"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Scotland, Mrs. Byron, with the hope of having his lameness removed, placed her son under the care of a person, who professed the cure of such cases, at Nottingham. The name of this man, who appears to have been a mere empirical pretender, was Lavender; and the manner in which he is said to have proceeded was by first rubbing the foot over, for a considerable time, with handsful of oil, and then twisting the limb forcibly round, and screwing it up in a wooden machine. That the boy might not ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... prospected; these sandy and quartzose beds are natural conduits and sluice-boxes. But the search for "tailings" is completely different from that of gold-veins, and requires especial practice. The process, indeed, may be called purely empirical. It is not taught in Jermyn Street, nor by the Ecole des Mines. In this matter theory must bow to "rule of thumb:" the caprices of alluvium are various and curious enough to baffle every attempt at scientific induction. Thus ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... terminology, her range of thought and study gradually stretched out into a broader, grander cycle, embracing, as she grew older, the application of those great principles that underlie modern science and crop out in ever-varying phenomena and empirical classifications. Edna's tutor seemed impressed with the fallacy of the popular system of acquiring one branch of learning at a time, locking it away as in drawers of rubbish, never to be opened, where it moulders in shapeless ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... terminology of this theory that it should be stated frankly, at the start, that the words Sulphite and Bromide, and their derivatives, sulphitic and bromidic, are themselves so sulphitic that they are not susceptible of explanation. In a word, they are empirical, although, accidentally it might seem, they do appeal and convince the most skeptical. I myself balked, at first, at these inconsequent names. I would have suggested the terms "Gothic" and "Classic" to describe the fundamental ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... inherently unsuitable for private enterprise. He based this doctrine partly on natural rights grounds, partly on the belief that there was a pervasive natural and self-operating harmony, providentially established, between individual interest and the interest of the community, partly on the empirical ground that government was generally inefficient, ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Magic also remained half empirical and half religious. Like our physics, it was based on observation, it proclaimed the constancy of the laws of nature, and sought to conquer the latent energies of the material world in order to bring them under the dominion of man's will. But at the same time it recognized, in the powers ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... knowledge of its rules. They have not an idea of the laws of nature; if they want to cure a man, they have no conception at all of true scientific remedies. If they try anything they must try it upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in this bare, empirical way. What could be more improbable—at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason—than that some mineral springs should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral springs make wounds ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... sufficient to fit the future physicians to guide their patients in the selection, combination and preparation of food. Dietetics should be the principal subject of study. It should be approached both from the scientific and from the empirical side. It is not a rigid subject, but one which can be treated in a very elastic way. The scientific part is important, but the practical part, which is the art, is vastly more important. A part of the art of feeding and fasting is scientific, for we get the same ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... creature;—that it is a perfection which, not indeed in my intellect, but yet in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that 'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise by ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... repudiate any and all charges against their moral natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all scandals ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... it alone, without the presence of other children. This activity shows the presence of the nursing instinct, the tendency towards manipulation, physical activity, imitation and curiosity of the empirical type. The imagination is active but still undifferentiated from perception. The contentment in playing alone, or with an adult, shows the stage of development of the gregarious instinct. A girl of nine no longer cuddles or handles her doll just for the pleasure she gets ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... Howard West—who probably wasn't interested in her either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university—a great acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished diner-out—and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself, John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon and stayed awake at the opera in the evening. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... de La Mothe. At length two other Presidents came over to my opinion, being thoroughly convinced that succours from Spain at this time were a remedy absolutely necessary to our disease, but a dangerous and empirical medicine, and infallibly mortal to particular persons if it did not pass first ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, looked at in this way, I combatted it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... study of the world. They can never perceive the world in its entire reality. Yet their imagination, with its magnificent allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible, has pointed the way for empirical knowledge. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... and the humors. The rest, agreeing with Bianchon, maintained that the blood was poisoned by some hitherto unknown morbid infection. Bianchon produced Professor Duval's analysis of the blood. The remedies to be applied, though absolutely empirical and without hope, depended on the verdict in this ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... to assign to each its modicum and best modality of training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the first rise of his family, we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their respective champions, in order to take, as we proceed, a cursory view ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... is of genuine historical and literary interest. From the literary point of view, it is a near descendant—collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same English empirical humour of life—of Thomas Overbury's A Wife (1614—only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle's Microcosmographie (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard's Chrestoleros* (1598), in verse. It is an early instance of the stringing together, in a connected narrative, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... stood, there erected the priory, whose Norman arches as satisfactorily attest its date as Henry's charter. The piety of a court jester in the twelfth century, when the science of medicine was wholly empirical, founded one of the most valuable medical schools of the nineteenth century. The desire to raise up splendid churches in the place of the dilapidated Saxon buildings was a passion with Normans, whether clerics or laymen. Ralph Flambard, the bold and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... both of science, literature, and travel, bring the library up to date. He would devote his leisure to the study of various subjects—especially natural science—regarding which he was conscious of a knowledge, deficient, or merely empirical. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... returned to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages renewed: ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... tying arteries to stop haemorrhage, instead of the actual cautery. Pare, however, met with the usual fate of innovators and reformers. His practice was denounced by his surgical brethren as dangerous, unprofessional, and empirical; and the older surgeons banded themselves together to resist its adoption. They reproached him for his want of education, more especially for his ignorance of Latin and Greek; and they assailed ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... professional education and the etiquette is relaxed, we shall presumably revert to the same state of things. A surgeon was commonly a "sawbones," and a physician a compounder and prescriber of more or less empirical drugs. Their knowledge and skill were by no means contemptible, and their instruments and pharmacopoeia were surprisingly modern. Among the Greeks and Orientals their social standing was high, but at Rome, where they were chiefly foreigners, for the most part Greeks, the ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Ling aimed only at the regulation of associated, or the equal development of antagonistic groups. For, as the Supreme Medical Board of Russia say in their report on his system, made to the Emperor in 1850, "empirical gymnastics develop the muscular strength sometimes to a wonderful degree, and teach the execution of movements combined with an extraordinary effort of the muscles; by these means, instead of fortifying the whole body ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... The double form of consciousness is then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition of the two ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... breaks through stone walls for an increase of their appointments. From the marrowless bones of these skeleton establishments, by the use of every sort of cutting and of every sort of fretting tool, he flatters himself that he may chip and rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to diet into some similitude of health and substance the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... acknowledge. And, for the most part, they are little or nothing better acquainted with the distinctive effects on the system of the positive and negative poles of the instrument. There is, therefore, plainly no science in their electrical practice. Every thing is done at random—all is empirical. ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... connection between what in common language is called the theoretical and practical, but in more technical phraseology, the ideal and the actual. The actual, or true practical, consists in the uses of the forces of nature, according to the laws of nature; and here we must distinguish between it and the empirical, which uses, or attempts to use, those forces, without a knowledge of the laws. The true practical, therefore, is the result, or actual, of an antecedent ideal. The ideal, full and complete, must exist in the mind before the actual can be ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler. I make no pretence of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject. On the other hand, I have purposely treated the empirical physical foundations of the theory in a "step-motherly" fashion, so that readers unfamiliar with physics may not feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest for the trees. May the book bring some one a few ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... own uses. Such being the case, we fall to wrangling over it, and your appetite is like to go unappeased. I now have evidence to show you that your act of violent appropriation does not conduce to your interest. This is simply an experimental and empirical fact. I am in a position to show you that the character of your action is other than you supposed, that you were under a misapprehension as to its goodness. It leads not to the enjoyable activity which interests you, but to a series of bodily ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... means, is history continuous? But it also means that the problems of abstract theology were passing out of sight, and that speculation was turning to the historical and scientific problems. Hartley was expounding the association principle which became the main doctrine of the empirical school, and Hume was teaching ethics upon the same basis, and turning from speculation to political history. The main reason of this intellectual indifference was the social condition under which the philosophical ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... I should never have dared. For democracy, substitute "Modern Civilisation," which prides itself on redress after the event, agility in getting out of the holes into which it has snouted, and eagerness to snout into fresh ones. It foresees nothing, and avoids less. It is purely empirical, if one may use such a ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... a misconception in imagining that if they can find a law of uniformity in the succession of events they can infer the future from the past terms of the series. For such a law would only be an "empirical law"; it would not be a causal law or an ultimate law. However rigidly uniform, there is no guarantee that it would apply to phenomena outside those from which it was derived. It must itself depend on laws of mind and character (psychology and ethology). When those laws are known ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... divided, although, through a defect in logic, he accepts mechanics as the final explanation of things. And last, it is impossible to pass over, in silence, the rare works of Lord Kelvin, so full, for French readers, of unexpected suggestions, for they show us the entirely practical and empirical value which the English ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... high and satisfactory character, ought to consist of a deduction of causes and effects, shewing us not merely that a thing is so, but why it is as it is, and cannot be otherwise. The rest is merely empirical; and, though the narrowness of human wit may often drive us to this; yet it is essentially of a lower order and description. As it depends for its authority upon an example, or a number of examples, so examples of a contrary nature may continually come in, to weaken its ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... upon human beings, and not more than two or three of simian glands upon human beings. His statement, therefore, that successful transplantation of the glands of the goat into a human being is "impossible, and cannot succeed," is empirical, and entirely unsupported by any experience of his own in the matter. Against it, and completely confuting it, we set the clear conclusions of Dr. Brinkley, backed by his unequalled record of over 600 successful transplants of goat-glands into men and women, during the past three years. ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... because we are groping in the dark. The elimination of selfishness; of condemnation; of fear and anger, and doubt, must have far greater power for universal happiness and well-being than all the systems which theology or science or politics could devise. Indeed, all these systems are sporadic and empirical attempts to express the vague dawning ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... essential to the different departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it has gathered from ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... looking at Editha's lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But how dreadful of her! How ...
— Different Girls • Various
... feel the pulse; fish for, bob for; cast for, beat about for; angle, trawl, cast one's net, beat the bushes. try one's fortune &c. (adventure) 675; explore &c. (inquire) 461. Adj. experimental, empirical. probative, probatory[obs3], probationary, provisional; analytic, docimastic[obs3]; tentative;unverified, unproven, speculative, untested. Adv. on trial, under examination, on probation, under probation, on one's trial, on approval. Phr. check it out, give it a try, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... forces in it, consider its figures in relation to any astrological positions, to any natural signs of whirlwinds, tempests, plagues, famine, or earthquakes, try long to discover some hidden symbolism in it, and confess finally that no man unregenerate to letters, by any a priori or empirical knowledge, could have at all suspected that a bit of dirty parchment, with an ecclesiastical scrawl upon it, would have power to drive the currents of history, inspire great national passions, and impel the wars and direct the ideas ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... a long time the art of training children's voices has been well understood by choirmasters of vested choirs, and by many others, but its basis was purely empirical. ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... physics, which stops with physics, leads man by dazzling promises into some Utopian desert only to leave him there to die of hunger. And it is no less true that metaphysics, without this basis in experimental science, is illusory and untrustworthy, wherever the original data are necessarily empirical. ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... blessings of limited reform and of the inevitable and necessary stages and degrees of progress, as well as of the danger of too sudden and radical change, effectually counteract the evil influence of the unmethodical and empirical reformer. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... explanation of the group of characteristics considered in this chapter is that they are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of biological, anthropological, and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... be done by the following empirical rule, which has been derived from observations made upon bearings of different sizes and moving with different velocities. Divide the number 70,000 by the velocity of the surface of the bearing ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... of every dynasty on the face of the earth. It is not our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... stone in the midst of their stormy swell. I wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could I acknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logical ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by most as a wild and fantastic fable; that ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... calabarine, and the other, now a highly important drug, known as physostigmine—or occasionally as eserine. The British pharmacopoeia contains an alcoholic extract of the bean, intended for internal administration; but the alkaloid is now always employed. This is used as the sulphate, which has the empirical formula of (C{15}H{21}N3O2)2, H2SO4, plus an unknown number of molecules of water. It occurs in small yellowish crystals, which are turned red by exposure to light or air. They are readily soluble in water or alcohol and possess a bitter taste. The dose is 1/60-1/30 grain, and should invariably ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... face, his chest, back to the carotid area of his neck. "He's all right," said Paresi, still working; then, as if to keep his mind going with words to avoid conjecture, he went on didactically, "This is the other fear reaction. Johnny's was 'flight.' Ives' is 'fight.' The empirical result is very ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... private purse, he having some contrivance of his own'. Also, Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685: 'a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping; not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines, and the easier mechanical mathematics.' Also, Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 155: 'the great and almost only pleasure of Mind he seem'd addicted to, was Shipping and Sea-Affairs; which seem'd to be so much his Talent for Knowledge, as well as Inclination, that a War of ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton-hash,—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... social or political gain; but this is not all. The danger emanating from natural phenomena has its discoverable laws, and therefore leads to a first empirical study of winds, currents, seasonal rainfall and the whole science of hydraulics. With deep national insight, the Greeks embodied in their mythology the story of Perseus and his destruction of the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... blows. In all the wars of the past nations have been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of the people. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossed countries and populations to each other as if they had been balls ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the olden time we should have dreamed of the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to Tristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feeling for the dead, for the dim past, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... purposes, however, the empirical laws of co-ordination of structures, which are embodied in the generalisations of morphology, may be confidently trusted, if employed with due caution, to lead to a just interpretation of fossil remains; or, in other words, we may look for the verification ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... The very sacredness of the relation in which two men stand to one another when one of them rescues the other from vice separates that relation from any connection with the work of the social busybody, the professional philanthropist, and the empirical legislator. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... our lust, not greatly caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and practical and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics, and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps may sound. It is no mere empirical theory. Americans ought to be proud to know that, in a modest way, it has recently been tried here, and is proving a success. I am told that already two masters of poetry have been presented to us as ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... naturally centred in the relation of consciousness to its object, a problem which, properly, belongs rather to theory of knowledge. We may take as one of the best and most typical representatives of this school the Austrian psychologist Brentano, whose "Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint,"* though published in 1874, is still influential and was the starting-point of a great deal of interesting ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... present—theories which, it is true, were for the most part gratuitous and premature enough, but which nevertheless rescued jurisprudence from that worse and more ignoble condition, not unknown to ourselves, in which nothing like a generalisation is aspired to, and law is regarded as a mere empirical pursuit—it was the fashion to explain the ready and apparently intuitive perception which we have of certain qualities in a Will, by saying that they were natural to it, or, as the phrase would run in full, attached to it by the Law of Nature. Nobody, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... "Exactly. That's empirical knowledge; but when you explain causes, you give a man a new pleasure. It clinches his knowledge. Then, again, supposing I were to tell those men something accurate about the movement of the stars? Don't you think that would be interesting? If I could not make it like a romance, then all the ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... as gold was not probably existent in nature in any but its metallic form, therefore it had been deposited in its siliceous matrix while in a molten state, and many ingenious arguments were adduced in support of this contention. Of late, however, most scientific men, and indeed many purely empirical inquirers (using the word empirical in its strict sense) have come to the conclusion that though the mode in which they were composed was not always identical, all lodes, including auriferous formations, were primarily derived from mineral-impregnated waters which deposited their contents ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... on the other hand, find, by empirical observation of the phenomena around us, anything which indicates the existence of a supernormal perceptivity such as theory would suggest? It is known to readers of the Society for Psychical Research Proceedings that we do find such indications, scattered ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... they are gross feeders;* [Dr. Campbell's definition of the Lepcha's Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew; for, as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.] rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelatinous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish: and they also eat elephant, and all ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... in evidence in the streets are, first and foremost, goats and sheep. I have to lump them together, for it is exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other. All along the Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their tails down, and goats carry their tails up; fortunately you need not worry much anyway, for they both "taste rather like the nothing that the world was made of," as Frau Buchholtz says, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... purpose is within." "A purposive process is one determined by its tendency to produce a certain result, purpose itself being an act [sic] determined in its character by that which it tends to bring about. As such it differs fundamentally from a mechanical cause." "The empirical and philosophical arguments point to the same general conclusion, that reality is the process of the development of Mind." As a guide to one's thinking, and as integrators of one's subconscious intuitions ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... have been thrown out of employment by the general stoppage of public works, and who are better qualified to take care of that costly and delicate machine, a Railway, than men whose knowledge is entirely empirical, yet few railways employ a resident engineer. Those that follow this practice are generally supposed to do so because he is a relative of some Director, and wants a place, and not because such an officer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... which is used in this study is an empirical one. As has already been explained (p. 8), every word contained in the frequency tables possesses a value of at least 0.1 per cent, and other words have a zero value. With the aid of our method the difficulty of classifying the reactions quoted above is obviated, as it is necessary only to refer ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... deign at times to give hints, to direct the researches, to flash some little light on that part of us which works and is conscious in this world, and which we call our brain-minds. So although most or all of what I am going to say would be called by the scientific strictly empirical, fantastic and foolish, yet I shall venture; aware that their Aristotelio-Baconian method quite breaks down when it comes to such a search into the unknown; and that this guessing, guided by what seems to be a law, would not, perhaps, have been sneered ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... entirely as soon as the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It always does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this "always" that the connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely empirical one in the brakeman's mind, bred of habit. But if the passenger had been an acute reasoner ... [and had] singled out of all the numerous points involved in a stove's not smoking the one special point of smoke pouring freely out of the stove-pipe's mouth, he would ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... recommended for the same purpose. Concerning a function over which so many fond superstitions still linger in the public mind we may, perhaps, charitably forgive Gilbert for the introduction of an empirical remedy for sterility, which, he assures us, he has often tried and with invariable success, and which enjoys the double advantage of ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... an idealistic philosophy (absolute idealism), which inevitably lands in Pantheism. The third is an intuitional or "faith-philosophy," which finally ends in Mysticism. The fourth is a rationalistic or "spiritualistic" philosophy, which yields pure Theism. The last is an empirical philosophy, which derives all religion from instruction, and culminates ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... richest nation in the world before the war, and wealth being only comparative, it is our empirical duty to achieve ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... too—and herein lies the difficulty—provided that the premises are also true. These premises may be in themselves general statements—how is their truth established? They may be, and often are, the generalisations of the empirical sciences, and must then possess the same degree of uncertainty that these generalisations possess. Some philosophers have contended that certain general ideas are innate, but few would be found nowadays to accept such a contention. At other times mere definitions ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... freedmen or slaves. Roman practitioners seem to have inspired less confidence even when they were willing to study. Habits of scientific observation are hereditary; and for centuries the Greeks had studied the conditions of health and the theory of disease, as well as practised the empirical side of the art, and most Romans were well content to leave the whole ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... that my errors can be marked and set aside before the mass of knowledge be further infected by them; and it will be easy also for others to continue and carry on my labours. And by these means I suppose that I have established for ever a true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the affairs ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... should have advocated the relief of living and suffering taxpayers, upon the principle, then undefined, of leaving money "to fructify in the pockets of the people"; while the whig economists of the day stickled for the policy of piling up new debts, if need be, rather than break in upon an empirical scheme for the gradual extinction ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... attempts had been made in Europe, prior to his time, to investigate the history of man according to those exhaustive methods which in other branches of Knowledge have proved successful, and by which alone empirical observations can be raised to scientific truths, the imperfect state of the Physical Sciences necessarily rendered the execution of such an undertaking extremely defective. It was not, indeed, until the vast mass of Facts ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... laws which we can never hope to penetrate,—-which are known only to the creator of all things existent. But as in botany and zoology and physiology we may observe and classify our observations, so we may observe a language, classify our observations, and create an empirical science of word-formation. Possibly in time it will become a science something more ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... triumph of the great law of universal gravitation to remove this empirical character from Kepler's laws. Newton's grand discovery bound together the three isolated laws of Kepler into one beautiful doctrine. He showed not only that those laws are true, but he showed why they must be true, and why no other laws could have been true. He proved ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... infinitely small currents, its resistance when acted on by an electromotive force of one volt (provided its temperature is kept the same) is not altered by so much as the millionth of a millionth part. This fine result is the more gratifying since Ohm's law is entirely empirical and does not rest at ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... use of lore as primarily empirical, and derived from the senses, it is traditional; it is well therefore to restrict it to this, and to revive the old word lear, still understood in Scotland in these precise senses—intellectual, rational, yet ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... the vicar of Rookwood, Dr. Polycarp Small; Dr. Titus Tyrconnel, an emigrant, and empirical professor of medicine, from the sister isle, whose convivial habits had first introduced him to the hall, and afterwards retained him there; and Mr. Codicil Coates, clerk of the peace, attorney-at-law, bailiff, and receiver. We were wrong in saying that Tyrconnel ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... fact is of considerable importance, for it at once suggests that the present systems of classification of eye-colours, to which some anthropologists attach considerable weight, are founded on a purely empirical and unsatisfactory basis. Intensity of colour is the criterion at present in vogue, and it is customary to arrange the eye-colours in a scale of increasing depth of shade, starting with pale greys and ending with the deepest browns. On this system ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... of the Instrument." Wells has, of course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James, Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who regard classification "as serviceable ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... unnecessary to explain any of the phenomena of the universe, than there is doubt that if I leave go of my pen it will fall upon the table. Nay, the doubt is even less than this, because while the knowledge that my pen will fall if I allow it to do so is founded chiefly upon empirical knowledge (I could not predict with a priori certainty that it would so fall, for the pen might be in an electrical state, or subject to some set of unknown natural laws antagonistic to gravity), the knowledge that a Deity is superfluous as an explanation ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... these dimensions of the propeller accurately at the present time, and without further knowledge of the action of the screw on the water, was, he thought, impossible. All the rules and formulae are empirical. The best one he knew is given in Table IV., due to Mr. Thom, the head of the Barrow Company's engineering drawing office, and at present acting manager, who has used it for some years in practice. These formulae are based upon the assumption that the area of propeller disk should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... geographers as the Old World; that is to say, you might meet with horses in Europe, Asia, or Africa; but there were none in Australia, and there were none whatsoever in the whole continent of America, from Labrador down to Cape Horn. This is an empirical fact, and it is what is called, stated in the way I have given it you, the "Geographical ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... thought of getting the theory of the screw-propeller from the marine engineers, and then, by applying our tables of air-pressures to their formulas, of designing air-propellers suitable for our purpose. But so far as we could learn, the marine engineers possessed only empirical formulas, and the exact action of the screw-propeller, after a century of use, was still very obscure. As we were not in a position to undertake a long series of practical experiments to discover a propeller suitable for ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... that man can do. That science can be used by anyone, mind you. If you'll read between the lines you'll see what a hidden struggle is shaping up for control of it as soon as it reaches maturity and empirical useability." ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... summary of all present knowledge of the voice. First, the insight into the singer's vocal operations is considered, which the hearer obtains by attentive listening to the tones produced. This empirical knowledge, as it is generally called, indicates a state of unnecessary throat tension as the cause, or at any rate the accompaniment, of every faulty tone. Further, an outline is given of all scientific knowledge of the voice. The ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... is true, have received my initiation in a school built up on more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much time, been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly had I been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed me in a school in which historical sources were examined more critically, but not less intelligently, and in which respect for individuality was greater. But such ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... thereby, is a sign that essential mastery has been achieved by the artist—the power, that is to say, of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing with religious objects, with what in the fulness of its own nature is not really ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... lord the free atmospheric nitrogen contained in the soil. As Macaulay would say, "every school boy knows" now that leguminous root nodules are endotrophic mycorrhiza,—but the Romans did not! Nevertheless their empirical practice of soil improvement with legumes was quite as good as ours. Varro (I, 23) explains the Roman method of green manuring more fully than Cato. Columella (II, 13) insists further that if the hay is saved the stubble of legumes should be promptly ploughed ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole connection. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... I may call the empirical view of the League. There are those of us in this country, and indeed all over the world, who, profoundly impressed with the horrors of war, hating war from the bottom of their hearts as an evil thing—a company which must include, as far as I ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... anything of the physiological effects of a remedy, in addition to those "on man in health," he speaks—still under the head of "physiological effects"—of those "on man when sick." When, setting aside its empirical employment, we come then to inquire what it is that furnishes us with the true indications for the use of a remedy, analysis of the question leads us invariably back to its physiological effects. If I have failed nevertheless to include the few effects which I am about ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... are in any way dangerous or offensive, also patent medicines, nostrums, and empirical preparations whose ingredients are concealed, will not be admitted to the exposition. The director of exhibits, with the approval of the president, has the authority to order the removal of any article he may consider dangerous, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... use of alum in the treatment of laminitis is held to be without reason other than the empirical one that it is beneficial. If laminitis is due chiefly to an autointoxication, good and sufficient reason for the administration of alum can be shown based upon its known physiological action. It is the most powerful intestinal astringent ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... went solid, and Garlock said hastily, aloud, "Excuse it, please. Cancel. I've just said, and know as an empirical fact, that you've got to do the job alone—but I can't seem to help putting my big, flat foot in it by blundering in anyway. Let's get to work, ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... it desirable to place all that one may have to say of the education of girls in America on some proved, rational basis, for in no country is the work of education carried on in so purely empirical a way. We are deeply impressed with its necessity; we are eager in our efforts, but we are always in the condition of one "whom too great eagerness bewilders." We are ready to drift in any direction on the subject. We adopt every new idea that ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... regulated. This ratio, to which the name speed-strength modulus has been given, may be expressed as a coefficient which, if multiplied into any proportional change in speed, will give the proportional change in strength. This ratio is derived from empirical curves. (See Table XVII.) ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... dangerous and empirical morality, which cures one vice by means of another. But envy is so base and detestable, so vile in its original, and so pernicious in its effects, that the predominance of almost any other quality is to be preferred. It is one of those lawless enemies of society, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 5.5561 Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The limit also makes itself manifest in the totality of elementary propositions. Hierarchies are and must ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... weighed upon my heart; it is only a few minutes that this want has affected Robespierre. I request to be heard." Leave was accorded, and he briefly exculpated himself. "Be especially on your guard," he said, as he concluded, and pointed to Robespierre, "against empirical orators, who have incessantly in their mouths the words of liberty, tyranny, conspiracy—always mixing up their own praises with the deceit they impose upon the people. Do justice to such men!" "Order!" cried Freron, Robespierre's friend; "this is insult and sarcasm." The tribune ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Appendix containing an exposition of the constituents of many favorite and famous cosmetics, pointing out at the same time their true character, the danger and unpleasantness of which, he says, are disguised with much empirical skill. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... country people, but in this case it seemed to have been ordered by a medical practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not. How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the 'cheats and frauds' which have hitherto everywhere practised on its simplicity. The tell us, in relation to philosophy, religion, and especially in relation to Christianity, that all that has been believed by mankind has been believed only on 'empirical' grounds; and that the old answers to difficulties will do no longer. They shake their sage heads at such men as Clarke, Paley, Butler, and declare that such arguments as theirs will not satisfy them.,—We are glad to admit that all this vague pretension is now but rarely displayed with the ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... line of Staffordshire yeomen, Quakers by persuasion, loved a roaming life, and having married a maltster's widow with a talent for business management, was left free to indulge his own propensities. He seems to have had a talent for medical science of an empirical kind, for he dabbled in magnetism and electricity, and wandered about the country collecting herbs for headache—snuffs, and healing ointments. Samuel, as soon as he had served his apprenticeship, found plenty of employment in the neighbourhood, the country gentlemen, who had taken ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... conflicting views of any topic or event as the ingenious rival journals are certain to discover. It is impossible, in their nature, for them to combine. I should as soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause, or an opinion, or a man, that does not get somewhere in the press a hearer and a defender. We will drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of whom it may concern. With all its faults, I believe the moral tone of the American ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Advent. Loyalty to the Brotherhood in matters even of minor observance is a great principle to be borne in mind in this connexion. There is usually a method in the Church's madness, and her prescriptions and counsels are the product of a very considerable empirical acquaintance with the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... 1844, he records: "Acted Virginius [in Paris] with much energy and power to a very excited audience. I was loudly called for at the end of the fourth act, but could not or would not make so absurd and empirical a sacrifice of the dignity of my poor art." Three years later he enters in his diary: "Acted King Lear with much care and power, and was received by a most kind, and sympathetic, and enthusiastic audience. I was ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... instinctive as no hatred can be but that of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man. But there was also something deeper in it than this. There was mixed with it the natural dread in the political diviner of the political logician,—in the empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, confounding the idea of society with the form of it then existing, would have preserved that as the only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it then existed was but another name for anarchy, would have reconstituted ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... and drink, and patted on the back with every appearance of affection. They can tell you of all sorts of queer, unknown customs and facts, and can show you all sorts of strange and unusual things. Yet at the last analysis these are also discursions and anecdotes. We gather empirical knowledge: only rarely do we think we get a glimpse of how the delicate machinery moves behind those ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... various compromises between faith and experience, idea and fact, which are represented by liberalism, conservatism, and the like. Now, the degree of enthusiasm which accompanies a belief, is commonly in direct proportion to its freedom from empirical elements. Simplicity and immediacy are the characteristics of all passionate conviction. But a critic like myself cannot believe that in politics, or anywhere in the field of practical action, any such simple and immediate beliefs are really and wholly true. ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... fall into it a few drops of another water-like solution of hydrochloric acid; a white insoluble precipitate of chloride of silver is formed. Any tyro in chemistry could have predicted the result with absolute certainty. But the prediction would have been based purely upon previous empirical knowledge—solely upon the fact that the thing had been done before over and over, always with the same result. Why the silver forsook the nitrogen atom and grappled the atom of oxygen no one knows. Nor can any one as yet explain ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... therefore more insightful in his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose "integrity," "honor," and biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. "For if you begin with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common sense, I think there can be no reasonable ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching willingness to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... there must have grown up, at a very early day, a belief in the remedial character of various vegetables as agents to combat disease. Here, of course, was a rudimentary therapeutics, a crude principle of an empirical art of medicine. As just suggested, the lower order of animals have an instinctive knowledge that enables them to seek out remedial herbs (though we probably exaggerate the extent of this instinctive knowledge); and if this be true, man must have inherited from his prehuman ancestors this instinct ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of the ultimate nature of matter becomes a question of philosophy and metaphysics. It is a field of research by itself. The chemist never confuses that problem with the specific problems of his particular science. These deal with empirical atoms and molecules as he finds them. No chemist would undertake to give the chemical formula of the union of sulphuric acid and zinc by a formula which expressed the ultimate nature of atoms or negative electricity. If he did so he would ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... non-ego—the person and the thing; he reduces man to a thing, instead of a person,—to one among the many phenomena of the universe, determined by the same laws of invariable antecedence and consequence, included under the same formulae of empirical generalization. He thus makes man the slave, and not the master of nature; passively carried along in the current of successive phenomena; unable, by any act of free will, to arrest a single wave in its course, or to divert ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable of proving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easily appreciate and make practical application of the truths they have affirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains are scientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules are implicitly followed by the common multitude. One form or receptacle of authority after another may be superseded; but authority itself always remains. And the true course for those to pursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, or church ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of mind that spread outward from that centre played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's engine was running along its rails and Evan's boat was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur in ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... when the paper is to be printed immediately after sensitizing, I use a larger proportion of citrate of iron and ammonia. Before arriving at the conclusion that these proportions were the best to be used, I made a series of purely empirical experiments, beginning ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... thought—products of a leisurely age when the thinkers of Europe were a brotherhood, calling to each other across the dim populations; some represented the more deferential doubts of disciples or the elegant misunderstandings of philosophic dilettanti, some his friendly intercourse with empirical physicists like Boyle or like Huyghens, whose telescope had enlarged the philosopher's universe and the thinker's God; there was an acknowledgment of the last scholium from the young men's society of Amsterdam—"Nil ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... past, by pressing home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... results stand for one fact as well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deductive logic is not a good discipline for these students; empirical psychology, or political economy, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to language study generally, I think the value of it, at this period, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... through individual faults of their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course; and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet, but lying behind the empirical law that East is East ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... natural tendency of my mind toward a generalization of views, and to encourage me to attempt, in a special work, to treat of the knowledge which we at present possess, regarding the sidereal and terrestrial phenomena of the Cosmos in their empirical relations. The hitherto undefined idea of a physical geography has thus, by an extended and perhaps too boldly imagined a plan, been comprehended under the idea of a physical description of the universe, embracing all created things in the regions ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... less empirical way must be found in which to acquire the understanding of sound play. My system of teaching differs from the usual ones, in that it sets down at the outset definite elementary principles of chess strategy by which any move can be gauged at its true value, thus enabling the learner to form ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... expression in the American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early organized ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... followed this up so well that, in 1803, the younger Moreau could boast, "the town has become in some sort the refuge of the unfortunate afflicted with carious joints, after they have tried all the means usually recommended by professional men, or have had recourse to empirical nostrums, or when amputation seemed to them the ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... with the nature of ultimate ends and that we can best employ our energies in trying to define the various goods which contribute now and here to human betterment. Let the effort be made, by all means. But when the last of empirical goods have been examined and appraised (assuming for the moment that we can indeed appraise without possessing ultimate norms) the cardinal question still waits for answer: To what are all these goods instrumental? What ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... an attempt to find the right beginning of a road, the end of which we shall know only when we have been taught the necessary lessons by actual experience with the conditions of the future. Let me ask you, therefore, to follow at first the same empirical road which the governments have followed, and to take conditions as they are, and not as we may wish they should be. If one has nothing better to put in the place of something that one does not entirely like, one had better, I believe, let matters take their own ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... positive." His expression showed just how little he wanted to make this admission. "However," he went on, brightening, "there is some evidence which seems to show that it is basically the same process as psychokinesis. And we do have quite a bit of empirical data on psychokinesis." He scribbled something on a sheet of paper and said: "For instance, there's this." He held the paper up to the screen so ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... There is, shall we say, no science of sociology—merely a heap of vague, empirical observations, too flimsy to be useful in strict logical inference? I should, I confess, be apt to say so myself. Then, you may proceed, is it not idle to attempt to introduce a scientific method? And to that I should ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... real, individual man is identical with the citizen, and has become a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual relationships, not until man has recognized and organized his own capacities as social capacities, and consequently the social force is no longer divided by the political power, not until then will human emancipation ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... ex-clergyman and quack-doctor, harangued the people of Chaudiere from his gaily-painted wagon. He had the perfect gift of the charlatan, and he had discovered his metier. Inclined to the picturesque by nature, melodramatic and empirical, his earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed him, though it had tempted Billy Wantage to forgery; and because ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "It has to be that way. This is a very complicated society you've stumbled into, Alan. Look: I'm a first-rate gamesman. That's not boasting; it's empirical truth proven over and over again during the course of a fifteen-year career. I could make a fortune competing against beginners and dubs and has-beens, so they legislate against me. You make a certain annual income from gambling and you go into Class A, and then you can't enter any ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... sort of empirical way of starting a subject with a question like this: "Do you know the meaning and derivation of the term 'bric-...-brac?'" "Do you believe in ghosts?" "What do you think of a ladies' club?" "Do you believe in chance?" "Is there more talent displayed ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... or lawyers or businessmen. In which of these ways shall we "realize" ourselves? [Footnote: Cf. William James, Psychology, vol. I, p. 309: "I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake |
