"Generalization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... character of the enemy of the gods. The two conceptions of her do not agree together perfectly, and the priority in time must be assigned to the latter. The idea that the world of gods and men and material things issued out of the womb of the abyss is a philosophic generalization that is more naturally assigned to a period ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which present the most striking contrasts manifested in the Alpine tropical landscapes of South America, and the dreary wastes of the steppes in Northern Asia. Travels, undertaken in districts such as these, could not fail to encourage the natural tendency of my mind toward a generalization of views, and to encourage me to attempt, in a special work, to treat of the knowledge which we at present possess, regarding the sidereal and terrestrial phenomena of the Cosmos in their empirical ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... that have never entered his head. Even in studies more immediately connected with obvious everyday life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly remarkable how little he possesses the power of generalization and inference. His elaborate lists of facts are imposing typographically, but are not even formally important, while his reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of course, Kenelm could not at a glance comprehend in detail. But as the mind of a man accustomed to generalization is marvellously quick in forming a sound judgment, whereas a mind accustomed to dwell only on detail is wonderfully slow at arriving at any judgment at all, and when it does, the probability is that it will arrive at a wrong one, Kenelm judged correctly when he came to this conclusion: ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it. Husband and wife come to look alike ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though these would be as effectual for murder. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sagacity of your judgment.' Oh, I've read his notes; or you would agree if it were Domaisen, the rhetoric teacher, who is much impressed—those are his very words, are they not, gentlemen?—with 'your powers of generalization, which' he says, are even 'as granite heated at a volcano.' But as it is only dear old Bauer"—and d'Hebonville shrugged his shoulders significantly. "Well, and what about 'dear old Bauer,' as you call him?" cried Napoleon; ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... it up with mannerisms, and so turn out much more than if they wrought it all. The world, too, has now accumulated a myriad handbooks of facts and compilations of statistics, which enable writers with a fondness for theory, like Buckle, to have all their material ready to spin into generalization. Then there is a popular education toward prolixity in the telegraphic part of newspapers. The associated press writers from Washington seem to be selected for their inability to be terse and pithy, and dribble out the simplest fact with pitiful ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... it had so often been thought before, because it was in the nature of things to think it of every woman, because his wife was so eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... state in a civil sense, that although there was a name for a common soldier (or sentinel, as he was termed by our ancestors)—viz. miles gregarius, or miles manipularis—there was none for an officer; that is to say, each several rank of officers had a name; but there was no generalization to express the idea of an officer abstracted from its several species or classes.] It cannot much surprise us that this department of the public service should gradually have gone to ruin or decay. Under the senate and people, under the auspices of those awful symbols—letters more significant ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... misgivings, played magnificently for all it was worth, as she could play it—she knew that now—it would be a rather wonderful life. They must be decidedly an exceptional pair of lovers, she thought. Certainly Madame Greville's generalization about Americans did not apply to them, and she was coming to suspect it did apply to the majority of her friends. She could have that life—safely, surely, as far as our poor mortality can be sure of anything. She had only to reach out ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the ultimate judgment of history Marx will have a place in social science analogous with that of Galileo in physical science."[19] In exile, and often desperate poverty, Marx worked out with infinite care the scientific basis of the generalization—first given to the world in the Communist Manifesto—that social and political institutions are the product of economic forces. In all periods there have been antagonistic economic classes whose relative power is determined by struggles between them. "Freedman ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... abstractions, no thought, no handing down of knowledge. Although all that is mental has its origin, in the last analysis, in simple sensations, its development requires emancipation from the sensuous, and language is the means for freeing ourselves from the pressure of sensations by the generalization and combination of ideas. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... substance, as a compound thing; no person reasons more distinctly in general, or sees more clearly the importance of his principles; yet, with regard to mineral concretions, how often has he been drawn thus inadvertently into improper generalization! I appeal to the analogy which, in this treatise, he has formed, between the stalactical concretions upon the surface of the earth, and the mineral concretions of siliceous substance. As an example of the great lights, and penetrating genius, of this assiduous ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... sweated his 'hands,' the parson who consigned his parishioners to hell, the peer who rode roughshod—all were equally odious to him. He thought of people as individuals, and it was, as it were, by accident that he had conceived the class generalization which he had fired back at Miltoun from Mrs. Noel's window. Sanguine, accustomed to queer environments, and always catching at the moment as it flew, he had not to fight with the timidities and irritations of a nervous ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... primitive times to the present, as we have seen, offers a most suggestive field and certifies to the importance of the manufacture of honest inks as necessary to the future enlightenment of society. That it has not been fully understood or even appreciated goes without saying; a proper generalization becomes possible only in the light of corroborative data and the experiences of ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... rendered to the State by the dozens of knights made every year, while he can see very well that the men of real distinction, whom he does know, never get any distinctions at all. These difficulties perplex and irritate him. Probably he goes home with a hasty generalization. