"Dialectics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... — N. {ant. 477} reasoning ratiocination rationalism; dialectics, induction, generalization. discussion, comment; ventilation; inquiry &c 461. argumentation, controversy, debate; polemics, wrangling; contention &c 720; logomachy^; disputation, disceptation^; paper war. art of reasoning, logic. process ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Christian revelation. The respectable name of Plato was used by the orthodox, and abused by the heretics, as the common support of truth and error: the authority of his skilful commentators, and the science of dialectics, were employed to justify the remote consequences of his opinions and to supply the discreet silence of the inspired writers. The same subtle and profound questions concerning the nature, the generation, the distinction, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... debate whether the American people will abandon it now? Those who have a fancy for that species of dialectics may weigh the chances, and evolve from circumstances of their own imagination, and canons of national and international obligation of their own manufacture, conclusions to their own liking. I need not consume much of your time in that unprofitable pursuit. We may as well, ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... venturesomeness of their faith and courage, and justifying their temper of mind and their intellectual attitude by alleging misinterpreted language of their wiser and deeper teachers. A recoil from Whately's hard and barren dialectics, a sympathy with many tender and refined natures which the movement had touched, made the leaders patient with intellectual feebleness when it was joined with real goodness and Christian temper; but this also sometimes made them less impatient than ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... informed you that this speech of mine was probably carefully prepared. I admit that it was. I am not master of language; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know what I meant, and I will not leave this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to them, what I really meant ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... of metaphysics. You are making a very hotbed of your intellect, while you heart is daily becoming a dreary desert. Take care, lest the starvation be so complete that eventually you will be unable to reclaim it. Dialectics answer very well in collegiate halls, but will not content you. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... and methods of reasoning fits in the metaphysical framework of thought. To dialectics, however, which takes in the objects and their conceivable images above all in their connections, their sequence, their motion, their rise and decline, processes like the above are so many attestations of its own method of procedure. Nature furnishes the ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... new, his method was no less so. He was the parent of dialectics and logic. Aristotle says, "To Socrates we may unquestionably assign two novelties—inductive discourses, and the definitions of general terms." Without any predecessor to copy, Socrates fell as it were instinctively into that ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... questions, which in those days hid that deep unbelief in any truth whatsoever which was spreading fast over the minds of men. Such word-splitters were Stilpo and Diodorus, the slayer and the slain. They were of the Megaran school, and were named Dialectics; and also, with more truth, Eristics, or quarrellers. Their clique had professed to follow Zeno and Socrates in declaring the instability of sensible presumptions and conclusions, in preaching an absolute and eternal Being. But there was this deep gulf between them and Socrates; that while Socrates ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... skill, and strength were not born with us. All the qualities of manly thought, though with ruder implements and cruder materials, have been as conspicuously exhibited down through the ages past as in our day. The power of governing, ability in war, diplomacy in peace, subtle dialectics, clear insight, the art of conversation, persuasive and impressive speech, high art in every form, whatever constitutes the test of good manhood, has been here in full force. It would puzzle us yet to lay the stones of Baalbec, or to carve, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... midwinter, half-frozen, the paper in one hand, the pencil in the other; and how, when these artistic enthusiasms were sternly if admiringly checked by a father intent on siring a Rabbi, he relieved the dreary dialectics of the Talmud—so tedious to a child uninterested in divorce laws or the number of white hairs permissible in a red cow—by surreptitious nocturnal perusal of a precious store of Hebrew scientific and historical works discovered in an old cupboard in his father's study. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the existence of Slavery, presto, Slavery must be regarded as existing under it in the Territories! This, we say, was more respectable ground than Squatter Sovereignty, because it met the question more fairly in the face; yet, considered either as dialectics or history, it was not one whit less absurd. We do not wonder that Webster, and all the other sound lawyers of the nation, heard such an announcement of Constitutional hermeneutics with utter surprise and astonishment. It was enough to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... climate, of the animal qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of philosophical ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... as I can't bridge it over I may as well forget it. Pah! I am boring you, and over-talking myself. Have a cigar, and let us say no more about it. There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses of Socratic Dialectics." ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... said he, 'you must be, with the aptness of my scholar. Julia has not studied dialectics in vain. Before I can feel myself able to contend with her, I must study the books she has commended so—from which, I must acknowledge, I have been repelled by a prejudice, I believe, rather than any thing else, or more worthy—and then, perhaps, I may ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... specimen of that facile and effective hack-work of which Johnson was master. In that characteristic way of his, half of patronage, half of reproof, and wholly pedagogical, he summons his subject to the bar of his dialectics, and according to his lights administers justice. He admits that Browne has "great excellencies" and "uncommon sentiments," and that his scholarship and science are admirable, but strongly condemns his style: "It is vigorous, but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... practise how to provoke a paternal Government, you mean,' she rejoined, and was quite a match for him in dialectics. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Fortunatus, he wrote some long poems, and notably a whole history in verse of the church at York: Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae. We owe to him, too, some manuals used in his educational work; a grammar and works on rhetoric and dialectics. They are written in the form of dialogues, and in the two last the interlocutors are King Charles and Alcuin. He wrote, finally, several theological treatises: a treatise de Fide Trinitatis, commentaries on the Bible, &c. The complete works of Alcuin have ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pupils, and won therein his own great renown whilst laying the foundation for that of the abbey of Bee, which was destined to be carried still higher by one of his disciples, St. Anselm. Lanfranc was eloquent, great in dialectics, of a sprightly wit, and lively in repartee. Relying upon the pope's decision, he spoke ill of William's marriage with Matilda. William was informed of this, and in a fit of despotic anger, ordered Lanfranc to be driven from the monastery and banished from Normandy, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... all his life, devoting himself with great zeal to letters, and had become famous for his visits to the schools of France and Italy, in order to gather there the secrets of learning. As a consequence he was well informed not only in grammar and dialectics, but also in astronomy and in music. He also possessed such an extensive knowledge of the natural sciences that in the town of Salerno, where, since ancient times, the best schools of medicine had existed, there was no one to equal him ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... accomplished by careful historical analysis, which will show different results for different epochs,—that, for example, the legal nature of liberty is entirely different in the ancient state and in the modern. Legal dialectics can easily deduce the given condition with equally logical acuteness from principles directly opposed to one another. The true principle is taught not by jurisprudence but ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... narrow; they remained, as Rabelais will say later, foolish and silly, dreaming, stultified things, "tout niais, tout reveux et rassotes." John of Salisbury, a brilliant scholar of Paris in the twelfth century, had the curiosity to come, after a long absence, and see his old companions "that dialectics still detained on St. Genevieve's Mount." "I found them," he tells us, "just as I had left them, and at the same point; they had not advanced one step in the art of solving our ancient questions, nor added ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... absolute need and resistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like the Jesuits, but in a different spirit, the Port-Royalists devoted themselves much to the task of education. They honoured classical studies; they honoured science, dialectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry were substantial additions to the literature of pedagogy. Isaac le Maistre de Sacy and others translated and annotated the Bible. Their theologian, moralist, and controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of Essais de ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... good sense opposes to religion, with the pretended solutions that have been given. You will perceive that the difficulties, evident even to the capacities of a child, have never been removed by divines the most practised in dialectics. You will find in their replies only subtle distinctions, metaphysical subterfuges, unintelligible verbiage, which can never be the language of truth, and which demonstrates the embarrassment, the impotence, and the bad faith of those who are interested by their position ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... invented. By the agency of evil demons they have stolen into human life with the other pests. For did not the simple-minded people of the Golden Age live happily, unprovided with any science, only led by nature and instinct? What did they want grammar for, when all spoke the same language? Why have dialectics, when there were no quarrels and no differences of opinion? Why jurisprudence, when there were no bad morals from which good laws sprang? They were too religious to investigate with impious curiosity the secrets of nature, the size, motions, influence of the stars, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... eminent in Bayle were equally so in Warburton. In his early studies he had particularly applied himself to logic; and was not only a vigorous reasoner, but one practised in all the finesse of dialectics. He had wit, fertile indeed, rather than delicate; and a vast body of erudition, collected in the uninterrupted studies of twenty years. But it was the SECRET PRINCIPLE, or, as he calls it, "the Academic exercise of Wit," ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... passage in this document which is most useful to the historian is that in which the republican nationalists remind the Afrikander leaders at the Cape of the insincerity of their original "mediation." In dialectics Mr. Fischer, Mr. Smuts, and Mr. Reitz are quite able to hold their own with Mr. Hofmeyr, Dr. Te Water, and Mr. Schreiner. They have not forgotten the Cape Prime Minister's precipitate benediction alike of President Krueger's Bloemfontein scheme and of the seven ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... additions during our period—that of religious controversy. A large portion of such literature is in its very nature ephemeral; and some of the disputes which have engaged the energies even of our greatest masters in dialectics have not been in themselves of supreme importance; but many points of doctrine and discipline have been violently canvassed among professing Christians, and attacks of long-sustained vigour and virulence have been made on almost every leading article ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... As a question of dialectics, it must be admitted that this sort of reasoning is not very formidable to those who are not to be frightened by consequences. It is an argumentum ad ignorantiam—take this explanation ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... modern terms which he uses sometimes like a genius, but often superficially and unjustly, he develops a view of the world which, although it appears in an independent way {204} in all its fundamentals, as regards its contents takes its origin from Spinoza, and as regards form and dialectics from Hegel, but sometimes, it is true, sinks into weaknesses of which these philosophers would hardly have been guilty. So, for instance, when he simply identifies religious faith with conjecture, he takes a superficial ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... character of them, shown especially in the appeals to mythology, in the reasons which are given by Zeus for reconstructing the frame of man, or by the Boeotians and Eleans for encouraging male loves; (7) the ruling passion of Socrates for dialectics, who will argue with Agathon instead of making a speech, and will only speak at all upon the condition that he is allowed to speak the truth. We may note also the touch of Socratic irony, (8) which admits of a wide application and reveals a deep insight ...
— Symposium • Plato
... the subjective form of myth and science, for which Descartes had prepared the way; the theory of Spinoza and of the German school in general fundamentally consists in the substitution of entified forms and dialectics of the mind for the earlier objective forms of ideas. A great error was rectified, and the former phase of the intellectual evolution of myth disappeared, in favour of another which, although still erroneous, was more ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... College, as it might include persons of advanced life, who had been educated and obtained their degrees at some other University. The usual course extended over four years, and was devoted to the study of philosophy, including rhetoric, dialectics, ethics, and physics. In the middle of the third year, students were allowed to propose themselves as candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts; and for this purpose, those who had completed or determined their course of study, during the trivium or period of ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... objection, however, would involve more logic-chopping than is desirable on the present occasion. But I have already dealt with it fully elsewhere,—viz. in The Contemporary Review for June, 1888, to which therefore I may refer any one who is interested in dialectics of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... ambition soaring to the height and brightness of physical things; others like young puppies, as Plato[265] says, rejoicing in tearing and biting, betake themselves to strifes and questions and sophisms; but most plunging themselves into dialectics immediately store themselves for sophistry; and some collect sentences[266] and histories and go about (as Anacharsis said he saw the Greeks used money for no other purpose but to count it up), merely piling up and comparing them, but making no practical use of them. Applicable ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... has been stated by one of the biographers of Bartholomew Las Casas, that he accompanied Columbus in his third voyage in 1498, and returned with him in 1500. [368] This, however, is incorrect. He was, during that time, completing his education at Salamanca, where he was instructed in Latin, dialectics, logic, metaphysics, ethics, and physics, after the supposed method and system of Aristotle. While at the university, he had, as a servant, an Indian slave, given him by his father, who had received him from Columbus. When Isabella, in her transport ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... animal qualities of the frame, and evil has become a good, and good has become evil .... Now, our displeasure with Mr. Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the finely-tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric, at Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of philosophical disguises .... Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Burgundy. Jean Mielot told how the virgin of Alexandria controverted the subtle arguments of Homer, the syllogisms of Aristotle, the very learned reasonings of the famous physicians AEsculapius and Galen, practised the seven liberal arts, and disputed according to the rules of dialectics.[275] Jacques d'Arc's daughter had heard nothing of all that; she knew Saint Catherine from stories out of some history written in the vulgar tongue, in verse or in prose, so many of which were in circulation ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... DIALECTIC, or DIALECTICS (from Gr. [Greek: dialektos], discourse, debate; [Greek: e dialektike], sc. [Greek: techne], the art of debate), a logical term, generally used in common parlance in a contemptuous sense for verbal or purely abstract disputation devoid of practical value. According ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... well-known figure in London literary society, and was busy making for himself a huge private reputation. The Christmas Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the dinner table of David Garrick. Dr. Johnson, then in full vigour of his mind, and with the all-dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished by daily use, was flatly contradicted by a fellow-guest some twenty years his junior, and, what is more, submitted to it without a murmur. One of the diners, Arthur Murphy, was so ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... knowledge may be reduced to one or other of these divisions. Even law belongs partly to the history of man, partly as a science to dialectics. The twelve languages are Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... optics, the canon law, and the divinity of the schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... which agitated the world in the tenth century, relating to dialectics, was concerning universals (as for example, man, horse, dog, &c.) signifying not this or that in particular, but all in general. They distinguished universals, or what we call abstract terms, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... dialectics," said he with a smack of the lips upon the word. It was a good cunning scholarly word, and the man who could produce it so ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... previous similar productions, under the title of Revolutions-Novellen. It is full of Ruge's keen, logical talent, and on-rushing energy, but is deficient in esthetic beauty and interest. He never forgets the Hegelian dialectics even when he writes novels. Clemens Metternich, and Ludwig Kossuth, by Siegmund Kolisch, is a skilfully done but not great production. Uffo Horn has a new series of tales, which he calls Aus drei Iahrhunderten ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... heroism, walked side by side with dialectics, and the pantheon of the gods and the achievements of warriors rivaled each other on the stage, as themes for the ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... I am entirely ignorant; and even if I were not, I should not presume to levy a tax upon it in discussions with you; for, however vulnerable you may possibly be, I regard an argumentum ad hominem as the weakest weapon in the armory of dialectics—a weapon too often dipped in the venom of personal malevolence. I merely gave expression to my belief that miserable, useless lives are sinful lives; that when God framed the world, and called the human race into it, he made most munificent provision ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... outgrowth of humanity in long-clothes. Man, ignorant of the forces of the Cosmos, blinded by theological dialectics and metaphysical subtleties, incapable of understanding the real essence of our moral and intellectual nature, philosophically untrained to observe that evil is but a sequence of the disturbed balance ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... understandings." His only criticism of the conversation of that day (1797-1802) concerned itself with the prevalence of that form of Scotch humor which was called wut, and with the disputations and dialectics. We were more fortunate than Sydney Smith, because Edinburgh has outgrown its odious smells, barbarous sounds, and bad suppers, and, wonderful to relate, has kept its excellent hearts and its enlightened and cultivated understandings. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... them doubtless saw whither such innovations tended. Meanwhile they were content to linger in that wide field of speculation which the development of the physical sciences had recently opened to philosophic thought. As, at the Revival of Learning, the thinker imprisoned in mediaeval dialectics suddenly felt under his feet the firm ground of classic argument, so, in the eighteenth century, philosophy, long suspended in the void of metaphysic, touched earth again and, Antaeus-like, drew fresh life from the contact. It was clear that Professor Vivaldi, whose very name had been unknown ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton |
