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Purposive   Listen
adjective
Purposive  adj.  Having or indicating purpose or design. "Purposive characters." "Purposive modification of structure in a bone." "It is impossible that the frog should perform actions morepurposive than these."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Purposive" Quotes from Famous Books



... Psychology James suggested that the mind's organization is essentially biological. It has evolved according to sound Darwinian principles, and in so doing the fittest of its 'variations' have survived. But were these variations quite fortuitous? May they not have been purposive responses to the stimulation of environment? Can logic have been invented like saws and ships for purposes of human service? These are some of the stimulating questions which James's work in Psychology ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... achievement has been gradual, and much of it without conscious planning, but the great inventors, the great architects, the great statesmen have been men of vision, and definite purpose is sure to fill a larger place in the story of achievement. Purposive progress rather than unconscious, telic rather than genetic, is the order ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... mechanisms of the same general nature as the human body. He was unwilling to allow a soul to any creature below man, so nothing seemed left to him save to maintain that the brutes are machines without consciousness, and that their apparently purposive actions are to be classed with such human movements as the sudden closing of the eye when it is threatened with the hand. The melancholy results of this doctrine made themselves evident among his followers. Even the mild and ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... and should never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in the opposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desire in men is this desire for great purposive activity. When man loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is lost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life and of ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence



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