"Premiss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rule, the justice or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was absolute; the king could do no wrong for which his subjects could call him to account; he was responsible to God but not to man—a doctrine which the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacy ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... maxims regarding human conduct, by the application of which to given states of fact, predictions may be made as to what will happen;' and all that is necessary for the construction of historical science, is the employment of these maxims on a larger scale. If the premiss here be sound, the inference may be owned to be sufficiently legitimate. If there be any formula with which the actions of individuals are observed to correspond, there is every likelihood that the ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceeds to the classical sentimental argument that the males of all species, including man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that their chief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the native reluctance ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... to be a rearrangement of the very same atoms). If you mean to assert that the difference between a live animal and a dead animal, i.e., between animate and sensitive matter, and the same matter when it becomes inanimate and insensitive, is a mere rearrangement of the same atoms, your premiss is intelligible. (It is a bolder one than any biologists have yet advanced. The most sceptical of them admits, I believe, that "vitality" is a thing per se. However, that is beside my present scope.) But this premiss is advanced to prove that it is of no "consequence" to kill an animal. ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... morality accordingly. What then is conscience? It is not a faculty, not a habit, it is an act. It is a practical judgment of the understanding. It is virtually the conclusion of a syllogism, the major premiss of which would be some general principle of command or counsel in moral matters; the minor, a statement of fact bringing some particular case of your own conduct under that law; and the conclusion, which is conscience, a decision of the case for yourself according ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J. |
