"Presupposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it must always remain true that knowledge does not reach absolute reality, nor morality absolute goodness, this cannot be used as an argument against optimism, except on the presupposition that mental and moral activity are a disease. And this is a contradiction in terms. If the ideal is in itself good, the process whereby it is attained is good; if the process in itself is evil, the ideal it seeks is evil, and therefore the condemnation of the actual by reference ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... from the presupposition of this idea that we became aware of a law that the subjective principles of action, i.e., maxims, must always be so assumed that they can also hold as objective, that is, universal principles, and so serve as universal laws of our own dictation. But why then should I subject ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... falling of tears; it arises also from the body of the woman; it refers to the well known highly significant water. Stekel has arranged for dreams the so-called symbolic parallels, according to which all secretions and excretions may symbolically represent each other. On the presupposition that marks of similarity are not conceived in a strict sense, the following comparisons may be drawn: Mucus blood pus urine stools semen milk sweat tears spirit air [breath flatus] speech money poison. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Impressionistic philosophizing, like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me, therefore, to become more technical. The great claim of the philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will therefore take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... no such thing as fortune, chance, or accident. All things are held together by invariable laws. Every event takes place in accordance with law. Uniformity of law is the condition and presupposition of all our thinking. The very idea of an event that has no cause is a contradiction in terms to which no reality can correspond, like the notion of two mountains without a valley between; or a yard stick ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... presuppositions. They ridicule the notion that 'God is a personage in history'; they assume that for the historian 'He cannot be found anywhere'; that He is as though He did not exist. On the strength of this presupposition, and for no other reason, they proceed to rule out, without further investigation, all alleged instances of divine intervention in history. Unhampered by any of the misgivings which predispose the ordinary believer to conservatism, they follow the rationalist ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... ordered reality. But working from the basis of this reality, and moving within its own circle, the novel, both as regards picturesqueness of incident and as regards characters and their fate, retrieves for poetry (so far as the above presupposition ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... regularities, but analyzes them until he can bring them down to simple physical connections, and these physical connections finally to mechanical processes, which realize for us logical necessities. That matter lasts and cannot disappear is such a presupposition, which comes to us with the necessity of logical thinking. We simply cannot think it otherwise. And the whole idea of natural science is to conceive the physical universe in such a way that all changes in the outer world can be understood as the movements of its parts ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... necessary that we should have a way of feeling time-intervals, and that this feeling should give what is constant in the meaning of the words "this morning." This appreciation of time-intervals is, however, obviously a product of memory, not a presupposition of it. It will be better, therefore, if we wish to analyse the causation of memory by something not presupposing memory, to take some other instance than that of a question ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... or curricula, the ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme[8] or L'Ecole des Roches,[9] may be rudely indicated ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall |
