"Hypothetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pirated edition of the book in Spain earlier than 1524: (ii) that this had been translated into French, also before 1524, although the version of Bertaut in 1531 is the earliest French translation we have any trace of: (iii) that Berners himself had come across this hypothetical French edition, again before 1524: and (iv) that the French translation had so faithfully reproduced the style of the original, that Berners was able to translate it from French into English, for the purpose of ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... are the "two facts" which, acting together, arouse the {476} perceptive response called inference, and the "third fact" thus perceived is the conclusion. [Footnote: The "two facts" or premises need not be true; either or both may be assumed or hypothetical, and still they may lead to a valid conclusion, i.e., a conclusion implicated in the assumed premises.] Logic cares nothing as to how the premises were found, nor as to the motive that led to the search for them, nor as to ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... delirium of delight, with whatever ingenious preciosity, we go through its process. Only as an image of beauty mated in some strange hermaphroditic ecstasy is that possible. I mean only as a dream projected into a hypothetical, a real heaven. But on earth we cannot complete the cycle in consciousness that would give us the freedom of an image in which two identities mysteriously realize their separate unities by the absorption of a third thing, the constructive rhythm of a work ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... interesting lesson which commences with a drawing on a blackboard of a "regulation workhouse, a board school, a free library, a lamp post, a water-cart, a dustman, a policeman, a steam roller, a navvy or two, and a long-handled shovel stuck in a heap of soil." A hypothetical payer of rates, "Mrs Smith," is revealed as getting a great ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the lowermost next the Earth, will be to the extension of the next below the uppermost, as 1. to 999. for as the pressure sustained by the 999. is to the pressure sustain'd by the first, so is the extension of the first to the extension of the 999. so that, from this hypothetical calculation, we shall find the Air to be indefinitely extended: For if we suppose the whole thickness of the Air to be divided, as I just now instanced, into a thousand parts, and each of those under differing Dimensions, or Altitudes, to contain an equall quantity ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... regions in the pioneer days for skill at "yarbs" and at nursing, and had taught her a great deal. But she had had small chance to practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so healthy. All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard. Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... underblocking (which is also referred to as "recall"). The rate of overblocking or precision is measured by the proportion of the things a classification system assigns to a certain category that are appropriately classified. The plaintiffs' expert, Dr. Nunberg, provided the hypothetical example of a classification system that is asked to pick out pictures of dogs from a database consisting of 1000 pictures of animals, of which 80 were actually dogs. If it returned 100 hits, of which 80 were ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... the line of the thirty-fifth parallel, is the Bermuda group, which belongs to England. It seems to me to be a good deal less hypothetical that, if the Count d'Artigas was entrusted with the abduction of Thomas Roch by a European Power at all, it was by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The possibility, however, remains that he may be acting solely in his ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... will indicate an hypothetical extreme case,—not infrequently met. In it a vertical shaft 1,500 feet in depth is taken as cutting the deposit at the depth of 750 feet, the most favored position so far as aggregate length of crosscuts is concerned. The cost of crosscutting is taken at $20 per foot and that of ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... Stand by and see my life and my love ruined or refuse Jack for the fortune of a man I did not love? Helen Bond is not that kind of a woman, I said to myself. I consulted the greatest lawyer I knew. I put a hypothetical case to him, and asked his opinion in such a way as to make him believe he was advising me how to make an unbreakable will. He told me of provisions and clauses to avoid, particularly in making benefactions. That was what ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... reader will receive this hypothetical statement as he finds it agreeable, or not, to his own experience,—a better guide, in all probability, than mere philosophy. The writer has his doubts upon the subject. But let every one judge for himself. For his part, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... hypothetical reader will say, "Why didn't that silly old fool, Allan, think of all these things? Why didn't he remember that he was commanding a pack of savages with whom he had no real acquaintance, among whom there were sure to be traitors, especially ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the solemn asseveration that I would never marry; and I ran as a raw recruit to swell the army of foolish virgins who lost all the wedding splendors, the hypothetical 'cakes and ale', for want of the oil of worldly wisdom. Now I am thirty-three, and my lamp is filled to the brim, and the bridegroom is in sight. Why not? Adverse weather, rain, rust and mildew spoiled my beautiful ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... modern critics, the charge is doubtless true that his writings are not free from prejudice in favour of his country. That he definitely regarded history rather as a moral agency and a lesson for the future than as an irrefutable narrative of the past, I consider highly hypothetical; but it is probable that his mind was not of the type that is most diligent in the close, exhaustive, and logical study so necessary to the historian of today. "Superficial," if we could eliminate the reproach in ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... that he had not done enough, that he had kept back too much. True, the thought had flickered through his brain: "And suppose that Lemarc should take the cash and let the credit go? Suppose that he should be contented with the ten thousand dollar bird in his hand and never mind the hypothetical Bellaire treasure bird in the bush?" Well, then, it would be worth it to Ygerne; just for her to know what sort Lemarc was. Drennen had more money than he needed; he had an assured income from the newly ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... Wendovers were profoundly indifferent to the Druids, and to that hypothetical race who lived ages before the Druids, and have broken out all over the earth in stony excrescences, as yet vaguely classified. That three-legged granite table, whose origin was lost in the remoteness of past time, seemed to the young ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... possible inheritance of a particular modification, and the possible inheritance of indirect results of that modification, or of changes correlated with it. This is a nice but crucial point on which most popular writers are confused. Let us examine it through a hypothetical case. A woman, not herself strong, bears a child that is weak. The woman then goes in for athletics, in order better to fit herself for motherhood; she specializes on tennis. After a few years she bears another child, which is much stronger and better developed than the first. "Look," some ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... attempt to arrange the various species of Genus Bos into groups, according to the Quinary or Circular System of M'Leay, is from the pen of Mr. Swainson—the precise and fastidious Swainson—who, from the number and boldness of his hypothetical views in every department of Zoology, may be truly regarded as the beau-ideal of a speculative naturalist—one of those, in short, so well described by Swift, "whose chief art in division hath been to grow ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... Carlisle Castle, was in 1596, and as Satchells' father was in that adventure (or so Satchells says) he probably knew much about the affair from fresh tradition. Colonel Elliot notices this, and says: "The probability of Satchells having obtained information from a hypothetical ballad is really quite an ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... are found in the history of science are not mere hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon only in masses. We recognise them as men like ourselves, and their actions and thoughts, being more free from the influence of passion, and recorded more accurately than those of other men, are ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... a few minutes for Kennedy, in his most engaging and plausible manner, to state the hypothetical reason of our call. Though it was perfectly self-evident from the start that Mrs. Martin would throw cold water on anything requiring an outlay of money Craig accomplished his full purpose of securing an interview with Mr. Haswell. The invalid ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... moth mimic (Anthomyza) the arrangement of the transparent scales is normal. Thus it is not some unknown external influence that has brought about the transparency of the wing in these five forms, as has sometimes been supposed. Nor is it a hypothetical internal evolutionary tendency, for all three vary in a different manner. The cause of this agreement can only lie in selection, which preserves and intensifies in each species the favourable variations that present themselves. The great faithfulness of the copy is astonishing in these ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... not admit that it is always binding between man and man. This view of truthfulness as merely a social obligation Augustine utterly repudiated; as, indeed, must be the case with every one who reckons lying a sin in and of itself. Augustine considered, in this treatise, various hypothetical cases, in which the telling of the truth might result in death to a sick man, while the telling of a falsehood might save his life. He said frankly: "And who can bear men casting up to him what a mischief it is to shun a lie that might save life, ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... had had in mind for several years, while occupying minor posts, but which he had not had the power to enforce. It seems to have become clear to his mind that, if a chess-player acquired skill, not only by playing actual games and by studying actual games played by masters, but also by working out hypothetical chess problems, it ought to be possible to devise a system whereby army officers could supplement their necessarily meagre experience of actual war, and their necessarily limited opportunities for studying with full knowledge the actual campaigns of great ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... extreme evolutionists will romance (it can be called nothing else) will do well to read Dr. Haeckel's "History of Creation," only they must be on their guard at every step. The author constantly states as facts (or, perhaps, with an impatient "must have been") the existence of purely hypothetical forms, of which there is no kind of evidence. To such ends does ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... harder thing to credit, sir; but one cannot reject all evidence, merely because It happens to be straightforward and not hypothetical." ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... the one by those of the other. A tradition always is useful when nothing else offers itself, but traditional beliefs are so apt to take the color of new eras that they should be employed only in the last emergency, and then with the understanding that they are of very hypothetical value. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... a "square meal" at Delmonico's; how the Right Bower's initial step was always a trip home "to see his mother;" how the Left Bower would immediately placate the parents of his beloved with priceless gifts (it may be parenthetically remarked that the parents and the beloved one were as hypothetical as the fortune); and how the Judge would make his first start as a capitalist by breaking a certain faro bank in Sacramento. He himself had been equally eloquent in extravagant fancy in those penniless days, he who now was quite cold and impassive ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... others, and all the great points of inquiry. The defendant's counsel take no distinct ground, as I have already said, on this point, either to admit or to deny. They choose to confine themselves to a hypothetical mode of speech. They say, supposing there was a conspiracy, non sequitur that the prisoner is guilty as principal. Be it so. But still, if there was a conspiracy, and if he was a conspirator, and helped to plan the murder, this may shed much light on the evidence ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... abnormal by nature, others, of this sympathetic artistic temperament, may become so through their sympathies plus their conditions of life." It is possible there may be some element of truth in this view, which my correspondent regarded as purely hypothetical. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... deferred to "Ulster Day," September 28th. Sir Edward Carson was provided with a guard carrying swords and wooden rifles, and in one instance dummy cannon made a feature of the pageant. These things excited a good deal of derision, and the language of the Covenant was held to be only "hypothetical treason." ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the Egyptian story is taken by some vegetable product of a red colour; and many of these versions reveal a definite confusion between the red fruit and the red clay, thus proving that the confusion of didi with the mandrake is no mere hypothetical device to evade a difficulty on my ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... applied mathematics. According to him political economy is a mixed science, its field being partly mental, partly physical. It may be called a positive science, because its premises are facts, but it is hypothetical in so far as the laws it lays down are only approximately true, i.e. are only valid in the absence of counteracting agencies. From this view of the nature of the science, it follows at once that the method to be pursued must be that called ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the eyes of the police authorities of Europe. It can only be poison—an unknown poison, perhaps. We shall be empowered to exhume the body of the late Sir Frank Narcombe in a few days' time, I hope. His case puzzles me hopelessly. What obstacle did a surgeon offer to this hypothetical Eastern movement? On the other hand, what can have been filched from him before his death? The death of an inventor, a statesman, a soldier, can be variously explained by your 'Yellow' hypothesis, M. Max, but what of the death ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... sooner than the arrival of the term for which he had deposited the rent. This might imply an expectation of refunding, which, as a Scotch wag said, of all species of funding, jumped least with the old gentleman's humour. He was beginning to enter a hypothetical caveat on this subject, and to quote several reasons why no part of the money once consigned as room-rent, could be repaid back on any pretence, without great hardship to the landlord, when Nigel, growing impatient, told him that the money was his absolutely, and without any intention ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... 'do' ... if I 'should' ... if I shall ... if I will ... if I must ... what can all the 'ifs' prove, but a most hypothetical state of the conscience? And in brief, I beg you to stand convinced of one thing, that whenever the 'certain time' comes for to 'hate writing to me' confessedly, 'avowedly,' (oh what words!) I shall not like it at all—not for all ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... something about making wills. As for the danger of shock from the first problem, we have never once found the slightest evidence of this much-feared result. The subject always understands that the situation depicted is hypothetical, and so answers either in a matter-of-fact manner ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... there have never been introductions of any kind; but let us see what they amount to here. Select for yourself your doctrine, or your ordinance, which you say was introduced, and try to give the history of its introduction. Hypothetical that history will be, of course; but we will not scruple at that;—we will only ask one thing, that it should cut clean between the real facts of the case, though it bring none in its favour; but it will not be able to do even ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the old doctor, "these friends of yours are what we professional people term hypothetical cases. We'd like to ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... purely relative values, it stands to reason that what may be bad or evil in a given man, relative to a certain environment, may actually be good if not highly virtuous in him relative to a certain other environment. If this hypothetical man represent the ascending line of life—that is to say, if he promise all that which is highest in a Graeco-Roman sense, then it is likely that he will be condemned as wicked if introduced into the society of men representing the opposite and ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... hypothesis which would need to be more closely examined before serving as a basis for so important a deduction." Accordingly, M. Figuier propounds an explanation which possesses the signal advantage that there is nothing hypothetical in it. "In our opinion, the solar radiation is sustained by the continual influx of souls into the sun." This, as the reader will perceive, is the well-known theory of Mayer, that the solar heat is due to a perennial bombardment of the sun by meteors, save that, in place of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... thought of that." Stanton stared into space for a moment, then nodded his head. "Of course. It would take too long for another race to teach it to them; it wouldn't be worth the trouble unless this hypothetical other race killed off all the adult Nipes and started the little ones off fresh. And if that had happened, their ritual-taboo system would have ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... apparent unconcern with which young Trevannion declared himself, there was something in his manner that arrested the attention of his uncle. While pronouncing his hypothetical forecast of a storm, he had turned his glance towards the sky, and kept it fixed there, as if making something more than a transient observation. The fog had evaporated, and the moon was now coursing across the heavens, not against a field of cloudy blue, but in the midst of black, cumulous clouds, ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... from the center of the Circle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the hypothetical base of algebraical science—the unknown quantity of which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete, perfect, and likewise simple; but ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... person, who wore a bright red fireman's coat for the purpose, and concealed the perpetual black eye with which he was afflicted, beneath a green shade. Previous to the institution of this equipage, Mr Toots sounded the Chicken on a hypothetical case, as, supposing the Chicken to be enamoured of a young lady named Mary, and to have conceived the intention of starting a boat of his own, what would he call that boat? The Chicken replied, with divers strong asseverations, that he ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... must have taken place on the coolest parts of the surface—namely, about the poles—there must thus have resulted the first geographical distinction of parts. To these illustrations of growing heterogeneity, which, though deduced from known physical laws, may be regarded as more or less hypothetical, Geology adds an extensive series that have been inductively established. Investigations show that the Earth has been continually becoming more heterogeneous in virtue of the multiplication of sedimentary strata which form its crust; ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... at the very outset of naval history, the vital truth that the man counts more than the machine. In these later days, when the tendency is to measure naval power merely by counting dreadnoughts, and to settle all hypothetical combats by the proportion of strength at a given point on the game board, it is well to remember that the most overwhelming victories have been won by the skill and audacity of a great leader, which overcame odds that would be reckoned by ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... of the paper from which we have quoted so freely, exclaim: "Strangest of foods! most impalpable of aliments! defying all the research of animal chemistry, tasking all the ingenuity of experts in hypothetical explanations, registering its effects chiefly by functional disturbance and organic lesions, causing its very defenders as a food to stultify themselves when in fealty to facts they are compelled to disclose its destructions, ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... by experience of what things they are the causes in the State; how indiscriminately they bring forth fruit, of which good men and wise rightly do repent. If there should be in any place a State, either actual or hypothetical, that wantonly and tyrannically wages war upon the Christian name, and it have conferred upon it that character of which we have spoken, it is possible that this may be considered more tolerable; yet the principles upon which it ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... theatre and manage it himself. He counted upon Risler for the funds. Opportunely enough, a small theatre on the boulevard happened to be for sale, as a result of the failure of its manager. Delobelle mentioned it to Risler, at first very vaguely, in a wholly hypothetical form—"There would be a good chance to make a fine stroke." Risler listened with his usual phlegm, saying, "Indeed, it would be a good thing for you." And to a more direct suggestion, not daring to answer, "No," he took refuge behind such phrases as "I will see"—"Perhaps ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... been making one of his little jokes in the shape of a petition from some more or less imaginary Quakers. These hypothetical persons pretend to have converted to Christianity and soap some hundreds of warriors of the wild and bounding Shawnee variety. Of course, for a basis of evangelical operations on this scale, it is requisite to have some land ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... attempt to lead a better life—or at least so he tells me," said Lady Agatha. "Morality does not come easy to Elmer, he says, and I believe him. Elmer's time is largely taken up by inward moral debate as to the right or wrong of particular hypothetical cases which his imagination insists on presenting ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... the days of her trouble, she so bravely asserted against popish and prelatic usurpations, was never resorted to till the attempt was made to remove the ark of the tabernacle from her. I therefore counsel you, my young friends, not to lend your ears to those that trumpet forth their hypothetical politics; but to believe that the laws of the land are administered with a good intent, till in your own homes and dwellings ye feel the presence of the oppressor—then, and not till then, are ye free to gird your loins for battle—and woe ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... thought fast. Presenting the case to O'Connor was impossible; it was too complicated, and it might violate governmental secrecy somewhere along the line. He decided to wrap it up in a hypothetical situation. "Doctor," he said, "I know that all the various manifestations of the psi powers were investigated and named long before responsible scientists became interested in ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in the perpetuation of the species? Are we to believe that the same deity who fashioned these forms of life created at the same time a number of forces that were certain to destroy them? Clearly we are bound to assume, either that this hypothetical Being pursues a number of mutually destructive plans, or that there are a number of designers at work and at war with each other, or that none at ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... have come at is, that those areas, in which species are most numerous, have oftenest been divided and isolated from other areas, united and again divided; a process implying antiquity and some changes in the external conditions. This will justly sound very hypothetical. I cannot give my reasons in detail; but the most general conclusion, which the geographical distribution of all organic beings, appears to me to indicate, is that isolation is the chief concomitant or cause of the appearance of NEW forms (I well know there are some staring exceptions). Secondly, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... trifle hypothetical," Herr Freudenberg muttered. "We had the utmost difficulty in persuading an ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there reached us from Chatto and Windus of London a most entertaining book by Hugh MacColl, entitled "Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet." It was a work of fancy, ingeniously constructed upon scientific principles. It described a hypothetical machine, a flying machine, which was made up of a substance more than half of whose mass had been converted into repelling particles. Such a fabric would leave the earth, pass the limits of its attraction with an accelerating velocity ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... was cautious but precise; "If Gracchus had formed the intention of seizing on the administration of the State, he had been justly slain." It was merely a restatement of the old constitutional theory that one who aimed at monarchy was by that very fact an outlaw. But the answer, hypothetical as was its expression, implied a suspicion of Gracchus's aims. It did not please the crowd; there was a roar of dissent. Then Scipio lost his temper. The contempt of the soldier for the civilian, of the Roman for the foreigner, of the man of pure for the man of mixed ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... much more life, that he adopted it in the text. Pressense considers that, by a careful study of the fragments of Celsus quoted by Origen, he is able to reproduce a picture of the whole work, as well as to gather his opinions. Such an arrangement must necessarily be hypothetical, like Niebuhr's treatment of Roman history, though extremely probable. It will be observed however, by noticing the references to Origen's work in the foot-notes of Pressense's text, and of Lecture II. in this volume, that the arrangement suggested for Celsus's treatise ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... not only tetanisation, but also CO2 has the power of converting the modified response into normal. Hence it has been suggested that the conversion under tetanisation of modified response to normal, in stale nerve, is due to a hypothetical evolution of CO2 in the nerve ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Blizzard, who was not in the least disturbed. "I've often wondered, and even, putting a hypothetical case, thrashed the matter out with my friends. You would hate me. It's thoroughly human. With me, for instance—I feel non-committal about a man. I decide to injure him. I do so. And then I ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... hypothesis of evolution does not in any degree explain the mystery of the universe. All it does is to offer us an hypothetical picture—true or false—of the manner in which the changes of organic and inorganic life succeeded one another in their historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere, just as "personalists" have; and it is much more difficult for them to show ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... remarkable is that his general plan of operations, founded upon a mere hypothetical estimate, should have proved ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... accessible to the exercise of thought, appertains to mathematics; the latter, from the apparent mysteries and greater difficulties, falls under the domain of the chemical sciences. In order to submit phenomena to calculation, recourse is had to a hypothetical construction of matter by a combination of molecules and atoms, whose number, form, position, and polarity determine, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... could make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods since they were born, he supposed he really couldn't get along without four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to try. I said, go ahead and use four hundred, and make any kind of a job he pleased out of it, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... practically step-mother to children of another race; and if she is sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which many authors will have spoken ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... could not be told. This, in Darwin's opinion, is a nearly parallel case, with the objection that selection explains nothing because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being. The shape of the fragments of stone at the base of the hypothetical precipice may be called accidental, but the term is not strictly applicable; for the shape of each depends on a long sequence of events, all obeying natural laws; on the nature of the rock, on the lines of deposition or cleavage, on the form ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... in her life she had had to obey. For the first time in her life she was of no account. For the first time she had been made conscious of the inferiority of her sex. The training of years had broken down under the experience. The hypothetical status in which she had stood with regard to Aubrey and his friends was not tolerated here, where every moment she was made to feel acutely that she was a woman, forced to submit to everything to which her womanhood exposed her, forced to endure everything that he might put upon ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... south, discovering one of the Austral Group on his way, when, finding no sign of the hypothetical southern Continent, and getting into very dirty weather, he first gained a more northern latitude and favourable winds, and then stood ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... that of Sheridan's hypothetical colleagues in office under the Prince Regent in the Cabinet outlined in February 1789, not one now supported him. Fox was not present, being engrossed in Lucretius and the "Poetics" of Aristotle. He, however, informed Lord Holland ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to a conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe. ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... is certainly here meant, to which Americus has chosen to give the fabulous or hypothetical name of Antilia, formerly mentioned; perhaps with the concealed intention of depreciating the grand discovery of Columbus, by insinuating that the Antilles were known ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... radiating from points of weakness, such, for instance, as the craterlets. And he goes on to suggest that the two tiny Martian satellites, with which we shall deal next, are the last survivors of his hypothetical swarm. Finally, with regard to the habitability of Mars, Dr. Wallace not only denies it, but asserts that the planet is ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... basis, one ton of hay, in excess of the amount required to keep up the animal heat and sustain the vital functions, gives us 200 lbs. of cheese. The point I wish to illustrate by these figures, which are of course hypothetical, is, that it is exceedingly desirable to get animals that will eat, digest, and assimilate a large amount of food, over and above that required to keep up the heat of the body and sustain the vital functions. ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... founded upon facts Judge Willis probably knew from common hearsay. But while sitting on the bench he had nothing to do with common hearsay. A fortiori, he was not justified, upon the mere assumption of a hypothetical case,[102] in admonishing the Attorney-General in the presence of his accuser, and in humiliating him in the presence of the bar of which he was the rightful head. An English judge would be considered ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... can't be objective, is all. If I saw her through the same set of filters you do, I'd be in love with her, too. So let's see if you can use your brain instead of your outraged sensibilities to answer a hypothetical question. If the foregoing were true, what would you ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... Sirius in 1844, Bessel was led to believe that the brilliant orb was accompanied by another body, whose gravitational attraction was responsible for the irregularities observed in the path of the great dog-star when pursuing his journey through space. The elements of this hypothetical body were afterwards computed by Peters and Auwers, and its exact position ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself—it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... In the hypothetical case, above suggested, of the whole surface being equally heated, and consequently the whole atmosphere at the same temperature, there would be a universal calm, whatever might be the rotatory motion ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... compounds, more or less stable, from organic structures. It has invented others which form the basis of long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, demonstrated and hypothetical. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... able-bodied whites between the ages of seventeen and fifty years; later the ages were extended both ways to sixteen and sixty years. Grant remarked that the Confederates had robbed "the cradle and the grave" in order to fill the armies[36]. Jefferson Davis began to see the futility of a hypothetical discussion as to the advisability or values in the use of Negroes as soldiers and in a letter to John Forsythe, February, 1865, stated "that all arguments as to the positive advantage or disadvantage of employing them are beside the question, which ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... year passed, however, and Home Rule seemed to hang upon a snap division, and its hypothetical results possibly hung up for another generation, Sinn Feiners grew stronger and stronger as English opposition to the Parliamentarians grew in strength, and they once more reiterated their old principle that, Home Rule or no ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... had failed; and I was only a poor, half-starved painter, in Great Howland Street, whose landlady was daily abating in her respect, and the butcher daily abating in his punctuality; whose garments were getting threadbare, and his dinners hypothetical, and whose day-dreams of fame and fortune had faded into the dull-gray of penury and disappointment. I was broken-hearted, ill, hungry; so I accepted an invitation from a friend, a rich manufacturer ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... and the circumstances, may we not pertinently inquire by what authority does Plato diminish the influence of the latter and enhance the value of the former? Why are facts to be burdened with such hypothetical creations, when it is obvious that a much simpler explanation is sufficient? Let us admit, as our best physiological views direct, that the starting-point of every organism, low or high, vegetable or animal, or whatever else, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Mormonism was, however, an unpublished novel, called "The Manuscript Found," that was read to Sidney Rigdon (afterwards a Mormon elder) by its author, a clergyman, and that formulated a creed for a hypothetical church. Smith had a slight local celebrity, for he and his father were operators with the divining-rod, and when he appropriated this creed a harmless and beneficent one, for polygamy was a later "inspiration" of Brigham Young—and began to preach it, in 1844, it gained many converts. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... powerful leader—a Gladstone or a Bright—the democratic forces in the country might have rallied together, and a struggle might have followed in which the Monarchy would have been shaken to its foundations. Or, on the other hand, Disraeli's hypothetical prophecy might have come true. "With Prince Albert," he said, "we have buried our... sovereign. This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown. If he had outlived some of our 'old stagers' ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... the medium of social interaction.—Each science postulates its own medium of interaction. Astronomy and physics assume a hypothetical substance, the ether. Physics has its principles of molar action and reaction; chemistry studies molecular interaction. Biology and medicine direct their research to the physiological interaction of organisms. Psychology is concerned with the behavior of the individual organism in terms of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... and Czechs is of vital interest to both peoples concerned, and to Europe as a whole. It is by no means hypothetical, considering that geographically the Poles and Czechs are neighbours, that they speak almost the same language, and that their national spirit, history and traditions bear a close resemblance. The history of Poland ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... evidence, show us that were the earth of equal density throughout, the flattening at the poles would be 1/234 of the equatorial diameter; that in the hypothetical case of infinite density at the centre, and infinite rarity at the surface, the flattening would be no more than 1/578; while, were the surface more dense than the interior, or did a cavity exist within, the oblateness ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... you not think that if all compositions were written in the key of C it would materially conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number?—The President has already deprecated the multiplication of hypothetical questions, which have reached a total of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... manifestly incomplete. It is a reflected light, and like the reflected light in the heavens, advances by imperceptible degrees to fill the whole silver round. It may be 'e'en in its imperfections beautiful,' but it assuredly has 'a ragged edge.' The hypothetical form of the last words of our text does not so much imply a doubt of the possibility of attaining the result as the recognition of the indispensable condition of effort on the part of him who attains it. That effort ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... well have been fired by my hypothetical Russian as far as the rifle was concerned; but he would have found it difficult to borrow Sir David's boots, and it seemed unlikely that any stranger would not only have dared to do so, but afterwards have had the audacity to return them. ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... (Adelung, iv. 154.)] (when the upshot had come); and the Secret Bohemian Article NOT then made public, nor ever afterwards,—much the contrary; though it was true enough, but inconvenient to confess, especially as it came to nothing. "A hypothetical thing, that," says Friedrich carelessly; "wages moderate enough, and proper to be settled beforehand, though the work was never done." To reach down quite over the Mountains, and have the Elbe for Silesian Frontier: this, as an occasional ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... their unabated respect for all the rights and privileges of the admiral, they declared, that whatever shall be found in their previous license repugnant to these shall be null and void. (Doc. Dipl., 113.) The hypothetical form in which this is stated shows that the sovereigns, with an honest desire of keeping their engagements with Columbus, had not a very clear perception in what manner they ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... difficulties, as many circumstances, which are likely to modify the result, may escape notice during the experiments. It has been said, that as water is most dense at from 37 to 39 Fahrenheit, this may be presumed to be the mean temperature at the bottom of the sea; but such hypothetical deductions are, perhaps, entitled to little confidence. It may however be safely enough presumed, that the temperature of the sea is kept tolerably uniform on the well-known principle of statics, that the heavier columns of any fluid displace those that are lighter. The waters ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Just as there are, strictly speaking, no mathematical lines or points in nature, and no mathematical lever, there is nowhere such a thing as production or rent, entirely pure and simple. The mathematical laws of motion operate in a hypothetical vacuum, and, where applied, are subjected to important modifications, in consequence of atmospheric resistance. Something similar is true of most of the laws of our science; as, for instance, those in accordance with which the price of commodities is fixed ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... day, hours at a stretch, Hollister brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness. It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead, resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to "love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... have an illustration of a planet whose axis is almost at right angles to the plane of its orbit, being inclined but about a degree and a half. The hypothetical inhabitants of this majestic planet must therefore have perpetual summer at the equator, eternal winter at the poles, and in the temperate regions everlasting spring. On account of the straightness of the axis, however, even the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... would test her lover. Love was a very powerful force; she had found it the greatest, grandest, sweetest thing in the world. Tryon had said that he loved her; he had said scarcely anything else for several weeks, surely nothing else worth remembering. She would test his love by a hypothetical question. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... changing seasons, and the anatomy of the human body were the chief subjects of study. The human cadaver was never dissected, but a knowledge of anatomy was obtained from diagrams which were wholly hypothetical. In early times medical officers were appointed to experiment with medicines upon monkeys, and also to dissect the bodies of monkeys. From these dissections, as well as from the printed diagrams of Chinese books the imperfect knowledge which they had reached ...
— Japan • David Murray
... decisive victory of Charles I. would have been a calamity of the first magnitude. It would have been like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours, supposing the worst consequences ever imagined in those hypothetical cases to have been realized. Or taking a more contracted view, we can see how England, robbed of her Puritan element, might still have waxed in strength, as France has done in spite of losing the Huguenots; but she could not have taken the proud position that she has come ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... throng, there were throbs within him of a higher life which could not be stilled. His conscience reproached him continually amidst all his amusements, and left him uneasy even in the most exulting moments of the love that filled his heart. This is no hypothetical picture, but one suggested by himself in conversation with his sister. She tells us from her retreat how her brother came to see her, fascinated by the steadfastness of her faith, in contrast with his own indifference and vacillation. Formerly it was his ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... English Law, does not get nearer to a real apprehension of them than to be led to accuse Englishmen of considering that the queen is impeccable and infallible, and that the Parliament is omnipotent. Mr. Kingsley has read me from beginning to end in the fashion in which the hypothetical Russian read Blackstone; not, I repeat, from malice, but because of his intellectual build. He appears to be so constituted as to have no notion of what goes on in minds very different from his own, and moreover to be stone-blind to his ignorance. A modest man or a philosopher would ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... verbal forms he considers as much earlier than any attempts at declension in nouns. No one who has read Curtius' arguments in support of this chronological arrangement would deny their extreme plausibility; but there are grave difficulties which made me hesitate in adopting this hypothetical framework of linguistic chronology. Ishall only mention one, which seemed to me insurmountable. We know that during what we called the First Radical Period the sway of phonetic laws was already so firmly established, that, from that period ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... proper time, sighting through the periscope as he did so, he pressed the button of a little arrangement which he held, half concealed, in the palm of his hand. There was a soft explosion, a sort of woof!—and a torpedo was on the way to a hypothetical enemy, with only the captain able to see that it reached ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... had closed upon that veteran; "but still I hope I did not offend her with that last thoughtless slip of mine. But really, over here in Ireland, we are not accustomed to the extraordinary language in which Mitchell indulges at times. She seems to me to be saving up her aspirates for a hypothetical dearth of that article ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... welcome to go on with your profession. I wouldn't stand in your way any more than I do now. 'Fourth—Freedom,'" he read slowly. "That is easy in one way—hard in another. If you married me,"—She stirred resentfully at this constant reference to their marriage; but he seemed purely hypothetical in tone; "I wouldn't interfere with your freedom any. Not of my own will. But if you ever grew to love me—or if there were children—it would make some difference. Not much. There mightn't be any children, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... four thousand a year and her independence to marry a man does it for love, let me tell you. If anybody knows you better than your mother, son, I'd hate to know who it is. And if anybody loves you more than your mother—well, we needn't go into that, because it would have to be hypothetical, anyway. You see, Jock, I've loved you so long and so well that I know your faults as well as your virtues; and I love you, not in spite of them but ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... But the abstract, hypothetical, and variable portions of the craft—or, if you will, of the science—depending on ten thousand varying and variable circumstances—depending on persons, passions, fancies, whims; caprices royal, national, parliamentary, and personal, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... scene is obvious and significant, and dramatically rendered. The foreground group is very strongly painted, natural in attitude and gesture, and the figure of a man in striped hose is magnificently modelled. I do not care to touch on so hypothetical a thing as the supposed portraiture in this group, but it is interesting to note, in the old man right of Antichrist, the features familiar to us in the drawings of Leonardo, possibly painted from a study of the same model. Behind is a profile head, obviously intended ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... such a thing as suum,—who are old-fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their feelings touched by these things, to think that human nature is older and more sacred than any claim of property whatever, and that it has rights at least as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of our Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes it harder to recover a fugitive chattel; but the existence of human nature in a man here and there is surely one of those accidents to be counted on at least as often as fire, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... to think it proper to take an indirect part in the political movements of Europe, American policy would be exposed to acts of retaliation, and to certain inconveniences which would not fail to affect the commerce and industry of the two hemispheres." As to this possible fortune, this hypothetical retaliation, the government and people of the United States are quite willing to take their chances and abide their destiny. Taking neither a direct nor an indirect part in the domestic or intestine movements of Europe, they have no fear of events of the nature alluded to by ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... duffer," he said affectionately to himself. "He's playing go to the hotel, I suppose. Perhaps when that imagination of his gets to work at hypothetical bread and butter he'll find the ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... machinery in motion by which the contracts were procured; and to straighten out any irregularities that might arise afterward. His position was almost academic. The matters he fought and decided were so detached from actuality, as far as he was concerned, that they might have been hypothetical cases. When Dick wanted anything specific, Keith instructed Patsy Corrigan to see that the proper officials awarded the contract. If the matter ever came to the courts, Keith furnished the brains and Patsy somehow ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the light in No. 401; but then it was too late. Had he been delayed ten seconds, or had he gotten off at the fourth floor, he would have—. However, I anticipate; or rather I speculate on what would have happened under hypothetical conditions—which is fatuous in the extreme; hypothetical conditions ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... Ceremonial occasions such as these are worthy of record and meditation only when they surround, and, as it were, frame some incident really material. Such an incident occurred now. My inner mind was still full of my sojourn with the Bartensteins, of the pathetic, whimsical, hypothetical connection between little Elsa and myself, and of the chains that seemed to bind my life in bonds not of my making. These reflections went on in an undercurrent while I was bowing, saluting, grasping hands, listening and responding to appropriate observations. ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... unslung and the kettle over, our first move was to ascertain in what state of preservation a certain dug-out might be, which the guide averred, he had left moored in the vicinity the summer before,—for upon this hypothetical dug-out our hopes of venison rested. After a little searching, it was found under the top of a fallen hemlock, but in a sorry condition. A large piece had been split out of one end, and a fearful chink was visible nearly to the water line. Freed from the treetop, however, and calked ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems, can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... by a woman,—the only person in the settlement (and she a native) who could read correctly. One woman (married) was baptized, hypothetically, with her infant. Twenty-one in all were admitted, the majority with hypothetical baptism. Both of the women who came to be married had infants in their arms; one of them had three children. Not one person in the whole settlement could read correctly, except the woman before mentioned; her ...
— Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the "Hawk," 1859 • Edward Feild
... so great a literary evil, that it has excited my curiosity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured on this project; he claims the honour, and the critics do not deny it, of being ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... I maintain throughout dinner a lofty height of aristocratic elegance that impresses even the impassive Dawson, towards whom it is solely directed. To the amazement and amusement of Salemina (who always takes my cheerful inanities at their face value), I give an hypothetical account of my afternoon engagements, interlarding it so thickly with countesses and marchionesses and lords and honourables that though Dawson has passed soup to duchesses, and scarcely ever handed a plate to anything less than a baroness, he dilutes the ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I say, Reason!" Here the ghost proceeded to analyze reason, cited from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, part II, section I, book 2, chap. 3, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, then went on to construct a hypothetical system of ghosts, piled one syllogism on another, and concluded with the logical proof that there are absolutely no ghosts. Meanwhile the cold sweat ran down my back, my teeth clattered like castanets, and from very agony of soul I nodded an unconditional assent to every assertion which the phantom ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... there were funds there at present to meet the demand; but if the unknown benefactor should pay in the six thousand he promised within the next few weeks, then Cyril could repay himself from that hypothetical fortune. On the other hand, Guy didn't disguise from himself the strong probability that the unknown benefactor might now refuse to pay in the six thousand. In that case, Guy said to himself with a groan, he would take to the diamond fields, and never rest day or ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... question yet. It's a hypothetical question—yes, hypothetical. I'm sure that's what I want to say. Hypo—hypothetical question. Question; yes, that's right. Now, suppose you'd been a pretty wild young shark, and had kept your mother anxious and miserable, and had drifted ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... charmed with your metaphor of the streamlet never running against the force of gravitation. Your distinction between an hypothesis and theory seems to me very ingenious; but I do not think it is ever followed. Every one now speaks of the undulatory THEORY of light; yet the ether is itself hypothetical, and the undulations are inferred only from explaining the phenomena of light. Even in the THEORY of gravitation is the attractive power in any way known, except by explaining the fall of the apple, and the movements of the Planets? ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... widow-lady, who did not make a great parade of her widowhood, but whose circumstances seemed reasonable enough, and challenged no inquiry. Inquisitiveness would have seemed needless impertinence—just as much so as yours would have been in the case of the hypothetical So-and-sos at the beginning of our last chapter. A vague impression got in the air that Sally's father had not been altogether satisfactory—well, wasn't it true? It may have leaked out from something in "the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... excellent things; still, it is far from exhausting the subject. The author, for instance, entirely overlooks the observations made by day. I also find, that the hypothetical part of the discussion is not perhaps so distinctly separated from the rigorous part as it might be; that disputable numbers, though given with a degree of precision down to the smallest decimals, do not look well as terms of comparison with some ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... of the great works of architecture, sculpture, and painting in Europe which he will recognize as landmarks of history in their potent influence on the civilization of mankind. Let us suppose that our hypothetical student has marked out on these lines his college course of four years, and his graduate course of three. At the age of twenty-five he will then have received an excellent college education. The university with its learned and hard-working teachers, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... but his peculiar kind of intellectual piety lacked the imagination of Pascal. He could play, cleverly enough, with hypothetical infidelity, and refute it, so to say, "in his study" with his eye on the little chapel door; but there was a sort of refined shrinking from the jagged edges of reality in his somewhat Byzantine temperament which throws a certain suspicion of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... involved be interdependent (as they always are), a strain is gradually produced in human affairs, social equilibrium is at length destroyed; there follows a period of readjustment by means of violence and force. It must not be fancied that the case supposed is merely hypothetical. The whole history of mankind and especially the present condition of the world unite in showing that far from being merely hypothetical, the case supposed has always been actual and is actual to-day on a vaster scale than ever before. My contention is that while progress in ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... expedition through the deadly fever country just to the south of Delagoa Bay, between the Lebomba Mountains and the sea, and of his now having to go with the effective remnant of his veterans on a quest for copper to a hypothetical spot only ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... inequalities of Nature neutralize each other, talents associate, and forces balance. Violence and inertia are found only among the poor and the aristocratic. And in that lies the philosophy of political economy, the mystery of human brotherhood. Hic est sapientia. Let us pass from the hypothetical state of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... President-Emperor. His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... this instruction is contained, and thence carry up our inferences from one testimony to another, till we arrive at the eyewitnesses and spectators of these distant events. In a word, if we proceed not upon some fact, present to the memory or senses, our reasonings would be merely hypothetical; and however the particular links might be connected with each other, the whole chain of inferences would have nothing to support it, nor could we ever, by its means, arrive at the knowledge of any real existence. If I ask why you believe any particular matter ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... in preaching heresies; but it can never be a question that a man should be silent if unprepared to speak the truth as he conceives it. Deference to popular opinion is one great source of bad writing, and is all the more disastrous because the deference is paid to some purely hypothetical requirement. When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent. He may be excused if he shrink from the lurid glory of martyrdom; he may be justified in not placing ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... civilization, and onward to Western Europe, he attempts to show that the actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with his law. To secure, however, even this semblance of harmony between the facts of history and his hypothetical law, he has to treat the facts very much as Procrustes treated his victims,—he must stretch some, and mutilate others, so as to make their forms fit the iron bed. The natural organization of European civilization ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... going to die, believes that the future state is, in some way or other, and in some degree, one of retribution; and from Monday morning to Saturday night he ignores all these facts, and never allows them to influence one of his actions. May I venture to speak direct to this hypothetical person, whose originals are dotted about in my audience? It would be the very same to you if you said 'No' instead of 'Yes' to all these affirmations. The fact that there is a God does not make a bit of difference to what you do, or what you think, or what you feel. The fact that there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Elijah Impey, indeed, he did put a question; and, upon my word, it did not require an Oedipus or a Sphinx to answer it. Says he, "I asked Sir Elijah Impey." What? a question on the title between the Nabob and his mother? No such thing. He puts an hypothetical question. "Supposing," says he, "a rebellion to exist in that country; will the Nabob be justified in seizing the goods of the rebels?" That is a question decided in a moment; and I must have a malice to Sir Elijah Impey of which I am incapable, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... mysteries of the cosmos, the most phenomenal is light. Unlike sound-waves, whose transmission requires air or other material media, light-waves pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space. Even the hypothetical ether, held as the interplanetary medium of light in the undulatory theory, can be discarded on the Einsteinian grounds that the geometrical properties of space render the theory of ether unnecessary. Under either hypothesis, light remains the most subtle, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... This hypothetical appreciation probably represents the general opinion current both at home and abroad during the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the War; but it proved to be mistaken from the first. The Free Staters ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... is not less delicate; and the flattering prospect of its being merely hypothetical forbids an overcurious discussion of it. It is one of those cases which must be left to provide for itself. In general, it may be observed, that although no political relation can subsist between the assenting ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... (one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... after suppressing the presence of albuminous substances, the action, nevertheless, went on in a purely inorganic medium, out of contact with air, a fact, of which we shall give irrefutable proofs. [Footnote: Traube's conceptions are governed by a theory of fermentation entirely his own, a hypothetical one, as he admits, of which the following is a brief summary: "We have no reason to doubt," Traube says, "that the protoplasm of vegetable cells is itself, or contains within it, a chemical ferment which causes the alcoholic fermentation of sugar; its efficacy seems closely ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you satisfied? You have made one match—you, and you'll pardon me for saying so, not Heaven—and now you want to unmake it and make a brand-new hypothetical one." ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke |
