"Empiricism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elusive and without words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by some wonder of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language for narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin's consciousness messages that were ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... where the whole foam of sound would have broken at their feet, transported them into a sphere, more limited, indeed, but far more idealized! What confident perception of the future powers of his instrument must have presided over his voluntary renunciation of an empiricism, so widely spread, that another would have thought it a mistake, a folly, to have wrested such great thoughts from their ordinary interpreters! How sincerely should we revere him for this devotion to the Beautiful for its own sake, which induced ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... and the supply will cease. Science, whether natural or social, is not in demand in Great Britain, and hence the diminution of supply. We have here the secret of literary and scientific decline, so obvious to all who study English books or journals, or read the speeches of English statesmen. Empiricism prevails everywhere, and there is a universal disposition to avoid the study of principles. The "cheap labor" system, which it is the object of the whole British policy to establish, cannot be defended on principle, and therefore principles are avoided. Centralization, cheap ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... to control the great business corporations and to exercise supervision over the accumulation and distribution of wealth; for such supervision and control can only come through this particular kind of increase of power. We no more believe in that empiricism which demand, absolutely unrestrained individualism than we do in that empiricism which clamors for a deadening socialism which would destroy all individual initiative and would ruin the country with a completeness that not even an ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... thought, which are the 'presuppositions' of the complexities Kant loved, operate upon so alien a stuff as the sensations are assumed to be? And, after all, was not Kant a bit premature in proclaiming the finality of his analysis and of his refutation of empiricism for all time? The searching question, Why should the future resemble the past? had received no answer, and so might not the mind itself, with all its categories, be susceptible to change? Was it certain that the miracle whereby the data presented to our faculties conformed to ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... easily be shown that the conclusions of this metaphysic, springing from science, have rebounded upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate the whole of our so-called empiricism. Physics and chemistry study only inert matter; biology, when it treats the living being physically and chemically, considers only the inert side of the living: hence the mechanistic explanations, in spite of their development, include only a small part of the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... may set aside their pretensions to have founded an exact science. What, then, is to come in its place? Are we simply to admit that there is no certainty about economical problems, and to fall back upon mere empiricism? Everything,—shall we say?—is to be regarded as an open question. That is, perhaps, a common impression in the popular mind. Yet, on the other hand, we may find some very able thinkers applying mathematical formulae to economics; and that seems to suppose, that within a certain region they obtain ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the land, whose soil was trodden by Pythagoras and Saint Augustine, will not link themselves with doctrines which always run those who hold them aground sooner or later upon the sad and gloomy shores of a vulgar empiricism. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... word "mordant" indicates the empiricism, or our old friend "the rule of thumb," of the age in which it was first created and used. It serves as a landmark of that age, which, by the way, needed landmarks, for it was an age of something between scientific twilight and absolute ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... American Indians, who still remain under the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to their ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the author says, "is to add to the general store of ever increasing knowledge of the nature of language, and to contribute a share toward ascertaining the principles which will help to emancipate language-teaching and language-study from the domain of empiricism and will place it once for all on ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... golden key of mental phaenomena, which has lain buried for ages in the deepest vein of the mine of physiological research, is now, by a happy combination of practical and speculative investigations, grasped, if I may so express myself, firmly and inexcusably, in the hands of physiognomical empiricism." The Cambrian visitors listened with profound attention, not comprehending a single syllable he said, but concluding he would finish his speech by proposing the health of Squire Headlong. The gentlemen accordingly tossed off their ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... that man had conquered death already, in the person of its King and Lord—in the flesh of Him who ascended up on high, and led captivity captive, and received gifts for men. The "empire of mind over matter?" What practical proof had he of it amid the miserable alternations of empiricism and magic which made up the pseudo-science of his time; amid the theories and speculations of mankind, which, as he said, were "but a sort of madness—useless alike for discovery or for operation." What right had he, more than any other man who had gone before him, to believe that man could ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... doctrines were used by later generations to prepare the way for still greater inroads upon the contents of Christianity, and finally to justify an attitude of doubt concerning the very foundations on which Christianity was based. Empiricism, Sensualism, Materialism, and Scepticism in philosophy, undermined dogmatic Christianity, and prepared the way for the irreligious and indifferentist opinions, that found such general favour among the educated and higher classes during the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... was the living form in which its spirit was embodied, the concrete practical force of which it stood in need. Marx was the most clearly convinced and the most powerful among those who put an end to the empiricism of the labor movement and the utopianism of the socialist thought, and this should always be remembered to his credit. By a crowning application of the Hegelian method, he united the Idea and the Fact, thought and history. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... vitally necessary to society. Once he is brought to repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he will repudiate the very conception of law and the very groundwork of institutions, ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless methods as "historical," and tolerating nothing except pure empiricism in conduct, with dynamite as the basis of politics and vivisection as the basis of science. That is hideous; but what is to be done? Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... cases are well known to medical science; and at the present day, when the manufacture and sale of an alleged universal heal-all is said to be one of the shortest and surest paths that lead to fortune—when in our own country 'the powers that be' encourage rather than check such wholesale empiricism—we cannot consistently condemn the more ancient quack, who having, in all faith, given an immense sum for a piece of nut-shell, remunerated himself by selling draughts of water out of it to his believing dupes. The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... present anarchy of political opinion and parties, changes in the existing social order inevitably assume, he urged, the character, at the best, of a mere groping empiricism; at the worst, of a social convulsion like that of the French Revolution. Under the direction of a positive, in place of a speculative or, as Comte would have said, metaphysical science of society, progress must assume the character of an ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... cause just as plain, and it is just here where the laity lack the proper education, and where they should understand that the intelligent physician generalizes the disease and only individualizes the patient; and it is this ignorance on the part of the laity that gives to empiricism and quackery that advantage over them, as they look upon all disease as a distinct individual ailment, that should have an equally distinct and individual therapeutic agent to cope singly with. The laity know very little of these things, and in their happy ignorance care still less ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... . The end of me may be empiricism. . . . They have destroyed eight years' work, and I have nothing left of it but memories of data which I can't produce for evidence—worthless, that is, for a man of my scientific conscience. En revanche and on the other side of the stream I find I have it; to carry on ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... revolutionary spirit in politics, not of native growth, but imported from abroad, which only satisfied itself by the overthrow of thrones, by the transgression of all established limits, and by its declaration of the supreme rights of reason and will; and a false philosophy, with its unholy brood of Empiricism, Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, and Naturalism. The skepticism of the present day asserts rights to which it has no claim whatever, for it holds that the so-called mysteries of Christianity have no divine basis, and that there can be nothing supernatural in revelation. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... predicates proctitis and sometimes colitis. It is declared that constipation is its primary symptom; and that diarrhea is one of its secondary symptoms, resulting from constipation. There is a legion of secondary symptoms of proctitis, all of which medical empiricism considers and denominates causes. As constipation is such an every-day complaint of almost everybody one meets, it will not tax our imagination unduly to conceive how it may be a frequent cause of diarrhea, which is only Nature's effort to get rid of its useless and excessive burden of retained ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... science, the parade of classification, and the mystery imparted by technical terms. By these means they have given plausibility enough to their theories, to leave many a one in doubt, whether it is really a new triumph of human discovery, or merely a later form of empiricism. Its professors are commonly converts to their own theories, at least in a great degree; for, strange as it may seem, there can mingle with the disposition to deceive others, the power of deceiving one's self; and while they exercise much acuteness and penetration ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker |
