"Thinkable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the case of light we see that the shadow is only the absence of light, so the negative of Goodness, i.e. Evil, may in reality be looked upon as folly or wasting of opportunity for exercising the Good. Owing to their limitations our thoughts are based upon relativity, and it is hardly thinkable that we could, under our present conditions, have any cognisance of the positive without its negative; we shall in fact see later on that it is by examining the Physical, the negative or shadow, that we can best gain a knowledge of the Spiritual, the ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... nature, which is a construction in thought, is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable objects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism which—if we have it at all—must be fundamental, he made derivative; and the realism, which must then be derivative, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... swift enough, had their line cut off, and were thus less likely to be represented in the following generation. The constant result of errors along this line would be to destroy the slow and preserve the swift, and in the course of time it is quite thinkable that only the swift should remain. As the movements grew more and more keen, even the slower of these would pass out, thus tending always to produce the succeeding generation from those who were most rapid, and hence most likely to transfer ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... that he had regrets for the course he had taken with Percy. No other course had been thinkable. But while Hal had known these North Valley people for ten weeks, he had known the occupants of Percy's car for as many years. So these latter personalities loomed large in his consciousness, and here in the darkness their thoughts about him, whether actively hostile or passively ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... concierge who could not be bought for money, and the manager was the mirror of managers. Fancy the landlord of the Waldorf-Astoria, or the St. Regis, coming out on the sidewalk and beating down a taxicabman from a charge of fifteen pesetas to six for a certain drive! It is not thinkable, and yet the like of it happened to xis in Seville from our manager. It was not his fault, when our rear apartment became a little too chill, and we took a parlor in the front and came back on the ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... can only be one, and yet each of us can know all. Hence arises the need for philosophy. The double knowledge which each of us possesses of his own body is the key to the nature of every phenomenon in the world. Nothing is either known to us or thinkable by us except will and idea. If we examine the reality of the body and its actions, we discover nothing beyond the fact that it is an idea, except the will. With this double discovery ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... has recourse to inventing a wholly gratuitous hypothesis to explain one mode of existence in particular. If it is said that the latter hypothesis has the merit of causing the mystery of material existence and the mystery of mental existence to be united in a thinkable manner—viz., in a self-existing Mind,—I reply, It is not so; for in whatever degree it is unthinkable that Matter should be the cause of Mind, in that precise degree must it be unthinkable that Mind was ever the cause of Matter, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... accepted as quite believable are absolutely inconceivable. There is a perpetual confusing of actual ideas with what are nothing but pseud-ideas. No distinction is made between propositions that contain real thoughts and propositions that are only the forms of thoughts. A thinkable proposition is one of which the two terms can be brought together in consciousness under the relation said to exist between them. But very often, when the subject of a proposition has been thought of as something known, and when the predicate of a proposition has ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... personality? Relations of such rare quality exact their own pitiless price; and the woman influence would always be, for Roy—as for most men of genuine gifts and high purpose—his danger point or salvation. The dim and distant prospect of parting was thinkable—though perturbing. But all this talk of steamers and outfits startlingly illumined the fact that in October he was actually going—to the other end ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... been seen; such changes in the alliances between States have occurred at intervals from the seventeenth century onward in Europe, a phase of the subject that is too lengthy to discuss here, but which every student of history knows all about. And it is thinkable ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... great world theories, complete each in itself, both of them thinkable, mutually exclusive, one of which only can be true, and one of which must finally become dominant in the educated and free thought of the world. These two theories I wish to place face to face before you this morning, call your attention to some of their special features and note the claims ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... thought of the same way of saving himself that I did; so good-natured I had never imagined him.—But where shall we find the man who is willing to—well, she is pretty, and I shall not mind a little silver and even a bit of land. Has Olaf already spoken to some one? That is hardly thinkable!—Well, then I shall see to that. I have servants enough on ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... conceive that idea was but little hampered by traditional conceptions. He was exercising a rare combination of the rigidly scientific spirit with the poetical imagination. He who possesses these gifts is sure not to stop in his questionings of nature until he has found some thinkable explanation of the character of matter itself. Anaxagoras found such an explanation, and, as good luck would have it, that explanation has been preserved. Let us examine his reasoning in some detail. We have already referred to the claim alleged to have been made by Anaxagoras ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... eyes before the accusing glance of the man. Then, after a moment's pause, a sound escaped his lips. And in it was every thinkable expression ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... permanent elements are Ideas, i.e. General Forms or Notions, which, although they may come second as regards time into consciousness, are by reason known to have been there before, because through them alone can the sensations become intelligibly possible, or thinkable, or namable. Thus Plato is led to the conception of an order the reverse of our individual experience, the order of creation, the order of God's thought, which is equivalent to the order of God's working; for God's thought ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... that they claim? The cell is the unit of life; all living bodies are but vast confraternities of cells, some billions or trillions of them in the human body; the cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up the organs, the organs build up the body. Now if it is not thinkable that chemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could build a living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole? If there is an inscrutable something at work at the start, which organizes that wonderful piece of vital ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... from witch trials until some few conclusions about a given period can be ventured. A large proportion of cases can be proved to belong in this or that category, a certain percentage of the women can be shown to possess these or those traits in common. Yet it is quite thinkable that one might be armed with a quiver full of generalizations, and fail, withal, to comprehend Jacobean witchcraft. If one could have asked information on the subject from a Londoner of 1620, he would probably have heard little about ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... This, of course, is the explanation of the phenomena involved in wireless telegraphy, and is equally the explanation of the phenomena involved in telepathy. At a meeting of the Society of Arts in May of 1901, Professor Ayrton, commenting on Marconi's system, said that we "are gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, at a time when, if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud electro-magnetic voice, heard by him who had the electro-magnetic ear, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... whose grant it lay, stood punctilious upon their rights; and Tamasese, as the representative of their natural opponents, the Tupua line, was the last who should have had it. And there was yet more, though I almost despair to make it thinkable by Europeans. Certain old mats are handed down, and set huge store by; they may be compared to coats of arms or heirlooms among ourselves; and to the horror of more than one-half of Samoa, Tamasese, the head of the Tupua, began collecting ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at the back o' baith, bairn!" rejoined the soutar. "It's thinkable that the Almichty may hae special diffeeculty wi sic as he, but nane can jeedge o' ony thing or body till they see the hin'er en' o' 't a'. But I'm thinkin it maun aye be harder for ane that hasna his ain mither to luik til. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked Lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in advance, to say that she had not expected him. "Friendly creature!" he said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that already there was ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... men did, bestial things, cruel things, things they did to women. But not things like this. They didn't think of them, because this thing wasn't thinkable. ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... the vortex theory of matter, especially when that vortex theory is given an electric basis, as is the case in Dr. Larmor's electron theory, we have a thinkable and logical explanation of the physical and chemical properties of matter, by which all elements and compounds may be formed from the primordial aetherial or electric atom. As all Nature is composed of about ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... to refute solipsism, of course assumes and confirms it; for all these cans and musts touch only your idea of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... generalizes from the above is, "that the conceivable is in every relation bounded by the inconceivable." Or, again, "The conditioned or the thinkable lies between two extremes or poles; and these extremes or poles are each of them unconditioned, each of them inconceivable, each of them exclusive or contradictory of the other."[298] This is the celebrated "Law of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity of God, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? So the question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of this kind, it has been well said, are simply an attempt to terrorize the imagination, and are not to be yielded to. As ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... - that iron gentleman - had long ago enthroned himself on the heights of the Disruption Principles. What these are (and in spite of their grim name they are quite innocent) no array of terms would render thinkable to the merely English intelligence; but to the Scot they often prove unctuously nourishing, and Mr. Nicholson found in them the milk of lions. About the period when the churches convene at Edinburgh in ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... carry the responsibility of it all through one's life. Imagine it, two boys playing together—then this comes upon them, for no reason whatever—out of the air. Ursula, it's very frightening! Oh, it's one of the things I can't bear. Murder, that is thinkable, because there's a will behind it. But a thing like that to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... contact of any sort is at once transformed into positive hatred and conflict. Without this aversion life in a great city, which daily brings each into contact with countless others, would have no thinkable form. The activity of our minds responds to almost every impression received from other people in some sort of a definite feeling, all the unconsciousness, transience, and variability of which seem to remain only in the form of a certain indifference. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... progress and sighed a good bit and turned on a pathetic note, which he had at command, and blew his nose once or twice; but these little touches didn't move Jane, so he ventured to ask her what her future ideas might be away from Wych Elm, if such a fearful thing was thinkable. ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... no such thing as abstract liberty; it is not even thinkable. If you ask me, "Do you favor liberty?" I reply, "Liberty for whom to do what? Just now I distinctly favor the liberty of the law to cut off the noses of anarchists caught red-handed or red-tongued. If they go in for mutilation let them feel ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce |
