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More "Generalization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with an ever-shifting background of fair, foreign towns and cities, Kursaals, palaces, salons, gardens, mountains, and lakes, and quiet green nooks of country—all, as it seemed to her, with the power of generalization that seizes on the most salient points, and takes them as types of the whole, shining in sunlight that never clouded, under clear blue skies that never darkened. Madelon knew that that time had gone ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... plainer than another, it is that neither the pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while, the righteous begs ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... advantages and defects. It offers marvellous facilities for defining the perceptions of the senses with the utmost accuracy, but regarding everything in the concrete, it is unfriendly to the nobler labors of the mind, to abstraction and generalization. In the numberless changes of these languages, their bewildering flexibility, their variable forms, and their rapid deterioration, they seem to betray a lack of individuality, and to resemble the vague and tumultuous history of the tribes who employ them. They exhibit an almost incredible ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... a human story in every instance. There is always dramatic conflict between interesting characters, of course, but behind them is always the background of some considerable social tendency—some comprehensive generalization—that includes and explains them all. The commander from his eminence saw all the combatants: he knew what the fight was about, and it always was about something worth while. ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... translation is no more than a choice of evils, since we have no real equivalent for the term. It was applicable not merely to human conduct, but also to the acting of the lower animals, and even to the growth of plants. Now, apart from a craze of generalization we should hardly think of the "stern daughter of the voice of God" in connection with an amoeba corresponding successfully to stimulus, yet the creature in its inchoate way is exhibiting a dim analogy to duty. The term in question was first used by Zeno, and was explained ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... distinguishing marks of cultivated social life everywhere, and to people who are habituated to these conditions of life it is painful to have incongruous or inappropriate acts or sounds thrust upon their attention. Here is a generalization that explains the reason why many things, harmless in themselves are unpleasant to and offend the taste of cultivated people. No really cultivated young girl will, for instance, open and play upon a piano in a hotel parlor or any other parlor at inappropriate ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... the atmospheric valve and condenser. There are still other considerations, such as water supply, condition of circulating water, style of pump, etc., which must all necessarily have an obvious bearing upon the settlement of this question; so that generalization is somewhat out of place, the final design in all cases depending solely upon ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... rest, yet the lower classes long preceded the higher; that there has been on the whole a steady progression within each class and order; and that the highest plants and animals have appeared only in relatively modern times. It is only, however, in a broad sense that this generalization is now thought to hold good. It encounters many apparent exceptions, and sundry real ones. So far as the rule holds, all is as it should be ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death. Filled with awe at this stupendous generalization, it was with great hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society—results demonstrated by experiments. But the physiologists present advised me to confine myself to physical investigations, in which my success ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... and identify the former with the ideas (which are nothing else than universals, each of which expresses the essence of many phenomena), and it is a very easy process to conceive of these ideas themselves being united in another more inclusive idea, and so, by a process of generalization, to reach at length the "Idea of Ideas"—the absolute Idea, in which lies the essence of all in the universe. Thus from any one fact of beauty, harmony, etc., the human mind may rise to the notion of a common quality in all objects of beauty, etc.: "from a single beautiful ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... a political revolution. When we recognize that the focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents of our national life and explains the altering tasks ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... metaphor and generalization, each Avataric movement centered around an individual Man, and this Man embodied the principle and undertook the special work of an evangel, or Christos, or "Avatar," ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... reading these, cast the work aside. It should be remembered, however, that the minds of such men are so well stocked with information that most, and sometimes all, of the author's details may be unnecessary to them; they are already prepared for the generalization. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... of Prince Salm-Dyck, Dr. Engelmann found original specimens of C. scheerii which were exactly his var. valida. So far as collections show the Texan form seems to be more robust than the Mexican, but the material is too scanty to justify such a generalization. Dr. Engelmann speaks of this species as "a stately plant, by far the largest, of the northern Mamillariae" Its tubercles are bright green and in beautiful contrast ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... each stray into the other's province whenever he thinks fit. But the fact remains that they are primarily concerned with different things: and that each is most to be trusted when he is upon his own ground. When, therefore, the economist indulges in a generalization about psychology, even when he gives it as a reason for an economic proposition, in nine cases out of ten the economics will not depend upon the psychology; the psychology will rather be an inference (and very possibly a crude and hasty one) ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... to found a philosophy. If consciousness is the product of rhythm all things ARE conscious, for all have motion, and all motion is rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the significance and breadth of his thought—the scope of this momentous generalization; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the tortuous and uncertain ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... democratic states. We see that now we are clearly swinging over to some new form of social solidarity, of which tendency federalism and socialism are expressions, and doubtless from that we shall recoil toward individual liberty once more. It is a safe generalization that whenever human thought shows some decided trend, a corrective movement is not far away. However enthusiastic we may be, therefore, about the idea of progress and the positive contributions which it can make to our understanding ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... mind was passively rather than actively engaged in such directions, until later. At the normal school she led a class which has had a proud intellectual record as teachers and workers. She was the easy victor in every contest; with an inclusive grasp, an incisive analysis, instant generalization, a very tenacious and ready memory, and unusual talent for every effort of study, she took and held the first place as a matter of course until she graduated, when she gave the valedictory address. This valedictory was a prophetic note in the line of her future expression; for it gave ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... Troost, Torrey, and a few others, still pursue mineralogy for its own sake; but, generally, our mineralogists have turned geologists, studying rocks on a large scale, instead of their individual constituents, and vieing with their brethren in Europe in bold and successful generalization, and in the application of physical science to their subject. Maclure was one of the pioneers, and Eaton and Silliman contributed much to the stock of knowledge. This school has given rise to the great geological surveys made or progressing in several of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... is the grandest generalization of science that was ever conceived. It is the fundamental law of the relations of the two worlds, the psychic and the physical. The spiritual and material worlds unite in man, in whom the eternal spirit is combined with a transitory material body, and the law of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts" at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a hundred loaves of bread? and is not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Natural History and the then prevailing tendencies of all the Sciences" was given on the 12th of November, 1832, at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization which marked Agassiz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning his success as an instructor was undoubted. He had, indeed, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the literature of our theme, we are astounded by the apparently hopeless confusion in which the whole is involved. Everywhere attempts at ill-founded generalization are encountered. We are compelled to admit, after perusing long debates in regard to the relative merits of various therapeutic measures, that those who were foremost to disparage the treatment pursued by others were totally ignorant of the fact that those same symptomatic manifestations which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... particular case," he returned; "and don't tempt me into your woman's snare of a generalization. It's possible, of course, to be one-ideaed and obstinate. But I have not yet seen your savage guilty of a deceit. Her heart has been stirred, and her heart, as you may judge, has force enough to be constant, though none can deny that it has ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... judicious observations with regard to the nature of siliceous substance, as a compound thing; no person reasons more distinctly in general, or sees more clearly the importance of his principles; yet, with regard to mineral concretions, how often has he been drawn thus inadvertently into improper generalization! I appeal to the analogy which, in this treatise, he has formed, between the stalactical concretions upon the surface of the earth, and the mineral concretions of siliceous substance. As an example of the great lights, and penetrating genius, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... everything they say from the beginning is false. According to your idea, there was never any hidden menace, or secret society, or Valley of Fear, or Boss MacSomebody, or anything else. Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to. They invent this theory to account for the crime. They then play up to the idea by leaving this bicycle in the park as proof of the existence of some outsider. The stain on the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... 4 varieties of 4 recognized elements and prefixed meta to the name of each, and a second form of platinum, that we named Pt. B. Thus we have tabulated in all 65 chemical elements, or chemical atoms, completing three of Sir William Crookes' lemniscates, sufficient for some amount of generalization. ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... which an apple falls to the ground. It was not incumbent on Newton to prove the impossibility of its being any other force; he was thought to have made out his point when he had simply shown that no other force need be supposed. We know the existence of other beings by generalization from the knowledge of our own; the generalization merely postulates that what experience shows to be a mark of the existence of something within the sphere of our consciousness, may be concluded to be a mark of the same thing ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob—the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in, with the downfall of feudalism, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... male or female, whom we should care to have long in the same house with us. A real lady seldom appears in these comedies, and—to approach a paradox—when she does she usually comes perilously close to being no lady; the same is usually true of the real gentleman. The generalization in the Epilogue of The Captives may well be made particular: "Plautus finds few plays such as this which make good men better." Yet there is little in his plays which makes men—to say nothing of good men—worse. ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... the most striking contrasts manifested in the Alpine tropical landscapes of South America, and the dreary wastes of the steppes in Northern Asia. Travels, undertaken in districts such as these, could not fail to encourage the natural tendency of my mind toward a generalization of views, and to encourage me to attempt, in a special work, to treat of the knowledge which we at present possess, regarding the sidereal and terrestrial phenomena of the Cosmos in their empirical relations. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... despairing and desperate masses of men. I venture to say that when the history of this tragic episode in the life of Russia is authoritatively written, it will be found that Jews have not been responsible for the most objectionable features of Bolshevism. Not even Trotzky need be excluded from this generalization, for, while it is true that his genius made Bolshevism the formidable military power it became, the brutal excesses of the Red Terror must be charged against such men as Peters, the Lett, ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... generalization is difficult. There is undoubtedly a much larger criminal element among the blacks than among the whites. There are proportionately more crimes against property, crimes of sensuality, crimes of violence. Materials are wanting for exact comparison, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to denote the material out of which all things were formed, as the Everlasting, the Divine. The idea of elevating an abstraction into a great first cause was certainly a long stride in philosophic generalization to be taken at that age of the world, following as it did so immediately upon such partial and childish ideas as that any single one of the familiar "elements" could be the primal cause of all things. It seems ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... as it may seem, Samuel had never before heard the phrase, "the survival of the fittest." And so now he was living over the experience of the thinking world of fifty or sixty years ago. What a marvelous generalization it was! What a range of life it covered! And how obvious it seemed—one could think of a hundred things, perfectly well known, which fitted into it. And yet he had never thought of it himself! The struggle for existence! The ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... they cannot partake of a part of greatness, for that will not make them great, etc.; nor can each object monopolise the whole. The only answer to this is, that 'partaking' is a figure of speech, really corresponding to the processes which a later logic designates by the terms 'abstraction' and 'generalization.' When we have described accurately the methods or forms which the mind employs, we cannot further criticize them; at least we can only criticize them with reference to their fitness as instruments of thought ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... {opp. 79} generality, generalization; universality; catholicity, catholicism; miscellany, miscellaneousness[obs3]; dragnet; common run; worldwideness[obs3]. everyone, everybody; all hands, all the world and his wife; anybody, N or M, all sorts. prevalence, run. V. be general &c. adj.; prevail, be going about, stalk abroad. render ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... for the double purpose of practising the form-ideas as well as the number-ideas. Arithmetic study and form-study can well grow up together, gradually merging into the combined algebra and geometry so far as students need to reach the higher levels of mathematical generalization. ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... this statement is merely a generalization of many made in the preceding lectures, the tenor of which any readers acquainted with my ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... declared, who commences with the points of the highest importance, as a plan of campaign, and afterward descends to the necessary details. Tactics, on the contrary, begins with details, and ascends to combinations and generalization necessary for the formation and ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... last word of scientific explanation of psychical facts? Can psychology really in this way reach an ideal similar to that of scientific astronomy or chemistry? Would the scientist of nature ever be satisfied with this kind of explanation, which is nothing but generalization of certain sequences? Does not the explanation of the naturalist contain an entirely different element? He does not merely want to say that this effect has sometimes been observed and that there is thus probability that it will come again, when similar causes are given. No, the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... water; so that the conviction is proximately established in the minds of all that water is invariably the product of these elements in certain proportions. But this proof does not establish the generalization as inevitably true, nor show that it is impossible for it to be otherwise. It is possible, in the nature of things, for us to conceive that the fluid which we call water may be produced from other constituents than oxygen or hydrogen, or ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... present, as we have seen, offers a most suggestive field and certifies to the importance of the manufacture of honest inks as necessary to the future enlightenment of society. That it has not been fully understood or even appreciated goes without saying; a proper generalization becomes possible only in the light of corroborative data and the experiences of ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... matter of principle, it recognizes itself as impotent and even absurd a priori, it knows that once in possession of the principle, it borrows from its light and becomes identified with it—an incomparable power of generalization. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... case of man, however, the operation of this theory of limitations has not as yet been so clearly observed. The laws governing our social life are not so clearly understood as to permit of a clear generalization. Still, the opinions, pleas, and judgments of society serve as boundaries which are none the less real for being intangible. When men or women err—that is, pass out from the sphere in which they are accustomed to move—it is not as if ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... been given to our knowledge of the fossil animals which dwelt on the earth in past ages. Now, though Owens researches were intimately connected with the great labours of Darwin, and afforded the latter material for his epoch-making generalization, yet Owen deliberately refused to accept the new doctrines. Like Tycho, he kept on rigidly accumulating his facts under the influence of a set of ideas as to the origin of living forms which are now universally admitted to be erroneous. If, therefore, we liken Darwin to Copernicus, and Owen ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... rational generalization, which I illustrated from the law of larceny, are shown in the other branches of the law, as well as in that of crime. Take the law of tort or civil liability for damages apart from contract and the like. Is ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... out much more than if they wrought it all. The world, too, has now accumulated a myriad handbooks of facts and compilations of statistics, which enable writers with a fondness for theory, like Buckle, to have all their material ready to spin into generalization. Then there is a popular education toward prolixity in the telegraphic part of newspapers. The associated press writers from Washington seem to be selected for their inability to be terse and pithy, and dribble out the simplest fact with pitiful iteration. The ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... disgusted him. Of mere animalism, he had none. Here in this widest essential, his nature marked its contrast with Traill. To admit the beast in every man would have been beyond him; simply because the admission of a generalization such as that, would most directly have implied himself. In Traill's concession of it, such an admission may easily be read. And this is the type of man, such as Devenish, most ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had concluded with the proposition that out of their two formulas de Gaultier had constructed an even profounder formula. The "Will-to-Live" of the one and the "Will-to- Power" of the other were, after all, only parts of de Gaultier's supreme generalization, the "Will-to-Illusion." ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the Office of the Secretary of Defense also used the familiar 291.2 classification to designate materials related to the subject of Negroes. (An exception to this generalization were the official papers of the secretary's office during the Forrestal period when a Navy file system was generally employed.) The most important materials on the subject of the Defense Department's racial interests are ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... talk, saw and heard a duck on the water, and said quack. Thereafter the child called, on the one hand, all birds and insects, on the other hand, all liquids, quack. Finally, it called all coins also quack, after having seen an eagle on a French sou. Thus the child came, by gradual generalization, to the point of designating a fly, wine, and a piece of money by the same onomatopoetic word, although only the first perception contained the characteristic that gave ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... may be made clearer by considering a genuinely-empirical generalization, such as 'All men are mortal.' It is plain that we believe this proposition, in the first place, because there is no known instance of men living beyond a certain age, and in the second place because there seem to be physiological grounds for thinking that an organism such ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... sensibility; the modes of their memory and forms of association, their intellectual processes, etc. But up to this time no conclusion has been drawn from these individual descriptions that would allow any generalization. Besides, has an experiment, in the strict sense of the word, ever been made at the "psychological moment"? I know of none. Would it be possible? Let us admit that by some happy chance the experimenter, using all ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... have little value unless translated into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number of students would try, for example, the plan of worship suggested ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... watched her father. A new light shone upon him, a new emotion disturbed him; perhaps that old hardness within was giving way. Ledwith had the poetic temperament, and the philosopher's power of generalization. A hint could open a grand horizon before him, and the cathedral in its solemn beauty was the hint. Of course, he could see it all, blind as he had been before. The Irish revolution worked fitfully, and exploded in a night, its achievement measured ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... candle—to the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions—in his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... at the future with sufficient accuracy to direct us in the present but by generalization from experience? Now, a departed spirit certainly has had a wider experience—sees more into other souls and their workings than we can possibly do while encumbered with these robes of clay—and consequently can make a juster generalization," said ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... with respect to their conclusions that in so far as they have the evidence, this or that conclusion seems to be justified. It may even be well to have them reach the conclusion in some parts of their work that there are not sufficient data available upon which to base a generalization, or that certain principles which are accepted as valid by some thinkers are questioned by others, and that the conclusions which are based upon principles which are not commonly accepted must always be stated by saying: it follows, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... principle, arrive at a logical conclusion, or be influenced by any other than a mean motive. The cordons bleus of the political cooks at Philadelphia were men admirably adapted for the petty intrigues of a local caucus, but by defect of nature profoundly unconscious of that simple process of generalization from a few plain premises by which the popular mind is guided in times like these, and upon questions which appeal to the moral instincts ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Jackson's to develop itself: if it was a retreat, to attack the column at the proper time; if a tactical flank movement, to allow it to be completed, and then thrust himself between the two wings of Lee's army, and beat them in detail. This admirable generalization lacked the necessary concomitant ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... lady was ready, he had conveyed them back again to the station, and they took the up-train. That was all he knew. The gentleman, if his opinion were asked, was "a scaly varmint." On inquiry, Maitland found that this wide moral generalization was based on the limited pour-boire which Mr. Lithgow had presented to his charioteer. Had the gentleman any luggage? Yes, he had a portmanteau, which he left in the cloak-room, and took away with him on his return ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... some form, and is therefore capable of being sensed, or known to be indicated by some trace. Identical inner states do not, of course, invariably have identical bodily concomitants, neither in all individuals alike, nor in the same individual at different times. Modern methods of generalization so invariably involve danger and incorrectness that one can not be too cautious in this matter. If generalization were permissible, psychical events would have to be at least as clear as physical processes, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... must be conceded that Mr. Mill lived at an unfortunate time. While his vigor and independence of thought led him to break loose from the trammels of the traditional philosophy, modern scientific generalization had not yet reached a stage favorable to his becoming a leader in developing the new philosophy. Still, whatever may be the merits of his philosophic theories, I believe that up to a quite recent time no work on scientific method appeared worthy to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... pursued. Yet, when rightly prosecuted, its benefits are wide, deep, and continuous, more than can be easily set forth—and they range through the whole scale, rising with the gradual expansion of the mind. It comprises subtle distinctions, close analysis, broad generalization, and that balancing of evidence which is the basis of all moral reasoning; it tracks the countless shadings of human thought, and their incarnation in the growths of speech, and seizes, in Comparative Philology, the universal affinities of the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... so captured by commercialism, to use Mr. Chapman's generalization, that we do not see a moral dereliction when business or educational interests are served thereby, although we are still shocked when the saloon interest ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... examples less extreme than those quoted, but the generalization was no doubt too broad and presented in some respects an erroneous conclusion. The only mode of getting at the number of voters was by the ballots cast at the general elections, and the relative ratio was varied by so many considerations that it did not correctly represent ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... great cities do. It is a forest of brick and stone of the most stupendous dimensions, and one traverses it in the same adventurous kind of way that he does woods and mountains. The maze and tangle of streets is something fearful, and any generalization of them a step not to be hastily taken. My experience heretofore had been that cities generally were fractions that could be greatly reduced, but London I found I could not simplify, and every morning for weeks, when I came out of ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... in pure research, in paths undirected to the market-place, that such theories have been thought out. Let us consider electricity as an aid to investigation conducted for its own sake. The chief physical generalization of our time, and of all time, the persistence of force, emerged to view only with the dawn of electric art. When it was observed that electricity might become heat, light, chemical action, or mechanical motion, that in turn any of these ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... from the hoopaa alone, who, it will be remembered, maintained the kneeling position, while, according to another authority, the olapa also took part in it. There is no reason for doubting the sincerity of both these witnesses. The disagreement probably arose from hasty generalization. One is reminded of the wise Hawaiian saw, already noted, "Do not think that your halau holds all ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... fecundity of his ideas often left him no time to test the validity of his principles. He enunciates one brilliant generalization after another. Sometimes he reveals the mind of a seer or poet, throwing out conclusions which are highly suggestive, on the face of them convincing, but which on examination prove untenable, or at best must be set down as unproven or needing qualification. But these were just the slag ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... played magnificently for all it was worth, as she could play it—she knew that now—it would be a rather wonderful life. They must be decidedly an exceptional pair of lovers, she thought. Certainly Madame Greville's generalization about Americans did not apply to them, and she was coming to suspect it did apply to the majority of her friends. She could have that life—safely, surely, as far as our poor mortality can be sure of anything. She had only ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... me just as teleologic and divinatory as those I have previously named. It assumes Evolution as a law of the universe, whereas in natural science it is only a limited generalization, inapplicable to most series of natural events, and therefore of uncertain continuance in any series. The optimism which it inculcates is insecure and belongs to deductive, not inductive, reasoning. The mechanical theory on which it is based lacks proof, ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... down to the most advanced political theory of our own day, there is on this point complete unanimity." He speaks of this subordination as a postulate "which is, indeed, of self-evident validity," as ranking "next in certainty to the postulates of exact science." As the result of his search for "a generalization which may habitually guide us when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous," he concludes: "This method is to compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself in the "other ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... upon him to assure me, that the feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in by speculative ontologists—the other, to those that result from the inductive process of searching into the physical arcana of nature. He was not aware of the bent of my mind, or his comparison might have been ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... fire and sword. Cities were destroyed by fire and sword. Hundreds of thousands of human beings fell by fire and sword. Even conversion to Christianity was attempted by fire and sword." One is reminded, in this passage, of Macaulay's method of giving vividness to his confident generalization of facts by emphatic repetitions of the same form of words. The repetition of "fire and sword," in this series of short, sharp sentences, ends in forcing the reality of what the words mean on the dullest imagination; and the climax is capped by affirming that "fire and sword" were the means ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... a type of the Australian world. The events recorded in these volumes represent the policy, modified slightly, which has everywhere prevailed. The author has however rarely attempted generalization, and has represented every fact in its independent colors. Thus an evil pursued to its source might have been avoidable by greater forethought and care, or it may have been the inevitable issue of a system upon the whole beneficial ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... the other hand, they radiated an atmosphere of manliness and the fair play that goes with manliness. They might gouge and rend in a fight—which was no more than natural; but he felt, somehow, that they would gouge and rend according to rule. This was the impression he got of them—a generalization tempered by knowledge that there was bound to be a certain ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... doctrine is often out of all proportion to the authority that fortifies it. There are sweeps of generalization quite permeable to objection, which yet find metaphysical support; there are irrefragable dogmas which the mind drops as futile and fruitless. It is recorded of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... by which we share each others' burdens, is to do as we would be done by. It is not a scientific principle, and does not admit of such generalization or interpretation that A can tell B what this law enjoins on B to do. Hence the relations of sympathy and sentiment are essentially limited to two persons only, and they cannot be made a basis for the relations of groups of persons, or for discussion ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... unrestrained talk to find that the delicious non sequitur, which is the charm of the grave-diggers' conversation in "Hamlet," is by no means obsolete. But who can write such a colloquy? It would be easier, we fancy, for a clever man to give a sketch of Lord Bacon, with all his rapid and profound generalization, than to follow the slow and tortuous mental processes of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... mind that the concepts of the instincts and fundamental tendencies of human nature, as thus enumerated, are products of abstraction and generalization—are general notions gathered from the numberless concrete instances of desire and will furnished by our observation—we are forced to realize that the objects which individual men set before themselves in desiring and willing are really ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the Dreamer," the artistic typification of many souls through which the great Ghetto dream has passed. Artistic truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena. Time and Space are only the conditions through which spiritual facts straggle. Hence I have here and there permitted myself liberties with these categories. Have I, for instance, misplaced the moment of Spinoza's obscure ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Leaving all further generalization about friendly visiting for the last chapter, in the following pages my point of departure will be the organization of the poor man's home rather than the organization of charity. The head of the family as citizen, employee, husband, and father; the wife as homemaker; ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... and it is not opened to him; death comes to him—also without his choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source of an enjoyment ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... had been originally formed regular, and which shows the use as well as means for the formation of our mountains. Here illustration and confirmation of the theory may be found in the examination of nature; and natural appearances may receive that explanation which the generalization of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the formation ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... 1748). The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. When Madame du Deffand said that its title ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the abstract principles of jurisprudence, with a richness and ethical fulness that more than compensate for their lack of dry legal detail. Bacon seems indeed to have been a lawyer of the first order, with a keen scientific insight into the bearings of isolated facts and a power of generalization which admirably fitted him for the self-imposed task, unfortunately never completed, of digesting or codifying the chaotic mass of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... they were calculated to prevent the Jews from any chance of adopting the manners and customs of the peoples around them; and the Indians, having had similar views, naturally adopted similar means. Such then is a brief generalization of the causes which led to caste laws, which were, no doubt, carried in some instances to a ridiculous length, but which were founded in common sense, and were admirably adapted to carry into effect the opinions ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... intense suffering Lanier impressed her favorably. "It was refreshing," she says, "to listen to a professor of literature who was something more than a 'raconteur' and something different from a bibliophile, who had, indeed, risen to the level of generalization and employed the method of a philosopher. . . . [His] face [was] very pale and delicate, with finely chiseled features, dark, clustering hair, parted in the middle, and beard after the manner of the Italian school of art. . . . He sits not very reposefully in his professorial armchair, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... consider the stars from more general statistical points of view, it may therefore be of interest first to make ourselves familiar with these well-known stars, strongly emphasizing, however, the exceptional character of these stars, and carefully avoiding any generalization from the attributes we ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... they meant "Chance;" "God acts," when they meant "Instinct" or "Sense;" and "God is every where," when they meant "the Soul of Nature." The Almighty is something infinitely different from a principle, or a centre of action, or a quality, or a generalization of phenomena. If, then, by the word, you do but mean a Being who keeps the world in order, who acts in it, but only in the way of general Providence, who acts towards us but only through what are ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... are made to express their thoughts in view of the waterfall. Apoet cries, "Ye gods, what a hell of waters;" atradesman, "away with the rock;" aBriton complains of the "confounded noise," and so on. It is plain that the word suffered a generalization ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... established facts, so as to draw most valuable moral instruction. History is a boundless field of inquiry. No man can master it, in all its departments and periods. What he gains in minute details, he is apt to lose in generalization. If he attempts to embody too much learning, he may be deficient in originality; if he would say every thing, he is apt to be dry; if he elaborates too much, he loses life. Society, too, requires different kinds and styles of history,—history for students, history for ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... The one generalization that I have thus far drawn from the investigation—namely, that the optical illusions are not reversed in passing from the field of touch, and that we therefore have a safe warrant for the conclusion that sight and touch do function alike—has ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... do nothin' else but! Every word in their language is a high-order generalization. Hroosha, live-thing. Noosha, bad-thing. Dhishta, thing-to-eat. Want me to go on? There are only seventy-nine more ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... work on "The Beautiful, True, and Good" he raises the science of aesthetics to its highest dignity. Lamennais (1782-1854) exhibits in his writings various phases of religious thought, ending in rationalism. Comte (1798-1857), in his "Positive Philosophy," shows power of generalization and force of logic, though tending to atheism and socialism. De Tocqueville and Chevalier are distinguished in political science, the former particularly for his able work on "Democracy in America." Renan ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... narrated, except so far as they elucidate some national or local habit; and no such habits and customs have been noted unless they could be referred to some particular branch of our populations; for the object has been specification rather than generalization, the indication of certain Cornubian, Kentish, or Caledonian peculiarities rather than of British ones. At the same time, the fact that all the occupants of the British Islands are referrible to the great Keltic stock, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... scientific inquiry to a remarkable conjunction of natural gifts and conditions. There was the teeming wealth of constructive imagination united with the sleepless critical spirit which shrank from no test of audacity; there was the most powerful impulse to generalization coupled with the sharpest faculty for descrying and distinguishing the finest shades of phenomenal peculiarity; there was the religion of Hellas, which afforded complete satisfaction to the requirements of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... he really did in definite sets of circumstances, and what practical objects he had in view. The average European reader, not having specific facts and places under his eye, can only conceive from this rough generalization, and from the usual anecdotal tit-bits told about him, that Confucius was an exceedingly timid, prudent, benevolent, and obsequious old gentleman who, as indeed his rival Lao-tsz hinted to him, was something like a superior dancing-master ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... and unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature that you could fix upon as a positive test: the uncomfortable and unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where people lived among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where they had none. A broad generalization, you will say! Perhaps a little too broad; yet, in all sobriety, it will come truer than you think. Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some virtue in it; but in the iron railing none. There is, first, your castle rampart of stone—somewhat too grand ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... active in children, those of 'sensation, perception, observation, and simple memory,' adding, for mature years, those of 'abstraction, the higher powers of reason, imagination, philosophical memory, generalization,' etc. But that any one of all these is in the true psychological sense, a faculty—save, it may be, in the single instance of imagination—we shall decidedly question; and Mr. Calkins will see by the intent of his very lessons, that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... is based on certain facts which, taken in their collective capacity, mean the truth which is expressed in the formula. A higher generalization embraces those which are simpler, and unites by its expression the truths which they contain into the formula of one great truth. This process goes on, rising constantly higher and higher, the generalizations of the ascending series becoming more comprehensive, and the convergence of all the diversified ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of a Universal Soul, to have been the instinctive creed of any savage people or rude race of men. To imagine all nature with all its apparently independent parts, as forming one consistent whole, and as itself a unit, required an amount of experience and a faculty of generalization not possessed by the rude uncivilized mind, and is but a step below the idea of a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... mind of the farmer, the difficulty is to find the typical farmer's mind that north, south, east, and west will be accepted as standard. In our science there is perhaps at present no place where generalization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing concrete facts into general statements that do violence ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... misconception a sufficient flavoring of truth to make the erroneous notion pass as true. At bottom, the human soul loves truth, nor willingly believes or receives a lie. Our intellectual sin is synecdoche, the putting a part truth for a whole truth. Generalization is dangerous intellectual exercise. Our premise is insufficient, and our conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion of a decayed house. Trace the origin of this idea of a poet's non-sanity. He was not ordinary, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... movement of humanity has received conspicuous interpretation by Darwin, who by most patient investigation discovered at least approximately the path by which man has been developed out of the lower animal forms. Spencer has shown, by a vast generalization of facts, the working throughout all realms of existence known to man of certain common tendencies—of variation and new and specialized formation. Apart from all debatable theories of psychology and metaphysics, he and a host of other students in the same direction have discovered clews by ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... myself in the society of these petrified persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions. And then there was the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... tells us that "we have every reason to believe, at least in the generality of cases, that a nebula is nothing more than a cluster of stars."[33] Sir David Brewster is equally explicit: "It was certainly a rash generalization to maintain that nebulae differed essentially from clusters of stars, because existing telescopes could not resolve them. The very first application of Lord Rosse's telescopes to the heavens overturned the hypothesis; and with such ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... between were a period of development and change, a development in all that regards technique, a change in national ideals and in the artist's attitude toward life and toward his art. A quick survey of the period, if so hasty a generalization permits correctness of statement, will help us in the understanding of the craft ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... workshops and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of endeavouring to make himself acquainted with the various resources of mechanical art, he was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalization to which his other pursuits had naturally given rise. It should be observed, that he has not attempted to offer a complete enumeration of all the mechanical principles which regulate the application of machinery to arts and manufactures, but he has endeavoured to present ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... said Mrs. Heth, who held that any kind of generalization constituted good talk. She added: "Who are all these people? ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... impression of the mere objector. Indeed, I felt this so strongly that I had written of him as "the great, but factious, leader of the opposition." In proofreading I struck out "factious;" as needless, and as a generalization on insufficient premises. ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... thought that, but he was not prepared to endorse Timmins's following generalization that it didn't much matter what name a man worshipped under. It penetrated down through the aforesaid rubble of disintegration and touched native granite. Stiffly enough he returned that Presbyterianism was good ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this that led poetry into that slough of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence. But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... commonplaces one frequently finds the generalization that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human nature. If there be some degree of truth in this reflection, Publius ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... home work as was necessary to determine the names and affinities of the species, Mr. Mill never penetrated deeply into the philosophy of botany, so as to take rank among those who have, like Herbert Spencer, advanced that science by original work either of experiment or generalization, or have entered into the battle-field where the great biological questions of the day are being fought over. The writer of this notice well remembers meeting, a few years since, the (at that time) parliamentary logician, with his trousers turned ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... its blessings, has been, and remains, consistent and strong. Indeed, we miss the significance of that support if we do not realize that Irish Home Rule is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of the various parts of the Empire. Let us add the wider generalization that it is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of all the English-speaking races. It may be fairly computed that a fifth of the present white population of the United States is of Irish blood.[40] American opinion, as a whole, so far as it is directed towards Ireland and away ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... perceived evidently that this generalization was not quite applicable to all the gods, and he goes on to say: "Or, it may be, these gods are all distinct beings, for the praises addressed to them are distinct, and their appellations also." This is quite right. It is the very object of most of these divine names to impart distinct individuality ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... is a charming book, with illuminating passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosity of dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, either of Spain ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... results, as the subject is beyond the domain of my special studies. The author has collected a great number of observations in order to avoid erroneous conclusions. He warns the reader against a hasty generalization, which attributes without proof certain customs of living savage tribes to ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... without difference, no one can hold it in more utter contempt than I do; but if, on the contrary, he means the power of analysis and combination—that power which reduces the most complex idea into its elements, which traces causes to their first principle, and, by the power of generalization and combination, unites the whole in one harmonious system—then, so far from deserving contempt, it is the highest attribute of the human mind. It is the power which raises man above the brute—which distinguishes his faculties from mere sagacity, ...
— Remarks of Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina on the bill to prevent the interference of certain federal officers in elections: delivered in the Senate of the United States February 22, 1839 • John C. Calhoun
... the maxims of Sun Tzu, it is that their essence has been distilled from a large store of personal observation and experience. They reflect the mind not only of a born strategist, gifted with a rare faculty of generalization, but also of a practical soldier closely acquainted with the military conditions of his time. To say nothing of the fact that these sayings have been accepted and endorsed by all the greatest captains ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... her do not agree together perfectly, and the priority in time must be assigned to the latter. The idea that the world of gods and men and material things issued out of the womb of the abyss is a philosophic generalization that is more naturally assigned to a period ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... important and very precious, does not produce the great events in the life of mankind. These are produced by the kind of idealization that corresponds to what we have called in the mathematical prototype, limit-begotten generalization—a kind of idealization that is peculiar to creative genius and that, not content to pursue ideals within established types of excellences, creates new types thereof in science, in art, in philosophy, in letters, in ethics, in education, in social order, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... from the dawn of recorded time up to, say, midnight, August 4, 1919, will continue to be observed on August 5, 1919. How, except by relying on the truth of some principle which does not depend itself on the validity of 'generalization', can we tell that it is even slightly probable that the nature of things will not change suddenly at the moment of midnight between August 4 and August 5, 1919? What is called 'inductive' science certainly has 'pulled ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... consequences of actions. Mankind were said by him to act rightly when they knew what they were doing, or, in the language of the Gorgias, 'did what they would.' He seems to have been the first who maintained that the good was the useful (Mem.). In his eagerness for generalization, seeking, as Aristotle says, for the universal in Ethics (Metaph.), he took the most obvious intellectual aspect of human action which occurred to him. He meant to emphasize, not pleasure, but the calculation of pleasure; neither is he arguing ...
— Philebus • Plato
... With this plain generalization in mind, all further desirable knowledge upon the subject can be had by following the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the author of seven quartos on mathematics, showing very great power of generalization. He was also deep in the transcendental philosophy,[572] and had the Absolute at his fingers' ends. All this knowledge was rendered useless by a persuasion that he had greatly advanced beyond the whole world, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... genus to another species until no further subdivisions can be made. This last indivisible species is termed the infima species. Every genus may be a species to another genus until a point is reached where no further generalization may be made or the summum genus is attained. In the Patent Office classification of the useful arts, the summum genus is useful arts. The summum genus of the plastic arts would be plastics. The ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... great discovery when it established the fact that there was a continuous belt of languages from Iceland to Ceylon which were the variant forms of one mother-tongue, the Indo-European; but it must prepare itself for a still wider generalization. There is abundant proof—proof with which pages might be filled—that there was a still older mother-tongue, from which Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic were all derived—the language of Noah, the language ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... existence of two kinds of sporangia, unilocular and plurilocular, among Phaeosporeae, lies in the fact that unilocular sporangia are for asexual reproduction, and that plurilocular sporangia are gametangia—potential or actual. It must, however, be remembered that so important a generalization is as yet supported upon a somewhat narrow base of observation. Moreover, for the important family of the Laminariaceae only unilocular sporangia are known to occur; and for many species of other families, only one or other kind, and in some ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has led him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of art. Having, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... part and parcel of this generalization. Generation by generation and century by century it has professed and proclaimed the advantages of universality while it yielded to the persistent demands of nationalism, regionalism and localism. Throughout the latter years of the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... external properties and relations of matter, and less upon those which, though they are more extensive and general in their nature, and, therefore, more suitable, in a strictly-scientific point of view, for the foundations of a system, are less apparent, and require higher powers of generalization and abstraction; and are, therefore, less in accordance with the genius and ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... character of the enemy of the gods. The two conceptions of her do not agree together perfectly, and the priority in time must be assigned to the latter. The idea that the world of gods and men and material things issued out of the womb of the abyss is a philosophic generalization that is more naturally assigned to a period ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which present the most striking contrasts manifested in the Alpine tropical landscapes of South America, and the dreary wastes of the steppes in Northern Asia. Travels, undertaken in districts such as these, could not fail to encourage the natural tendency of my mind toward a generalization of views, and to encourage me to attempt, in a special work, to treat of the knowledge which we at present possess, regarding the sidereal and terrestrial phenomena of the Cosmos in their empirical ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... that have never entered his head. Even in studies more immediately connected with obvious everyday life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly remarkable how little he possesses the power of generalization and inference. His elaborate lists of facts are imposing typographically, but are not even formally important, while his reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of course, Kenelm could not at a glance comprehend in detail. But as the mind of a man accustomed to generalization is marvellously quick in forming a sound judgment, whereas a mind accustomed to dwell only on detail is wonderfully slow at arriving at any judgment at all, and when it does, the probability is that it will arrive at a wrong one, Kenelm judged correctly when he came to this conclusion: ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it. Husband and wife come to look alike ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... sagacity of your judgment.' Oh, I've read his notes; or you would agree if it were Domaisen, the rhetoric teacher, who is much impressed—those are his very words, are they not, gentlemen?—with 'your powers of generalization, which' he says, are even 'as granite heated at a volcano.' But as it is only dear old Bauer"—and d'Hebonville shrugged his shoulders significantly. "Well, and what about 'dear old Bauer,' as you call him?" cried Napoleon; ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... it up with mannerisms, and so turn out much more than if they wrought it all. The world, too, has now accumulated a myriad handbooks of facts and compilations of statistics, which enable writers with a fondness for theory, like Buckle, to have all their material ready to spin into generalization. Then there is a popular education toward prolixity in the telegraphic part of newspapers. The associated press writers from Washington seem to be selected for their inability to be terse and pithy, and dribble out the simplest fact with pitiful ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... it had so often been thought before, because it was in the nature of things to think it of every woman, because his wife was so eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... state in a civil sense, that although there was a name for a common soldier (or sentinel, as he was termed by our ancestors)—viz. miles gregarius, or miles manipularis—there was none for an officer; that is to say, each several rank of officers had a name; but there was no generalization to express the idea of an officer abstracted from its several species or classes.] It cannot much surprise us that this department of the public service should gradually have gone to ruin or decay. Under the senate and people, under the auspices of those awful symbols—letters more significant ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... misgivings, played magnificently for all it was worth, as she could play it—she knew that now—it would be a rather wonderful life. They must be decidedly an exceptional pair of lovers, she thought. Certainly Madame Greville's generalization about Americans did not apply to them, and she was coming to suspect it did apply to the majority of her friends. She could have that life—safely, surely, as far as our poor mortality can be sure of anything. She had only to reach out ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the ultimate judgment of history Marx will have a place in social science analogous with that of Galileo in physical science."[19] In exile, and often desperate poverty, Marx worked out with infinite care the scientific basis of the generalization—first given to the world in the Communist Manifesto—that social and political institutions are the product of economic forces. In all periods there have been antagonistic economic classes whose relative power is determined by struggles between them. "Freedman ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... abstractions, no thought, no handing down of knowledge. Although all that is mental has its origin, in the last analysis, in simple sensations, its development requires emancipation from the sensuous, and language is the means for freeing ourselves from the pressure of sensations by the generalization and combination of ideas. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... substance, as a compound thing; no person reasons more distinctly in general, or sees more clearly the importance of his principles; yet, with regard to mineral concretions, how often has he been drawn thus inadvertently into improper generalization! I appeal to the analogy which, in this treatise, he has formed, between the stalactical concretions upon the surface of the earth, and the mineral concretions of siliceous substance. As an example of the great lights, and penetrating genius, of this assiduous ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... sweated his 'hands,' the parson who consigned his parishioners to hell, the peer who rode roughshod—all were equally odious to him. He thought of people as individuals, and it was, as it were, by accident that he had conceived the class generalization which he had fired back at Miltoun from Mrs. Noel's window. Sanguine, accustomed to queer environments, and always catching at the moment as it flew, he had not to fight with the timidities and irritations of a nervous ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... primitive times to the present, as we have seen, offers a most suggestive field and certifies to the importance of the manufacture of honest inks as necessary to the future enlightenment of society. That it has not been fully understood or even appreciated goes without saying; a proper generalization becomes possible only in the light of corroborative data and the experiences of ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... rendered to the State by the dozens of knights made every year, while he can see very well that the men of real distinction, whom he does know, never get any distinctions at all. These difficulties perplex and irritate him. Probably he goes home with a hasty generalization. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... though they are more extensive and general in their nature, and, therefore, more suitable, in a strictly-scientific point of view, for the foundations of a system, are less apparent, and require higher powers of generalization and abstraction; and are, therefore, less in accordance with the genius and spirit ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... avoid a pedantic specialism and let each stray into the other's province whenever he thinks fit. But the fact remains that they are primarily concerned with different things: and that each is most to be trusted when he is upon his own ground. When, therefore, the economist indulges in a generalization about psychology, even when he gives it as a reason for an economic proposition, in nine cases out of ten the economics will not depend upon the psychology; the psychology will rather be an inference (and very possibly ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... Nature; he was capable of delicate handling and minute execution, but he resolutely cast them aside lest any idol should interfere between him and his new religion. There may be traced a lingering likeness in his landscapes to those of Rubens; but this arose more from his generalization of details, his sinking the parts in the whole, than to any imitation of the great Fleming. It is like the recollection of some sweet melody which the musician weaves into his theme, all unconscious that it is a memory and not a ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Diaspora and Nationalism broke out with new fury. Again we see Diaspora Judaism pitched against Palestinian Judaism, and Religion against Nationalism. Reason has given way to passion, and discrimination to generalization. The Jews of the new Palestine, who have given of their life-blood to the rejuvenation of our homeland, are sweepingly declared to be "anarchists," while, on the other hand, American Jews who, with single-hearted ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... establish certain mathematical or GEOMETRIC laws of cerebral action, concerning the direction and mode in which all faculties act upon the mind and body, which laws constitute the BASIC PHILOSOPHY of Anthropology, the highest generalization of science. These laws constitute a compact system of science, lying at the basis of all psychology, as the bony skeleton is the basis of the human form. These laws being easily demonstrated, and giving great clearness and systematic beauty ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... order of procedure of a general when war is first declared, who commences with the points of the highest importance, as a plan of campaign, and afterward descends to the necessary details. Tactics, on the contrary, begins with details, and ascends to combinations and generalization necessary for the formation and handling of ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Mrs. Browning's implication seems to be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, Echoes; Olive Dargan, Ye Who ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... opposite characteristics, which sometimes, indeed, served to neutralize each other. An acute and subtile perception was often clouded by mysticism and abstraction. They combined a habit of classification and generalization, with a marvellous fondness for detail; a vivacious fancy with a patience of application, that a German of our day might envy; and, while in fiction they launched boldly into originality, indeed extravagance, they were content in philosophy to tread ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... too high for me. I have no skill in the flights of speculation. I take no pleasure in the enunciation of principles. To my restricted vision, placed as I am upon the earth, isolated facts obtrude themselves with a capricious particularity which defies my powers of generalization. And that, perhaps, is the reason why I attached myself to the party to which I have the honour to belong. For it is, I think, the party which sees things as they are; as they are, that is, to mere human vision. Remenham, in his haste, has called us the party of reaction. ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum of all the ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables, and bodies of animals and men. This creed is popularly expressed in the sentence so often heard, "God is everything, and everything is God." But this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity—this exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving stones to the same level of divinity—by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so impartial. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the final end, and the person meant to make use of the thing produced. It further is matter of experience that whatever consists of non-sentient matter is dependent on, or ruled by, a single intelligent principle. The former generalization is exemplified by the case of jars and similar things, and the latter by a living body in good health, which consists of non-intelligent matter dependent on an intelligent principle. And that the body is an effected thing follows from its consisting of parts.—Against ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. When Madame ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and condenser. There are still other considerations, such as water supply, condition of circulating water, style of pump, etc., which must all necessarily have an obvious bearing upon the settlement of this question; so that generalization is somewhat out of place, the final design in all cases depending solely upon ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... supposed to be above such trickery. Yet I read a few days ago, not as a single example, but only as the last I happen to remember, an article by a distinguished American professor, protesting with great moderation that an important scientific generalization which he published in 1902 had been annexed, without acknowledgment, by a versatile and adroit professor in the University of Berlin—an acquaintance of my own—in the year 1906; and it was not until 1910 that the latter was made to confess his guilt, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... intellect. The practical man rarely seeks wide generalizations because the truth of these and their value can only be demonstrated through the course of long periods of time, during which no good to the individual himself is seen. Besides which, the practical man knows that the wide generalization may be an error. Practical aims are usually immediate aims, whereas the aims of intellect are essentially remote and may project beyond the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me. But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, "You need not accuse your German blood, for I have lived long enough in my American's Paradise to know that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this particular respect, with the addition of a certain goblin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... see, Watson. You are sketching out a theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false. According to your idea, there was never any hidden menace, or secret society, or Valley of Fear, or Boss MacSomebody, or anything else. Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to. They invent this theory to account for the crime. They then play up to the idea by leaving this bicycle in the park as proof of the existence of some outsider. The stain ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... no wise contributed to what he foresaw and, so to speak, prophesied—the growing stress of the struggle for life in domains political, social, financial, industrial, the coming of uncrowned kings greater in puissance than monarchs of yore, the reign of not one despot but many, the generalization of intrigue, the replacement of ancient disorders by others of equal or increased virulence and harder to remedy, hundred-headed hydras to combat, most difficult of herculean tasks. The reflection of all this in the Comedy was calculated to impress at its hour, and the hour ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... human beauty as it gladdens our daily path. Byron, who often erred, erred not in saying, I've seen more living beauty, ripe and real, than all the nonsense of their stone ideal. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has induced him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of Art. Having, I say, felt its truth here. For the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations, than the sentiment of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... original sin in the Christian sense, and explains the vice and virtue of mankind by the actions of the souls of men in a state of pre-existence. No signs or miracles are referred to in the account of 'the just man'; and that it was intended as a generalization is evident from the change of the singular into the plural number in the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... by the necessity for generalization! The word PROPERTY has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say THE PROPERTIES OF THE TRIANGLE or ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the instinctive creed of any savage people or rude race of men. To imagine all nature with all its apparently independent parts, as forming one consistent whole, and as itself a unit, required an amount of experience and a faculty of generalization not possessed by the rude uncivilized mind, and is but a step below the idea of a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature that you could fix upon as a positive test: the uncomfortable and unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where people lived among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where they had none. A broad generalization, you will say! Perhaps a little too broad; yet, in all sobriety, it will come truer than you think. Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some virtue in it; but in the iron railing none. There is, first, your castle rampart of stone—somewhat too ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... how brief—of the medical profession during the century, however, should include mention of a man who, although not a full-time professional physician, proves to be the exception to Dr. Blanton's generalization about the prominence of individual medical men and the quality of medical practice during the late 1600's. This man, the Reverend John Clayton, is a noteworthy example of the intellectual level an individual could attain and maintain while living in ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... power, and as such, if, in a matter of principle, it recognizes itself as impotent and even absurd a priori, it knows that once in possession of the principle, it borrows from its light and becomes identified with it—an incomparable power of generalization. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... not, indeed, to ask forgiveness for turning Annie out of school, but to beg permission to transplant her one day to a home of his own. Whatever was said, we suspect Annie might have served as "an instance in point" for that rather broad generalization ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... ridiculous and fanciful, but they were calculated to prevent the Jews from any chance of adopting the manners and customs of the peoples around them; and the Indians, having had similar views, naturally adopted similar means. Such then is a brief generalization of the causes which led to caste laws, which were, no doubt, carried in some instances to a ridiculous length, but which were founded in common sense, and were admirably adapted to carry into effect the opinions of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... predicate a considerable group of people, with such organization and division of activities as to guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on. Sex is a group problem. Considering the mutual interdependence and the diversity of activities in human society, to make the generalization that one sex is superior to the other is on a par with saying that roots and branches are superior to trunks and leaves. It is sheer foolishness. Yet oceans of ink have flowed in attempts to establish one or the other ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... altogether for John Ballantyne's benefit. The author afterwards spoke of them as "rather flimsily written,"[200] but we may surmise that to the fact that they were not the result of special study is due something of their ripeness of reflection and breadth of generalization. "They contain a large assemblage of manly and sagacious remarks on human life and manners,"[201] wrote ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... still pursue mineralogy for its own sake; but, generally, our mineralogists have turned geologists, studying rocks on a large scale, instead of their individual constituents, and vieing with their brethren in Europe in bold and successful generalization, and in the application of physical science to their subject. Maclure was one of the pioneers, and Eaton and Silliman contributed much to the stock of knowledge. This school has given rise to the great geological surveys made or progressing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... paid women disgusted him. Of mere animalism, he had none. Here in this widest essential, his nature marked its contrast with Traill. To admit the beast in every man would have been beyond him; simply because the admission of a generalization such as that, would most directly have implied himself. In Traill's concession of it, such an admission may easily be read. And this is the type of man, such as Devenish, most ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... times greater than those which fall to the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight—the delight in fable and story—to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic appeals is indicative of a stage of intellectual development to which only a small minority even of our so-called cultivated public attains. It is therefore a minority of a minority which he addresses, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... told that a man who writes pure Spencerian can never do anything else. This, however, is a hasty generalization, put forth by a party who wrote a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... there were allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming from ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... exhibits widely different phenomena as to continuity and no generalization is of any value. In gold deposits of this type in West Australia, Colorado, and Nevada, continuity far beyond a sampled face must be received with the greatest skepticism. Much the same may be said of most copper replacements in limestone. On the other hand ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... meditation of general injustice—when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning, (for we will now confess the case our own), an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generalization! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand the identical S——, in whose favour we had suspected him of the contumacy. Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... thought out, admirably written, and always stimulating in its generalization and in the perspectives it ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... than imitated, is in error. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has led him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of art. Having, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations than the sentiments of his art yields the artist. He not only believes, but ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the same generalization expressed to the modern student under the term 'Balkan Peninsula,' extinguishing every ray and trace of ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... are at present," she said, "it is true. We live under man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we're underpaid and sweated—it's dreadful to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went on, conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... folkways dominate the societal life. Then they seem true and right, and arise into mores as the norm of welfare. Thence are produced faiths, ideas, doctrines, religions, and philosophies, according to the stage of civilization and the fashions of reflection and generalization. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... zealous because the attitude of the public and of the courts was more friendly to the accused witch. This explanation is at best, however, nothing more than a suggestion. We have not the material for confident generalization. ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... grave. Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out. A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of your muddy, stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the reports of the physicians and specialists of all countries reveals the baffling nature of the disease. These leprosy specialists are unanimous on no one phase of the disease. They do not know. In the past they rashly and dogmatically generalized. They generalize no longer. The one possible generalization that can be drawn from all the investigation that has been made is that leprosy is FEEBLY CONTAGIOUS. But in what manner it is feebly contagious is not known. They have isolated the bacillus of leprosy. They can determine by bacteriological ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... ethical fulness that more than compensate for their lack of dry legal detail. Bacon seems indeed to have been a lawyer of the first order, with a keen scientific insight into the bearings of isolated facts and a power of generalization which admirably fitted him for the self-imposed task, unfortunately never completed, of digesting or codifying the chaotic mass of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... supposed. To do this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence. But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... us, but is now gradually supplanting the old one? Did the nose aquiline largely represent class, and does the phenomenon of the new semi-straight, semi-nothing nose represent the intrusion of mass? Against this timid and, it may be, spurious generalization, one may pit the working-man with the nose of a duke, and the young colonial ruler with the unformed, delicate feature of a school-girl. So we accept the fact that in our own ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Sefton, but the Secretary remained calm, composed and smiling, listening to Harley with the same air of interested curiosity shown by the others. Prescott saw it all with a flash of intuition; the Secretary had given Harley a hint, just a vague generalization, within the confines of truth, but without any names—enough to make those concerned uneasy, but not enough to put the power in any hands save those of the Secretary. Harley himself confirmed this by continuing the subject, though somewhat uncertainly, as if ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Buckle signally failed. His fundamental conceptions, upon which reposes the whole edifice of his labor, are sciolistic assumptions caught up in his youth from Auguste Comte and other one-eyed seers of modern France; his generalization, multitudinous and imposing, is often of the card-castle description, and tumbles at the touch of an inquisitive finger; and his cobweb logic, spun chiefly out of his wishes rather than his understanding, is indeed facile and ingenious, but of a strength to hold only flies. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... individual facts are affirmed or denied at once. But a general proposition is not merely a compendious form for recording and preserving in the memory a number of particular facts, all of which have been observed. Generalization is not a process of mere naming, it is also a process of inference. From instances which we have observed, we feel warranted in concluding, that what we found true in those instances holds in all similar ones—past, present, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... that neither the pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while, the righteous ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... upon it as a thing longed for. For, to those advanced students who have kept well abreast of the chemical tide, it offers a calm philosophy. To those others, youngest of the class, who have emerged from the schools since new methods have prevailed, it presents a generalization, drawing to its use all the data, the relations of which the newly-fledged fact-seeker may but dimly perceive without its aid.... To the old chemists, Prof. Cooke's treatise is like a message from beyond the mountain. They have heard of changes in the science; the clash of the battle of old and ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... The most comprehensive generalization by which we may hope to arrive at an idea of the business of New York is that which includes in tabular form the statistics of the chief institutions which employ ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... suggested that the author had been interrupted, or convinced of the futility of proceeding, with her pen in the air.... Oh, yes, Ralph had come in at that point. She scored that sheet very effectively, and, choosing a fresh one, began at a great rate with a generalization upon the structure of human society, which was a good deal bolder than her custom. Ralph had told her once that she couldn't write English, which accounted for those frequent blots and insertions; but she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... in the other all those of the second class, we should make this discovery, that government-forming animals are those which by nature live together in companies, while the other class as a rule live apart. The generalization reached is, that only gregarious animals form governments. We would discover upon further investigation that the greater the interdependence of the individuals, the ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... one frequently finds the generalization that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human nature. If there be some degree ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... was modified, and the reasons why and the conditions under which Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered. The suction of fluids was brought under the general law of mechanical pressure. The doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fair generalization and expression of the facts of this kind that up to that time had been observed. A new fact was observed which would not fall under the rule. The examination of this fact led to the old rule being superseded; and Science advanced ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob—the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reported by his wife to have said once, "give me the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue. There is a way to take a fool; but a rogue is smart and slippery." This was an airy generalization drawn from the particular case of Captain MacWhirr's honesty, which, in itself, had the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay. On the other hand, Mr. Jukes, unable to generalize, unmarried, and unengaged, was in the habit of opening his heart after another fashion to an ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... therefore, it will rain tonight." While we do not commonly think in complete syllogisms, it is often convenient to cast our reasoning in this form to test its validity. For example, a fallacy lurks in the generalization, "Lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain." Hence the conclusion is of ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... and to defend Shakespeare against the familiar accusations of barbaric crudity and formlessness. In surveying the field, it was likewise incumbent upon him to demonstrate in what respects the classic drama differed from the independently developed modern play, and his still useful generalization regards antique art as limited, clear, simple, and perfected—as typified by a work of sculpture; whereas romantic art delights in mingling its subjects—as a painting, which embraces many objects and looks out into the widest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the greatest men of all time, did more to advance and prove the theory of evolution than anybody else who ever lived. This he accomplished by virtue of the highest gifts of observation, experiment, and generalization. His truthfulness, patience, and calmness of judgment have never been exceeded by mortal. His works are published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, together with his "Life and Letters," edited by his son Francis. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... himself examine all the specific instances, he cannot consider all the illustrations which might support his position, but he must be careful of a too hasty generalization. Having talked with a dozen returned soldiers he may not declare that all American army men are glad to be out of France, for had he investigated a little further he might have found an equal number ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... told absurdities; he knocks and it is not opened to him; death comes to him—also without his choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source of an enjoyment nothing ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... any exactness in money and added to the sum of an average week's income. What is the worth to a labourer of the crops he grows in his garden? It depends, obviously, on the man's skill, and the size of the garden, and the clemency of the seasons—matters, all of them, in which any attempt at generalization must be received with suspicion. All that can be said with certainty is that most of the cottages in the valley have gardens, and that most of the cottagers are diligent to cultivate them. But when the circumstances are considered, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... or known to be indicated by some trace. Identical inner states do not, of course, invariably have identical bodily concomitants, neither in all individuals alike, nor in the same individual at different times. Modern methods of generalization so invariably involve danger and incorrectness that one can not be too cautious in this matter. If generalization were permissible, psychical events would have to be at least as clear as physical processes, but that is not admissible for many reasons. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... from Cumberland County and New Jersey, and one each from Dauphin County and from Orange County in New York. Nine of these settlers, incidentally, were Scotch-Irish. Although these data are insufficient for any valid generalization, they do conform to the characteristic migratory trends indicated ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... brachycephalic is "Belasco" and the next "Akop," the two of unusual stature. These men are less brachycephalic than the Igorot measured at Ambuklao and Kayapa, but the numbers in each case are too few to permit generalization. The group is platyrhinian for the greater part, four only being mesorhinian. On the whole this is a very homogeneous group of men. With two exceptions all are of about the same low stature, all mesaticephalic, all platyrhinian or nearly so. The ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... In regard to morality, generalization is difficult. There is undoubtedly a much larger criminal element among the blacks than among the whites. There are proportionately more crimes against property, crimes of sensuality, crimes of violence. Materials are ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... switch methods intelligently and of purpose, that is quite another matter. An abstract discussion may be enlivened by a concrete illustration. A concrete narrative or portrayal may be given weight and rationalized by generalization. Moreover many things lie on the borderland between the two domains and may properly be attached to either. Thus the abstraction is legitimate when you say or write: "A man wishes to acquire the comforts and luxuries, as well as the necessaries, of life." The concreteness is likewise ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the delicious non sequitur, which is the charm of the grave-diggers' conversation in "Hamlet," is by no means obsolete. But who can write such a colloquy? It would be easier, we fancy, for a clever man to give a sketch of Lord Bacon, with all his rapid and profound generalization, than to follow the slow and tortuous mental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... journalistic cleverness. Selma had no intention of becoming a second Mrs. Earle. That is, she promised herself to follow, but not to follow blindly; to imitate judiciously, but to improve on a gradually diverging line of progress. This was mere generalization as yet. It was an agreeable seething brain consciousness for future development. For the moment, however, she counted on Mrs. Earle to obtain for her a start by personal influence at the office of the Benham Sentinel. This was provided forthwith in the form ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... by their effects; for this is the only means we have of knowing them to be such. And if a poison is in common use, we must embrace all the results of such use in a perfect generalization before we can decide impartially. We do not hesitate to eat peaches, though we know they owe much of their peculiar flavor to prussic acid. It is but fair to apply an equally large generalization to tobacco. Chemistry can concentrate the sapid and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... is inimical to music, or rather that music is inimical to good verse; that music demands ordinary verse, rhymed prose, rather than verse, which is malleable and reducible as the composer wishes. This generalization is assuredly true, if the music is written first and then adapted to the words, but that is not the ideal harmony between two arts which are made to supplement each other. Do not the rhythmic and ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... the genesis of a generalization that gives the less critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts in an evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... something of a relaxation to get among the easy-going once more. Their slouchiness, however, will in the end get on one's nerves quite as much as the "eternal" attention of the Japanese. One more generalization borrowed from one of our Chinese friends here, and I'm done. "The East economizes space and the West time"—that also is much truer than ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Tyler took charge of the three horses. The fame of Cairns had travelled before him to Rosanna, but none had been prepared for a figure so weird or for a countenance so forbidding and malign. His manners were equally uncouth. He shook his bent head to decline refreshment; he pointedly ignored a generalization of Hardcastle's about the crime; and when he spoke, it was in a gratuitously satirical style of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... first-rate importance. But nobody need be frightened of it on that account. Unlike most important works on the theory of art, it is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end. Its main thesis is a generalization which, if true, is applicable to all schools and all epochs. The book is stimulating and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Basuto, have carried their powers of generalization still farther, and arranged the other parts of the same great family of South Africans into three divisions: 1st. The Matebele, or Makonkobi—the Caffre family living on the eastern side of the country; 2d. The Bakoni, or Basuto; ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... petrified persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions. And then there was the crushing ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... — N. {opp. 79} generality, generalization; universality; catholicity, catholicism; miscellany, miscellaneousness[obs3]; dragnet; common run; worldwideness[obs3]. everyone, everybody; all hands, all the world and his wife; anybody, N or M, all sorts. prevalence, run. V. be general ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents of our national life and explains the altering ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... given on the 12th of November, 1832, at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization which marked Agassiz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning his ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... admiration and wonder, as she gazed up at him, offered temptation and excuse enough. It was not timidity nor lack of opportunity that caused Sundown to hesitate, but rather that innate respect for women which distinguishes the gentle man from the slovenly generalization "gentleman." "Adios! Linda Rosa!" he murmured, and stooping, kissed her brown fingers. Then he gestured with magnificence toward the flowers bordering the roadway. "And you sure are the lindaest little Linda Rosa ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... with a generalization, simple, yet of a significance too little recognized. "They don't see a thing!" she said. "The young men that buzz around a girl's house don't see a thing of what goes on there! Inside, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... he seems to us equally far from scientific truth when he asserts that intellect is 'disrupting' in its tendency, and that science is primarily 'disturbing.' It is true the intellect has the analytical faculty; but it is equally true that the opposite faculty of generalization is that which most strongly characterizes it and distinguishes reason from instinct. So far from analysis being the earliest predominant tendency of the intellect, almost all its most familiar and ordinary acts are those of synthesis. In all ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... lived in her memory as a bright, changeful dream, varying from one pleasure to another, with an ever-shifting background of fair, foreign towns and cities, Kursaals, palaces, salons, gardens, mountains, and lakes, and quiet green nooks of country—all, as it seemed to her, with the power of generalization that seizes on the most salient points, and takes them as types of the whole, shining in sunlight that never clouded, under clear blue skies that never darkened. Madelon knew that that time had gone by for ever; and yet, in all her dreams for the future, her imagination ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... and so on. But, in the first place, it cannot be said that the conflict of statements concerning the world affects the statements concerning the cause, i.e. Brahman, in which all the Vedanta-texts are seen to agree—for that would be an altogether unfounded generalization;—and, in the second place, the teacher will reconcile later on (II, 3) those conflicting passages also which refer to the world. And, to consider the matter more thoroughly, a conflict of statements regarding the world would not ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... him, has felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all, and has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to study it, patiently, slowly, diligently; content if he could gather a few crumbs of the great harvest of knowledge, happy if he could grasp some great generalization or wide-embracing law, and so in some small measure enter into the mind and thought of the Designer of all this ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... at the school till the young lady was ready, he had conveyed them back again to the station, and they took the up-train. That was all he knew. The gentleman, if his opinion were asked, was "a scaly varmint." On inquiry, Maitland found that this wide moral generalization was based on the limited pour-boire which Mr. Lithgow had presented to his charioteer. Had the gentleman any luggage? Yes, he had a portmanteau, which he left in the cloak-room, and took away with him on his return to town—not in the van, in the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... more in accordance with facts, that all the powers of the mind, instinct, feeling, and thought, enter into action simultaneously, and condition each other? The very first act of perception, the first distinct cognition of an object, involves thought as much as the last generalization of science. We know nothing of mind except as the development of thought, and the first unfolding, even of the infant mind, reveals an intellectual act, a discrimination between a self and an object which is not self, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and power to the smallest forms, in Albert Duerer and others. But this attention to minutiae was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the natural shadow of every ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fact. The word truth ought to be kept for higher things. There are those that think such facts the highest that can be known; they put therefore the highest word they know to the highest thing they know, and call the facts of nature truths; but to me it seems that, however high you come in your generalization, however wide you make your law—-including, for instance, all solidity under the law of freezing—you have not risen higher than the statement that such and such is an invariable fact. Call it a law if you will—a law of nature if you choose—that it always is so, but not a truth. It cannot be to ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... of the following tables, "National Banks of the United States," illustrates the above generalization. It is unnecessary to mention that 1878, 1884, and 1890 have been the last three panic years. But it is very necessary in studying this table, to bear in mind that its figures are taken from the standing of the banks at the first of ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... could give him. For this poetry is an attempt to express life, not to explain it. It offers pictures or reports rather than analyses of religious experience. It gives utterance to the real life of religion in the individual soul, and is not a generalization of religious thoughts ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... every exact science, its substance having grown sufficiently to make generalization possible, there is a time when a series of changes bring it into clearness. This time has most certainly arrived for the science of kinematics. The number of mechanisms has grown almost out of measure, and the number of ways ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... statement is merely a generalization of many made in the preceding lectures, the tenor of which any readers acquainted with my recent ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... classes of Protestant Christians. The last and most pretentious form of this dogma is, that the sense of the miraculous fades away in the progress of what arrogates to itself the name of Rationalism. This is one of the delusive results of introducing generalization into historical disquisitions. History deals with man. Man is always the same. The race consists, not of an aggregation, but of individuals, in all ages, never moulded or melted into classes. Each individual has ever retained his distinctness from every other. There ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... best let modern times alone. For here you've all facts and no generalization; and in the case of the Greeks you've all ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... work of English literature during the first quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The abstract, the typical, the general—these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14] Classical tragedy, e.g., undertook ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... organize, conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative, intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well as by ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... was a retreat, to attack the column at the proper time; if a tactical flank movement, to allow it to be completed, and then thrust himself between the two wings of Lee's army, and beat them in detail. This admirable generalization lacked the necessary concomitant ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... contrast. The countrymen of Sir Richard claim that in London from time immemorial not a single cup was ever stolen from the public fountains. So tempting a theme for generalization could not be resisted by the Paris newspaper philosophers, who have deduced from this theft of the cups a broad distinction between the British loafer and the French loafer, declaring that the former "respects ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... criticism on the nature of classification. There we are exhorted not to fall into the common error of passing from unity to infinity, but to find the intermediate classes; and we are reminded that in any process of generalization, there may be more than one class to which individuals may be referred, and that we must carry on the process of division until we have arrived at the ...
— Statesman • Plato
... strength. He died on the last day of March. Most touching and appreciative eulogies were delivered by Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster, after his death had been announced by his colleague, Judge Butler. Mr. Clay spoke of his "transcendent talents," of his "clear, concise, compact logic," of his "felicity in generalization surpassed by no one." He intimated that he would have been glad to see Mr. Calhoun succeed Mr. Monroe in the Presidency in 1820. Mr. Webster, who always measured his words, spoke of him as "a man of undoubted genius and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a generalization—and you must look at it that way. In reality society is infinitely complex, and the ramifications and possibilities are endless. It can do a lot more things than fizzle or go boom. Pressure of population, war or persecution patterns can cause waves of immigration. Plant and animal species ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 'average' Dutch peasant would be to say very little of him. There is far too much difference in this class of people all over the Netherlands to allow of any generalization. In Zeeland we meet two distinct types; one very much akin to the Spanish race, having a Spaniard's dark hair, dark eyes, and sallow complexion, and often very good-looking. The other type is entirely different, fair-haired, light-eyed, and of no particular beauty. In Limburg, the most southern ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... again for a while. We lay in the blank—we had spread on some soft, dry sand in preference to the stable, where Taylor and Tommy had gone. Under the contemplative influence of the stars, Lin fell into generalization. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... not an experimental thing, an instrument of research, and this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on which one feels that he pronounces no judgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophic generalization, which was almost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. A mind that generalizes rapidly, continually prevents the experience that would have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... philosophy was that powerfully presented in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief, that conservative ideals were bad, not because They were conservative, but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... not regarded as an adulterant—it is an addition, or modifier, if you please. And so many people have acquired a coffee-and-chicory taste, that it is doubtful if they would appreciate a real cup of coffee should they ever meet it. This, of course, is a generalization; and like all generalizations, is dangerous, for it is possible to obtain good coffee, properly made, in any European country, even England, in the homes of the people, but seldom in the hotels ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... appreciated through his researches into the languages, laws, and institutions of Ancient Rome and Italy, as the most thoroughly versed scholar now living in these departments of historical investigation. To a wonderfully exact and exhaustive knowledge of these subjects, he unites great powers of generalization, a vigorous, spirited, and exceedingly graphic style and keen analytical powers, which give this history a degree of interest and a permanent value possessed by no other record of the decline and fall of the Roman Commonwealth. "Dr. Mommsen's work," as Dr. Schmitz ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalization does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity were engaged. That's why, may be, she ventured so far. For a woman she chose to be as open as the day with me. There was not only the form but almost the whole substance of her thought ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... achieved a great discovery when it established the fact that there was a continuous belt of languages from Iceland to Ceylon which were the variant forms of one mother-tongue, the Indo-European; but it must prepare itself for a still wider generalization. There is abundant proof—proof with which pages might be filled—that there was a still older mother-tongue, from which Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic were all derived—the language of Noah, the language of Atlantis, the language of the great "aggressive empire" of Plato, the language of the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
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