"A priori" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 5. But from within (a priori) no human wisdom has been able to conceive what God is in himself, or in his internal essence. Neither can anyone know or give information of it except it be revealed to him by the Holy Spirit. For no one knoweth, as Paul says (1 Cor 2, 11), the things of man save ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... experience is concerned, it is empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To regard known things ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... find that the distribution of these stars on the sky is tolerably uniform, as might have been predicted. All these stars have a large proper motion, this being in the mean 3".42 per year. This was a priori to be expected from their great proximity. The radial velocity is, numerically, greater than could have been supposed. This fact is probably associated with the generally small mass ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... 77 (9th ed.) of the "Eclipse." he implies, without absolutely asserting, that I hold the Bible to be an impertinence. He repeats this in p. 85 of the "Defence." Such is his mode. I wrote: "Without a priori belief, the Bible is an impertinence," but I say, man has this a priori belief, on which account the Bible is not an impertinence. My last sentence in the very passage before us, expressly asserts the value of (good) external teaching. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... itself;—we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs—to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... friendship together. The whole sum of their pleasure is much increased by mutual sympathy. This happy moral truth, upon which so many of our virtues depend, should be impressed upon the mind; it should be clearly demonstrated to the reason; it should not be repeated as an a priori, sentimental assertion. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... that regard, which the natural sentiment of benevolence engages us to pay to the interests of mankind and society. If we consider the principles of the human make, such as they appear to daily experience and observation, we must, A PRIORI, conclude it impossible for such a creature as man to be totally indifferent to the well or ill-being of his fellow-creatures, and not readily, of himself, to pronounce, where nothing gives him any particular bias, that what promotes their ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... resume the question with one who so circumspectly refused to take a metaphysical or a priori view of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... does not cause fish to be there; after a series of random movements it is found that this result is to be caused by going to the City in the morning and coming back in the evening. No one would have guessed a priori that this movement of a middle-aged man's body would cause fish to come out of the sea into his larder, but experience shows that it does, and the middle-aged man therefore continues to go to the City, just as the cat in the cage continues to lift the latch when it has once found ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... the gulf—to create a common standing-ground for both teacher and parent—and on that basis to carry on an educational campaign that it is hoped will result in the many desirable conditions which, a priori, might be expected from such a union. At present the movement is confined practically to the rural schools. It consists in the organization of a county Teachers and Patrons' Association, with a membership of teachers and school patrons, properly officered. Its chief method of work is to hold one ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... is noticeable, further, that the whole was designed by a single man, there being no subsequent additions, as there are, for instance, at Chatsworth and Wentworth. Vanbrugh is responsible for good and bad qualities alike. One would imagine a priori that he had everything in his favor—unlimited money and a free hand. Far from this being the case, the stupendous work was accomplished under difficulties greater than any long-suffering architect ever had ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... inquiries against evidence of facts, is wholly unwarrantable. It is a mode of reasoning which will not do in natural history, which will not do in natural religion, which cannot therefore be applied with safety to revelation. It may have same foundation in certain speculative a priori ideas of the divine attributes, but it has none in experience or in analogy. The general character of the works of nature is, on the one hand, goodness both in design and effect; and, on the other hand, a liability ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often 'more so than it should be' (NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a priori reason that they should be.) "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." This is generalized from the computer-science terms 'NP-hard' and 'NP-complete'. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... of the stile and manner of it, with those my father constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of his conjecture,—proving it as strongly, as an argument a priori could prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick's and no one's else:—It was proved to be so, a posteriori, the day after, when Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby's house ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... read Catulle Mendes's two letters. M. Mendes goes pretty far in declaring a priori that "Pagliacci" is an imitation of his "Femme de Tabarin." I had not known this book, and only know it now through the accounts given in the daily papers. You will remember that at the time of the first performance of "Pagliacci" at Milan in 1892 several ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
