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More "Generalize" Quotes from Famous Books



... to decide which process of arithmetic should be used in dealing with them. Once these decisions are made the succeeding arithmetical calculations are simple and easy. In technical terms the ability that is needed is the ability to generalize one's experiences. In every-day terms it is the ability to use what ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz

... the mores. The tendency of the mores of a period to consistency has been noticed (sec. 5). No doubt this tendency is greatly strengthened when people are able to generalize "principles" from acts. This explains the modern belief that principles are causative. The passion for equality, the universal use of contract, and the sentiments of humanitarianism are informing elements in modern society. Whence did they come? Undoubtedly ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... of the method of Descartes; add to it his advice on the art of reasoning, which even in his time was not at all novel, but which with him is very precise; not to generalize too hastily, not to be put off with words, but to have a clear definition of every word, etc., and thus a sufficient idea of it ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... generalize the law that is at the basis of the theory of value. In reality, it is all-comprehensive. The first generalization to be made consists in applying the law, not to single articles, but to consumers' wealth in ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson

... of such diverse usage that it is difficult to generalize regarding it. The tendency seems at present to be in the direction of using the slur (in instrumental music) as a phrase-mark exclusively, it being understood that unless there is some direction to the contrary, the tones are to be performed in ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens

... no reason for the belief that farmers' wives as a class look and dress like this, only that people love to generalize; to fit cases to their theory, they love to find ministers' sons wild; mothers-in-law disagreeable; women who believe in suffrage neglecting their children, and farmers' ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... that his poem should be interpreted as if only he and his opinions, prejudices, or passions were concerned. He would not have been the great poet he was if he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he could never have won the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to generalize his special experience into something mediatorial for all of us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto of the Purgatorio says that "unless you understand him and his figures allegorically, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our author made his ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for instance, it would ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee

... ago died out. She saw that England was ripe for heresy, and the result confirmed her worldly sagacity. How came it, then, that the change which was absolutely impossible in Ireland, was so easily effected in the other country? Or, to generalize the question: How is it that, to speak generally, the nations of Northern Europe embraced Protestantism so readily, while those of Southern Europe refused to receive it, or were only slightly affected ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... you, Evelina," he continued, stealthily. "A man just can't generalize the creatures. Apparently they are craving nothing so much as emotional excitement and when you offer it to them they want to go to housekeeping with it. Love is a business with them ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... mind you do have, Olive! I wish you'd come into my classes; I'd teach you how to generalize, and give you some much-needed lessons in beauty of diction. You mean well; but you certainly do talk like a housemaid, and—Good morning, Mr. Brenton. Jolly sort of morning, too!" Then Dolph digressed. "What in thunder is the matter with ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... exist: then if 70 Xs be Ys, and 40 Zs be Ys, it follows that 10 Xs (at least) are Zs. Hamilton, whose mind could not generalize on symbols, saw that the word most would come under this system, and admitted, as valid, such a syllogism as "most Ys are Xs; most Ys are Zs; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and newly-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and there positions, as they ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... I aim to generalize the most important facts, leaving the reader to examine at his leisure recondite authorities, in which, too often, the argument is obscured by minute details, and art ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... of given facts and phenomena. It would seem that positive science began with Aristotle, since he maintained that experience furnishes the principles of every science; but while his conception was just, there was not at that time a sufficient amount of experience from which to generalize with effect. It is only a most extensive and exhaustive examination of the accuracy of a proposition which will warrant secure reasoning upon it. Aristotle reasoned without sufficient certainty of the major premise of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... knowledge should have withheld Max Muller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions, the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have ever existed,' says an idealist,—'Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Goethe, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... these essays, received at the time with contemptuous aversion, is now accepted as truth; and few compositions of equal length contain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection. It is only when they generalize too confidently that they are in danger of misleading us; for all expositions of the art and practice of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts, is essentially a "mystery." Its charm ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... he said, "I am the way." By thus pointing out the way, and showing that eternal life and happiness are the blessed reward of walking in it, I hope to induce some here to-night to enter it. I might here generalize somewhat by calling your attention to the fact that it is natural for us all, when going anywhere, to feel best satisfied when we know the way we are on is the right way to where we want to go. It is true, however, one may tramp along ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... would say—what like is it? Does it give any signs of qualities, physical or mental, tending to distinguish it from Britons, Australians, or North Americans? The answer is not easy. Nothing is more tempting, and at the same time more risky, than to thus generalize and speculate too soon. As was said at the outset, New Zealand has taken an almost perverse delight in upsetting expectations. Nevertheless, certain points are worth noting which may, at any rate, help readers to draw conclusions ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... most photographic moments. Both his figures and his landscapes are clearly portraits—typical and not merely individual, to be sure, but somehow not exactly creations. His skies are the least successful portions of his pictures, I think; one must generalize easily to make skies effective, and perhaps it is not fanciful to note the frequency of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... ultimate end to be contemplated, I do not admit that it should be the proximate end. The Expediency-Philosophy having concluded that happiness is a thing to be achieved, assumes that Morality has no other business than empirically to generalize the results of conduct, and to supply for the guidance of conduct nothing more than ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... studied public sentiment in this country for any period knows how easy it is to generalize from a few facts, and yet, if the subject be more thoroughly investigated, it becomes apparent how unsatisfactory such generalizations are apt to be; not that they are essentially untrue, but rather because ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... AS. Since, however, the observer is not conscious of his own translatory motion with the earth in its orbit, the star appears to have a displacement which is at all times parallel to the motion of the observer. To generalize this, let S (fig. 3) be the sun, ABCD the earth's orbit, and s the true position of a star. When the earth is at A, in consequence of aberration, the star is displaced to a point a, its displacement sa being parallel to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... [Footnote: Cf. Wallas, Our Social Heritage, pp. 77 et seq.] I do not doubt that there are important biological differences. Since man is an animal it would be strange if there were not. But as rational beings it is worse than shallow to generalize at all about comparative behavior until there is a measurable similarity between the environments to ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... reflection of the Gothic; another may be objected to as being frivolously Oriental-looking and brilliant, whereas the critic likes only the sober and the dull. Few are sufficiently educated to appreciate style: and we cannot rule our own by anybody's opinion; but we can generalize and find something that shall be agreeable to all—something approaching to a golden mean. The artist for decoration should be sensitively alive to any suggestion from the style of that which he is to adorn, remembering the antecedent motives of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... now in a position to sit down and generalize about the wind. It is a tiresome thing to have it as the recurring insistent theme of our story, but to have had it as the continual obstacle to our activity, the opposing barrier to the simplest task, was even ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... life, as ascent on land. Recent investigations appear to show that Forbes was right enough in his classification of the facts of distribution in depth as they are to be observed in the Aegean; and though, at the time he wrote, one or two observations were extant which might have warned him not to generalize too extensively from his Aegean experience, his own dredging work was so much more extensive and systematic than that of any other naturalist, that it is not wonderful he should have felt justified in building upon it. Nevertheless, so far as the limit of the range of life in depth ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... once calm and profound, of which so few know the power, and the direct influence of human relation, Gibbie's emotional joy was more stirred by storm than by anything else; and with all forms of it he was so familiar that, young as he was, he had unconsciously begun to generalize ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... alike. After learning to use the hands, for example, for a certain act, the same hand movements are afterward used for other similar acts which the child finds it well to perform. He thus tends, as psychologists say, to "generalize," that is, to take up certain general attitudes which will answer for a great many details of experience. On the side of the reception of his items of knowledge this was called Assimilation, as will be remembered. This saves him enormous trouble ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... persons and manners of the unfortunate beings, whose figures or voices awoke sympathetic sorrow in Maria's bosom; and the stories she told were the more interesting, for perpetually leaving room to conjecture something extraordinary. Still Maria, accustomed to generalize her observations, was led to conclude from all she heard, that it was a vulgar error to suppose that people of abilities were the most apt to lose the command of reason. On the contrary, from most of the instances she could investigate, she thought ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... "You generalize, and since you are laying down a rule, you are right," said Raymond. "But this is a particular case and an exception. We owe some duties to the feminine gender as well as to patriotism. The greater shouldn't always be ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... went smoothly on, continuing to rise in the estimation of his party, and commanding a certain respect from the neutral public, by acknowledged and eminent talents in the details of business; for his quickness of penetration, and a logical habit of mind, enabled him to grapple with and generalize the minutiae of official labour or of legislative enactments with a masterly success. But as the road became clearer to his steps, his ambition became more evident and daring. Naturally dictatorial and presumptuous, his early suppleness to superiors was now exchanged for a self-willed ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... spent an evening in them, and I found them very pleasant; only at first the women used to ask me such a lot of inconvenient questions that I became quite confused. They were always puzzled because I had no children. One cannot generalize on the subject of harims; they differ in degree just as much as families in London. A first-class harim at Constantinople is one thing, at Damascus one of the same rank is another, while those ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... have changed. Nowadays they are all selfish and sordid. But—I shouldn't generalize, for I'm a ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... many ideas and systems of ideas, supposed philosophies and sciences, were false and unsubstantial as the "baseless fabric of a vision." Things received as truths from time immemorial were shown to be untrue. The tendency of the human intellect is to generalize; and finding many previously received systems and facts to be without evidence sufficient to substantiate them, there arose the unwilled generalization that all these systems are likewise false. I do not say that man has formulated this thought into ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... conditions in which one works. When you are here and he understands really what you want, he can answer you for everything that concerns the center of France, and the general geology of the planet, if there is any opportunity to generalize. His reasoning has been this: not to make innovations, but to push to its greatest development what exists, in making use always of the method established by experience. Experience can never deceive, it may be incomplete, but never mendacious. With this I embrace you, I summon you, I ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... only occurs in St. Matt. xiii. 36 and xv. 15, we cannot generalize about the Peshitto rendering of this verb. Conversely, [Syriac letters] is used as the rendering of other Greek words besides [Greek: ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... Generalize as to the similarity of the places in which the pupils have seen the sparrow singing, and as to the times of day in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... characterize christianize civilize colonize criticize crystallize demoralize dogmatize economize emphasize epitomize equalize eulogize evangelize extemporize familiarize fertilize fossilize fraternize galvanize generalize gormandize harmonize immortalize italicize jeopardize legalize liberalize localize magnetize memorialize mesmerize metamorphize methodize minimize modernize monopolize moralize nationalize naturalize neutralize organize ostracize ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton

... practical book "from the ground up." It gives complete directions for growing all vegetables cultivatable in the climate of the northern United States. It represents a departure in vegetable-garden literature. It does not generalize. The illustrations, numbering about 150, are all from ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of responsibility ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... hitherto, why may they not equally coexist hereafter? And what ground is left for the reckless prediction that Theology is doomed, and must fall before the onward march of Positive Science? If man was able from the beginning to observe, to compare, to abstract, and to generalize, and if the fundamental laws of human thought have been ever the same, it follows that there must have been a tendency, coeval with the origin of the race, towards Theological, Metaphysical, and Inductive Speculation, and that the same tendency ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... emphasize the more general and universal qualities revealed by the poet's work. But while the schools and fashions of criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more important fact than the rightness or wrongness of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... correspondent—I cannot formulate any theory of friendship which will cover all the conditions. I know a few things that friendship is not, and a few things that it is, but when I come to generalize upon the abstract quality I am quite at a loss for ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... purely physical sciences. He does not even know the name of history, or the meaning of metaphysics and ethics. He knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. He does not readily generalize or conceive of abstractions. He observes the qualities common to certain bodies without reasoning about the qualities themselves. With the aid of geometric figures and algebraic signs, he knows ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... colored-ball construction as though wondering if they could add anything more without spoiling the design. "I'd say: a level of mentation qualitatively different from nonsapience in that it includes ability to symbolize ideas and store and transmit them, ability to generalize and ability to form abstract ideas. There; I didn't say a word about talk-and-build-a-fire, ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... Montresor what I thought. It is all very well to generalize and to be glad that certain institutions produce certain effects; but of course you are superior to the institutions, or you wouldn't be generalizing so, and all the more, of course, superior to the effects, and so I don't see how ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus all the facts grouped nowadays under the name of auto-suggestion may, in my opinion, be explained. Here we shall generalize the law in this form: every idea conceived by the mind is an auto-suggestion, the selective effect of which is only counterbalanced by other ideas producing a different auto-suggestion. This is especially noticeable in the young, who so rapidly carry ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form—because they address themselves to "all," because they generalize where generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and sometimes even seductive, when they are ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... anywise gratified or improved by the spectacle, I was thinking how in this, as in all other good, the too much destroyed all. The breadth of a robin's breast in brick-red is delicious, but a whole house-front of brick-red as vivid, is alarming. And yet one cannot generalize even that trite moral with any safety—for infinite breadth of green is delightful, however green; and of ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... in Manchester I had found no bath, and asking for one at Chester, the chambermaid said, with earnest good-will, that "they had none, but she thought she could get me a note from her master to the Infirmary (!!) if I would go there." Luckily I did not generalize quite as rapidly as travellers in America usually do, and put in the note-book,—"Mem.: None but the sick ever bathe in England"; for in the next establishment we tried, I found the plentiful provision for a clean and healthy day, which I had ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... mountain, or a forest half a league broad, sometimes separates hordes who could not meet in less than two days by navigating rivers. In open countries, or in a state of advanced civilization, communication by rivers contributes powerfully to generalize languages, manners, and political institutions; but in the impenetrable forests of the torrid zone, as in the first rude condition of our species, rivers increase the dismemberment of great nations, favour the transition ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... is modified by an indisposition to generalize," said Bernard, laughing. "On this point permit me not to generalize. I am interested in the particular case—in ascertaining whether Mrs. Vivian thinks very ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... this sort have indicated that with pleasantness goes slower heart beat and quicker breathing, with unpleasantness quicker heart beat and slower breathing. But not all investigators have got these results; and, anyway, it would be impossible to generalize to the extent of asserting that slow heart beat always gave a pleasant state of feeling, and rapid heart beat an unpleasant; for there is slow heart beat during a "morning grouch", and rapid during joyful expectation. Or, in regard to breathing, try this experiment: hasten your breathing ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... individual cases, the other gives an universal and necessary principle by the analysis of a single concrete fact. As an illustration we may instance "the principle of causality." To enable us to affirm "that every event must have a cause," we do not need to compare and generalize a great number of events. "The principle which compels us to pronounce the judgment is already complete in the first as in the last event; it can change in regard to its object, it can not change ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... process of falling prices may also be considered as direct and indirect. The direct results are somewhat of the opposite character to those just related for a period of rising prices. It is difficult to generalize about them. If the period of falling prices follows closely upon a period of sharply rising prices, during which latter period wage increases lagged greatly behind price increases, the tendency for wages to rise may ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... contradistinction to the old implied right of the sovereignty of the king, just as we idly substituted the words "God save the people" at the end of a proclamation, for "God save the king." It was a form. But, if it is desirable to affix to them any more precise signification, it will not do to generalize according to the argument of one party; but we are to take the words, in their limited and appropriate meaning and with their accompanying facts. They can only allude to the constituencies, and these constituencies existed ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... incompatible with the laws that constitute its particular state for the time being. For it is not true only of the great divisions or classes into which we have found it expedient to distinguish, while we generalize, the powers acting in nature, as into intellectual, vital, chemical, mechanical; but it holds equally true of the degrees, or species of each of these genera relatively to each other: as in the decomposition of the alkalies by heat, or the galvanic spark. Like the combining power of Life, the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... Goldsmith's, and rather more veracious. But he plainly had not the scholar's training and methods which we now demand of the historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color,—this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... easier to prove than that in this world nobody ever invented anything. So it may be proved that, Johnson having written 'Great thoughts are always general', Blake had countered him by affirming (long before Hazlitt) that 'To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the great distinction of merit': even as it may be demonstrable that Charles Lamb, in his charming personal chat about the Elizabethan dramatists and his predilections among them, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... forward one culminating point, which serves to determine their true character. Such is the wise economy of all revealed laws, that generally avoiding abstractions, they select as a standard one special case of the most interesting, and leave it to thy care of the human understanding to generalize, and deduce from it universal theories.[2] Consequently, on analysing the ten emanations of the Divine Will, we must transfer mentally each of them to the class of duties to which it belongs, and consider it as intended to ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio

... If we generalize this process, and look out for the principle or law involved in every such inference, and presupposed in every syllogism, the propositions of which are any thing more than merely verbal; we find, not the unmeaning dictum de omni et nullo, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... introduced into their codes the principle of distributive justice which governs printing-offices; if they had observed the popular instincts,—not for the sake of servile imitation, but in order to reform and generalize them,—long ere this liberty and equality would have been established on an immovable basis, and we should not now be disputing about the right of property and the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... readily describe what they mean by that expression. Profoundly engaged in the study of particular classes of natural phenomena, they are usually too much engrossed in the immense and ever accumulating details of their special sciences to generalize upon the methods of reasoning which they unconsciously employ. Yet few will deny that these methods of reasoning ought to be studied, especially by those who endeavor to introduce scientific order into less successful and ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... in Latin poetry, when the object is to generalize a remark—as not connected with one mode of time more than another. In reality, all three modes of time—past, present, future—are used (though not equally used) in all languages for this purpose ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... lowest. Both were working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying conditions are determined ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... to secret societies are not directed only to political ends. They impose on the initiates in the most explicit terms a life of self-denial, and sometimes celibacy; and though these vows do not always avail against some of the worst forms of sensuality, it would be foolish and wrong to generalize from unworthy exceptions. In its moral aspects the revolt of young Bengal represents very frequently a healthy reaction against sloth and self-indulgence and the premature exhaustion of manhood which is such a common feature in a society that has ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... it is, this symmetry shows us how unwise it were to generalize from the conclusions to which the Three-pronged Osmia leads us. Whereas some Bees, such as the Anthidium and the Chalicodoma, share the Osmia's talent for using the twofold exit, others, such as the Solenius and ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... boot, and marriage the crutch that may help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand into hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize I always know you're tired. No one who feels well stops to generalize about symptoms. If you won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is going to carry out his orders. What you want is quiet. Be reasonable and send away everybody before Mr. Amherst ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse, classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... further, and yet generalize at the same time, we will say here that the Tea plant or tree is greatly modified in hardiness, in height, in size of leaf, and in the quality of the leaf for a beverage, by soil, by moisture, tillage, and climate. Some soils and some climates develop a tea plant decidedly more suitable for a ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.

... a name for a thing, we cannot argue that the thing has or has not an actual existence; or that the antitheses, parallels, conjugates, correlatives of language have anything corresponding to them in nature. There are too many words as well as too few; and they generalize the objects or ideas which they represent. The greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our servants, and not allowing them to be ...
— Cratylus • Plato

... to represent nearly half a lifetime! A thousand cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his say on every question which the law ever has presented, and then to go on and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical, philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus with its roots in history and its justifications of expedience, real ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... wounded antagonist. The casual observer might-and often does-say that all bears are cowardly, all bucks are easily killed, or the reverse, according as the god of chance has treated him to one spectacle or the other. As well try to generalize on the human race-as is a certain ecclesiastical habit-that all men are vile or noble, dishonest ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... imbued with political (Jacobin) artificiality, think that in order to solve the social question it will be necessary to generalize the system of metayage. They imagine, then—though they do not say so—a royal or presidential decree: "Art. 1. Let all men ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... present state of erotics beyond our power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletons of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the science of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our own premises, only rising above them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates. Such a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field of view appears ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... imagination than good sense, teach distinctions which do not exist, generalizations which do not generalize, and do incalculable mischief ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... has the historic mission of also carrying the revolution to perfection, and to promote on all fields the budding of the germs for radical transformations, which a social order, built on new foundations, would only have to generalize on a large scale, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... derived, had been originally believed as true, and, having ceased to be thus received, had continued to be repeated, in a shape more or less altered, for mere amusement. If we may venture to affirm this and to generalize from such cases, this is the way ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... language, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that our field of observation has been thus far extremely limited, and that we should act in defiance of the simplest rules of sound induction, were we to generalize on such scanty evidence. Let us but clearly see what place these two so-called families, the Aryan and Semitic, occupy in the great kingdom of speech. They are in reality but two centres, two small settlements of speech, and all we know of them is their period of decay, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... by this to generalize on the causes of this fatal fall after the unselfish enthusiasms of youth. He sees them especially in a mysterious force: "The Invisible," already studied by Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Tchekoff, and especially by de Maupassant; and he sees them in the unhappy conditions of Russian history, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... could only give back the proper response, we should see them, if not be filled with wonder at the marvellous perfection of their structure. But into whatever divisions or classifications we may distinguish or generalize the properties of matter, we can never predicate vitality of it, any more than we can predicate intellectuality. Indeed, "intellectual matter" presents no greater incongruity or invalidity of conception than "vital matter." These qualifying terms are applied to the known laws and forces ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... to say that Hicks was not a bad fellow. I disliked him immensely, and I ought to do him justice, now he's gone. He deserved all your pity. He's a doomed man; his vice is irreparable; he can't resist it." Lydia did not say anything: women do not generalize in these matters; perhaps they cannot pity the faults of those they do not love. Staniford only forgave Hicks the more. "I can't say that up to the last moment I thought him anything but a poor, common little creature; and yet I ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... and all with a woman when she begins to read stuff like that is her inability to generalize. You women take everything home to yourselves. You try to deduct conclusions from your own lives which men like Schopenhauer have scanned the centuries for. The natural course of your life could hardly have provided you with the pessimism with which—I hope ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... connected story; but he has been restrained by the conviction that the thousands of opium-eaters, whose relief has been his main object in preparing the volume, will be more benefited by allowing each sufferer to tell his own story than by any attempt on his part to generalize the multifarious and often discordant phenomena attendant upon the disuse of opium. As yet the medical profession are by no means agreed as to the character or proper treatment of the opium disease. While medical science remains in this state, it would be impertinent in any but ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... two—story intellects, three story intellects with skylights. All fact—collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... was always the case, so far as we know, where the Corinthian capital was used. In Corinthian buildings the anta, where met with, has a capital like that of the column. But there is very little material to generalize from until we descend ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... the impossible. Other Indians might have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as he did; but he alone knew the white man's wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law. But these things had not come to him in a day. The aboriginal mind is slow to generalize, and many facts, repeated often, are required to compass an understanding. Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... merely professional, merely scientific, or of whatever other peculiar complexion. Men, whose life lies in the cultivation of one science, or the exercise of one method of thought, have no more right, though they have often more ambition, to generalize upon the basis of their own pursuit but beyond its range, than the schoolboy or the ploughman to judge of a Prime Minister. But they must have something to say on every subject; habit, fashion, the public require it of them: and, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... of a somber religion. And this characteristic, with qualifications, will be found to belong to popular Hawaiian sport and amusement of every variety. Exception must be made, of course, of the unorganized sports of childhood. One is almost inclined to generalize and to say that those children of nature, as we are wont to call them, in this regard were less free and spontaneous than the more advanced race to which we are proud to belong. But if the approaches to the temple of Terpsichore with them were more guarded, we ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people," she said, with an air of great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE love. 'He prayeth best who loveth best—all things both great and small.' For my own part ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... they are the expressions of that "yearning after the gods" which the earliest of poets discerned in the hearts of all men. Studied in this sense they are rich in teachings. Would we estimate the intellectual and aesthetic culture of a people, would we generalize the laws of progress, would we appreciate the sublimity of Christianity, and read the seals of its authenticity: the natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the philosophic ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... can measure the amount of homesickness that would be engendered on the way. In fact, one doubts whether the sufferer would even need to be of English strain to attach the vision of home to the essentially lovable places that Mr. Parsons depicts. They seem to generalize and typify the idea, so that every one may feel, in every case, that he has a sentimental property in the scene. The very sweetness of its reality only helps to give it that story-book quality which persuades us we have known ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... to generalize from the above to the effect, that, previously to the age of the early kings, proper names compounded with El were prevalent; and in the regal and prophetic age, those compounded with Jah; again, after the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... and clear to the distant view which below on the plain a thousand things would come between to intercept. But there was some morbidness about it too. Disappointment in two or three instances where he had given his full confidence and been obliged to take it back had quickened him to generalize unfavourably upon human character, both in the mass and in individuals. And a restless dissatisfaction with himself and the world did not tend to a healthy view of things. Yet truth was at the bottom; truth ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... observer might-and often does-say that all bears are cowardly, all bucks are easily killed, or the reverse, according as the god of chance has treated him to one spectacle or the other. As well try to generalize on the human race-as is a certain ecclesiastical habit-that all men are vile or noble, dishonest or upright, wise ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... my own broken memories of moss {17} and this unbroken, though unfinished, gift of the noble labour of other people, the Flora Danica, I can generalize the idea of the precious little plant, for myself, and for ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... master; small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form—because they address themselves to "all," because they generalize where generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... of her right to engage in a punitive expedition against Servia, guaranteed that she would do nothing to generalize the conflict by her assurances to Russia and to the world that there would be no annexation of Servian territory or annihilation of the Servian Kingdom. Whether these assurances were genuine or not is impossible of determination. We have no right to constitute ourselves ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... of the physical history of the universe, for in the present day these are too well understood to be contested, but likewise to prove how, without detriment to the stability of special studies, we may be enabled to generalize our ideas by concentrating them in one common focus, and thus arrive at a point of view from which all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active whole, animated by one sole impulse. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... tales from which they had been derived, had been originally believed as true, and, having ceased to be thus received, had continued to be repeated, in a shape more or less altered, for mere amusement. If we may venture to affirm this and to generalize from such cases, this is the way in ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... if Tis-sa-ack himself were but one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads at a time,—if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of some one small being in the fenceless vivarium of the Universe? Let not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we bared our heads to the barer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people," she said, with an air of great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE love. 'He prayeth best who loveth best—all things both great and small.' For my own part I go ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... are—the proneness to suppose in nature greater order and regularity than there actually is; the tendency to support a preconceived opinion by affirmative instances, neglecting all negative or opposed cases; and the tendency to generalize from few observations, or to give reality to mere abstractions, figments of the mind. Manifold errors also result from the weakness of the senses, which affords scope for mere conjecture; from the influence ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... head. "Men have changed. Nowadays they are all selfish and sordid. But—I shouldn't generalize, for I'm a ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... that this would be attributable to the peculiarity of his temperament, and that he had no call to generalize and go beyond that. But I will lend a hand to the public prosecutor in this perplexity. I will bring the charge against myself in a more telling form than he has been able to do. I will formulate it as the facts of the case require ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Muller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions, the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have ever existed,' says an idealist,—'Pericles, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... society, is there the least reason to accuse him of culpable misrepresentation of actual facts. He has selected the material most suited to his peculiar genius: we may complain of his principle of selection, and of his tendency to generalize. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... reason for the belief that farmers' wives as a class look and dress like this, only that people love to generalize; to fit cases to their theory, they love to find ministers' sons wild; mothers-in-law disagreeable; women who believe in suffrage neglecting their children, and farmers' ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... subject ought to be possible. Ignorance is the best of law reformers. People are glad to discuss a question on general principles, when they have forgotten the special knowledge necessary for technical reasoning. But the present willingness to generalize is founded on more than merely negative grounds. The philosophical habit of the day, the frequency of legislation, and the ease with which the law may be changed to meet the opinions and wishes of the public, all make it natural and unavoidable that judges as well as others ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... in the mores. The tendency of the mores of a period to consistency has been noticed (sec. 5). No doubt this tendency is greatly strengthened when people are able to generalize "principles" from acts. This explains the modern belief that principles are causative. The passion for equality, the universal use of contract, and the sentiments of humanitarianism are informing elements in modern society. Whence did they come? Undoubtedly they ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... not admit that it should be the proximate end. The Expediency-Philosophy having concluded that happiness is a thing to be achieved, assumes that Morality has no other business than empirically to generalize the results of conduct, and to supply for the guidance of conduct nothing more than its ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... by the poet's work. But while the schools and fashions of criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more important ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... with more of imagination than good sense, teach distinctions which do not exist, generalizations which do not generalize, and do incalculable mischief ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... English race has largely peopled, we can measure the amount of homesickness that would be engendered on the way. In fact, one doubts whether the sufferer would even need to be of English strain to attach the vision of home to the essentially lovable places that Mr. Parsons depicts. They seem to generalize and typify the idea, so that every one may feel, in every case, that he has a sentimental property in the scene. The very sweetness of its reality only helps to give it that story-book quality which persuades us we ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... to-day might have represented to my mind a mere spectacle, the hecatomb of its inhabitants extorting little more than a conventional sigh. So it is. The human heart has been constructed on somewhat ungenerous lines. Moralists, if any still exist on earth, may generalize with eloquence from the masses, but our poets have long ago succumbed to the pathos of single happenings; the very angels of Heaven, they say, take more joy in one sinner that repenteth than in a hundred righteous, which, duly apprehended, is only an application ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... of falling prices may also be considered as direct and indirect. The direct results are somewhat of the opposite character to those just related for a period of rising prices. It is difficult to generalize about them. If the period of falling prices follows closely upon a period of sharply rising prices, during which latter period wage increases lagged greatly behind price increases, the tendency for wages to rise may continue to manifest itself ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... gained so much. At the beginning it was a process belonging to the sovereign and used solely for his business, or employed for the business of others only by his permission in the special case. What Henry seems to have done was to generalize this use, to establish certain classes of cases in which it might always be employed by his subjects, but in his courts only. In essence it was a process for getting local knowledge to bear on a doubtful question ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... painfully struck by the undeniable evidences of German Kultur that instead of taking them to England he returned them to the United States, to be included eventually in our exhibition. It would be very wrong to generalize upon the standard of German art from this small display, but a number of these pictures can well afford to go entirely upon their ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus

... this civilization, I aim to generalize the most important facts, leaving the reader to examine at his leisure recondite authorities, in which, too often, the argument is obscured by minute details, and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... to reflect, analyze, and generalize, has an advantage over uncultured minds even of double experience. Poor as your cook is, she now knows more of her business than you do. After a very brief period of attention and experiment, you will not only know more ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... book "from the ground up." It gives complete directions for growing all vegetables cultivatable in the climate of the northern United States. It represents a departure in vegetable-garden literature. It does not generalize. The illustrations, numbering about 150, are ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... two or three bears each has happened to see or kill, often reach diametrically opposite conclusions as to the fighting temper and capacity of the quarry. Even old hunters—who indeed, as a class, are very narrow-minded and opinionated—often generalize just as rashly as beginners. One will portray all bears as very dangerous; another will speak and act as if he deemed them of no more consequence than so many rabbits. I knew one old hunter who had killed a score without ever seeing one show ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... difficult to generalize about England's treatment of Irish political offenders. From the earliest nationalist activities she has treated them practically all as common criminals, or worse, if such a thing is possible. She has either filled ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... Aristotle, since he maintained that experience furnishes the principles of every science; but while his conception was just, there was not at that time a sufficient amount of experience from which to generalize with effect. It is only a most extensive and exhaustive examination of the accuracy of a proposition which will warrant secure reasoning upon it. Aristotle reasoned without sufficient certainty of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... chain of motives. B. is the end to A.; but it is itself a mean to C., and in like manner C. is a mean to D., and so on. Thus words are the means by which we reduce appearances, or things presented through the senses, to their several kinds, or 'genera'; that is, we generalize, and thus think and judge. Hence the understanding, considered specially as an intellective power, is the source and faculty of words;—and on this account the understanding is justly defined, both by Archbishop Leighton, and by Immanuel Kant, the faculty ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... to add to our collection of horns or to get food for the porters. Sometimes the whole party went out, either photographing charging rhinos or shooting, but this part of the daily program was usually too varied to generalize as part of the daily doings. Several porters went with each of us to bring in the game, which there is ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... a good map of a newly explored region, has been driven to despair by the inadequacy of the route surveys in his hands. Not a few of these surveys have been unworthy of reproduction in the books of the explorers who made them, and the best that could be done was to generalize their information on maps of comparatively small scale. But Donaldson Smith's route-maps appear in his book on the comparatively large scale of 1:1,000,000 (about sixteen statute miles to the inch), and they are worthy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... for the reckless prediction that Theology is doomed, and must fall before the onward march of Positive Science? If man was able from the beginning to observe, to compare, to abstract, and to generalize, and if the fundamental laws of human thought have been ever the same, it follows that there must have been a tendency, coeval with the origin of the race, towards Theological, Metaphysical, and Inductive Speculation, and that the same tendency must continue as long as his powers remain unchanged. ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... to judge the habitability of a planet such as Venus we must first, as far as possible, generalize the conditions that govern life and ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... call attention to the fact that in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not generalize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly never dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had been gradually and slowly developed from the coarse and selfish passions of our ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... Ballads. Much of the matter of these essays, received at the time with contemptuous aversion, is now accepted as truth; and few compositions of equal length contain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection. It is only when they generalize too confidently that they are in danger of misleading us; for all expositions of the art and practice of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts, is essentially a "mystery." Its charm depends upon qualities ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began to extend their ideas, and generalize their words, the ignorance of the inventors must have confined this method to very narrow bounds; and as they had at first too much multiplied the names of individuals for want of being acquainted with ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... divorce-court judge writing a treatise on marriage we should smile. But it is equally absurd for the physician, so long as his knowledge is confined to disease, to write regarding sex at large; valuable as the facts he brings forward may be, he can never be in a position to generalize concerning them. And to me, at all events, it seems that we have had more than enough pictures of gross sexual perversity, whether furnished by the asylum or the brothel. They are only really instructive when they are seen in their ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates the cornice has dentels, and this was always the case, so far as we know, where the Corinthian capital was used. In Corinthian buildings the anta, where met with, has a capital like that of the column. But there is very little material to generalize from until we descend ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... to determine their true character. Such is the wise economy of all revealed laws, that generally avoiding abstractions, they select as a standard one special case of the most interesting, and leave it to thy care of the human understanding to generalize, and deduce from it universal theories.[2] Consequently, on analysing the ten emanations of the Divine Will, we must transfer mentally each of them to the class of duties to which it belongs, and consider it as intended to represent ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio

... words of Zarathustra and in the theology of Christianity, we frequently meet with the distinct recognition of the fundamental unity of all power. At core, all religions have seeds of monotheism. When we generalize the current concepts of motion or force beyond individual displays and relative measures of quantity, we recognize their qualitative identity, and appreciate the logical unity under which we must give ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... symmetry shows us how unwise it were to generalize from the conclusions to which the Three-pronged Osmia leads us. Whereas some Bees, such as the Anthidium and the Chalicodoma, share the Osmia's talent for using the twofold exit, others, such as the Solenius and the Leaf-cutter, behave like a flock of sheep and follow the first that ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... our senses a variety of material objects; some more, some less calculated to arrest our attention. Among these, the sun, moon and stars,—earth and sea, mountains and rivers, occupy prominent places. To facilitate our knowledge of these, and prompt reference to any part of them, we generalize or throw them into groups. Thus we speak familiarly of the "solar system," the "animal, vegetable or mineral kingdom." Now, just transfer these systematized objects from the material and physical, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... impossible. Other Indians might have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as he did; but he alone knew the white man's wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law. But these things had not come to him in a day. The aboriginal mind is slow to generalize, and many facts, repeated often, are required to compass an understanding. Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, expatriating himself, once and ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... dangerous than the grizzly. As it happened, however, the only narrow escape I personally ever had was from a grizzly, and in Africa the animal killed closest to me as it was charging was a rhinoceros—all of which goes to show that a man must not generalize too broadly from his own personal experiences. On the whole, I think the lion the most dangerous of all these five animals; that is, I think that, if fairly hunted, there is a larger percentage of hunters killed or mauled for a given number of lions killed than for a given number ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... to change the face of society. It is not because the French have changed their former opinions, and altered their former manners, that they have convulsed the world; but because they were the first to generalize and bring to light a philosophical method, by the assistance of which it became easy to attack all that was old, and to open a path ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... you shall have it hot-shot, but I'll have to generalize the story for you. The most decisive of all the tests have been made during the last eighteen months, and the final and most convincing of all within the year, under the direction of Lombroso, Morselli, and Bottazzi. It is safe to say that ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... modes of thought. As Zeller says, speaking of the myths: "From the first, in the act of producing his work he thinks in images. They mark the point where it becomes evident that he cannot be wholly a philosopher because he is still too much of a poet." And this is true of all Philo's writings, and to generalize somewhat widely, of most Jewish philosophy. In "The Timaeus," particularly, Plato, throughout, is the poet-philosopher, writing imaginative myths, which present pictorially an idealistic scheme of the universe; and "The Timaeus" is for Philo, after the Bible, the most authoritative ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... consist of concrete examples and specific instances are popular for expository articles. Sometimes several instances are related in the introduction before the writer proceeds to generalize from them. The advantage of this inductive method of explanation grows out of the fact that, after a general idea has been illustrated by an example or two, most persons can grasp it with much less effort and with much greater interest than ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... a scientific school, except just so far as medicine itself is a science. On the natural history side, medicine is a science; on the curative side, chiefly an art. This is implied in Hufeland's aphorism: "The physician must generalize the disease ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... esteem. As a Parisian, Dinah was superior to the most fascinating courtesan; she could be as amusing and as witty as Malaga; but her extensive information, her habits of mind, her vast reading enabled her to generalize her wit, while the Florines and the Schontzes exerted theirs over ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... You generalize this by saying that any opinion, however satisfactory, can count positively and absolutely as true only so far as it agrees with a standard beyond itself; and if you then forget that this standard perpetually grows up endogenously inside the web of the experiences, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... cannot formulate any theory of friendship which will cover all the conditions. I know a few things that friendship is not, and a few things that it is, but when I come to generalize upon the abstract quality I am quite at a ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... one well-endowed professorship. It were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... review of great value in strengthening the student's ability to generalize and analyze, consists of what might be called "problems in history." They are given out in much the same way as original problems in geometry, assuming that the student is acquainted with the facts from which to deduce the answers to the question. The object ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell

... college smoked cigars in his room, and we (the Balliol fellows) generally condemned it, I remember, in reply to my remark that a man who smoked made himself a nuisance, one of them said, 'It would not do to generalize; for in Germany the man who objects to smoking is the nuisance.' ... If anyone calls on me I must offer him a pipe and smoke one myself; and, conversely, when I call on anyone, I must not refuse the pipe.... The pipe fills up gaps of time, and 'breaks the ice' ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... as they possibly could. The women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying conditions ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... the French and English schools, in this department of the Art, well proves that mind has scope for its powers in portrait, and that genius alone can so generalize the details "as to identify the individual man with the dignity of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith—to take only men of the first eminence—were thinking not less for politics than for ethics when they ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... not particularize among so many schools and churches as were in the path of my visitation, and one must generalize if he will keep within limits. For ten years now it has been my privilege to study the South as a personal observer, not only in schools and churches and not only on the regular routes of travel, but in the bypaths of rural life and in talks with ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various

... sets of personal pronouns are not used indiscriminately, but the examples of their use which I collected are too few to generalize upon. However, ngatu and the three next under it, appear to be used only with a certain class of verbs of which an example is afforded by the sentence ngatu nudu matumina I struck him; and the use of the second set of these pronouns is illustrated ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... four, or wings or fins, lack reason just in proportion to their idiocy. Lor'! why I have seen human creatures at the Idiot Asylum with less intellect than cats. And I have seen some horses with more intelligence than some legislators. You can't generalize on these subjects, grandpa," said Miss Electra, ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... early religion is referred to The Soul of Abraham Lincoln, by William Eleazer Barton. It is to be observed that the present study is never dogmatic about Lincoln's religion in its early phases. And when Herndon and Lamon generalize about his religious life, it must be remembered that they are thinking of him as they knew him in Illinois. Herndon had no familiarity with him after he went to Washington. Lamon could not have seen very much of him—no one but ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... mistake is a special one for the conditions in which one works. When you are here and he understands really what you want, he can answer you for everything that concerns the center of France, and the general geology of the planet, if there is any opportunity to generalize. His reasoning has been this: not to make innovations, but to push to its greatest development what exists, in making use always of the method established by experience. Experience can never deceive, it ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... Freddie Drummond, in the role of his other self, came to experience genuine outrage, and it was only when he returned to the classic atmosphere of the university that he was able, sanely and conservatively, to generalize upon his underworld experiences and put them down on paper as a trained sociologist should. That Bill Totts lacked the perspective to raise him above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond clearly saw. But Bill Totts ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... emphasized by Dugas that Goblet was forced to repudiate many facts in order to generalize his theory. There are, moreover, dreams from which we do not awaken, e.g., some dreams in which we dream that we dream. From our knowledge of the dream-work, we can by no means admit that it extends only over the period of ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... were a few others who did. But some 550 of the group, though they had inherited the potentiality of reaching the average age of 90, actually died somewhere around 60; they failed by at least one-third to live up to the promise of their inheritance. If we were to generalize from this single case, we would have to say that five-sixths of the population does not make the most of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... the argument is weak just where it seeks to generalize. We are compelled to put the insane under restraint for social reasons apart from their own benefit. But their own benefit would be a fully sufficient reason if no other existed. To them, by their misfortune, liberty, as we understand the term, has no application, because they are incapable ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... immaterial and constant, neither dependent on, nor developed by exertion. Generally, it is well to conceal anatomical development as far as may be; even Michael Angelo's anatomy interferes with his divinity; in the hands of lower men the angel becomes a preparation. How far it is possible to subdue or generalize the naked form I venture not to affirm, but I believe that it is best to conceal it as far as may be, not with draperies light and undulating, that fall in with, and exhibit its principal lines, but with ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... distinction on which he had fixed his steadfast heart. Patiently he plodded on through the formal drudgeries of his new profession, lighting up dulness by his own acute comprehension, weaving complexities into simple system by the grasp of an intellect inured to generalize, and learning to love even what was most distasteful, by the sense of difficulty overcome, and the clearer vision which every step through the mists and up the hill gave of the land beyond. Of what the superficial are ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... which surrounds Monna Vanna, Jean, Thais, Salome, or Sapho. She becomes, indeed, so much a part of the character she assumes that the spectator finds great difficulty in dissociating her from that character, and I have found those who, having seen Mary Garden in only one part, were quite ready to generalize about her own personality from the impression they ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... rather more veracious. But he plainly had not the scholar's training and methods which we now demand of the historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color,—this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun to loom vaguely ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... growth and decay of language, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that our field of observation has been thus far extremely limited, and that we should act in defiance of the simplest rules of sound induction, were we to generalize on such scanty evidence. Let us but clearly see what place these two so-called families, the Aryan and Semitic, occupy in the great kingdom of speech. They are in reality but two centres, two small ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... uncertain quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of responsibility for ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... usurers: they won the battle against socialism; and from this legitimation of usury society gained some immense and unquestionable advantages. Under these circumstances socialism, which had tried to generalize the law enacted by Moses for the Israelites alone, Non foeneraberis proximo tuo, sed alieno, was beaten by an idea which it had accepted from the economic routine,— namely, farm-rent,—elevated into the theory ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... opportunity for definiteness. Facts and events are its one concern; theories and abstractions are beyond its range. Hence the more definite and concrete its presentation of facts, the better will be its effect. The reporter should never generalize or present his statements hazily and uncertainly—a fact is a fact and must be presented as such. He must try to avoid such expressions as "several," "many," "a few"—it is usually possible to give the exact number. He must continually ask himself ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way. If his sphere of action and interest impinges on that of any other man, there will have to be compromise and adjustment. Wait for the occasion. Do not attempt to generalize those interferences or to plan for them a priori. We have a body of laws and institutions which have grown up as occasion has occurred for adjusting rights. Let the same process go on. Practise the utmost reserve possible in your interferences even of this ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... principle by the analysis of a single concrete fact. As an illustration we may instance "the principle of causality." To enable us to affirm "that every event must have a cause," we do not need to compare and generalize a great number of events. "The principle which compels us to pronounce the judgment is already complete in the first as in the last event; it can change in regard to its object, it can not change in itself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... some interest for the reply, but it did not come. Possibly Sam did not wish to generalize on ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... of indignant hatred and contempt with which he regarded the mass of humanity; his quiet and powerful perception of their failings, errors, and crimes; his zeal for liberty and freedom of thought, tended at once to generalize, while it embittered, his satire, and to change traits of personal severity for that deep shade of censure which Gulliver's Travels throw upon mankind universally." Most of the sentiments which impressed Swift, seem also to have been ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... physical speculations of the Greek philosophers to have been, 'that though they had in their possession Facts and Ideas, the Ideas were not distinct and appropriate to the Facts.' The main cause of defect in the mental process here employed is the tendency of the human mind to generalize at too early a stage of the investigation, and consequently upon a too ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... We may generalize the whole position thus. When we first observe the working of the Law under the conditions spontaneously provided by Nature, it appears to limit us; but by seeking the reason of the action exhibited under these limited conditions, we discover ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be able to generalize even for my own private satisfaction. I observed, and expected to observe, that the most reactionary quarters were the most respected. It is the same everywhere. When a manager, having discovered that two real clocks in one real room never strike simultaneously, ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... in any respect alike. After learning to use the hands, for example, for a certain act, the same hand movements are afterward used for other similar acts which the child finds it well to perform. He thus tends, as psychologists say, to "generalize," that is, to take up certain general attitudes which will answer for a great many details of experience. On the side of the reception of his items of knowledge this was called Assimilation, as will be remembered. This saves him enormous trouble and risk; for as ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... by an indisposition to generalize," said Bernard, laughing. "On this point permit me not to generalize. I am interested in the particular case—in ascertaining whether Mrs. Vivian thinks very often of Gordon ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... who has studied public sentiment in this country for any period knows how easy it is to generalize from a few facts, and yet, if the subject be more thoroughly investigated, it becomes apparent how unsatisfactory such generalizations are apt to be; not that they are essentially untrue, but rather because they express only a part of the truth. If a ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... particular line of truth and motive the Lord had in mind when he said, "I am the way." By thus pointing out the way, and showing that eternal life and happiness are the blessed reward of walking in it, I hope to induce some here to-night to enter it. I might here generalize somewhat by calling your attention to the fact that it is natural for us all, when going anywhere, to feel best satisfied when we know the way we are on is the right way to where we want to go. It is true, however, one may tramp along through life over public roads, ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... nature of a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... thing has or has not an actual existence; or that the antitheses, parallels, conjugates, correlatives of language have anything corresponding to them in nature. There are too many words as well as too few; and they generalize the objects or ideas which they represent. The greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our servants, and not allowing ...
— Cratylus • Plato

... Tarantula is therefore dangerous to other animals than insects: it is fatal to the Sparrow, it is fatal to the Mole. Up to what point are we to generalize? I do not know, because my enquiries extended no further. Nevertheless, judging from the little that I saw, it appears to me that the bite of this Spider is not an accident which man can afford to treat lightly. This is all that I have ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... serious value to the efforts of the Marquis of Worcester, save as illustrating the principle with which I prefaced this article: that according to the mental peculiarities of the most vigorous of races—the Indo-Germanic above others—there is a tendency in certain active minds to generalize and draw practical conclusions, not unfrequently centuries in advance of the wants of their age. The partial and premature forcing of these principles into practice, is sometimes quoted in after years as derogatory to the merit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... ends in a chain of motives. B. is the end to A.; but it is itself a mean to C., and in like manner C. is a mean to D., and so on. Thus words are the means by which we reduce appearances, or things presented through the senses, to their several kinds, or 'genera'; that is, we generalize, and thus think and judge. Hence the understanding, considered specially as an intellective power, is the source and faculty of words;—and on this account the understanding is justly defined, both by Archbishop Leighton, and by Immanuel Kant, the faculty ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... of concrete examples and specific instances are popular for expository articles. Sometimes several instances are related in the introduction before the writer proceeds to generalize from them. The advantage of this inductive method of explanation grows out of the fact that, after a general idea has been illustrated by an example or two, most persons can grasp it with much less effort and with ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... of rural life apparently give this element less attention than it deserves. As Professor Ross has pointed out in "South of Panama," for example, the precocious development of sex tends to enfeeble the intellect and to prevent the largest kind of mental capacity. It is unsafe at present to generalize regarding the differences between country and city life in matters of sex, but it is certainly true, when rural life is empty of commanding interests and when it is coarsened by low traditions and the presence ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... "Oh, but generalize! From what you know of women as Woman, what should you expect? Shouldn't you expect her to make you pay somehow for your privity to her disgrace, to revenge her misery upon you? Isn't there a theory that women forgive ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... of the reader an effort has been made to arrange these sententious sayings under general subjects. These selected by no means exhaust the mine of African proverbial lore but are only a few nuggets that suggest the Negro's power to infer and generalize and to express himself in a graphic and concise way relative to life as he ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... would have given, always made him, on the contrary, love his fellow-men with a warmth that quite excluded misanthropy. Still this natural ardor rendered him extremely sensitive to neglect from those he loved, especially in early youth, when he was led by the fault of an individual to generalize blame against mankind. He relates somewhere, with merited contempt, that one of his friends would accompany a female relative to her milliner, instead of coming to take leave of him when he was about to leave England ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... you do have, Olive! I wish you'd come into my classes; I'd teach you how to generalize, and give you some much-needed lessons in beauty of diction. You mean well; but you certainly do talk like a housemaid, and—Good morning, Mr. Brenton. Jolly sort of morning, too!" Then Dolph digressed. "What in thunder is the matter ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... driven to despair by the inadequacy of the route surveys in his hands. Not a few of these surveys have been unworthy of reproduction in the books of the explorers who made them, and the best that could be done was to generalize their information on maps of comparatively small scale. But Donaldson Smith's route-maps appear in his book on the comparatively large scale of 1:1,000,000 (about sixteen statute miles to the inch), and they are worthy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... plain a thousand things would come between to intercept. But there was some morbidness about it too. Disappointment, in two or three instances, where he had given his full confidence and been obliged to take it back, had quickened him to generalize unfavourably upon human character, both in the mass and in individuals. And a restless dissatisfaction with himself and the world did not tend to a healthy view of things. Yet, truth was at the bottom; truth rarely arrived at without the help of revelation. He discerned a want he did not ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... it may be retorted that neither are all men Shakespeares and St. Augustines. The credit is so much the greater to those of the species which have overcome the disadvantages of a low and repulsive origin. None the less, however, will a strict veracity of mind and speech be careful not to generalize too sweepingly from a few particulars, and also not to make too indiscriminate and imperious a demand upon other people's enthusiasm. Especially will it be unwise for the friends of the dog to persist in their attempt to exalt him by depreciating man, inasmuch as man is the party ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... decide which process of arithmetic should be used in dealing with them. Once these decisions are made the succeeding arithmetical calculations are simple and easy. In technical terms the ability that is needed is the ability to generalize one's experiences. In every-day terms it is the ability to ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz

... occurs in St. Matt. xiii. 36 and xv. 15, we cannot generalize about the Peshitto rendering of this verb. Conversely, [Syriac letters] is used as the rendering of other Greek words ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... the poet's work. But while the schools and fashions of criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to particularize and also to generalize, to be "romantic" and "classic" by turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in giving a permanently ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... that a factor of greatness in any field is the power to generalize, the ability to discover the principle underlying apparently discordant facts. Bronson Howard's plays are notable for their evidence of this power. He saw causes, tendencies, results. His plays are expositions of this chemistry. 'Shenandoah' dealt broadly with the forces and feelings ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard

... entertaining three or four in the front parlor. Miss Ainsley remained chatting with Ella, who felt that the Northern girl's remarks were largely tentative, evincing a wish to draw her out. Shrewd Ella soon began to generalize to such a degree that Miss Ainsley thought, "You are no fool," and had a growing respect for the "little baker," as she had ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... treatment of the subject ought to be possible. Ignorance is the best of law reformers. People are glad to discuss a question on general principles, when they have forgotten the special knowledge necessary for technical reasoning. But the present willingness to generalize is founded on more than merely negative grounds. The philosophical habit of the day, the frequency of legislation, and the ease with which the law may be changed to meet the opinions and wishes of the public, all make it natural and unavoidable that judges as ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... thinking it well to generalize and spare Mrs. Freddy further rending, 'we've been talking about this public demonstration of the unfitness of ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... what ground is left for the reckless prediction that Theology is doomed, and must fall before the onward march of Positive Science? If man was able from the beginning to observe, to compare, to abstract, and to generalize, and if the fundamental laws of human thought have been ever the same, it follows that there must have been a tendency, coeval with the origin of the race, towards Theological, Metaphysical, and Inductive Speculation, and that ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... canonize catechize catholicize cauterize centralize characterize christianize civilize colonize criticize crystallize demoralize dogmatize economize emphasize epitomize equalize eulogize evangelize extemporize familiarize fertilize fossilize fraternize galvanize generalize gormandize harmonize immortalize italicize jeopardize legalize liberalize localize magnetize memorialize mesmerize metamorphize methodize minimize modernize monopolize moralize nationalize naturalize neutralize ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton

... educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... Drummond, in the role of his other self, came to experience genuine outrage, and it was only when he returned to the classic atmosphere of the university that he was able, sanely and conservatively, to generalize upon his underworld experiences and put them down on paper as a trained sociologist should. That Bill Totts lacked the perspective to raise him above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond clearly saw. But Bill Totts could not see it. When he saw a scab ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... has been a matron at the Perkins Institution for twenty years, and during the time that Miss Sullivan was a pupil there she was like a mother to her. In these letters we have an almost weekly record of Miss Sullivan's work. Some of the details she had forgotten, as she grew more and more to generalize. Many people have thought that any attempt to find the principles in her method would be nothing but a later theory superimposed on Miss Sullivan's work. But it is evident that in these letters she was making a clear analysis of what she was doing. She was her own critic, and in spite of her later ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... aside the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction, either by a figurative explanation, or, like Kimchi, by the absurd remark, that this doctrine is an error put into the mouth of the Gentiles. On the other hand, they depart from the true explanation, in so far that they generalize that which belongs to a definite subject, and that, flattering the pride of the natural man, they ascribe to mere man what belongs only to the God-man. Most distinctly was this view expressed by the Commentator on the book [Hebrew: eiN ieqb] or [Hebrew: eiN iwral], which has been very frequently ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... expressions of that "yearning after the gods" which the earliest of poets discerned in the hearts of all men. Studied in this sense they are rich in teachings. Would we estimate the intellectual and aesthetic culture of a people, would we generalize the laws of progress, would we appreciate the sublimity of Christianity, and read the seals of its authenticity: the natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the philosophic mind, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... events, etc., which are in any respect alike. After learning to use the hands, for example, for a certain act, the same hand movements are afterward used for other similar acts which the child finds it well to perform. He thus tends, as psychologists say, to "generalize," that is, to take up certain general attitudes which will answer for a great many details of experience. On the side of the reception of his items of knowledge this was called Assimilation, as will be ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... have the Will to Power and would like to play the master; small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form—because they address themselves to "all," because they generalize where generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and sometimes even seductive, when they are over-spiced and begin ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... All politics must be based on concrete historical facts—i.e., circumscribed in time and space. Indeed, strictly considered, political philosophy is only applied history. That is why political treatises are so disappointing. The philosopher is content to generalize, and does not know the facts. On the other hand, the historian who knows the facts has not the capacity of generalization. Politics must be mainly empirical. The political thinker does not reason forward from the past to the present, but backwards from the present to the past. He studies the present ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... scientific, and he did not try to generalize his knowledge under general laws; yet he formed a theory for almost everything which occurred. I do not think I gained much from him intellectually; but his example ought to have been of much moral service to all his children. One of his golden rules (a ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakspeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,—so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her privileges and rank in the household; and ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... "We have undertaken to generalize the law that is at the basis of the theory of value. In reality, it is all-comprehensive. The first generalization to be made consists in applying the law, not to single articles, but to consumers' wealth in all its forms. ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson

... the beginning it was a process belonging to the sovereign and used solely for his business, or employed for the business of others only by his permission in the special case. What Henry seems to have done was to generalize this use, to establish certain classes of cases in which it might always be employed by his subjects, but in his courts only. In essence it was a process for getting local knowledge to bear on a doubtful question of fact of interest to the government. Ought A to pay a certain tax? The question ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... Scotch would say—what like is it? Does it give any signs of qualities, physical or mental, tending to distinguish it from Britons, Australians, or North Americans? The answer is not easy. Nothing is more tempting, and at the same time more risky, than to thus generalize and speculate too soon. As was said at the outset, New Zealand has taken an almost perverse delight in upsetting expectations. Nevertheless, certain points are worth noting which may, at any rate, help readers to draw ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... assumed at once a more grand and a darker complexion. The spirit of indignant hatred and contempt with which he regarded the mass of humanity; his quiet and powerful perception of their failings, errors, and crimes; his zeal for liberty and freedom of thought, tended at once to generalize, while it embittered, his satire, and to change traits of personal severity for that deep shade of censure which Gulliver's Travels throw upon mankind universally." Most of the sentiments which impressed Swift, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... means, which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began to extend their ideas, and generalize their words, the ignorance of the inventors must have confined this method to very narrow bounds; and as they had at first too much multiplied the names of individuals for want of being acquainted with the distinctions ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... abacus. In the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates the cornice has dentels, and this was always the case, so far as we know, where the Corinthian capital was used. In Corinthian buildings the anta, where met with, has a capital like that of the column. But there is very little material to generalize from until we descend to ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... number of individual cases, the other gives an universal and necessary principle by the analysis of a single concrete fact. As an illustration we may instance "the principle of causality." To enable us to affirm "that every event must have a cause," we do not need to compare and generalize a great number of events. "The principle which compels us to pronounce the judgment is already complete in the first as in the last event; it can change in regard to its object, it can not change in itself; it neither increases ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... however, something more in the claim to universality in aesthetic judgments than the desire to generalize our own opinions. There is the expression of a curious but well-known psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing. If we say that other men should see the beauties we see, it is because we think those beauties are in the object, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... go back to the lawn. A good extent of open lawn space is always beautiful. It is restful. It adds a feeling of space to even small grounds. So we might generalize and say that it is well to keep open lawn spaces. If one covers his lawn space with many trees, with little flower beds here and there, the general effect is choppy and fussy. It is a bit like an over-dressed person. One's grounds lose all individuality thus treated. A single ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw

... well-ordered whole. He lacked not only literary ambition, but also that genius for organizing and systematizing which classifies and co-ordinates all the laws. Though methodical, he lacked the power to generalize. ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... ideas, would very soon acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus all the facts grouped nowadays under the name of auto-suggestion may, in my opinion, be explained. Here we shall generalize the law in this form: every idea conceived by the mind is an auto-suggestion, the selective effect of which is only counterbalanced by other ideas producing a different auto-suggestion. This is especially noticeable ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... vast stretch of country, with its poor communications, we can only know in part. When one sets out to generalize he does so at his own peril. The only consolation is that it is almost impossible to disprove any statement; for, however fantastical, it is probably in accord with the facts in some part ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger

... the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Much of the matter of these essays, received at the time with contemptuous aversion, is now accepted as truth; and few compositions of equal length contain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection. It is only when they generalize too confidently that they are in danger of misleading us; for all expositions of the art and practice of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts, is essentially a "mystery." Its charm depends upon qualities which we can neither define accurately ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... 'that though they had in their possession Facts and Ideas, the Ideas were not distinct and appropriate to the Facts.' The main cause of defect in the mental process here employed is the tendency of the human mind to generalize at too early a stage of the investigation, and consequently upon a ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... are critics, in a greater or less degree. They can generalize upon the merits and defects of a picture, although they cannot point out the details of the defects, or in what the beauty of a picture consists; and to prove this, only let the reader visit the Exhibition at Somerset ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various

... French and English schools, in this department of the Art, well proves that mind has scope for its powers in portrait, and that genius alone can so generalize the details "as to identify the individual man with the dignity ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... would be engendered on the way. In fact, one doubts whether the sufferer would even need to be of English strain to attach the vision of home to the essentially lovable places that Mr. Parsons depicts. They seem to generalize and typify the idea, so that every one may feel, in every case, that he has a sentimental property in the scene. The very sweetness of its reality only helps to give it that story-book quality which persuades us we ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... never any hotter cheeks than young Ried's just at that moment. This was the most extraordinary person with whom he had ever talked. It was impossible to generalize with her. Not that he wanted to generalize; on the contrary, he at once saw the possibilities growing out of individual effort, and caught at the idea of undertaking something. But the question ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden

... he must to Court on the morrow, instead of showing indignation or obstinate resolve to outwit tyranny, he generalizes in Shakespeare's way, exactly as Romeo and Orsino generalize in poetic numbers: ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... the mind, inaccuracy brings a partial deviation from the truth, and it does not take long for this slight error to generalize itself, if not corrected by its natural ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi

... prominently forward one culminating point, which serves to determine their true character. Such is the wise economy of all revealed laws, that generally avoiding abstractions, they select as a standard one special case of the most interesting, and leave it to thy care of the human understanding to generalize, and deduce from it universal theories.[2] Consequently, on analysing the ten emanations of the Divine Will, we must transfer mentally each of them to the class of duties to which it belongs, and consider it as intended to represent ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio

... Novikov, Le Federation de l'Europe, chap. iv. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour, chap. IV. While this is the fundamental fact, we must remember that we cannot generalize about the ideas or the feelings of a whole sex, and that the biological traditions of women have been associated with a primitive period when they were the delighted spectators of combats. "Woman," thought Nietzsche, "is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... insist that you shall accept my system of ethics. Deplorable results might follow its practical application in every imaginable case. I simply state facts, leaving the "thoughtful reader" to generalize from them whatever ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... evenings, by describing the persons and manners of the unfortunate beings, whose figures or voices awoke sympathetic sorrow in Maria's bosom; and the stories she told were the more interesting, for perpetually leaving room to conjecture something extraordinary. Still Maria, accustomed to generalize her observations, was led to conclude from all she heard, that it was a vulgar error to suppose that people of abilities were the most apt to lose the command of reason. On the contrary, from most of the instances she could investigate, she thought it resulted, that the passions only appeared ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... shafts of iron, hastily rigged up and left to rust when done with, run everywhere, and the scum of oil is on the water. The profit of the hour was all that was visible of motive or achievement in that smoky valley, though I know it is not safe to generalize, for miracles have been wrought ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... We may now generalize and clearly state: That is masculine which belongs to the male—to any or all males, irrespective of species. That is feminine which belongs to the female, to any or all females, irrespective of species. That is ovine, bovine, feline, canine, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... 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 general &c. adj.; generalize. Adj. general, generic, collective; broad, comprehensive, sweeping; encyclopedical[obs3], widespread &c. (dispersed) 73. universal; catholic, catholical[obs3]; common, worldwide; , ecumenical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... divisions of that awkward compound word,) tried the other day to persuade me that luster was an ignobleness in anything; and it was only the fear of treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain streams, and to morning dew, which kept me from yielding the point to him. One is apt always to generalize too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question that luster is destructive of loveliness in color, as it is of intelligibility in form. Whatever may be the pride of a young beauty in the knowledge that her eyes ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin

... expression. Profoundly engaged in the study of particular classes of natural phenomena, they are usually too much engrossed in the immense and ever accumulating details of their special sciences to generalize upon the methods of reasoning which they unconsciously employ. Yet few will deny that these methods of reasoning ought to be studied, especially by those who endeavor to introduce scientific order into less successful and ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... yet none the less a ghost in my opinion. Now let us generalize. It needn't be a sound maxim to seek the person who benefits by a crime—not always—for often enough the actual legatee of a murdered man may have had nothing whatever to do with his death. Albert, for example, will inherit Mr. Bendigo Redmayne's estate when leave to assume his death is granted ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... more about men, as such, from him than ever she had learned, consciously at least, from Rodney. She'd never been able to regard her husband as a specimen. He was Rodney, sui generis, and it had never occurred to her either to generalize from him to other men, or to explain any of the facts she had noted about him, on the mere ground of his masculinity. She began doing that now a little, and the exercise ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse, classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian formulas of the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... 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 old chum and former shipmate, actually serving as second officer on board ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad

... aim of this book to teach boys the primary requirements—not to generalize—but to show how to prepare and how to do the work; what tools and materials to use; and in what manner the tools used may be made most serviceable, and ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... humanity or the race in general. Of these, the most prominent are—the proneness to suppose in nature greater order and regularity than there actually is; the tendency to support a preconceived opinion by affirmative instances, neglecting all negative or opposed cases; and the tendency to generalize from few observations, or to give reality to mere abstractions, figments of the mind. Manifold errors also result from the weakness of the senses, which affords scope for mere conjecture; from the influence exercised over the understanding ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... world about him, the rising and setting of the sun, the return of the seasons, the movements of the tides and the stars, there have been individuals born with a marked and sometimes a passionate desire to observe Nature and to generalize their observations. They have noted that, given certain conditions, certain results follow. They observe that animals with given similarities of form and structure have certain identical ways of life, that some substances are malleable and others not, that dew appears at certain ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... Aims of Art, that is, why men toilsomely cherish and practise Art, I find myself compelled to generalize from the only specimen of humanity of which I know anything; to wit, myself. Now, when I think of what it is that I desire, I find that I can give it no other name than happiness. I want to be happy while I live; for as ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... of erotics beyond our power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletons of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the science of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our own premises, only rising above them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates. Such a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... us—and I go out on a scouting expedition and look for good specimens to add to our collection of horns or to get food for the porters. Sometimes the whole party went out, either photographing charging rhinos or shooting, but this part of the daily program was usually too varied to generalize as part of the daily doings. Several porters went with each of us to bring in the game, which there is rarely any uncertainty ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... be remarked that in returning to one's post of duty after a time of "leave," there is at first a disposition rather to generalize about what ought to be done than to set to work and do it. It is natural, indeed, that before putting on the harness once more we should take a look at the collar and buckles, and at the load to be drawn, and it may be allowable to the soldier, while on his way to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... megatherium, and if the microscope could only give back the proper response, we should see them, if not be filled with wonder at the marvellous perfection of their structure. But into whatever divisions or classifications we may distinguish or generalize the properties of matter, we can never predicate vitality of it, any more than we can predicate intellectuality. Indeed, "intellectual matter" presents no greater incongruity or invalidity of conception than "vital matter." These qualifying terms are applied to the known laws and forces ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... that the argument is weak just where it seeks to generalize. We are compelled to put the insane under restraint for social reasons apart from their own benefit. But their own benefit would be a fully sufficient reason if no other existed. To them, by their misfortune, liberty, as we understand the term, has no application, because they ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... should seek now to generalize these experimental results, they would take some such form as ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... could see only by monads at a time,—if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of some one small being in the fenceless vivarium of the Universe? Let not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we bared our heads to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... that Ptolemy in the Alexandrian time, and Alhazen, the Arab, made studies of refraction. Kepler repeated their experiments, and, striving as always to generalize his observations, he attempted to find the law that governed the observed change of direction which a ray of light assumes in passing from one medium to another. Kepler measured the angle of refraction by means of a simple yet ingenious trough-like apparatus which enabled him ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... from the lips of Christ at different times. These sentences, rapid and incomplete as they are in the form in which they have reached us, do yet give us glimpses of the most momentous character into the profoundest thoughts of his mind. They are sufficient to enable us to generalize their fundamental principles, and construct the outlines, if we may so speak, of his theology, his inspired conception of God, the universe, and man, and the resulting duties and destiny of man. We will briefly bring together and interpret these passages, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... cases with my informants, we came to the conclusion that the red light in the human eye is probably always a pathological condition, a danger signal; but it is not perhaps safe to generalize on these few instances, and I must add that all the medical men I have spoken to on the subject shake their heads. One great man, an eye specialist, went so far as to say that it is impossible, that the red light in the eye was not seen by my informants but only imagined. The ophthalmoscope, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... frivolously Oriental-looking and brilliant, whereas the critic likes only the sober and the dull. Few are sufficiently educated to appreciate style: and we cannot rule our own by anybody's opinion; but we can generalize and find something that shall be agreeable to all—something approaching to a golden mean. The artist for decoration should be sensitively alive to any suggestion from the style of that which he is to adorn, remembering ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... Charlotte like Sylvia? Was Charlotte even now sitting watching for him with that awful eagerness which comes from a hunger of the heart? He had seen one woman's wounded heart, and, like most men, was disposed to generalize, and think he had seen the wounded hearts of ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... I do generalize on the attitudes of both black and white servicemen and the black and white communities at large as well. But I have permitted myself to do so only when these attitudes were clearly pertinent to changes in the services' racial policies and only when the written record ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... myself not at all for my reveries, but that they have not yet got possession of my house and barn. But I shall not lose my love for books. I only worship Eternal Buddh in the retirements and intermissions of Brahma.—But I must not egotize and generalize to the end of my sheet, as I have a message or ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... It is dangerous to generalize here, because there is a fine distinction between harmony at home and bringing business into the home. Hasty thinking is likely to confuse the two. The man who takes petty troubles of the routine day home to his wife is a weakling, and business cannot consider him for increased responsibility. The ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... three story intellects with skylights. All fact—collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... shall have it hot-shot, but I'll have to generalize the story for you. The most decisive of all the tests have been made during the last eighteen months, and the final and most convincing of all within the year, under the direction of Lombroso, Morselli, and Bottazzi. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... than that in this world nobody ever invented anything. So it may be proved that, Johnson having written 'Great thoughts are always general', Blake had countered him by affirming (long before Hazlitt) that 'To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the great distinction of merit': even as it may be demonstrable that Charles Lamb, in his charming personal chat about the Elizabethan dramatists and his predilections among them, was already putting into practice ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... smoothly on, continuing to rise in the estimation of his party, and commanding a certain respect from the neutral public, by acknowledged and eminent talents in the details of business; for his quickness of penetration, and a logical habit of mind, enabled him to grapple with and generalize the minutiae of official labour or of legislative enactments with a masterly success. But as the road became clearer to his steps, his ambition became more evident and daring. Naturally dictatorial and presumptuous, his early suppleness to superiors was now exchanged ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sake, if the Celebrity had been content with women in general, all would have been well; but he was unable to generalize, in one sense, and to particularize, in another. And it was plain that he wished to monopolize Miss Trevor, while still retaining a hold upon the others. For my sake, had he been content with women alone, I should have had no ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... speech), and intelligence only becomes intellect when it is able to see the world from the standpoint of abstract ideas, such as truth, beauty, love, honor, goodness, evil, justice, race, individual, etc. The wider one can generalize correctly, the higher the 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 ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... contemplated, I do not admit that it should be the proximate end. The Expediency-Philosophy having concluded that happiness is a thing to be achieved, assumes that Morality has no other business than empirically to generalize the results of conduct, and to supply for the guidance of conduct nothing more than ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... of the sovereignty of the king, just as we idly substituted the words "God save the people" at the end of a proclamation, for "God save the king." It was a form. But, if it is desirable to affix to them any more precise signification, it will not do to generalize according to the argument of one party; but we are to take the words, in their limited and appropriate meaning and with their accompanying facts. They can only allude to the constituencies, and these constituencies ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... say that this would be attributable to the peculiarity of his temperament, and that he had no call to generalize and go beyond that. But I will lend a hand to the public prosecutor in this perplexity. I will bring the charge against myself in a more telling form than he has been able to do. I will formulate it as the facts of the case require that it must be formulated if ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... was right enough in his classification of the facts of distribution in depth as they are to be observed in the Aegean; and though, at the time he wrote, one or two observations were extant which might have warned him not to generalize too extensively from his Aegean experience, his own dredging work was so much more extensive and systematic than that of any other naturalist, that it is not wonderful he should have felt justified in building upon it. Nevertheless, so far as the limit of the range of life in depth goes, Forbes' ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... aim to generalize the most important facts, leaving the reader to examine at his leisure recondite authorities, in which, too often, the argument is obscured by minute details, and art is buried ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... the general mind, not in one age only but in all ages—is that which is always simple and always luminous." He did not embody in impassioned forms the sufferings, emotions, or problems of the human kind, but was disposed to generalize them, as in 'The Journey of Life,' the 'Hymn of the City,' and 'The Song of the Sower,' it is characteristic that two of the longer poems, 'Sella' and 'The Little People of the Snow,' which are narratives, deal with legends of an individual human life merging ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... one for the conditions in which one works. When you are here and he understands really what you want, he can answer you for everything that concerns the center of France, and the general geology of the planet, if there is any opportunity to generalize. His reasoning has been this: not to make innovations, but to push to its greatest development what exists, in making use always of the method established by experience. Experience can never deceive, it may be incomplete, but never mendacious. With this I embrace you, I summon ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... in a position to sit down and generalize about the wind. It is a tiresome thing to have it as the recurring insistent theme of our story, but to have had it as the continual obstacle to our activity, the opposing barrier to the simplest ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... the purposes of instruction, if we generalize this subject, by briefly stating a few of the most usual causes of apostacy from God; some of which are strictly applicable to the history of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... not even know the name of history, or the meaning of metaphysics and ethics. He knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. He does not readily generalize or conceive of abstractions. He observes the qualities common to certain bodies without reasoning about the qualities themselves. With the aid of geometric figures and algebraic signs, he knows something of extension and quantity. Upon ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... public sentiment in this country for any period knows how easy it is to generalize from a few facts, and yet, if the subject be more thoroughly investigated, it becomes apparent how unsatisfactory such generalizations are apt to be; not that they are essentially untrue, but rather ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... etc. Certain experiments of this sort have indicated that with pleasantness goes slower heart beat and quicker breathing, with unpleasantness quicker heart beat and slower breathing. But not all investigators have got these results; and, anyway, it would be impossible to generalize to the extent of asserting that slow heart beat always gave a pleasant state of feeling, and rapid heart beat an unpleasant; for there is slow heart beat during a "morning grouch", and rapid during joyful ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... of frost fighting as follows: "Frost is more likely to occur where the air is dry than where it is moist." It is also true that a dusty atmosphere is less favorable for frost than a dust-free atmosphere. Thus we may generalize and say that whatever favors clear, still, dry air favors frost. The theory of successful frost fighting then is to interfere with or prevent these processes which as we have seen facilitate cooling close to the ground. In what way can this best ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... time, it is possible only to generalize and point out that each case will have its own individual aspects. Controlling features for consideration will be the type of film, the type and size of lights, the method of lighting (direct, side, transmitted or reflected) and also whether or not filters are ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation

... in the direction AS. Since, however, the observer is not conscious of his own translatory motion with the earth in its orbit, the star appears to have a displacement which is at all times parallel to the motion of the observer. To generalize this, let S (fig. 3) be the sun, ABCD the earth's orbit, and s the true position of a star. When the earth is at A, in consequence of aberration, the star is displaced to a point a, its displacement sa being parallel to the earth's motion at A; when the earth is at B, the star appears ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... veracious. But he plainly had not the scholar's training and methods which we now demand of the historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color,—this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun to loom vaguely ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... conjured the same into life, has the historic mission of also carrying the revolution to perfection, and to promote on all fields the budding of the germs for radical transformations, which a social order, built on new foundations, would only have to generalize on a large scale, and make ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased her more than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and conventional morality, and down her by ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... judge the habitability of a planet such as Venus we must first, as far as possible, generalize the conditions that govern life and ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way. If his sphere of action and interest impinges on that of any other man, there will have to be compromise and adjustment. Wait for the occasion. Do not attempt to generalize those interferences or to plan for them a priori. We have a body of laws and institutions which have grown up as occasion has occurred for adjusting rights. Let the same process go on. Practise the utmost reserve possible in your interferences ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... to root out as those which the understanding has pledged its credit to uphold. In this Class are contained censors, who, if they be pleased with what is good, are pleased with it only by imperfect glimpses, and upon false principles; who, should they generalize rightly, to a certain point, are sure to suffer for it in the end; who, if they stumble upon a sound rule, are fettered by misapplying it, or by straining it too far; being incapable of perceiving when it ought to yield to one of higher order. In it are found critics too petulant ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... not generalize too much as to the merit or lack of merit of species-hybrids. Some are very good and of great economic importance. Many others of which we never hear are without merit, often being discarded, leaving only a few lines in a notebook ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's one of the things I never can understand—how people can generalize about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see anything to ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... dear boy! God bless us, haven't I had three years of this city to use my eyes and ears in? And I had a peculiar training in my youth," he added, retrospectively, "to fit me to see straight and generalize accurately." ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... it happened, however, the only narrow escape I personally ever had was from a grizzly, and in Africa the animal killed closest to me as it was charging was a rhinoceros—all of which goes to show that a man must not generalize too broadly from his own personal experiences. On the whole, I think the lion the most dangerous of all these five animals; that is, I think that, if fairly hunted, there is a larger percentage of hunters killed or mauled for a given number of lions ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... leave the everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely— the rest never—break through the spell of personality;—where Anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;—to leave this species of converse—if converse ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... scientific, or of whatever other peculiar complexion. Men, whose life lies in the cultivation of one science, or the exercise of one method of thought, have no more right, though they have often more ambition, to generalize upon the basis of their own pursuit but beyond its range, than the schoolboy or the ploughman to judge of a Prime Minister. But they must have something to say on every subject; habit, fashion, the public require it of them: and, if so, they can only give sentence according to their knowledge. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... to understand his relation to the revolutionary ideas and revolutionary movements of modern times. The peasant, in Germany as elsewhere, is a born grumbler. He has always plenty of grievances in his pocket, but he does not generalize those grievances; he does not complain of "government" or "society," probably because he has good reason to complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks from the first French Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and in certain villages of Saxony ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... systems in poetry and philosophy, some exchange might have been made with advantage to each. In the former, he counted general ideas for nearly all in all. (See his Essay on Poetry and Music, p. 431.) In the latter, he had not learnt to generalize at all; but would have rested merely in fact ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... I often spent an evening in them, and I found them very pleasant; only at first the women used to ask me such a lot of inconvenient questions that I became quite confused. They were always puzzled because I had no children. One cannot generalize on the subject of harims; they differ in degree just as much as families in London. A first-class harim at Constantinople is one thing, at Damascus one of the same rank is another, while those of the ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... Her tone was quite confident; even at that age, as I have observed, she knew very well what she liked. For my part I remembered so vividly my own early dreams and later awakenings that I would not cut short her guileless visions; moreover, to generalize from one's self is the most fatal foolishness, even while ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... forms in Gothic sculpture, three styles are enough to generalize about. The early work usually represented springlike leaves, clinging, half-developed, and buds. Later, a more luxuriant foliage was attempted: the leaves and stalks were twisted, and the style was more like that actually seen in nature. Then came an overblown period, when the leaves were positively ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... explain how the study of social insects has set moralists of recent years thinking in a new direction, it will be necessary to generalize a great deal in the course of so short a lecture. It is especially the social conditions of the ants which has inspired these new ideas; but you must not think that any one species of ants furnishes us with all the facts. The facts have been arrived ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... Both were working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... more coherent and connected story; but he has been restrained by the conviction that the thousands of opium-eaters, whose relief has been his main object in preparing the volume, will be more benefited by allowing each sufferer to tell his own story than by any attempt on his part to generalize the multifarious and often discordant phenomena attendant upon the disuse of opium. As yet the medical profession are by no means agreed as to the character or proper treatment of the opium disease. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... catastrophe of life about which he knew nothing at all, but which, nevertheless, he felt to be the conclusive supreme disaster. Although he did not comprehend it, he apprehended it no less poignantly than do men who know and generalize far more deeply and widely ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... and yet generalize at the same time, we will say here that the Tea plant or tree is greatly modified in hardiness, in height, in size of leaf, and in the quality of the leaf for a beverage, by soil, by moisture, tillage, and climate. Some soils and some climates develop ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.

... history of the universe, for in the present day these are too well understood to be contested, but likewise to prove how, without detriment to the stability of special studies, we may be enabled to generalize our ideas by concentrating them in one common focus, and thus arrive at a point of view from which all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active whole, animated by one sole impulse. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... instances might be cited, but for the sake of impartiality it is preferable to allow a German to generalize: "The rage of the populace has found vent not only against foreigners, but also against good German patriots, indeed ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... it the more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says of Burns, "We can see horribly clear in the work of such a man his whole life, as if we were God's spies." [Footnote: Sidney Colvin, John Keats, p. 285.] The Rousseau-like nudity of the poet's soul is sometimes put forward as a plea that the public should close its eyes to possible ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... their depredations on his beds. The rooting gave him the most trouble; but this he contrived in a great measure to prevent, by admitting his hogs only when they were eager for grass, and turning them out as soon as they began to generalize, like an epicure picking ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal interests and exploitation, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... "That is not a fair question to ask any man, for an affirmative makes a prig of him and a negative a mere politician. I will therefore generalize freely and tell you that a man who believes himself to be a statesman considers the nation first, as a matter of course. Howard, for instance, nearly killed himself at the end of last session over a measure which was of great national importance. He should have been in his bed, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... was highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people," she said, with an air of great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE love. 'He prayeth best who loveth best—all things both great and small.' For my own part I go ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... good is a quality of experience which does not demand an explanation. When we are thwarted we begin to ask why. It was the evil in the world that set Leibniz the task of justifying the ways of God to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life misfortune turns men to philosophy. One might generalize and say that as soon as we begin to explain, it is because we have ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... with political (Jacobin) artificiality, think that in order to solve the social question it will be necessary to generalize the system of metayage. They imagine, then—though they do not say so—a royal or presidential decree: "Art. 1. Let ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... make, on the altars of liberty and a becoming vengeance. We are in possession of but few of the numerous enterprises in which he was engaged; imperfect memories of the aged give us glimpses of deeds for the particulars of which we turn in vain to the dusty pages of the chronicler. But we need not generalize farther upon the traits of his military character. We have endeavored to make these speak for themselves, page by page, in the narration of the events, so far as we know them, by which his reputation was acquired. It is enough that his fame has entered ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms

... this symmetry shows us how unwise it were to generalize from the conclusions to which the Three-pronged Osmia leads us. Whereas some Bees, such as the Anthidium and the Chalicodoma, share the Osmia's talent for using the twofold exit, others, such as the Solenius and the Leaf-cutter, behave like a flock of sheep and follow ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... some less calculated to arrest our attention. Among these, the sun, moon and stars,—earth and sea, mountains and rivers, occupy prominent places. To facilitate our knowledge of these, and prompt reference to any part of them, we generalize or throw them into groups. Thus we speak familiarly of the "solar system," the "animal, vegetable or mineral kingdom." Now, just transfer these systematized objects from the material and physical, to the moral and spiritual world. Then consider ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele









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