"Quantitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is to guide thought to the consideration of the progressive simplicity of natural relations as we progressively diminish the temporal extension of the duration considered. Now the whole point of the procedure is that the quantitative expressions of these natural properties do converge to limits though the abstractive set does not converge to any limiting duration. The laws relating these quantitative limits are the laws of nature 'at an instant,' although in truth there is no nature at an instant and there is only ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... (the sexual glands) are concerned. But it is also possible that the determination of the latter—the weighty determination whether the child is to be a boy or a girl—depends on a slight qualitative or quantitative difference in the nuclein or the coloured nuclear matter which comes from both parents in ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... connected with the one just examined as often to be confused with it. It is this: Are all functions of the same kind, rank, or grade? They are not; and this qualitative difference is indicated by the terms higher and lower, as the quantitative difference was by greater and less. But differences of rank are more slippery matters than difference of amount, and easily lend themselves to arbitrary and capricious treatment. In ordinary speech we are apt to employ the words high and low as mere signs of approval or disapproval. We talk ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... discontent of place that isolation brings. It makes a difference in social attitude whether the telephone, automobile, and parcel post draw the people nearer together in a common community life or whether they bring the people under the magic of the city's quantitative life and in this way ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... to enumerate some of the conditions necessary for experimenting with them, and to describe the apparatus he had invented for the purpose. Hertz had used waves which were about 10 metres in length. It was impossible to attempt any quantitative measurement of their optical properties on account of large waves curling round corners. The lecturer had succeeded in producing the shortest waves, with frequency of 50,000 millions of vibrations per second, the particular invisible radiation being ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... natural bodies are either quite indeterminate, as in the case of planets, stones, trees, &c., or they vary within moderate limits, as in the case of seeds, eggs, &c.; but even in these cases small quantitative differences are met with which do not interfere with the essential properties ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... demand for profound truth and significance in the drama is clearly to be reached from the purely dramatic need. Inner "possession," the condition for our dramatic tension, depends not alone on the cumulation of suggestions— suggestion in its, so to speak, quantitative aspect. The attitude of a character must be necessary in itself: that is, it must be true to the great and general laws of life. If it is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter into ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Evolution owes its seeming simplicity and its popularity. The word "existence" or "life" (which is the existence of organic beings, about which we are chiefly concerned), is taken as having one homogeneous meaning, like "heat" or "warmth;" the only difference being quantitative—a difference of intensity, of breadth, of duration; not a difference of kind such as would destroy all common measure. Life is something which we predicate of the most diversely organized beings, and therefore would seem to be ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... But I find myself balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will speak of as the sense of Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in me which demands not simply gratification but the best and keenest of a sense or continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse quantitative assuagements. It ranges all over the senses, and just as I refuse to wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its use to the plane of the eye or ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... hyphen in a word, in all probability bear no important relation to anything. Those that have this vital relation are essential and need careful attention; the others are non-essential and deserve for that reason to be neglected. In other words, thoroughness is a qualitative rather than a quantitative matter; it is qualitative because it involves careful selection in accordance with the nature and relation of the details. The student, to whom thoroughness is a question of allness needs mental endurance as a chief virtue; the real student, on the other ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... disappearances correspond to transformations and not to simultaneous creations and destructions. We thus represent energy to ourselves as taking different forms—mechanical, electrical, calorific, and chemical— capable of changing one into the other, but in such a way that the quantitative value always remains the same. In like manner a bank draft may be represented by notes, gold, silver, or bullion. The earliest known form of energy, i.e. work, will serve as the standard as gold serves ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... entirely useless thing, fit only for the dust-bin (and known to be such, it may be well to add) will fetch no price at all, however costly it may be to produce. But it is not easy to express the connection in quantitative terms. It seems reasonable enough to say that the prices of commodities are roughly proportionate to their costs of production. But directly we contemplate saying a similar thing of their usefulness, we are pulled up short. As we look round the world, and enumerate the commodities which by common ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... sublimity on their own account. But even if they were infinitesimal as compared with the vast stretches of modern scientific measurements, the moral grandeur of the idea of God of which they were the framework stands forth unmistakably. We must not permit the quantitative bigness of modern scientific notions to obscure the qualitative fineness of the biblical ideal of God. Modern philosophy comes also and announces that it has a better God than that of the Scriptures. The most imposing modern philosophical systems are those which proclaim some form of idealism. ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell |
