"Postulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as far as possible, endeavours to conceive those things which increase or help the body's power of activity (III. xii.); in other words (III. xii. note), those things which it loves. But conception is helped by those things which postulate the existence of a thing, and contrariwise is hindered by those which exclude the existence of a thing (II. xvii.); therefore the images of things, which postulate the existence of an object of love, help the mind's endeavour to conceive the object of love, in other words (III. xi. note), affect ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... how was the nation to make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... spent some considerations on the scale of being, of which, yet, I am obliged to renew the mention, whenever a new argument is made to rest upon it; and I must, therefore, again remark, that consequences cannot have greater certainty than the postulate from which they are drawn, and that no system can be more hypothetical than this, and, perhaps, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... therefore must be sometimes reviewed, complications analyzed into principles, and knowledge disentangled from opinion. It is not always possible, without a close inspection, to separate the genuine shoots of consequential reasoning, which grow out of some radical postulate, from the branches which art has ingrafted on it. The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel—a theosophic romance of the first order—it could have been written by ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... originality ere long, may thank us for a new sensation. The French continue to find Shakspeare exaggerated, because he treated English just as our folk do when they speak of "a steep price," or say that they "freeze to" a thing. The first postulate of an original literature is, that a people use their language as if they owned it. Even Burns contrived to write very poor English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Horace Mann, in one of his Addresses, commented at some length on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... got you," cried Brett "I thought I recognised the source of your new-born philosophy in the first postulate. The second convinces me. You have been reading 'The ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... with unwavering pluck; I've struggled if ever a man did; Infringed every postulate, stuck At nothing,—nay, once, to be candid, I shifted the cadence—designed A fresh but unauthorised fare-well; 'Twas plausible, too, but I find The thing doesn't ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... agreed. "So it presents a dilemma. To resolve it, it is necessary to postulate a Supreme Mind, and to say that all things are just thoughts in God's Mind. That makes us both the same then and there is no argument about who ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... in effect that we must postulate a divine consciousness to account for human consciousness; but, on your theory, how could human consciousness come out of a divine consciousness; and, anyhow, contrary to your implication, we know of no consciousness which has come, except by inheritance, from another consciousness, ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... postulate underlying this theory. It is, that upon each planet the possibilities of development just attain to the margin of the next higher step in mental evolution. That is, that on Mercury the period of brawn develops ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... our civilized governments, failure in which wakens our apprehension and our fear; it has made equal suffrage a fact, although practical people only yesterday laughed at it as a dream; it has made equality in opportunity for an education the underlying postulate of our public school systems, although in New York State seventy-five years ago the debate was still acute as to whether such a dream ever could come true; it is to-day lifting races, long accounted ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... with God, like that which in the seventy-third Psalm marks the very high-water mark of Old Testament faith in regard to a future life, where the Psalmist finds himself so completely blessed and well in present fellowship with God, that he must needs postulate its eternal continuance, and just because he has made God the portion of his heart, and is holding fellowship with Him, is sure that nothing can intervene to break that sweet communion. They did not get it from ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... source we neither see, nor hear, nor feel; it is given in thought, supplied by the spontaneous activity of mind as the correlative prefix to the phenomena observed."[251] Unless, then, we are prepared to deny the validity of all our rational intuitions, we can not avoid accepting "this subjective postulate as a valid law for objective nature." If the intuitions of our reason are pronounced deceptive and mendacious, so also must the intuitions of the senses be pronounced illusory and false. Our whole intellectual constitution is built up on false and erroneous principles, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... creed, which his school imagines, and I once imagined, to be the roots out of which they are fed. That they depend directly on the heart's belief in the sympathy of God with individual man,[7] I am well assured: but that doctrine does not rest upon the Bible or upon Christianity; for it is a postulate, from which every Christian advocate is forced to start. If it be denied, he cannot take a step forward in his argument. He talks to men about Sin and Judgment to come, and the need of Salvation, and so proceeds to the Saviour. But his very first step,—the idea of Sin,—assumes ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... whole theory which regards the Iliad as the work of four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details of a life remote from their ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... amounts of heat by the same amount of work, it would follow that the oxidation of the same amount of material would sometimes yield a less, sometimes a greater, quantity of heat. 'Hence,' says Mayer, 'that a fixed relation subsists between heat and work, is a postulate of the physiological ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... basic survey first, of course," Neel told him. "Chances are that that will be enough to straighten things out. Since the completion last year of the refining equations of Debir's Postulate, all sigma-110 and ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... point his sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin. The omission of itself is fatal to Mr. King's case. Franklin has certainly a "preeminent name." He has, ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... as far as variations are summated in successive generations, so as eventually to give rise to new structures, organs, mechanisms, &c., natural selection is theoretically competent to explain the facts, without our having to postulate the operation of unknown causes producing variations in determinate lines,—or not further than is stated in paragraphs 1 ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... (nimitta) of the world, but its material cause as well. The world springs from Brahman by way of modification (pari/n/ama; Sutra 26).—Ramanuja views this adhikara/n/a as specially directed against the Se/s/vara-sa@nkhyas who indeed admit the existence of a highest Lord, but postulate in addition an independent pradhana on which the Lord acts as ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... as a postulate, that to a slave, as such, there appertains and can appertain no relation, civil or political, with the State or the Government. He is himself strictly property, to be used in subserviency to the interests, the convenience, or the will, of his owner; and to suppose, with respect to ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... D'Aurevilly, 'c'est un sentiment contre lequel tout le monde est impitoyable.' Few remember that the dandy's vanity is far different from the crude conceit of the merely handsome man. Dandyism is, after all, one of the decorative arts. A fine ground to work upon is its first postulate. And the dandy cares for his physical endowments only in so far as they are susceptible of fine results. They are just so much to him as to the decorative artist is inilluminate parchment, the form of a white vase or the surface of a wall ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... more or less of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them, and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't know anything; we simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amoeba moves out of the shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our feelings to feed our brains, until the ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... economic systems of our time (or, at all events, the systematic exposition of our economic arrangements) have furthermore accustomed us to think of everything like work as done under compulsion, fear of worse, or a kind of bribery. It is really taken as a postulate, and almost as an axiom, that no one would make or do anything useful save under the goad of want; of want not in the sense of wanting to do or make that thing, but of wanting to have or be able to do something else. Hence everything which is manifestly done from no such motive, but from an ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... can afford, I shall produce, upon my word; 760 And if she ever gave that boon To man, I'll prove that I have one I mean by postulate illation, When you shall offer just occasion: But since y' have yet deny'd to give 765 My heart, your pris'ner, a reprieve, But made it sink down to my heel, Let that at least your pity feel; And, for the sufferings of your martyr, Give its poor entertainer quarter; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... regarded morals, were the best and ultimate achievements of the pagan world. Now Christianity, said he, is the synthesis of whatever is separately excellent in either. It will abate as little as the haughtiest Stoicism of the ideal which it contemplates as the first postulate of true morality; the absolute holiness and purity which it demands are as much raised above the poor performances of actual man, as the absolute wisdom and impeccability of the Stoic. Yet, unlike the Stoic scheme, Christianity is aware ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... in the performance of a treaty is made a cause of war by the Barbary powers, and of remonstrance and explanation by civilised powers. The Mahometans of Barbary negociate by the sword—they seize first, and ex-postulate afterwards; and the federal leaders have been labouring to barbarize the United States by adopting the practice of the Barbary States, and this they call honour. Let their honour and their hypocrisy go weep together, for both are defeated. Their present Administration is too moral for hypocrites, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... according to the varying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the most typical portion of the central body, the section containing the scientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, we can postulate certain tendencies with some confidence. Certain ways of thought they must develop, certain habits of mind and eye they will radiate out into the adjacent portions of the social mass. We can even, I think, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C.: Will Dr. Clark explain the eccentric convulsions such as when there is uraemia, on similar grounds? Also, if he will postulate in such cases as recover with metabolic treatment. I have published cases in which recurrent attacks of some years duration were removed by means which considered only the metebolesia. (See Journal of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... lost in mystery. No objection can lie against this postulate about the way in which folkways began, on account of the element of inference in it. All origins are lost in mystery, and it seems vain to hope that from any origin the veil of mystery will ever be raised. We go up the stream of history to the utmost point for which we have ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... furthermore, that those rights inhere in the individual, are part of his existence, and not the gift of any man or aggregation of men. If they were, equality under a despotism might find its justification in the postulate just as well as equality under a republic. Caesarean Democracy could claim like paternity with American Democracy. The assumption, then, that freedom in any of its forms is a privilege conceded by society is utterly unwarrantable, because society itself is a concession ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... facts cannot, however, all be put down to constitutional defects of vision. When he deals with woman he is no longer scrupulously conscientious. We begin to have our suspicions of his uprightness when we find him in his Subjection of Women laying it down as a fundamental postulate that the subjection of woman to man is always morally indefensible. For no upright mind can fail to see that the woman who lives in a condition of financial dependence upon man has no moral claim to unrestricted ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... without some key. But having once proved the existence of such examples as the clan Coneely and the Ossory wolves, this difficulty, though still great, is very much lessened. Our method would be as follows. We first of all postulate that totem peoples did actually exist in ancient Britain, or whence such extraordinary survivals? We next examine and classify the beliefs and customs which are incidental to totemism in savage society, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... clamored for justice; England would be just: but she must first be obeyed. England might forgive the debt, but must insist upon acknowledgment that the debt was due, and upon the right to collect it at pleasure. As for the plea that taxation should postulate representation, it would not bear examination. It might be true that Parliament was a theoretically representative body; but, in fact, it was a gathering of the men in England best qualified to govern, who were rather selected than elected. Many of the commons ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... gessi:, gestus, bear, carry on; wear; /bellum gerere, to wage war /occupo:, occupa:re, occupa:vi:, occupa:tus, seize, take possession of (occupy) /postulo:, postula:re, postula:vi:, postula:tus, demand (ex-postulate) /recu:so:, recu:sa:re, recu:sa:vi:, recu:sa:tus, refuse /sto:, sta:re, steti:, status, stand /tempto:, tempta:re, tempta:vi:, tempta:tus, try, tempt, test; attempt /teneo:, tene:re, tenui:, ——, keep, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... is an almost undiscussed postulate of most metaphysics. "Reality is not merely one and self-consistent, but is a system of reciprocally determinate parts"[19]—such a statement would pass almost unnoticed as a mere truism. Yet I believe ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... resistance. This is straight track. The wedge would go in even. It should have spread the rails equally. That's the probable thing. But instead it did the improbable thing; it spread one. I hold the improbable thing always in question. Human knowledge is built up on that postulate. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... protected because a man by taking possession of an object has brought it within the sphere of his will. He has extended his personality into or over that object. As Hegel would have said, possession is the objective realization of free will. And by Kant's postulate, the will of any individual thus manifested is entitled to absolute respect from every other individual, and can only be overcome or set aside by the universal will, that is, by the state, acting through its organs, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... aesthetic scale of values. In brief, true progress becomes possible for the whole universe. Herbert Spencer stopped short at progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. It is more interesting, not to say, inspiring, to postulate increase of capacity for sharing in reason and form. The vast process of evolution may then be viewed as an upward sweep into fuller beauty ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the old Aryans; nor may we expect to find any sense, active or dormant, of monotheism in the primitive intelligence of uncivilized men. [102] The whole fabric of comparative mythology, as at present constituted, and as described above, in the first of these papers, rests upon the postulate that the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... a postulate which begins to assert itself in the book-market. Poor and bad copies are eschewed by many or most of those who are willing to pay handsomely for fine specimens; and the worst type of indifferent exemplars is the sophisticated volume, which can ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... and resolved to oppose its growth. The voice of James Otis the younger, a ripe scholar of six-and-thirty, and then the Advocate General of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, first denounced the scheme and declared the great political postulate which became the basis of all subsequent resistance to kingly domination, that "TAXATION, WITHOUT REPRESENTATION, IS TYRANNY." Like the deep and startling tones of an alarm-bell, echoing from hill to hill, his bold eloquence aroused the hearts of thinking men from ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... soon as produced by the admixture of unvaried blood which would so greatly preponderate around it; and indeed the necessity for a nearly simultaneous and similar variation, or readiness so to vary on the part of many individuals, seems almost a postulate for evolution at all. On ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... other, no matter which—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Reformation, and did really contribute largely to that great reaction which checked and narrowed the first successes of Protestantism. But beginning in the attempt, not to establish, but to evade—not to discover a principle, but to escape a postulate—not to settle the nature of right and wrong, but to determine what was not wrong of a particular nature,—Casuistry went on with its dexterous refinements till it ended in so attenuating the moral features of actions, and so belying the moral instincts of our being, that at length the conscience ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... acceptance of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing.' This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter and of ether, namely they are the outcome ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... is perverted or destroyed, can be restored and transformed. Christian Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the question, By what power can a man achieve the right and do the good? It is not enough to postulate the inherent capacity of man. Experience of human nature shows that there are hostile elements which too often frustrate his natural development. Hence the practical problem which Christian Ethics has to face is, How can the spiritual ideal be ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... felt and the rational postulate of God is made, it immediately verifies its practical value in the solution of our deepest problems. A happy illustration of the practical value and verifying evidence of the rational postulate of God has been given by James Ward: "Suppose," he says, "that ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... natural that the ethical perspective should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying mate. It is easy to postulate a storm-driven world when the personal horizon is dark and lowering; easy, also, to justify the past by the present. From theorizing never so resolutely upon the rights of man in the abstract to robbing a bank is a broad step, and given an opportunity to ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... be any more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun. It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid's elements holds good universally, 'that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... whatever they may be, down to the lowest speck of protoplasmic matter in which life can be manifested, a series of gradations, leading from one end of the series to the other, either exists or has existed. Undoubtedly that is a necessary postulate of the doctrine of evolution. But when we look upon living Nature as it is, we find a totally different state of things. We find that animals and plants fall into groups, the different members of which are pretty closely allied together, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Parry suggested that the perception of Good might perhaps be an instinct, you objected that instincts conflict one with another, and that we therefore require another faculty to choose between them. Now it seems to me that your own argument is open to the same objection. You postulate some faculty—which perhaps you might as well call an instinct—and this faculty, as I understand you, in the effort to realize itself, proceeds to discriminate various objects as good. But, now, does this same faculty also know that the ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... will prove effective in a case of double pneumonia, or compound fracture, or malignant tumour, without the assistance of the physician—above all, without "drugs," which are pronounced taboo by Mrs. Eddy; "and that," to quote Mr. Podmore again, "is a postulate which can never be contradicted by experience, for failure can always be {128} ascribed—as it is, in fact, ascribed by the Christian Scientist to-day—to want of faith or 'Science' on the part of the sufferer." Nothing could be ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... elevation, atmospheric currents, etc. We, thus, follow Lowell in ascribing the accentuation of the canals to the circulation of water in Mars; but we assume a simple and natural mode of conveyance and do not postulate artificial structures of all but impossible magnitude. That vegetation may take part in the darkening of the elevated tracts is not improbable. Indeed we would expect that in the Martian climate these tracts would be the only fertile parts ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... ill humour, made upon God's noblest work, man; and don't hope, on the other hand, as many great saints and sages have done, by prayer and fasting, or by study and meditation, to work yourself up to a god, and jump bodily out of your human skin. Assume as the first postulate, and lay it down as the last proposition of your "philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a very comprehensive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... collected the produce of Arabia and the exports of India and of West Africa, the traditional site could hardly have escaped the notice of the inquiring Arabian geographers of our Middle Ages. The ruins of a port would have been found, and we should not be compelled theoretically to postulate its existence. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... said with truth that the Bible is a book which reads History, and the perplexities of Man, in the light of one great postulate, viz. that there is a God. The natural sequences, which are now partially explained by scientific discoveries, are in the Bible attributed to God's guidance: and of course there is no contradiction between the two. Science explains something of the ways of God's working: ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... world? "The fate of all is the same-just and unjust, pure and impure. As fares the good, so fares the sinner," ix. 2. This is a direct and deliberate challenge of the law of retribution in which the writer had been brought up. It may be urged, of course, that his belief in a divine judgment is a postulate of his faith which he retains, though he does not find it verified by experience. But such words—and there are many such—seem to carry us much farther. Here, then, is the essential problem of the book. Can it be regarded ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... and General Principle of Relativity 19. The Gravitational Field 20. The Equality of Inertial and Gravitational Mass as an Argument for the General Postulate of Relativity 21. In What Respects are the Foundations of Classical Mechanics and of the Special Theory of Relativity Unsatisfactory? 22. A Few Inferences from the General Principle of Relativity 23. Behaviour of Clocks and Measuring-Rods ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... with this postulate, and was curious to hear the Magian's reply; but he could not follow his argument till he ended by saying, rather more emphatically: "You, even, do not deny the physical connection of things; but I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fallacy. We fancy ourselves the fixed and necessary element in society, to which all others are to accommodate themselves. "Given the rights of the few rich, to find the condition of the many poor." It seems to me that other postulate is quite as fair: "Given the rights of the many poor, to find the condition of the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of London, and even more violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters. And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the Times starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to be even a vast sewer, in short, the cloaca maxima of London, there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to our mighty English capital. On the contrary, all great ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... The first postulate in all military problems is that, other things being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign necessarily in favour of the superior ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... we must assume certain other things which are less obvious and cannot be proved but yet have to be accepted; these are called postulates, because they make a demand on the faith of the learner. Euclid's Postulates are of this kind, especially that known as the parallel-postulate. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... is concerned with the freedom of the seas. In this postulate the President speaks from the hearts of all, and I can here fully and completely share America's desire, the more so as the President adds the words, 'outside territorial waters'—that is to say, we are to understand the freedom of the open sea, ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... here's the enduring wonder—I am still but man, though man blessed with so much profundity, fecundity, and redundity of thought and expression, and therefore a facile scribe or speaker, able to create, relate, formulate or postulate any truth, axiomatic, sophistry subtle, or, in other words, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... whole has come into being without direct intelligence and apart from spiritual guidance, that it is managed so well (or so ill) that it is really not managed at all, that no Deity exists, and that it is absurd to postulate the existence of a comprehensive and ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... reality that makes the timeless claim, reality to which defeat can't happen. This is what the men of principles, and in general all the men whom I called tender-minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged to postulate. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... new movement so clearly that the dullest will apprehend. Surely the inhibition of all apperceptions in art is correlative to the inner ego? That simple postulate granted, it will be unquestioned that the true focus of vision should co-ordinate the invisible. Faith we must have, or we faint by the roadside of the intelligible. The only altruism is that which can defy the cold brutality of things as they are, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates ... so how can a man fight a native superstition with ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... up now the question of ideas, and postulate again that these too must conform both to the subject and to men's character. Ideas agree with the subject if they are true, if they are appropriate, and if they so to speak get into the insides of the thing. They are in accord with men's character if they fit in with natural ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the jugglery of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... individual developments to the first differentiation of the simplest cell, they followed out the unity of the plan of the organic kingdoms—which hitherto had been maintained only ideally and proclaimed as a philosophic postulate—farther and deeper into the sphere of empiric reality. We must mention, moreover, the great palaeontological discoveries which, from the first foraminifera of the Cambrian formations up to the historical period of man, showed a great progressive scale in the appearance of the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." This is clear and explicit. There is no controversy, he truly says, that voluntary actions, that is, external actions proceeding from the will, are necessitated by the will. And as according to his postulate, the will or volition is also caused by other things of which it has no disposal, so they are also necessitated. In other words, external voluntary actions are necessarily caused by volitions, and volitions are necessarily caused by something else other ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... no great Power, or Intellect, were required to account for its origin. After all, some will say, if we grant your great, wise, beneficent, designing Creator, the finite human mind has as little idea of a self-existing God, as it has of self-existing matter and self-existing law. You postulate one great mystery, we postulate two smaller ones; and the two together really present less "unthinkableness" to the mind than your one. That is so far plausible, but it is no more. To believe in a GOD is to believe in One Existence, who necessarily ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... formerly laid down as a postulate of the Christian's belief that Hinduism is of the devil; and that, coming from below, it must be shunned as a study and denounced root and branch as a thing purely satanic. This theory has entirely given way to a more rational belief. The question whether ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... lover—sacrificing Himself for the sake of love. We cannot conceive the Sublime with any other principal function than that of love; for love is the deepest and profoundest emotion of the human heart, and, in accordance with the first postulate, must therefore be the soul of the universe. On this point all mystics and all metaphysical ecstatics are agreed; "God is love" is written in the Gospel of St. John. "Love which moves the sun and all the stars," stands at ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... than psychology the datum is primarily a perception, in which only the sensational core is ultimately and theoretically a datum, though some such accretions as turn the sensation into a perception are practically unavoidable. But if we postulate an ideal observer, he will be able to isolate the sensation, and treat this alone as datum. There is, therefore, an important sense in which we may say that, if we analyse as much as we ought, our data, outside psychology, consist of sensations, which include within ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... considered as self-forming by an inherent intelligence abiding in itself becomes evident from the fact that intelligence is the essential quality of spirit; and if we were to conceive of the primordial substance as something apart from spirit, then we should have to postulate some other power which is neither spirit nor matter, and originates both; but this is only putting the idea of a self-evolving power a step further back and asserting the production of a lower grade of undifferentiated spirit by a higher, which is both a purely gratuitous assumption ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... more mystery connected with publication. When the first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to contain "All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies." According to the postulate of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by Jonson acting for him. It contains several plays which, according to many critics, are not the author's. This, if true, is mysterious, and so is the fact that a few plays were published, as by Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the actor ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... and content, For whose least pleasure he would die; Oh, cruelty, she cannot care For one to whom she's always kind! He says he's nought, but, oh, despair, If he's not Jove to her fond mind! He's jealous if she pets a dove, She must be his with all her soul; Yet 'tis a postulate in love That part is greater than the whole; And all his apprehension's stress, When he's with her, regards her hair, Her hand, a ribbon of her dress, As if his life were only there; Because she's constant, he ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... Hall's postulate is, that God's work could not admit of any substantial change, which is above the reach of all infernal powers; but "Herein the divell plays the double sophister; the sorcerer with sorcerers. Hee both deludes the witch's conceit and the beholder's eyes." In ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... perceive, and do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it. However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not only a law-giver, but in himself also the realisation of the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... we may venture on a practical suggestion, Assuming that your postulate's indubitably true, And all should be examined—there must yet remain the question, Custodes quis custodiet?—For ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... "gentiles" the Apostle evidently means genuine heathens, not converts from paganism to Christianity, and hence the meaning of the passage is that the heathens who know the natural law embodied in the Decalogue only as a postulate of reason, are by nature(147) able to "do those things that are of the law,"(148) i.e. observe at least some of its precepts. That St. Paul did not think the gentiles capable of observing the whole law without the aid of grace appears from his ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... tha-ta, therefore, and Latin istud, postulate a Sanskrit tad, while Zend and Greek at all events do not conflict with an original final media. Everything therefore depends on what was the original form in Sanskrit; and here no Sanskrit scholar would hesitate for one moment between tat and tad. Whatever the origin of tat may ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... If the postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth, if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, unconnected ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... been written by men, like Lord Morley and Lord Bryce, having first-hand knowledge of their subjects, others by the best critics of the next generation, such as Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Clutton-Brock. With their critical ability I am not able to compete; but they often postulate a knowledge of facts which the average reader has forgotten or has never known. Having written these sketches primarily for boys at school I am not ashamed to state well-known facts, nor have I wished to ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... tap numbers. The table of the mediumistic seances contains much mathematics (in its physical assemblage), but in order to make it "tap" there must be somebody to move it: in fact, a "medium." In my view, as soon as the animal subject has been able to understand "numbers"—and this postulate of the new zoopsychology, I repeat, I believe to be indispensable to the whole edifice—the animal finds itself sufficiently in harmony with the master to become capable (in principle) ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... expression the revised view of matter is, substantially, that it is the lowest expression of life; and now modern science is turning tardy attention to a study of the life side of the universe. The moment that is done the sense of consistency and the law of correspondence compel us to postulate a gradation of intelligences rising above man as man does ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... man's protection. ("Enslavement" they called it.) Why should she, when in the evolution of society there was not now, or presently would not be, anything from which to protect her? ("Competing slaveowners" was what they said.) When you wish to behold protectors you must postulate dangers. The first are valueless save as a preventive of the second. Both evils will be conveniently dispensed with. All this was new to me, most of my thinking life having been passed in distant lands, where the science of ethics is codified into a ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... we know of mankind justifies the statement that, as regards all the qualities and motives with which the primal sympathies deal, men are remarkably alike. Their loves, hates, fears, and sorrows are alike in their essentials; so that the postulate of sympathy that the other man is essentially like one's self is no idle fancy but an established truth. It not only embodies the judgment of all men in thought and action but has its warrant from all the science we can apply ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... mates in the superstructure; and these, secure in their five-inch protection, pitied those in the fighting-tops, where, cold logic says, no man may live through a sea-fight. Yet all would have volunteered to fill vacancies aloft. The healthy human mind can postulate suffering, but ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... second postulate of the Nebular Hypothesis is the origin of force and motion in the huge gas ball which existed in the beginning. La Place says that "at some point concentration took place in the homogeneous mass, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... logical convenience of the assumption. Ricardo, who has always to state an argument at the cost of an intellectual contortion, is content to lay down a rule without introducing troublesome qualifications and reserves. Yet he probably held that his postulate was a close approximation to the facts. Looking at the actual state of things at the worst time of the poor-law, and seeing how small were the prospects of stirring the languid mind of the pauper to greater ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out, the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... philosophical necessarian does not grant this postulate. He assumes the existence of an infinite mind, to whose knowledge all events are open, and thence infers the necessity of these events. He pleads that omniscience and contingency are incongruous ideas, and, on the ground of pure metaphysics, it would be difficult to ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... present order of things was brought about suddenly and irrespective of any pre-existent order; and it is important to hold clear ideas as to which of these beliefs is the true one. In the first place, we may postulate that the world had a beginning, and, equally, that the existing terrestrial order had a beginning. However far back we may go, geology does not, and cannot, reach the actual beginning of the world; and we are, therefore, left simply to our own speculations on ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... thunder-cloud; only to trust, and do our best, and wear as smiling a face as may be for others and ourselves. But there is no royal road among this complicated business. Hegel the German got the best word of all philosophy with his antinomies: the contrary of everything is its postulate. That is, of course, grossly expressed, but gives a hint of the idea, which contains a great deal of the mysteries of religion, and a vast amount of the practical wisdom of life. For your part, there is no doubt as to your duty - to take things easy and be as happy as you ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... postulate or axiom rests on Postulate i. and Lemmas v. and vii., which see after ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... Being. But this seems to leave no room for creation out of nothing, and it is to that extent pantheistic. There are doubtless saving interpretations, but it is difficult to follow them; and they cannot cancel the initial postulate of one eternal process, consisting in the relations of infinite subject, object and reunion. On such a system I do not see how there can be anything but God, and, therefore, notwithstanding his aversion to the ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... The postulate of the One Wise man is repeated in KRATYLUS, on the unpromising subject of Language or ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... there was no incentive for the Christians to try to prove the existence of God, for the philosophy of that portion of the world was essentially religious in its character, and based its speculation on the existence of God as a fundamental postulate of revelation and of reason as well. In the combination of Judaism and Hellenic philosophy made by the "Hellenizing Jews" and by the "Judaizing Hellenes," the existence of God was admitted quite as freely, and maintained quite as zealously, as ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... the body of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven to be facts. So they ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... assertion is wholly negative. The geologist reasons thus: The more perfect organisms have not been discovered in the earlier strata; therefore, they do not exist in them. When, in a different connection, it suits our author's purpose to throw doubt on the very postulate which is here admitted, he ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... probable that two persons should make a dozen or more letters in precisely the same way under similar conditions and exhibit precisely the same peculiarities of style. He should reply with the unanswerable postulate that millions of persons possess red hair, snub noses, a scar on the face, blue eyes, bent fingers and a stammer; but it is millions to one against any two persons possessing all six of ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... assertion of Mr Cobden's; and others, we have heard, not generally disposed to view that gentleman's doctrines with favour, who insist upon it, that, in mere candour, we must grant this particular postulate. "Really," say they, "that cannot be refused him; the law was for the purpose he assigns; its final cause was, as he tells us, to keep up artificially the price of our domestic corn-markets. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... then have we become to rapid change in the conditions of life that the first thing we postulate is further change. The rustic accustomed to the same food every day of his life does not criticise his fare; it is the epicure, accustomed to variety, who is critical of the menu. The active mind which witnesses perpetual variety must be perpetually critical. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... the hypothesis of metaphysical teleology, although in a physical sense gratuitous, may be in a psychological sense legitimate. But as against the fundamental position on which alone this argument can rest—viz. the position that the fundamental postulate of Atheism is more inconceivable than is the fundamental postulate of Theism—we have seen ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... field seems to be a verification of it. But it need not be stated in such an absolute form. Recently, scientific men have been inclined to express the axiom with more reserve and less dogmatically. They are prepared to recognize that it is simply a postulate without which the scientific comprehension of the universe would be impossible, and they are inclined to state it not as a law of causation—for the idea of causation leads into metaphysics—but rather as uniformity of experience. But ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... postulate a congenital abnormality in order to account satisfactorily for at least a large proportion of sexual inverts, wherein does that abnormality consist? Ulrichs explained the matter by saying that in sexual inverts a male body coexists with a female soul: anima ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... child is to be adjusted, but we must also take note of the nature of the services which the given society requires of its adult members. These services vary in character, and there can be no one kind of education which equally fits the individual to perform efficiently any and every service. To postulate this would be to affirm that there is a kind of experience useful for the realisation indifferently of any and every purpose of adult life, and to affirm that a system of knowledge acquired and organised for the attainment of certain definite ends can be used for the furtherance of ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... and consequent upon this their ubiquity under the dominant categories of time and place, precludes any possibility of their incarnation, we are compelled to postulate that their complex vision's attribute of sensation, in the absence of any bodily senses, finds its contact with "the objective mystery" and with the objective "universe" in some definite and permanent "intermediary" which serves in their case the same primal necessity as is served ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of belief is, that substance, life, and intelligence are something apart from God. 91:27 The second erroneous postulate is, that man is both mental ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... metaphysicians postulate a fifth state of life, the divine, placing it above the rest ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... not to wound needlessly the sentiments of the French people, or to offend any principle of public law. It is difficult to question these two postulates, at least in the abstract. Only when we come to the application is there opportunity for difference. The third postulate, demanded alike by justice and humanity, is the establishment of some rule or precedent by which the recurrence of such a barbarous duel shall be prevented. It will not be enough to obtain a guaranty for Germany; there must be ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... of the mental plane is again totally different, for in this case we can no longer speak of separate senses such as sight and hearing, but rather have to postulate one general sense which responds so fully to the vibrations reaching it that when any object comes within its cognition it at once comprehends it fully, and as it were sees it, hears it, feels it, and knows all there is to know about it ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... to shell it. They seized a second position at Kamfers Dam, and placed a second gun there. We had good people in Kimberley who asserted that the gentle Boer knew not how to use a gun; that he considered it so much lumber, an incumbrance. These were apart from the school given to postulate that the farmers had no guns to use. No need to say that both theories were dispelled, by sight as well as by hearing. Much attention was devoted to Otto's Kopje—our most exposed position—and many missiles dropped dangerously close to it. They burst, too, though ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... belief. Mathematics and Metaphysics excluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's account of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development of Science from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate: which nevertheless ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... with the observed difference of substances in the world. "Primitive seeds," or "atoms," were alike conceived to be primordial, un-changeable, and indestructible. Wherein then lies the difference? We answer, chiefly in a name; almost solely in the fact that Anaxagoras did not attempt to postulate the physical properties of the elements beyond stating that each has a distinctive personality, while Democritus did attempt to postulate these properties. He, too, admitted that each kind of element has its distinctive personality, and he attempted to visualize and describe ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... set into vibration, between the electric light and our eyes. That medium scientists call ether, but it is so subtile that no instrument has been devised whereby it may be measured or analyzed and therefore the scientists are without much information concerning it, though forced to postulate its existence. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... satire on royalty as an institution "The King" is most interesting—that is, royalty logically and speculatively considered, without reference to its historical basis and development. To me the postulate that it had its origin in a kind of conspiracy (for mutual benefit) of the priest and the king seems shallow and unphilosophical. Bjoernson's fanatical partisanship has evidently carried him a little ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being influenced by normal human motives. In general, they helped the good and punished the bad, though doubtless they tended ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... mathematically no evil. The finite disappears in relation to the infinite. All the sufferings and sins of earth, through all ages, are strictly nothing when viewed in the light of the eternal joy and holiness which are to result from them. This is a postulate of pure reason. Make evil finite, and good infinite,—make evil temporal, and good eternal,—and evil ceases to be anything. But make evil eternal, as is done by this doctrine, and then we have Manicheism—an infinite dualism—on the throne of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... arbitrary changes than the individual body.—A full perception of the truth that society is not a mere aggregate, but an organic growth, that it forms a whole, the laws of whose growth can be studied apart from those of the individual atom, supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern speculation.—L. STEPHEN, Science of Ethics, 31. Wie in dem Leben der einzelnen Menschen kein Augenblick eines vollkommenen Stillstandes wahrgenommen wird, sondern stete organische Entwicklung, so verhalt es sich such in dem Leben der Volker, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... in 67 is a new English face designed by Mr. C. R. Ashbee for a prayerbook for the King. Interesting as it is, it seems in many ways too extreme and eccentric to be wholly satisfactory: the very metal of type would seem to postulate a less "tricky" treatment. ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... (the Stoic) lays claim; therefore I take it subjectively as an attribute alleged to belong to man. (Perhaps the expression virtue, with which also the made great show, would better mark the characteristic of his school.) The expression of a postulate of pure practical reason might give most occasion to misapprehension in case the reader confounded it with the signification of the postulates in pure mathematics, which carry apodeictic certainty with them. These, however, postulate the possibility of an action, the object of which has been previously ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... "Continuing to accept your postulate that you're not Mersey, but an alien inhabiting his mind," the doctor said finally, "I can enlarge on my theory without changing it in ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... said I, "the postulate, George Douglas, the most active of the gang. Let him arise at your call—the claimant of wealth which he does not possess, the partaker of the illustrious blood of Douglas, but which in his veins is sullied with illegitimacy. Paint him the ruthless, the daring, the ambitious—so ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... for that which does not exist for us is for us nothing; that which we do not know does not exist qua us, and therefore it does not exist. When I say "we," I mean mankind generally, for things may exist qua one man and not qua another. And when I say "nothing" I postulate something of which ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... circumstance. He even introduced a contemporary critic of Utopian conditions in the shape of the talkative person, "a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way a most consummate ass." But once we begin to postulate our Utopian villains, the reader's thought is distracted from the contemplation of the heroic which is the cement that binds every stone in the visionary city. In order to change conditions it is necessary to change much in the present cast of human nature. In a fiction of Utopia there is no ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... indistinguishable likeness in two persons, yet these are mere individual accidents, 'casus ludentis naturae', and the 'verum' will not excuse the 'inverisimile'. But farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces commence in a postulate, which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... habitually ignore this fact, and constantly speak of feeling and intelligence as true causes of adjustive action; but by so doing they merely beg from this contradictory theory of Spiritualism a flat denial of the fundamental postulate on which they elsewhere proceed—the postulate, namely, that mental changes are determined by cerebral changes. Consider, for example, the following passage from Mr. Spencer's Principles of Psychology (Sec. 125), which serves to show in brief compass ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... the only writer we have who gives us anything of himself. Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and—the postulate assumed that we are not speaking of fools—courage in such case springs only from two sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of course, can be entirely indifferent to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... which harmonise so well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. They occasionally suggest that wisdom of Gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire. It is this that vitiates so much of his poetic reasoning. Truth may ring regnant in the lines of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... its primitive and guiding assumption is at war with truth. By its theory all people are entitled to the same political power, and they can only be so entitled on the ground that in politics they are equally wise. But at the outset of an agricultural colony this postulate is as near the truth as politics want. There are in such communities no large properties, no great capitals, no refined classes—every one is comfortable and homely, and no one is at all more. Equality is not artificially established ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Lockyer, in talking to me about the new star. "Most of those who oppose my theory have not taken the trouble to make observations for themselves, but have contented themselves with falling back apparently on the postulate that because a theory is new it must be wrong. Then, outside the scientific world, comparatively few people appreciate the extreme parsimony of nature. They expect, therefore, that when such a phenomenon as the appearance of a new star occurs, the new-comer ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... deeper foundation than material success, no higher prompting than conquest for conquest's sake and mere race glorification. To go far and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived righteousness. But it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies. So be it. The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before. It has gained impetus. Affairs rush to conclusion. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the minister will appeal frankly to manly and heroic qualities. He will advance no dark premise of their natural estrangement from God, but will postulate for all a sonship which is at once a divine challenge to the best that is in them and the guaranty that the best is the normal and the God-intended life. They must qualify for a great campaign under the greatest soul that ever lived. They ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am very glad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, and pathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourth dimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. 'I have never doubted,' a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... things continuing the same. Should you suppose various things in the system changed at once, you can neither judge of the possibility nor the consequences of the changes, having no degree of experience to direct you." Now assuredly this postulate makes the whole question as easy a one as ever metaphysician or naturalist had to solve. For it is no longer—Why did a powerful and benevolent Being create a world in which there is evil—but only—The world being given, how far are its different arrangements consistent ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... than inertia, rigidity, and mutual impenetrability, we can thoroughly model not only an elastic solid, and any combination of elastic solids, but so complex and recondite a phenomenon as the passage of polarized light through a magnetic field. But now, with the view of ultimately discarding the postulate of rigidity from all our materials, let us suppose some to be absolutely destitute of rigidity, and to possess merely inertia and incompressibility, and mutual impenetrability with reference to the still remaining rigid ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... pages: its cases are to be found for the most part in geometrical systems, or in notes to them. Most of them consist in the proposal of additional postulates; some are attempts to do without any new postulate. Gen. Perronet Thompson, whose paradoxes are always constructed on much study of previous writers, has collected in the work above named, a budget of attempts, the heads of which are in the Penny and English Cyclopaedias, at "Parallels." He has given thirty instances, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the habit of supposing that temporal prosperity is owing either to worldly chance or to worldly prudence; and is never granted in any visible relation to states of religious temper. Put that treacherous doubt away from you, with disdain; take for basis of reasoning the noble postulate, that the elements of Christian faith are sound,—instead of the base one, that they are deceptive; reread the great story of the world in that light, and see what a vividly real, yet miraculous tenor, it will then ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... characteristic of the Middle Ages, are still preserved. The aristocracy and the clergy possess an influence almost unknown in Germany, but solely over the people, not over the government. As corporative bodies they still are, as in the days of Charles VI., convoked for the purpose of holding postulate diets, whose power, with the exception of that of the Hungarian diet, is merely nominal. The nobility, even in Hungary, as everywhere else throughout the Austrian states (more particularly since the Spanish system adopted by Ferdinand II.), ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... covering the particular point in dispute; for instance, maintaining the uncertainty of medicine by postulating the uncertainty of all human knowledge. (3) If, vice versa, two things follow one from the other, and one is to be proved, you may postulate the other. (4) If a general proposition is to be proved, you may get your opponent to admit every one of the particulars. This is the converse ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... perhaps nervous theorizers—who has wavered about the military policy of the country; but there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have been such people: one would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, being fundamentally temperate, are ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton |
