"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nelson concerning the degeneration consequent on adoption of the parasitic habit. All parasites seem to have descended from free living beasts. One asks 'what is degeneration?' without receiving a very satisfactory answer. After all, such terms must be empirical. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... well without us for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even—not one! In practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course—frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep—but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there were none." ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... that does not yet speak perfectly, resembles the diseased adult who, for any cause, no longer has command of language. And to compare these two with each other is the more important, as at present no other empirical way is open to us for investigating the nature of the process of learning to speak; but this way conducts us, fortunately, through pathology, to solid, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... splendid court. He honoured Count Bruhl by keeping me at his house for a fortnight, and sending me out every day with his doctor, the famous Styrneus, the sworn foe of Van Swieten, a still more famous physician. Although Styrneus was undoubtedly a learned man, I thought him somewhat extravagant and empirical. His system was that of Asclepiades, considered as exploded since the time of the great Boerhaave; ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... upon which life itself depends. The analysis of organic compounds is probably best taught in connection with the course in organic chemistry. It is here that the student is introduced to the use of the combustion furnace and the method of working out the empirical formulae of the compounds which he has carefully prepared and purified. The laboratory practice in organic chemistry generally requires the use of larger pieces of apparatus. Some of the experiments also are connected with peculiar dangers of their own. These facts require that the student ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... high and satisfactory character, ought to consist of a deduction of causes and effects, shewing us not merely that a thing is so, but why it is as it is, and cannot be otherwise. The rest is merely empirical; and, though the narrowness of human wit may often drive us to this; yet it is essentially of a lower order and description. As it depends for its authority upon an example, or a number of examples, so examples of a contrary nature ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... manipulation, or perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on these matters, there will be found, as I ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the case, we fall to wrangling over it, and your appetite is like to go unappeased. I now have evidence to show you that your act of violent appropriation does not conduce to your interest. This is simply an experimental and empirical fact. I am in a position to show you that the character of your action is other than you supposed, that you were under a misapprehension as to its goodness. It leads not to the enjoyable activity which interests you, but to a series of bodily exertions and ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... has been the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... then Howard West—who probably wasn't interested in her either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university—a great acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished diner-out—and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself, John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon and stayed ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Eaton's geological notions and nomenclature as very empirical here, as they are considered in France and England, and his ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... already been produced to sustain the allegation that the old system of medicine is unworthy of our confidence; that, with no law upon which to base its principles of treatment, its practice rests upon a chaotic mass of empirical experiences, groundless theories, and ever-changing fancies; that those best acquainted with its principles, and the results of its practice, have the least faith in its usefulness; and that the interests of ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... between spiritual substances and corporeal things, it is perfected naturally in two ways. First by knowledge received from sensible things; secondly, by knowledge imprinted or infused by the illumination of spiritual substances. Now in both these ways the soul of Christ was perfected; first by empirical knowledge of sensible things, for which there is no need of angelic light, since the light of the active intellect suffices; secondly, by the higher impression of infused knowledge, which He received ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... I am a democrat, or I should never have dared. For democracy, substitute "Modern Civilisation," which prides itself on redress after the event, agility in getting out of the holes into which it has snouted, and eagerness to snout into fresh ones. It foresees nothing, and avoids less. It is purely empirical, if one may use such a ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... often offended those whose love he might have conciliated, converted friends into enemies, and let those perish who were his most faithful partisans." Thus it must be acknowledged that even his boasted knowledge of human nature and his power of dealing with men was rather superficial and empirical than the real ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... experimenting scientists to draw upon, the practicing physicians could deduce therapeutic techniques or justify curative measures, but the emphasis on theory brought with it the danger of ignoring experience and abandoning empirical solutions. Aware that many of his fellow physicians tended to overemphasize theory Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), who received his doctorate of medicine from Cambridge University, recommended personal experience drawn from close observation. He scoffed at physicians who learned ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... contains a peculiar alkaloid of which, for thirty years past, I had taken (in solution) a much-diluted dose almost daily. You see the result. I also give Ramon an occasional dose, and he is the most vigorous man of his years I know. I sent some to Giessler, but he said it was an empirical remedy, and declined to take it. He preferred electric baths. I take my electric baths by horseback ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... shall we say, no science of sociology—merely a heap of vague, empirical observations, too flimsy to be useful in strict logical inference? I should, I confess, be apt to say so myself. Then, you may proceed, is it not idle to attempt to introduce a scientific method? And to that I should ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... greater resistance and the screw the smaller pitch/diameter, the higher revolutions permit the use of a smaller screw. But from this example the influence of the high revolutions in diminishing the size of screw does not appear so great as some empirical rules would indicate. The screws for A and B are also worthy of attention. Although the ship A has a much greater resistance than B, the screw of the former is much the smaller, both in the blade area and the disk. A's screws, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... that I shall say something in the last chapter. The very sacredness of the relation in which two men stand to one another when one of them rescues the other from vice separates that relation from any connection with the work of the social busybody, the professional philanthropist, and the empirical legislator. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... speed-strength modulus has been given, may be expressed as a coefficient which, if multiplied into any proportional change in speed, will give the proportional change in strength. This ratio is derived from empirical curves. (See ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these points the Utilitarian School ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... summary of all present knowledge of the voice. First, the insight into the singer's vocal operations is considered, which the hearer obtains by attentive listening to the tones produced. This empirical knowledge, as it is generally called, indicates a state of unnecessary throat tension as the cause, or at any rate the accompaniment, of every faulty tone. Further, an outline is given of all scientific knowledge of the voice. The anatomy of the vocal organs, and the acoustic and ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... they are gross feeders;* [Dr. Campbell's definition of the Lepcha's Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew; for, as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.] rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelatinous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish: and they also eat elephant, and all ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed without leave, and rests on the belief in nature ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... physical perfection developed thereby, is a sign that essential mastery has been achieved by the artist—the power, that is to say, of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing with religious objects, with what ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... mind which he is trying to stimulate; and third, knowledge of the way to bring these two together in a helpful manner. Of the three, I am afraid that university instructors have, in the main, but the first. At any rate, all they know of the other two is of an empirical character and what they have picked up incidentally. There are exceptions, to be sure. Every worthy institution has them, striking exceptions, too, some of them are. A few of our older men have become good teachers thru practise and experiment, and an occasional young man now comes with ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton-hash,—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given flavor, we might be able to pronounce instantly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... not long before I definitely abandoned all hope of obtaining, by any of the means I found in use, the results for which I was striving. Consequently, from that time to the present my work has necessarily been more or less independent and empirical in its nature, and, while I trust I am neither prejudiced nor intolerant in my attitude towards pianoforte education in its general aspect, I cannot help feeling that a great deal of natural taste is stifled and a great deal of mediocrity created by the persistent and unintelligent ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... man less thorough and empirical in method than Edison, it would have been sufficient to have made his plans clear to associates or subordinates and hold them responsible for accurate results. No such vicarious treatment would suit him, ready as he has always been to ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... play with it alone, without the presence of other children. This activity shows the presence of the nursing instinct, the tendency towards manipulation, physical activity, imitation and curiosity of the empirical type. The imagination is active but still undifferentiated from perception. The contentment in playing alone, or with an adult, shows the stage of development of the gregarious instinct. A girl of nine no longer cuddles or handles her doll just for the pleasure she gets ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... may call the empirical view of the League. There are those of us in this country, and indeed all over the world, who, profoundly impressed with the horrors of war, hating war from the bottom of their hearts as an evil thing—a company which must include, as far as I can see, all Christian men ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... can never be "natural" or "God-given," or absolute in any sense. The morality of a group at a time is the sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the folkways by which right conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never be intuitive. They are historical, institutional, and empirical. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... and never so much as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right—she usually is right in these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical—for she seems dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she guessed it: I only guess that she ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... facility with which the materials might be collected. Of the devil's origin, and the first rise of his family, we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their respective champions, in order to take, as we proceed, a cursory ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... a science and an art seems backward compared with surgery, it has nevertheless made considerable advances since it began to be empirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely dogmatic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was the nature of the human body and the effect of this or that drug on it, they asked Aristotle, or Hippocrates, or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries, and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of the Harlowes when in the olden time we should have dreamed of the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to Tristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feeling for the dead, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... softened, improved, if it is to satisfy an enlightened generation. It must be stereotyped as the patron of arts, or the pupil of speculation, or the protege of science; it must play the literary academician, or the empirical philanthropist, or the political partisan; it must keep up with the age; some or other expedient it must devise, in order to explain away, or to hide, tenets under which the intellect labours and of which it is ashamed—its doctrine, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... obtain by keeping in close contact with those whose chief function is the application of scientific knowledge to practice. The latter in carrying out its more practical aims requires, if it is to be saved from the narrowness of mere specialisation and from degenerating into empirical methods, the constant co-operation of those whose outlook is not narrowed down to the immediate practical end, but takes in the subject as a whole, and whose chief function is the ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... pictorial as this edition will supply), there would have been so many accidents and so many failures, that Mr. Rarey would have had great difficulty in obtaining a hearing, and for many years our splendid colts would have been left to the empirical treatment ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... indiscretion. I squeezed him by the hand and winked at MM. de Beaufort and de La Mothe. At length two other Presidents came over to my opinion, being thoroughly convinced that succours from Spain at this time were a remedy absolutely necessary to our disease, but a dangerous and empirical medicine, and infallibly mortal to particular persons if it did not pass first ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... complete any imperfect series, and, in the departments both of science, literature, and travel, bring the library up to date. He would devote his leisure to the study of various subjects—especially natural science—regarding which he was conscious of a knowledge, deficient, or merely empirical. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... "Connaughts," the County Council tramways will doubtless be made as free as its roads and bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not the Council already run a free service ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... terminology, her range of thought and study gradually stretched out into a broader, grander cycle, embracing, as she grew older, the application of those great principles that underlie modern science and crop out in ever-varying phenomena and empirical classifications. Edna's tutor seemed impressed with the fallacy of the popular system of acquiring one branch of learning at a time, locking it away as in drawers of rubbish, never to be opened, where it moulders in shapeless confusion till swept out ultimately ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... empirical view of his subject, but collecting a rich variety of facts, brings the lights of a profound philosophy to their explanation. His work, indeed, neglects no essential detail—it is minute and accurate in its statistics—it abounds in lively pictures of society, manners and character. * * * Whoever ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... stated frankly, at the start, that the words Sulphite and Bromide, and their derivatives, sulphitic and bromidic, are themselves so sulphitic that they are not susceptible of explanation. In a word, they are empirical, although, accidentally it might seem, they do appeal and convince the most skeptical. I myself balked, at first, at these inconsequent names. I would have suggested the terms "Gothic" and "Classic" to describe the fundamental types of mind. But it took but a short conversation with the ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... exhibit them embodied before us. What the ideas are, which in this view are essential to the different departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it has gathered ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... that I am ignorant of something; and God forbid, that a transcendental metaphysician, who has pure anticipated cognitions of every thing, and carries the whole science of geometry in his head without ever having looked into Euclid, should fall into so empirical an error as to declare himself ignorant of any thing: to say that I do know, would be to pretend to positive and circumstantial knowledge touching present matter of fact, which, when you consider the ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... at Editha's lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But how dreadful of her! ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... arrival from Scotland, Mrs. Byron, with the hope of having his lameness removed, placed her son under the care of a person, who professed the cure of such cases, at Nottingham. The name of this man, who appears to have been a mere empirical pretender, was Lavender; and the manner in which he is said to have proceeded was by first rubbing the foot over, for a considerable time, with handsful of oil, and then twisting the limb forcibly round, and screwing it up in a wooden machine. That ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... beginning of a road, the end of which we shall know only when we have been taught the necessary lessons by actual experience with the conditions of the future. Let me ask you, therefore, to follow at first the same empirical road which the governments have followed, and to take conditions as they are, and not as we may wish they should be. If one has nothing better to put in the place of something that one does not entirely like, one had better, I believe, let ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... city-states—but also through individual faults of their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course; and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet, but lying behind the empirical law that East is East and ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of every dynasty on the face of the earth. It is not our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... arrived at, provided, too—and herein lies the difficulty—provided that the premises are also true. These premises may be in themselves general statements—how is their truth established? They may be, and often are, the generalisations of the empirical sciences, and must then possess the same degree of uncertainty that these generalisations possess. Some philosophers have contended that certain general ideas are innate, but few would be found nowadays to accept ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... is essentially historical though by no means empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled il maestro di color che sanno, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both in the process called ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the emotional atmosphere through which men habitually view women.[353] I do not purpose to deal fully with this question, because it is one which may be more properly dealt with at length by the student of culture and by the historian, rather than from the standpoint of empirical psychology. It is, moreover, a question full of complexities in regard to which it is impossible to speak with certainty. But we here strike on a factor of such importance, such neglected importance, for the proper understanding of the sexual relations of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... herself in becoming costume. As to maiden's greatest and shyest curiosity, well—as a child of her epoch—she knew so much about the theory of it that it ceased to be a curiosity at all. Besides, love—she had preserved a girl's faith in beauty—was a psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold empirical methods which could be employed in the solution of other problems. I must ask you to bear this in mind when judging Lady Auriol. She had once fancied herself in love with an Italian poet, an Antinous-like young man ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... it. About fifteen deaths a day don't incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I've tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but I ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... correctness of this surmise, Columbus was still as far from a true interpretation of the whole situation as when he supposed Hispaniola to be Ophir. He entered upon a series of speculations which forcibly remind us how empirical was the notion of the earth's rotundity before the inauguration of physical astronomy by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. We now know that our planet has the only shape possible for such a rotating mass that once was fluid or nebulous, the shape of a spheroid slightly protuberant ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... general theory of transformation which he had erected on a broad inductive basis; and he had sufficient penetration to detect the agencies that had been at work in the evolution of the erect bimanous man from the arboreal and quadrumanous ape. He had, however, few empirical arguments to advance in support of his hypothesis, and it could not be established until the further development of the biological sciences—the founding of comparative embryology by Baer (1828) and of the cell-theory by ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... with small favor the therapeutic application of plants by the Filipino "herb-doctors" (curanderos) as being entirely empirical. This disparagement is unjustified because in all the most rational and scientific remedies that we make use of, the first step towards the final development of their relative position among remedies is due to empiricism which is founded on ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... real experimental science, which shall guide education and deliver the child from slavery, is not yet born; when it appears, it will be to the so-called "sciences" that have sprung up in connection with the diseases of martyred childhood as chemistry to alchemy, and as positive medicine to the empirical medicine ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... own strictly subjective point of view that's very natural. I also look at the question abstractly from the side of the empirical ego, and correctly deduce a corresponding conclusion. Only then, you see, the terms of the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... every objection had its answer. This is the proper method to adopt in teaching authoritatively young men; and the work in fact was intended for students in theology. My own book, on the other hand, was of a directly tentative and empirical character. I wished to build up an Anglican theology out of the stores which already lay cut and hewn upon the ground, the past toil of great divines. To do this could not be the work of one man; much less, could it be at once received into Anglican theology, however well ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... from special relations between the four moments) any fifth moment either contains the whole of their common intersection or none of it. No further subdivision of the common intersection is possible by means of moments. The 'all or none' principle holds. This is not an a priori truth but an empirical fact ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... hear from Mr. Spencer that conscience, so far from being the voice of God, is but "the capitalised instinct of the tribe," an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that the Socratic conception of conscience ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... successive hours to the end. But, however many failures, it was evident, we must begin on another form at the earliest point again, and follow it to the close. I saw soon that every other method would have been merely empirical, a mere piecemeal of imagination and fact. When one observer's ability to continue a long observation was exhausted, there must be another at hand to take up the thread and continue it; and thus to the end. I was fortunate indeed at this time in securing the ready and enthusiastic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... Lore of the Northern Counties of England, Mr. Baring-Gould has made an ingenious and praiseworthy attempt to reduce the entire existing mass of household legends to about fifty story-roots; and his list, though both redundant and defective, is nevertheless, as an empirical classification, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... movement discernible which may be called the New Buddhism, and has not only new wine but new wineskins. It is democratic, optimistic, empirical or practical; it welcomes women and children; it is hospitable to science and every form of truth. It is catholic in spirit and has little if any of the venom of the old Buddhist controvertists. It is represented ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... complicated escapement made. We mean by this that there are more factors involved in the problem of designing it correctly than in any other known escapement. Most—we had better say all, for there are no exceptions which occur to us—writers on the lever escapement lay down certain empirical rules for delineating the several parts, without giving reasons for this or that course. For illustration, it is an established practice among escapement makers to employ tangential lockings, as we explained ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... watches know nothing about watchmaking. A watch goes wrong and it stops; you see the owner giving it a shake, or, if he is very bold, he opens the case, and gives the balance-wheel a turn. Gentlemen, that is empirical practice, and you know what are the results upon the watch. I should think you can divine what are the results of analogous operations upon the human body. And because men of sense very soon found that such were the effects of meddling with very complicated machinery ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in these latter days, when reason and science together have dispelled the darkness of superstition, have diminished the possibility of miraculous occurrences, have laughed empirical occultism out of the field, for ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... quantity of steam that the boilers can make, we have got pretty nearly as far as we can get. To fix these dimensions of the propeller accurately at the present time, and without further knowledge of the action of the screw on the water, was, he thought, impossible. All the rules and formulae are empirical. The best one he knew is given in Table IV., due to Mr. Thom, the head of the Barrow Company's engineering drawing office, and at present acting manager, who has used it for some years in practice. These formulae are based upon the assumption that the area of propeller disk should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the high degree of generality which marks the speculations of Montesquieu, empirical as they are, was as great as the rise from the mere maxims of worldly wisdom to the widest principles of ethical philosophy. Polybius, indeed, in the remarkable chapters with which his Histories open, uses expressions that are so modern as almost to startle us. 'People who study history,' he says, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... most part, they are little or nothing better acquainted with the distinctive effects on the system of the positive and negative poles of the instrument. There is, therefore, plainly no science in their electrical practice. Every thing is done at random—all is empirical. ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... the armed forces' failure to understand the fundamental needs of black servicemen remained. The committee's investigation, with its emphasis on off-base realities and its dependence on statistics and other empirical data, did not lend itself to more than a superficial treatment of these subtle and stubborn, if ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical and psychical maltreatment, ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... the inward and the outward, there can be no speech, no expression. It is a necessity of our condition. Spirit is cognizable by us only when endowed with a material body; so an idea or a feeling can be stated only when it puts on the form and definiteness of the sensuous, the empirical. Hence the highest utterance is a perpetual marrying of thought with things, as in poetry,—a lifting up of the actual and a bringing down of the ideal,—giving a soul to the one and a body to the other. This takes place more or less in all speech, but only with genius is it natural and complete. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... chief advances the science has made since Adam Smith published his "Wealth of Nations." They are text-books in the colleges even of Sweden and Norway, while at the University in the street next to that in which the author has his residence, books are adopted composed of ideas from empirical and nearly obsolete systems: Say and Ricardo are regarded as expositors of the last and ultimate discoveries. Let us see if this law respecting prophets cannot be changed; or if not changed, confirmed, by an exception in the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... hysterias, and recurrent insanities, afford examples of the development of what I have called secondary mnemonic chains; fresh personalities, more or less complete, alongside the normal state. And I would add that hypnotism is only the name given to a group of empirical methods of inducing these ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... be accurately informed of the state of the instruments of research which are at their disposal, and be regularly apprised of any improvements that from time to time may be made in them. Experience and accident have been for a long time trusted to supply this information; but empirical knowledge, besides being costly, as we have already pointed out, is almost always imperfect. Recently the task has been undertaken of constructing catalogues of catalogues—critical and systematic lists of all the catalogues in existence. There can be no doubt that few ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... returned to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages renewed: Philip prided himself ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and early years of the seventeenth century as a result of the aforementioned investigations of Aldrovandus, Coiter, and Fabricius. Concerned with description and depiction of the anatomy of the embryo, they established a period of macro-iconography in embryology. The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... shut fist planted close under the ham is, like the "cucumber shin" and "lark heel", a good sign in a slave. Shapely calves and well-made legs denote the idle and the ne'er-do-well. I have often found this true although the rule is utterly empirical. Possibly it was suggested by the contrast of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem. The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... ankle in 1792, and had followed this up so well that, in 1803, the younger Moreau could boast, "the town has become in some sort the refuge of the unfortunate afflicted with carious joints, after they have tried all the means usually recommended by professional men, or have had recourse to empirical nostrums, or when amputation seemed to them ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... where the common gallows stood, there erected the priory, whose Norman arches as satisfactorily attest its date as Henry's charter. The piety of a court jester in the twelfth century, when the science of medicine was wholly empirical, founded one of the most valuable medical schools of the nineteenth century. The desire to raise up splendid churches in the place of the dilapidated Saxon buildings was a passion with Normans, whether clerics or laymen. Ralph Flambard, the bold and unscrupulous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, looked at in this way, I combatted it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... considered in this chapter is that they are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of biological, anthropological, and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... destiny was the dynamic force of his young life. Its essential mystery kept him alert and buoyant. His keen, self-centred mind realized that his search on the stage for the true expression of his genius was only empirical. If he failed there, it was for him to try a hundred other spheres until he found the right one. But just as in his childish days he could not understand why he was not supreme in everything, so now he could not appreciate ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Lent and Advent. Loyalty to the Brotherhood in matters even of minor observance is a great principle to be borne in mind in this connexion. There is usually a method in the Church's madness, and her prescriptions and counsels are the product of a very considerable empirical acquaintance with the workings of the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... penultimate brandy-bottle, coal-on-the-head-piece gift Of who avenged the Old Sea-Rover's smirch. Marchant he treads the all-along of inarable drift On dubiously connivent legs, The facile prey of predatory flies; Panting for further; sworn to lurch Empirical on to the Menelik-buffered, enhavened ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... acetylene than other plant, where purification might be desirable, that an addition of a special purifier was wholly unnecessary. Later on the more responsible members of the trade took another view, but they attacked the problem of purification in a perfectly empirical way, either employing some purely mechanical scrubber filled with some moist or dry porous medium, or perhaps with coke or the like wetted with dilute acid, or they simply borrowed the processes adopted in the purification of ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... understanding the essential nature of pleasure and pain, the fact that what is pleasure to one man is pain to another, rather discredited this as a psychological explanation. I think we may phrase the situation fairly on an empirical basis when we say that seeking arises in instinct but receives its impulse to continuity by some agreeable affective state of satisfaction. Man steers towards pleasure and satisfaction of some type or other, but the force is the unbalance ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... one which is at present finding remarkably wide acceptance. Philosophers are often reproached with an indisposition to agree, and naturally where inquiry is active diversity will obtain. But to-day there appears a strange unanimity as regards the ultimate formula of ethics. The empirical schools state this as the highest form of the struggle for existence; the idealistic, as self-realization. The two are the same so far as they both regard morality as having to do with the development of life in persons. These curious ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... into the empirical and ideal systems of philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the great ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... of nature; if they want to cure a man, they have no conception at all of true scientific remedies. If they try anything they must try it upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in this bare, empirical way. What could be more improbable—at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason—than that some mineral springs should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral springs make wounds heal quickly? And yet the chance knowledge ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... persons, and marks them as clumsy or dexterous, sure-footed or the reverse. Ling aimed only at the regulation of associated, or the equal development of antagonistic groups. For, as the Supreme Medical Board of Russia say in their report on his system, made to the Emperor in 1850, "empirical gymnastics develop the muscular strength sometimes to a wonderful degree, and teach the execution of movements combined with an extraordinary effort of the muscles; by these means, instead of fortifying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order will never quite lose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... odd-toed. Now, whether an animal has an even or an odd number of toes may seem a curiously artificial distinction on which to found so important a classification of the mammalian group. But if we look at the matter from a less empirical and more intelligent point of view, we shall see that the alternative of having an even or an odd number of toes carries with it alternative consequences of a practically important kind to any animal of the digitigrade type. For suppose an aboriginal five-toed animal, walking ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... place. He fought manfully, persuading himself that his scruples were as idle as air, remnants of the long since outgrown superstitions of his childhood. He defiantly claimed the right to be true to his powers, to his genius, rather than to an empirical standard erected by narrow moralists. He should be thankful that he had escaped entangling his life by that absurd marriage in Rome seven years ago, and that he was now free to win a wife worthy Of himself ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... will to national independence by sledge-hammer blows. In all the wars of the past nations have been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of the people. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossed countries and populations to each other as if they had been balls ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... happen that until the [x] last half-century Herbal Physic has remained only speculative and experimental, instead of gaining a solid foothold in the field of medical science. Its claims have been merely empirical, and its curative methods those of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... predicted with a precision which to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect. And though an equal degree of regularity had not been discerned in natural phaenomena generally, even the most empirical observation had ascertained so many cases of an uniformity almost complete, that inquiring minds were eagerly on the look-out for further indications pointing in the same direction; and vied with one another in the ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... of things. And last, it is impossible to pass over, in silence, the rare works of Lord Kelvin, so full, for French readers, of unexpected suggestions, for they show us the entirely practical and empirical value which the English attach ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... endeavoured to unite sprang into new activity within a century after his death. The Arabian physicians, acute and curious as they were, had exercised but a very transient influence upon the real progress of the art, the chief cause of their non-success being their adhesion to arbitrary and empirical tradition. At the end of the fifteenth century, Leonicinus, a professor at Ferrara, recalled the allegiance of his pupils to the authority of Hippocrates by the ability and eloquence of his teaching; and, by his translation of Galen's works ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... it is a perfection which, not indeed in my intellect, but yet in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that 'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the light of reason, and (the most important ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... geometry that he stated his new theory. Non-Euclidean geometry is a study of which the primary motive was logical and philosophical; few of its promoters ever dreamed that it would come to be applied in physics. Some of Euclid's axioms were felt to be not "necessary truths," but mere empirical laws; in order to establish this view, self-consistent geometries were constructed upon assumptions other than those of Euclid. In these geometries the sum of the angles of a triangle is not two right ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... stream of life. The double form of consciousness is then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition of the two ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... The elimination of selfishness; of condemnation; of fear and anger, and doubt, must have far greater power for universal happiness and well-being than all the systems which theology or science or politics could devise. Indeed, all these systems are sporadic and empirical attempts to express the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... or North Eastern Africa, probably within a few years of the development of the art of agriculture, some scientific theorist, interpreting the body of empirical knowledge acquired by cultivating cereals, propounded the view that water was the great life-giving element. This view eventually found expression ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith |
