"Dialectics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Robert, his nephew. "This Rudolph had been a student all his life, devoting himself with great zeal to letters, and had become famous for his visits to the schools of France and Italy, in order to gather there the secrets of learning. As a consequence he was well informed not only in grammar and dialectics, but also in astronomy and in music. He also possessed such an extensive knowledge of the natural sciences that in the town of Salerno, where, since ancient times, the best schools of medicine had existed, there was no one to equal him with the exception ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... scene, of climate, of the animal qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with so little attempt at disguise. It has ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... and Kennicott trying to determine by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... him in a discussion on the freedom of the will, and Macalister, with his well-stored memory, brought out argument after argument. He had a mind that delighted in dialectics, and he forced Philip to contradict himself; he pushed him into corners from which he could only escape by damaging concessions; he tripped him up with logic ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... don't trouble my head with such matters—I say Stukely was a right good-hearted fellow at bottom; and if you plague my head with any of your dialectics, and propositions, and college quips and quiddities, you sha'n't have any more sack, sir. But here come the knaves, and I hear the cook knock ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Slavery, presto, Slavery must be regarded as existing under it in the Territories! This, we say, was more respectable ground than Squatter Sovereignty, because it met the question more fairly in the face; yet, considered either as dialectics or history, it was not one whit less absurd. We do not wonder that Webster, and all the other sound lawyers of the nation, heard such an announcement of Constitutional hermeneutics with utter surprise and astonishment. It was enough to astound even the veriest tyro in the law. The Constitution—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... consolatory to a meditative Christian. Had I been a Papist, I should not have wished for a more vanquishable opponent in controversy. I certainly believe Chillingworth to have been in some sense a Socinian. Lord Falkland, his friend, said so in substance. I do not deny his skill in dialectics; he was more than a match ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... anticipated one of the most surprising discoveries of the Christian revelation. The respectable name of Plato was used by the orthodox, [29] and abused by the heretics, [30] as the common support of truth and error: the authority of his skilful commentators, and the science of dialectics, were employed to justify the remote consequences of his opinions and to supply the discreet silence of the inspired writers. The same subtle and profound questions concerning the nature, the generation, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... even further with my bragging: I can exegete the psalms and the prophets, and they cannot. I can translate, and they cannot. I can read Holy Scriptures, and they cannot. I can pray, they cannot. Coming down to their level, I can do their dialectics and philosophy better than all of them put together. Plus I know that not one of them understands Aristotle. If, in fact, any one of them can correctly understand one part or chapter of Aristotle, I will eat my hat! No, ...
— An Open Letter on Translating • Gary Mann
... relation to some other thing it is too large or too small, the former is considered as existing for the sake of the latter, and requiring to be adapted to it. Among the trivial subjects of discussion in the old schools of dialectics was this question: "If a ball cannot pass through a hole, shall we say that the ball is too large or the hole too small?" In this case it is indifferent what expression we employ; for we do not know which exists for the sake of the other. On the other hand, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example—to cite a much disputed instance—is it plausible that Nora, in A Doll's House, should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children, slamming the door ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... proportion, three cups of water being mixed in two of wine; three, the double proportion, two being mixed with one; four, the sesquiterce, three cups of water to one of wine, which is the epitrite proportion for those exercising their minds in the council-chamber or frowning over dialectics, when changes of speeches are expected,—a sober and mild mixture. But in regard to those proportions of two to one, that mixture gives the strength by which we are confused and made half drunk, "Exciting ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... objective myth, they did it in such a way as to add strength to the subjective form of myth and science, for which Descartes had prepared the way; the theory of Spinoza and of the German school in general fundamentally consists in the substitution of entified forms and dialectics of the mind for the earlier objective forms of ideas. A great error was rectified, and the former phase of the intellectual evolution of myth disappeared, in favour of another which, although still erroneous, was ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... commentator—down to these our times, when this so perplexing doctrine proceeded from that most learned man aforesaid. His was a mind of no common cultivation; first in the preliminaries of literature in Greek education, then as a master of dialectics and argumentation. Moreover, he was most grave in his whole life, and reckoned among the very first of those who ever deserved the love of the orthodox, and so continued till his maintenance of this doctrine. Nay, he had undergone banishment for not submitting to the Arians;—but why enlarge ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... eminent in Bayle were equally so in Warburton. In his early studies he had particularly applied himself to logic; and was not only a vigorous reasoner, but one practised in all the finesse of dialectics. He had wit, fertile indeed, rather than delicate; and a vast body of erudition, collected in the uninterrupted studies of twenty years. But it was the SECRET PRINCIPLE, or, as he calls it, "the Academic exercise of Wit," on an enlarged ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... pupils, and won therein his own great renown whilst laying the foundation for that of the abbey of Bee, which was destined to be carried still higher by one of his disciples, St. Anselm. Lanfranc was eloquent, great in dialectics, of a sprightly wit, and lively in repartee. Relying upon the pope's decision, he spoke ill of William's marriage with Matilda. William was informed of this, and in a fit of despotic anger, ordered Lanfranc to be driven from the monastery ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... question of dialectics, it must be admitted that this sort of reasoning is not very formidable to those who are not to be frightened by consequences. It is an argumentum ad ignorantiam—take this explanation ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... mental relaxation which supplied the place of amusement. Sandemanians, Adamites, Peterites, Bowlists, Davisonians, and Rogereens, though agreeing mainly in essentials, found vast gratification in playing against each other at theological dialectics. On one cardinal point of discipline only—the necessity of administering creature comfort to the sinful body—did all sects zealously unite. They offered copious, though coarse, libations to Bacchus, in the spirit-stirring rum of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... referred to but one side of Athenian life. Though "seekers after wisdom," the cultivated people of Athens did not spend all their valuable leisure in dialectics or in connoisseurship. They were not a set of dilettanti or dreamy philosophers, and they were far from subordinating the material side of life to the intellectual. Also, though they dealt not in money-making ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... which agitated the world in the tenth century, relating to dialectics, was concerning universals (as for example, man, horse, dog, &c.) signifying not this or that in particular, but all in general. They distinguished universals, or what we call abstract terms, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... should be past for the mental attitude: "Revolution is atrocious. Sir, there is no revolution." Likewise should the time be past for that other familiar attitude: "Socialism is slavery. Sir, it will never be." It is no longer a question of dialectics, theories, and dreams. There is no question about it. The revolution is a fact. It is here now. Seven million revolutionists, organized, working day and night, are preaching the revolution—that passionate gospel, the Brotherhood of Man. Not only is it a cold-blooded ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... receptivity and the circumstances of his training. If he had been merely a student the case would have been different but he was not a student. He was a journeyman printer; and hard work has a tendency to demolish the distinctions of dialectics. He had also been to school outside his shop, and had learned many lessons, often confusing and apparently contradictory. Blanketeer marches; his first wife; the workhouse imprisonment; his second wife; the little Pauline had each come to him with its own special message, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... convince his listeners, he was obliged to use a new method of argument. So he carried on his argumentation by question and answer, and was therefore the first who used dialogue, which he called dialectics, as a medium ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... yeshibahs of Volozhin, Mir, [2] and other towns sent forth thousands of rabbis and Talmudists. Mentality, erudition, dialectic subtlety were valued here above all else. Yet, as soon as the mind, whetted by talmudic dialectics, would point its edge against the existing order of things, or turn in the direction of living knowledge, of "extraneous sciences," [3] it was checked by threats of excommunication and persecution. Many were the victims of this petrified milieu, whose protests against ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... letters constantly appeared in the newspapers, signed "George Wyndham." A certain flippancy and cynicism of tone, joined to a skilful though school-boyish delight in dialectics, suggested that though the name was George Wyndham, the writer was an eminent chief. When at last Mr. George Wyndham made his appearance in the House and delivered himself of his maiden speech, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman—one of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... materialist of the most uncompromising order. But I want it clearly understood that my materialist philosophy does not permit me to strike this plank out of the platform. I want it understood that my materialist dialectics do not permit me to forget the exigencies of the moment for our ideals in the far future.... Would you expect to go out among the people of this country, people of different churches, of many different religious factions, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... birds, in their levity and ambition soaring to the height and brightness of physical things; others like young puppies, as Plato[265] says, rejoicing in tearing and biting, betake themselves to strifes and questions and sophisms; but most plunging themselves into dialectics immediately store themselves for sophistry; and some collect sentences[266] and histories and go about (as Anacharsis said he saw the Greeks used money for no other purpose but to count it up), ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... natural right. The decision of such important questions can only be accomplished by careful historical analysis, which will show different results for different epochs,—that, for example, the legal nature of liberty is entirely different in the ancient state and in the modern. Legal dialectics can easily deduce the given condition with equally logical acuteness from principles directly opposed to one another. The true principle is taught not by jurisprudence ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... field, and fraternise with the adversary of the eve and the morrow in friendly curiosity and liberal recognition. It fell to the present writer at one time to have one or two bouts of public controversy with Mr. Greg. In these dialectics Mr. Greg was never vehement and never pressed, but he was inclined to be—or, at least, was felt by an opponent to be—dry, mordant, and almost harsh. These disagreeable prepossessions were instantly dissipated, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... epistles in the style of Fortunatus, he wrote some long poems, and notably a whole history in verse of the church at York: Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae. We owe to him, too, some manuals used in his educational work; a grammar and works on rhetoric and dialectics. They are written in the form of dialogues, and in the two last the interlocutors are King Charles and Alcuin. He wrote, finally, several theological treatises: a treatise de Fide Trinitatis, commentaries on the Bible, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... processes and methods of reasoning fits in the metaphysical framework of thought. To dialectics, however, which takes in the objects and their conceivable images above all in their connections, their sequence, their motion, their rise and decline, processes like the above are so many attestations ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... first place, the model and the measure of style; and the root of the Renaissance was the persuasion that a man who could write like Cicero had an important advantage over a man who wrote like Bartolus or William of Ockham; and that ideas radiant with beauty must conquer ideas clouded over with dialectics. In this, there was an immediate success. Petrarca and his imitators learnt to write excellent Latin. Few of them had merit as original thinkers, and what they did for erudition was done all over again, and incomparably better, by the scholars who appeared after the tempest of the Reformation had ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... silence all contradiction, and, like sacred reliquaries, impose upon all who approach them a calm, earnest, and reverential regard. Others, more particularly the earlier ones, including "Opera and Drama," excite and agitate one; their rhythm is so uneven that, as prose they are bewildering. Their dialectics is constantly interrupted, and their course is more retarded than accelerated by outbursts of feeling; a certain reluctance on the part of the writer seems to hang over them like a pall, just as though the artist were somewhat ashamed ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... being conducted out of the door, all manner of speech was hurled at me—a bountiful supply of that sort of dialectics which America can beat all the world at handling. However, the main desire of the mob at this point seemed to have been to get a sight of me; so they arraigned themselves in a double file, while I was conducted through the centre thereof, somewhat after the fashion of a military hero—a ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... pupil of the "God-taught" Ammonius, tells us that the secret gnosis or the knowledge of Theosophy, has three degrees-opinion, science, and illumination. "The means or instrument of the first is sense, or perception; of the second, dialectics; of the third, intuition. To the last, reason is subordinate; it is absolute knowledge, founded on the identification of the mind with the object known." Theosophy is the exact science of psychology, so to say; it stands in relation to natural, uncultivated ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... difficulty—that of understanding how the temporal process in which human morality is developed can be related to a reality which is defined as out of time or eternal. This difficulty cannot be avoided in a metaphysical theory of morality. And it does not stand alone. Green's own dialectics were directed against the Sensationalist and Hedonist theories which used to be regarded as typical of English thought; and on them they acted as a powerful solvent. His own views of the spiritual nature of man and its relation to the eternal self-consciousness were worked out with ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... powers, of humanity struggling perilously to see justice done upon earth, to let reason and the will of God prevail. It lost its hold upon him the instant it became a thing of technicalities, of mere learning, of statutory dialectics. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the medium through which tradition was handed on; others were creative as well. To put the same fact in Rabbinical metaphor, some were Sinais of learning, others tore up mountains, and ground them together in keen and critical dialectics. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... faith and adhesion of every rational observer. "Evidences of Christianity," "Controversies," "Exegetical Commentaries," have all proved [222] more or less futile—as perhaps they ought—with the Science and Modern Criticism which perverts religion into a matter of dialectics. But there is a hope for mankind in the fact that Science itself shall have ultimately to admit the limitations of human inquiry into the details of the Infinite. Meanwhile it requires no technical proficiency to recognize the criminality ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... nature in presence of the absolute need and resistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like the Jesuits, but in a different spirit, the Port-Royalists devoted themselves much to the task of education. They honoured classical studies; they honoured science, dialectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry were substantial additions to the literature of pedagogy. Isaac le Maistre de Sacy and others translated and annotated the Bible. Their theologian, moralist, and controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of Essais ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... ideas. He devoted himself on equal terms to classical and to Christian antiquity, and drew from both alike the same lessons of morality and wisdom; for he valued doctrine chiefly for the sake of a good life and a happy death, and was impatient of subtle dialectics and speculative disputations. With so much of Renaissance studies as did not serve the good estate of souls he showed little sympathy, and was indifferent to art, to metaphysics, to antiquarian pedantry. He endeavoured to make men familiar with the wisdom of the ancients by a collection of 1451 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... have succeeded (with the aid of the scriptures and of inference) in dispelling all doubts. Madhava never resides in the hearts of those that are under the sway of doubts and that would dispute away everything with the aid of false dialectics. They that are conversant with the Pancharatra scriptures, that are duly observant of the duties laid down therein, and that are devoted to Narayana with their whole souls, succeed in entering into Narayana. The Sankhya and the Yoga systems are eternal. All the Vedas, again, O monarch, are ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest, of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing art in avoiding the artificial?" I had some difficulty in making myself understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds aesthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously factitious to the truly imaginative mind. But I shall always remember his reply, when he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a Gordian knot of this ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... well, so far as the run of the students is concerned, be in Arabic. Nine-tenths of the young men leave the Collegio Romano as learned as they entered it. The higher priesthood are educated at the Sapienza, where, I believe, a thorough training in theological dialectics ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Dialectics, dynamics, economics, mathematics, ethics, politics, tactics, when used as substantives, require a ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... human knowledge may be reduced to one or other of these divisions. Even law belongs partly to the history of man, partly as a science to dialectics. The twelve languages are Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... opposite side. The lawyer, however, does not always limit himself to the discovery of the truth, but often seeks to discover and bring to bear unsound but plausible arguments to refute the other side; and by his skill in dialectics he may often deliberately "make the worse appear {34} the better reason." The student of mathematics, on the other hand, does not gain in that study much practice in weighing evidence or seeking objections to an argument, for ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... influence which was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude to Schelling and his philosophy, which received more than one impulse from Herder's ideas; nor to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical system and defended them with his wonderful dialectics. But F.A. Wolf, when he points out to us in Homer the process of epic poetry; Niebuhr, in revealing to us the growth of Rome, the birth of her religious and national legends, the slow, gradual formation of her marvellous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... grounds, glorying in the venturesomeness of their faith and courage, and justifying their temper of mind and their intellectual attitude by alleging misinterpreted language of their wiser and deeper teachers. A recoil from Whately's hard and barren dialectics, a sympathy with many tender and refined natures which the movement had touched, made the leaders patient with intellectual feebleness when it was joined with real goodness and Christian temper; but this also sometimes made them less impatient than they might well have been with ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church |
