"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... represents him as seeking pleasurable, affective states. The difficulty of understanding the essential nature of pleasure and pain, the fact that what is pleasure to one man is pain to another, rather discredited this as a psychological explanation. I think we may phrase the situation fairly on an empirical basis when we say that seeking arises in instinct but receives its impulse to continuity by some agreeable affective state of satisfaction. Man steers towards pleasure and satisfaction of some type or other, but the force is ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and sending me out every day with his doctor, the famous Styrneus, the sworn foe of Van Swieten, a still more famous physician. Although Styrneus was undoubtedly a learned man, I thought him somewhat extravagant and empirical. His system was that of Asclepiades, considered as exploded since the time of the great Boerhaave; ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... hostile spirits, or caused by the anger of a god, so that medicines, no matter how powerful, could only be expected to assuage the pain; but magic alone, incantations, spells and prayers, could remove the disease. Experience brought much of the wisdom we call empirical, and the records, extending for thousands of years, show that the Egyptians employed emetics, purgatives, enemata, diuretics, diaphoretics and even bleeding. They had a rich pharmacopoeia derived from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... history. That is why political treatises are so disappointing. The philosopher is content to generalize, and does not know the facts. On the other hand, the historian who knows the facts has not the capacity of generalization. Politics must be mainly empirical. The political thinker does not reason forward from the past to the present, but backwards from the present to the past. He studies the present results of the mature experience of many ages, and then explains the distant past in ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... mind will also control all that man can do. That science can be used by anyone, mind you. If you'll read between the lines you'll see what a hidden struggle is shaping up for control of it as soon as it reaches maturity and empirical useability." ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... as an empirical confirmation of the relation which exists in the insane between the state of their hair and minds, that the wife of a medical man, who has charge of a lady suffering from acute melancholia, with a strong fear ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... life. As a rule, the waking life was remembered in hypnosis, and the hypnotic life forgotten in the waking state; this destroyed any claim of the primary memory to be the sole memory. The self below the threshold of ordinary consciousness Myers termed the "subliminal consciousness," and the empirical self of common experience the "supraliminal." He held that to the subliminal consciousness and memory a far wider range, both of physiological and psychical activity, was open than to the supraliminal. The latter was inevitably limited by the need ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... might meet with horses in Europe, Asia, or Africa; but there were none in Australia, and there were none whatsoever in the whole continent of America, from Labrador down to Cape Horn. This is an empirical fact, and it is what is called, stated in the way I have given it you, the ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... agree with, they do not agree with each other. The public itself never takes so many conflicting views of any topic or event as the ingenious rival journals are certain to discover. It is impossible, in their nature, for them to combine. I should as soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause, or an opinion, or a man, that does not get somewhere in the press a hearer and a defender. We will drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of whom it may concern. With all its faults, I believe the moral tone ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... no reason, save our own self-sufficient arrogance, to believe that the discovery of these two forces exhausts the treasures of infinite wisdom. Humboldt thus well refutes the folly of such an imagination: "The imperfectibility of all empirical science, and the boundlessness of the sphere of observation, render the task of explaining the forces of matter by that which is variable in matter, an impracticable one. What has been already perceived, by no means exhausts that which is perceptible. If, simply referring to the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and concrete political views, and to illustrate the limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics, there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... substitute "Modern Civilisation," which prides itself on redress after the event, agility in getting out of the holes into which it has snouted, and eagerness to snout into fresh ones. It foresees nothing, and avoids less. It is purely empirical, if one may use ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... substances and corporeal things, it is perfected naturally in two ways. First by knowledge received from sensible things; secondly, by knowledge imprinted or infused by the illumination of spiritual substances. Now in both these ways the soul of Christ was perfected; first by empirical knowledge of sensible things, for which there is no need of angelic light, since the light of the active intellect suffices; secondly, by the higher impression of infused knowledge, which He received directly from God. For as His soul was united to the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... assumption of some kind, and without an assumption thought is impossible. This is just as true of the strictest scientific processes as it is of deductive reasoning, and indeed it is interesting to watch the way in which within recent years idealistic philosophy and empirical science have joined hands. Does physical science, then, imply the doctrine of the Trinity? Yes, unquestionably it does, after a fashion, for it starts with an assumption which takes it for granted. Perhaps this would be news to Professor Ray Lankester, and such as he, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... plausible solution of its mysteries. And it seems surprising that Apicius has never been suspected before of withholding information essential to the successful practice of his rather hypothetical and empirical formulae. The more we scrutinize them, the more we become convinced that the author has omitted vital directions—same as we did purposely with the two modern examples above. Many of the Apician recipes are dry enumerations of ingredients supposed to belong to a given ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... has often been stated that domestic races do not differ from each other in characters of generic value. It can be shown that this statement is not correct; but naturalists differ much in determining what characters are of generic value; all such valuations being at present empirical. When it is explained how genera originate under nature, it will be seen that we have no right to expect often to find a generic amount of ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton-hash,—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That empirical procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... matter, because conduct was three-fourths of life. Plato retorted that it did matter, and he invented an archetypal universe of which this was a faint and distorted copy. Naturally Aristotle must contradict him by founding empirical science, which concerns itself only with this world. On his heels came the Stoics, who would have nothing to do with science except in so far as it made men virtuous, and who wanted to live soberly and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... cases (e.g. in physiology, or a fortiori, in politics and history), whether it be the method of simple observation, which compares instances, whether positive or negative, to see if they agree in the presence or the absence of one common antecedent, or the empirical method, which proceeds by directly trying different combinations (either made or found) of causes, and watching what is the effect. Both are inconclusive; the former, because an effect may be due to the concurrence of many causes, and the latter, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... doubtless be made as free as its roads and bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... which in this view are essential to the different departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it has gathered from ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... unthankful to the Great Mother, who surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention to me, they were still worse; for in that case, the vast ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... they want to cure a man, they have no conception at all of true scientific remedies. If they try anything they must try it upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in this bare, empirical way. What could be more improbable—at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason—than that some mineral springs should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral springs make wounds heal ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy of our day ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the fullest possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as a force and to base ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... in its objective existence; it is God—nothing but God and the unfolding of God. Philosophy is not the wisdom of the world, but the knowledge of things which are not of this world. It is not the knowledge of external mass, of empirical life and existence, but of the eternal, of the nature of God, and of all which flows from His nature. For this nature ought to manifest and develop itself. Consequently, philosophy in unfolding religion merely unfolds itself, and in unfolding itself it unfolds ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... nature in any but its metallic form, therefore it had been deposited in its siliceous matrix while in a molten state, and many ingenious arguments were adduced in support of this contention. Of late, however, most scientific men, and indeed many purely empirical inquirers (using the word empirical in its strict sense) have come to the conclusion that though the mode in which they were composed was not always identical, all lodes, including auriferous formations, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... of his private purse, he having some contrivance of his own'. Also, Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685: 'a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping; not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines, and the easier mechanical mathematics.' Also, Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 155: 'the great and almost only pleasure of Mind he seem'd addicted to, was Shipping and Sea-Affairs; which seem'd to be so much ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... a doctor-errant, that keeps himself up by being, like a top, in motion, for if he should settle he would fall to nothing immediately. He is a pedlar of medicines, a petty chapman of cures, and tinker empirical to the body of man. He strolls about to markets and fairs, where he mounts on the top of his shop, that is his bank, and publishes his medicines as universal as himself; for everything is for all diseases, as himself is of all places—that is to say, of none. His business ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man. But there was also something deeper in it than this. There was mixed with it the natural dread in the political diviner of the political logician,—in the empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, confounding the idea of society with the form of it then existing, would have preserved that as the only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it then existed was ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the earliest times, we find men everywhere and always possessed of the power of speech, and holding mythical superstitions, it may be of the rudest and most elementary kind; so also do we find men possessed of rational ideas, although they may be very simple and empirical. They have some knowledge of the causes of things, of periods in the phenomena of nature, which they know how to apply to the habits and necessities of their social ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the empirical formula C{6}H{10}O{5}, which shows it to belong to the group of carbo-hydrates, that is, bodies which contain the hydrogen and oxygen present in them in the proportion in which they are ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... examination of the former, we could not determine a priori, that they must be followed by the latter, or by any other result whatever. Our knowledge here, if knowledge it can be called, is wholly empirical, or founded on experience. As we have seen, it is absurd to say, that one atom of matter literally acts on another. On the other hand, in the world of mind, we are directly conscious of action, and even of causation. All mental exertion is true action; every ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... flowed and ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching willingness to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rights of the people, the rationally conditioned rights of the State, a natural, prudential, utilitarian morality interested men. One of the consequences of this theory of the State was a complete alteration in the thought of the relation of State and Church. The nature of the Church itself as an empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the same criticism with the State. Men saw the Church in a new light. As the State was viewed as a kind of contract in men's social interest, so the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... man is identical with the citizen, and has become a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual relationships, not until man has recognized and organized his own capacities as social capacities, and consequently the social force is no longer divided by the political ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... historical though by no means empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled il maestro di color che sanno, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... human intelligence, or its existing equivalent. I pretend to no opinion on this point, for I have as yet studied the evidence with so little critical care that Myers was always surprised at my negligence. I can therefore speak with detachment from this question and, as a mere empirical psychologist, of Myers' general evolutionary conception. As such a psychologist I feel sure that the latter is a hypothesis of first-rate philosophic importance. It is based, of course, on his conviction ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... be collected. Of the devil's origin, and the first rise of his family, we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their respective champions, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... relation in which two men stand to one another when one of them rescues the other from vice separates that relation from any connection with the work of the social busybody, the professional philanthropist, and the empirical legislator. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... seventeenth century as a result of the aforementioned investigations of Aldrovandus, Coiter, and Fabricius. Concerned with description and depiction of the anatomy of the embryo, they established a period of macro-iconography in embryology. The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually eliminated ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... call the empirical view of the League. There are those of us in this country, and indeed all over the world, who, profoundly impressed with the horrors of war, hating war from the bottom of their hearts as an evil thing—a company which must include, as far as I can see, all Christian men and women—these ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... laid, and dentistry came to be practised as a specialty of medicine. Certain minor operations, however, such as the extraction of teeth and the stopping of caries in an imperfect way, were still practised by barbers, and the empirical practice of dentistry, especially of those operations which were almost wholly mechanical, had developed a considerable body of dental artisans who, though without medical education in many cases, possessed a high degree of manipulative skill. Thus there came to be two classes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... numerous defects. There are faults in the details of their organization and management, whilst many of them are financially unsound. Like other institutions in their early stages, they have been tentative and in a great measure empirical,—more especially as regards their rates of contribution and allowances for sick relief. The rates have in many cases been fixed too low, in proportion to the benefits allowed; and hence the "box" is often declared to be closed, after the money subscribed has been expended. The society ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... between the empirical and the rational mode of treating Ethics. Nothing properly good, except Will. Subjection of Will to Reason. An action done from natural inclination is worthless morally. Duty is respect for Law; conformity to Law is the one ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... of Orleans did not suspect the role of the mother of vinegar in the production of this article when they were employing empirical processes that had been established by practice. The vats were often infested by small worms ("vinegar eals") which disputed with the mycoderma for the oxygen, killed it through submersion, and caused the loss of batches that had been under troublesome preparation for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... of this surmise, Columbus was still as far from a true interpretation of the whole situation as when he supposed Hispaniola to be Ophir. He entered upon a series of speculations which forcibly remind us how empirical was the notion of the earth's rotundity before the inauguration of physical astronomy by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. We now know that our planet has the only shape possible for such a rotating mass that once was fluid or nebulous, the shape of a spheroid slightly protuberant ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... empirical rules of a reliable nature upon which the tester can base his deductions. The only way calculated to give satisfaction is to conduct a series of preliminary tests upon the turbine undergoing observation, ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... merely an attempt to find the right beginning of a road, the end of which we shall know only when we have been taught the necessary lessons by actual experience with the conditions of the future. Let me ask you, therefore, to follow at first the same empirical road which the governments have followed, and to take conditions as they are, and not as we may wish they should be. If one has nothing better to put in the place of something that one does not entirely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... unlike it in that its purpose is within." "A purposive process is one determined by its tendency to produce a certain result, purpose itself being an act [sic] determined in its character by that which it tends to bring about. As such it differs fundamentally from a mechanical cause." "The empirical and philosophical arguments point to the same general conclusion, that reality is the process of the development of Mind." As a guide to one's thinking, and as integrators of one's subconscious intuitions and resultants, such concise formulae certainly have much value, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... meagre. Almost every word which deals with man's mind reflects the moral and religious values and is thus removed from pure psychology into ethics. Or we find comparisons which suggestively illuminate the working of the mind without amplifying our psychological understanding. We approach empirical psychology most nearly in verses like these: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of the child, but the word of correction should drive it far from him"; or "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the face, and concludes his volume with an Appendix containing an exposition of the constituents of many favorite and famous cosmetics, pointing out at the same time their true character, the danger and unpleasantness of which, he says, are disguised with much empirical skill. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... it die?" In many instances it is personified. The child is often perfectly content to play with it alone, without the presence of other children. This activity shows the presence of the nursing instinct, the tendency towards manipulation, physical activity, imitation and curiosity of the empirical type. The imagination is active but still undifferentiated from perception. The contentment in playing alone, or with an adult, shows the stage of development of the gregarious instinct. A girl of nine no longer cuddles or handles her doll just for the pleasure ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... to be that way. This is a very complicated society you've stumbled into, Alan. Look: I'm a first-rate gamesman. That's not boasting; it's empirical truth proven over and over again during the course of a fifteen-year career. I could make a fortune competing against beginners and dubs and has-beens, so they legislate against me. You make a certain annual income from gambling and you go into ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... double form of consciousness is then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... though nothing had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put up a very fair imitation of Doctor ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... well from the other side, that overhung his own familiar garden. There, among the willows, the stream passed from ford to bridge, and on again, circling in loops and curves. The village would be a different place after that, not known by an empirical experience, but apprehended as a construction, as a settled design, where each field and garden had ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... they are gross feeders;* [Dr. Campbell's definition of the Lepcha's Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew; for, as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.] rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelatinous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish: and they also eat elephant, and all kinds of animal food. When travelling, they live on whatever ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... don't think it. About fifteen deaths a day don't incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I've tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... as we learn to play on a musical instrument, and we may arrive at the highest perfection in performing on any instrument, without having a notion of thorough bass or the laws of harmony. For practical purposes this purely empirical knowledge is all that is required. But though it would be a mistake to attempt in our elementary schools to replace an empirical by a scientific knowledge of grammar, that empirical knowledge of grammar ought in time to ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... how closely our feeling for the beautiful and the great is connected with the noblest part of our being, it is impossible for me to regard this feeling as a mere subjective play of the emotional faculty, capable of none but empirical rules. It seems to me that beauty too, as well as truth and right, must rest upon eternal foundations, and that the original laws of the reason must also be the laws of taste. It is true that the circumstance of our feeling beauty ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... any kind in any portion of the United Kingdom is alike "Common" or "Imperial." The details of the division were never disclosed, when the proportions were originally fixed. The segregation of the services classified as "Imperial" is open to serious objections. The method of computation is empirical and unconstitutional, and if carried to its logical conclusion would now result in depriving Ireland of any share whatever in future Equivalent grants, as her contribution to the services thus classified as "Imperial" is practically a minus quantity, though the revenue actually ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... lady said, looking at Editha's lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But how dreadful of her! ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... done by the following empirical rule, which has been derived from observations made upon bearings of different sizes and moving with different velocities. Divide the number 70,000 by the velocity of the surface of the bearing in feet per minute. The quotient will be ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... For, as we shall show directly, universal reason is not given in individual reason, in other words, the knowledge of social laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from the fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means of deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that universal reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws; universal reason, which exists, reasons, labors, in a separate sphere and as a reality distinct from pure reason, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... stresses in all the members of the bowstring girder—see Fig. 2—which produce a state of equilibrium at each point. The fact that this state of equilibrium is produced proves conclusively that the rule above described and thus applied, although possibly it may be considered empirical, results in the correct solution of the question, and that the stresses shown are actually those which the girder would have to sustain under the given position of the live load. Figs. 2 to 10 inclusive show stresses arrived at in this manner for every position ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... juncture appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay's famous attack on my father's Essay on Government. This gave me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the writer, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... and patted on the back with every appearance of affection. They can tell you of all sorts of queer, unknown customs and facts, and can show you all sorts of strange and unusual things. Yet at the last analysis these are also discursions and anecdotes. We gather empirical knowledge: only rarely do we think we get a glimpse of how the delicate machinery moves behind those ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... upon the terminology of this theory that it should be stated frankly, at the start, that the words Sulphite and Bromide, and their derivatives, sulphitic and bromidic, are themselves so sulphitic that they are not susceptible of explanation. In a word, they are empirical, although, accidentally it might seem, they do appeal and convince the most skeptical. I myself balked, at first, at these inconsequent names. I would have suggested the terms "Gothic" and "Classic" to describe the fundamental types of mind. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... continued to happen that until the [x] last half-century Herbal Physic has remained only speculative and experimental, instead of gaining a solid foothold in the field of medical science. Its claims have been merely empirical, and its curative methods those of a ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the past nations have been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of the people. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossed countries and populations to each other as if they had been balls in a ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... in his vague but glorious destiny was the dynamic force of his young life. Its essential mystery kept him alert and buoyant. His keen, self-centred mind realized that his search on the stage for the true expression of his genius was only empirical. If he failed there, it was for him to try a hundred other spheres until he found the right one. But just as in his childish days he could not understand why he was not supreme in everything, so now he could not appreciate ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... specific cases, but also in the relation of the specific cases to the whole and so give a bird's eye view of the interrelation of nature in an approximately scientific form by means of the facts shown by empirical science itself. To furnish this complete picture was formerly the task of the so-called philosophy of nature. It could then only do this by substituting ideal and imaginary hypotheses for the unknown real interconnection, by filling out the missing facts ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... comprehend such cause, noumenally considered, is not to be supposed. To do this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence. But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... "God-given," or absolute in any sense. The morality of a group at a time is the sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the folkways by which right conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never be intuitive. They are historical, institutional, and empirical. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... as delineators of character, under the term Physiognomists. I believe that such persons do so because they lack the ability and learning to comprehend Phrenology, and are unable to combat the prejudices of the ignorant. I have never seen a so-called "Physiognomist" who was not an empirical mountebank of the purest stamp, and who did not trim his sails to pander to the silly sentiment which I have just exposed. The delineations of such persons are worse than valueless, because they are pure guess-work. They pursue a shadow ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... planet be inside the orbit of Uranus? No, for then it would perturb Saturn and Jupiter also, and they were not perturbed by it. It must, therefore, be some planet outside the orbit of Uranus, and in all probability, according to Bode's empirical law, at nearly double the distance from the sun that Uranus is. Finally he proceeded to determine where this planet was, and what its orbit must be to produce the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... on adoption of the parasitic habit. All parasites seem to have descended from free living beasts. One asks 'what is degeneration?' without receiving a very satisfactory answer. After all, such terms must be empirical. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Philebus of the rank and order of the sciences or arts, which agrees generally with the scheme of knowledge in the Sixth Book of the Republic. The chief difference is, that the position of the arts is more exactly defined. They are divided into an empirical part and a scientific part, of which the first is mere guess-work, the second is determined by rule and measure. Of the more empirical arts, music is given as an example; this, although affirmed to be ...
— Philebus • Plato
... citizens of free city-states—but also through individual faults of their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course; and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet, but lying behind the empirical law that East is ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... root of the distinction between pure and empirical science. The propositions of geometry, being derived from our own pure activity, are of the former class; the inductive conclusions of physical experimental science, being gathered by observation and measurement from sensible data, are empirical and approximate. ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... not more than two or three of simian glands upon human beings. His statement, therefore, that successful transplantation of the glands of the goat into a human being is "impossible, and cannot succeed," is empirical, and entirely unsupported by any experience of his own in the matter. Against it, and completely confuting it, we set the clear conclusions of Dr. Brinkley, backed by his unequalled record of over ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... their common intersection or none of it. No further subdivision of the common intersection is possible by means of moments. The 'all or none' principle holds. This is not an a priori truth but an empirical fact ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the disorders incidental to the climate, and the treatment of ulcerations caused by the wounds of the mosquitoes and leeches, the native Singhalese have a deservedly high reputation; but their practice, when it depends on specifics, is too empirical to be safely relied on; and their traditional skill, though boasting a well authenticated antiquity, achieves few triumphs in competition with the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... scientists to draw upon, the practicing physicians could deduce therapeutic techniques or justify curative measures, but the emphasis on theory brought with it the danger of ignoring experience and abandoning empirical solutions. Aware that many of his fellow physicians tended to overemphasize theory Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), who received his doctorate of medicine from Cambridge University, recommended personal experience drawn from close observation. He scoffed at physicians who learned medicine ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... both of science, literature, and travel, bring the library up to date. He would devote his leisure to the study of various subjects—especially natural science—regarding which he was conscious of a knowledge, deficient, or merely empirical. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the governors and the governed, and form the single organ of both. Those who govern a nation cannot at the same time enlighten the people, for the executive power is not empirical; and the governed cannot think, for they have no continuity of leisure. The great systems of thought, and the great discoveries in moral and political philosophy, have come from the solitude of contemplative men, seldom occupied in public affairs or ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... CnH2n-1COOH, and soon. Dibasic acids of the paraffin series of hydrocarbons have the general formula CnH2(COOH)2n; malonic and succinic acids are important members. The isomerism which occurs as soon as the molecule contains a few carbon atoms renders any classification based on empirical molecular formulae somewhat ineffective; on the other hand, a scheme based on molecular structure would involve more detail than it is here possible to give. For further information, the reader is referred to any standard work on organic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and those who have not so received; those who are "born from above" and those who have had only a natural birth; the twice-born and the once-born; those who are "of the Spirit," i.e. spiritual, and those who are "of this world," i.e. empirical. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... of all our speculations. On the one hand, so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty barrenness. The most they can say is that the elements of the world are such and such, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... squeezed him by the hand and winked at MM. de Beaufort and de La Mothe. At length two other Presidents came over to my opinion, being thoroughly convinced that succours from Spain at this time were a remedy absolutely necessary to our disease, but a dangerous and empirical medicine, and infallibly mortal to particular persons if it did not pass first through ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... be filled with pity and disapproval to see the independent existence of the soul, as it were, authoritatively reaffirmed by a purely empirical science, and also brought into the field all the defensive forces at her command. But throngs flocked to the camp of Materialism, for the trumpets of her leaders had a clearer, more confident sound than the lower and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... of the jelly. "The world did very well without us for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even—not one! In practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course—frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep—but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... larger life of which we are a part, 308. This life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of monism, 310. God as a finite being, 311. Empiricism is a better ally than rationalism, of religion, 313. Empirical proofs of larger mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality, 317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least foreign, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole connection. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... vicar of Rookwood, Dr. Polycarp Small; Dr. Titus Tyrconnel, an emigrant, and empirical professor of medicine, from the sister isle, whose convivial habits had first introduced him to the hall, and afterwards retained him there; and Mr. Codicil Coates, clerk of the peace, attorney-at-law, bailiff, and receiver. We were wrong in saying that Tyrconnel ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... questions which are dealt with in the 'Self and Sex Series' of books are always being asked, and if the answer is not forthcoming from pure and wise lips it will be obtained through vicious and empirical channels. I therefore greatly commend this series of books, which are written lucidly and purely, and will afford the necessary information without pandering to unholy and sensual passion. I should like to see a ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... the Saturday Club from the first; in reality before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House" of Boston. This little group gathered others to ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... hint that Byron had too much empeiria (an excess of mondanite—a this-worldliness), found it hard to read Beppo after Macbeth. "I felt," he says, "the predominance of a nefarious, empirical world, with which the mind which introduced it to us has in a certain measure associated itself" (Conversations of Goethe, etc., 1874, p. 175). But Beppo must be taken at its own valuation. It is A Venetian Story, and the action takes place behind the scenes of "a comedy of Goldoni." ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... his predecessor and therefore more insightful in his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose "integrity," "honor," and biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. "For if you begin with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common sense, I think there can be no reasonable ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... revelations and partially admitted consciences, with a practical application of the principle of "that which works best". The majority are not philosophers, and care little for a logical basis. They are unconscious empirics, and their morality is empirical. ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, looked at in this way, I combatted it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not yet ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... nature of Mr. Mueller's dissertations. They are, (1.) On the science of language as one of the physical sciences; (2.) On the growth of language in contradistinction to the history of language; (3.) On the empirical stage in the science of language; (4.) On the classificatory stage in the same; (5.) On the genealogical classification of languages; (6.) On comparative grammar; (7.) On the constituent elements of language; (8.) On the morphological classification of languages; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... provided, too—and herein lies the difficulty—provided that the premises are also true. These premises may be in themselves general statements—how is their truth established? They may be, and often are, the generalisations of the empirical sciences, and must then possess the same degree of uncertainty that these generalisations possess. Some philosophers have contended that certain general ideas are innate, but few would be found nowadays to ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... name speed-strength modulus has been given, may be expressed as a coefficient which, if multiplied into any proportional change in speed, will give the proportional change in strength. This ratio is derived from empirical curves. (See Table XVII.) ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... its exact equivalent in force to work the vocal mill-wheel." Thus again is illustrated the close analogy between vocal art and physical law, and further evidence given of the value of a physiological method of voice-production as opposed to those methods that are purely empirical. In fact when it is considered that speech is Nature's method of communication and that song is speech vitalized by musical tone, it would seem as if song were Nature's art and, therefore, more than any other based ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... following from Professor Baldwin: "The question of the relation of psychology to metaphysics, over which a fierce warfare has been waged in recent years, is now fairly settled by the adjustment of mutual claims. . . . The terms of the adjustment of which I speak are briefly these: on the one hand, empirical investigation must precede rational interpretation, and this empirical investigation must be absolutely unhampered by fetters of dogmatism and preconception; on the other hand, rational interpretation must be equally free in its own province, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... assign to each its modicum and best modality of training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic emphasis, and what lacks this must at best be feeble; and if ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... get faith now. The empirical method is the very best way to get it firmly rooted. Experientia docet. "Now we believe, not because of what you say, but because we have seen for ourselves." Did not Judas work with Jesus? Yet it is absurd to contend ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... the outbreak of the Civil War he sided, though somewhat half-heartedly, with the Royalists, but in 1644 he surrendered to the Parliament, received a pension, held various offices, and d. in 1648. It was in 1624 that he wrote his treatise, De Veritate, "An empirical theory of knowledge," in which truth is distinguished from (1) revelation, (2) the probable, (3) the possible, (4) the false. It is the first purely metaphysical work written by an Englishman, and gave rise to much controversy. It was reprinted in 1645, when ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin |
