"Postulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... transcending human experience that the human mind finds itself without the proper concepts, symbols, and words with which to think of It. But none the less, the Intellect finds itself bound by its own laws to postulate the existence of such ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... possibility of performing arithmetical calculations by machinery may appear to non-mathematical readers to be rather too large a postulate, and as it is connected with the subject of the division of labour, I shall here endeavour, in a few lines, to give some slight perception of the manner in which this can be done—and thus to remove a small portion of the veil which covers ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... But in the first place this assumes that the relationship to the father was considered rather than the relationship to the mother, and this is against all analogy. In the second place, even granting Morgan's postulate, the relation of a mother to her son is not that of a wife to the children of other wives of a polygynous husband. Poverty of language is therefore established in this case, and may be taken for granted where the obvious relationships ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... had unquestioningly accepted the old and hard gospel of righteousness by duress of brimstone awoke to a new insurgency and eyes little given to the light of thought kindled to this new postulate of brotherhood ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... fact, his power was infinite. The primary postulate of the Chaldean astrology was that all phenomena and events of this world were necessarily determined by sidereal influence. The changes of nature, as well as the dispositions of men, were controlled according to fate, by the divine energies that resided in the heavens. In other words, the gods were ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... to develop the theory that the 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 all-inclusive ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... 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 ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... 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 with matter, possessed an undivided ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... but upon the whole it explains much. This has been a favourite notion with me, almost since I wrote on erratic boulders of the south. It harmonises with the modification of species; and without admitting this awful postulate, the Glacial epoch in the south and tropics does not work in well. About Atlantis, I doubt whether the Canary Islands are as much more related to the continent as they ought to be, if formerly ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... far as you perceive and understand this predicate and postulate of Mind-healing; but the Science of Mind-healing is best understood in practical demonstration. The proof of what you apprehend, in the simplest definite and absolute form of healing, can alone answer this question of how much you understand of Christian ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... it was not seemly that the World should watch. Hitherto they had toiled in a harbour at which the World did not touch. Knowing naught else, they had come to take their privacy for granted. Now suddenly this precious postulate had been withdrawn. Since wellnigh the whole of the estate was edged by road, the erection of the fence at once cost them seclusion and showed them how dear ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... her point of view. She had been drilled—in her tradition, in her upbringing—to keep her mouth shut. But there were times, she said, when she was so near yielding to the temptation of speaking that afterwards she shuddered to think of those times. You must postulate that what she desired above all things was to keep a shut mouth to the world; to Edward and to the women that he loved. If she ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... great beauty, but possible Byzantine workmanship) in the Irish Academy, are the chief grounds on which rest the claims of Ireland to ancient civilization. Yet not merely civilization, but the extreme grandeur and magnificence of Ireland in "former times," is the first postulate of all Irish discontent. It is because England has dimmed her glory and overthrown her royal state that Irishmen burn with patriot indignation, and not by any means because she has merely left barbarism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of to-day has hitherto failed to demonstrate any actual knowledge of the human soul, or even to postulate its existence, as a ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... belief that the 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, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... than that? How then, upon what conditions, in what sense, can a principle which is its own denial enter into science? How can it become an organic law of society? If competition is necessary; if, as the school says, it is a postulate of production,—how does it become so devastating in its effects? And if its most certain effect is to ruin those whom it incites, how does it become useful? For the INCONVENIENCES which follow in its train, like the good which it procures, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 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 power. What it means is that in any particular field, if armament ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... communion 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 any ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... can exist in a discarnate state, and that it reincarnates into 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. ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... whose song charmed Bran's companions for seven years, and of her marriage to Manawyddan—an old myth in which Manawyddan may have been Pryderi's father, while possibly in some other myth Pryderi may have been child of Rigantona and Teyrnon (Tigernonos, "king").[398] We may postulate an old Rhiannon saga, fragments of which are to be found in the Mabinogi, and there may have been more than one goddess called Rigantona, later fused into one. But in the tales she is merely a queen of ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... third day of the season of nuts, there will be the commencement of a great moral eclipse, in that portion of the monikin region which lies immediately about the pole. The property in eclipse will be the great moral postulate usually designated by the term Principle; and the intervening body will be the great immoral postulate, usually known as Interest. The frequent occurrence of the conjunction of these two important ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to the drawer in which I had espied the rough monks' habits, and pulling one out I held it for her to don. She sat there now, in that garment of coarse black cloth, the cowl flung back upon her shoulder, the fairest postulate that ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... legislative powers to the President; thirdly, the delegation in many instances of like powers to so-called independent agencies or commissions, in which are merged in greater or less measure the three powers of government of Montesquieu's postulate. Under Roosevelt the first two of these developments were brought to a pitch not formerly approximated, except temporarily ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... of his moral precepts, the eloquence of his inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which he conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again, of so much ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the phenomena of creation with reflective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth and death. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over the world; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamental postulate is that the necessary life of God is one constant process of radiation and resorption, "letting out and drawing in," to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... posxtkarto. Postman posxtisto, leteristo. Post-office posxta oficejo. Poster (placard) afisxo, kartego. Poste-restante posxtrestante. Posterior posta, malantaux. Posterity idaro, posteularo. Postillion kondukisto. Postscript postskribajxo. Postulate petado. Posture tenigxo. Pot poto. Potash potaso. Potato terpomo. Potency potenco. Potent potenca. Potential potencebla, poviga. Potter potisto. Pottery (art) potfarado. Pottery, a potfarejo. Pouch saketo. Poultice ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Jesus was to reconstruct the kingdom of heaven in Israel, and he was crucified. All Israel had the same object in view, and stood at the brink of dissolution. If the basis and principles of the kingdom of heaven became the postulate of society at large, Jesus is resurrected in the world, and Israel is saved, was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... 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 liberty. The suspicion of Mill's honesty which is thus awakened is confirmed ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the very texture and ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 must be granted. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... 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 earliest ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... 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 know the power that causes it. It is the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Mr. Buckle would have some difficulty in maintaining his favorite postulate, that tolerance is the result of progressive intelligence. It is also the result of courtesy, as we may occasionally see in well-bred persons of limited intellect. Such, undoubtedly, is the basis of that tolerance which no one who has had much personal intercourse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... of in the ages before the 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, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... I refer is the notion that the only force at work in the development of the law is logic. In the broadest sense, indeed, that notion would be true. The postulate on which we think about the universe is that there is a fixed quantitative relation between every phenomenon and its antecedents and consequents. If there is such a thing as a phenomenon without these fixed quantitative relations, it is ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... 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 Murders in the ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... ethical theory underlies Wordsworth's teaching of the transformation of instinct into reason. We must start from the postulate that there is in fact a Divine order in the universe; and that conformity to this order produces beauty as embodied in the external world, and is the condition of virtue as regulating our character. It is by obedience to the 'stern lawgiver,' Duty, that flowers gain their ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... by repeating the same proposition over and over again, it would be true that any intrinsic fallibility of the postulate would not make the conclusion more untrustworthy than the first step. But an argument consists of unlike propositions. Now, since Mr. Mill's criticism on the Universal Postulate is that in some cases, which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... 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 first ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... it further. I postulate we would all die for that baby if a locomotive was to trundle up right here and try to handle it. [To the GERMAN] I guess you don't know how good you are. [As the GERMAN is twisting up the ends of his moustache—to the ENGLISHWOMAN] I should like ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... glory o' sweet phrase, and yet, and 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 ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... experience may be commoner. And yet, to those who have observed their own sex, as I have, my case is not remarkable. Men about town are women's favourites—that's the postulate—and superficial people don't think far enough to see that there ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... technical terms of 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 above ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... 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 ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... objections are that abstract thought does not postulate being; and that possibly all intelligence is not one in kind. To the former objection the most satisfactory, reply has been offered by Professor J. F. Ferrier. He has shown that the conception of object, even ideal object, implies the conception of self in the subject; ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... fictional scares, novels of German super-spies, and unsuspecting islanders taken unprepared. But to think this is to reckon without the ingenuity of such writers as Mr. RIDGWELL CULLUM. He, for example, has but to postulate that worst nightmare of all, an inconclusive peace, and we are back in the former terrors, blacker than ever. Suppose the Polish inventor of German undersea craft to have been so stricken with remorse at the frightful results thereof that he determines to hand all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... In this attitude there is more than a germ of truth. "Occam's razor" is as valuable an implement to-day as it ever was, and everyone will admit that we must exhaust all known causes before we proceed to postulate a new one. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... America. She 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. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... 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
... 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 will establish ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 this subject Mr. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... postulate that Aryans and Semites, or rather their ancestors, must have passed through the savage state. Dr. Tylor writes:—'So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation secondary. Culture must be gained before it can be lost.' ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... more vividly than he remembered pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. That whole of which our life on earth forms ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... 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 ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... postulate or axiom rests on Postulate i. and Lemmas v. and vii., which see after ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... definite positive expression to their sense of nationality and their idea of God. Jehovah was not merely the God of Israel; as such he was the God at once of law and of justice, the basis, the informing principle, and the implied postulate of their ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or 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 ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... arguments for a physical speculation, like that about human longevity, resurrection, or metempsychosis, a hybrid principle is required: thus, even if we have answered those moral questions in the conventional way and satisfied ourselves that personal immortality is a postulate of ethics, we cannot infer that immortality therefore exists unless we import into the argument a tremendous optimistic postulate, to the effect that what is requisite for moral rationality must in every instance ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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, no ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism. It springs from the same postulate, with this sole difference, that in the movement of our finite intellects along successive things, whose successiveness is reduced to a mere appearance, it holds in front of us the light with which it claims to guide us, instead of putting it behind. It substitutes the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... through to the end as a civilized people, and we answer for this upon our good name and upon our honor!" Why this humble and pitiful repudiation? Perhaps because their theory of war rested upon the postulate of their invincibility, and that, in the first shiver of their defeat upon the Marne, it collapsed, and now their repudiation quickly follows—in dread of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the very centre of his pupils and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... original of the scattered beliefs and customs would be well-nigh insurmountable 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, and having set these forth ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... judgments to a system centering in some single fundamental principle, is the ethical interest. But this is at the same time a particular application of the general rationalistic method of definition, and of the general rationalistic postulate that one knows nothing until one can form unitary and determinate conceptions. The recognition which Socrates thus gives to criteria of knowledge is an expression of the logical interest. In a certain sense, indeed, the whole labor of Socrates was in the cause of the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there 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 any ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... school, or playground give him an impulse and an impetus toward this event? Or, in other words, are the activities of his earlier life functioning on the bit of paper before him? If this is an effect, what and where was the cause? In the case of any type of human behavior can we postulate antecedent causes? If a hundred musicians were writing musical compositions at the same moment, would they offer similar ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... ascent. If we accept this hypothesis, can we acquit the Artificer of wanton cruelty? Can we view his action with approval, even with gratitude? Or must we, like Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an outlet for religious emotion, postulate another, subsequent, intermeddling Power—like, say, an American consul at the scene of the Turkish massacre—wholly guiltless of the disaster of life, and doing his little best to ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... 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 nigh greatness, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... and Europe, which will be hard-pushed for 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... lurid light it was only 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 reflect upon it calmly ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the direct primary it does not follow that it will benefit the Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the satisfaction of some reform magazines when China or Turkey or Persia imitates the constitutional forms of Western democracies. Such enthusiasts postulate a uniformity of human ability which every ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... dissections have laid bare the inner springs of the connection of events. Moreover, to the 'real world which our choice has built out of the chaos of 'appearances' we may hypothetically add 'infernal' and 'heavenly' regions.[B] Both are transformations of 'the given' by the will, but, like the postulate of causal series, experience may confirm them. Kant's a priori activity of the mind may thus in a sense supply an answer to Hume—but only in a voluntaristic philosophy which would probably have seemed too bold both to ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... social evolution ground-rent and undertaker's profit must become obsolete and must be given up—this I perceived; but with respect to the interest of capital I adhered to the classical-orthodox view that this was a postulate of progress which would survive all the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... or even from an impossible fact. If a man, taking a hint from the Roman 'Saltatio' (saltavit Andromachen), should say that he would 'whistle Waterloo,' that is, by whistling connected with pantomime, would express the passion and the changes of Waterloo, it would be monstrous to refuse him his postulate on the pretence that 'people did not whistle at Waterloo.' Precisely so: neither are most people made of marble, but of a material as different as can well be imagined, viz. of elastic flesh, with warm blood coursing along its tubes; and yet, for all that, a sculptor will ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... readers of the report would take from it that the conspiracy which the Commissioner appears to postulate in his references to 'a pre-determined plan of deception' and 'an orchestrated litany of lies' was seen by him as so wide as to cover all those persons. Paragraph 377 is the culmination of a series of paragraphs beginning with paragraph 373 and ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... 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)
... to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some sort or other,—the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,—with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth had entertained very opposite ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Man necessarily conceives his own existence as being so; so far then this is a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being regards its existence similarly, just on the same rational principle that holds for me: [Footnote: This proposition is here stated as a postulate. The grounds of it will be found in the concluding section.] so that it is at the same time an objective principle, from which as a supreme practical law all laws of the will must be capable of being deduced. Accordingly the practical ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of this statement, which is no theoretical postulate, it must be remembered that no other class of instincts has required so vast a suppression at the behest of civilization as the sexual, whilst their mastery by the highest psychical processes are in most ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... than the somewhat impudent and undoubtedly insistent claim to certitude advanced by the materialistic apostles of modern non-humanitarianism. When questioned about the ultimates all human knowledge must admit that it hangs upon the slender thread of a theory or postulate. The student of philosophy is more honest than others; he has the candour to confess the assumptions he makes before he ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... 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) of all the ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... taken centuries of patient technological research to master in a practical way the tremendous implications of Einstein's original postulate. Warp space with a rapidly moving object, move away from the observer with the speed of light—and the whole of human history assumed the firm contours of a landscape in space. Time and space merged and became one. And ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... dreams: it is an inexpensive and gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me: Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authority I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself, the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The ego ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... shown 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 ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... this hour how many have clear in their minds the cardinal distinction established by its Founder between "born of the flesh" and "born of the Spirit?" By how many teachers of Christianity even is not this fundamental postulate persistently ignored? A thousand modern pulpits every seventh day are preaching the doctrine of Spontaneous Generation. The finest and best of recent poetry is colored with this same error. Spontaneous ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... is that man inhabits a moral universe, and from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the difficulty of punishment for sin. In a little book of his called Belief and Life ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... may be in place here to substantiate still more clearly the postulate that Esperanto fulfills absolutely the ideal requirement of a language that means to be introduced throughout the world as a secondary or auxiliary language: Facility of ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... certain extent by facial expression, manner, carriage and dress. A few of the methods used have become organized into specialties, such as the study of the head or phrenology, and the study of the hand or palmistry. All of these systems are really "materialistic" in that they postulate so close a union of mind and body as to ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... gulf between them widens until they stand at opposite poles of thought. In their isolation they constitute a standing challenge to the mind of man. If he thinks the world in terms of time, he must postulate a creator. If he thinks the world out of time, he is forced to conceive a ground of the world's being. The world cannot be thought without God nor God without the world. The one necessitates the other. Yet when the thinker tries to define the terms, he can at first only do so by negatives. ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... their essential invisibility, 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
... enterprise of 1886"; whilst on the other hand those Irish Nationalists who followed Mr Dillon's lead attacked the new movement with a ferocity that was as stupid as it was criminal. For at least it did not require any unusual degree of political intelligence to postulate that if The Times, Sir Edward Carson, The Northern Whig and other Unionist and Orange bravoes and journals were denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... electricity, does, indeed, show us that the apparent continuity of material things is spurious, that all material things consist of discrete particles, and are hence measurable in numerical terms. But modern science is also obliged to postulate an ether behind these atoms, an ether which is wholly continuous, and hence transcends the domain of number.(1) It is true that, in quite recent times, a certain school of thought has argued that the ether is also atomic in constitution—that ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.'—'A very unreasonable postulate,' said the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the conviction is 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 ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... if 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 who'll ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... and 'sky,' besides and beside the blessed Manes. A word here regarding the priority of monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on a priori grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... religious than the mediaeval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... 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 the truths of Hinduism, with those of other ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... mean that I am an opponent of democracy? Not at all. Fiction for fiction, it is the least harmful. But it is well not to confound its promises with realities. The fiction consists in the postulate of all democratic government, that the great majority of the electors in a state are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic—whereas such a postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any state is necessarily ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... smallest of our acts implies the belief in something perceptible which is wider and more durable than our astonished perceptions. I could not write these lines unless I implicitly supposed that my inkstand, my paper, my pen, my room, and the surrounding world subsist when I do not see them. It is a postulate of practical life. It is also a postulate of science, which requires for its explanations of phenomena the supposition in them of an indwelling continuity. Natural science would become unintelligible if we were ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... formal part of poetry must admit that its force can no farther go. Verse and phrase cannot be better moulded to the melodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these scraps show, is the thought below the verse. Even if Hallam's postulate of misplaced and ill-regulated passion be granted (and I am myself very far from granting it), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of self-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... forms; so that, from the highest animals, 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, but which are separated ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... and muscle system and to man's possibilities of perception, of attention, of memory, of feeling, and of will. Industrial technique with its restless improvements has always been subordinated to this postulate. Every change which made it possible for the workingman to secure equal effects with smaller effort or to secure greater or better effects with equal effort counted as an economic gain, which was welcome ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... few special demands which are contained in such a general postulate for a new artistic method, we naturally think at once of the role of words. The drama and novel live by words. How much of this noblest vehicle of thought can the photoplay conserve in its domain? We all know what a large part of the photoplay ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... therefore, relative. The Absolute includes the idea of necessity, which the mind cannot cognize. (2) The Absolute exists for thought only. In this theory the absolute is the unknown x which the human mind is logically compelled to postulate a priori as the only coherent explanation and justification of its thought. (3) The Absolute exists but is unthinkable, because it is an aid to thought which comes into operation, as it were, as a final explanation beyond which thought cannot go. Its existence is shown ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... 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 on a Rotating Body of Reference 24. ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... like a monotony of fine weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I may mention, was reversed by the order of publication; the earlier written of the two books having appeared as the later.) Even under the weight of my hero's years I could feel my postulate firm; even under the strain of the difference between those of Madame de Vionnet and those of Chad Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking, I could still feel it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem to make out, in this full and sound ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... 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 ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... assuming the rate of change in the forms of life to have been the same formerly, Lyell concludes that geological phenomena postulate 200,000,000 years at least," [88] "to account for the undoubted facts of geology since life began." [89] On the other hand, mathematical astronomy, [90] on theories which Mr. Laing complains of as wanting the solidity of geological calculations (yet which do not involve more, but fewer ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... other 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 ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... philosophers. It was because they turned nature into an unmanageable jungle, in which trees, bushes, and parasites of a thousand kinds wildly interlaced. There was nothing for it, if science was to proceed, but to clear the ground and replant with spruce in rows: to postulate a single uniform nature, of which there should be a single science. Now neither probatology nor cynology could hope to be [18] universal—the world is not all sheep nor all dog: it would have to be hylology; for the world ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... all a consequence of Emma, invented to do her a service, described in order that they may make the description of her. Her world, that is to say, would belong to the treatment of the story; none of it, not her husband, not the life of the market-town, would be a part of the author's postulate, the groundwork of his fable; it would be possible to imagine a different setting, better, it might be, than that which Flaubert has chosen. All this—if the subject of the book is nothing but the portrait of such ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... old postulate respecting the etymology of this important word, from [Greek: aeioon], however superficial, is too attractive to be surrendered, even in the present day, by some respectable authorities, the judgment of your classical correspondents is requested, as to the accuracy of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... use to express their relations to Jesus had they been wives and mothers? Such questions admit of one answer, which is, in its way, decisive. Professor James admits that modern psychology holds as a general postulate "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."[2] The 'medical materialist' can ask for no more than this. But this being granted, on what ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... a mistake to jump to the conclusion that this degeneracy had as yet gone too far to be arrested. It was assuredly not that degeneracy of senility which Mr. Balfour is inclined to postulate as an explanation of decadence. So far as I can judge, the Romans were at that stage when, in spite of unhealthy conditions of life and obstinate persistence in dangerous habits, it was not too late to reform and recover. To me the main interest of the history of the early Empire lies in seeking ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... application in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a beneficent and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Mannheim German Society, in June, 1784, on the question: 'What can a good permanent theater really effect?' It is an excellent, thoughtful essay, instinct with lofty idealism and at the same time full of sound observation. Setting out from the postulate that the highest aim of all institutions whatsoever is the furtherance of the general happiness, the paper discusses the theater as a public institution of the state. Its claims are examined, and the sphere and manner of its influence discussed, along with those of religion and the laws. Probably ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... 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
... 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 ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... given assurance of Banneker's head on a salver to be rid of these persecuting autocrats. They withdrew, leaving behind an atmosphere of threat and disaster, dark, inglorious clouds of which Haring trailed behind him when he entered the office of the owner with his countenance of woe. His postulate was that Mr. Marrineal should go to his marplot editor and duly to him lay down the law; no more offending of the valuable department-store advertisers. No; nor of any others. Or he, Haring (greatly ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 of the necessity, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... preaching must postulate three essentials in any man undertaking the office. (I) Orderly thought. (2) Abundant vocabulary. (3) Accurate and graceful expressions. Without these he cannot speak. Admit the want of any one ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... must fly; She looks too happy 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 will change, And kindest glances coldly meet, And, all ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... highest functions, both mental and physical of human life—that life which depends for its well-being upon electro-chemical combustion, metabolism, and the fuel supply we designate as food. It is the first postulate of healthy vitality in the human frame that metabolism and catabolism—intake and output—shall go hand in hand—that the body must receive continually such fresh nutrition as may replace what it consumes ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... phrase, it must be admitted, involves a certain assumption, which may be regarded as the fundamental postulate of the organic view of society. It implies that such a fulfilment or full development of personality is practically possible not for one man only but for all members of a community. There must be a ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... 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 ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... 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 ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... 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 ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... 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 far less the slaves of the luxuries ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... 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 two important objections ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... correspondence of fact with thought and language, we shall often have to put up with it. Candour and humility having been satisfied by the above acknowledgment of the subtlety of Nature, we may henceforward proceed upon the postulate—that it is possible to use contradictory terms such as cannot both be predicated of the same subject in the same relation, though one of them may be; that, for example, it may be truly said of a man for some years that his hair is black; and, if so, that during those years to call it not-black ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... postulate being granted, as we are sure it will by most (and we beg to assure those who are refractory or argumentative, that, were this a treatise on the sublime and beautiful, we could convince and quell their incredulity to ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... 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 that it embodies a failure ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... intelligible world. There can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can 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 ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... result, costly airlift was used to move forces that should have traveled by land and sea. If added space capabilities had been needed, there was almost no capability for the timely launch of a satellite. Would it not be wise to index spending on land, sea, air, and space launch on one and other, postulate lift requirements on what the new force needs as it innovates and slims down. The need to respond on a moment's notice adds to the value of airlift and prepositioned ships. The outcome though would ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... 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 be manipulated by ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... mysterious and sovereign force, whereof use has been made; but it is only the feeblest of writers who have ventured to accept this postulate in its entirety: only those to whom reality and probability were matters of smallest moment. The affirmation that wickedness is necessarily and visibly punished in this life, and virtue as necessarily and visibly rewarded, is too manifestly ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... operative cause (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 an operative ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... ("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 simple ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... back also their 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
... not add that 'apologetic' writers refer to such passages as Matt. xiii. 37 (comp. Luke xiii. 34), 'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ... how often would I have gathered thy children together'? Here the expression 'how often,' it is contended, obliges us to postulate other visits, probably several visits, to Jerusalem, which are not recorded in the Synoptic Gospels themselves. And it may be suggested also that the twice-repeated notice of time in the context of St. Luke, 'I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... 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 audience he strives to please; and it would ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Monsieur 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
... entirely valid. All 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
... 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 ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... by all the Irish members, irrespective of party. The outcome was a resolution in the House of Commons, proposed by Mr. John Redmond, and seconded by Mr. Lecky. The rejoinder of the Government to the demands made was to the effect that the postulate of the Commissioners that Ireland and Great Britain must, for the purposes of the inquiry, be considered as separate entities stultified ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... 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
... individual, 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
... with the fundamental postulate of Lincoln's syllogism—that a Territory is the mere creature of Congress and cannot be clothed with powers not possessed by the creator. He denied that such an inference could be drawn from that clause in the Constitution which permits Congress to dispose of, and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... 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 and into correspondingly ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... 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 none but a man of remarkable ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... leaves us liable to be taken in by a false postulate of any man's, however well turned the postulate or able the man, then I have no respect for culture. The fact that Schopenhauer said such a thing does not prove it true. An assertion like that is a mere matter of opinion. Half the worry in the world is caused by differences of opinion. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the remedy by which character, once it 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 ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander |
