"Empiric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well-known character among the bushmen of New South Wales, and although the profession did not recognise him, and denounced him as an empiric, his skill was undoubted. Bushmen had great faith in him, and would often ride incredible distances in order to bring him to the bedside of a sick friend. He drank fearfully, but was seldom incapable of treating a patient; he would, however, sometimes be found in an obstinate mood and refuse ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... youthful hope, and when he looks back in parental solicitude. It is a question of many forms and multiplying answers. Shall there be a long, fundamental training, wide and general? or, shall it be closely professional? Shall it be predominantly classic, or scientific, or esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... their complaints, yet they listen with profound interest to the experience of fellow-sufferers, even when this experience is unprofessionally and unconnectedly told. Medical empirics understand this and profit by it. In place of the general statements of the educated practitioner of medicine, the empiric encourages the drooping hopes of his patient by narrating in detail the minute particulars of analagous cases in which his skill has ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of sophistication so cleverly disguised that to an inexperienced eye the repair is not palpable. If one goes in search of desiderata to the trade, let it be to the dealer who knows his business and charges his price, but who supplies the article, and not to the empiric, who charges a price and does not supply it, for the excellent reason (among others) that this party does not know a fine binding when he sees it—or ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... certain herbs are efficacious in certain combinations of symptoms. These plants would thus come into more frequent use and finally would obtain general recognition in the Indian materia medica. By such a process of evolution an empiric system of medicine has grown up among the Cherokees, by which they are able to treat some classes of ailments with some degree of success, although without any intelligent idea of the process involved. It must be remembered that our own medical system ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... bigoted monopolists. He, too, says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery of Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who was visited with the punishment of other heretics by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of geometry which Herr Jung of Hamburg, one of the most admirable men of his time, called 'empiric'. It makes use of conclusive experiments and proves various propositions of Euclid, but especially those which concern the equality of two figures, by cutting the one in pieces, and putting the pieces together again to make the other. In this manner, by cutting ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... not without effect. The baroness, who had her own views on the matter, was quite as ready to take the field, with as many theoretic and empiric data and recognized authorities as had been her opponent. The count one day would despatch a letter to the manor, and Baroness Katharina would send her reply the next—each determined not to remain the other's debtor. The count's epistles were dictated ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... forgotten is handed to him to be read, and while with lips stammering with fear he reads a few words, the power of the judge is loosed, the accuser is withdrawn, and death is put to flight. O marvellous virtue of an empiric verse! O saving antidote of dreadful ruin! O precious reading of the psalter, which for this alone deserves to be called the book of life! Let the laity undergo the judgment of the secular arm, that either sewn up in sacks they may be carried out to Neptune, ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... immutable; that of prudence in second causes that are transient and subordinate. What is universally true is alone necessarily true—the knowledge that rests in particulars must be accidental. The theorist disdains experience—the empiric rejects principle. The one is the pedant who read Hannibal a lecture on the art of war; the other is the carrier who knows the road between London and York better than Humboldt, but a new road is prescribed to him and his knowledge ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... place, in whose different parts several charlatans are placed, each one straining himself to attract customers by depreciating the remedies offered by his competitors. Each stand has its purchasers, who are persuaded that their empiric alone possesses the good remedies; notwithstanding the continual use which they make of them, they do not perceive that they are no better, or that they are just as sick as those who run after the charlatans ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... where a caustic had been applied by an empiric on a large white swelling of the knee, and was told, that a fluid had been discharged from the joint, which became anchylosed, and healed without loss of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... that a Scotch empiric of the seventeenth century professed the cure of those "'visseit with frenacies, madness, falling evil (epilepsy), persones distractit in their wittis, and with feirful apparitiones, etc., and utheris uncouth diseases; all done be sorcerie, incantation, devellische charmeing.' Above forty persons ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... the well-known physician and wit, was often denounced as a clever empiric. Early in 1711 he treated Swift for his dizziness. By his will, Radcliffe left most of his property to ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... "I shall be at your service, madam, when that empiric has given the patient up." And ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... that the destinies of this admirable people are in strange hands. Mr. Lincoln, honest man of nature, perhaps an empiric, doctoring with innocent juices from herbs; but some others around him seem to be quacks of the first order. I ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... himself in, when the toils of the day are over. I found out a Coffee-House in the Rue de Merinos, or Spaan Scheep Straet, as the Flemings call it, in strange likeness to our tongue, and there, over my Tobacco, made some strange Acquaintance. There was one De Suaso, an Empiric, that had writ against the English College of Physicians, and was like to have made a Fortune by his famous Nostrum for the Gout, the Sudorific Expulsive Mixture; but that Scheme had fallen through, it having been discovered that the Mixture was naught but Quicksilver and Suet, which made the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... evolution, even though it draws upon illimitable ages, can evolve what was not already present in the form of a spiritual potency. The empiric treatment of conscience as the result of social environment and culture leads inevitably back to the assumption of some rudimentary moral consciousness without which the development of a moral sense would be an impossibility. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of thought. The Saxon was both mystic and a schoolman; to him religion was all in all and dogma a large part of religion. Zwingli approached the problem of salvation from a less personal, certainly from a less agonized, and from a more legal, liberal, empiric standpoint. He felt for liberty and for the value of common action in the state. He interpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his reason under the tuition of the Bible in ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Greeks, from what I can learn, knew more of it than any people since: though the Italian painters and sculptors must have known much; far more than we. In a more scientific civilisation there will be such a science once more: but its laws, though still in the empiric stage, are not altogether forgotten by some. Little children have often a fine and clear instinct of them. Many cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clear instinct of them likewise. And some such would tell us that there is intellect in plenty ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... much as a moral equality disallows the divine right of kings. Speculators among stars, speculators among sounds and colors, are the skirmishers in front of an intellectual post, whose tread reverberates but little in their rear. Accoutred with a few empiric facts and inductive minds, they aspire to beautiful and stable theories, whence they may descend, by deductive steps, accurate even to mathematical absoluteness, to the very arcana of what has been the inexplicable. To them the true, the beautiful, must be facts, defined, realized, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... presents to us one unchanging attitude in these very refusals. "I'm going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents—and bury nothing," says Remington; and that purpose is implicit in every book that Wells has written. He is an empiric, using first this test and then that to try the phenomena of life; publishing the detail of his experiment and noting certain deductions. But while he may offer a prescription for certain symptoms, he gives ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... superior to Warburton's and Hanmer's, which were not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... consequence, as he informs me, was a frenzy of several hours, during which he fled into the neighbouring moors, in one of the wildest spots of which he chose, when he was somewhat recovered, to fix his mansion, and set up for a sort of country empiric, a character which, even in his best days, he was fond of assuming. It is remarkable, that, instead of informing me of these circumstances, that I might have had the relative of my late wife taken such care ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... study arrived, so far from being pleased to find his instructions anticipated, or welcoming such promise of future greatness,—so far from rejoicing in his pupil's proficiency, the pedagogue chafed at the insult offered to his system by this empiric antepast. He was like one who suddenly discovers that he is telling an old story where he thought to surprise with a novelty; or like one who undertakes to fill a lamp, which, being (unknown to him) ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... less cockneyfied, and its fine and Alpine air would be much better for you, and I believe for Mrs. Morley, than the atmosphere of the melancholy main, the effects of which on the human constitution have been so well expounded by that eminent empiric, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... jewellers in small quantities at a time. But Madame de la Motte insisted that she had entrusted it to Cagliostro, who had seized and taken it to pieces, to "swell the treasures of his immense unequalled fortune." She spoke of him as "an empiric, a mean alchymist, a dreamer on the philosopher's stone, a false prophet, a profaner of the true worship, the self-dubbed Count Cagliostro!" She further said that he originally conceived the project of ruining the Cardinal de Rohan; that he persuaded ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... inquiry. Now what inquiry can be so useful as that which hath for its object the saving the lives of men? And when shall we find one more successful than that before us? Here are no vain boastings of the empiric, nor ingenious and delusive theories of the dogmatist; but a concise, an artless, and an incontested relation of the means, by which, under the Divine favour, Captain Cook, with a company of an hundred and eighteen men*, performed a voyage of three years and eighteen days, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... was an empiric, who had offices at Boston and Philadelphia, where he sold quack medicines of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... impatient to shelve a great form, like vain women afraid of the fashion. It is part of our constant rage for novelty. The shallower artist ever tinkered with new devices,—to some effects, in truth. Such is the empiric course of art that what is born of vanity may ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp |
