"Deductive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dark-green cloth, lettered at the side, and published in 1841. They were upon the oddest subjects: such as, Ought Children to learn Rules before Reasons? The Higher Mathematics and Materialism. Ought We to tell Those Whom We love what We think about Them? Deductive Reasoning in Politics. What Troubles ought We to Make Known and What ought We to Keep Secret: Courage as a ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... attainment of Truth! Believe it if you can! It appears that long, long ago, in the night of Time, there lived a Turkish philosopher (or Hindoo possibly) called Aries Tottle. This person introduced, or at all events propagated what was termed the deductive or a priori mode of investigation. He started with what he maintained to be axioms or "self-evident truths," and thence proceeded "logically" to results. His greatest disciples were one Neuclid, and one Cant. Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... remind you that the absolute is useless for deductive purposes. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... years, represented only a section of the country, that section was alone bound by its measures. The moment it is admitted that the national legislature, as now constituted, is an incomplete body, and that it needs Southern "loyal men" to make its laws operative over the South, a whole brood of deductive reasoners will spring up in that region, eager to carry the principle out to its remotest logical consequences. After two or three of those cotton crops on which some persons rely so much to make the South contented have given it the requisite leisure to follow long trains of reasoning, it will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Suppose someone had come to Sherlock Holmes and said, 'Mr. Holmes, here's a case for you. When is my wife's birthday?' Wouldn't that have given Sherlock a jolt? However, I know enough about the game to understand that a fellow can't shoot off his deductive theories unless you start him with a clue, so rouse yourself out of that pop-eyed trance and come across with two or three. For instance, can't you remember the last time she had a birthday? What sort of weather was it? That ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... to that school. It all forms a chain of very logical deductions and proffers itself with a certain air of likelihood which we should be glad to find in a host of evolutionist arguments put forward as irrefutable. Well, I will make a present of my deductive views, without regret, to whoever cares to have them: I don't believe one word of them; and I confess my profound ignorance of the origin of the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... other books, which I feel bound to mention with special emphasis, are Hansel's edition of Aldrich and McCosh's Laws of Discursive Thought. If there be added to the foregoing Watts's Logic, Thomson's Outlines of the Laws of Thought, Bain's Deductive Logic, Jevons's Studies in Deductive Logic and Principles of Science, Bradley's Principles of Logic, Abbott's Elements of Logic, Walker's edition of Murray, Ray's Text-book of Deductive Logic, and Weatherley's Rudiments of Logic, I think the list will be exhausted of modern works from which I ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... Lucretius' companion. This habit was apparently a composite product. The ingredients are the capacity for wonder that we find in some great poets like Wordsworth and Plato, a genius for noting details, bred in him as in Lucretius by long occupation with deductive methods of philosophy,—scientific pursuits have thus enriched modern poetry also—and a sure aesthetic sense. This power of observation has been overlooked by many of Vergil's commentators. Conington, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... path it should, from observation and calculation, be following. If this were the case, from the amount of deflection it was mathematically calculated, prior to any further observation, that the supposed planet should appear at a certain point in space. It was by this deductive elaboration that the planet Neptune was discovered. It was figured out deductively that a planet deflecting the path of the planet Uranus by just so-and-so much should be found at just such and such a particular point in the heavens. When the telescopes were turned in that direction, the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... or near the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford, then residing with his uncle in the House ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Deductive reasoning is the method of demonstrating the truth of a particular statement by showing that some general principle, which has previously been established or which is admitted to be true, applies to it. A stranger on coming to the United States might ask whether our postal system ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... fish, like all other natural objects, were studied by the ancients only to pet or to eat. All their views of Nature were essentially selfish; none were disinterested, reverential, deductive, or scientific. Nature ministered only to their appetites, in her various kinds of food,—to their service, in her beasts of burden,—or to their childish or ferocious amusement, with talking birds, as the starling, with pet fish, or with pugnacious wild beasts. There was no higher ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... but he had not the same fondness for abstract reasoning from mental premises. His starting-point was always the external fact, and he regarded ideas as possessing a sort of objective reality. His homage was paid to nature and the five senses; Schiller's to the deductive reason. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... knew better than Heldon Foyle the danger of jumping to conclusions. Inferences, however clever, however sound they may seem when they are drawn, are apt to lead one astray. The detective who habitually used the deductive method would spend a great deal of his time exploring blind alleys. Yet Foyle, with the unostentatious Maxwell at his right hand, hurried in the direction of Berkeley Square with a hope that his theory might not ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... released under nominal bond and attended by certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county building to his home on Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of deductive reasoning. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... that we have studied it physiologically and psychologically and culture-logically, as you have been doing in England. Theologies are a little beyond our ken, and we leave it to the old country to discover, by a harmonious combination of deductive and inductive teachings, what education really is. Our educational crisis has been merely legislative and administrative; but it is no small transformation for us to have emerged from the chrysalis state of clerical and private-venture instruction into the full butterflydom ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Once more Kennedy's reasoning seemed to be leading into a maze of considerations beyond me. How could the deductive method produce results in a ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... their own sake, no doubt; then, perhaps still more, from another point of view, for community's sake. Leaving the rest to the sentimentalists, we present freedom as sufficient in its scientific aspect, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and passionless ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... case of nearly all deductive reasoning the handwriting expert becomes sensitive to slight suggestions. If called upon, as he sometimes is, to explain to others how and why one of these slight and almost imperceptible signs fit in with his theory, he fails. Therefore the cautious ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... that even in a minor instance of deductive reasoning, such as this, the man who smells rather than the man who smokes tobacco solves the ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... fool, Fandor; far from it, but if in many circumstances you reason and argue with considerable aptness, I grant you far less deductive faculty. That does not seem to ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... very boyishness which was his greatest asset. He had a way of stepping into a case before the principals knew he was there, and of solving it in a manner which savored not at all of flamboyance. A quiet man was Carroll, and one whose deductive powers Eric Leverage ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... to the foundations of scientific certainty, but, in his 'Principes de Philosophie,' indicated where the goal of physical science really lay. However, Descartes was an eminent mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to overestimate the value of deductive reasoning from general principles, as much as Bacon had underestimated it. The progress of physical science has been effected neither by Baconians nor by Cartesians, as such, but by men like Galileo and Harvey, Boyle and Newton, who would have done their work just as well if neither Bacon nor Descartes ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... propositions except Professor Giblet, who accepted all three saving and excepting the term "synthetical" as applied to Rabelais' mind. "For," said he, "you must not be so deceived by an early use of the Inducto-Deductive method as to believe that a sixteenth-century man could be, in any true sense, synthetical." And this judgment the Professor emphasized by raising his voice suddenly by one octave. His position and that of Mrs. Whirtle ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... know the Tenant came up to me, very respectfully, and said, 'I hope you don't think, sir, that I was presumptuous in trying to display my humble deductive abilities to you.'" ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... sensation, to the exclusion of any other principle, that, in short, everything has its source in sensation: man is nothing but what he has acquired.—Translator's Note.) My twenty-year-old mind, full of faith in syllogisms, loved to follow the deductive jugglery of the abbe-philosopher: I saw, or seemed to see, the statue take life in that action of the nostrils, acquiring attention, memory, judgment and all the psychological paraphernalia, even as still waters are aroused and rippled by the impact of a grain of sand. I recovered ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... (Mrs. Oldcastle was petite and softly rounded in figure; I am tall and inclined in these days to a stooping, scraggy kind of gauntness) a most delightful companion, admirably well-informed, vivacious, and unusually gifted in the matter of deductive powers and the sense of humour. Also, that (whatever the ship's chatterboxes might say) there had been nothing in the faintest degree compromising in our relations ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... him standing before the fire, with that look upon his face which I had seen only once or twice in our acquaintance—a look which I may call an absolute concatenation of inductive and deductive ratiocination—from which all that was human, tender, or sympathetic was absolutely discharged. He was simply an icy algebraic symbol! Indeed, his whole being was concentrated to that extent that his clothes fitted ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... entirely arbitrary. Apparently this "young god" is an invention of Brinton. The purely inductive and descriptive study of the manuscripts does not prove the existence of such a personage, and we must decline to admit him as the result of deductive reasoning. In this so-called "young god", we miss, first of all, a characteristic mark, a distinct peculiarity such as belongs to all the figures of gods in the manuscripts without exception and by which he could be recognized. Except his so-called youthfulness, ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... pride in order to discuss with Rolfe the enlistment of the services of Crewe. Rolfe was no less indignant than his chief at the intrusion of an outsider into their sphere. Crewe was an exponent of the deductive school of crime investigation, and had first achieved fame over the Abbindon case some years ago, when he had succeeded in restoring the kidnapped heir of the Abbindon estates after the police had failed to trace the missing child. In detective ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... the universe. Theology is simply the necessary result of human minds turned to the consideration of the Christian facts. But it makes all the difference which end you start from, the facts or the theory: whether your method is a posteriori or a priori; inductive or deductive; scientific or obscurantist. And Christianity follows the scientific method of starting with the facts. In this lies the justification of its claim to be a religion at once universal and life-giving. It is universal ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... deductive powers were far from perfect. They saw in Jan a leader who could not hide the soreness and stiffness caused by his many wounds. They, for their part, were feeling rather like indiscreet workmen after a public holiday that has been too recklessly enjoyed. They had no ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Bridgewater Treatise, p. 334.)—Scarcely less acute is the remark which the late excellent Hugh James Rose has somewhere left on record, concerning the chapter wherein the preceding remark occurs,—That the world would not easily forgive Dr. Whewell for those two chapters on "Inductive" and "Deductive Habits." ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... among Mendelians and mutationists to overestimate the importance of experiments in comparison with reasoning, either inductive or deductive. Bateson, however, has admitted that Mendelian experiments and observations on mutation have not solved the problem of adaptation. It seems to be demanded, nevertheless, that characters must be produced experimentally and then inherited before the hereditary influence of external stimuli ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... 177. Deductive Reasoning.—When once a general principle has been established, we may demonstrate the truth of a specific proposition by showing that the general principle applies to it. We see a gold ring and say, "This ring is valuable," because we believe the general ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... interfere with the laws of gravitation. Not that the political economist, or any man, can be true to his own fallacy. He must needs try his hand at the synthetic method though he forbids it to the rest of the world: but the only deductive hint which he has as yet given to mankind is, quaintly enough, the most unnatural "eidolon specus" which ever entered the head of a dehumanised pedant—namely, that once famous "Preventive Check," which, if a nation did ever apply it—as ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... said to possess souls—untrustworthy things beyond the reach of sociologists. The inductive method—reasoning from the particular to the general—though it lead to a fine crop of errors, should at least help to counterbalance the psychological superficiality of the deductive method; to counterbalance, for example, the nonsense of those well-meaning persons who go routing about among the poor in search of evil, and suppose that they can chain it up with little laws. Chained ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... "Nowhere for deductive certainty. Nor, if the things themselves are not worth remembering, or worthy of influencing us, is there any good in enquiring concerning them? Shall I mind a thing that is not worth minding, because it came to me in a dream, or was told me by a ghost? It ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... particulars, to the tendencies of causes considered singly, and then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... to make, but who, after a moment, was convinced that the guard had given him the title merely out of politeness. The guard placed the traps inside of one of the many vehicles stationed at the street exit of the terminus. He was an intelligent and deductive servant. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... wickedness or lunacy can resist the evidence that has convinced a vast majority. By arithmetical calculation the chances that twelve men are wrong and twelve thousand [11] right, on a matter of inductive or deductive proof, are found to amount to what must be taken for practical certainty; and when the twelve still hold out, they are regarded as madmen or knaves, and treated accordingly by their fellows. If it be thought desirable to invoke a legal settlement of the issue, a council of all the overseers ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... century failed to destroy this illiberality owing to the method of the Scotch philosophers. The school which arose was in reaction against the dominant theological spirit; but its method was deductive not inductive. Now, the inductive method, which ascends from experience to theory is anti-theological. The deductive reasons down from theories whose validity is assumed; it is the method of theology itself. In Scotland the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... combination of the vertebrate and the mollusc, so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had not the family been amongst the commonest, from the earliest geological epochs) it would have seemed, to man's deductive intellect, a form almost as impossible as the mermaid, far more impossible than the sea- serpent. These, and perhaps a few handsome sea-slugs and bivalve shells, you will be pretty sure to find: perhaps a ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... my dear Major, as far as information goes. If I did not use these arguments before, it was because it seemed to me an impertinence to offer what, after all, are no more than the conclusions of my own constructive and deductive reasoning to one so well versed in strategy ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... of the data available in geology tend in themselves toward generalizations in teaching—toward the deductive rather than the inductive method. A certain amount of generalization is desirable, but its over-emphasis develops bad habits of mind on the part of the student, and requires radical readjustment of his ideas in subsequent field ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... is that of a strict science, such as Geometry, or deductive; the method of Physics, at least on starting, is that of an empirical pursuit, or inductive. This peculiarity on either side arises from the nature of the case. In Physics a vast and omnigenous mass of information lies ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... the human sleuth all right, all right! It's a home-run every time when you get your deductive theories unlimbered. Yes, George; the stage it is. I'm an actorine—one of the pony ballet in The Island of Girls at the Melody. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... consequently, natural selection is the only possible cause of modification, whether adaptive or non-adaptive. Here again, therefore, we must observe that none of these sweeping generalizations can possibly be justified by deductive reasoning from the theory of natural selection itself. Any attempt at such deductive reasoning must necessarily end in circular reasoning, as I shall likewise show in the second volume, where this whole "question of utility" will be thoroughly ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... first Essay on "The Economic Basis of Socialism," and also a second, a paper read to the British Association in September, 1888, on the "Transition to Social Democracy." His characteristic style retains its charm, although the abstract and purely deductive economic analysis on which he relied no longer commends itself to the modern school of thought. Sidney Webb's "Historic Basis" is as readable as ever, except where he quotes at length political programmes long forgotten, and recounts the achievements of municipal socialism with ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... sometimes in recovering articles or in spotting criminals guilty of murder and so on, but at other times you're simply playing to blind, dumb luck, only your vanity is so enormous that you won't admit it. You want everybody to believe that you dope out all your problems with that wonderful deductive reasoning power that you get from injecting 'coke' into your arm, and sitting still with a pipe in your mouth! 'Intuition,' my eye! You might be able to tell that to Barney Letstrayed, but you can't tell ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... the result of a theoretical formulation, but a situation forced upon us by the logic of events. It is as logical, however, and as irrevocable, as tho produced by deductive reasoning. An explanation of a statement made earlier in the paper as to the relative teaching abilities of elementary, secondary, and higher teachers, can now be seen in the periods of development ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... in the shape of a cloud, the pitch of a thrush's note, the nuance of a sea-shell you would find, had you only insight enough, inductive and deductive cunning enough, not only a meaning, but, I am convinced, a quite endless significance. Undoubtedly, in a human document of this kind, there is a meaning; and I may say at once that this meaning is entirely ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... founder of the deductive method, Des Cartes still proudly reigns to the present day, although some of his conclusions have been over-turned, and others of his thinkings have been carried to conclusions which he never dared to dream of. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... point of view, they differed from the philosophers in two very important points. They did not believe that society was of human institution, and therefore they did not believe that there could be any deductive science of society based simply on man's nature. Moreover, they held that inequality of condition was one of its immutable features, immutable because it is a consequence of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of dealing with transformations so many-sided as those which all existences have undergone, or are undergoing, is such as to make a complete and deductive interpretation almost hopeless. So to grasp the total process of redistribution of matter and motion as to see simultaneously its several necessary results in their actual interdependence is scarcely ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... knowledge he acquires. He is taught elementary mathematics, that he may understand all those relations of number and form, upon which the transactions of men, associated in complicated societies, are built, and that he may have some practice in deductive reasoning. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... theory of Coral-reefs which was begun in a more "deductive spirit" than any of his other work, for in 1834 or 1835 it "was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral-reef." ("L.L." I. page 70.) The final chapter in Lyell's second volume of the "Principles" was devoted to the subject ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... progress might march to fulfill her splendid destiny. Luther was the iconoclast whose giant strokes demolished the castle doors of Romish superstition, and broke to fragments the images of Mariolatry. The practical induction of Bacon, Earl of Verulam, was the death-warrant of the fruitless deductive philosophy which had culminated in the vagaries of Scholasticism. The Declaration of Independence and the Federation of the States were the iconoclast which slew the phantom of the divine necessity of kings. It is thus evident that iconoclasm abounds, and there will be no marvel if ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... definitely assured. Lacking imagination and the subtler senses of criminology, Captain Cronin had built up a reputation for success and honesty in every assignment by bravery, persistence, and as in this case, the ability to cover his own deductive weakness by employing the brains ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... "You see I'm going to imbibe my information by the deductive rather than the excavative process," he ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... him, and went on with hardly a moment's interruption. 'I am a student,' he said, 'of the deductive method of reasoning, and I begin with the a priori assumption that E. W. Smith could not die. I should hold the same belief even if I believed in Purgatory.' (Dunbar pronounced the word with an incalculable number of r's in it, and it came ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... two questions I saw his incongruity of subject-matter and expression.' My economics taught me the 'law of supply and demand.' 'Analytical research of original authorities' taught me where the demand was. There was only the problem of a cause to stimulate it. Through deductive logic' and 'psychology' I got the cause that would appeal, and the effect worked out in an increased demand which we were ready to supply—just like ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... once, "All men are by nature born free and unequal." I stick to it still; it's the truth. They say it takes three generations to make a gentleman; nonsense utterly; it takes at least a dozen. You can't work out the common fibre in such a ridiculous hurry. That results as a simple piece of deductive reasoning from all modern theories ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... was not the vacillating, veering sheriff who had spent nearly four days accepting the hints of a detective or sitting, chameleon-minded, at the feet of a designing woman. Here was an impressive and self-appreciative gentleman, one who delighted in his own deductive powers and relished ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... will lead the pupil, to the higher, wider generalizations of thought, which belong to the domain of pure reason. In the work of classification, by detecting differences, a knowledge of the inductive process is gained. Similarly, by detecting likenesses, a knowledge of deductive reasoning is acquired. ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the science that had been taught him. But in this society he met young men—and older men too, for several of the Dons were members—who were rationalists, materialists, and definitely sceptical. It dawned on his mind for the first time that, while all other sciences were of a deductive kind, endeavouring to approach principles from the observation and classification of phenomena, from the scrutiny of evidence, that theology was a science based on intuitions, and dependent on assumptions which it was impossible to test scientifically. The first effect of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Catholic discipline on points of sex-relation that perhaps weakens a man's instinctive confidence in women. Evil and its varieties, in this field, are pressed upon his thoughts perpetually with a scholastic fulness so complete, a deductive frankness so compelling, that nothing stands against the process. He sees corruption everywhere—dreads it everywhere. There is no part of its empire, or its action, that his imagination is allowed to leave in shadow. It is the confessional that works. The devout Catholic sees all the world sub ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... while my eyes still could see typed on the white paper whole sentences and paragraphs that I could read again and marvel at ere the vision faded. In passing, I call attention to the fact that at the time I noted that the process of reasoning employed in these dream speeches was invariably deductive. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... deal of time on the roof. They had not many books to pass the slow hours, though Dr. Angus sent two every week. Louis began to lecture her on medicine; he really knew extraordinarily well what he had learnt: he was an excellent teacher of facts, but he had not one iota of deductive thought in his teaching and, like Andrew Lashcairn, was remarkably impatient if she did not understand or, understanding, ventured to express an opinion of her own about anything. They had many glamorous nights on the roof, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... bouts during which rules, logic and technicalities engross us, followed by others in which the unwritten and unwritable common sense of grace defies and over-rides the law. That is to say, we have our inductive fits and our deductive fits, our arrangements according to the letter and according to the spirit, our conclusions drawn from logic secundum artem and from absurdity and the character of the arguer. This heterogeneous mass of considerations forms the mental pabulum with which we feed our minds. How that ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... clear conviction that scientific investigation is not, as many people seem to suppose, some kind of modern black art. I say that you might easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the "Baconian philosophy." I do protest that, of the vast number of cants in this world, there are none, to my mind, so contemptible as the pseudoscientific cant which is talked about ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... escaped them. Every redundancy of expression was freighted with meaning, every repetition was made to give birth to new truth. Some of the inferences were logical and natural, some artificial and far-fetched, but all ingenious. Sometimes the method was inductive and sometimes deductive. That is, occasionally a needed law was promulgated by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and then its authority sought in the Scripture, or the Scripture would be sought in the first instance to ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... at the removal of a foreign body that never was present. 9. Laryngeal symptoms may be due to acute or chronic laryngitis, diphtheria, pertussis, infective laryngotracheitis, and many other diseases. 10. Deductive decisions are dangerous. 11. If the roentgenray is negative, laryngoscopy (direct in children, indirect in adults) without anesthesia, general or local, is the only way to make a laryngeal diagnosis. 12. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... of this argument—that which is directed against the deductive philosophy of the Unconditioned—Mr. Mill manifests the same want of acquaintance with its meanings, and with the previous history of the question; which he had before exhibited in his attack on Sir W. Hamilton. He begins by finding fault with the definition ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... local citizenry, who marveled at his deductive skill, he advanced against Kelly's barn in the outskirts of Berryville. Here, perceiving evidences of occupation, he demanded admittance and on being ignored he forced an entrance and courageously arrested two young fellows ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... never got out of his deductive head that some day she would learn to love him. Had he known the temptation, the despair that was hers, he would not have been so quietly deliberate. But she had never told him. In fact, he had loved her from a distance all his life in his quiet way, though now, by her decree, they were ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr. Mill's admirable chapter "On the Deductive Method," that there are multitudes of scientific inquiries in which the method of pure induction helps the investigator ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... potentiel dans l'explication de la nature des choses. Il s'est mepris aussi sur les caracteres de la methode scolastique de connaitre la constitution intime du monde experimental; il croit cette methode exclusivement deductive." ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... he continued, sitting down in the rocking-chair, "that the cares of medical practice have not entirely obliterated the interest which you used to take in our little deductive problems." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... perceived that the function of thought is to fix static terms and reveal eternal relations, have inadvertently transferred to the living act what is true only of its ideal object; and they have expected to find in the process, treated psychologically, that luminous deductive clearness which belongs to the ideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible, however, lies at the periphery of experience, the surd at its core; and intelligence is but one centrifugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought must execute a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the modern sciences. These are the men who brought new worlds to our knowledge and new methods to our use. That the sun does not move about the earth, that the earth is but a speck in space, that heaven cannot be above nor hell beneath, these are thoughts which have consequences. Instead of the old deductive method, that of the mediaeval Aristotelianism, which had been worse than fruitless in the study of nature, men now set out with a great enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws. Modern optics, acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process ; for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science. As soon as a science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... to construct a deductive economic science upon a piece-meal basis by framing special and separate theories of wages, rent, value, the functions of money, and so forth, are now recognised to be in large measure failures precisely because ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... element is understanding (Verstand). It may be inductive—i.e., inclining toward the collection of facts in order to draw generalizations from them—or deductive, taking general concepts and laws to ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... spirit existed in geometers and Encyclopaedists; at once too reasonable and too little reasonable; too precise and scientific and too vague; too rigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on the other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the deductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate and complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... and Dr. Currie says in his letters, that when a laborer and his wife came to consult him, the man always got all the information from the wife. Buckle illustrates this at some length, and points out that a woman's mind is by its nature deductive and quick; a man's mind, inductive and slow; that each has its value, and that science ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... for the existence and substance of nature. It gave little consideration to man in himself, and said little of the supernatural. Everything was speculative in nature, hypothetical in proposition, and deductive in argument. The Greek mind, departing from its dependence upon mythology, began boldly to assert its ability to find out nature, but ended in a scepticism as to its power to ascertain certainty. There was a final determination as to the distinction ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... to the fact that he assumed nothing; but merely ran down each clew quickly yet painstakingly until he had a foundation of fact upon which to operate. His theory was that the simplest way is always the best way and so he never befogged the main issue with any elaborate system of deductive reasoning based on guesswork. Burton never guessed. He assumed that it was his business to KNOW, nor was he on any case long before he did know. He was employed now to find Abigail Prim. Each of the several crimes committed the previous night might or might not ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her aunt, with an air of deductive reasoning from the premises, "the advantage of having a bonnet on, even if it's only a make-believe. I don't believe a soul knew it. All those Americans had hats. You were the only American girl there with a bonnet. I'm sure that it had more than half to do with Lady ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... conceived of as being otherwise than as they are, and to proceed from them, by equally irresistible Inferences, to conclusions which are, from the nature of the human mind, inevitable. It is in the Mathematics, in which the Deductive Method is rightly operative, that this kind of Proof—Demonstration in the strict sense of the term—prevails. The various branches of Mathematics have therefore been appropriately denominated the Exact Sciences, in contradistinction from ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. The mass of a system attracts the young and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people are very dubious about it. They are ready to receive hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever welcome. But a large book of deductive philosophy is much to be suspected. No doubt the deductions may be right; in most writers they are so; but where did the premises come from? Who is sure that they are the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of the matter in hand? Who is not almost sure beforehand that they will contain a strange ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... would seem evident, from the Argument of the story in hand, that Nicolas de Caen attributes a large part of this mysterious business to the co-operancy of Isabel of Valois, King Richard's eleven year old wife. And (should one have a taste for the deductive) the foregoing name of Orvendile, when compared with "THE STORY OF THE SCABBARD," would certainly hint that Owain Glyndwyr had a finger ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... ideal annotator. He was neither inductive nor deductive; he had no axe to grind. His talent consisted in an ant—like hiving faculty. He was acquisitive of information for a set purpose—to bring the ANTIQUITIES up to date. Whatever failed to fit in with this programme, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 2. DEDUCTIVE REASONING. Deductive reasoning is the method of demonstrating the truth of a particular statement by showing that some general principle, which has previously been established or which is admitted to be true, applies to it. A stranger on coming to the United States ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... character of the book, as consisting of a number of expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... had acquired a close acquaintance with all of it except the interior of the huge mattress itself, and here, he finally concluded, must of necessity be the solution. The surface of the mattress he knew to be unbroken; nevertheless the book was there. He had recently stimulated his deductive powers with a narrative of French journalistic sagacity in a similar case; and he applied French reasoning. The ledger existed. It was somewhere in the room. He had searched everything except the interior of the mattress. The ledger was in ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... of suicide—the first is only the last and acute stage of a long illness, and this kind belongs distinctly to pathology; the second is the suicide of despair; and the third the suicide based on logical argument. Despair and deductive reasoning had brought Lucien to this pass, but both varieties are curable; it is only the pathological suicide that is inevitable. Not infrequently you find all three causes combined, as in the case ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... senses; moral judgments result from an internal moral sense. The external senses give us our intellectual first principles; the moral sense our moral first principles. He is at pains to exemplify the deductive process in morals. It is a question of moral reasoning, Ought a man to have only one wife? The reasons are, the greater good of the family, and of society in general; but no reason can be given why we should prefer greater ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... listening to these explanations. He had formed an opinion that had not much foundation, but he would not admit that Caesar, by reasoning, could arrive at the glimmering of an inductive and deductive method, where others saw ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... into ordinary education do not discipline the mind in this way. Mathematical training is almost purely deductive. The mathematician starts with a few simple propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... vast number of properties of objects, and his inductions will not be completed, I fear, for ages to come; but when they are, his science will be as deductive and as exact as ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... Raleigh, embarking on his History of the World, and in Bacon, assuming all knowledge to be his province, while affirming and formulating the principles of Inductive Reasoning in substitution for the Deductive methods by which the Schools had lived for centuries. Wherever the critic turns his glance, he can find no sign of the Decadent. In every field of life, in politics, in war, in religion, in letters, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... implicitly, the tertium quid, or the basis of classification—the class-type, to which both terms are referred—that is, the proposition secondarily asserts an analysis. According to the first condition we have the inductive process; according to the second we have the deductive process. A complete movement of idea from its purely physical symbolization to its metaphysical interpretation, ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... one term of our journey to the other. Popularly, no doubt, it is permissible to speak of the soil as a "producer," just as we may talk of the daily movement of the sun. But, as I have elsewhere remarked, propositions which are to bear any deductive strain that may be put upon them must run the risk of [157] seeming pedantic, rather than that of being inaccurate. And the statement that land, in the sense of cultivable soil, is a producer, or even ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the Church depended for success upon a public opinion which was hard to move. Not because the average layman was critical or anti-clerical, but because he was illogical and unimaginative, he remained cold to any programme of reform which could only be justified by long trains of deductive reasoning; his natural impulse was against violent innovations, and he felt rather than argued that the State, as the ultimate guarantee of social order, must be maintained even at some cost of theological consistency. Until he could be convinced that high moral issues and his ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... to speak, because I know no science, and have not even taught it, as Mr. Arthur Sidgwick said. I do not really know what constitutes greatness in science. I suppose that the great man of science is the man who to a power of endlessly patient investigation joins a splendid imaginative, or perhaps deductive power, like Newton or Darwin. But we who stand at the threshold of the scientific era are perhaps too near the light, and too much dazzled by the results of scientific discovery to say who is great and who is not great. I have met several distinguished men of science, and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cannon-shot of unparleying fact. What authority had the boundary man or I to dogmatise on the Coming Australian? Just the same authority as Marcus Clarke, or Trollope, or Froude, or Francis Adams—and that is exactly none. Deductive reasoning of this kind is seldom safe. Who, for instance, could have deduced, from certain subtly interlaced conditions of food, atmosphere, association, and what not, the development of those silky honours which grace the upper ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... realisation of the presence of God, is as distinct from scholasticism as empiricism is from rationalism, or "tough-minded" philosophy (to use JAMES' happy phrase) is from "tender-minded". But no philosophy can be absolutely and purely deductive. It must start from certain empirically determined facts. A man might be an extreme empiricist in religion (i.e. a mystic), and yet might attempt to deduce all other forms of knowledge from the results of his religious experiences, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... discipline, arises from a prior or pre-existent knowledge. This is evident, if we survey them all; for both mathematical sciences, and also each of the arts, are obtained in this manner. The same holds true in the case of reasonings, whether through [deductive] Syllogism or through Induction, for both accomplish the instruction they afford from information previously known—the former (syllogistic reasoning) receiving it, as it were, from the traditions of the intelligent, the latter (inductive ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... great interest. I am neither capable nor willing to criticize those who, with the deductive ability of such men as Sir Oliver Lodge, are brave enough and unselfish enough to devote their talents to pioneering in a field that certainly needs and merits more scientific investigation, seeing that it has possibilities of ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... a brief discussion of the subject with the hope that it will furnish a basis for a short study; it can be reenforced by a few weeks on such a manual as Jevons's "Primer of Logic," or Bode's "Outline of Logic" if there is time. Whatever be one's view of the positive value of deductive logic, there can be no doubt that every student should have some knowledge of the canons of inductive logic, and that a study of propositions and syllogisms is a mighty sharpener of the discrimination for the real ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... hypotheses can claim the same value, for the same reasons. In formulating them we are acting on the same inductive and deductive methods, and with almost equal confidence, as the geologist. We hold them to be correct, and claim the status of "biological theories" for them, because we cannot understand the nature and origin of man and the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... the stature it attains, its methods are through external appeals to the soul—influences from without. Its common theology steadily refused for eighteen hundred years to credit the union of the divine with the human in the soul of mankind. Its deductive intellect is blind to truth till her presence is proved by facts—as if we would hale an archangel, with the shining light of the upper world yet flowing adown him, before the police magistrate, and swear the butchers and the newsboys on the question of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... long slope of the hill. The wind up there blew him a welcome, and the sting and taste of dust were sweet. His steps was swift. And then again he loitered, with keen, roving glance studying the lay of the ground. Neale's was the deductive method of arriving at conclusions. Today he was inspired. And at length there blazed suddenly his solution to ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... approximately true, i.e. are only valid in the absence of counteracting agencies. From this view of the nature of the science, it follows at once that the method to be pursued must be that called by Mill the physical or concrete deductive, which starts from certain known causes, investigates their consequences and verifies or tests the result by comparison with facts of experience. It may, perhaps, be thought that Cairnes gives too little attention to the effects of the organism of society ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... suffer from fatal flaws. They are deductive instead of inductive; they are a defensio sententiarum instead of an investigatio veri; they assume the final truth as known, and go not forth to seek it. They are therefore "teleologic," that ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... elements of the conception expressed in the sentence and the paragraph should be arranged in strict correspondence with an inductive or a deductive progression. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... which has been called Science,—the Mathematics, which we dismiss for the instant, excepted,—took place under the operation of a Method, which, ordinarily confounded with the true Deductive one, is now better known among rigorous Scientists as the Hypothetical or Anticipative Method. This has two modes of expression, one of which consists in the assumption of Laws or Principles, which have not been adequately verified, or in the erection of fanciful hypotheses, as the starting ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various |
