed a kind of treason; he was not married to any such hypothetical woman—he was married to Corydon, and it was Corydon he had to save ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... this principle of selection is not hypothetical. It is certain that several of our eminent breeders have, even within a single lifetime, modified to a large extent their breeds of cattle and sheep. In order fully to realise what they have done it is almost necessary to read several of the many treatises devoted to this ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... of unstable organic matter, it will be conceded at once that the chief factor in the purification is the nitrification produced by the bacteria in the upper layers of the sand. On the other hand, the purification by sand filters of a hypothetical water containing no organic matter, but only finely-divided mineral matter in suspension, could take place only by the physical deposition of the particles upon the sand grains. Between these two extremes lie all classes of water. In ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy

... 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 ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... Dilemma. One special 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 connected ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... to handle space and say 3 ft. or 7 ft. in order to handle space relations. In other words, to handle space we utilize a formulation which we call a measure of space. In the same manner in order to handle time we make a hypothetical unit to be pragmatic. In handling the phenomena of electricity, we formulate other units. In my own mind there has grown up therefore the analogy that in order to handle psychological phenomena we have formulated the Oedipus by hypothesis. This hypothesis I would define as the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... few minutes for Kennedy, in his most engaging and plausible manner, to state the hypothetical reason of our call. Though it was perfectly self-evident from the start that Mrs. Martin would throw cold water on anything requiring an outlay of money Craig accomplished his full purpose of securing an interview with Mr. Haswell. The invalid ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... The boys were also trained to apply these principles and rules to the cases which occurred among themselves, each acting as judge in turn, to discuss and decide the questions that arose from time to time, either from real transactions as they occurred, or from hypothetical cases invented to put their powers to the test. To stimulate the exercise of their powers, they were rewarded when they decided right, and punished when they decided wrong. Cyrus himself was punished on one occasion for a wrong decision, under ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... 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; or a standard for emitting a system of new inches ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... he undoubtedly is—you cannot possibly esteem without taking a great deal for granted, especially as you have not yet set eyes on him. Now it is evident that, if one of you should kill the other, a second life of approved worth will be sacrificed for an infant of purely hypothetical merits. As a man of business I condemn the transaction. As a Christian I deprecate the shedding of blood. But if somebody's blood must be shed, let us be reasonable and kill ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... lies in the area of consciousness," Ernst Mallin was saying. "You all know, of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... 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

... surface—namely, about the poles—there must thus have resulted the first geographical distinction of parts. To these illustrations of growing heterogeneity, which, though deduced from known physical laws, may be regarded as more or less hypothetical, Geology adds an extensive series that have been inductively established. Investigations show that the Earth has been continually becoming more heterogeneous in virtue of the multiplication of sedimentary strata which ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... 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 ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... I 'do' ... if I 'should' ... if I shall ... if I will ... if I must ... what can all the 'ifs' prove, but a most hypothetical state of the conscience? And in brief, I beg you to stand convinced of one thing, that whenever the 'certain time' comes for to 'hate writing to me' confessedly, 'avowedly,' (oh what words!) I shall not like it at all—not for all the explanations ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... and disposing of wealth, and can do nothing more; it cannot itself declare that it is a subordinate science, that its end is not the ultimate end of all things, and that its conclusions are only hypothetical, depending on its premisses, and liable to be overruled by a higher teaching. I do not then blame the Political Economist for anything which follows from the very idea of his science, from the very moment ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... 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 which that conclusion ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... of the cosmos, the most phenomenal is light. Unlike sound-waves, whose transmission requires air or other material media, light-waves pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space. Even the hypothetical ether, held as the interplanetary medium of light in the undulatory theory, can be discarded on the Einsteinian grounds that the geometrical properties of space render the theory of ether unnecessary. Under either hypothesis, light remains the most subtle, the freest from material dependence, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... Seeker and Antinomian (ante, p. 151-3), entitled "A New Quere, at this time seasonably to be considered, &c.. viz. Whether it be fit, according to the principles of true Religion and State to settle any Church-government over the Kingdom hastily or not." Burton was already in the same mood of hypothetical Voluntaryism (ante, p. 109), and I think it was spreading now among the Independents. Certainly, however, the perception of the necessary identity of the principle of Independency with absolute Voluntaryism, or the doctrine of ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... Ministry were then called, to distinguish them from the country party—that is to say, the Opposition—endeavored to qualify and make light of the expressions used in the late King's letter, to show that they were merely hypothetical and conditional, and insisted that effectual care had since been taken in every way to maintain the right of England to Gibraltar. The country party moved that words be added to the Lords' resolution requiring "that all pretensions on the part of the Crown of Spain ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... 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 of Butler's accordingly. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey



Words linked to "Hypothetical" :   theory, possibility, theoretic, theoretical, hypothesis



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