"Predicate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nothing more than the substitution of pride for sensuality. I grant it, I think I shall have something to say on this point presently; but this is not a necessary result, it is but an incidental evil, a danger which may be realized or may be averted, whereas we may in most cases predicate guilt, and guilt of a heinous kind, where the mind is suffered to run wild and indulge its thoughts without training or law of any kind; and surely to turn away a soul from mortal sin is a good and a gain ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... misapprehension in such men as, smitten with admiration of a certain cluster of excellencies, or series of heroic acts, are willing to predicate of the individual to whom they belong, "This man is consummate, and without alloy." Take the person in his retirement, in his hours of relaxation, when he has no longer a part to play, and one or more spectators before whom he is desirous to appear to advantage, and you shall find him a very ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... upon but his own address to secure patronage and promotion,—nothing but his own merits to justify the countenance that his ingenuity should win. Without undue vanity, it is tolerably safe to say now that he was authorized by the existing state of things to confidently predicate his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... reflected on the divine nature deny that God has a body. Of this they find excellent proof in the fact that we understand by body a definite quantity, so long, so broad, so deep, bounded by a certain shape, and it is the height of absurdity to predicate such a thing of God, a being absolutely infinite. But meanwhile by other reasons with which they try to prove their point, they show that they think corporeal or extended substance wholly apart from the divine nature, and say it was created by God. ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... to say—though I did then believe it—that the First Councillor of the Mormon Church was prepared to have the doctrine of plural marriage abandoned in order to have the people saved. It is impossible to predicate the thoughts of a man so diplomatic, so astute, and at the same time so deeply religious and so credulous of all the miracles of faith. He did believe in Divine guidance. He was sincere in his submission to the "revelations" ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... may puzzle us;—its use no Christian can deny. A sensual philosophy may shrink from it, in all its aspects, and retreat into a morbid skepticism or a timid submission. If we predicate mere happiness as "our being's end and aim," there is no explanation of evil. From this point of view, there is an ambiguity in nature,—a duality in every object, which we cannot solve. The throne of infinite light and love casts over the face of creation an inexplicable ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... what Aristotle calls 'a form,' others had ascribed a material nature only. The tendency of their philosophy was to deny to Being all predicates. The Megarians, who succeeded them, like the Cynics, affirmed that no predicate could be asserted of any subject; they also converted the idea of Being into an abstraction of Good, perhaps with the view of preserving a sort of neutrality or indifference between the mind and things. As if they had ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... quality—rather a substantial and, in fact, a supersubstantial quality.[20] For God is not one thing because He is, and another thing because He is just; with Him to be just and to be God are one and the same. So when we say, "He is great or the greatest," we seem to predicate quantity, but it is a quantity similar to this substance which we have declared to be supersubstantial; for with Him to be great and to be God are all one. Again, concerning His Form, we have already shown that He is Form, and truly One without Plurality. The ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... case).—In conclusion we remark that in defining right knowledge as 'that which has for its antecedent another entity, different from its own antecedent non-existence,' you do not give proof of very eminent logical acuteness; for what sense has it to predicate of an entity that it is different from nonentity?—For all these reasons Inference also does not prove an ajna which is a positive entity. And that it is not proved by Scripture and arthpatti, will ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... down very definite rules as to what is allowable and what not. It is best not to deviate from the usual order of words unless one can find a precedent in one of the Dramas. Some inversions, however, are quite allowable. Thus one may put the complement of a predicate, e.g. an infinitive, an accusative, or a participle, at ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... with Philo, who was an eminent Platonic Jewish philosopher and a celebrated writer, flourishing previous to the composition of the fourth Gospel, in which, indeed, there is scarcely a single superhuman predicate of Christ which may not be paralleled with striking closeness from his extant works. In all these fields are found, in imperfect proportions and fragments, the materials which are developed in John's belief of the Logos become flesh. To present all these materials here would be somewhat ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... located your claim, the next thing is to select some specimens and subject them to the test of the "fire assay." For this purpose it is customary to select the richest lump you can find, and take it to the assayer. On the result of his assay, he will predicate that a ton of such ore would yield hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars; and in this way many a worthless mine has been sold for a large price. In fact, I think, as a rule, the speculators made far more ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... at our command, new morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... way, all form by which one could predicate the existence of the saint is abandoned and uprooted like a fan palm[515], so that it will never grow up in future. The saint who is released from what is styled form is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... anyone else it would have been said that she must be finding the afternoon rather dreary in the quaint halls not of her forefathers: but of Miss Power it was unsafe to predicate so surely. She walked from room to room in a black velvet dress which gave decision to her outline without depriving it of softness. She occasionally clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of a window; but she more particularly bent her footsteps up and down the Long Gallery, where ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... necessary. A sentence is a unit of thought, an idea reduced to its lowest terms. It may not be necessary that each sentence be analyzed strictly by grammatical rules, but it is essential that the reader should recognize by study if necessary the subject and the predicate and the character and rank of all the modifiers of each. Even the practiced reader by unconsciously laying undue prominence upon some minor phrase frequently modifies the meaning an author intends to convey. This is particularly true in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... your way of speaking; and yet when you say that Simmias is greater than Socrates and less than Phaedo, do you not predicate of Simmias ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... difficult to say when the American elm is most worthy of admiration. In summer those same arching branches are clothed and tipped with foliage of such elegance and delicacy as the form of the tree would seem to predicate. The leaf itself is ornate, its straight ribs making up a serrated and pointed oval form of the most interesting character. These leaves hang by slender stems, inviting the gentlest zephyr to start them to singing of comfort in days of summer heat. The elm is fully clothed ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... of this damaging accusation. There was no public denial from Mr. Clay. The press in his support had from the first treated the story as too ridiculous to be noticed other than by a flat denial; but the circumstances were sufficiently plausible to predicate such a slander, and the effect upon Mr. Clay was beginning to be felt seriously by his friends. In the mean time, rumors reached the popular ear that the proofs of its veracity were in the hands ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... no more possible to predicate the conduct of an Indian than that of a woman. In Detroit lived Wasson, one of the warriors of the dreaded Pontiac, who had felt some tender movings of the spirit toward a girl of his tribe. The keeper of the old red mill that stood at the foot of Twenty-fourth Street adopted her, with ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... scarcely done more than recognize the possibility of molecular disease of the brain. Hereafter science will, probably, succeed in unveiling the obscure facts of molecular brain pathology, and enable the medical psychologist to predicate disease of recognized classes of brain elements from the special phenomena of mind disturbance. This is the line of inquiry, and the result, to which the progress already made distinctly tends. For the present, the inferences we can surely draw from known facts are very few; but prominent among ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... parenthesis "(never Shakspere, by-the-bye)—and at others my heart aches and I cry real, bitter, warm tears as earnestly as if I was in earnest." Reading which last sentence, one might very safely predicate that in the one instance, where she could turn her words into burlesque, she would be certain to act but indifferently, whereas in the other, with the hot, scalding tears running down her face, she could not by necessity do ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... so far as you perceive and understand this predicate and postulate of Mind-healing; but the Science of Mind-healing is best understood in practical demonstration. The proof of what you apprehend, in the simplest definite and absolute form of healing, can alone answer this ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... step up to one of her charts and, placing a finger on a point, she would say: "Here is General ——'s detachment; here is the rebel army; such and such are the fortifications and surrounding circumstances; and she would then begin thoughtfully to predicate the result and ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... settled" is a predicate common to natural and supernatural, not the differentia of either. And here let me remark that the expression, "Laws of Nature," is a modern technical expression which the Catholic philosopher would require, probably, to have defined before employing ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... propagated on the miracles on which the gospels have founded it. Here, sir, have I not an occasion of some little complaint? If you really thought that the gospels were, none of them, written in the life time of the apostles, and considered it safe to predicate an argument on this ground, why should you withhold the proof of this fact? Why did you not inform me of the authority by which your argument is supported in your own mind? And furthermore, why do ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... Pavaent in naming a school-house describes the purpose for which it is used. These examples illustrate the general characteristics of Indian nouns; they are excessively connotive; a simply denotive name is rarely found. In general their name-words predicate some attribute of the object named, and thus noun, adjective, and predicant ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... own resources. The fact is, every year improves our fabrics. Our mechanics, our manufacturers, are working with an energy, a zeal, and a skill that carry things forward faster than anybody dreams of; and nobody can predicate the character of American articles in any department now by their character ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... artistic treatment as distinguished from the original creative power—which Dryden, the translator of the Roman poet, familiar therefore with his weakness and with his strength, meant in this place to predicate as characteristically observable ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... have a great belief in the penetration—in the observation of the feminine mind; more than I have, if you will excuse my frankness, in their power of dealing with a practical situation. Woman to interpret events, men to foresee contingencies. Woman to indicate, man to predicate—perhaps I mean predict! No matter; the thought, I think, is clear. Well, then, that is settled! I claim Howard for luncheon—a very simple affair—and for a walk; and by five o'clock we shall have settled this important ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is in Mark and the Clementines a predicate, in Matthew the subject. In the introduction to the Eschatological discourse the Clementines approach more nearly to St. Mark than to any other Gospel: [Greek: Horate] ([Greek: blepeis], Mark) [Greek: tas] ([Greek: megalas], Mark) [Greek: oikodomas tautas; amaen ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... and even professional philosophers speak of reason as if it were a jewel that can be placed in a drawer or in a human skull, they are simply myth-makers. It is precisely in this ever recurring elevation of an adjective or a verb to a noun, of a predicate to a subject, that this disease of language, as I have called mythology, has its deepest roots. Here lies the genesis of the majority of gods, not by any means, as it is generally believed I have taught, merely in later ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... thought I was getting older and older; at last I acquired the reputation of a prophet, and was held in veneration by a great many religious people. Of course I could not prophesy, but as I had such a vast deal of experience I was able to predicate intelligently something about the future from my knowledge of the past. I became famed as a wonderful seer, and there were a great many curious ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... die, an obsolete form of the fifth declension. Adverso colle evadunt, 'they worked their way up the opposite hill.' The author might have said in adversum collem, 'they ascended it.' [290] The neuter predicate tutata sunt here refers to two feminine nouns, instead of tutatae sunt; but it is quite in accordance with the custom of Sallust. See Zumpt, S 377. [291] 'What the enemy were doing in every place;' for ubique signifies 'in every place;' not absolutely, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... do, to make, with the acc. and predicate adj.: prs. (god) ged him sw gewealdene worolde dlas, makes the parts of the world (i.e. the whole world) so subject that ..., 1733; inf. ne hyne on medo-bence micles wyrne drihten wereda gedn ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, does not "weep" over the failure of "a theory of the quantification of the predicate," nor "shriek" over the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental attitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Legation at the Court of St. James.' 'The devil you are,' said Abernethy; "then you'll soon get rid of your dyspepsy.' 'I don't see that 'ere inference,' said Alden, 'it don't follow from what you predicate at all; it ain't a natural consequence, I guess, that a man should cease to be ill because he is called by the voice of a free and enlightened people to fill an important office.' (The truth is, you could no ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... may predicate a) that one half of them is flat, and the other half sharp, and b) that some are continuous, and that ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... this ghost that animates your world, This ethical ghost,—and I, you'll say, in reason,— Or sensuous beauty,—or in my secret self . . . Though as for that you put your faith in these, As much as I do—and then, forsaking reason,— Ascending, you would say, to intuition,— You predicate this ghost of yours, as well. Of course, you might have argued,—and you should have,— That no such deep appearance of design Could shape our world without entailing purpose: For can design exist without a purpose? Without conceiving mind? . . . We are ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... there can be no sound without an ear to appreciate it, so there be can no matter without an existing ego, in some state of consciousness in the universe, to apprehend it—to ascribe to it attributes.[2] On what, therefore, are we to predicate the existence of either matter or motion, except it be these intuitions of consciousness whose validity, so far as we have any knowledge whatever on the subject, rests exclusively on that "breath of life," which was breathed into man when he became a living ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... sentence, as well as the first; because what the writer calls a separation into seven, involves a change of are to is, and of rays to ray, as well as a sevenfold repetition of this altered predicate, "is a refrangible ray of light." But the parser, in interpreting the words of others, and expounding the construction of what is written, has no right to alter anything in this manner. Nor do I admit that he has a right to insert or repeat anything needlessly; for the nature of a sentence, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Altogether different is the case of the two Mima/m/sa-sutras. There scarcely one single Sutra is intelligible without a commentary. The most essential words are habitually dispensed with; nothing is, for instance, more common than the simple ommission of the subject or predicate of a sentence. And when here and there a Sutra occurs whose words construe without anything having to be supplied, the phraseology is so eminently vague and obscure that without the help derived from a commentary we should be unable to make ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... light—what fearful obscurity! Heaven and Hell war in his soul! Strange visions traverse his intellect, throwing their lurid light into the vague depths of his heart. His power to love and feel seems boundless—his power to know almost at zero. What can he predicate even of himself, with his boundless desires for he knows not what—his fleeting emotions and insatiable wishes! Ah! if the language of poetry, of music, of the arts, came not to gift these passing images with external life, to fix them in the wildered consciousness, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... upon precipices, brought to light by the researches, and translated by the energy of science from forgotten and buried ages. The deductions to be drawn from it, I leave to those who have a taste for the speculative, neither believing in, nor quarrelling with the theory which they may predicate upon it." ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... forward to the predicate "felt" and because of the importance of the idea it takes a long rising inflection; "with all a monarch's pride" being subordinate and incomplete also requires the voice to be kept up, but takes ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... 2: The object of hope is not the possible as differentiating the true, for thus the possible ensues from the relation of a predicate to a subject. The object of hope is the possible as compared to a power. For such is the division of the possible given in Metaph. v, 12, i.e. into the two kinds ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... cases where the subject is qualified rather than the verb, as with verbs of incomplete predication, 'being,' 'seeming,' 'arriving,' etc. In 'the matter seems clear,' 'clear' is part of the predicate of 'matter.' 'They arrived safe': 'safe' does not qualify 'arrived,' but goes with it to complete the predicate. So, 'he sat silent,' 'he stood firm.' 'It comes beautiful' and 'it comes beautifully' have different meanings. This explanation ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... this doctrine, that there is not, and cannot be any such thing as sin. If man be not a free agent—if he be incapable of acting otherwise than as predetermined by Jehovah—he is incapable of either virtue or vice. It would be as reasonable to predicate virtue or vice of the flux and reflux of the tides, or the circulation of the blood, as of man ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... present state, his future destiny, of the Being who made him, to whose judgment-seat he is going. The master's interests cry, "No!" "Such knowledge is too wonderful for you; it is high, you cannot attain unto it." To predicate happiness of a class of beings, placed in circumstances where their will is everlastingly defeated by an irresistible power—the abolitionists say, is to prove them destitute of the sympathies of our nature—not human. It is to declare with the Atheist, that man is independent ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Douglas. 'I thought,' said he, 'their contest had been over long ago.' I answered, 'The contest concerning Douglas's filiation was over long ago; but the contest now is, who shall have the estate.' Then, assuming the air of 'an antient sage philosopher', I proceeded thus: 'Were I to PREDICATE concerning him, I should say, the contest formerly was, What IS he? The contest now is, What HAS he?' 'Right,' replied Mr Harris, smiling, 'you have done with QUALITY, and ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... be perceived by sense, but they are names, and cannot be defined. When we assign to them some predicate, they first begin to have a meaning (onomaton sumploke logou ousia). This seems equivalent to saying, that the individuals of sense become the subject of knowledge when they are regarded as they are in nature in ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... formal concept exists is nonsensical. For no proposition can be the answer to such a question. (So, for example, the question, 'Are there unanalysable subject-predicate propositions?' cannot ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... though, I certainly had not the worst of the joke, and may, therefore, with better grace tell the story, which, happily for my readers, is a very brief one. A custom prevailed in Mrs. Clanfrizzle's household, which from my unhappy ignorance of boarding-houses, I am unable to predicate if it belong to the genera at large, or this one specimen in particular, however, it is a sufficiently curious fact, even though thereby hang no tale, for my stating it here. The decanters on the dinner-table were never labelled, with their more appropriate designation ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... of the five senses talks of truth, he regards it but as a predicate of something historical or scientific proved a fact; or, if he allows that, for aught he knows, there may be higher truth, yet, as he cannot obtain proof of it from without, he acts as if under no conceivable obligation to seek any other satisfaction concerning it. Whatever ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... by their politico-economical situation. It is especially in the higher stages of civilization, that one bankrupt may easily drag numberless others down with him; and where the laws are bad or powerless, not even the wealthiest man can predicate his own solvency for any length of time in advance. One of the most important conditions of credit is the certainty that, if the debtor's good will to meet his obligations should fail, it shall be supplied by the compulsory process of the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... a dozen pressgangs' for manning the navy in war-time, and, for aught we can predicate to the contrary, they may be so again; but we reiterate our conviction, that they never caused sailors to ship aboard a man-o'-war. Landsmen might volunteer by scores through the influence of such stirring, patriotic ditties; but seamen, who 'knew the ropes,' would never be induced ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... consciousness is stilled by slumber, subconsciousness or ganglionic consciousness remains awake, and sometimes makes itself evident in dreams. I have repeatedly observed my terrier when under dream influence, and have been able to predicate the substance of his dreams from his actions. Like man, the dog is sometimes unable to differentiate between his waking and dreaming thoughts; he confounds the one with the other, and follows out in his waking state the ideas suggested by ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... of life," said he, in his most didactic manner, "none of us can predicate what opportunities of observation one may have from what we may call the spirit plane to the plane of matter. It surely must be evident to the most obtuse person" (here he glared a Summerlee) "that ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from those who maintain that Sirius recedes from us. I say that he approaches. The principles of a body so enlightened must be those of progress." Then addressing Graham in English, he added, "there will be a mulling in this fogified planet some day, I predicate. Sirius ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... persuaded the Misses Emmering and Lutzer, and the Messrs. Wild, Cicimara, and your Frederick to perform some music at the honoured man's house; almost from beginning to end the performance was deserving of the predicate "parfait." I never heard the quartet from Moses better sung; but Miss Gladkowska sang "O quante lagrime" at my farewell concert at Warsaw with much more expression. Wild was in excellent voice, and I acted in a way ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... existence; or, who hath a soul, hath a soul. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other: and had he but words, might no doubt have said, 'Oyster in right hand is subject, and oyster in left hand is predicate:' and so might have made a self-evident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster; and yet, with all this, not have been one whit the wiser or more knowing: and that way of handling the matter would much at one have satisfied the monkey's hunger, or a man's understanding, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Nineteenth Century," especially the preface, which is written by a man who uses a better style than Chamberlain, you will find that he attempts to summarize the progress of the previous eighteen centuries as a predicate for the strides of human civilization in the nineteenth. As he minimizes the effect of one century and then another, you note how few centuries, in his judgment, play any part in the onward march, and you are discouraged as to what one man can do to help along any ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... profitable approach to the study of synonyms. Each of them is represented by a generic word. So elementary are idea and word alike that a person cannot have the one in mind without having the other ready and a-quiver on his tongue. Every person is master of both. But it is unsafe to predicate the person's acquaintance with the shades and phases of the idea, or with the corresponding discriminations in language. He may not know them at all, he may know them partially, he may know them through and through. Let us suppose him ignorant of them but determined ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak directly to the hearts ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... had struck Rhoda Vivian too, and if she were trying to make up for it. He had noticed that Miss Quincey had the power (if you could predicate power of such a person), a power denied to him, of drawing out the woman-hood of the most beautiful woman in the world; some infinite tenderness in Rhoda answered to the infinite absurdity in her. He was not sure that her attitude to Miss Quincey ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... forget that Jesus is the source of life to them, and that the name has thus a deeper meaning. Further, He is possessed of eternity. If He is so closely related to God as the former name implies, that predicate is not wonderful. Dying men need and have an undying Christ. He is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... seems to be this—That no system of government can long exist among men, unless it is substantially, and in the majority of cases, founded in reason and justice, and sanctioned by experienced utility for the people among whom it exists; and therefore, that we may predicate with perfect certainty of any institution which has been generally extended and long established, that it has been upon the whole beneficial, and should be modified or altered with a very cautious hand. That this proposition is true, will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... former year Cookery was taught in 925 schools, in the latter year in 2,665. In 1899, Laundry Work was taught in 11 schools, in 1910 in 691. If this is not progression—and progression under the Legislative Union—to what can the predicate be more truthfully applied? Statistics are apt to be barren and uninforming and can be adapted, with almost equal plausibility, to support the arguments of either side; but these figures are eloquent and ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... upright with her hands on her lap was of another type altogether—of that type of which it is impossible to predicate anything except that it makes itself felt in every company. Any respectable astrologer would have had no difficulty in assigning her birth to the sign of the Scorpion. In outward appearance she was not remarkable, though extremely pleasing, and it was a pleasingness that grew upon acquaintance. Her ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... within infinity. There cannot be two infinities, nor can there be an infinite and also a finite beyond it. What infinity may be we have no means of knowing. Here the most devout Christian is just as much of an agnostic as Professor Huxley; we can predicate nothing with confidence concerning the all-comprehending unity wherein we live and move and have our being, save and except as we see it manifested in that part of our universe which lies open to us. One would think that this were so obvious as to need no ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good," which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might perhaps have ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of esoteric Christianity. God is the nameless and supra-essential One, elevated above goodness itself. Hence 'negative theology,' which ascends from the creature to God by dropping one after another every determinate predicate, leads us nearest to the truth. The return to God is the consummation of all things and the goal indicated by Christian teaching. The same doctrines were preached with more of churchly fervour by Maximus the Confessor (580-622). Maximus represents ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... course, furnish data of a very tangible and convincing kind; but the evidence in its totality includes also a host of data from the realms of embryology and comparative anatomy—data which, as already suggested, enabled Professor Haeckel to predicate the existence of pithecanthropus long in advance of his actual discovery. Whether the more remote gaps in the chain of man's ancestry will be bridged in a manner similarly in accord with Professor Haeckel's predications, it remains for future discoveries of zoologist and paleontologist ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... once that a man finds in a great city just the qualities he takes to it. That's true of romance as well. Modern novelists don't find beauty and nobility in life, because they don't look for them. They predicate from their inner souls that the world is 'cheap and nasty' and that is what they find it to be. There is more true romance in a New York tenement than there ever was in a baron's tower—braver battles, truer ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... outgrowth of the order, but come despite its constant teachings and warnings. Bad work they of course make, and so at times and to a limited extent bring the fraternity under the ban of popular displeasure, but shall the world predicate unfavorable judgment upon a few and unfair tests? If so, and the principle logically becomes general, pray who shall be appointed administrator of the effects of other social and moral organizations, and even of the church itself? For in these ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... We may predicate from this that Mr Palliser's chance of being able to shipwreck himself upon that rock was but small, and that he would, in spite of himself, be saved from his uncle's anger. Lord Dumbello took the letter and read it very slowly, standing, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... is older than I am, but he is young enough. Upon the probable duration of his life one might predicate forty years of mental activity, and from what I have seen of him he appears to have a good intellect. They talk about an aqueduct and waterworks he is about to construct. That indicates the study of geology, and engineering capacity, and such a bias of mind would suit me ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... ladies and gentlemen," he observed, as soon as Paul ceased, "to have the honour of being wracked (for so the steward, in conformity with the Doric of the forecastle, pronounced the word,) in such company. I should deem it a disgrace to be cast away in some society I could name, although I will predicate, as we say in America, nothing on their absence. As to what inwolves the stores, it surgested itself to me that the ladies would like delicate diet, and I intermated as much to Mrs. Sidley and t'other ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... if any Proposition, which we wish to use in an argument, is not in normal form, we must reduce it to such a form, before we can use it. pg009 A 'Proposition,' when in normal form, asserts, as to certain two Classes, which are called its 'Subject' and 'Predicate,' either ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between' is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens, and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the first of existences, father of many sons, the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without predicate, unnameable. ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... that a particular predicate is applicable to one thing and less properly to another, does not prevent this latter from being simply better than the former: thus the knowledge of the blessed is more excellent than the knowledge of the wayfarer, although ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... absorbed or even annihilated. Awful as such a mysticism may appear, yet it leaves still something that exists, it acknowledges a feeling of dependence in man. It knows of a first cause, though it may have nothing to predicate of it except that it is [Greek: to kinoun akineton]. A return is possible from that desert. The first cause may be called to life again. It may take the names of Creator, Preserver, Ruler; and when the simplicity and helplessness of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... three parts: the Subject, the Predicate, and the Copula. The predicate is the name denoting that which is affirmed or denied. The subject is the name denoting the person or thing which something is affirmed or denied of. The copula is the sign ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... principles of scientific demonstration do to the speculative reason: for both sets of principles are self-evident. A thing is said to be self-evident in two ways, either in itself, or in reference to us. In itself every proposition, the predicate of which can be got from consideration of the subject is said to be self-evident. But it happens that to one who is ignorant of the definition of the subject, such a proposition will not be self-evident: as this proposition, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... of the human race it is not rationally possible to predicate a typical generic characteristic of mind. A physical trait will endure down the generations, as witness the Hapsburg lip and the swarthy complexion of the Finch-Hattons, in the face of alliances from outside the races; but, save as regards one exception, there is no ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... fidelity residence direct intimate continent digest levity finance indivisible defensible hilarious reticent imitate equidistant predicate maritime reticule piazza ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo, His mental processes are plain—one knows what he will do, And can logically predicate his finish by his start; But the English—ah, the English—they are quite a ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... more arbitrary than the assertions of the Catholics or the Orthodox. If we admit the idea of a church in the sense Homyakov gives to it—that is, a body of men bound together by love and truth—then all that any man can predicate in regard to this body, if such an one exists, is its love and truth, but there can be no outer signs by which one could reckon oneself or another as a member of this holy body, nor by which one could put anyone outside ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... yellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for its own specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a term into rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate of propositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discovered only when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can be observed, and when various themes and strains of experience are woven together ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... self-contradictory: for that entity, the knowledge of {246} the existence of which presses itself ever more and more upon the cultivated intellect, cannot be the unknown, still less the unknowable, because we certainly know it, in that we know for certain that it exists. Nay more, to predicate incognoscibility of it, is even a certain knowledge of the mode of its existence. Mr. H. Spencer says:[248] "The consciousness of an Inscrutable Power manifested to us through all phenomena has been growing ever clearer; and must eventually be freed from ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... gives a WHAT; and if other feelings should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as subject or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some judgment, perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which the other feelings may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a name and be no longer speechless. But every name, as students of logic know, has its 'denotation'; ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... bulletins sometimes brought news of a general's defeat. Rome was accustomed to these things; and her efforts were still marked by their usual characteristics of steady expansion and decorous success. To predicate failure of her foreign activity for this period is to predicate it for all her history, for never was an empire more slowly won or more painfully preserved. It is true that at the commencement of this epoch an imperialist might have been justified in taking ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... "equality" can never be predicated of them. Power in the family, in industry, in civil affairs, war, and religion is not the same thing and cannot be. Each sex has more power for one domain, and must have less power for another. Equality is an incongruous predicate. "Under the influence of the law of battle the male has become more courageous, powerful, and pugnacious than the female.... So, too, the male has, in the struggle, often acquired great beauty, success on his part depending largely, in many cases, upon the choice ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... let us enquire what we mean by giving many names to the same thing, e.g. white, good, tall, to man; out of which tyros old and young derive such a feast of amusement. Their meagre minds refuse to predicate anything of anything; they say that good is good, and man is man; and that to affirm one of the other would be making the many one and the one many. Let us place them in a class with our previous opponents, and interrogate ...
— Sophist • Plato
... since at a Broadway hotel, from which she was expelled at a very short notice by the proprietors in presence of a number of the guests. It is presumed that at present she is almost penniless, though no one can safely predicate at what place or in what guise she may appear hereafter. For an adventurer, like ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... toast, need not deny praise to a masterpiece of words. Words, sir, not facts. What I want to know is at whom—not at what, at whom—you were firing? I thought once that Aaron Burr was your mark. But he's too light metal—a mere buccaneer! That broadside of yours would predicate a general foe—and I'm damned if I wouldn't like ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... predicated accidentally, predicates, not substance, but quantity, or quality, or some other mode of being. If therefore the human nature accrues accidentally, when we say Christ is man, we do not predicate substance, but quality or quantity, or some other mode of being, which is contrary to the Decretal of Pope Alexander III, who says (Conc. Later. iii): "Since Christ is perfect God and perfect man, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... how should you? You are not familiar with our terms. You lack the comprehensio visi. The earnest student of logic knows this and more than this. He understands the nature of subject, predicate, and contingent, and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... nothing, revolves in the Apostle's mind mainly round these two 'earthly' as contrasted with 'in the heavens'; and 'tabernacle,' or tent, as contrasted, first of all with a 'building,' and then with the predicate 'eternal.