"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... true that for a long time the art of training children's voices has been well understood by choirmasters of vested choirs, and by many others, but its basis was purely empirical. ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... lust, not greatly caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and practical and informative, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... characteristic contra-distinction between the speculative reasoners of the age before the Revolution, and those since, is this:—the former cultivated metaphysics without, or neglecting empirical, psychology:—the latter cultivate a mechanical psychology to the neglect and contempt of metaphysics. Both, therefore, are almost equi-distant from true philosophy. Hence the belief in ghosts, witches, sensible replies to prayer, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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
... Thus the empirical school, in its representative, Aristotle, met in the martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to deism, skepticism, atheism, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Her beauty was still in its first radiance, and her smile was angelic. She was short of stature, but it was impossible to imagine more beautiful features or hands. Her education had been very desultory; she had learned more from lovers than from teachers. She had a strong taste for empirical medicine and for alchemy, and was always compounding elixirs, tinctures and balms, some of which she regarded as valuable secrets. So it was that charlatans, trading on her weakness, made her consume, amid drugs and furnaces, a talent and a spirit ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete expression in the American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... animal is not conscious of the intelligence and design which are manifested in its instincts, which it obeys and works out, the conscious life of the individual must be wholly a life within the senses. The senses alone can give the animal only an empirical knowledge of the world of its observation. The senses may register and report facts, but they can never arrive at an understanding of necessary truths; the source of this kind of knowledge is the rational ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... class of facts, and of their relations, namely, the facts of nature or of the external world. This usage is not universal, nor is it fixed. In Germany, especially, the word Wissenschaft is used of all kinds of ordered knowledge, whether transcendental or empirical. So we are accustomed to speak of mental, moral, social, as well as of natural science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use of the word is very common and very influential. It is important that this fact should be ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... "It has 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 ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... to say anything of the physiological effects of a remedy, in addition to those "on man in health," he speaks—still under the head of "physiological effects"—of those "on man when sick." When, setting aside its empirical employment, we come then to inquire what it is that furnishes us with the true indications for the use of a remedy, analysis of the question leads us invariably back to its physiological effects. If I have failed nevertheless to include the few effects which ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... 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 of the two terms, as also, perhaps, of their common origin. But, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... finally, in our methods of travel, and then, in logical sequence, with what he could see about him. He watched curiously my loading of the canoe, for I had a three-mile stretch of open water, and the wind was abroad. Deuce's empirical boat wisdom aroused his admiration. He and his son were both at the shore to ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... either, that he had his way to make almost unaided by previous explorers. The science of comparative philology is of later birth; the English of Webster's day were no better equipped than he for the task which he undertook, except so far as they were trained by scholarship to avoid an empirical method. Horne Tooke was the man who opened Webster's eyes, and him he followed so long as he followed anybody. But Tooke was a guesser, and Webster, with all his deficiencies, had always a strong reliance upon system and method. He made guesses also, but he thought they were scientific analyses, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... 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 ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... between the ego and the non-ego—the person and the thing; he reduces man to a thing, instead of a person,—to one among the many phenomena of the universe, determined by the same laws of invariable antecedence and consequence, included under the same formulae of empirical generalization. He thus makes man the slave, and not the master of nature; passively carried along in the current of successive phenomena; unable, by any act of free will, to arrest a single wave in its course, or to divert it from ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... of the great law of universal gravitation to remove this empirical character from Kepler's laws. Newton's grand discovery bound together the three isolated laws of Kepler into one beautiful doctrine. He showed not only that those laws are true, but he showed why they must be true, and why no other laws could have been true. He proved to ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... be further infected by them; and it will be easy also for others to continue and carry on my labours. And by these means I suppose that I have established for ever a true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... small that u and [Delta] may be considered constant. As regards the quantity f(u), or the friction per unit of length, the natural law which regulates it is not known, audit can only be expressed by some empirical formula, which, while according sufficiently nearly with the facts, is suited for calculation. For this purpose the binomial formula, au bu squared, or the simple formula, b1 u squared, is generally adopted; a b and b1 being coefficients deduced from experiment. The values, however, which are to ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... when he first applied it felt a glow of joy—for an instructor he was still empirical—rise from the apprehension that living with them would really he to see life. Their sociable strangeness was an intimation of that—their chatter of tongues, their gaiety and good humour, their ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... hear from Mr. Spencer that conscience, so far from being the voice of God, is but "the capitalised instinct of the tribe," an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... 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 ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... 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 wide and ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... had thought of getting the theory of the screw-propeller from the marine engineers, and then, by applying our tables of air-pressures to their formulas, of designing air-propellers suitable for our purpose. But so far as we could learn, the marine engineers possessed only empirical formulas, and the exact action of the screw-propeller, after a century of use, was still very obscure. As we were not in a position to undertake a long series of practical experiments to discover a ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... takes no superficial, empirical view of his subject, but collecting a rich variety of facts, brings the lights of a profound philosophy to their explanation. His work, indeed, neglects no essential detail—it is minute and accurate ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Brown, ex-clergyman and quack-doctor, harangued the people of Chaudiere from his gaily-painted wagon. He had the perfect gift of the charlatan, and he had discovered his metier. Inclined to the picturesque by nature, melodramatic and empirical, his earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed him, though it had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... carefully prospected; these sandy and quartzose beds are natural conduits and sluice-boxes. But the search for "tailings" is completely different from that of gold-veins, and requires especial practice. The process, indeed, may be called purely empirical. It is not taught in Jermyn Street, nor by the Ecole des Mines. In this matter theory must bow to "rule of thumb:" the caprices of alluvium are various and curious enough to baffle every attempt at scientific ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... fortunate discovery of the specific for him. All to further science!—to which, in spite of the petitions of all the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the scaffold, poor gentleman! But we know politics to be no such empirical science. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his senior year is chiefly given over to 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 itself on this sure ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... 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 or ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... this should always be checked by run-off computations. The drainage area contributing water to the stream passing through the culvert under consideration is computed from contour maps or from a survey of the ground, and the size of culvert determined by one of the empirical formulas applicable to that purpose. In these formulas, the solution depends upon the proper selection of a factor "C" which varies in accordance with the nature of the drainage area. Two of these that are quite ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... doubt that if I leave go of my pen it will fall upon the table. Nay, the doubt is even less than this, because while the knowledge that my pen will fall if I allow it to do so is founded chiefly upon empirical knowledge (I could not predict with a priori certainty that it would so fall, for the pen might be in an electrical state, or subject to some set of unknown natural laws antagonistic to gravity), the knowledge ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... way most men 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 that Jesus ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... knew so 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 ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... concrete are unreliable, but the author's proposed method is equally so. We can determine by experiment limiting percentages of steel which a concrete of given quality can safely carry as reinforcement, and then use empirical formulas based on the stress in the steel and an assumed percentage of its depth in the concrete as a lever arm with more ease and just as much accuracy. The common methods result in designs which are safe enough, but they ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... (absolute idealism), which inevitably lands in Pantheism. The third is an intuitional or "faith-philosophy," which finally ends in Mysticism. The fourth is a rationalistic or "spiritualistic" philosophy, which yields pure Theism. The last is an empirical philosophy, which derives all religion from instruction, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... with small favor the therapeutic application of plants by the Filipino "herb-doctors" (curanderos) as being entirely empirical. This disparagement is unjustified because in all the most rational and scientific remedies that we make use of, the first step towards the final development of their relative position among remedies is due to empiricism which is founded on daily experience, on observation of results obtained ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... 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! How ...
— Different Girls • Various
... was that, if people were left to themselves, and if the restraints imposed by authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation of ordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. But their theory was quite empirical; worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence of the English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... admit, however, that the treatments of poulticing and blistering are only expectant—we might almost say empirical. At any rate, we admit to ourselves that what we have advised and carried out is not in itself curative, but only a means of assisting Nature to satisfactorily work her own ends. Empirical or not, however, we believe that in every case of quittor ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... believed to be due to 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 Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... Therefore rights can never be "natural" or "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
... against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are 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 ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... III. Articles that are in any way dangerous or offensive, also patent medicines, nostrums, and empirical preparations whose ingredients are concealed, will not be admitted to the exposition. The director of exhibits, with the approval of the president, has the authority to order the removal of any article he ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... severe a science, and in spite of my books full of musical "parsing," so to speak, declensions of chords, and conjugations of scales, I do not think I learned much from Mr. Laugier, and, never having followed up this beginning of the real study of music, my knowledge of it has been only of that empirical and contemptible sort which goes no further than the end of boarding-school young ladies' fingers, and sometimes, at any rate, amounts to tolerably skilful and accurate execution; a result I never attained, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... mastery has been achieved by the artist—the power, that is to say, of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing with religious objects, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... real, individual 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 power, not until then will human ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... characteristics considered in this chapter is that they are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, coinciding as they did with a period of philosophic activity, that revealed the shallowness and empirical nature of all that had been done up to that time. Napoleon's methods appeared to his contemporaries to have produced so strenuous a revolution in the conduct of land warfare that it assumed a wholly new aspect, and it was ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... abstract notion of right, of the State and of the social compact.[2126] According to this process, by virtue of political geometry alone, they shall have the perfect vessel and since it perfect it follows that it will sail, and that much better than any empirical craft.—They legislate according to this principle, and one may imagine the nature of their discussions. There are no convincing facts, no pointed arguments; nobody would ever imagine that the speakers were gathered together to conduct real business. Through speech after speech, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... experience who have been thrown out of employment by the general stoppage of public works, and who are better qualified to take care of that costly and delicate machine, a Railway, than men whose knowledge is entirely empirical, yet few railways employ a resident engineer. Those that follow this practice are generally supposed to do so because he is a relative of some Director, and wants a place, and not because such an officer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... 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 be raised to a ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Principia Ethica I owe so much, are, of course, profoundly religious and live by a passionate faith in the absolute value of certain states of mind; also they have fallen in love with the conclusions and methods of science. Being extremely intelligent, they perceive, however, that empirical arguments can avail nothing for or against a metaphysical theory, and that ultimately all the conclusions of science are based on a logic that precedes experience. Also they perceive that emotions are just ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... a summary of all present knowledge of the voice. First, the insight into the singer's vocal operations is considered, which the hearer obtains by attentive listening to the tones produced. This empirical knowledge, as it is generally called, indicates a state of unnecessary throat tension as the cause, or at any rate the accompaniment, of every faulty tone. Further, an outline is given of all scientific ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... This language of Bacon is applied by him to the empirical and rational faculties of ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... without Timothy's annotations. These were followed by some questions put to the conjurer, who, laying aside his black gown, and plucking off his white beard, exhibited to the astonished spectators the very individual countenance of the empirical politician Ferret, who had played our hero such a slippery trick ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... relation to any astrological positions, to any natural signs of whirlwinds, tempests, plagues, famine, or earthquakes, try long to discover some hidden symbolism in it, and confess finally that no man unregenerate to letters, by any a priori or empirical knowledge, could have at all suspected that a bit of dirty parchment, with an ecclesiastical scrawl upon it, would have power to drive the currents of history, inspire great national passions, and impel the wars and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... diluvian billows fixed into stone in the midst of their stormy swell. I wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could I acknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logical ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... facility with which the materials might 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 ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 Word above the common mode, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... less empirical way must be found in which to acquire the understanding of sound play. My system of teaching differs from the usual ones, in that it sets down at the outset definite elementary principles of chess strategy by which any move can be gauged at its true value, thus enabling the learner to form his ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... from Scotland, Mrs. Byron, with the hope of having his lameness removed, placed her son under the care of a person, who professed the cure of such cases, at Nottingham. The name of this man, who appears to have been a mere empirical pretender, was Lavender; and the manner in which he is said to have proceeded was by first rubbing the foot over, for a considerable time, with handsful of oil, and then twisting the limb forcibly round, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... 