"Dialectical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is not that in which I propose to engage at present, unless indirectly. My immediate concern is not with the strength of theism, but with the weakness of atheism, and the hollowness of the latter's dialectical pretensions. What in every form of piety is most provocative of philosophic scorn, is its forwardness of faith, its eagerness of acquiescence; but to this sort of reproach I expect to be able to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... group. These variations are sometimes due to differences in the life conditions, but generally causes for them are unascertainable, or the variations appear capricious. Therefore each in-group forms its own ways, and looks with contempt and abhorrence upon the ways of any out-group (sec. 13). Dialectical differences in language or pronunciation are a sufficient instance. They cannot be accounted for, but they call out contempt and ridicule, and are taken to be signs of barbarism and inferiority. When groups are compounded by intermarriage, intercourse, conquest, immigration, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... fact, as the curriculum consisted almost exclusively of philosophy, Greek, Latin, rhetoric, and a little mathematics, there was no great need of much equipment. The classics were taught by the intensive grammatical method; in philosophy there was a great deal of dialectical disputation; rhetoric was studied as an aid to oratory; mathematics included only arithmetic and geometry. The aim of instruction was, not to give a wide acquaintance with many fields of knowledge for cultural and appreciative purposes, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... he had, for about ten seconds, the misguided sense of dialectical triumph. "I know a little how you feel toward her, and maybe she's justified it. But not in this case. Because it was Harriet who made me see that there wasn't anything—disgraceful about your going on ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... by Athene 'mind' (nous) and 'intelligence' (dianoia), and the maker of names appears to have had a singular notion about her; and indeed calls her by a still higher title, 'divine intelligence' (Thou noesis), as though he would say: This is she who has the mind of God (Theonoa);—using alpha as a dialectical variety for eta, and taking away iota and sigma (There seems to be some error in the MSS. The meaning is that the word theonoa theounoa is a curtailed form of theou noesis, but the omitted letters do not agree.). Perhaps, however, ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... Consult the family means—waste your time Convictions are generally first impressions Country can go on very well without so much speech-making Crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke (of history) Dialectical stiffness Effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative Give our consciences to the keeping of the parsons Hates a compromise Man owes a duty to his class Mark of a fool to take everybody for a bigger ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize that this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method. Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of The Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a highly effective ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... order to balance the accounts of a financially independent Ireland, but it is not the kind of measure they would care about when their national finance was dictated by Great Britain. If one cared to make a dialectical point, one could add that a common argument against Home Rule is a fear of oppressive taxation of the rich or oppressive taxation of North-East Ulster, at the hands of an Irish Parliament, through high direct imposts. The fear is one of those which scarcely ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... have marks of distinction. They both belong not only to the Semitic race, but to the same branch of the race. Presenting the same physical features, the languages spoken by them are identical, barring differences that do not always rise to the degree of dialectical variations, and affect chiefly the pronunciation of certain consonants. At what time the Babylonians and Assyrians settled in the district in which we find them, whence they came, and whether the Euphrates Valley or the northern Tigris ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... work, "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death." Also to Mr. J. Burns and his brother, for freely granting permission for any use to be made of the James Burns 1873 Edition of the "Report of the Committee of the Dialectical Society." ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... "Bohemian Papers," making a single not very plethoric volume, the author's first book of prose. But he deems it worthy of consideration that during this period, i.e. from 1862 to 1866, he produced "The Society upon the Stanislaus" and "The Story of M'liss,"—the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance,—his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish but very enthusiastic belief ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... as early as 1853, the work was taken up in the true scientific spirit, and Professor Marc Thury and the Count de Gasparin completely demonstrated the fact of telekinesis; and at about the same time that the Dialectical Society was getting into action, Flammarion, the astronomer, took up his study of the subject. But it was not until 1891 that anything like Crookes's searching analysis was made of a medium. This important sitting—a ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... is necessary. It is difficult to condense it and keep its clearness of thought. Briefly, it amounts to this, that the formulation of the doctrine of Parallelism rests on an ambiguity in the terms employed in its statement, that it contains a subtle dialectical artifice by which we pass surreptitiously from one system of notation to another ignoring the substitution: logically, we ought to keep to one system of notation throughout. The two systems are: Idealism and Realism. Bergson attempts to show that neither of these ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... silenced him by some quibbling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five "dialectical daughters" behind him, to be thorns in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as "emancipated women;" a class but too common in the later days of Greece, as they will always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and crumbling to pieces, leaving their members ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... nature we can form no conception; we are all of us in process of transition from one degree of good or evil to another. The difficulties which are urged about the origin or existence of evil are mere dialectical puzzles, standing in the same relation to Christian philosophy as the puzzles of the Cynics and Megarians to the philosophy of Plato. They arise out of the tendency of the human mind to regard good and evil both as relative and absolute; ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... dialectical humiliation was within one point of completion, Miss Metford came to my rescue. For some time she had looked on at my discomfiture with a good-natured neutrality, and when I was metaphorically in my last ditch, she ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... said Cressy, who was purposely dialectical to strangers, "considering that you trapsed up and down the lane, past the ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... to shunt, &c.—In the report of the evidence regarding the death of Mrs. Hathway, at Chipping Sodbury, supposed to have been poisoned by her husband, the following dialectical expression occurs, which may deserve notice. One of the witnesses stated that he was invited by Mr. Hathway to go with him into a beer-house in Frampton Cotterell, "and have ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... Home, another episode which marks a stage in the advance of this movement was the investigation and report by the Dialectical Society in the year 1869. This body was composed of men of various learned professions who gathered together to investigate the alleged facts, and ended by reporting that they really WERE facts. They were unbiased, and their conclusions ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... treated the life of the ex-monk Bazhakuloff divide it into five clearly marked periods: the probationary, dialectical, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... what it represented in antiquity, and what it represents now, the study of the true relationship of things, but rather the application of truths revealed once and for all. There was nothing more to be discovered, and therefore scientists took a delight in logical and dialectical speculations which to a man of our day seem senseless and childish. Far into the Renascence, natural history was a medley of ancient traditions, oriental fables and superficial observations. The strangest qualities were attributed to animals with which we ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... little. Darwin realised to the full the essential strength of Mr. Huxley's nature; he knew, as all the world now knows, the delicate sense of honour of his friend, and he was ever inclined to lean on his guidance in practical matters, as on an elder brother. Of Mr. Huxley's dialectical and literary skill he was an enthusiastic admirer, and he never forgot what his theories owed to the fighting powers of his "general agent." (32/3. Ibid., I., page 171.) Huxley's estimate of Darwin is very interesting: he valued him most highly for what was so strikingly ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... it the easier, I shall not describe them at too great a length. Old Mr. and Mrs. Talbot were the sole survivors of the less active founders of New Zion, meekly not militantly pious, stubborn as sheep in a dumb obstinacy of ancient faith, but in no sense dialectical, and in every ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... all conclusions into logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. (3) Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premisses, the materials from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally (4) Sophistic ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Isabel and the Foreign Office, if it can so be called, ended in January, 1872, three months after her return to England; and it terminated in a dialectical triumph for her, and the offer of several small posts for her husband, which he indignantly refused. Among others, Burton was offered Para, but would not take it. "Too small a place for ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... ever heard of Nietzsche. The late Captain Wilson, author of several queer pamphlets, propagandist of a metaphysical system called Comprehensionism, and inventor of the term "Crosstianity" to distinguish the retrograde element in Christendom, was wont thirty years ago, in the discussions of the Dialectical Society, to protest earnestly against the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount as excuses for cowardice and servility, as destructive of our will, and consequently of our honor and manhood. Now it is true that Captain Wilson's moral criticism of Christianity ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Clonard, Tallaght Clonmacnois; Slane in Meath, where Dagobert II. one of the kings of France, was educated; Kildare, where the sacred fire—not lamp—of St. Bridget was kept burning for centuries, all are places whose names fill a considerable space in the fierce dialectical controversy of that fiery ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... not to be regarded as the stages of an idea, rising above one another to a climax. They are fanciful, partly facetious performances, 'yet also having a certain measure of seriousness,' which the successive speakers dedicate to the god. All of them are rhetorical and poetical rather than dialectical, but glimpses of truth appear in them. When Eryximachus says that the principles of music are simple in themselves, but confused in their application, he touches lightly upon a difficulty which has troubled the moderns ...
— Symposium • Plato
... Mahinda and his following alighted on the Missaka mountain[27] whither King Devanampiya Tissa had gone in the course of a hunt. The monks and the royal cortege met: Mahinda, after testing the king's intellectual capacity by some curious dialectical puzzles, had no difficulty in converting him.[28] Next morning he proceeded to Anuradhapura and was received with all honour and enthusiasm. He preached first in the palace and then to enthusiastic audiences of the general public. In these discourses he dwelt chiefly ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... was simply practising his dialectical skill, the result was a failure. But if he had an eye to certain lower ends, his success surpassed his expectations. Pope was in ecstasies. He fell upon Warburton's neck—or rather at his feet—and overwhelmed him with professions of gratitude. He invited him to Twickenham; ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... supposed by Dr. Franklin to exist in some German university. Paine grew bolder as he advanced: "If monarchy is a useless thing, why is it kept up anywhere? and if a necessary thing, how can it be dispensed with?" This is a pretty good specimen of one of Paine's dialectical methods. Here is another: The French constitution says, that the right of war and of peace is in the nation. "Where else should it reside, but in those who are to pay the expense? In England, the right is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... discreditable conduct of physicians at consultations. Sometimes several doctors would hold a consultation, and, apparently forgetting the patient for the time, would hold violent disputations. Their main object was to display their dialectical skill, and their arguments sometimes led to blows. These discreditable exhibitions were rather frequent in Rome ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... beck," and it at once tells its story to a Lowland Scot, and ought to do so to every "Anglo-Saxon" of any kind. As for the local dialect, it is French. It is not, like that of Aquitaine and Provence, a language as distinct as Spanish or Italian. It is French, with merely a dialectical difference from "French of Paris." But the Normans, in this resembling the Gascons, have no special objection to a final consonant, and most vulgarly and perversely still sound divers s's and t's which the politer tongue of the capital dooms to ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... the Fallacy of Many Questions ([Greek: t t do rotmata n poien]) is a deceptive form of interrogation, when a single answer is demanded to what is not really a single question. In dialectical discussions the respondent was limited to a simple 'yes' or 'no'; and in this fallacy the question is so framed as that either answer would seem to imply the acceptance of a proposition which would be repudiated. The old stock instance will do as well as another—'Come ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... confirmed by the absence of the doctrine of recollection and of any doctrine of ideas except that which derives them from generalization and from reflection of the mind upon itself. The general character of the Theaetetus is dialectical, and there are traces of the same Megarian influences which appear in the Parmenides, and which later writers, in their matter of fact way, have explained by the residence of Plato at Megara. Socrates disclaims the character of a professional ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... Persian sources. Even if so, they seemed to have escaped that confused and mystical philosophy which has robbed Oriental thought of much power in the realm of practical life. Philo says, "Of philosophy, the dialectical department, as being in no wise necessary for the acquisition of virtue, they abandon to the word-catchers; and the part which treats of the nature of things, as being beyond human nature, they leave to speculative air-gazers, with the exception of that part ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the offspring of human beings, generally below the age of puberty; the term is the correlative of "parent," and applies to either sex, though some early dialectical uses point to a certain restriction to a girl. The word is derived from the A.S. cild, an old Teutonic word found in English only, in other Teutonic languages kind and its variants being used, usually derived from the Indo-European root ken, seen in Gr. [greek: genos], Lat. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Books and the literary works, and is also well acquainted with European philosophical thought, may find it literally impossible to understand even small portions of a work of advanced Indian logic, or the dialectical Vedanta. This is due to two reasons, the use of technical terms and of great condensation in expression, and the hidden allusions to ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... to do so, especially those in the smaller classes of the University. A good illustration is in the suggestion he made to a class that they might together work out some interesting etymological and dialectical points. "Why should not some of the intelligent ladies of this class," he asks, "go to work and arrange the facts — as I have called them — so that scholars might have before them a comprehensive view of all the word-changes which have occurred since the earliest Anglo-Saxon ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Spaniards, and was sure that the dream would come true; and moreover, that he did not very much care if they did, or if he ever got back alive; "for it was better to die than be made an ape, and a scarecrow, and laughed at by the men, and badgered with Ramus his logic, and Plato his dialectical devilries, to confess himself a Manichee, and, for aught he knew, a turbaned Turk, or Hebrew Jew," and so flung into the boat like a ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Preliminaries, did not dare to take the responsibility of cutting the knot, but said, "It is a very grave point,"—Champeaux, who was obliged to modify his idea and then renounce it, saw his course fall into such discredit that they hardly let him make his dialectical lectures, as though dialectics consisted entirely in the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... sufficiently realize the dialectical incompetence of the uneducated is partly to be explained by the fact that they often get bits of reasoning by rote, much as young boys learn their Euclid; and that they frequently seem to understand principles because they apply them in the right cases, just as we ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... speak they through their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of all—the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself—a natural instinct of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came by the truth that he communicated to men; but, though ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... but he had been trained to believe that straws show which way the wind blows, and that there is no smoke without fire. He approached King in Common-room with a sense of injustice, but King was pleased to be full of airy persiflage that tide, and brilliantly danced dialectical rings round Prout. ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... began as amateurs. Southey became a professional writer, and his sun set in the mists of valuable information. Coleridge, as an amateur, enriched the language with a few priceless poems, and then got involved in the morass of dialectical metaphysics. The point is whether a man writes simply because he cannot help it, or whether he writes to make an income. The latter motive does not by any means prevent his doing first-rate artistic work—indeed, there are certain persons who seem to have required the stimulus ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... London Dialectical Society, an association of cultured liberals, embracing many well-known personages, appointed a committee to examine "the asserted phenomena of Spiritualism." The committee divided itself into six sub-committees, each of which submitted a report, and according to a general ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... to bear? Is a lover's feeling for his lady stronger before she has accepted him or afterwards? Is a bad noble or a poor but upright man more worthy to find favour? The discussion of such questions provided an opportunity of displaying both poetical dexterity and also dialectical acumen. But rarely did either of the disputants declare himself convinced or vanquished by his opponents' arguments the question [33] was left undecided or was referred by agreement ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... He cannot be fully and rightly convinced who does not himself know how to convince, and no man is competent to judge in the last resort of the force of an argument who is not on something like an equality of knowledge and dialectical skill with the person using it. This is true in all fields of discussion; it is pre-eminently true in scientific fields. Of course, therefore, the real public of the scientific man—the public which settles finally whether he has made out his case—is a small one. Outside of it there is another ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... speak not yet of the eating up of Eyes-in-the-hands. Hath not the ear of the spirit of Tarum spoken upon these matters?" inquired Bakahenzie in his favourite dialectical manner. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... bustling schemer, but a grave and blameless presbyter of Alexandria. Arius was a disciple of the greatest critic of his time, the venerated martyr Lucian of Antioch. He had a name for learning, and his letters bear witness to his dialectical skill and mastery of subtle irony. At the outbreak of the controversy, about the year 318, we find him in charge of the church of Baucalis at Alexandria, and in high favour with his bishop, Alexander. It was no love of heathenism, but a real ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... the man who apprehended it could not expound or explain it to his neighbour." In support of this strange doctrine, Gorgias adopted the quibbling method of argument which had been applied with some success to dialectical purposes by Zeno, Melissus, and others (see above, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... wherein they would be scanned by Brasenose and a less formidable posterity. These minor monumental productions were always exciting to Mr. Casaubon; digestion was made difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain. And from the first there was to be a Latin dedication about which everything was uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to Carp: it was a poisonous regret to Mr. Casaubon ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the human understanding. The reason of man soared to the loftiest flights that it has ever attained. It cast its searching eye into the most abstruse inquiries which ever tasked the famous intellects of the world. It exhausted all the subjects which dialectical subtlety ever raised. It originated and it carried out the boldest speculations respecting the nature of the soul and its future existence. It established most important psychological truths. It created a method for the solution of the most abstruse questions. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... arises whenever an author would disguise his solicitude for his work, by appearing negligent, and even undesirous of its success. A writer will rarely conclude such a preface without betraying himself. I think that even Dr. Johnson forgot his sound dialectic in the admirable Preface to his Dictionary. In one part he says, "having laboured this work with so much application, I cannot but have some degree of parental fondness." But in his conclusion he tells us, "I dismiss ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled to brand all our empirical unions as a sham. But unions by continuous transition are the only ones we ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... The subject is Dialectic Efficiency—without quotation-marks, be it noted. The way of it is this: I have been reading, or, rather, trying to read the masterly book by Doctor Fletcher Durell, whose title is "Fundamental Sources of ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... 'noisy stream;' the Lackawanna, Lechau-hanne, 'forked stream' or 'stream that forks:'[17] with affix, Lechauhannak or Lechauwahannak, 'at the river-fork,'—for which Hendrick Aupamut, a Muhhekan, wrote (with dialectic exchange of n for Delaware l) 'Naukhuwwhnauk,' 'The Forks' of the Miami.[18] The same name is found in New England, disguised as Newichawanock, Nuchawanack, &c., as near Berwick, Me., 'at the fork' or confluence of Cocheco and Salmon Fall rivers,—the 'Neghechewanck' ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... that we know nothing. Thus instead of proposing as the highest activity of man a life of speculative thought, they came to consider inactivity and impassibility [13] the chief attainable good. Their method of proof was a dialectic which strove to show the inconsistency or uncertainty of their opponent's positions, but which did not and could not arrive at any constructive result. Philosophy (to use an ancient phrase) had fallen from the sphere of knowledge to that of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... conscientious study and that careful research which we shall devote to it just as soon as the tremendous spring rush in local literature eases up a little. The recent opening up of the Straits of Mackinaw, and the prospect of a new railroad-line into the very heart of the dialectic region of Indiana, have given Chicago literature so vast an impetus, that we find our review-table groaning under the weight of oovrays that demand our scholarly consideration. Mdlle. Prud'homme must understand (for she appears to be exceedingly amiable) that the oovrays ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... a question, torture a question; take up a side, take up a case. contend, take one's stand upon, insist, lay stress on; infer &c. 480. follow from &c. (demonstration) 478. Adj. reasoning &c. v.; rationalistic; argumentative, controversial, dialectic, polemical; discursory[obs3], discursive; disputatious; Aristotelian[obs3], eristic[obs3], eristical[obs3]. debatable, controvertible. logical; relevant &c. 23. Adv. for, because, hence, whence, seeing that, since, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... inspiration is the enlightenment of mind as it exists in man, by mind as it underlies the motions which make up matter. The truth thus reached is not the formulae of the Calculus, nor the verbiage of the Dialectic, still less the events of history, but that which gives what validity they have to all of these, and moreover imparts to the will and the conscience their power to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... cab-stance in front of the College; and 'Carriage Entrance' was posted above the main arch, on what the writer pleases to call 'coarse, unclassic boards.' The benches of the 'Speculative' then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the 'Dialectic' is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which it is pointedly said that 'nothing else could conveniently be made of them.' However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain that they were paid for, and that far too heavily for the taste of session 1823-4, which found ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... was thought and said concerning the subjects that interested him. He assimilated the substance of a vast correspondence, and on every topic the ideas which he received became a part of him. His intellectual life was thus an incessant dialectic with the best minds of his time. But he never accepted ideas from others without the most generous acknowledgment, and did not, as so many men do, proceed, after assimilating another man's thought, to imagine that it was his own invention. This intellectual candour, involving ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Lockhart, Provost of the Collegiate Church of Crichton, in Mid-Lothian, was Rector of the University of St. Andrews, from 1521 to 1525. He was the author of more than one work, printed at Paris, on Dialectic Philosophy. He afterwards was Dean of Glasgow, where he died on the 22d of June 1547.—(Obituary in the Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, vol. ii. ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... The dialectic of Socrates is positive in so far as it shows the futility of reasoning as a means of reaching the truth. If we wish to know whether courage is knowledge, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... extended even farther;[15] for it would not be hard to show that his comparisons and illustrations from outward things are almost invariably drawn from actual eyesight. As to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he went through the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course. To these he afterward added painting (or at least drawing,—designavo un angelo sopra certe tavolette),[16] theology, and medicine. He is said to have been the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a tongue current all over the island, called by the Spaniards la lengua universal and la lengua cortesana. This is distinctly said by all the historians to have been but very slightly different from that of Cuba, a mere dialectic variation in accent being observed.[15] Many fragments of this tongue are preserved in the narratives of the early explorers, and it has been the theme for some strange and wild theorizing among would-be philologists. Rafinesque christened it the "Taino" language, and discovered ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... the apostles of the idea of Progress. It never secured any hold upon his mind. But he had grown up in the same intellectual climate in which that idea was produced; he had been nurtured both on the dissolving, dialectic of Bayle, and on the Cartesian enunciation of natural law. And his work contributed to the service, not of the doctrine of the past, but of the doctrine ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... charm of simple style And close dialectic, all but proving man An automatic series of sensations, Has often numb'd me into apathy Against the unpleasant jolts of this rough road That breaks off short into the abysses—made me A Quietist taking all ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... numerous admirers. There is no common thread, no common action which would have tied together all the parts of the novel; all of it is in some way just separate rhapsodies. . . . This novel is didactic, a real learned treatise written in dialectic form, and each character as he appears serves as an expression and representative of a certain opinion and direction. . . . All the attention of the author is turned on the principal hero and the other acting characters, however, not on their personality, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... apt to starve, or a luxury without which it grows parsimonious. Men who are isolated from society by distance, feel these wants by an instinct, and are grateful for an opportunity to relieve them. In Meriwether the sentiment goes beyond this. It has, besides, something dialectic in it. His house is open to everybody, as freely almost as an inn. But to see him when he has had the good fortune to pick up an intelligent, educated gentleman, and particularly one who listens well!—a respectable, assentatious stranger!—All the better if he has been in the Legislature, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... world. Nor would he have been a true Greek unless he had grappled with this Play of the Negative, which had some marvelous fascination for the Greek mind. It is the leaven working in the Sophists with their subtle rhetoric, in Socrates with his negating elenchus, in Plato with his confounding dialectic. Homer, as the prophet of his people, foreshadowing all forms of Greek spirit and of Greek literature, bring to light repeatedly this ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... rigor with which, in the earlier part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering consciences of his hearers. The terrors of the Lord, the shadows of the world to come, were thus already on all hearts. So much as this. Bourdaloue, too, with his incomparable dialectic, could have accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be superadded to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon's discourse ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... let him laugh at it; it will be more discretion to do so, than to go about to answer it; or let him borrow this pleasant evasion from Aristippus: "Why should I trouble myself to untie that, which bound as it is, gives me so much trouble?"—[Diogenes Laertius, ii. 70.]— One offering at this dialectic juggling against Cleanthes, Chrysippus took him short, saying, "Reserve these baubles to play with children, and do not by such fooleries divert the serious thoughts of a man of years." ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... as to become a thing totally different from the theory proposed by Volta. The more persistently it was defended, however, the more clearly did it show itself to be a congeries of devices, bearing the stamp of dialectic skill rather than ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... colony went up or down on the same stream and commenced a new village. Repeated at intervals of time, several such villages would appear, each independent of the other and a self-governing body, but united in a league or confederacy for mutual protection. Dialectic variation would finally spring up, and thus complete their ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining away this contradiction; but the old current of thought, strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention, and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest men of the Church, influenced theological ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... through the Congo. The former is made one of the four streams ferried over by those travelling from the Cazembe to the Mwata ya Nvo, and Dr. de Lacarda[FN22] records it as the "Guarava," probably a dialectic form of Lualava. It is the Luapula of the "Geographer of N'yassi," who, with his usual felicity and boldness of conjecture (p. 38), bends it eastward, and discharges it into his ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest 'marks of design'—justice more than the external frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or the organisation of ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Jerome [*Comment. in Ep. ad Ephes. iv, 17] says: "Is it not evident that a man who day and night wrestles with the dialectic art, the student of natural science whose gaze pierces the heavens, walks in vanity of understanding and darkness of mind?" Now vanity of understanding and darkness of mind are sinful. Therefore curiosity about ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... give this knowledge and furnish this magic key to hearts in wilds unknown. No human system of mental training could ever do it. In this connection I smile somewhat at Dr. Leitner's profound German dialectic in the discussion on the paper read by McNair over the preliminary preparation in language and terms required by an explorer to do his work effectively. Where man is equipped by that instinctive faculty of accommodating himself to the men of all nations with their physical ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... always on fire, and with Grammar that is the moon's daughter, I have shut their ears to the imaginary harpings and speech of the angels; and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spearman and my catapult! Oh! my swift horseman! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of foolishness! [An ANGEL, in a dress the color of embers, and ...
— The Hour Glass • W.B.Yeats
... or Christian psalmists, and a mere turn for definition would have made them quibblers or schoolmen; but the two united, and together animated by a strenuous faith, made them theologians. In such intellects the seventeenth century abounded, but we question if in dialectic skill, guided by sober judgment, and in extensive acquirements, mellowed by a deep spirituality, it yielded an equivalent to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... I will endeavour to explain in what way Socrates fostered this greater "dialectic" capacity among his intimates. (1) He held firmly to the opinion that if a man knew what each reality was, he would be able to explain this knowledge to others; but, failing the possession of that knowledge, it did not surprise him that men should stumble themselves ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... other dialogues of Plato, and he himself regards the consideration of them as a rational pastime only. He is beginning to feel the need of further divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware that besides dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another field which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as yet defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... hear good old United States spoken with every dialectic flavour from New England hardness to Texas drawl. In charge of all the operations in the field was Doyle, a clear-cut, upstanding American engineer who had served his apprenticeship in the Angola jungles, where he was a member ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... Darwinism supplanted the traditional theory of the fixity of species? Surely it is clear that it is only in the rarest cases that false or inadequate ideas on such subjects have any tendency to shorten life or weaken health. Bishop Wilberforce was killed by a fall from his horse, not by the triumphant dialectic of Professor Huxley. Sir Richard Owen lived to a patriarchal old age, and did not disappear from the face of the earth because he still clung to an idea which the best intellect of his time had relinquished. There is nothing in the doctrine of the fixity of species—if ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... superior men and to inspire the eloquence of orators. That a set of people on the other side was professing to do the same things, with totally different and utterly wrong notions of the results to be obtained, afforded the whet of antagonism, and let in dialectic and partisanship as a seasoning to relieve the high severity of the main topic. Quisante's personal relations with the Church had never been intimate; he was perhaps the better able to lay hold of its romantic and picturesque aspect. The Dean, for instance, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... about the Renaissance of art in Italy. The works of Mr Walter Pater were as a treasure-house of suggestion to him, and did much to form and guide his gradually developing mentality. He read Plato, being even more fascinated by the exquisite technique of the dialectic than by the ethical value of the teaching. And there was one small, slim book that he always carried about with him, and kept for special reading in the fields and woods. This was Virgil's Eclogues, the sylvan atmosphere of which penetrated the very depths of his being, and created ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... and of which the ne plus ultra is Sir Samuel Ferguson's magnificent squib in Blackwood, Father Tom and the Pope. Everybody knows the merits of that story, its inexhaustible fertility of comparison, its dialectic ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But, after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... of the Renaissance (Mylaens, Francesco Patrizzi, and others), and after them the writers of the last two centuries, ask what is the relation of history to dialectic and rhetoric; to how many laws the historical branch of literature is subject; whether it is right for the historian to relate treasons, acts of cowardice, crimes, disorders; whether history is entitled to use any style other than the sublime; and so on. The only books on Historic, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... him from his contemporaries. Learning may be acquired; the habit of reasoning may be induced by constant dialectic contest; but eloquence is far more than these the gift of nature. Lord Brougham's eloquence savors of the peculiar constitution of his mind. It is eminently adapted for educated men. He was never intended ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... it listeth: it is governed by no laws but those which its own reverence imposes: it lives in changing speculation. But in Europe it has been in double bondage to the logic of Greece and the law of Rome. India deals in images and metaphor: Greece in dialectic. The original thought of Christianity had something of this Indian quality, though more sober and less fantastic, with more limitation and less imagination. On this substratum the Greeks reared their edifices of dialectic and when the quarrels of theologians began ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... half-amused, half-earnest contradiction, which made him feared by loose reasoners and pretentious talkers, and even by quiet easy-going friends, who unexpectedly found themselves led on blindfold, with the utmost gravity, into traps and absurdities by the wiles of his mischievous dialectic. This was the outside look of his relentless earnestness. People who did not like him, or his views, and who, perhaps, had winced under his irony, naturally put down his strong language, which on occasion could certainly be unceremonious, to flippancy and arrogance. But within ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... had visited the Museum and had carried on learned discussions with the most prominent of the sages and professors there, in the presence of their assembled disciples. At last a formal disputation had arisen, and the dialectic keenness and precision with which Hadrian, in the purest Attic Greek, had succeeded in driving his opponents into a corner had excited the greatest admiration. The Sovereign had quitted the famous institution with a promise to reopen the contest ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. But every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... come to hear Fra Giuseppe. All his impassioned spirituality was wasted on an audience of Christians and oft-converted converts. Baffled, he fell back on scholastic argumentation, but in vain did he turn the weapons of Talmudic dialectic against the Talmudists themselves. Not even his discovery by cabbalistic calculations that the Pope's name and office were predicted in the Old Testament availed to draw the Jews, and it was only in the streets that he came upon the scowling faces of his brethren. For months he preached in patient ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... three philosophical schools: the Dialectic, the Atomic, and the Vedanta. The Dialectic school considers the principles of knowledge as entirely distinct from nature; it admits the existence of universal ideas in the human mind; it establishes the syllogistic form as the complete method of reasoning, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... fact that the root khand, in the sense of stepping or striding, has not been fixed in Sanskrit as a verbal, but only as a nominal base, is no real objection either. The same thing has happened over and over again, and has been remarked as the necessary result of the dialectic growth of language by so ancient a scholar as Yaska. ('Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft, vol. viii. p. 373 seq.) That scandere in Latin, in the sense of scanning is a late word, does not affect the question ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... very commonly themselves Scholastics) produced in verse. With the exception of Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly literary, and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediaeval dialectic, the Doctors Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left nothing which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can be included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the least select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Bajolardus given to him when a student. As a boy, he showed an extraordinary quickness of apprehension, and, choosing a learned life instead of the knightly career natural to a youth of his birth, early became an adept in the art of dialectic, under which name philosophy, meaning at that time chiefly the logic of Aristotle transmitted through Latin channels, was the great subject of liberal study in the episcopal schools. Roscellinus, the famous canon of Compiegne, is mentioned by himself as his teacher; but whether he heard ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... work. The education given in the cathedral and monastic schools was found to be too restricted; the monasteries, moreover, now began to refuse assistance to secular students.[1] To some extent the catechetic method of the theologians was forced to give place to the dialectic method, equally dogmatic, but more exciting and stimulating. Hence was compiled such a book as Peter Lombard's Sentences (1145-50), a cyclopaedia of disputation, wherein theological questions were collected under heads, together with Scriptural passages and statements of ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... keeping Fenelon's definition until Swann should have given his own. Swann remained silent, and, by this fresh act of recreancy, spoiled the brilliant tournament of dialectic which Mme. Verdurin was rejoicing at being able ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... two ways of filling up chasms; and Warburton, who had reasons best known to himself for cultivating Pope's favor, besides considerable practice during his youth in a special pleader's office, took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the chasms with philosophic oakum, he 'payed' them with dialectic pitch, he sheathed them with copper and brass by means of audacious dogmatism and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have been silenced, and the vessel righted so far as to float. The result, however, as a permanent result, was this—that the demurs which ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... sorrow, who shall deliver, like a loving father? Like the horse changing his master loses all gracefulness, as he forgets his many words of guidance! as a king without a kingdom, such is the world without a Buddha! as a disciple with no power of dialectic left, or like a physician without wisdom, as men whose king has lost the marks of royalty, so, Buddha dead, the world has lost its glory! the gentle horses left without a charioteer, the boat without a pilot left! The three divisions of an army left without a general! the merchantman without a guide! ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... science of government, but those formed by certain idealists who build republics in the air and try to obtain political perfection, presupposing the perfection of the human race, in such a way that we have philosophers as leaders, philanthropy instead of law, dialectic instead of tactics, and sophists instead of soldiers. With this subversion of things, social order was shaken up, and from its very beginning advanced with rapid strides towards universal dissolution, which ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... nothing of all this matters a jot in comparison with the association of youth with youth and the communion of quick and eager spirits. I have lived my life with clever people, men and women who thought themselves masters of dialectic, but I can say truthfully that I have never heard such good talk as in my own rooms and in the rooms of my contemporaries at Oxford. There, and there only, have I seen practised what Dr. Johnson believed to be an essential to good talk, the ability to stretch one's legs and have one's talk out. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... rising that vast and subtle passion for dialectic combat, which was of his very fibre. He had almost lost the feeling that this was his own future being discussed. He saw before him in this sanguine man, whose voice and eyes had such a white-hot sound and look, the incarnation of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it has been much disputed which of the two is to be considered as giving the most accurate description of his opinions. As a young man he had been to a certain extent a pupil of Archelaus (the disciple of Anaxagoras), and derived his fondness for the dialectic style of argument from Zeno the Eleatic, the favourite Pupil of Parmenides. He differed, however, from all preceding philosophers in discarding and excluding wholly from his studies all the abstruse sciences, and limiting his philosophy to those practical points ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... into fragments. Superstition is eaten away by the strong acid of liberty, and spiritual despotism flies affrighted from the broken loyalty of its metropolis. Protestantism also, divided and subdivided by its dialectic quarrels, falls into the finest, driest powder of disintegration. Be not afraid. The new order crystallizes only as the old is dissolved; and no sooner is the old unity of orders and authorities effectually dissolved than the reconstructive affinities of a new and better unity begin to appear ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, and, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, 'broad' forms of utterance, are not dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them, and all phrases developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Pascal—has that affected too the work of Augustin, enlisted in spite of himself in the ranks of these pious schismatics? And yet, if there have ever been any beings who do not resemble Augustin, and whom probably he would have attacked with all his eloquence and all the force of his dialectic, they are the Jansenists. Doubtless he would have said with contempt: "The party of Jansen," even as in his own day, with his devotion to Catholic unity, he ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... than cave-men had their changes Our fathers may have slain a son or two, Discouraging a further dialectic Regarding what was new; And after their unstudied admonition Occasional contrition For their old-fashioned ways May have reduced their doubts, and in addition Softened their ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... between the two heads of measure and symmetry; and though a hint is given that the divine mind has the first place, nothing is said of this in the final summing up. The relation of the goods to the sciences does not appear; though dialectic may be thought to correspond to the highest good, the sciences and arts and true opinions are enumerated in the fourth class. We seem to have an intimation of a further discussion, in which some topics lightly passed over were to receive a fuller consideration. The various ...
— Philebus • Plato
... of necessity, gentlemen," finally said the High Bailiff, "in my advice it is written that our necessity is too fine for dialectic. Our present need is to kill the common enemy. Here is a gentleman who asks for no other pleasure. Let him in." ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... he could destroy, any falsehood or injustice, he made for, not to discuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence with his mind much less with his tongue, and had no love for the exploits of a nimble dialectic. He had no readiness either in thought or word for this; his way was slowly to think out a subject, to get it well "bottomed," as Locke would say; he was not careful as to recording the steps he took in their order, but the spirit of his mind was logical, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... enough of Darwin's book to catch glimpses of the grandeur of the conception which underlies its argumentation. It was then that my beloved uncle, out of that wide and accurate reading which so frequently astonished his friends, and with that penetrating dialectic of his, opened my eyes to certain fallacies in Darwin's argument, especially to the fatal weakness of the chapter on Instinct. The reading of St. George Mivart's book "The Genesis of Species" later convinced me ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... lower of the stages symbolic of the higher. Indeed to introduce the concept of symbolism at all into such a context is to court inextricable confusion. Let symbolism be one thing, and let organic (or dialectic) connection be another—then we know where we are when we claim for natural objects that they have a being and a meaning in their own right, and that they are akin to the soul of man. Emerson had a firm grasp of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... remarked to Marion afterwards, it was a hard team to drive, for the table was too small to permit anything like private conversation at either end, and to enter upon general topics was to start Clarke and Weissmann into dialectic clamor. "I trusted in the food," she answered to Marion's query. "It was a good dinner and kept even the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... make an antedeluvian point of view lest you should do injustice to the megatherium. But now I have given ear to him in his proper person, I find him really a sort of philosophical-allegorical-mystical believer, and yet with a sharp dialectic point, so that any argumentative rattler of peas in a bladder might soon be pricked in silence by him. The mixture may be one of the Jewish prerogatives, for what I know. In fact, his mind seems so broad that ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... "alu" was a bull-like demon of tempest, and there were also many composite, distorted, or formless monsters which were vaguely termed "seizers" or "overthrowers", the Semitic "labashu" and "ach-chazu", the Sumerian "dimmea" and "dimme-kur". A dialectic form of "gallu" or devil was "mulla". Professor Pinches thinks it not improbable that "mulla" may be connected with the word "mula", meaning "star", and suggests that it referred to a "will-o'-the-wisp".[83] In these islands, according to an ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... incident and action. Great part of the poem is but an abstract theological debate between our Saviour and Satan. The speeches he makes them utter are admirable, the reasoning is close, the arguments cogent, the sentiments elevated in the speakers, but dialectic too. In many of the speeches of the angel Raphael, and in the council of heaven, in the Paradise Lost there is too much of that species of discussion for a poem which is to interest the generality of men. Dryden says, that Satan is Milton's real hero; and every reader of the Paradise Lost must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... exposition of a somewhat complicated budget of finance or legislation, or whether he showed it most in the heat of extemporary debate. At least this we may say, that from the humbler arts of ridicule or invective to the subtlest dialectic, the most persuasive eloquence, the most cogent appeals to everything that was highest and best in the audience that he was addressing, every instrument which could find place in the armory of a member of this House, he had at his command without premeditation, without forethought, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... mechanic to invent some spiritual cement, some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies? ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... I have to offer is just the reverse. The use of the terminal b in "Mayab" is probably a dialectic error, other examples of which can be quoted. Thus the writer of the Dictionary of Motul informs us that the form maab is sometimes used for the ordinary negative ma, no; but, he adds, it is ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... political problems with which Plato's mind is occupied. He treats them more slightly, partly because the dialogue is shorter, and also because the discussion of them is perpetually crossed by the other interest of dialectic, which has begun ...
— Statesman • Plato
... employing arguments such as would baffle and confound the unprincipled opponent, rather than such as would satisfy the mature Christian. If a man denied himself all specious arguments, and all artifices of dialectic subtlety, he must renounce the hopes of a present triumph; for the light of absolute truth on moral or on spiritual themes is too dazzling to be sustained by the diseased optics of those habituated to darkness. And hence we explain ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... oratorical and some legal training, these schools included a further linguistic and literary training, some mathematical and scientific knowledge, and even some philosophy. The famous "Seven Liberal Arts" of the Middle Ages—Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic; Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy—all seem to have been included in the instruction of these schools. [23] The great studies, though, were the first three and some Law, Music being studied largely to help ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... private school of his own, outside the walls. "I attached myself to the Palatine Peripatician who then presided on the hill of Sainte-Genevieve, the doctor illustrious, admired by all. There, at his feet, I received the first elements of the dialectic art, and according to the measure of my poor understanding I received with all the avidity of my soul everything that ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... admit that all Irishmen outside Ulster are blackguards, and that the atmosphere of Dublin is poisonous. Clithering, on the other hand, was officially committed to an unqualified admiration for everything south of the Boyne. I do not think that Malcolmson appreciated his dialectic advantage. His mind was running on ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... with the lateness of his discovery of truth,[87:2] and with his childish subservience to the old jeux d'esprit of the Sceptics which professed to prove the impossibility of knowledge.[87:3] It seems that he had lost faith in speculation and dialectic and the elaborate superstructures which Plato and others had built upon them; and he felt, like many moralists after him, a sort of hostility to all knowledge that was not ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... brilliantly examined the theory of natural rights, and by means of much subtle dissection and argument found that there were no natural rights; law was the only basis of privilege. It is quite easy to be convinced by the author's delightful dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish suddenly in the presence of a ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... country estate and claimed to have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and dialectic is an after-thought—an accident from the fact that the prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel. Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had at least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her own so well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do with my marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herself invited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in the pulpit, where ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... another characteristic—his feeling for logic, for dialectic, which made him one of the severest reasoners that it would be possible to meet in argument. He used, in his admirably assumed air of brag, an attitude which he could take with perfect humour and perfect dignity—to protest that he was one of two or three Englishmen who had ever mastered ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... west, was Acoma. The most northerly villages on the Rio Grande were those of the Tehuas. Still beyond, but some distance east of the Rio Grande, lay the Pueblos of Taos and Picuris, the inhabitants of which spoke a dialectic variation of the Tigua language of the south. The Tehuas also approached the Rio Grande quite near, at what is called La Bajada; and in about the same latitude, including the former village at Santa ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
... themselves. On these evenings "class privileges" permit the first- and third-classmen to be absent from camp till the practice is over. Sometimes a special permit is necessary. It might be well to say here, ere I forget it, that Wednesday evening is devoted to prayer, prayer-meeting being held in the Dialectic Hall. All cadets are allowed to attend by reporting their departure and return. The meeting is under the sole management of the cadets, although they are by no means the sole participants. Other privileges, more or less limited, ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... French dialectic form, avalance, descent), a mass of snow and ice mingled with earth and stones, which rushes down a mountain side, carrying everything before it, and producing a strong wind which uproots trees on each side of its course. Where the supply of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... old Spanish the article was often used before a possessive adjective that preceded its noun. This usage is now archaic or dialectic. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... in exactly that case. The symphonies of the French seemed to him to be abstract, dialectic, and musical themes were opposed and superposed arithmetically in them: their combinations and permutations might just as well have been expressed in figures or the letters of the alphabet. One man would construct a symphony on the progressive development of a sonorous formula which did ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... memorable by that "still figure, and clear, low, penetrating voice, and the mental hush that fell upon his audience while he meditated, alone with the Alone, in words of awful austerity. His discourses were poems, but transcripts too from the soul, reasonings in a heavenly dialectic...." ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... that acrobatic exhibition of diplomatic tight-rope walking we had witnessed from Washington. Mere "words, words, words, professor!" Our dialectic President had thus far failed to establish any one of his contentions, either with Germany or Great Britain, nor did it seem likely that he ever could. While he was still modifying that awkward phrase, "strict accountability," ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... of the human and divine in His nature, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But though their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon it, they did, nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God as one come into human life and sharing it and using it, without which there would have been ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... patricians nor plebeians found any thing to criticise; but, whether this were the result of tact, or owing merely to the adoption of a negative standard, no one could say. In language she was uniformly correct, without seeming at all scholastic; she occasionally used the idioms and dialectic peculiarities of those around her, though never with the air of being ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... much encouragement to talk in private. He talked incessantly, before, at, and after dinner, and he did enormous harm. He was horribly clever, too, and usually got the best of an argument, so that various eminent private Liberals had their tempers ruined by his dialectic. In his rich and unabashed accent—he had long discarded his Edinburgh-English—he dissected their arguments and ridiculed their character. He had once been famous for his soapy manners: now he was as ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... was a religion; "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto" were holy writ enshrining the dogmata of Marxism-Leninism, and the conflict with the West was a jehad, a holy war in which God, in His manifestation as Dialectic Materialism, would naturally ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, and, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, "broad" forms of utterance, are not dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them; and all phrases developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the speakers are men of varied idea and good ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... constitution. This is a great error. Speeches, when delivered in the midst of a popular tumult, must be pithy in order to be effective: nor was Appius such an ass as to have lost the opportunity afforded him by this dialectic display, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... those questions which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: "Very ingenious, sirs, but who ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... consequences for thought and life, was filtering into Europe and forcing Christian thinkers to defend the bases of their faith. Since these, so far as defensible at all, depended upon the Platonic doctrine of universals, and this could be maintained only by dialectic, this science became extremely popular,—indeed, almost the rage. Little of the real Aristotle was at that time known in the West; but in Porphyry's Introduction to Aristotle's Logic was a famous passage, in which all the difficulties with regard to universals were stated ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... criticism of him. He saw and states the whole rebels' position—"In Memoriam" is largely a debate between the Shelley-Swinburne point of view and the Christian. Only he states it so abstractly that to people familiar with Browning's concrete and humanised dialectic it seems cold and artificial. But it's really his sincerest and deepest thought, and he deliberately rejects the rebel position as intellectually and morally untenable: and adopts a position of aquiescent agnosticism on the problem of evil subject to an unshakeable faith ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... wonderful dream. If afterwards the work be analysed, the pains with which it was built up can be traced; the powerful effect which it produced will be found due, not alone to the creative power, the imagination of the author, but also to his dialectic skill and to his critical faculty. It is all very well to talk of great works as the fruits of hot inspiration and not cold intellect. A masterpiece is the outcome of both; the one provides the material, the other shapes it. Schubert was an inspired composer, but most of his works, especially ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... given by the bilingual lists of gods, the bilingual incantations and hymns, and the references contained in the historical and other documents. A trilingual list of gods enables us also to recognise, in some cases, the dialectic ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... inability to comprehend the finer nuances of Galactic Socialism has made all Earthmen look foolish. It is too bad that a competent Russian zoologist was not chosen for the trip that McLeod made; a man properly trained in the understanding of the historical forces of dialectic materialism would have realized that any Galactic society must of necessity be a Communist State, and would have interpreted it as such. The petty bourgeois mind of McLeod has made it impossible for any Earthman to hold up his head in the free Socialist ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... This Association was instituted in 1833, and is a union of literary and debating societies. It is at present composed of five: the Dialectic, Scots Law, Diagnostic, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of the classification of a critique of practical reason must be arranged in accordance with that of the speculative. We must, then, have the Elements and the Methodology of it; and in the former an Analytic as the rule of truth, and a Dialectic as the exposition and dissolution of the illusion in the judgements of practical reason. But the order in the subdivision of the Analytic will be the reverse of that in the critique of the pure speculative reason. For, in the ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... voice was extremely agreeable. It suggested to Frederick the sound of colliding billiard balls. His enunciation was perfect, absolutely free of a dialectic tinge. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... and of that close, searching thought which pierces to the core of a subject, and broods patiently over its living elements and relations, before it assumes to take them as materials for argumentation. This broad grasp of premises, which implies a penetrating and interpretative as well as dialectic mind, is the distinguishing difference between a great reasoner and an able logician. In regard to the form of the work, we can see no reason why its essays should be thrown into the shape of letters. The epistolary spirit vanishes almost as soon as "Dear Sir" and "Dear Madam" create its expectation. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the region without finding any marked resemblances. The family is hence admitted provisionally. The language appears to be spoken by but a single tribe, although there is a manuscript vocabulary in the Bureau of Ethnology exhibiting certain differences which may be dialectic. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... preliminary examination of executive authority, in which he laid down principles of strict construction of the Constitution which have never been adopted in practice and which are now interesting only as specimens of dialectic subtlety. ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... there's enough for one bout, and too much for some. No good ever came of argument and dialectic, for these breed only angry gestures and gusty disputes (de gustibus non disputandum) and the ruin of friendships and the very fruitful pullulation of Dictionaries, textbooks and wicked men, not to speak of Intellectuals, Newspapers, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... question was taken up by another divine, Middleton's equal in learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business, to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... I note this deficiency, that there hath not been, to my understanding, sufficiently inquired and handled the true limits and use of reason in spiritual things, as a kind of divine dialectic: which for that it is not done, it seemeth to me a thing usual, by pretext of true conceiving that which is revealed, to search and mine into that which is not revealed; and by pretext of enucleating inferences and contradictories, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon |
