"Ratiocination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only added to its effect. The slow and musing air which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... continued allegory."[169] In comparing his judgments on Spenser and Dryden we may conclude that the critic found more in the later poet of that solid intellectual basis which he emphasizes in characterizing him. "This power of ratiocination," says Scott, "of investigating, discovering, and appreciating that which is really excellent, if accompanied with the necessary command of fanciful illustration and elegant expression, is the most interesting ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... fifteen times repeated, to get once more into his hands the single pound-note of which he had treacherously and like a coward robbed Fenton while asleep in the carriage. This loss, in connection With the robbery which occasioned it, forced him to retrace to a considerable extent the process of ratiocination on the subject of fate and destiny, in which he had so complacently indulged ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... landscape has ceased to vibrate. In the douce benignance of equinoctial sunshine we gaze about us with eyes of inventory. Where my observation errs by too much sentiment the Urchin checks me by his cooler power of ratiocination. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... ascend from the solid ground of verification, the less confidence should we place in our wings of speculation, while the more do we find the practical wisdom of such intellectual caution, or distrust of ratiocination, as can be given only by experience. Therefore, most of all is this the case in those departments of thought which are furthest from the region of our sensuous life—viz. metaphysics and religion. And, as a matter of fact, it is just in these departments of thought that we find the rashness ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... we, poor slaves of traditional ratiocination, seek to turn these explosions of eternal lava into eternal systems. The lava of life pours forth forever, but the systems break and crumble; each one overwhelmed in its allotted time by a new outrushing of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite and accurate men of that university; who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge, that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted, and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university in less volume; whither they came not so much ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... said that Poe invented or perfected—more exactly, perfected his own invention of—the modern short story; that is his general and supreme achievement. He also stands superlative for the quality of three varieties of short stories, those of terror, beauty and ratiocination. In the first class belong A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Black Cat (1843), and The Cask of Amontillado (1846). In the realm of beauty his notable ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... before the fire, with that look upon his face which I had seen only once or twice in our acquaintance—a look which I may call an absolute concatenation of inductive and deductive ratiocination—from which all that was human, tender, or sympathetic was absolutely discharged. He was simply an icy algebraic symbol! Indeed, his whole being was concentrated to that extent that his clothes fitted loosely, ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... of world-wide slow developments of useful inventions, craftsmanship, commerce, and art—Why? Ages of dark impulsive groping before the slow discovery of reason, followed by centuries of belief in the sufficiency of ratiocination unaided by systematic observation and experiment—Why? At length the dawn of scientific method and science, the growth of natural knowledge, immeasurable expansion of the universe in Time and in Space, belief in the lawfulness of Nature, rapidly increasing subjugation ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... demolished by argument. But in his heart every man, including the most obstinate supporter of the theory, demolishes it every hour of every day. On the other hand, the theory of free-will can be demolished by ratiocination! So much the worse for ratiocination! If we regard ourselves as free agents, and the personalities surrounding us as the puppets of determinism, we shall have arrived at the working compromise from ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... marvellous phenomenon. The literary faculty is born of the marriage of chronic desperation with chronic trust. This may account in part for that peculiar condition of mind which is both engendered and required by abundant writing. A bold abandon, a desperate guidance, a thoughtless ratiocination, a mechanical swaying of rhetoric, are the grounds of dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state, destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head could be relieved ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... study, designs some valuable blessing for his lower and more animal brethren, only pursues the craving of his nature; and that his happiness is no higher than their's in their several occupations and delights. Sight and sense are fully as powerful for happiness as thought and ratiocination. Nature grows flowers wherever she can; she causes sweet waters to ripple over stony beds, and living wells to spring up in deserts, so that grass and herbs may grow and afford nourishment to some of God's creatures. Even the granite and the lava ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... revival of religion, most earnestly counselled his auditors to exercise "fiduciary" faith; the other, of a learned divine whose appointment in a certain village coincided with the visit of a travelling menagerie. "I perceive," he said, in sensational tones, "that a spirit of German transcendental ratiocination is creeping into the Church." The congregation, remembering the adjacent caravans, left at once in ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... of ratiocination was in them, hardly passed through her mind; it was filled, rather, with a confused mass of tangled thought and feeling, which tossed about in it like the nets of a fishing fleet rolled together by ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... not rustic, felt in her narrow soul a kind of hatred for the ecstatic declarations of the old maid. She had found a phrase by which to describe her, a term of contempt that rose to her lips, called forth by I know not what confused and mysterious mental ratiocination. She said: 'That woman is a demoniac.' This epithet, applied to that austere and sentimental creature, seemed to me irresistibly droll. I myself never called her anything now but 'the demoniac,' experiencing a singular pleasure in pronouncing aloud ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... jestice," said the old squire, hastily, whose capacities of ratiocination had been cultivated by the exercise of the judicial functions of his modest ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... confer on Man his immeasurable superiority above all other animate things are traceable far down into the animate world. The dog, the cat, and the parrot, return love for our love and hatred for our hatred. They are capable of shame and of sorrow, and though they may have no logic nor conscious ratiocination, no one who has watched their ways can doubt that they possess that power of rational cerebration which evolves reasonable acts from the premises furnished by the senses—a process which takes fully as large a share as conscious reason ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... example of 'emotional ratiocination'. There is a flash of ecstasy through the strangely cautious description of Karshish; every syllable is weighed and thoughtful, everywhere the lines swell ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter. This affinity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion as the species of wit is higher and deals less with less words and with superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of Johnson's most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an analogy which immediately exposes the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... vituperation, as meaning to impugn my honour or genteelity, I would blithely put the same to issue, venturing in that quarrel with my single person against you three. But if you speak it in the way of logical ratiocination, whilk I have studied in my youth at the Mareschal-College of Aberdeen, I am ready to prove to ye LOGICE, that my resolution to defer, for a certain season, the taking upon me either of these quarrels, not only becometh me as a gentleman and a man of honour, but also as a person of sense ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... therefore, is to be carried on either by induction, or by ratiocination. Induction is a manner of speaking which, by means of facts which are not doubtful, forces the assent of the person to whom it is addressed. By which assent it causes him even to approve of some points which are doubtful, on account of their resemblance to those things to which he ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... new caste of people makes its appearance, and they say, "All this is nonsense; all this must be abandoned." This is the deductive method of ratiocination (wherein lies the difference between the deductive and the inductive method, no one can understand); these are the dogmas of the technological and metaphysical period. Every thing that these men discover by inward experience, and which they communicate ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Mills, the 'association' theory, is treated differently by Brown. Brown, as we have seen, both in his theory of causation and in his theory of our belief in an external world, speaks of principles in the mind which somehow override 'ratiocination.' In the first case, he speaks of 'intuition,' but in the other, as I have said, he seems to prefer association. The difference is remarkable because the belief in an external world is upon his showing simply a case of causation. It means essentially ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... fact!" said the rest in high admiration of the Judge's ratiocination. Steve was specially pleased, and drawing a neck-yoke from a barrel standing near, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... developed traits and even eccentricities enough to make it a sort of microcosm of life. There, for instance, was Patience, the maiden aunt, his father's sister, the news-monger of the fireside, whose powers of ratiocination first gave Philip the Greek idea and method of reasoning to a point and arriving at truth by the process of exclusion. It did not excite his wonder at the time, but afterwards it appeared to him as one of the New England eccentricities ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the moral idea seem to have touched the zenith. The philosophy of Aristotle, considered as a whole, appears on one side to have passed the line of the great Hellenic period. If it did not inaugurate, it at least prepared the way for the decline. It perfected logic, as the instrument of ratiocination, and gave it exactness and precision, Yet taken all in all, it was greatly inferior to its predecessor. From the moral point of view it is a decided retrogression. The god of Aristotle is indifferent to virtue. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Machiavelli. There is the same manner of approaching a subject, the same neglect of opposing arguments, and the same disposition to rely on the force of general maxims. Machiavelli exceeded him in power of ratiocination from a given proposition, but does not seem to have been able to determine whether a given proposition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... O. Henry puts it in one of his most delightful stories: "He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness." To say that he was thinking of Miss Chapman would imply too much power of ratiocination and abstract scrutiny on his part. He was not thinking: he was being thought. Down the accustomed channels of his intellect he felt his mind ebbing with the irresistible movement of tides drawn by the blandishing moon. ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... went over this whole matter once for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee." An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... a singular instance of perverse ratiocination, that, unwarned by experience, the French should still persist in perpetuating this political vice; that all their policy should still be the policy of Centralization,—a principle which secures the momentary strength, but ever ends in the abrupt destruction of States. It is, in fact, the perilous ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." Fourthly, that it must assume the aspect of verisimilitude; "truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale—some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination." Fifthly, that it must give the impression of finality; the story, and the interest in the characters which it introduces, must begin with the opening sentence ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... however, the appearance of more circumspection; it wants neither harmony of numbers, accuracy of thought, nor elegance of diction. It has either been written with great care, or, what cannot be imagined of so long a work, with such felicity as made care less necessary. Its two constituent parts are ratiocination and description. To reason in verse is allowed to be difficult; but Blackmore not only reasons in verse, but very often reasons poetically; and finds the art of uniting ornament with strength and ease with closeness. This is a skill which Pope might have condescended to learn from him, when ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Black Cat" and "The Tell-tale Heart," wherein the retributions of remorse are portrayed with an awful fidelity; such tales of natural beauty as "The Island of the Fay" and "The Domain of Arnheim"; such marvellous studies in ratiocination as the "Gold-bug," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," the latter, a recital of fact, demonstrating the author's wonderful capability of correctly analyzing the mysteries of the human mind; such ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... rapidity, and rare, indeed, are the instances in which my anticipations are not promptly and fully realised. By a similar rule of progression the incubator is seldom a match for the confirmed maniac, either in the light play of sarcasm, the coruscations of wit or the severer encounters of dialectical ratiocination." ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... favor, while it could not estrange him from his father more than he was already estranged, would give her greater influence over him for good. Such were the conclusions of her mind—not arrived at by cold ratiocination, but by woman's shorter way of perception. And she ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... servants have been lost to England because, however accomplished, they lacked the mathematical twist required to pass the standard in this one subject? As a training in intelligence it is harmful: it teaches a person to underestimate the value of evidence based on their other modes of ratiocination. It is the poorest form of mental exercise—sheer verification; conjecture and observation are ruled out. A study of Chinese grammar would be far more valuable from the point of view of general education. All mathematics above the standard of the office boy should be a special subject, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... a priest severe In conduct and in conversation, It did a sinner good to hear Him deal in ratiocination. ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... Allan Poe who wrote "Shades" was one of the most brilliant of American writers, and his stomach was empty most of the time. And when this master of ratiocination had on rare occasions a full stomach it was invariably full ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... jump at that point just as did the pioneer. So it is with a pietistical and puristical people—they will follow some stupid old bellwether because utterly incapable of independent thought, of individual ratiocination. When "Les Miserables" first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book, that it was shot full of "slang," the expressive patois of the race, that it was liberally spiced with argot, the vernacular ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... treat every determination as capricious, that shocks their inclination. The chef d'oeuvre of a good education is to form a reasonable human being; and yet they pretend to govern a child by argument and ratiocination. This is to enter upon the work at the wrong end, and to endeavour to convert the fabric itself into one of the tools by which it is constructed. The laws of the preceptor ought to be as final and inflexible, as they are mild ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... as are the names of Vertues, and Vices; For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice; one Prodigality, what another Magnanimity; one Gravity, what another Stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... dispute, Confute, change hands, and still confute; He'd undertake to prove by force Of argument, a man's no horse; He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl, And that a Lord may be an owl; A calf an Alderman, a goose a Justice, And rooks Committee-Men or Trustees. He'd run in debt by disputation, And pay with ratiocination. All this by syllogism true, In mood and figure, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Bennett didn't get either killed or wounded," said his mother with that defective ratiocination which it is a pretty woman's privilege to indulge in ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... be as easy as conscription or destruction. We have only to change our mind, and there we are, as though nothing had happened. It is the greatest wonder of the human brain that its own accommodating ratiocination never affords it any amusement. We use reason only to make convincing disguises for our desires and appetites. Perhaps it is fear of the wrath to come that is partly responsible for the clamour of the economists and sociologists in the publishers' announcements, almost drowning there the ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... businesse to consider the Phaenomena relating to the present Question, which have been afforded by experiments, especially since it might seem injurious to our senses, by whose mediation we acquire so much of the knowledge we have of things corporal, to have recourse to far-fetched and abstracted Ratiocination [Errata: Ratiocinations], to know what are the sensible ingredients of those sensible things that we daily see and handle, and are supposed to have the liberty to untwist (if I may so speak) into the primitive bodies they consist of. He annexed that he wished therefore they would no longer delay ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... cares and pleasures of the world has been often recommended as useful to repentance. This at least is evident, that every one retires, whenever ratiocination and recollection are required on other occasions; and surely the retrospect of life, the disentanglement of actions complicated with innumerable circumstances, and diffused in various relations, the discovery of the primary ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... my blood and my groats to nourish thy sweethearts, wench," said the surly money-lender. "I have saved this prelatist and malignant from his adversaries, and now"——He considered a while, muttering his thoughts and arguments to himself with a most confused and volatile impetuosity of ratiocination. In a short time he seemed to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion through all this obscurity, and drew out a handful of coin, of some low denomination, apparently by the sound, and placed it in the hands of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... narrating things, which could only be suggested by subsequent reflection. Reason, then, emboldened by these contradictions, hesitates not to reject whatever does not accord with the nature of things, and accepts nothing for historical truth that is not capable of being established by argument and ratiocination. Its ideas and suggestions ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... given you here a third of mine own life] [Theobald had argued that Miranda was at least half of Prospero's life and had emended.] In consequence of this ratiocination Mr. Theobald printed the text, a thread of my own life. I have restored the ancient reading. Prospero, in his reason subjoined why he calls her the third of his life, seems to allude to some logical distinction of causes, ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... butterflies, and find hard life still more irksome. Of all this, and much more, in the general way of consolers who set out on the principle that grief is a matter of logic, did Gentleman Waife deliver himself with a vigour of ratiocination which admitted of no reply, and conveyed not a particle of comfort. And feeling this, that great actor—not that he was acting then-suddenly stopped, clasped the child in his arms, and murmured in broken accents,—"But ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... intellectual, I should rather say instinctive—for his keen intuitive thoughts appeared more like instincts, than the results of a process of ratiocination. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... value, also, the story about animals: universal interest in puzzles, in the science of ratiocination, is not more pronounced than the interest in rationalizing the brute. "The Mottled Slayer" and "The Elephant Remembers" offer sympathetic studies of struggles in the animal world. Mr. Marshall's white elephant will linger ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... my little poem, so I am now set out in the cold by every big magazine and publisher, and may as well understand and admit it—which is just as well, for I find I am palpably losing my sight and ratiocination. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... by the Fathers and councils leaves no doubt that supernatural knowledge manifests itself mainly in judgments. But simple apprehension and ratiocination must also play a part, (1) because these two operations are of the essence of human thought, and the grace of illumination always works through natural agencies; and (2) because some intellectual apprehensions are ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... Church. A Roman priest always wants to argue with you. A Church of England parson flies in terror from an argument, a fundamentally sensible course. George Fox simply knocked arguers out with his "I have experimental knowledge of God." St. Thomas Aquinas was like me: he knew the worthlessness of ratiocination because he could do it so well, and yet despaired of the Inspirationists in practical life because they did it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a kind of cerebral sensation of foolishness in my ideas of ratiocination; but I pulled out the little brick and unwrapped my ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... their project put upon Mother so great a burden in the way of preparations. At first he took it for granted that only women could know about tea and tea-cups, decorations and paper napkins and art and the disposal of garbage. He determined to learn. By dint of much deep ratiocination while riding in the Elevated between flat and store ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... however, that it is this mutual good understanding, and comparing of notes between the author and the persons he describes; his infinite circumspection, his exact process of ratiocination and calculation, which gives such an appearance of coldness and formality to most of his characters,—which makes prudes of his women, and coxcombs of his men. Every thing is too conscious in his works. Every thing ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... ratiocination," said one of them, "do you arrive at the conclusion that the division of society into producing and non-possessing classes predicates failure when compared with competitive systems that are monopolizing in tendency and result ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... was from New York, but the rest of us wondered how Bud guessed it. So, when the steaks were done, we besought him to lay bare his system of ratiocination. And as Bud was something of a Territorial talking machine he made ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... sinuosities. Such is the deepest fact of the human soul, and to image it, there springs into existence the corresponding literary form. Not that it was taken consciously by the poet or maker after much ratiocination; he has to take it, if he sees the universe as it is. This form is the form of the everlasting reality, of which he has the immediate vision, it is also the form of very ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... which affixes signs to all sorts of objects and qualities, and excites trains of thought which would never arise from the mere impression of the senses, or, if they did arise, could not be followed out. The higher intellectual powers of man, such as those of ratiocination, abstraction, self-consciousness, etc., probably follow from the continued improvement and exercise of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... generally described with considerable minuteness, and the time and place of meeting foretold. This may be fictitious, and it is fortunate for her if it is so. Rut the seeress too frequently needs no powers of clairvoyance or ratiocination to make these disclosures, for some roue; who has exhausted the ordinary rounds of dissipation, or some fast young fellow seeking a change, has made a bargain with the prophetess for a new and innocent victim—the amount of the fee to depend on the means ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... as though it had become a permanent colour. Mr. Corbeck had a big head, massive and full; with shaggy, dark red-brown hair, but bald on the temples. His forehead was a fine one, high and broad; with, to use the terms of physiognomy, the frontal sinus boldly marked. The squareness of it showed "ratiocination"; and the fulness under the eyes "language". He had the short, broad nose that marks energy; the square chin—marked despite a thick, unkempt beard—and massive ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... on the wind, they would merely have shot the wedge firmer and sharper into the air, and answered the earth-born shout with an air-born gabble—clangour to clangour. Where were Mr Atherstone's powers of ratiocination, and all his acoustics? Two shouts slew an eagle. What became of all the other denizens of air—especially crows, ravens, and vultures, who, seeing two millions of men, must have come flocking against a day of battle? ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... saying that it is not in point of narrative that the present author will obtain any advantage over his predecessors. It is in disquisition that he rejoices, and succeeds; it is the argumentative matter which excites and sustains him. His style seems to languish when the effort of ratiocination gives place to the task of the narrator. We fancy we see him resume the pen with listlessness, when nothing remains for the historian ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... negligencies in the subordinate parts. The original impropriety, and the subsequent unpopularity of the subject, added to the ridiculousness of its first elements, has sunk it into neglect; but it may be usefully studied, as an example of poetical ratiocination, in which the argument suffers ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... recollections; one idea assimilating and explaining another, with astonishing rapidity. I do not now allude to that quick perception of truth, which is so intuitive that it baffles research, and makes us at a loss to determine whether it is reminiscence or ratiocination, lost sight of in its celerity, that opens the dark cloud. Over those instantaneous associations we have little power; for when the mind is once enlarged by excursive flights, or profound reflection, the raw materials, will, in some degree, arrange themselves. The understanding, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... were something well known (and the clause, 'as by one lump of clay,' &c., undoubtedly does refer to something well known), in order to render the initial assertion plausible. And we are not aware of any means of knowledge—assisted or non-assisted by ratiocination—that would prove the non-reality of things effected, previous to the cognition produced by texts such as 'That art thou'; a point which will be discussed at length under II, 1.—'Being only this was in the beginning, one, without a second'; 'it thought, may I be many, may ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... confess this is a doctrine which puzzles one greatly, although one may have no difficulty in accepting the spirit of man as an entity, for the phenomena of ratiocination are altogether so widely different from all physical phenomena that they can hardly be explained by any of the physical forces known to us. The materialist, who tells us that consciousness, sensation, thought, and ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... increase of height, and little of strength, there is, likewise, a period, though more variable by external causes, when the mind commonly attains its stationary point, and very little advances its powers of reflection, judgment, and ratiocination. The body may acquire new modes of motion, or new dexterities of mechanick operations, but its original strength receives not improvement: the mind may be stored with new languages, or new sciences, but its power of thinking remains nearly the same, and, unless it attains new ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... perhaps, the livelier from his not having encumbered himself with more. To any regular train of reasoning, even on this his most favourite topic, it was not possible to lead him. He would start objections to the arguments of others, and detect their fallacies; but of any consecutive ratiocination on his own side he seemed, if not incapable, impatient. In this, indeed, as in many other peculiarities belonging to him,—his caprices, fits of weeping, sudden affections and dislikes,—may be observed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... women, Louis reflected, is that in the midst of a silly argument that you can shatter in ten words they will by a fluke insert some awkward piece of genuine ratiocination, the answer to which must necessarily be lengthy ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... that is, stories of great fear induced in a character by a mass of rather vague and unusual incidents, such as The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1843); and stories of "ratiocination," that is, of the ingenious thinking out of a problem, as The Mystery of Marie Roget (1843). In the latter type he is the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... intellectual and rational operations. Do they cease to be so when the man ceases to be conscious of them? That depends upon what is the essence and what the accident of those operations, which, taken together, constitute ratiocination. ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... for example, cannot be estimated by the same standards as the truthfulness of Stubbs's Constitutional History.) In reading a book, a sincere questioning of oneself, "Is it true?" and a loyal abiding by the answer, will help more surely than any other process of ratiocination to form the taste. I will not assert that this question and answer are all-sufficient. A true book is not always great. But a great book is ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett |