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... their ideas, and now they were beginning to ask themselves whether the expression might not be distinguished from the idea? They were also seeking to distinguish the parts of speech and to enquire into the relation of subject and predicate. Grammar and logic were moving about somewhere in the depths of the human soul, but they were not yet awakened into consciousness and had not found names for themselves, or terms by which they might be expressed. Of ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature. The rude primitive child of nature at this lowest stage of development is as yet far from being the restless Ursachenthier (cause-seeking animal) of Lichtenberg; his demand for causes has not yet risen above that of apes and dogs; his curiosity ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... completing the verb, and thus becoming part of the predicate in acting upon an object: "Time makes the worst enemies friends;" "Thou makest the storm a calm." In these sentences the real predicates are makes friends, taking the object enemies, and being equivalent to one verb, reconciles; and makest a calm, taking the object ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... saloon, which bore the painted legends: on the west wall, "Last Chance"; on the east wall, "First Chance." Next to this, and separated by two or three acres of weedy vacancy from the corners where the population centred thickest, stood-if one may so predicate of a building which leaned in seven directions-the house of Mr. Robert Skillett, the proprietor of the saloon. Both buildings were shut up as tight as their state of repair permitted. As they were furthest to the east, they formed the nearest shelter, and to them the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good name is a proof of a man's estimation in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... transcend consciousness: consciousness is only possible under the antithesis of a subject and an object known only in correlation, and mutually limiting each other"[318] Thought necessarily supposes conditions; "to think is simply to condition," that is, to predicate limits; and as the infinite is the unlimited, it can not be thought. The very attempt to think the infinite renders it finite; therefore there can be no infinite in thought, and, consequently, the infinite can not ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... nature of language. Admitting that language is a sign, are we to take that as signifying a spiritual necessity (phusis) or as a psychological convention (nomos)? Aristotle made a valuable contribution to this difficult question, when he spoke of a kind of proposition other than those which predicate truth or falsehood, that is, logic. With him euchae is the term proper to designate desires and aspirations, which are the vehicle of poetry and of oratory. (It must be remembered that for Aristotle words, like poetry, belonged ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... all well-established monarchies! One cannot help desiring, nevertheless, that men of honour should have the management of it. Were they men of humane feeling too, it would be so much the better. Is it possible to predicate these things of the persons who gave poor Carteret his orders? Is it possible to believe he was expected to circumnavigate the world in the Swallow? An opinion has already been hazarded on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... a tragic side to this question. I mean that, after all, a sublime simplicity of mind is a necessary predicate to the acceptance of this "cheap" fiction. "A penn'orth o' loove," George the Fourth calls a novelette, and there's something very grim to me in ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... our knowledge of things must be. There, for example, are all the truths of mathematics. When we enunciate a truth regarding the relations of the lines and angles of a triangle, we are not merely unfolding in the predicate of our proposition what was implicitly contained in the subject. There are propositions that do no more than this; they are analytical, i.e. they merely analyze the subject. Thus, when we say: Man is a rational animal, we may merely be defining the ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... (or, also)—ophelimos, serviceable—pros, towards, didaskalian, doctrinal truth. Now this sentence, when thus rendered into English according to the rigor of the Grecian letter, wants something to complete its sense—it wants an is. There is a subject, as the logicians say, and there is a predicate (or, something affirmed of that subject), but there is no copula to connect them—we miss the is. This omission is common in Greek, but cannot be allowed in English. The is must be supplied; but where must it be supplied? That's ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... antecedents of fetich-worship? He appears to conceive himself to be arguing with persons (p. 127) who 'have taken for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich, call it power, spirit, or god.' If there are reasoners so feeble, they must be left to the punishment inflicted by Mr. Muller. On the other hand, students who regard the growth of the idea of power, which is the predicate of every fetish, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... "Let no man predicate That aught the name of gentleman should have Even in a king's estate Except the heart there be ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... hatched from them. A bird cannot be called an egg without an abuse of terms. Nevertheless, it is doubtful how far we should not say this, for it is only with a mental reserve—and with no greater mental reserve— that we predicate absolute identity concerning any living being for two consecutive moments; and it is certainly as free from quibble to say to two fowls and a dozen eggs, "you are the two eggs I had on my kitchen ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... "Female Heroism," and as she sought among the dusky annals of the past for instances in confirmation of her predicate, that female intellect was capable of the most exalted attainments, and that the elements of her character would enable woman to cope successfully with difficulties of every class, her voice grew clear, firm, and deep. Quitting the fertile fields of history, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... She would either accept his suggestion, or she would not: but at least she would waste no time in protestations and objections, or any vain sacrifice to the idols of conformity. The conviction that one could, on any given point, almost predicate this of her, gave him the sense of having advanced far enough in her intimacy to urge his arguments against a hasty ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... her mother died. It was the consensus of opinion that heart trouble had something to do with it. In fact, Mrs. Corblay had often complained of pains in her heart and was subject to fainting spells; besides which, there was that in her eyes which seemed to predicate a heartache of many years' standing. At any rate, she fainted at the eating-house one day and they carried her home. She passed away very quietly the same night, leaving an estate which consisted of Donna, the two Indian servants, and a quantity of ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... "therefore every unlawful wish deserves death," which is the "conclusion or proof." We learn, also, that "sometimes the first is called the premises (sic), and sometimes the first premiss"; as also that "the first is sometimes called the proposition, or subject, or affirmative, and the next the predicate, and sometimes the middle term." To which is added, with a mark of exclamation at the end, "but in analyzing the syllogism, there is a middle term, and a predicate too, in each of the lines!" It is clear that ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... remark, observation; position &c (proposition) 514, saying, dictum, sentence, ipse dixit [Lat.]. emphasis; weight; dogmatism &c (certainty) 474; dogmatics &c 887. V. assert; make an assertion &c n.; have one's say; say, affirm, predicate, declare, state; protest, profess. put forth, put forward; advance, allege, propose, propound, enunciate, broach, set forth, hold out, maintain, contend, pronounce, pretend. depose, depone, aver, avow, avouch, asseverate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Radiates lowest, how do the Articulates and Mollusks stand to these and to each other? To me it seems, that, while both are decidedly superior to the Radiates and inferior to the Vertebrates, we cannot predicate absolute superiority or inferiority of organization of either of these groups as compared with each other; they stand on one structural level, though with different tendencies,—the body in Mollusks having always a soft, massive, concentrated character, with great power of contraction and dilatation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... some authority for the alleged practice of Roman potters (or crock-vendors) to rub wax into the flaws of their unsound vessels. This was the very burden of my Query! I am no proficient in the Latin classics: yet I think I know enough to predicate that [Pi]. [Beta]. is wrong in his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... askance, and his face grew red with a stroke of passion as he noted Sir Julian's look of evident admiration, and jealousy for a moment swept the young lord's heart, and he cursed in thought the wicked feeling that in connection with his noble friend could predicate of naught but the foul fiends. Indeed, so open were Sir Julian's glances that the maid herself became confused and said, with ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... within time, as in the circle. But to form the first conception of a real thing, we state both as one in the idea, duration. The formula is: (ABBA)(AA) or the oneness of space and time, is the predicate of ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and polished. Men whose undegenerate spirit, &c. In prose, this would run, "(Ye) men whose spirit has been proved (to be) undegenerate," &c. The word "undegenerate," which is introduced only as an epithet, is the real predicate of ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... is predicated of another, all that which is predicable of the predicate will be predicable also of the subject. Thus, 'man' is predicated of the individual man; but 'animal' is predicated of 'man'; it will, therefore, be predicable of the individual man also: for the individual man is both ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... one principal subject and one principal predicate, should try to express one thought and no more. If we try to mix two thoughts in the same sentence, we shall come to grief. Likewise, we shall fail if we attempt to mix two subjects in the same ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... sentence expresses a single thought and consists of one subject and one predicate, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Voice."—P. 131. Afterwards, in spite of the fancied limitation, he acknowledges the passive use of the participle in ing, and that there is "authority" for it; but, at the same time, most absurdly supposes the word to predicate "action," and also to be wrong: saying, "Action is sometimes predicated of a passive subject. EXAMPLE—'The house is building,.. for.. 'The house is being built,'.. which means.. The house is becoming built." On this, he remarks thus: "This is one of the instances in which ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... a predicate noun, completing a verb, and referring to or explaining the subject: "A bent twig makes ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... speaking through his hat in the Reichstag, said that he wished to state in the clearest language of which he was capable that the German peace plan would not only provide the fullest self determination of all ethnographic categories, but would predicate the political self consciousness (politisches Selbstbewusztsein) of each geographical and entomological unit, subject only to the necessary rectilinear guarantees for the seismographic action of the German empire. The ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... of space. If the materials of the moon were what a mathematician would call absolutely rigid, there can be no doubt that the tides could no longer exist, and the moon would be emancipated from tidal control. It seems impossible to predicate how far the moon can ever conform to the circumstances of an actual rigid body, but it may be conceivable that at some future time the tidal control shall have practically ceased. There would then be no longer any necessary identity between the period of rotation and ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... dangerous. As he approached her she rose to her feet, but almost before she knew it he had taken her hand and drawn her to a seat beside him. This was not what Miss Jo had expected, but nothing is so difficult to predicate as the exact preliminaries ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... (in the sense of to ebb,) if this water had been the sea and not a lake. But possibly the meaning is, "I heard the water whoop or wail aloud" (from Wopan); and "the waves whine or bewail" (from Wanian to lament). But even then the two verbs would seem to predicate of transposed subjects.] ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... My friend Mr. Tindal is come to settle (for the present at least) in this neighbourhood. He is going to succeed me in the curacy of Fordham. He plays the Fiddle well, the Harpsichord well, the Violoncello well. Now, sir, when I say 'well,' I can't be supposed to mean the wellness that one should predicate of a professor who makes the instrument his study; but that he plays in a very ungentlemanlike manner, exactly in time and tune, with taste, accent, and meaning, and the true sense of what he plays; and, upon the Violoncello, he has execution sufficient to play Boccherini's ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... limited resources in Heaven? Such an incongruity as this, and the inane dilution of the writing (which of course does not appear at its worst in the selected passages) make a genuine George Eliot control hard to predicate, and yet this control, like virtually every other one, is an individuality, and is less unlike George Eliot than is any other control I know. Will difficulties of communication or any other tertium quid, make up the difference? I first read the record with repulsion, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... quenched. All the essential elements of life itself are to be mortified that the soul may, unhampered by its own entanglement, reach that consummation which is supposed to be final. And what is it? Who can tell? The Aryan philosopher himself stands mute in its presence. All that we can predicate of it is not life and happiness, according to any standard of human experience known or imagined. The idea that the individual soul will finally sink into and blend with the Absolute Being as a drop of water returns to and mingles with ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... ideal of perfect Liberty is the entire absence of all limitation, and to have no limitation in Being is to be co-extensive with All-Being. We are all grammarians enough to know that the use of a predicate is to lead the mind to contemplate the subject as represented by that predicate; in other words, it limits our conception for the time being to that particular aspect of the subject. Hence every predicate, however extensive, implies some limitation of the ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... science would predicate concerning this panacea, I know not, but thousands of cuts in rural districts treated with powder-post did very well, and faith in it waxed strong. So when Sam Eastman cut his foot over in the "east woods," all the wiseacres in the neighborhood declared that that foot must be done up in powder-post. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... is hardly possible to predicate much about the environment as it affects art in America. The result of the climate, the temperament, and the mixture of nations in the production or non-production of painting in America cannot be accurately computed at this early stage of history. One thing only is certain, and that ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... man fording a swift stream can dip his foot twice into the same water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible world that it is.[Note 2] As he utters the words, nay, as he thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the present has become the past; the "is" should be "was." And the more we learn of the nature of things, the more evident is it that what we call rest is only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous battle. In every part, at every moment, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Burn's Justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth would be rewarded with the pillory is merely matter for a peal of elvish laughter. A real Horner, a real Careless, would, it is admitted, be exceedingly bad men. But to predicate morality or immorality of the Horner of Wycherley and the Careless of Congreve is as absurd as it would be to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. "They belong to the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. When we are among them ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... annuls the tes- [1] timony of the senses, which say that sin is an evil power, and substance is perishable. Intelligent Spirit, Soul, is substance, far more impregnable and solid than matter; for one is temporal, while the other is eternal, the ultimate [5] and predicate of being. ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... any degree derived from Hegel. It may be illustrated by the following passage from Lossky, "The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge" (Macmillan, 1919), p. 268: "Strictly speaking, a false judgment is not a judgment at all. The predicate does not follow from the subject S alone, but from the subject plus a certain addition C, WHICH IN NO SENSE BELONGS TO THE CONTENT OF THE JUDGMENT. What takes place may be a process of association of ideas, of imagining, or the like, but is not a process of judging. ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... that habit of the mind by virtue of which it constructs diversities and arranges them (created in their turn by its own constructive activity—parikalpa) in a logical order of diverse relations of subject and predicate, causal and other relations. He who knows the nature of these two categories of the mind knows that there is no external world of matter and that they are all experienced only in the mind. There is no water, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... potentes a seculo (these are mighty men from the beginning). But the word seculum (olam) does not here signify duration of time, nor does it predicate extent. These giants did not exist from the beginning, they were not born until the sons of God had degenerated. But seculum (olam) connotes a second predicate, that of substance, so that Moses explains the nature of the power in which they trusted to have been secular or worldly. They ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... is a group of words, containing neither subject nor predicate, that is used as a ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... oral tradition. But they have to do with characters and places which are tied to the present by stronger cords than those of the divine age. What the events really were which are involved in the myths of the preceding chapter it is impossible to predicate. That the celestial invasion of the island of Kyushu means the coming thither of a chief and his followers from the continent by way of Korea seems most reasonable. The inter-mixture of Izumo with these legends may mean that ...
— Japan • David Murray
... with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... farmer. It puts him at his ease with you, and he will tell you more willingly after that ceremony what are his ideas about the wind, and what may be expected of the day. His day's hunting is to him a solemn thing, and he gives to it all his serious thought. If any man can predicate anything of the run of a fox, ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... decidedly alert, and somewhat self-congratulatory that I was not more scared. No man can predicate how efficient he is going to be in the presence of really dangerous game. Only the actual trial will show. This is not a question of courage at all, but of purely involuntary reaction of the nerves. Very ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... descriptions of its effects. Kindly observe that I am far from accepting either one or the other. Love is, according to me, somewhat akin to mania, a temporary condition of selfishness, a transient confusion of identity. It enables man to predicate of others who are his other selves, that which he is ashamed to say about his real self. I will suppose the beloved object to be ugly, stupid, vicious, perverse, selfish, low minded, or the reverse; man finds it charming ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... lunar atmosphere, it may be said, in a word, that even those who advocate the existence of vegetation and of clouds of dust or ice crystals on the moon do not predicate any greater amount, or greater density, of atmosphere than do those who consider the moon to be wholly dead and inert. Professor Pickering himself showed, from his observations, that the horizontal refraction of ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... equivalent to saying that we can only reason concerning man as a finite part of an infinite existence, and we can only predicate respecting what comes under the category of positive knowledge ; we are therefore disabled from speculating in any theories which have for a basis opposition to the collected experience of mankind. This was a position laid down by Bolingbroke to escape all the historical ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a group of words, containing both subject and predicate, that is used as part of a sentence. If used as a single part of speech, it is called a subordinate, or dependent, clause. Some grammarians use the word clause ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... interrupted, thus cutting out the predicate of her rhetorical sentence, "you surely couldn't have thought a dentist's fee of thirty francs would have put ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... and republics still formed a great corporation, at the head of which was the German Emperor. Even the crown of France had to submit to manifold and wearisome negotiations in order to obtain the predicate of "majesty," which until then had belonged exclusively to the Emperor. The other sovereigns then laid claim to the same dignity as that enjoyed by the King of France, and the Venetian republic to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... of the external catholic unity, his monarchical politics accorded with the hierarchical episcopacy of the church. Hence from the year 313 he placed himself in close connection with the bishops, made peace and harmony his first object in the Donatist and Arian controversies, and gave the predicate 'catholic' to the church in all official documents. And as his predecessors were supreme pontiffs of the heathen religion of the empire, so he desired to be looked upon as a sort of bishop, as universal bishop of the eternal affairs ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... stage of abstraction; but, on the other hand, it is equally little in question that this degree of mental development had been attained long before the opening of our historical period. The primeval man, then, whose scientific knowledge we are attempting to predicate, had become, through his conception of fishes, birds, and hairy animals as separate classes, a scientific zoologist ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... upon the careworn query, "Is Marriage a Failure?" a vigorous negative side under various pen-names which argued not only inclination, but experience. He felt, therefore, that he could not possibly predicate anything of himself under the circumstances, and that it would be distinctly the part of wisdom to wait until there was less going on. Mr. Rattray had an indefinite idea that in case of a rejection he might find it necessary to go out of town for some weeks ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... justice is an attribute or quality of conduct rather than a disposition or state of mind, and of conduct toward others rather than of conduct toward one's self. It is only of the conduct of men in their relations to other men that we can predicate justice or injustice. One's conduct may result in good or evil to himself and so be wise or unwise, but assuming, what probably is never the fact, that it affects only himself, in no way affects any other, his conduct is neither just nor unjust. Robinson Crusoe, until the arrival ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... mean by that general expression of yours?—It is impossible to predicate what may happen in time of panic and alarm. A great alarm prevailed certainly amongst the commercial world, and it could never have been alleviated, except by some extraordinary means of relief. We might probably have been in the state in which ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... moral evil in the world is undeniable. Are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's heart and soul? But there is also much physical evil in the world,—pain, weakness, disease, decay, and death. Are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's body? And this physical evil, this liability to disease, is not confined to man, but also ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of their own brains, it may be that they will bow to what they will call destiny. "Heaven has declared against us," is an expression that I already hear frequently uttered. It is indeed as impossible to predicate here, as it is in London, what may be the mood of this fickle and impulsive population a week hence. All I can positively say is, that at the present moment they are in "King Cambyses' vein." We ought not to judge a foreign nation by our own standard, but it is impossible ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere |
