"Hypothesis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dwellings were most attractive, with their frescoed chambers, fountains, and open courts. Few of the houses had any windows; the light probably being admitted from the roof above, and reflected from the marble tanks of water in the centre of the court. But even under this hypothesis, I cannot help thinking the ancients had some other means of catching the light and diffusing it in their apartments, in some such manner as the Chappuis' reflectors we now use, though no certain evidence is yet forthcoming that they did so. There were places of amusement, and ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... On this hypothesis, it will be proper to cut out about one-twentieth, viz., young people who are newly married and who will be faithful to their vows for a ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... been caused by the people's guilt. In this connexion the Prince alluded to those acts of condemnation which the Governor-General had promulgated under the name of pardons, and treated with scorn the hypothesis that any crimes had been committed for Alva to forgive. "We take God and your Majesty to witness," said the epistle, "that if we have done such misdeeds as are charged in the pardon, we neither desire nor deserve the pardon. Like the most abject creatures which crawl the earth, we will ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to mistake the despotism of hypothesis for the reign of law, nor physical law for the great 'I AM.' True thinkers must respect other thinkers and God. They cannot ignore the primal utterances of consciousness, the laws of logic, nor the truths of history. Foregone conclusions are ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... a contrast to the assertions which we have already pondered of His oneness with the Father, and to His assurance in almost the same breath that He would Himself answer His people's prayers! It is inexplicable, save on the hypothesis that He has a dual nature, by virtue of which, on the one hand, He is God, who answers prayer, and on the other the Son of Man, who pleads as the Head and Representative ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... suggested that the Seri may be descendants of people who, hard-pressed by the environmental poverty of this section of Baja California, may have moved across the Gulf to Tiburon Island and Sonora (Kroeber, 1931, pp. 5, 49-50). This hypothesis has appealed to one California archaeologist, although at present there is insufficient evidence from archaeology or ethnography either to support or to deny it (Rogers, 1945, p. 194). However, the archaeological collection from ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and the emotions appertaining to them remain equally excellent and appropriate. Whereas take away from the Mad Lover of Beaumont and Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must go ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... substances, it seems further possible to calculate chemical equilibria from heats of reaction and specific heats. The circumstance that chemical affinity and heat-evolution so nearly coincide at low temperatures may be derived from the hypothesis that chemical processes are the result of forces of attraction between the atoms of the different elements. If we may disregard the kinetic energy of the atoms, and this is legitimate for low temperatures, it follows that both heat-evolution and chemical affinity are merely equal to the decrease ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... frantically destroyed her child by this man—some three years old—to revenge herself upon him. Mr. Jaggers worked that in this way: "We say these are not marks of finger-nails, but marks of brambles, and we show you the brambles. You say they are marks of finger-nails, and you set up the hypothesis that she destroyed her child. You must accept all consequences of that hypothesis. For anything we know, she may have destroyed her child, and the child in clinging to her may have scratched her hands. What then? You are not trying her for the murder of her child; why don't you? ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... that the work of art in question is no sea-born and foam- born Aphrodite, but the very Victory Without Wings that once stood in the little chapel outside the gates of the Acropolis at Athens. So long ago as 1826, that is to say six years after the discovery of the statue, the Venus hypothesis was violently attacked by Millingen, and from that time to this the battle of the archaeologists has never ceased. Mr. Stillman, who fights, of course, under Millingen's banner, points out that the statue is not of the Venus type at all, being far too heroic in character to correspond to the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... mineral monad" authorized by the Adepts? If so, what relation does the monad bear to the atom, or the molecule, of ordinary scientific hypothesis? And does each mineral monad eventually become a vegetable monad, and then at last a human being? Turning now to some historical difficulties, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of Johanna, on which Skene mainly founds his assertion that Johanna of Strathnaver was Earl John's daughter, is just as easily explicable, and with equal verisimilitude, if she was not. Snaekoll went to Norway in 1232, leaving behind him, on our hypothesis, one child, an infant daughter of tender years, or possibly as yet unborn. The child of a younger child of Ragnhild would probably be still younger. Heiress to very large landed estates and justly entitled to claim a moiety of the Erlend Thorfinnson half of Caithness and all the Moddan territories, ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... evolution is the attraction of particles of matter for one another. This leads to the condensation of matter into suns and their planets, and the geological evolution of the earth, for example. Laplace's nebular hypothesis is an attempt to give an adequate statement of the cosmic phase of evolution. While this hypothesis has been much criticized of late, in its essentials it seems to stand. We are not, however, as students of society, concerned with this phase ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... represented by that predicate; in other words, it limits our conception for the time being to that particular aspect of the subject. Hence every predicate, however extensive, implies some limitation of the subject. But the ideal subject, the absolutely free self, is, by the very hypothesis, without limitation; and, therefore, no predicate can be attached to it. It stands as a declaration of its own Being without any statement of what that Being consists in, and therefore it says of itself, not "I am this or that," ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... travelling. After procuring some bearings from its summit we re-embarked and pulled up Munster Water, supposing that it was connected with the strait at the back of Greville Island; but as the tide then flowing was running in a contrary direction to what was expected from the hypothesis we had formed, we began to suspect some other communication with the sea, and in this we were not deceived; for a narrow but a very deep strait opened suddenly to our view, at the bottom of the Water, through which some of the islands in the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... rent, but did not, and does not to this day, denote any particular spot or measurement, but merely such proportion of the whole township as had been equivalent to one money merk of rent, when the whole was valued at a given number. This hypothesis, for I acknowledge it is little more, at least gives a result corresponding precisely to our present idea of a merk of land, and also accounts for the great variety of contents which we find in merk, since, to be equal in value, they must have been of very different ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history. There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent wholly on the record of things said ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... its inhabitants. Nor will this be at the cost of what still remains to be learned. I shall pass over in silence the hoary traditions that, in the country and many a book, still constitute the legend of the hive. Whenever there be doubt, disagreement, hypothesis, when I arrive at the unknown, I shall declare it loyally; you will find that we often shall halt before the unknown. Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer our ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a chapter on mosses wherein it is explained how the first vestige of lichen catches the dust particles of disintegrating rock, and we get the first tokens of a coming forest. Darwin never made a point better; and the nebular hypothesis and the origin of species are worked out with conjectures, fanciful flights, queer conceits, poetic comparisons, far-reaching analogies, and most astounding ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... not go farther and envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... of Mrs. Raikes's gipsy face, and Evelyn Howard's warnings, but wisely decided to hold my peace, whilst Cynthia exhausted every possible hypothesis, and cheerfully hoped, "Aunt Emily will send him away, and will never speak ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... affected to doubt of their own senses; that some, for venting unintelligible nonsense, pretended to think themselves superior to kings; that they gave themselves airs of accounting for all that we do and do not see-and yet, that no two of them agreed in a single hypothesis; that one thought fire, another water, the origin of all things; and that some were even so absurd and impious, as to displace God, and enthrone matter in his place. I do not mean to disparage such wise men, for we are really obliged to them: they anticipated and helped us off with an ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... got under way, my thoughts slowly loitered back to the theme which had been occupying them before I dropped asleep. What was my working hypothesis of the Perfect Woman, towards whom I was thus leisurely strolling? She might be defined, I reflected, as The Woman Who Is Worthy Of Us; but the improbability which every healthily conceited young man must feel of ever finding such a one ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did it rather thoroughly. There wasn't much sympathy for the vanquished in those days. And it's entirely conceivable that a city or two in Alexander's way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for protection and have decided ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... wandered over the dancers and he turned his head away and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the Southern Cross burning low on the horizon. He was irritated by the bare shoulders and arms of the women. If he had a daughter he would never permit it, never. But his hypothesis was the sheerest abstraction. The thought process had been accompanied by no inner vision of that daughter. He did not see a daughter with arms and shoulders. Instead, he smiled at the remote contingency of marriage. He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal experience of ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... others might be added, seem fatal to the late date and modern origin of the ballad, and Mr. Child's own faith in the hypothesis ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... unprincipled advocate never finds any difficulty in buying false testimony; and even where justice is uprightly and skilfully administered, it is not rare to encounter between equally credible witnesses such flagrant and irreconcilable contradictions as to leave no room for any hypothesis other than perjury on one side or both. Perjury in transactions with the national revenue and with municipal assessors is by no means unprecedented among persons of high general reputation. False oaths of this description ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... apparently British built, was in reality an enemy's privateer, with designs upon the disabled ship as soon as a favourable opportunity should occur for carrying them out. At all events there appeared to be enough probability in the hypothesis to induce Captain Winter to remain in company of the convoy, to watch the progress of events, instead of wearing round and resuming our ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... divide the word of truth," we shall hardly be "workmen that need not be ashamed, approved unto God" (2 Tim. ii. 15). Some one has written that "the searcher in science knows that if he but stumble in his hypothesis—that if he but let himself be betrayed into prejudice or undue leaning toward a pet theory, or anything but absolute uprightness of mind—his whole work will be stultified and he will fail ignominiously. To get ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... your SPECTATOR of last Tuesday, Mr. Hobbs's Hypothesis for solving that very odd Phaenomenon of Laughter. You have made the Hypothesis valuable by espousing it your self; for had it continued Mr. Hobbs's, no Body would have minded it. Now here this perplexed Case arises. A certain Company laughed very heartily upon the Reading of that very ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... probability—seemed to offer a clear contrast and a clear foreshadowing also of Prince Henry's method. Even his nearest forerunners, in seamanship or in map-making[33] were strikingly different from himself. They were too much in the spirit of Ptolemy and of ancient science; they neglected fact for hypothesis, for clever guessing, and so their work was spasmodic and unfruitful, or ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... was that some absent-minded person had built a three-story house upon my unhappy body; but I was joggling and bouncing up and down, so that that hypothesis was manifestly untenable. ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... right to assume an impassable barrier. That is an inadmissible hypothesis. There is no such thing as a line of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... over my startled soul. The facts were clear, the hypothesis definite, the sequence certain; there was no ambiguity, no supposititious hinge upon which I could hang a hope; no, not one. I could not even expect that I should be missed and sought for; there was no one to search for me. The simple habitans of the village I had left knew ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means incapable ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... too, the most extraordinary errors with respect to facts cannot be explained by the hypothesis that Tacitus wrote the Annals; for there could not have been such deviations from truth on the part of any Roman who lived in the time of the first Caesars: on the other hand, the errors are just of the character which makes it ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... of several medieval scientists and philosophers, including—Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century.] This so-called deductive method of Aristotle assumed as a starting-point some general of principle as a premise or hypothesis and thence proceeded, by logical reasoning, to deduce concrete applications or consequences. It had been extremely valuable in stimulating the logical faculties and in showing men how to draw accurate conclusions, but it had shown a woeful inability to devise new general principles. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... ordinary merit. To his self-education, however, he owed almost everything. He studied with intensity mathematics, metaphysics, and physiology; before he was nineteen he began to study chemistry, and in four months proposed a new hypothesis on heat and light, to which he won over the experienced Dr. Beddoes. With his associate, Gregory Watt (son of the celebrated James Watt) he collected specimens of rocks and minerals. He made considerable progress in medicine; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... this century, the properties of bodies were investigated by several distinguished French mathematicians on the hypothesis that they are systems of molecules in equilibrium. The somewhat unsatisfactory nature of the results of these investigations produced, especially in this country, a reaction in favour of the opposite method of treating bodies as if they were, ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... either has read Suarez and has totally misrepresented him—a hypothesis which, I hope I need hardly say, I do not for a moment entertain: or, he has got his information at second hand, and has himself been deceived. But in that case, it is surely an imprudence on his part, to reproach ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Messenia, Ephialtes was able to attack the Areopagus with success. The probability is that when the expedition failed, Cimon was ostracized, and that then Ephialtes defeated the Areopagus, and also made a change in foreign policy by making alliances with Sparta's enemies, Argos and Thessaly. This hypothesis alone explains the absence of any account of a third struggle between Cimon and Ephialtes over the Areopagus. The chronology would thus be: ostracism of Cimon, spring, 461; fall of the Areopagus and reversal of Philo-Laconian policy, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... more months which were made shorter by the encouragement forwarded to him by his mother, who was careful to send him everything she could find out that seemed to be, or that she imagined might be, in his favor; she underlined such things and commented upon them, so as to make the faintest hypothesis seem a certainty. Sometimes she did not even wait for the post. Fred would find, on putting in at some post, a cablegram: "Good news," or "All goes well," and he would be beside himself with joy and excitement until, on receiving his poor, dear mother's next letter, he found out on how slight a ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more intelligible. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... not even yet done with Mr. Kingsley's method of disputation. Observe secondly:—when a man is said to be a knave or a fool, it is commonly meant that he is either the one or the other; and that,—either in the sense that the hypothesis of his being a fool is too absurd to be entertained; or, again, as a sort of contemptuous acquittal of one, who after all has not wit enough to be wicked. But this is not at all what Mr. Kingsley proposes to himself in the antithesis which he suggests ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... and exhibiting marks of a birth-right which indelibly stamped him of a social class far below her own. Surely, she could not love the fellow, yet unquestionably he possessed a mysterious power over her, difficult to explain through any other hypothesis. If West had not known the young woman under different conditions, he might have accepted this theory, and dismissed the whole matter from mind. But it was the haunting memory of that earlier Natalie Coolidge, the mistress of Fairlawn, which would not permit his complete surrender. She had seemed ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... he came at last to the conclusion that she must be anxious to learn some details concerning the Doctor's departure, from which again he argued that Claudius had not taken her into his confidence. The hypothesis that she might be willing to make an effort with him for Claudius's justification Mr. Barker dismissed as improbable. And he was right. He waited, therefore, for her to broach the subject, and confined himself, as they drove along, to remarks ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... if the syce can extort two pice from you for repairs and get the work done for five pies, one clear pie will adhere to his glutinous palm. I do not assert that this is what happens, for I know nothing about it. All I maintain is that there is no hypothesis which will satisfactorily explain all the facts, unless you admit the general principle that the syce derives advantage of some kind from the manipulation of the smallest copper coin. One notable phenomenon which this principle helps to explain is the ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... hypothesis falls to the ground. I had greatly hoped," he added meaningly, "that you might be able to throw ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to rest ourselves at the theatre. Pompeii had two such places of amusement, one tragic and the other comic, or, rather, one large and one smaller, for that is the only positive difference existing between them; all else on that point is pure hypothesis. Let us, then, say the large and small theatre, and we shall be ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... have attached himself to the Israelites? The answer seems to me very simple. It is known that in ancient, as well as in modern times, discussions were often raised as to which of two brothers should succeed to the father's throne. Why not admit this hypothesis, viz., that Mossa, or Moses, having an elder brother whose existence forbade him to think of occupying the throne of Egypt, ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... was not content with a system of thought which provided him with a working hypothesis for the construction of the physical universe and the conduct of this present life. He looked above and beyond; and reinforced his own faith in immortality by an appeal to the ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... between physical and metaphysical facts, but between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... be underlying this theory will, I think, be best explained upon a different hypothesis. Let us in the first place endeavour, so far as may be possible after the lapse of nearly three centuries, to realize the mental attitude of the author in approaching the composition of his play. In order to do this a closer analysis of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... directed, and the elements opposing its action are demoralized. Now, to any one who has thought out and connected the various evolution theories, as taken, not from any occult source, but from the ordinary scientific manual accessible to all—from the hypothesis of the latest variation in the habits of species—say, the acquisition of carnivorous habits by the New Zealand parrot, for instance—to the farthest glimpses backwards into Space and Eternity afforded by the "Fire Mist" doctrine, it will be apparent that they all rest on one basis. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Enquiries, was not only proper for the Moral Reason which the Poet assigns, but because it would have been highly absurd to have given the Sanction of an Archangel to any particular System of Philosophy. The chief Points in the Ptolemaick and Copernican Hypothesis are described with great Conciseness and Perspicuity, and at the same time dressed in very ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... opposite walls, look north and south. Some persons conjecture that observations were made through them of the solstices, and perhaps of some star, to establish the seasons for these primitive people. "The foundation for this unwarranted hypothesis," Doctor Fewkes writes, "is probably a statement in a manuscript by Father Font in 1775, that the 'Prince,' 'chief' of Casa Grande, looked through openings in the east and west walls 'on the sun as it rose and set, to salute it.' The openings should not be confused with smaller holes made ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... his stimulating book, Comment la route cree le type Social, Edmond Desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain the pre-eminence of the Gauls in the growing and making of pork, and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early success in cultivating the cereals. He describes their migrating ancestors, the Celts, pushing their way up the Danube as hordes of ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... opinion was divided about the ultimate purpose of the poster. The majority expected the announcement of a new play or novel; a few held that a pill or a cocoa would be recommended. Next morning the question became more explicit, and the hypothesis of the play and the pill were excluded. 'What,' the new poster ran, 'is Ireland going to do for the Boers?' The public were not intensely anxious to find an answer to the conundrum thrust thus forcibly on their attention, but they became curious to know who the advertisers were who hungered ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... advanced the theory that man is the climactic consequence of innumerable improvements of the monkey; the negro as he now exists being the result of the Fifteenth Amendment. These philosophers erect a sort of pyramid of progress, placing an Ape at the base and a Caucasian at the Apex. This wild hypothesis of a monkey apotheosis can of coarse only be regarded Jockolarly, in other words, with a grin. Nevertheless the Marmozet is sufficiently like a little Frenchwoman to be called a Ma'amoiselle, and there are (in New-Zealand for instance) human ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... in case of fire. The pulpit is large and handsome; but not so magnificent as that at Bayeux. The organ is comparatively small. Perhaps the thirteenth century is a period sufficiently remote to assign for the completion of the interior of this church, for I cannot subscribe to the hypothesis of the Abbe de la Rue, that this edifice was probably erected by Tancred King of Sicily at the end of the eleventh, or at the beginning ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... theory, half-formed, it is true, but still a theory," said Taxiing. "In fact, it's hardly so much a theory as an hypothesis." ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... prove "an unity of design in this Epistle," as well as to illustrate "the pertinent connection of its several parts." Many perhaps, like myself, will hesitate to embrace the system of that acute Critick; and as many, or more, may reject my hypothesis. But I am thoroughly persuaded that no person, who has considered this work of Horace with due attention, and carefully examined the drift and intention of the writer, but will at least be convinced of the folly or blindness, or haste and carelessness of those Criticks, however ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... are so numerous and obvious, that one feels at first an inclination to deny the reality of those schemes, and to suppose them entirely the chimeras of calumny and faction. But the utter impossibility of accounting, by any other hypothesis, for those strange measures embraced by the court, as well as for the numerous circumstances which accompanied them, obliges us to acknowledge, (though there remains no direct evidence of it,[*]) that a formal plan ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... with, there could be no objection to the publication of the work. In the first place, the title of the book was to be so carefully worded as to show plainly that the Copernican doctrine was merely to be regarded as an hypothesis, and not as a scientific fact. Galileo was also instructed to conclude the book with special arguments which had been supplied by the Pope himself, and which appeared to his Holiness to be quite conclusive against the new doctrine ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence didn't tell—but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have been going their own way regardless of the common events ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... they are constantly represented by these gentlemen), are sufficient to excite this disturbance, very perverse must be the disposition of that people amongst whom such a disturbance can be excited by such means. It is besides no small aggravation of the public misfortune that the disease, on this hypothesis, appears to be without remedy. If the wealth of the nation be the cause of its turbulence, I imagine it is not proposed to introduce poverty as a constable to keep the peace. If our dominions abroad are the roots which feed all this rank luxuriance ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... favor the hypothesis that pleuro-pneumonia is produced by animalculae, and that these enter the lungs by myriads, and thereby set up irritation and inflammation, which lead to all the phenomena and pathological conditions which are ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... inward vision; for, being already known to the people, they could not fail to produce their impression. [Pg 419] Every other solution can be proved to be untenable. 1. Least of all is there any refutation needed of the hypothesis which is now generally abandoned, viz., that the passage in Isaiah is the original one; compare, against this hypothesis, Kleinert, Aechtheit des Jes. S. 356; Caspari, S. 444. 2. Equally objectionable is another supposition, that both the prophets had made use of some older prophecy—one ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... accomplice of the Socialists and the members of the International. Confining ourselves simply to the analysis of facts, and to those considerations which may enlighten public opinion respecting the causes of events, we shall not allow ourselves to be carried over the vast field of hypothesis, but preserve the modest character of narrators. On the night of the 27th of February, the admiral commanding the third section of the fortifications, having noticed the hostile attitude of the National Guard, caused the troops which had been disarmed in accordance ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... needs authoritative guidance. Into the business of forming literary taste faith enters. You probably will not specially care for a particular classic at first. If you did care for it at first, your taste, so far as that classic is concerned, would be formed, and our hypothesis is that your taste is not formed. How are you to arrive at the stage of caring for it? Chiefly, of course, by examining it and honestly trying to understand it. But this process is materially helped by an act of faith, by the frame of ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... we have no satisfactory explanation to offer. He may have set his own judgment above Homer—a most unlikely hypothesis: he may have been consistently following, in the framework of his story, some original now lost to us: there may be more, and longer, lacunae in the text than any editors have ventured to indicate: but, whatever theory we adopt, it must ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... gypsy was struggling with two men, that Quasimodo had a companion; and the morose and haughty face of the archdeacon passed confusedly through his memory. "That would be strange!" he said to himself. And on that fact and that basis he began to construct a fantastic edifice of hypothesis, that card-castle of philosophers; then, suddenly returning once more to reality, "Come! ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... new; but that was an error. I remember that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts and their origin. Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo, which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure—by ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Hebrew ideal of the subjection and seclusion of woman. Milton, in whose mind the rigidity of Puritan doctrine was now contending with the freer spirit of culture and romance, shows on the present occasion a like conflict of doctrine with sentiment. While he adopts the oriental hypothesis of woman for the sake of man, he modifies it by laying more stress upon mutual affection, the charities of home, and the intercommunion of intellectual and moral life, than upon that ministration of woman to the appetite and comforts of man, which makes up the whole of her ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... people to your Majesty's august person, by whose government and victories the safety and happiness of France are secured. To recommend subjects generally to submit to their sovereign would not, in the present hypothesis, direct that submission towards its proper end. I therefore thought it necessary to make a clear explanation, and apply the precept in a precise manner to your Majesty. That will prevent any ambiguity, by fixing men's ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... in advance of that held by it fifteen years ago. The problem of Evolution is hardly any longer to be treated as one of first principles; nor has Mr. Darwin to do battle for a first hearing of his central hypothesis, upborne as it is by a phalanx of names full of distinction ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... night before had sunk to a shadowy hypothesis. She knew nothing—nothing that would justify her in taking any step; and her only chance of knowing more lay in what she would get out of Kerr; for that he knew more about her ring than she, she was convinced. She was afraid of him, yet, in spite of her fear, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... termini; alumnus, alumni; datum, data; stratum, strata; formula, formuloe; vortex, vortices; appendix, appendices; crisis, crises; oasis, oases; axis, axes; phenomenon, phenomena; automaton, automata; analysis, analyses; hypothesis, hypotheses; medium, media; vertebra, vertebroe; ellipsis, ellipses; genus, genera; fungus, fungi; minimum, ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... some mysterious fashion "intimidated" by a disloyal minority. How, in the absence of any special means of coercion, one man can "intimidate" two was never explained any more than it is explained when the same absurd hypothesis is brought forward in relation to Irish agrarian and English labour troubles. At any rate in this case there is not, and never has been, the slightest justification for doubting that Secessionism was ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... compelled to use. For there are in all societies and of both sexes, who will drink and use those beverages to excess, even when there exists a moral certainty, that they will sustain injury from such indulgence, and as an evidence of my hypothesis, I offer the free use of coffee, tea, &c. so universally introduced at the tables of ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... identical in form and function can have been twice evolved. On the second supposition, we have to face the fact that there is very little evidence from palaeontology of the former presence of the American type in Eurasia. But, on the whole, the latter hypothesis presents fewer difficulties and is probably the correct one; in which case two migrations must have taken place, an earlier one of the generalized type to which Blastomeryx and Cosoryx belonged, and a later one of the direct ancestor ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... apt to be startled to the edge of flight by the grunting upheaval of what had seemed a black shadow under the moon. Bob in especial acquired concentrated practice in horsemanship for the simple reason that his animal refused to dismiss his first hypothesis of bears. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... dozen reasons. Purely as an hypothesis, Grell may have a hold on these people by threatening them with exposure for some crime they have committed. Self-interest is the finest incentive I know ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... laying aside hypothesis, what have you ascertained, from actual observation, besides that which ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... This I have never seen, but suppose it, at least, compiled with integrity. He engaged, likewise, in theological controversy, and wrote two books against the Arians; Just Prejudices against the Arian Hypothesis; and Modern Arians unmasked. Another of his works is Natural Theology, or Moral Duties considered apart from Positive; with some observations on the Desirableness and Necessity of a supernatural Revelation. This was the last book that he published. He left ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... country town the person who thinks, instinctively hunts out the other man who thinks—granting the somewhat daring hypothesis that there are two of them. So Byron and the Pigots often met for walks and talks, and on such occasions the poet would read to his friends the scraps of verse he had written. He had gotten into the habit—he wrote whenever his pulse ran up above eighty—he wrote ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... suspicious of Kinko? No! the hypothesis is unlikely. The driver and stoker seem to be the object of their very particular attention. They are two brave Chinamen who have just come on duty, and perhaps Faruskiar is not sorry to see men in whom he can trust, with ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... me rather than for you? The hypothesis is very disputable. You are the elder; you, therefore, would be the first to be thought of. Besides, I do not ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... call oxygen gas, can be the radical of saline matters—namely, can be the principle of acidity, of causticity, or any salinity whatever. There are a thousand ways of refuting this error without the possibility of a reply.... This hypothesis, the best of all those which had been imagined when Lavoisier conceived it, cannot now be longer held, since I have discovered what is really ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the several States be not official, yet they are stated on such evidence as to satisfy both parties that the republican vote has been successful. We may, therefore, venture to hazard propositions on that hypothesis, without being justly subjected to raillery or ridicule. The constitution, to which we are all attached, was meant to be republican, and we believe to be republican according to every candid interpretation. Yet we have ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... mistake until his death, Volta realized that the source of the electric force, as in the first of Galvani's observations, must still be sought outside the specimens, and himself rightly attributed it to the contacting metals. Guided by this hypothesis, Volta started systematic research into the Galvanic properties of metals, and presently succeeded in producing electricity once more from purely mineral substances, namely from two different metals in contact ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... what hypothesis can it be accounted for that the sea should commit depredations on the northern coast, of which there are the most evident tokens as high up at least as Ipu, and probably to Indrapura, where the shelter of the neighbouring islands may put a stop to them, and that it ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe, and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea of cure by medicine, that drugs actually cure, is existent to this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be that he knew more than he could ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... disaster ahead, would have rendered their departure imperative, and that their place will be taken by twenty or thirty others in whom the voice of Chance does not speak with a similar power. Here we touch the profoundest depths of the profoundest of human enigmas; and the hypothesis necessarily falters. But is it not more reasonable, in the fictitious case before us—wherein we merely thrust into prominence what is of constant occurrence in the more obscure conjunctures of daily life—to regard ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to act upon it; they would be prosperous, then, according to the argument, precisely in the proportion in which they abolished intercourse with one another. The less of mutual commerce the better, upon this hypothesis. Protection and encouragement may be, and doubtless are, sometimes, wise and beneficial, if kept within proper limits; but when carried to an extravagant height, or the point of prohibition, the absurd ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... saltness of the sea, of its ebbing and flowing, and of the original and nature both of the heavens and the earth; they dispute of them, partly as our ancient philosophers have done, and partly upon some new hypothesis, in which, as they differ from them, so they do not in all things agree ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... her poor little head was busy on this perturbing question, till she inquired of herself whether after all it might not be possible for photographs to represent people as they had never been. Before rejecting the hypothesis she determined to have the word of a professor on the point, which would be better than all her surmises. Returning to Markton early, she told the coachman whom Paula had sent, to drive her to the shop of Mr. Ray, an obscure photographic artist in that town, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... dwellings were not temporary camps, as such a migration would imply, but places of permanent abode. The houses are too numerous and well constructed to be accounted for on any other hypothesis. A people fleeing periodically to the cliffs to escape from an enemy could not have built such houses. Indeed, they are simply marvelous when considered as to location and construction. The time that ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... examining your hypothesis before you proceed to decide by it, is probably unknown to you," Sir William observed, after bestowing a considerate smile on his brother, who muffled himself up from the chilling sententiousness, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it as a working hypothesis. We will suppose, then, that something was burned in each case which produced an atmosphere causing strange toxic effects. Very good. In the first instance—that of the Tregennis family—this substance was placed in the fire. Now the window was shut, but the fire would naturally carry ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first volume when it appeared in 1857, and almost immediately afterwards, in 1859, read the Origin of Species and felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of natural laws, never doubted that historians would follow until they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history. Year after year passed, and little progress has been made. Perhaps the mass of students are more skeptical now than they were thirty years ago of the possibility that such a science can be created. Yet almost every successful ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... man as he is in one race-type to man as he is in some other. Of this there are but two explanations; ONE, that these great types were originally separate creations, as they stand—that the Negro was made so, and the Greek made so. But this easy hypothesis of special creation has been tried so often, and has broken down so very often, that in no case, probably, do any great number of careful inquirers very firmly believe it. They may accept it provisionally, as the best ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... so situated as to be reached. The difference is greatly in favor of the latter mode when that is practicable, from the greater certainty of its results. This assertion is based, not upon vague hypothesis, but ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... question is answered, probably, by spontaneous generation. Only the merest particle of living protoplasm was necessary to be formed from lifeless matter in the beginning; for, in the eyes of any consistent evolutionist, any further independent formation would be sheer waste, as the hypothesis of evolution postulates the unlimited, though perhaps not, indefinite modifiability of such matter. As we have seen that there exists no absolute barrier between organic and inorganic bodies, it is not so difficult to conceive that the first particle of protoplasm may have originated, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... her wits' end, and thought that he had had nothing less than a coup-de-soleil. And when he recovered from his faintness, he began to be so horribly ill, that Clara, who had been called in to help, had some grounds for the degrading hypothesis (for which Lucia all but boxed her ears) that "Master had got away into the woods, and gone eating toadstools, or some such poisonous stuff;" for he lay a full half-hour on the sofa, death-cold, and almost pulseless; ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... All sorts of false statements don't necessarily tell against the spiritistic hypothesis. If you get other evidences of personality, the false statements only confirm R. H.'s belief that "they" are in a sort of dreamy, half-trance state and very suggestible. My own opinion of the Piper trance is that, since R. H.'s death, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... involved, and that the limitations of his knowledge will permit him to form a wholly inadequate conception even of the few factors that have obtruded themselves upon his attention. But he may frame a working hypothesis in explanation of the factors he had appreciated, which may seem perfectly exhaustive and final, as well as logical and rational to him, but to those who come after him, with a wider knowledge of the properties of matter and the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... have been made, yet much uncertainty inevitably persists. Our knowledge of nuclear warfare rests largely on theory and hypothesis, fortunately untested by the usual processes of trial and error; the paramount goal of statesmanship is that we should never learn from ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... waned and morning began to dawn in the east, the chief grew seriously uneasy at the prolonged absence of his agents—a circumstance that he could only account for upon the absurd hypothesis that those stupid brutes had suffered themselves to be overtaken by sleep in ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... figure principally in the story, will help to show to those who wish to read it intelligently, how much of it is genuine history. They will see that the tale is mainly constructed on a succession of hypotheses, but that every hypothesis rests on a substratum of fact, however slender, and in many cases on careful weighing and comparison of a number of facts together. Some of these conjectures are perhaps the only ones which will fully and satisfactorily account ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt |
