"Divinatory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... truth as known, and go not forth to seek it. They are therefore "teleologic," that is, they study the record of man as the demonstration of a problem the solution of which is already known. In this they are essentially "divinatory," claiming foreknowledge of the future; and, as every ethnologist knows, divination belongs to a stadium of incomplete intellectual culture, one considerably short of the highest. As has been well said by Wilhelm von Humboldt, any teleologic ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... Brahmans. In all these researches, which were necessarily of a somewhat conjectural character, Colebrooke was guided by his usual caution. Instead of attempting, for instance, afree and more or less divinatory translation of the hymns of the Rig-Veda, he began with the tedious but inevitable work of exploring the native commentaries. No one who has not seen his MSS., now preserved at the India Office, and the marginal notes with which the folios of Sya{n}a's commentary are covered, can form any idea ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... appeals to me as one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as well as written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art backed by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not forget that the best dramatic art is the operation of a divinatory instinct for truth. Be that as it may, John was certainly not the man to believe in the Second Coming and yet give a date for it after that date had passed. There is really no escape from the conclusion that the originals of all the gospels ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw |
