"Empiricism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... four antinomies constitute the teaching of philosophical dogmatism. The antitheses constitute doctrines of philosophical empiricism. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... weedy person; even his vanity was directly traceable to the early influence of an eccentric and feckless father with experimental ideas on the upbringing of a child. It was a pity that brilliantly unsuccessful man had not lived to see the result of his sedulous empiricism. His wife was left to bear the brunt—a brave exile whose romantic history was never likely to escape her continent lips. None even knew whether she saw any or one of those aggravated faults of an only child which were so ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... "superhuman" and "supernatural," borrowed from our petty theology, had no meaning in the exalted religious consciousness of Jesus. To him Nature and the development of humanity were not limited kingdoms apart from God—paltry realities subjected to the laws of a hopeless empiricism. There was no supernatural for him, because there was no Nature. Intoxicated with infinite love, he forgot the heavy chain which holds the spirit captive; he cleared at one bound the abyss, impossible to most, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... may set aside their pretensions to have founded an exact science. What, then, is to come in its place? Are we simply to admit that there is no certainty about economical problems, and to fall back upon mere empiricism? Everything,—shall we say?—is to be regarded as an open question. That is, perhaps, a common impression in the popular mind. Yet, on the other hand, we may find some very able thinkers applying mathematical ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... were used by later generations to prepare the way for still greater inroads upon the contents of Christianity, and finally to justify an attitude of doubt concerning the very foundations on which Christianity was based. Empiricism, Sensualism, Materialism, and Scepticism in philosophy, undermined dogmatic Christianity, and prepared the way for the irreligious and indifferentist opinions, that found such general favour among the educated and higher classes during ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... that all government is more or less a failure; society as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn to the uplift—particularly the professional uplift—what do we find but the same old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as "friends of the people," preaching the pussy gospel of ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... mere knowledge of separate facts that history can contribute to our improvement or our happiness; it would then exchange the character of philosophy treated by examples, for that of sophistry misleading by empiricism. The more systematic the view of human events which it enables us to gain, the more nearly does it approach its real office, and entitle itself to the splendid panegyric of the Roman statesman—"Historia, testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... the Scientific Methods, and thus only. The most complex of all problems are the problems relating to Man himself; and of them those concerned with the Mind and Society have never been scientifically resolved. They can be rescued from empiricism, if at all, only by being submitted to some of the methods already characterised as applicable to science in general. Which of these methods must be selected, and why; what are the causes of previous failures; ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... nineteenth century new channels of influence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great Britain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out of existence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and seventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for target practice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by the first-year ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... remark that they never eat women, a fact which some may be inclined to attribute to respect for the female sex. It is, however, assignable to a different feeling. All the South American Indians, who still remain under the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the Anthropophagi the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... intellect, his wit, his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his sling! How fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that composite monster, if only it had had a forehead! Some of them might even ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Empiricism is not peculiar to Denmark; and I know no way of rooting it out, though it be a remnant of exploded witchcraft, till the acquiring a general knowledge of the component parts of the human frame becomes a part ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... has devoted his pen, is making. It would seem that the better portion at least of that public that is interested in the progress of vocal art has made up its mind that the time has come when sense and science must replace tradition and empiricism. ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... accustomed make it difficult for us to think that the state could be constructed and modelled to express the good life. We can appreciate Aristotle's critical analysis of constitutions, but find it hard to take seriously his advice to the legislator. Moreover, the idealism and the empiricism of the Politics are never ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... It is declared that constipation is its primary symptom; and that diarrhea is one of its secondary symptoms, resulting from constipation. There is a legion of secondary symptoms of proctitis, all of which medical empiricism considers and denominates causes. As constipation is such an every-day complaint of almost everybody one meets, it will not tax our imagination unduly to conceive how it may be a frequent cause of diarrhea, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... medical practice he was by some accused of empiricism. From this charge, both Miss Seward and Mr. Edgeworth have, I think, justly vindicated him. The former has recorded a project which he suggested, on the supposed authority of some old practitioners, but which he did not execute, for curing one of his consumptive patients ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the Preface, as well as those papers in the volume which follow the same style of orthography or rather cacography, will illustrate well enough the unprincipled character of the reform as it lay in Webster's mind. He acted upon the merest empiricism apparently, without any well-considered plan, making the spelling occasionally conform to the sound, but allowing even the same sounds to have different representation in different words. Indeed, in the extract ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... of ever increasing knowledge of the nature of language, and to contribute a share toward ascertaining the principles which will help to emancipate language-teaching and language-study from the domain of empiricism and will place it once for all on ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... very certain that too much of our teaching is simply empirical, and as Germany has, more than any other country, endeavored to found it upon universal truths, it is to that country that we must at present look for a remedy for this empiricism. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... established a period of macro-iconography in embryology. The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually eliminated empiricism during the scholastic period. However, the decline of this vitalistic rationalism coincided with the rise of a mechanistic rationalism ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... the frontier spawned has been described as rationalistic. However, this was a rationalism which was not at odds with empiricism, but which was more in line with what has been called the American philosophy, pragmatism. Or, to put it in the vernacular, "if it works, it's good." The frontiersman was a trial-and-error empiricist, who believed in his own ability to fathom the depths of the problems which plagued him. If the ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... reason of its deadly effect; and all that we know is that when introduced even in most minute quantities into an open wound, the blood is dissolved, so to speak, and the stream of life paralyzed with an almost incredible rapidity. Without test or antidote, terror has led to blind, fanatical empiricism, necessarily attended with no little injury in the search for specifics, and it may be reasonably asserted that no substance can be named so inert and worthless as not to have been recommended, or so disgusting as not to have been employed; nor is any practice too absurd to find ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... spirit in politics, not of native growth, but imported from abroad, which only satisfied itself by the overthrow of thrones, by the transgression of all established limits, and by its declaration of the supreme rights of reason and will; and a false philosophy, with its unholy brood of Empiricism, Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, and Naturalism. The skepticism of the present day asserts rights to which it has no claim whatever, for it holds that the so-called mysteries of Christianity have no divine basis, and that there can be nothing supernatural in revelation. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... ample quid pro quo to offer from their own researches. The balancing of opinions at the proposed medical congress and in private intercourse must tend to free medical science from what remnants of empiricism still disfigure it, to perfect diagnosis and to trace with precision the operation of all remedial agents. Means remain to be found of administering the coup de grace to the few epidemics which have not yet been extirpated, but linger in a crippled condition. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... intelligently to apprehend the Theorem is the foundation and the first step in the scientific solution of the problem of life, and the progressive and continuous evolution of the human soul. To use the term "Science" (as applied to the study of psychology) in any other way, is pure empiricism, is wholly unscientific, and has never yet resulted in anything but confusion and in laying a foundation for belief, conjecture, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... great business corporations and to exercise supervision over the accumulation and distribution of wealth; for such supervision and control can only come through this particular kind of increase of power. We no more believe in that empiricism which demand, absolutely unrestrained individualism than we do in that empiricism which clamors for a deadening socialism which would destroy all individual initiative and would ruin the country with a completeness that not even ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... turned impatiently from abstract argument, and left the inquiry into 'social contracts' to philosophers, that is, to silly people in libraries. Politics were properly a matter of business, to be discussed in a business-like spirit. In this sense, 'individualism' is congenial to 'empiricism,' because it starts from facts and particular interests, and resents the intrusion ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism, as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... can claim to see a similar gradual metamorphosis in the light-of the history of the last one hundred, or even fifty, years, Radicalism, experimentalism, empiricism have been let loose on every institution of the country, and it is only when we take the greatest common measure of the results that we can see that the upshot has been on the whole rather good than bad. When Parnell declared that while accepting Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... [Lat.], proof, (demonstration) 478; criterion, diagnostic, test, probe, crucial test, acid test, litmus test. crucible, reagent, check, touchstone, pix^; assay, ordeal; ring; litmus paper, curcuma paper^, turmeric paper; test tube; analytical instruments &c 633. empiricism, rule of thumb. feeler; trial balloon, pilot balloon, messenger balloon; pilot engine; scout; straw to show the wind. speculation, random shot, leap in the dark. analyzer, analyst, assayist^; adventurer; experimenter, experimentist^, experimentalist; scientist, engineer, technician. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget |