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; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... unsupported by lectures (or such explanations written and pictorial as this edition will supply), there would have been so many accidents and so many failures, that Mr. Rarey would have had great difficulty in obtaining a hearing, and for many years our splendid colts would have been left to the empirical treatment ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... uses. Such being the case, we fall to wrangling over it, and your appetite is like to go unappeased. I now have evidence to show you that your act of violent appropriation does not conduce to your interest. This is simply an experimental and empirical fact. I am in a position to show you that the character of your action is other than you supposed, that you were under a misapprehension as to its goodness. It leads not to the enjoyable activity which interests ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... long before I definitely abandoned all hope of obtaining, by any of the means I found in use, the results for which I was striving. Consequently, from that time to the present my work has necessarily been more or less independent and empirical in its nature, and, while I trust I am neither prejudiced nor intolerant in my attitude towards pianoforte education in its general aspect, I cannot help feeling that a great deal of natural taste is stifled and a great deal of mediocrity created by the persistent and ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... myself has weighed upon my heart; it is only a few minutes that this want has affected Robespierre. I request to be heard." Leave was accorded, and he briefly exculpated himself. "Be especially on your guard," he said, as he concluded, and pointed to Robespierre, "against empirical orators, who have incessantly in their mouths the words of liberty, tyranny, conspiracy—always mixing up their own praises with the deceit they impose upon the people. Do justice to such men!" "Order!" cried Freron, Robespierre's friend; "this is insult and sarcasm." ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... meaning to include only self-evident (intuitive) synthetic propositions, i.e. of space and time. The nature of axiomatic certainty is part of the fundamental problem of logic and metaphysics. Those who deny the possibility of all non-empirical knowledge naturally hold that every axiom is ultimately based on observation. For the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... "Actually, we can't be quite positive." His expression showed just how little he wanted to make this admission. "However," he went on, brightening, "there is some evidence which seems to show that it is basically the same process as psychokinesis. And we do have quite a bit of empirical data on psychokinesis." He scribbled something on a sheet of paper and said: "For instance, there's this." He held the paper up to the screen so that Malone could ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with those it is brought to illustrate, you have only to suppose that, although the boomerang thrown by me went forward to a definite place, and at least appeared to subserve a purpose, and the bystanders, after a while, could get traces of the mode or the empirical law of its flight, yet they could not themselves do anything with it. It was quite beyond their power to use it. Would they doubt, or deny my intention, on that account? No: they would insist that design on my part must be presumed from the nature of the results; that, though ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... that it is the correct and proper thing not to work with your own hands but to get some underling to do all that sort of thing for you, while you read and write. This false ideal formed by the native from his empirical observations of some of the white men around him, has been the cause of great mischief. He sees the white man is his ruling man, rich, powerful, and honoured, and so he imitates him, and goes to the mission-school classes to read and write, and as soon ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... unsatisfactoriness 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, and that each is identical with itself wherever found; but the question ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of plants was at one time supposed to be a distinct body, and was called lignine, but they are now regarded as identical. The formula of cellulose is (C{6}H{10}O{6}){X}, and it is generally assumed that the molecular formula must be represented by a multiple of the empirical formula, C{12}H{20}O{10} being often regarded as the minimum. The assumption is based on the existence of a penta-nitrate and the insoluble and colloidal nature of cellulose. Green (Zeit. Farb. Text. Ind., 1904, 3, 97) ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... which seems to mock their intelligence, humbly to ponder the evidence—to investigate causes and ascertain results." In the present case the utility of the waters, if not for cooking or drinking then for other specific purposes, had been put to the proof time out of mind, in an empirical fashion; though it was not till the reign of the Good Duke Alfred that a series of classical experiments placed our knowledge of their medicinal properties ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... condition. In our groping and inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions; the whole object, the parts observed plus the parts interpolated, is the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of this complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe's casual sensation of light is a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother's. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... should have dreamed of the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to Tristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feeling for the dead, for the dim ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Laplace who solved the problem of the inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn by the theory of gravitation, reducing the errors of the tables from 20' down to 12", thus abolishing the use of empirical corrections to the planetary tables, and providing another glorious triumph for the law of gravitation. As Laplace justly said: "These inequalities appeared formerly to be inexplicable by the law of gravitation—they now form one of its ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... artiodactyls and perissodactyls, i. e. even-toed and odd-toed. Now, whether an animal has an even or an odd number of toes may seem a curiously artificial distinction on which to found so important a classification of the mammalian group. But if we look at the matter from a less empirical and more intelligent point of view, we shall see that the alternative of having an even or an odd number of toes carries with it alternative consequences of a practically important kind to any animal of the digitigrade type. For suppose an aboriginal five-toed ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly possible—it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... puts it, some grand recipe for freedom and equality, invented, well drawn up, and inserted in the Moniteur, was all that was needed to secure those benefits for the world at large. If George Sand, led afterwards into searching for this empirical remedy for the wrongs and sufferings of the masses, believed the elixir to have been found in the establishment of popular sovereignty by universal suffrage, it was through the persuasive arguments of the leaders of the movement, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... ordinate. Question of one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One knower. Value of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda. Various types of union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and follow empirical findings. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... evolution, the physicist being able to establish solid theories only on the laws of movement." The same idea is again met with in the words of Cornu in 1896: "The general tendency should be to show how the facts observed and the phenomena measured, though first brought together by empirical laws, end, by the impulse of successive progressions, in coming under the general laws of rational mechanics;" and the same physicist showed clearly that in his mind this connexion of phenomena with mechanics had a deep and philosophical reason, ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... 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, were primarily derived from mineral-impregnated ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... which corresponds to 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
... rightly to 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 ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... representative numbers are obtained by adding 1 to the following series (irregular, it will be observed, in its first member, which should be 1/2 instead of 0); 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, etc. The formula is a purely empirical one, and is, moreover, completely at fault as regards the distance ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... for unusual efficiency. His collapse, when analyzed, can usually be traced to the fact that his previous experience contained nothing on which he could directly base a decision. His prior efficiency was based on empirical knowledge rather than on judgment or ability ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... in children's libraries as elsewhere; but we can assure those who have not tried it that facts are stubborn things, and the hypothesis has frequently to be made over in accordance with newly-observed facts, and theories may or may not be proven correct. The whole subject is as yet in the empirical stage, and the way must be felt from day to day. If the children's librarian lives in a continual rush, what "leisure to grow wise" on her chosen subject does she have? and if she is hurried constantly from one child to ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... 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
... skylark from a redbreast, and did not confound the dog-rose with the honeysuckle. But I am sure that he had never acquired that interest in nature's things and ways, which leads to close and loving watching of them. He had not that sense of outdoor nature, empirical and not scientific, which endows the Angler of his cotemporary Walton, with its enduring charm, and which is to be acquired only by living in the open country in childhood. Milton is not a man of the fields, but of books. His life ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... 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 ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... been, perhaps, the richest nation in the world before the war, and wealth being only comparative, it is our empirical duty to achieve a like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... therefore, my lords, is, as it has been termed, only an experiment; an experiment, my lords, of a very daring kind, which none would hazard but empirical politicians. It is an experiment to discover how far the vices of the populace may be made useful to the government, what taxes may be raised upon poison, and how much the court may be enriched by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... a high and satisfactory character, ought to consist of a deduction of causes and effects, shewing us not merely that a thing is so, but why it is as it is, and cannot be otherwise. The rest is merely empirical; and, though the narrowness of human wit may often drive us to this; yet it is essentially of a lower order and description. As it depends for its authority upon an example, or a number of examples, so examples of a contrary nature may continually ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... show the correspondence at this period between abstract reasoning 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... pays higher wages, and cuts off the principal source of misery—the wants and sufferings of infancy, sickness, and old age. Laborers too will be less skillful, and perform less work—enhancing the price of that sort of labor. The poor laws of England are an attempt—but an awkward and empirical attempt—to supply the place of that which we should suppose the feelings of every human heart would declare to be a natural obligation—that he who has received the benefit of the laborer's services ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... can be said is that they are probably no less effective than most of the modern drugs recommended for the same purpose. Concerning a function over which so many fond superstitions still linger in the public mind we may, perhaps, charitably forgive Gilbert for the introduction of an empirical remedy for sterility, which, he assures us, he has often tried and with invariable success, and which enjoys the double advantage of applicability ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... 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 of concentration upon recollections ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... From your own strictly subjective point of view that's very natural. I also look at the question abstractly from the side of the empirical ego, and correctly deduce a corresponding conclusion. Only then, you see, the terms of the minor ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... about, and then Howard West—who probably wasn't interested in her either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university—a great acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished diner-out—and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself, John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon and stayed awake at the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... talking of building a new yacht out 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 his Talent for Knowledge, as well as Inclination, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... years of study of the text and after almost despairing of a 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 ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... curious and puzzling empirical rules gained from the life-long experience of miners in regard to the varying richness and poorness of mineral lodes, according to the directions in which they strike—whether north, south, east or west—may very probably ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... up. He 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
... made of a purely empirical strength dictated solely by convenience of manipulation, or the concentration may be chosen with reference to a system which is applicable to all solutions, and based upon chemical equivalents. Such solutions are called !Normal Solutions! ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... by a painstaking teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams colored ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... not fail to 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 less readily understood opposing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... friendly, full of unaccountable instincts; obstinate and capricious, given up to irrational and inexplicable superstitions; sluggish, suspicious, cautious, hostile to theory, enamoured of inconsistencies, humorously critical of all ideals, realistic, empirical, wayward, ready to listen to any magical whisper, to any faint pipings of the flutes of Pan, but grumblingly reluctant to follow the voices of the prophets and the high doctrines ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ready for the most practical demonstration. I verily believe that his last moments ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... philosophers start their study of the world. They can never perceive the world in its entire reality. Yet their imagination, with its magnificent allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible, has pointed the way for empirical knowledge. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... within itself, little helped by thoughts or other aid from without. The efforts made by others to operate on it were faithful, kindly, well meant, but not adapted to its individuality. The fact is, that, so far as they had any supposed basis on system, it was on the Scotch empirical analysis of perception, conception, reason, will; a Procrustean mental philosophy which absolutely ignores individuality, and assumes that all human beings are alike. It is as good as the little boys' conventional system of portraiture. A round ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... 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
... 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
... is there, then, in these latter days, when reason and science together have dispelled the darkness of superstition, have diminished the possibility of miraculous occurrences, have laughed empirical occultism out of the field, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and benefits, have 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 ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... known to geographers as the Old World; that is to say, you 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics, and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... had defined species by the criterion of fertility. Now not only the great explorers, but every ship's captain, knew by this time that white men, at all events, would form fertile unions with all known kinds of humanity. But in the eighteenth century it became known also, and in the same empirical way, that the fertility of unions between white men and black was imperfect; and as this was the only human cross for which there was any large quantity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distance between these races was greater than had been supposed. ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... feel when in an age of doubt they make the discovery that they are undoubtedly to live again. To the question "how are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?" modern Spiritualism, with its empirical methods, is not adequate to reply. Yet long before Paul suggested it, it had the attention of the most celebrated schools of philosophy, whose speculations on the subject, however little they may seem to be verified, ought not to be without interest ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... occasionally as eserine. The British pharmacopoeia contains an alcoholic extract of the bean, intended for internal administration; but the alkaloid is now always employed. This is used as the sulphate, which has the empirical formula of (C{15}H{21}N3O2)2, H2SO4, plus an unknown number of molecules of water. It occurs in small yellowish crystals, which are turned red by exposure to light or air. They are readily soluble in water ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... all other phases of dairying, has been developed mainly as a result of empirical methods. Within the last decade or so, the subject has received more attention from the scientific point of view and the underlying causes determined to some extent. Since the subject has been investigated from the bacteriological point of view, much light has ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... a German philosopher and professor in Berlin of the so-called empirical school, that is, the Baconian; an opponent of the methods and systems of Kant and Hegel; confined his studies to psychology and the phenomena of consciousness; was more a British thinker ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... once, for example, create a representative system in practice, when it has been discovered in theory, and can by judicious regulations so distribute 'self-interest' as to produce philanthropy and public spirit. Macaulay's answer really makes a different assumption. He accepts the purely 'empirical' or 'rule of thumb' position. It is idle, he says, to ask what would happen if there were no 'checks.' It is like leaving out the effect of friction in a problem of mechanics. The logic may be correct, but the conclusions are false in practice.[115] Now this 'friction' was precisely the favourite ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... distinguishing feature of the Indian character, as I have here tried to sketch it, I should say it was transcendent, using that word, not in its strict technical sense, as fixed by Kant, but in its more general acceptation, as denoting a mind bent on transcending the limits of empirical knowledge. There are minds perfectly satisfied with empirical knowledge, a knowledge of facts, well ascertained, well classified, and well labelled. Such knowledge may assume very vast proportions, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller |
