"Dialectic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: "Very ingenious, sirs, but who made all that?" ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... torture a question; take up a side, take up a case. contend, take one's stand upon, insist, lay stress on; infer &c. 480. follow from &c. (demonstration) 478. Adj. reasoning &c. v.; rationalistic; argumentative, controversial, dialectic, polemical; discursory[obs3], discursive; disputatious; Aristotelian[obs3], eristic[obs3], eristical[obs3]. debatable, controvertible. logical; relevant &c. 23. Adv. for, because, hence, whence, seeing that, since, sith[obs3], then thence ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and doctrines; though it has been much disputed which of the two is to be considered as giving the most accurate description of his opinions. As a young man he had been to a certain extent a pupil of Archelaus (the disciple of Anaxagoras), and derived his fondness for the dialectic style of argument from Zeno the Eleatic, the favourite Pupil of Parmenides. He differed, however, from all preceding philosophers in discarding and excluding wholly from his studies all the abstruse sciences, and limiting his philosophy to those practical ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... d- alternate (Dialectic Variants, Chapter III) according to locality. In Tennyson, for Denison, son of Denis, we have the opposite change. The forms assumed by Theobald are very numerous (Chapter I). Besides Dibble we have the shorter Dibb. Other variants are Dyball, Dipple, Tipple, Tidball, Tudball, and a number ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... theologian and scholastic philosopher of French birth, renowned for his dialectic ability, his learning, his passion for Heloise, and his misfortunes; made conceivability the test of credibility, and was a great ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... most enthusiastic and daring of these Mediaeval thinkers, and it is not surprising that he should have found himself at issue not only with the duller type of theologians but with his philosophical peers themselves. He was an intellectual force of the first magnitude and a master of dialectic; he was also an egotist through and through, and a man of strong passions. He would and did use his logical faculty and his mastery of dialectic to justify his own desires, whether these were for carnal satisfaction or the ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... father, Democritus devoted the whole of his inherited fortune to the culture of his mind. He travelled everywhere; visited Athens when Socrates and Plato were there, but quitted the city without making himself known. Indeed, the dialectic strife in which Socrates so much delighted, had no charm for Democritus, who held that 'the man who readily contradicts, and uses many words, is unfit to learn anything truly right.' He is said to have discovered and educated Protagoras the Sophist, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... rising that vast and subtle passion for dialectic combat, which was of his very fibre. He had almost lost the feeling that this was his own future being discussed. He saw before him in this sanguine man, whose voice and eyes had such a white-hot sound and look, the incarnation of all that he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with Plotinus the latter attained four times to ecstatic union with "the One." Plotinus combined, in unusual measure, the intellect of the metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason. His sixth Ennead, "On the Good or the One," is one of the great philosophic treatises of the world, and it sums up ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... France, gave England a pretext for rejecting the German efforts to effect an understanding between the two countries. But it is impossible to believe in the honesty of these arguments, which were recently defended, in dialectic perversion of the truth, by Sir Edward Cook in an article entitled "How Britain Strove for Peace." England's aggressive tendency is clearly shown by its above-mentioned agreements with France and Russia, which are today publici juris. Regarding that point there was no self-deception in those ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... first prepared himself for public life,[6] and progressed so far as to accept one case in court. In order to enter public life in those days it was customary to train one's self as widely as possible in literature, history, rhetoric, dialectic, and court procedure, and to attract public notice for election purposes by taking a few cases. It was not every citizen who dared enter such a career. This was the one occupation that the nobility guarded most jealously. While any foreigner or freedman ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... on this grade, of the Creative organic force or Divine energy, commenced the series of human generations. The first is a hypostatized legend, the second a metaphysical personification, the third a philosophical hypothesis. The first is an attractive heap of imaginations, the next a dialectic mass of dogmatisms, the last ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... before, the Emperor had visited the Museum and had carried on learned discussions with the most prominent of the sages and professors there, in the presence of their assembled disciples. At last a formal disputation had arisen, and the dialectic keenness and precision with which Hadrian, in the purest Attic Greek, had succeeded in driving his opponents into a corner had excited the greatest admiration. The Sovereign had quitted the famous institution ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of obols, could make black seem white, but was tolerated in this brilliant society, because he could carry on a dialogue. They used him to enliven their meetings, and pitted him in argument against Socrates, who, however, always entangled him in the meshes of his dialectic. At last came the one they expected. It was the head of the State, who would have been king had not the kingship been abolished. His appearance was majestic, but his entrance without a body-guard was like that of a simple citizen. He ruled ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Roman constitution. This is a great error. Speeches, when delivered in the midst of a popular tumult, must be pithy in order to be effective: nor was Appius such an ass as to have lost the opportunity afforded him by this dialectic display, of effectually ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... —Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (absit nomen!), Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Leonidas' and sublime as Paul's. The stormy days of the fifties and sixties gave evidence of the physical side of this quality, and his entire life, of the moral. He "feared no foe in shining armor," and rather courted than avoided a passage at arms dialectic. Eminently a man of peace, and loving the pursuits that make for it, he would see no principle of right unjustly assailed without girding himself for the conflict, and standing where ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... really have no structure. To what, then, shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... languages spoken in the region without finding any marked resemblances. The family is hence admitted provisionally. The language appears to be spoken by but a single tribe, although there is a manuscript vocabulary in the Bureau of Ethnology exhibiting certain differences which may be dialectic. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... extremely agreeable. It suggested to Frederick the sound of colliding billiard balls. His enunciation was perfect, absolutely free of a dialectic tinge. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... There are dialectic varieties in the Mythology of the Esquimaux as of the Greeks and Hindus, and, with a change of gender between Sun and Moon, the same story occurs among other tribes ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... in common with a generalization of facts. It might, however, be defined as "integral experience." Nevertheless Intuition, once attained, must find a mode of expression in well-defined concepts, for in itself it is incommunicable. Dialectic is necessary to put Intuition to the proof, necessary also in order that Intuition should break itself up into concepts and so be propagated to others. But when we use language and concepts to communicate it, we tend to make these in themselves mean something, whereas ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... identity of mind and being. He supplied Spinoza with the substance of his reasoned pantheism; Leibnitz with his theory of monadism and pre-established harmony. He laid down Hegel's doctrine of contraries, and perceived that thought was a dialectic process. The modern theory of evolution was enunciated by him in pretty plain terms. He had grasped the physical law of the conservation of energy. He solved the problem of evil by defining it to be a relative condition of imperfect development. He denied that Paradise or a Golden Age is possible ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the work be analysed, the pains with which it was built up can be traced; the powerful effect which it produced will be found due, not alone to the creative power, the imagination of the author, but also to his dialectic skill and to his critical faculty. It is all very well to talk of great works as the fruits of hot inspiration and not cold intellect. A masterpiece is the outcome of both; the one provides the material, the other shapes it. Schubert was an inspired composer, but most of his works, especially ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... the protector of palaces; the "alu" was a bull-like demon of tempest, and there were also many composite, distorted, or formless monsters which were vaguely termed "seizers" or "overthrowers", the Semitic "labashu" and "ach-chazu", the Sumerian "dimmea" and "dimme-kur". A dialectic form of "gallu" or devil was "mulla". Professor Pinches thinks it not improbable that "mulla" may be connected with the word "mula", meaning "star", and suggests that it referred to a "will-o'-the-wisp".[83] In these islands, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... that diplomatic contempt for the Senate which his colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to conceal. He performed his duties with conscientious precision. He never missed an opportunity to thrust the sharp point of his dialectic rapier through the joints of the clumsy and hide-bound senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully exposing to Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance. His conversation at such times sparkled with historical allusions, quotations in half a dozen different languages, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... spirit bloweth where it listeth: it is governed by no laws but those which its own reverence imposes: it lives in changing speculation. But in Europe it has been in double bondage to the logic of Greece and the law of Rome. India deals in images and metaphor: Greece in dialectic. The original thought of Christianity had something of this Indian quality, though more sober and less fantastic, with more limitation and less imagination. On this substratum the Greeks reared their edifices ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... been doing some of the dialogue, {211b} which seems the easiest thing in the world to do but is not. It is not easy to keep to good dialectic, and yet keep up the disjected sway of natural conversation. I talk, you see, as if I were to do some good thing: but I don't mean that. But any such trials of one's own show one the art of such dialogues as Plato's, where the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... opposition to the Foreign Enlistment Bill, and pointed to the fact that the French were now obtaining the services of that very Swiss Legion we stood so much in need of. His defence was a mere Parliamentary dialectic, accusing the clumsy way in which Ministers had introduced their Bill, but he promised to do what he could to relieve the difficulties of the country. In conclusion I showed him, under injunctions of secrecy, the letter I had received from Count Walewski, which showed to what a state of degradation ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining away this contradiction; but the old current of thought, strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention, and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest men of the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... exhibiting of | knowledge, any statement must be | taken in its full extension, it must | join things which are necessarily | related and it must be equivalent to | a definition. But these rules for | syllogistic or dialectic art in | Aristotle or Ramus become rules for | inductive invention in Bacon: and | their meaning is quite different. | With the rule of certainty and | liberty, Bacon aims at directiy | opposing the old logic, infected by | syllogistic ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... the beginning of the sixteenth century consisted of what was called the Trivium, Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The Quadrivium or Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy, was relegated to the Universities and only pursued by very few. In 1535 Henry VIII wished "laten, greken, and hebrewe to ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... Still differentiation would be largely at work. Without frequent intercourse, frequent interchange of women as the great factor in that intercourse, the tribes and bands of mankind would still go on separating, would develop dialectic and customary, if not physical and moral differences. It was no longer a case of pools perhaps, but they were still in lakes. There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With advancing civilization, with iron ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... principle, the spirit of reformations and revivals. But since every active principle must find for itself appropriate instruments, Mysticism has developed a speculative and practical system of its own. As Goethe says, it is "the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings." In this way it becomes possible to consider it as a type of religion, though it must always be remembered that in becoming such it has incorporated elements which do not belong to its inmost being.[7] As a type of religion, then, Mysticism seems to rest on the following ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Mary, are not, on the whole, successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the poet who has written, upon one hand, Guinevere and the Passing of Arthur, and upon the other the homely, dialectic monologue ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... strength of which the Court was convicting and taking the lives of innocent persons. No such piece of reasoning has come to us from that age. Its author must be acknowledged to have been an expert in dialectic subtleties, and a pure reasoner of unsurpassed acumen and force. It requires, but it will reward, the closest attention and concentration of thought in following the threads of the argument. It reaches its conclusions ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... protect or to cultivate those sciences which give to man a power over nature: thus it was that mathematics were most shamefully neglected; in physics the absurd doctrines of the Peripatetics predominated; and the name of philosophy was given to a puerile and complicated dialectic which had neither the merit of ingenious classification, nor that subtlety of argument which distinguished the school ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... in His nature, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But though their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon it, they did, nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God as one come into human life and sharing it and using it, without which there would have been in all the ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these" (Levit. 19:18; Mark 12:29-31). Thus his instinct for God and his instinct for the essential carry him to the very centre and acme of Moses' law. At the same time he can use the Old Testament in an efficient way for dialectic, when an "argumentum ad hominem" best meets the case (Mark 7:6; Luke ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... although their several coins do not pass current very generally, yet they are taken here and there by a few disciples, and throw some standard money out of the market. The want of consideration evinced in these novel vocabularies is remarkable. Whewell, whose scientific position and dialectic turn of mind may fairly qualify him to be a word-maker, seems peculiarly deficient in ear. Take, as an instance, "idiopts," an uncomfortable word, barely necessary, as the persons to whom it applies are comparatively rare, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... theory of the fixity of species? Surely it is clear that it is only in the rarest cases that false or inadequate ideas on such subjects have any tendency to shorten life or weaken health. Bishop Wilberforce was killed by a fall from his horse, not by the triumphant dialectic of Professor Huxley. Sir Richard Owen lived to a patriarchal old age, and did not disappear from the face of the earth because he still clung to an idea which the best intellect of his time had relinquished. There is nothing in the doctrine of the fixity ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... lorded not, nor rose the hectic Up to the cheek of youth; But reigned throughout their dialectic ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... atmosphere of Dublin is poisonous. Clithering, on the other hand, was officially committed to an unqualified admiration for everything south of the Boyne. I do not think that Malcolmson appreciated his dialectic advantage. His mind was running on ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... practical employment, the general outline of the classification of a critique of practical reason must be arranged in accordance with that of the speculative. We must, then, have the Elements and the Methodology of it; and in the former an Analytic as the rule of truth, and a Dialectic as the exposition and dissolution of the illusion in the judgements of practical reason. But the order in the subdivision of the Analytic will be the reverse of that in the critique of the pure speculative reason. For, in the present case, we shall commence with the principles and proceed to the ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... through opposition—extremely irascible men; like farmers. Urbanity was the last note in their gamut, the City—urbs quam dicunt Romam—the last of places in their ken. There was no engaging them in dialectic, an Athenian art which they frankly despised. If you happened to disagree with them, their answer was a sturdy Anglo-Saxon brick. If you politely asked your way to Puddlehampton, and to be directed to ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... materials—physical, mental and spiritual—we have no occasion to urge its acceptance of so-called dialect, for dialect IS in Literature, and HAS been there since the beginning of all written thought and utterance. Strictly speaking, as well as paradoxically, all verbal expression is more or less dialectic, however grammatical. While usage establishes grammar, it no less establishes so-called dialect. Therefore we may as ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... sounded all that was human in its touching variety. Love and sympathy for man as man, could alone give this knowledge and furnish this magic key to hearts in wilds unknown. No human system of mental training could ever do it. In this connection I smile somewhat at Dr. Leitner's profound German dialectic in the discussion on the paper read by McNair over the preliminary preparation in language and terms required by an explorer to do his work effectively. Where man is equipped by that instinctive faculty of accommodating himself to the men of all nations with their physical attributes and surroundings, ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... unaided exertions, balanced all France during a month. His very enemies spoke with respect of his firmness, and those who had not the courage to follow him, yet would have been ashamed not to esteem him. His eloquence, which had been dry, verbose, and dialectic, now became more elegant and more imposing. The public journals printed his speeches. "You, O people, who do not possess the means of procuring the speeches of Robespierre, I promise them to you," said the Orateur du Peuple, the Jacobin paper. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... certain, Chesterton brings out the weaknesses of the dialectic of the parson and doctor in a remarkable way; he makes us realise that there are some things we really know nothing about; if lamps turn blue suddenly it may quite well be a 'Something' that may be magic and might be God or Satan; anyhow, it cannot be explained ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the foundation of three philosophical schools: the Dialectic, the Atomic, and the Vedanta. The Dialectic school considers the principles of knowledge as entirely distinct from nature; it admits the existence of universal ideas in the human mind; it establishes the syllogistic form as the complete method of reasoning, and finally, it holds as fundamental ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... partner after some delay got through to Edinburgh, and was presently engaged in the feverish dialectic which the long-distance telephone involves. "I want to speak to Mr. Glendonan himself.... Yes, yes, Mr. Caw of Paton and Linklater.... Good afternoon.... Huntingtower. Yes, in Carrick. Not to let? But I understand it's been in the market for some months. You say you've an ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan |
