"Postulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the hearer will believe; that, alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we perceive, but the highest that we have been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must also postulate the existence of God as the necessary condition of the attainment of the summum bonum. As the perfect good can only be promoted by accordance of the will with the moral law, so also this summum bonum is possible only through the supremacy of an Infinite Being possessed of causality harmonising ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... problem. The paradox of parallels does not contribute much to my pages: its cases are to be found for the most part in geometrical systems, or in notes to them. Most of them consist in the proposal of additional postulates; some are attempts to do without any new postulate. Gen. Perronet Thompson, whose paradoxes are always constructed on much study of previous writers, has collected in the work above named, a budget of attempts, the heads of which are in the Penny and English Cyclopaedias, at "Parallels." He has given thirty instances, selected ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... career, and therefore not be monist. For materialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who at the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, the follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward over flattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert in isolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a power that does not alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... theory that lines come into existence through the opening and closing of the hand. But the adoption of this view would have proved more disastrous to chiromancy than ridicule or serious criticism; so he straightway finds an explanation for this fact in the postulate that lines in young people's hands speak as to the future, and in old men's as to the past. Later he goes on to affirm that lines in the hand cannot be treated as mere wrinkles arising from the folding of the skin, unless we are prepared to admit that ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... condescension, it should not come from America. She clamored for justice; England would be just: but she must first be obeyed. England might forgive the debt, but must insist upon acknowledgment that the debt was due, and upon the right to collect it at pleasure. As for the plea that taxation should postulate representation, it would not bear examination. It might be true that Parliament was a theoretically representative body; but, in fact, it was a gathering of the men in England best qualified to govern, who were rather selected than elected. Many of the commons ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... harm, all other things continuing the same. Should you suppose various things in the system changed at once, you can neither judge of the possibility nor the consequences of the changes, having no degree of experience to direct you." Now assuredly this postulate makes the whole question as easy a one as ever metaphysician or naturalist had to solve. For it is no longer—Why did a powerful and benevolent Being create a world in which there is evil—but only—The world being ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... of the battle of Stromboli all the features to which he called the attention of English seamen in his thesis on the methods of action employed by them and their adversaries in and before his time. Clerk's thesis started from the postulate that English seamen and officers were superior in skill or spirit, or both, to the French, and their ships on the whole as fast; that they were conscious of this superiority and therefore eager to attack, while the French, equally conscious ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... class, the rout of the Abyss, the speculator, may develop in countless ways according to the varying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the most typical portion of the central body, the section containing the scientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, we can postulate certain tendencies with some confidence. Certain ways of thought they must develop, certain habits of mind and eye they will radiate out into the adjacent portions of the social mass. We can even, I think, deduce some conception of the home in which a fairly typical example ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... ever designed. In the first place it developed the utmost fire-face by bringing both broadsides into play. Secondly, by breaking up the enemy's line into fragments it deprived their admiral of any shadow of control over the part attacked. Thirdly, by seizing the leeward position (the essential postulate of the French method of fighting) it prevented individual captains making good their escape independently to leeward and ensured a decisive melee, such as Nelson aimed at. And, fourthly, it permitted a concentration on any part of the enemy's line, since it actually severed it at any desired ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... France of their own government. Granted that the Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... former Histories, selected out of his booke De noctibus atticis) remembreth this pretie controuersie. In Athenes there was a yong man, called Euathlus, who being desirous to be an Orator, and a pleading Aduocate, to the intent he might postulate, according to the accustomed maner of Athenes in those daies, accorded vpon a price, with a renowned Oratour named Protagoras, that he should instruct him that arte, for a price agreed vpon betwene them, vpon condicion that the Scholler should pay the one half of the money before hande vnto ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am very glad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, and pathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourth dimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. I took my sad ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... heresiarch, if he will not fall into line with defined opinion, ceases to be in communion; and his rejection, no less than his own original insistence upon his doctrine, are in themselves proofs that both he and his judges postulate unity and definition as the two ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... he remembered pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... truth that the Bible is a book which reads History, and the perplexities of Man, in the light of one great postulate, viz. that there is a God. The natural sequences, which are now partially explained by scientific discoveries, are in the Bible attributed to God's guidance: and of course there is no contradiction between the two. Science explains something of the ways of God's ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up all the emotions and faculties of man. Here Science, in accord ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... direction. The City was not—could not have been—self-supporting. There is no source of organic material on the planet great enough to support such a city; therefore, foodstuffs must have been imported. On the other hand, it is necessary to postulate some reason for establishing a city on an otherwise barren planet and populating it with an ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... been put with abrupt intensity; now the inquisitor drew back astonished. He heard the very postulate of the scheme to which he was devoting himself—and from a boy so like the dead Christ he was working to blot out of worship he ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... in the performance of a treaty is made a cause of war by the Barbary powers, and of remonstrance and explanation by civilised powers. The Mahometans of Barbary negociate by the sword—they seize first, and ex-postulate afterwards; and the federal leaders have been labouring to barbarize the United States by adopting the practice of the Barbary States, and this they call honour. Let their honour and their hypocrisy go weep together, for both are defeated. Their present Administration is too moral for ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the produce of his own labour, and that consequently in the course of social evolution ground-rent and undertaker's profit must become obsolete and must be given up—this I perceived; but with respect to the interest of capital I adhered to the classical-orthodox view that this was a postulate of progress which would survive ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... as possible, endeavours to conceive those things which increase or help the body's power of activity (III. xii.); in other words (III. xii. note), those things which it loves. But conception is helped by those things which postulate the existence of a thing, and contrariwise is hindered by those which exclude the existence of a thing (II. xvii.); therefore the images of things, which postulate the existence of an object of love, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... neither shall there be any more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun. It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid's elements holds good universally, 'that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of predestined circumstance—predestined from the instant when that primal atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years still ahead of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the human individuality can exist in a discarnate state, and that it reincarnates into the body of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... postulate is, that God's work could not admit of any substantial change, which is above the reach of all infernal powers; but "Herein the divell plays the double sophister; the sorcerer with sorcerers. Hee both deludes the witch's conceit and the beholder's eyes." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... is an important postulate underlying this theory. It is, that upon each planet the possibilities of development just attain to the margin of the next higher step in mental evolution. That is, that on Mercury the period of brawn develops to the possibility of the period of sense without fully exemplifying ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... our acts implies the belief in something perceptible which is wider and more durable than our astonished perceptions. I could not write these lines unless I implicitly supposed that my inkstand, my paper, my pen, my room, and the surrounding world subsist when I do not see them. It is a postulate of practical life. It is also a postulate of science, which requires for its explanations of phenomena the supposition in them of an indwelling continuity. Natural science would become unintelligible if we were ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... in either member of the proposition is impossible. It is impossible, for no such postulate as inability or faithlessness can be laid against ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... connection of events. Moreover, to the 'real world which our choice has built out of the chaos of 'appearances' we may hypothetically add 'infernal' and 'heavenly' regions.[B] Both are transformations of 'the given' by the will, but, like the postulate of causal series, experience may confirm them. Kant's a priori activity of the mind may thus in a sense supply an answer to Hume—but only in a voluntaristic philosophy which would probably have seemed too bold both to ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory realities of life. In the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... light and our eyes. That medium scientists call ether, but it is so subtile that no instrument has been devised whereby it may be measured or analyzed and therefore the scientists are without much information concerning it, though forced to postulate its existence. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... all-round tariff presents many difficulties, but there is one difficulty which it does not present, and that is the difficulty of so adjusting your duties that the total proportion of them falling upon the wage-earning classes shall not be increased. I for one regard such an adjustment as a postulate in any scheme of Tariff Reform. And just one other argument—and I recommend it especially to those working-class leaders who are so vehement in their denunciation of Tariff Reform. Is it of no importance to the people ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... postulate with which metaphysical reasoning sets out is that we are primarily conscious only of our sensations—that we certainly know we have these, and that if there be anything beyond these serving as cause for them, it can be known only ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... perplexed by this assertion of Mr Cobden's; and others, we have heard, not generally disposed to view that gentleman's doctrines with favour, who insist upon it, that, in mere candour, we must grant this particular postulate. "Really," say they, "that cannot be refused him; the law was for the purpose he assigns; its final cause was, as he tells us, to keep up artificially the price of our domestic corn-markets. So far he is right. But his error commences in treating this design as an unfair one, and, secondly, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... again I ask myself this question: Even assuming that Lord Hugh is right, and that it is our bounden duty to love the Germans, is love inconsistent with punishment? We postulate the love of God towards mankind, and we rightly regard it as the highest manifestation of what love means; but is it inconsistent with punishment for unrighteous action? Neither Revelation, nor Nature, nor History, knows anything of the conception ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... divinity among the old Aryans; nor may we expect to find any sense, active or dormant, of monotheism in the primitive intelligence of uncivilized men. [102] The whole fabric of comparative mythology, as at present constituted, and as described above, in the first of these papers, rests upon the postulate that the earliest religion ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... circumstances were not equal. The Dost could not have been more than a provincial ruler in the land; consequently he could not have undertaken that responsibility for the whole which formed the precise postulate of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing.' This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... hear, nor feel; it is given in thought, supplied by the spontaneous activity of mind as the correlative prefix to the phenomena observed."[251] Unless, then, we are prepared to deny the validity of all our rational intuitions, we can not avoid accepting "this subjective postulate as a valid law for objective nature." If the intuitions of our reason are pronounced deceptive and mendacious, so also must the intuitions of the senses be pronounced illusory and false. Our whole intellectual ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... familiar with this postulate, and was curious to hear the Magian's reply; but he could not follow his argument till he ended by saying, rather more emphatically: "You, even, do not deny the physical connection of things; but I know the power that causes ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... facts, assuming the rate of change in the forms of life to have been the same formerly, Lyell concludes that geological phenomena postulate 200,000,000 years at least," [88] "to account for the undoubted facts of geology since life began." [89] On the other hand, mathematical astronomy, [90] on theories which Mr. Laing complains of as wanting ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... from us the old fictional scares, novels of German super-spies, and unsuspecting islanders taken unprepared. But to think this is to reckon without the ingenuity of such writers as Mr. RIDGWELL CULLUM. He, for example, has but to postulate that worst nightmare of all, an inconclusive peace, and we are back in the former terrors, blacker than ever. Suppose the Polish inventor of German undersea craft to have been so stricken with remorse at the frightful results thereof ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... were hard of heart and dull of comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel—a theosophic romance of the first order—it could have been ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... between any two human beings is—Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me? I do not agree that any organised society has ever subsisted upon either of those principles, or that brutality is always present as a fundamental postulate in the relations between ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... merit of bringing me straight to the point at which I have been aiming; that, though the public is composed of distinct units, it may roughly be regarded as a single entity. Precisely because you and I have sensitive intelligences, we cannot postulate certainly anything about each other. The higher an animal be in grade, the more numerous and recondite are the points in which its organism differs from that of its peers. The lower the grade, the more numerous and ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... furthermore, that those rights inhere in the individual, are part of his existence, and not the gift of any man or aggregation of men. If they were, equality under a despotism might find its justification in the postulate just as well as equality under a republic. Caesarean Democracy could claim like paternity with American Democracy. The assumption, then, that freedom in any of its forms is a privilege conceded by society is utterly unwarrantable, because society itself is a concession from the individual—the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... assurance of Banneker's head on a salver to be rid of these persecuting autocrats. They withdrew, leaving behind an atmosphere of threat and disaster, dark, inglorious clouds of which Haring trailed behind him when he entered the office of the owner with his countenance of woe. His postulate was that Mr. Marrineal should go to his marplot editor and duly to him lay down the law; no more offending of the valuable department-store advertisers. No; nor of any others. Or he, Haring (greatly daring), would do ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mental plane is again totally different, for in this case we can no longer speak of separate senses such as sight and hearing, but rather have to postulate one general sense which responds so fully to the vibrations reaching it that when any object comes within its cognition it at once comprehends it fully, and as it were sees it, hears it, feels it, and knows all there is to know about it by the one instantaneous ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters. And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the Times starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to be even a vast sewer, in short, the cloaca maxima of London, there is in that arrangement of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... All we know of mankind justifies the statement that, as regards all the qualities and motives with which the primal sympathies deal, men are remarkably alike. Their loves, hates, fears, and sorrows are alike in their essentials; so that the postulate of sympathy that the other man is essentially like one's self is no idle fancy but an established truth. It not only embodies the judgment of all men in thought and action but has its warrant from all the science we ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a new sensation. The French continue to find Shakspeare exaggerated, because he treated English just as our folk do when they speak of "a steep price," or say that they "freeze to" a thing. The first postulate of an original literature is, that a people use their language as if they owned it. Even Burns contrived to write very poor English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Horace Mann, in one of his Addresses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... adopted the weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts when every one else produces a cigar—he puffed the spasmodic, defensive cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase is, little out of him—he rose in his good humour so much higher than the "rise" they ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... ethical theory underlies Wordsworth's teaching of the transformation of instinct into reason. We must start from the postulate that there is in fact a Divine order in the universe; and that conformity to this order produces beauty as embodied in the external world, and is the condition of virtue as regulating our character. It is by obedience to the 'stern lawgiver,' ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... which the given society requires of its adult members. These services vary in character, and there can be no one kind of education which equally fits the individual to perform efficiently any and every service. To postulate this would be to affirm that there is a kind of experience useful for the realisation indifferently of any and every purpose of adult life, and to affirm that a system of knowledge acquired and organised for the attainment of ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying mate. It is easy to postulate a storm-driven world when the personal horizon is dark and lowering; easy, also, to justify the past by the present. From theorizing never so resolutely upon the rights of man in the abstract to robbing a bank is a broad step, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... material success, no higher prompting than conquest for conquest's sake and mere race glorification. To go far and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived righteousness. But it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies. So be it. The world is ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... in which I had espied the rough monks' habits, and pulling one out I held it for her to don. She sat there now, in that garment of coarse black cloth, the cowl flung back upon her shoulder, the fairest postulate that ever ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... or indiscipline.... We will carry this conflict through to the end as a civilized people, and we answer for this upon our good name and upon our honor!" Why this humble and pitiful repudiation? Perhaps because their theory of war rested upon the postulate of their invincibility, and that, in the first shiver of their defeat upon the Marne, it collapsed, and now their repudiation quickly follows—in dread ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... were observing rites which it was not seemly that the World should watch. Hitherto they had toiled in a harbour at which the World did not touch. Knowing naught else, they had come to take their privacy for granted. Now suddenly this precious postulate had been withdrawn. Since wellnigh the whole of the estate was edged by road, the erection of the fence at once cost them seclusion and showed them ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... probability, there is no ground for objecting to the reality of Hasisadra's adventure. It would be unreasonable to doubt that such a flood might have happened, and that such a person might have escaped in the way described, any time during the last 5000 years. And if the postulate of loose thinkers in search of scientific "confirmations" of questionable narratives—proof that an event may have happened is evidence that it did happen—is to be accepted, surely Hasisadra's story is "confirmed ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... about the only writer we have who gives us anything of himself. Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and—the postulate assumed that we are not speaking of fools—courage in such case springs only from two sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of course, can be entirely indifferent to the audience he strives to please; and it would seem, then, that that daring ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it because it makes and will make all the difference in the world to your life whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not. This, then, is what I have to postulate as giving a value beyond the power of words to describe to every ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I may mention, was reversed by the order of publication; the earlier written of the two books having appeared as the later.) Even under the weight of my hero's years I could feel my postulate firm; even under the strain of the difference between those of Madame de Vionnet and those of Chad Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking, I could still feel it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem to make out, in this full and sound sense of the matter; ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... observed difference of substances in the world. "Primitive seeds," or "atoms," were alike conceived to be primordial, un-changeable, and indestructible. Wherein then lies the difference? We answer, chiefly in a name; almost solely in the fact that Anaxagoras did not attempt to postulate the physical properties of the elements beyond stating that each has a distinctive personality, while Democritus did attempt to postulate these properties. He, too, admitted that each kind of element has its distinctive personality, and he attempted ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the belief that the present order of things was brought about suddenly and irrespective of any pre-existent order; and it is important to hold clear ideas as to which of these beliefs is the true one. In the first place, we may postulate that the world had a beginning, and, equally, that the existing terrestrial order had a beginning. However far back we may go, geology does not, and cannot, reach the actual beginning of the world; and we are, therefore, left simply to our own speculations ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... with a wonder o' words and glory o' sweet phrase, and yet, and here's the enduring wonder—I am still but man, though man blessed with so much profundity, fecundity, and redundity of thought and expression, and therefore a facile scribe or speaker, able to create, relate, formulate or postulate any truth, axiomatic, sophistry subtle, or, in other ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... agreed. "So it presents a dilemma. To resolve it, it is necessary to postulate a Supreme Mind, and to say that all things are just thoughts in God's Mind. That makes us both the same then and there is no ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... with the order of life, think that they have resolved its nature. The wiser portion of mankind do not find in How a synonym for Whence. We still ask whence? When we see the issue of a long and complicated plan, we postulate a planning mind. When we trace, through the sketches and studies in a studio, the gradual embodiment of a vision of loveliness, which at length looks down upon us in its perfect grace from the canvas on the wall, we cannot be persuaded out of our conviction that some artist ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... obliterated almost as soon as produced by the admixture of unvaried blood which would so greatly preponderate around it; and indeed the necessity for a nearly simultaneous and similar variation, or readiness so to vary on the part of many individuals, seems almost a postulate for evolution at all. On ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... Seal, 14th March 1542-3. On the death of Cardinal Beaton, in the contest for his several preferments, the Abbacy of Arberbrothick, (now Arbroath,) had been conferred on Douglas by the Governor. Hume of Godscroft, alluding to his title of Postulate of Aberbrothock, says, he "not only did postulate it, but apprehended it also, and used it as his own."—(Hist. of the House of Douglas and Angus, vol. ii. p. 63, edit. 1743.) Yet James Beaton obtained possession of the Abbacy, and retained it till 1551, when he ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... has wavered about the military policy of the country; but there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have been such people: one would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, being fundamentally ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... proportionate end. Yet these, as regarded morals, were the best and ultimate achievements of the pagan world. Now Christianity, said he, is the synthesis of whatever is separately excellent in either. It will abate as little as the haughtiest Stoicism of the ideal which it contemplates as the first postulate of true morality; the absolute holiness and purity which it demands are as much raised above the poor performances of actual man, as the absolute wisdom and impeccability of the Stoic. Yet, unlike the Stoic scheme, Christianity is aware of the necessity, and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. 'I have never doubted,' a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in thinking, in the hegelian universe, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." This is clear and explicit. There is no controversy, he truly says, that voluntary actions, that is, external actions proceeding from the will, are necessitated by the will. And as according to his postulate, the will or volition is also caused by other things of which it has no disposal, so they are also necessitated. In other words, external voluntary actions are necessarily caused by volitions, and volitions are necessarily ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a beneficent and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... deal of foolish ridicule was excited by this book. Berkeley was supposed to maintain the absurd paradox that sensible things do not exist at all. The reader will remember how Dr. Johnson undertook to refute the postulate by striking his foot against a stone, while James Beattie (1735-1803), the poet and moral philosopher, in a volume for which he was rewarded with a pension of L200 a year, denounced Berkeley's philosophy as 'scandalously absurd.' 'If,' he writes, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... as a postulate, that to a slave, as such, there appertains and can appertain no relation, civil or political, with the State or the Government. He is himself strictly property, to be used in subserviency to the interests, the convenience, or the will, of his ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... theory which regards the Iliad as the work of four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details of a life remote from their own, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... to point his sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin. The omission of itself is fatal to Mr. King's case. Franklin has certainly a "preeminent name." He has, too, "immortal ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... starting point, I began to consider the mobility of the Earth; and although the idea seemed absurd, yet because I knew that the liberty had been granted to others before me to postulate all sorts of little circles for explaining the phenomena of the stars, I thought I also might easily be permitted to try whether by postulating some motion of the Earth, more reliable conclusions could be reached regarding the revolution of the heavenly bodies, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Georg Helm in Dresden, on the basis of mathematico-physical experiments, had already at an earlier date arrived at the same conclusions; in his treatise on "Influences at a Distance mediated by the Ether" (Annalen der Physik und Chemie, 1881, Bd. xiv.), he shows that it requires only the postulate of one particular kind of matter, the ether, to explain influence at a distance and radiation; that is, as regards these phenomena, all the qualities ascribable to matter, except that of motion, are of no account; in other words, that in thinking of the ether we simply require ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... be commoner. And yet, to those who have observed their own sex, as I have, my case is not remarkable. Men about town are women's favourites—that's the postulate—and superficial people don't think far enough to see that there may be reserved, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... than the individual body.—A full perception of the truth that society is not a mere aggregate, but an organic growth, that it forms a whole, the laws of whose growth can be studied apart from those of the individual atom, supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern speculation.—L. STEPHEN, Science of Ethics, 31. Wie in dem Leben der einzelnen Menschen kein Augenblick eines vollkommenen Stillstandes wahrgenommen wird, sondern stete organische Entwicklung, so verhalt es ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... monsters, or in an impersonal form as a sort of pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is the view of Dr. Edward Westermarck[799] and apparently of Professor Eugen Mogk.[800] It may be called the purificatory theory. Obviously the two theories postulate two very different conceptions of the fire which plays the principal part in the rites. On the one view, the fire, like sunshine in our latitude, is a genial creative power which fosters the growth of plants and the development of all that makes for health ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... in a case of double pneumonia, or compound fracture, or malignant tumour, without the assistance of the physician—above all, without "drugs," which are pronounced taboo by Mrs. Eddy; "and that," to quote Mr. Podmore again, "is a postulate which can never be contradicted by experience, for failure can always be {128} ascribed—as it is, in fact, ascribed by the Christian Scientist to-day—to want of faith or 'Science' on the part ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... toiled with unwavering pluck; I've struggled if ever a man did; Infringed every postulate, stuck At nothing,—nay, once, to be candid, I shifted the cadence—designed A fresh but unauthorised fare-well; 'Twas plausible, too, but I find ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... concerned with the freedom of the seas. In this postulate the President speaks from the hearts of all, and I can here fully and completely share America's desire, the more so as the President adds the words, 'outside territorial waters'—that is to say, we are to understand the freedom of the open sea, and there is thus, of course, ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... question. This done, he sets about discussing the possibility of reconciling an isolated expression in S. Mark's Gospel with another in S. Matthew's: just as if on that depended the genuineness or spuriousness of the entire context: as if, in short, the major premiss in the discussion were some such postulate as the following:—"Whatever in one Gospel cannot be proved to be entirely consistent with something in another Gospel, is not to be regarded as genuine." Did then the learned Archbishop of Caesarea really suppose that a comma judiciously thrown into ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... jungle, in which trees, bushes, and parasites of a thousand kinds wildly interlaced. There was nothing for it, if science was to proceed, but to clear the ground and replant with spruce in rows: to postulate a single uniform nature, of which there should be a single science. Now neither probatology nor cynology could hope to be [18] universal—the world is not all sheep nor all dog: it would have to be hylology; for the world is, in its spatial ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... classes of vertebrates. The four higher classes are characterized by a common underlying plan of limb structure, whilst fish have one peculiar to themselves. On the other hand it is an inevitable postulate of the doctrine of Descent that fish are the original progenitors of all other vertebrates. Hence the five-joint limbs of the latter must have developed from the fins of fish. This derivation was actually attempted but without success, as Fleischmann points out at considerable length. ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... enduring process of the redemption of matter through the interpenetration of spirit, what is a possible method of action? To explain what I mean I must use a diagrammatic figure, but I admit this must be not only inadequate but misleading, for instead of the two dimensions of a diagram, we must postulate three, with time added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well. Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the region of pure spirit, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Permit me, however, to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some sort or other,—the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,—with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... prolific pen of that poet was invariably to be determined in the last resort by consideration of its demerits. No English critic, therefore, who felt himself worthy to have been born a German, would venture to question the postulate on which all sound principles of criticism with regard to this subject must infallibly be founded: that, given any play of unknown or doubtful authorship, the worse it was, the likelier was it to be Shakespeare's. (This proposition was received with every sign ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the mediumistic seances contains much mathematics (in its physical assemblage), but in order to make it "tap" there must be somebody to move it: in fact, a "medium." In my view, as soon as the animal subject has been able to understand "numbers"—and this postulate of the new zoopsychology, I repeat, I believe to be indispensable to the whole edifice—the animal finds itself sufficiently in harmony with the master to become capable (in principle) of all the ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... life; nor does it consider the remedy by which character, once it is perverted or destroyed, can be restored and transformed. Christian Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the question, By what power can a man achieve the right and do the good? It is not enough to postulate the inherent capacity of man. Experience of human nature shows that there are hostile elements which too often frustrate his natural development. Hence the practical problem which Christian Ethics has to face is, How can the spiritual ideal be made a reality? It ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... consider their constructive programmes we find the positive demands put forward are based either on ideal conceptions derived from reminiscences of primitive communism, or else that they distinctly postulate a return to a state of things—the old mark-organisation—upon which the later feudalism had in various ways encroached, and finally superseded. Hence they were, in these respects, not merely not in the trend of contemporary progress, but in actual ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... the formal part of poetry must admit that its force can no farther go. Verse and phrase cannot be better moulded to the melodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these scraps show, is the thought below the verse. Even if Hallam's postulate of misplaced and ill-regulated passion be granted (and I am myself very far from granting it), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of self-knowledge, of clear vision of others ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... model not only an elastic solid, and any combination of elastic solids, but so complex and recondite a phenomenon as the passage of polarized light through a magnetic field. But now, with the view of ultimately discarding the postulate of rigidity from all our materials, let us suppose some to be absolutely destitute of rigidity, and to possess merely inertia and incompressibility, and mutual impenetrability with reference to the still remaining rigid matter. With these postulates we can produce a perfect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... objections are that abstract thought does not postulate being; and that possibly all intelligence is not one in kind. To the former objection the most satisfactory, reply has been offered by Professor J. F. Ferrier. He has shown that the conception of object, even ideal object, implies the conception of self in the subject; ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... author of the belief in Angelic visions. I was in France hearing stories of angelic intervention long before Mr. Machen wrote his delightful yarn. A frog might as well imagine that his croak is responsible for the whole world of music, as to postulate that his story gave rise to the theory of Angels. Men had visions of such long before the first stone of our venerable shrine at Westminster was laid, before the Romans built their first mud huts in the valley of ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... certain degree adapted to the human nerve and muscle system and to man's possibilities of perception, of attention, of memory, of feeling, and of will. Industrial technique with its restless improvements has always been subordinated to this postulate. Every change which made it possible for the workingman to secure equal effects with smaller effort or to secure greater or better effects with equal effort counted as an economic gain, which was welcome to the market. For instance, throughout ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... Everybody knew it would be, and his mother didn't share his father's attitude about things everybody knew. She hadn't any business questioning a fundamental postulate like that. ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... is an almost undiscussed postulate of most metaphysics. "Reality is not merely one and self-consistent, but is a system of reciprocally determinate parts"[19]—such a statement would pass almost unnoticed as a mere truism. Yet I believe that it embodies a failure to effect thoroughly the "Copernican ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect," and this other, "I foresee that other objects which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects"? This postulate, that the future will be like the past, and that like causes will have like effects, rests on a purely psychological basis. In virtue of the laws of association the sight of an object or event vividly recalls the image of a ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... them is the objective existence of a material world. It is assumed that the phenomena which are comprehended under this name have a 'substratum' of extended, impenetrable, mobile substance, which exhibits the quality known as inertia, and is termed matter.[E] Another postulate is the universality of the law of causation; that nothing happens without a cause (that is, a necessary precedent condition), and that the state of the physical universe, at any given moment, is the consequence of its state at any preceding moment. Another is that any of the rules, or so-called 'laws ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... at all events, the systematic exposition of our economic arrangements) have furthermore accustomed us to think of everything like work as done under compulsion, fear of worse, or a kind of bribery. It is really taken as a postulate, and almost as an axiom, that no one would make or do anything useful save under the goad of want; of want not in the sense of wanting to do or make that thing, but of wanting to have or be able to do something else. Hence ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... judgment or action either by the prescription of rigid rules before the event or by over-censorious criticism when the crisis is past. A situation which is essentially military must be dealt with in the light of military considerations which postulate breadth of view and due appreciation of all the possible contingencies. There are certain standards of conduct which no civilised Government can with impunity neglect and which His Majesty's Government are determined ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... considered as the cause of cosmic harmony, itself requires some explanatory cause such as the persistence of force and the indestructibility of matter cannot conceivably be made to supply. For unless we postulate some one integrating cause, the greater the number of general laws in nature, the less likelihood is there of such laws being so correlated as to produce harmony by their combined action. And forasmuch as the only cause that I am able to imagine as competent to produce such ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... between individuals, races, or sexes' are due to 'differences in circumstances.' In fact, this is an aim so characteristic from the beginning of the whole school, that it may be put down almost as a primary postulate. It was not, indeed, definitely formulated; but to 'explain' a social theorem was taken to be the same thing as to show how differences of character or conduct could be explained by 'circumstance'—meaning by 'circumstance' something not ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... principle is expressed in the following brief precept: "Interpret the Scripture like any other book." (p. 377.) To this favourite tune, (although he plays many intricate variations on it,) he invariably reverts in the end[145]. On this preliminary postulate therefore, which, at first sight, to a candid mind, seems fair enough, I proceed to remark ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... postulate, George Douglas, the most active of the gang. Let him arise at your call—the claimant of wealth which he does not possess, the partaker of the illustrious blood of Douglas, but which in his veins is sullied with illegitimacy. Paint him the ruthless, the daring, the ambitious—so ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott |