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... though they are more extensive and general in their nature, and, therefore, more suitable, in a strictly-scientific point of view, for the foundations of a system, are less apparent, and require higher powers of generalization and abstraction; and are, therefore, less in accordance with the genius and spirit ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... avoid a pedantic specialism and let each stray into the other's province whenever he thinks fit. But the fact remains that they are primarily concerned with different things: and that each is most to be trusted when he is upon his own ground. When, therefore, the economist indulges in a generalization about psychology, even when he gives it as a reason for an economic proposition, in nine cases out of ten the economics will not depend upon the psychology; the psychology will rather be an inference (and very possibly ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... Nature; he was capable of delicate handling and minute execution, but he resolutely cast them aside lest any idol should interfere between him and his new religion. There may be traced a lingering likeness in his landscapes to those of Rubens; but this arose more from his generalization of details, his sinking the parts in the whole, than to any imitation of the great Fleming. It is like the recollection of some sweet melody which the musician weaves into his theme, all unconscious that it is a memory and not a ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Diaspora and Nationalism broke out with new fury. Again we see Diaspora Judaism pitched against Palestinian Judaism, and Religion against Nationalism. Reason has given way to passion, and discrimination to generalization. The Jews of the new Palestine, who have given of their life-blood to the rejuvenation of our homeland, are sweepingly declared to be "anarchists," while, on the other hand, American Jews who, with single-hearted ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... establish certain mathematical or GEOMETRIC laws of cerebral action, concerning the direction and mode in which all faculties act upon the mind and body, which laws constitute the BASIC PHILOSOPHY of Anthropology, the highest generalization of science. These laws constitute a compact system of science, lying at the basis of all psychology, as the bony skeleton is the basis of the human form. These laws being easily demonstrated, and giving great clearness and systematic beauty ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... order of procedure of a general when war is first declared, who commences with the points of the highest importance, as a plan of campaign, and afterward descends to the necessary details. Tactics, on the contrary, begins with details, and ascends to combinations and generalization necessary for the formation and handling of ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Mrs. Browning's implication seems to be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, Echoes; Olive Dargan, Ye Who ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... opposite characteristics, which sometimes, indeed, served to neutralize each other. An acute and subtile perception was often clouded by mysticism and abstraction. They combined a habit of classification and generalization, with a marvellous fondness for detail; a vivacious fancy with a patience of application, that a German of our day might envy; and, while in fiction they launched boldly into originality, indeed extravagance, they were content in philosophy to tread ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... too high for me. I have no skill in the flights of speculation. I take no pleasure in the enunciation of principles. To my restricted vision, placed as I am upon the earth, isolated facts obtrude themselves with a capricious particularity which defies my powers of generalization. And that, perhaps, is the reason why I attached myself to the party to which I have the honour to belong. For it is, I think, the party which sees things as they are; as they are, that is, to mere human vision. Remenham, in his haste, has called us the party of reaction. ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum of all the ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables, and bodies of animals and men. This creed is popularly expressed in the sentence so often heard, "God is everything, and everything is God." But this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity—this exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving stones to the same level of divinity—by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so impartial. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the final end, and the person meant to make use of the thing produced. It further is matter of experience that whatever consists of non-sentient matter is dependent on, or ruled by, a single intelligent principle. The former generalization is exemplified by the case of jars and similar things, and the latter by a living body in good health, which consists of non-intelligent matter dependent on an intelligent principle. And that the body is an effected thing follows from its consisting of parts.—Against ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. When Madame ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and condenser. There are still other considerations, such as water supply, condition of circulating water, style of pump, etc., which must all necessarily have an obvious bearing upon the settlement of this question; so that generalization is somewhat out of place, the final design in all cases depending solely upon ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... supposed to be above such trickery. Yet I read a few days ago, not as a single example, but only as the last I happen to remember, an article by a distinguished American professor, protesting with great moderation that an important scientific generalization which he published in 1902 had been annexed, without acknowledgment, by a versatile and adroit professor in the University of Berlin—an acquaintance of my own—in the year 1906; and it was not until 1910 that the latter was made to confess his guilt, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... intellect. The practical man rarely seeks wide generalizations because the truth of these and their value can only be demonstrated through the course of long periods of time, during which no good to the individual himself is seen. Besides which, the practical man knows that the wide generalization may be an error. Practical aims are usually immediate aims, whereas the aims of intellect are essentially remote and may project beyond the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me. But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, "You need not accuse your German blood, for I have lived long enough in my American's Paradise to know that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this particular respect, with the addition of a certain goblin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... see, Watson. You are sketching out a theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false. According to your idea, there was never any hidden menace, or secret society, or Valley of Fear, or Boss MacSomebody, or anything else. Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to. They invent this theory to account for the crime. They then play up to the idea by leaving this bicycle in the park as proof of the existence of some outsider. The stain ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... no wise contributed to what he foresaw and, so to speak, prophesied—the growing stress of the struggle for life in domains political, social, financial, industrial, the coming of uncrowned kings greater in puissance than monarchs of yore, the reign of not one despot but many, the generalization of intrigue, the replacement of ancient disorders by others of equal or increased virulence and harder to remedy, hundred-headed hydras to combat, most difficult of herculean tasks. The reflection of all this in the Comedy was calculated to impress at its hour, and the hour ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... human beauty as it gladdens our daily path. Byron, who often erred, erred not in saying, I've seen more living beauty, ripe and real, than all the nonsense of their stone ideal. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has induced him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of Art. Having, I say, felt its truth here. For the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations, than the sentiment of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... original sin in the Christian sense, and explains the vice and virtue of mankind by the actions of the souls of men in a state of pre-existence. No signs or miracles are referred to in the account of 'the just man'; and that it was intended as a generalization is evident from the change of the singular into the plural number in the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... by the necessity for generalization! The word PROPERTY has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say THE PROPERTIES OF THE TRIANGLE or ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the instinctive creed of any savage people or rude race of men. To imagine all nature with all its apparently independent parts, as forming one consistent whole, and as itself a unit, required an amount of experience and a faculty of generalization not possessed by the rude uncivilized mind, and is but a step below the idea of a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature that you could fix upon as a positive test: the uncomfortable and unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where people lived among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where they had none. A broad generalization, you will say! Perhaps a little too broad; yet, in all sobriety, it will come truer than you think. Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some virtue in it; but in the iron railing none. There is, first, your castle rampart of stone—somewhat too ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... how brief—of the medical profession during the century, however, should include mention of a man who, although not a full-time professional physician, proves to be the exception to Dr. Blanton's generalization about the prominence of individual medical men and the quality of medical practice during the late 1600's. This man, the Reverend John Clayton, is a noteworthy example of the intellectual level an individual could attain and maintain while living in ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... power, and as such, if, in a matter of principle, it recognizes itself as impotent and even absurd a priori, it knows that once in possession of the principle, it borrows from its light and becomes identified with it—an incomparable power of generalization. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... not, indeed, to ask forgiveness for turning Annie out of school, but to beg permission to transplant her one day to a home of his own. Whatever was said, we suspect Annie might have served as "an instance in point" for that rather broad generalization ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... ridiculous and fanciful, but they were calculated to prevent the Jews from any chance of adopting the manners and customs of the peoples around them; and the Indians, having had similar views, naturally adopted similar means. Such then is a brief generalization of the causes which led to caste laws, which were, no doubt, carried in some instances to a ridiculous length, but which were founded in common sense, and were admirably adapted to carry into effect the opinions of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... predicate a considerable group of people, with such organization and division of activities as to guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on. Sex is a group problem. Considering the mutual interdependence and the diversity of activities in human society, to make the generalization that one sex is superior to the other is on a par with saying that roots and branches are superior to trunks and leaves. It is sheer foolishness. Yet oceans of ink have flowed in attempts to establish one or the other ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... altogether for John Ballantyne's benefit. The author afterwards spoke of them as "rather flimsily written,"[200] but we may surmise that to the fact that they were not the result of special study is due something of their ripeness of reflection and breadth of generalization. "They contain a large assemblage of manly and sagacious remarks on human life and manners,"[201] wrote ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... still pursue mineralogy for its own sake; but, generally, our mineralogists have turned geologists, studying rocks on a large scale, instead of their individual constituents, and vieing with their brethren in Europe in bold and successful generalization, and in the application of physical science to their subject. Maclure was one of the pioneers, and Eaton and Silliman contributed much to the stock of knowledge. This school has given rise to the great geological surveys made or progressing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... paid women disgusted him. Of mere animalism, he had none. Here in this widest essential, his nature marked its contrast with Traill. To admit the beast in every man would have been beyond him; simply because the admission of a generalization such as that, would most directly have implied himself. In Traill's concession of it, such an admission may easily be read. And this is the type of man, such as Devenish, most ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... times greater than those which fall to the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight—the delight in fable and story—to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic appeals is indicative of a stage of intellectual development to which only a small minority even of our so-called cultivated public attains. It is therefore a minority of a minority which he addresses, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... told that a man who writes pure Spencerian can never do anything else. This, however, is a hasty generalization, put forth by a party who wrote a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... there were allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming from ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... exhibits widely different phenomena as to continuity and no generalization is of any value. In gold deposits of this type in West Australia, Colorado, and Nevada, continuity far beyond a sampled face must be received with the greatest skepticism. Much the same may be said of most copper replacements in limestone. On the other hand ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... meditation of general injustice—when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning, (for we will now confess the case our own), an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generalization! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand the identical S——, in whose favour we had suspected him of the contumacy. Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... thought out, admirably written, and always stimulating in its generalization and in the perspectives it ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... than imitated, is in error. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has led him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of art. Having, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations than the sentiments of his art yields the artist. He not only believes, but ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the same generalization expressed to the modern student under the term 'Balkan Peninsula,' extinguishing every ray and trace of ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... are at present," she said, "it is true. We live under man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we're underpaid and sweated—it's dreadful to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went on, conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... folkways dominate the societal life. Then they seem true and right, and arise into mores as the norm of welfare. Thence are produced faiths, ideas, doctrines, religions, and philosophies, according to the stage of civilization and the fashions of reflection and generalization. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... zealous because the attitude of the public and of the courts was more friendly to the accused witch. This explanation is at best, however, nothing more than a suggestion. We have not the material for confident generalization. ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... grave. Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out. A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of your muddy, stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the reports of the physicians and specialists of all countries reveals the baffling nature of the disease. These leprosy specialists are unanimous on no one phase of the disease. They do not know. In the past they rashly and dogmatically generalized. They generalize no longer. The one possible generalization that can be drawn from all the investigation that has been made is that leprosy is FEEBLY CONTAGIOUS. But in what manner it is feebly contagious is not known. They have isolated the bacillus of leprosy. They can determine by bacteriological ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... ethical fulness that more than compensate for their lack of dry legal detail. Bacon seems indeed to have been a lawyer of the first order, with a keen scientific insight into the bearings of isolated facts and a power of generalization which admirably fitted him for the self-imposed task, unfortunately never completed, of digesting or codifying the chaotic mass of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... supposed. To do this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence. But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... us, but is now gradually supplanting the old one? Did the nose aquiline largely represent class, and does the phenomenon of the new semi-straight, semi-nothing nose represent the intrusion of mass? Against this timid and, it may be, spurious generalization, one may pit the working-man with the nose of a duke, and the young colonial ruler with the unformed, delicate feature of a school-girl. So we accept the fact that in our own ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Sefton, but the Secretary remained calm, composed and smiling, listening to Harley with the same air of interested curiosity shown by the others. Prescott saw it all with a flash of intuition; the Secretary had given Harley a hint, just a vague generalization, within the confines of truth, but without any names—enough to make those concerned uneasy, but not enough to put the power in any hands save those of the Secretary. Harley himself confirmed this by continuing the subject, though somewhat uncertainly, as if ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... metaphor and generalization, each Avataric movement centered around an individual Man, and this Man embodied the principle and undertook the special work of an evangel, or Christos, or "Avatar," ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... upon him to assure me, that the feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in by speculative ontologists—the other, to those that result from the inductive process of searching into the physical arcana of nature. He was not aware of the bent of my mind, or his comparison might have been made more suitable ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Buckle signally failed. His fundamental conceptions, upon which reposes the whole edifice of his labor, are sciolistic assumptions caught up in his youth from Auguste Comte and other one-eyed seers of modern France; his generalization, multitudinous and imposing, is often of the card-castle description, and tumbles at the touch of an inquisitive finger; and his cobweb logic, spun chiefly out of his wishes rather than his understanding, is indeed facile and ingenious, but of a strength to hold only flies. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... individual facts are affirmed or denied at once. But a general proposition is not merely a compendious form for recording and preserving in the memory a number of particular facts, all of which have been observed. Generalization is not a process of mere naming, it is also a process of inference. From instances which we have observed, we feel warranted in concluding, that what we found true in those instances holds in all similar ones—past, present, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... that neither the pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while, the righteous ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... upon it as a thing longed for. For, to those advanced students who have kept well abreast of the chemical tide, it offers a calm philosophy. To those others, youngest of the class, who have emerged from the schools since new methods have prevailed, it presents a generalization, drawing to its use all the data, the relations of which the newly-fledged fact-seeker may but dimly perceive without its aid.... To the old chemists, Prof. Cooke's treatise is like a message from beyond the mountain. They have heard of changes in the science; the clash of the battle of old and ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... The most comprehensive generalization by which we may hope to arrive at an idea of the business of New York is that which includes in tabular form the statistics of the chief institutions which employ ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... suggested that the author had been interrupted, or convinced of the futility of proceeding, with her pen in the air.... Oh, yes, Ralph had come in at that point. She scored that sheet very effectively, and, choosing a fresh one, began at a great rate with a generalization upon the structure of human society, which was a good deal bolder than her custom. Ralph had told her once that she couldn't write English, which accounted for those frequent blots and insertions; but she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... in the other all those of the second class, we should make this discovery, that government-forming animals are those which by nature live together in companies, while the other class as a rule live apart. The generalization reached is, that only gregarious animals form governments. We would discover upon further investigation that the greater the interdependence of the individuals, the ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... one frequently finds the generalization that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human nature. If there be some degree ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... was modified, and the reasons why and the conditions under which Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered. The suction of fluids was brought under the general law of mechanical pressure. The doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fair generalization and expression of the facts of this kind that up to that time had been observed. A new fact was observed which would not fall under the rule. The examination of this fact led to the old rule being superseded; and Science advanced ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob—the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reported by his wife to have said once, "give me the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue. There is a way to take a fool; but a rogue is smart and slippery." This was an airy generalization drawn from the particular case of Captain MacWhirr's honesty, which, in itself, had the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay. On the other hand, Mr. Jukes, unable to generalize, unmarried, and unengaged, was in the habit of opening his heart after another fashion to an ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... therefore, it will rain tonight." While we do not commonly think in complete syllogisms, it is often convenient to cast our reasoning in this form to test its validity. For example, a fallacy lurks in the generalization, "Lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain." Hence the conclusion is of ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... and to defend Shakespeare against the familiar accusations of barbaric crudity and formlessness. In surveying the field, it was likewise incumbent upon him to demonstrate in what respects the classic drama differed from the independently developed modern play, and his still useful generalization regards antique art as limited, clear, simple, and perfected—as typified by a work of sculpture; whereas romantic art delights in mingling its subjects—as a painting, which embraces many objects and looks out into the widest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the greatest men of all time, did more to advance and prove the theory of evolution than anybody else who ever lived. This he accomplished by virtue of the highest gifts of observation, experiment, and generalization. His truthfulness, patience, and calmness of judgment have never been exceeded by mortal. His works are published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, together with his "Life and Letters," edited by his son Francis. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... himself examine all the specific instances, he cannot consider all the illustrations which might support his position, but he must be careful of a too hasty generalization. Having talked with a dozen returned soldiers he may not declare that all American army men are glad to be out of France, for had he investigated a little further he might have found an equal number ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... told absurdities; he knocks and it is not opened to him; death comes to him—also without his choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source of an enjoyment nothing ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... any exactness in money and added to the sum of an average week's income. What is the worth to a labourer of the crops he grows in his garden? It depends, obviously, on the man's skill, and the size of the garden, and the clemency of the seasons—matters, all of them, in which any attempt at generalization must be received with suspicion. All that can be said with certainty is that most of the cottages in the valley have gardens, and that most of the cottagers are diligent to cultivate them. But when the circumstances are considered, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... or known to be indicated by some trace. Identical inner states do not, of course, invariably have identical bodily concomitants, neither in all individuals alike, nor in the same individual at different times. Modern methods of generalization so invariably involve danger and incorrectness that one can not be too cautious in this matter. If generalization were permissible, psychical events would have to be at least as clear as physical processes, but that is not admissible for many reasons. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... from Cumberland County and New Jersey, and one each from Dauphin County and from Orange County in New York. Nine of these settlers, incidentally, were Scotch-Irish. Although these data are insufficient for any valid generalization, they do conform to the characteristic migratory trends indicated ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... brachycephalic is "Belasco" and the next "Akop," the two of unusual stature. These men are less brachycephalic than the Igorot measured at Ambuklao and Kayapa, but the numbers in each case are too few to permit generalization. The group is platyrhinian for the greater part, four only being mesorhinian. On the whole this is a very homogeneous group of men. With two exceptions all are of about the same low stature, all mesaticephalic, all platyrhinian or nearly so. The ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... generalization is based on certain facts which, taken in their collective capacity, mean the truth which is expressed in the formula. A higher generalization embraces those which are simpler, and unites by its expression the truths which they contain ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... In regard to morality, generalization is difficult. There is undoubtedly a much larger criminal element among the blacks than among the whites. There are proportionately more crimes against property, crimes of sensuality, crimes of violence. Materials are ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... switch methods intelligently and of purpose, that is quite another matter. An abstract discussion may be enlivened by a concrete illustration. A concrete narrative or portrayal may be given weight and rationalized by generalization. Moreover many things lie on the borderland between the two domains and may properly be attached to either. Thus the abstraction is legitimate when you say or write: "A man wishes to acquire the comforts and luxuries, as well as the necessaries, of life." The concreteness is likewise ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the delicious non sequitur, which is the charm of the grave-diggers' conversation in "Hamlet," is by no means obsolete. But who can write such a colloquy? It would be easier, we fancy, for a clever man to give a sketch of Lord Bacon, with all his rapid and profound generalization, than to follow the slow and tortuous mental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... journalistic cleverness. Selma had no intention of becoming a second Mrs. Earle. That is, she promised herself to follow, but not to follow blindly; to imitate judiciously, but to improve on a gradually diverging line of progress. This was mere generalization as yet. It was an agreeable seething brain consciousness for future development. For the moment, however, she counted on Mrs. Earle to obtain for her a start by personal influence at the office of the Benham Sentinel. This was provided forthwith in the form ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... by their effects; for this is the only means we have of knowing them to be such. And if a poison is in common use, we must embrace all the results of such use in a perfect generalization before we can decide impartially. We do not hesitate to eat peaches, though we know they owe much of their peculiar flavor to prussic acid. It is but fair to apply an equally large generalization to tobacco. Chemistry can concentrate the sapid and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... is inimical to music, or rather that music is inimical to good verse; that music demands ordinary verse, rhymed prose, rather than verse, which is malleable and reducible as the composer wishes. This generalization is assuredly true, if the music is written first and then adapted to the words, but that is not the ideal harmony between two arts which are made to supplement each other. Do not the rhythmic and ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... the genesis of a generalization that gives the less critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts in an evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... something of a relaxation to get among the easy-going once more. Their slouchiness, however, will in the end get on one's nerves quite as much as the "eternal" attention of the Japanese. One more generalization borrowed from one of our Chinese friends here, and I'm done. "The East economizes space and the West time"—that also is much truer than ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Tyler took charge of the three horses. The fame of Cairns had travelled before him to Rosanna, but none had been prepared for a figure so weird or for a countenance so forbidding and malign. His manners were equally uncouth. He shook his bent head to decline refreshment; he pointedly ignored a generalization of Hardcastle's about the crime; and when he spoke, it was in a gratuitously satirical style of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... translation is no more than a choice of evils, since we have no real equivalent for the term. It was applicable not merely to human conduct, but also to the acting of the lower animals, and even to the growth of plants. Now, apart from a craze of generalization we should hardly think of the "stern daughter of the voice of God" in connection with an amoeba corresponding successfully to stimulus, yet the creature in its inchoate way is exhibiting a dim analogy to duty. The term in question was first ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... first-rate importance. But nobody need be frightened of it on that account. Unlike most important works on the theory of art, it is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end. Its main thesis is a generalization which, if true, is applicable to all schools and all epochs. The book is stimulating and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Basuto, have carried their powers of generalization still farther, and arranged the other parts of the same great family of South Africans into three divisions: 1st. The Matebele, or Makonkobi—the Caffre family living on the eastern side of the country; 2d. The Bakoni, or Basuto; ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... petrified persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions. And then there was the crushing ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... — N. {opp. 79} generality, generalization; universality; catholicity, catholicism; miscellany, miscellaneousness[obs3]; dragnet; common run; worldwideness[obs3]. everyone, everybody; all hands, all the world and his wife; anybody, N or M, all sorts. prevalence, run. V. be general ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents of our national life and explains the altering ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... given on the 12th of November, 1832, at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization which marked Agassiz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning his ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... admiration and wonder, as she gazed up at him, offered temptation and excuse enough. It was not timidity nor lack of opportunity that caused Sundown to hesitate, but rather that innate respect for women which distinguishes the gentle man from the slovenly generalization "gentleman." "Adios! Linda Rosa!" he murmured, and stooping, kissed her brown fingers. Then he gestured with magnificence toward the flowers bordering the roadway. "And you sure are the lindaest little Linda Rosa ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... with a generalization, simple, yet of a significance too little recognized. "They don't see a thing!" she said. "The young men that buzz around a girl's house don't see a thing of what goes on there! Inside, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... he seems to us equally far from scientific truth when he asserts that intellect is 'disrupting' in its tendency, and that science is primarily 'disturbing.' It is true the intellect has the analytical faculty; but it is equally true that the opposite faculty of generalization is that which most strongly characterizes it and distinguishes reason from instinct. So far from analysis being the earliest predominant tendency of the intellect, almost all its most familiar and ordinary acts are those of synthesis. In all ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... lived in her memory as a bright, changeful dream, varying from one pleasure to another, with an ever-shifting background of fair, foreign towns and cities, Kursaals, palaces, salons, gardens, mountains, and lakes, and quiet green nooks of country—all, as it seemed to her, with the power of generalization that seizes on the most salient points, and takes them as types of the whole, shining in sunlight that never clouded, under clear blue skies that never darkened. Madelon knew that that time had gone by for ever; and yet, in all her dreams for the future, her imagination ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... and so on. But, in the first place, it cannot be said that the conflict of statements concerning the world affects the statements concerning the cause, i.e. Brahman, in which all the Vedanta-texts are seen to agree—for that would be an altogether unfounded generalization;—and, in the second place, the teacher will reconcile later on (II, 3) those conflicting passages also which refer to the world. And, to consider the matter more thoroughly, a conflict of statements regarding the world would not ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... him, has felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all, and has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to study it, patiently, slowly, diligently; content if he could gather a few crumbs of the great harvest of knowledge, happy if he could grasp some great generalization or wide-embracing law, and so in some small measure enter into the mind and thought of the Designer of all this ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... at the school till the young lady was ready, he had conveyed them back again to the station, and they took the up-train. That was all he knew. The gentleman, if his opinion were asked, was "a scaly varmint." On inquiry, Maitland found that this wide moral generalization was based on the limited pour-boire which Mr. Lithgow had presented to his charioteer. Had the gentleman any luggage? Yes, he had a portmanteau, which he left in the cloak-room, and took away with him on his return to town—not in the van, in the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... more in accordance with facts, that all the powers of the mind, instinct, feeling, and thought, enter into action simultaneously, and condition each other? The very first act of perception, the first distinct cognition of an object, involves thought as much as the last generalization of science. We know nothing of mind except as the development of thought, and the first unfolding, even of the infant mind, reveals an intellectual act, a discrimination between a self and an object which is not self, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and power to the smallest forms, in Albert Duerer and others. But this attention to minutiae was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the natural shadow of every ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fact. The word truth ought to be kept for higher things. There are those that think such facts the highest that can be known; they put therefore the highest word they know to the highest thing they know, and call the facts of nature truths; but to me it seems that, however high you come in your generalization, however wide you make your law—-including, for instance, all solidity under the law of freezing—you have not risen higher than the statement that such and such is an invariable fact. Call it a law if you will—a law of nature if you choose—that it always is so, but not a truth. It cannot be to ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... of the following tables, "National Banks of the United States," illustrates the above generalization. It is unnecessary to mention that 1878, 1884, and 1890 have been the last three panic years. But it is very necessary in studying this table, to bear in mind that its figures are taken from the standing of the banks at the first of ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... could give him. For this poetry is an attempt to express life, not to explain it. It offers pictures or reports rather than analyses of religious experience. It gives utterance to the real life of religion in the individual soul, and is not a generalization of religious thoughts ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... every exact science, its substance having grown sufficiently to make generalization possible, there is a time when a series of changes bring it into clearness. This time has most certainly arrived for the science of kinematics. The number of mechanisms has grown almost out of measure, and the number of ways ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... statement is merely a generalization of many made in the preceding lectures, the tenor of which any readers acquainted with my recent ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... classes of Protestant Christians. The last and most pretentious form of this dogma is, that the sense of the miraculous fades away in the progress of what arrogates to itself the name of Rationalism. This is one of the delusive results of introducing generalization into historical disquisitions. History deals with man. Man is always the same. The race consists, not of an aggregation, but of individuals, in all ages, never moulded or melted into classes. Each individual has ever retained his distinctness from every other. There ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... generalization will answer in your case. You have as distinct an individuality as any flower ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... best let modern times alone. For here you've all facts and no generalization; and in the case of the Greeks you've all ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... work of English literature during the first quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The abstract, the typical, the general—these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14] Classical tragedy, e.g., undertook ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... organize, conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative, intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well as by ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... was a retreat, to attack the column at the proper time; if a tactical flank movement, to allow it to be completed, and then thrust himself between the two wings of Lee's army, and beat them in detail. This admirable generalization lacked the necessary concomitant ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... contrast. The countrymen of Sir Richard claim that in London from time immemorial not a single cup was ever stolen from the public fountains. So tempting a theme for generalization could not be resisted by the Paris newspaper philosophers, who have deduced from this theft of the cups a broad distinction between the British loafer and the French loafer, declaring that the former "respects ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... criticism on the nature of classification. There we are exhorted not to fall into the common error of passing from unity to infinity, but to find the intermediate classes; and we are reminded that in any process of generalization, there may be more than one class to which individuals may be referred, and that we must carry on the process of division until we have arrived at the ...
— Statesman • Plato
... strength. He died on the last day of March. Most touching and appreciative eulogies were delivered by Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster, after his death had been announced by his colleague, Judge Butler. Mr. Clay spoke of his "transcendent talents," of his "clear, concise, compact logic," of his "felicity in generalization surpassed by no one." He intimated that he would have been glad to see Mr. Calhoun succeed Mr. Monroe in the Presidency in 1820. Mr. Webster, who always measured his words, spoke of him as "a man of undoubted genius and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a generalization—and you must look at it that way. In reality society is infinitely complex, and the ramifications and possibilities are endless. It can do a lot more things than fizzle or go boom. Pressure of population, war or persecution patterns can cause waves of immigration. Plant and animal species ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 'average' Dutch peasant would be to say very little of him. There is far too much difference in this class of people all over the Netherlands to allow of any generalization. In Zeeland we meet two distinct types; one very much akin to the Spanish race, having a Spaniard's dark hair, dark eyes, and sallow complexion, and often very good-looking. The other type is entirely different, fair-haired, light-eyed, and of no particular beauty. In Limburg, the most southern ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... again for a while. We lay in the blank—we had spread on some soft, dry sand in preference to the stable, where Taylor and Tommy had gone. Under the contemplative influence of the stars, Lin fell into generalization. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... not an experimental thing, an instrument of research, and this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on which one feels that he pronounces no judgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophic generalization, which was almost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. A mind that generalizes rapidly, continually prevents the experience that would have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... philosophy was that powerfully presented in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief, that conservative ideals were bad, not because They were conservative, but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... not regarded as an adulterant—it is an addition, or modifier, if you please. And so many people have acquired a coffee-and-chicory taste, that it is doubtful if they would appreciate a real cup of coffee should they ever meet it. This, of course, is a generalization; and like all generalizations, is dangerous, for it is possible to obtain good coffee, properly made, in any European country, even England, in the homes of the people, but seldom in the hotels ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... appreciated through his researches into the languages, laws, and institutions of Ancient Rome and Italy, as the most thoroughly versed scholar now living in these departments of historical investigation. To a wonderfully exact and exhaustive knowledge of these subjects, he unites great powers of generalization, a vigorous, spirited, and exceedingly graphic style and keen analytical powers, which give this history a degree of interest and a permanent value possessed by no other record of the decline and fall of the Roman Commonwealth. "Dr. Mommsen's work," as Dr. Schmitz ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalization does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity were engaged. That's why, may be, she ventured so far. For a woman she chose to be as open as the day with me. There was not only the form but almost the whole substance of her thought ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... achieved a great discovery when it established the fact that there was a continuous belt of languages from Iceland to Ceylon which were the variant forms of one mother-tongue, the Indo-European; but it must prepare itself for a still wider generalization. There is abundant proof—proof with which pages might be filled—that there was a still older mother-tongue, from which Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic were all derived—the language of Noah, the language of Atlantis, the language of the great "aggressive empire" of Plato, the language of the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly |
