"Generalisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... larger experience. To say nothing of the valuable correction afforded by the polar winter and the polar summer, we have learned by a more comprehensive experience to replace the law that day follows night by the wider generalisation that the visibility of objects is invariably coincident upon the presence of some luminous body and not upon a previous state of darkness. But between cases of what we call mere succession and what is commonly called causal sequence the difference lies merely in the observed ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... imaginables. Que de sottises ne dirions-nous pas maintenant, si les anciens ne les avaient pas deja dites avant nous, et ne nous les avaient, pour ainsi dire, enlevees!— FONTENELLE. Without premature generalisations the true generalisation would never be arrived at.—H. SPENCER, Essays, ii. 57. The more important the subject of difference, the greater, not the less, will be the indulgence of him who has learned to trace the sources of human error,—of error, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... last, and the whole story is compact (if that word were not totally inapplicable) of windbags of sentiment, copy-book headings, and the strangest husks of neo-classic type-worship, stock character, and hollow generalisation. An Italian is necessarily a person of volcanic passions; an Englishman or an American (at this time the identification was particularly unlucky) has, of equal necessity, a grave and reserved physiognomy. Orthodox religion is a mistake, but a kind of moral-philosophical Deism ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... practical geometry of Euclid, but also its nearest generalisation, the practical geometry of Riemann, and therewith the general theory of relativity, rest upon this assumption. Of the experimental reasons which warrant this assumption I will mention only one. The phenomenon of the propagation of ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... which suffices for the mental or spiritual needs of the bulk of European people, indeed, the capacity for abstracting the general nature and character from the particular experience or emotion into pithy expressions by way of simile or metaphor that admirably convey the perceived generalisation is as highly evolved in the Native as in any ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... calculated to make us happy here. We are constantly taught to renounce sensual pleasure and selfish gratifications, to forget our body and sensible organs, to associate our pleasures with mind, to fix our affections upon the great ideal generalisation of intelligence in the one Supreme Being. And that we are capable of forming to ourselves an imperfect idea even of the infinite mind is, I think, a strong presumption of our own immortality, and of the distinct relation which our finite knowledge ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the order of discovery, not in the order most convenient for displaying them as a system. It would show what were the processes by which they were originally found out, and how they have been afterwards annexed or absorbed in some wider generalisation. These facts might be stated without any reference to the history of the discoverers or of the society to which they belonged. They would indeed suggest very interesting topics to the general historian or 'sociologist.' He might be led to inquire under what conditions ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... it. In Poland, like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... processes and methods in laundry work, cooking, or housekeeping. It is time some fundamental things were agreed upon, and although standardising must not be allowed to become stereotyping, at present constructive generalisation is needed, as well as the upsetting of out-grown traditions. In this context it would be well to discuss a question more properly to be taken at the end of this paper—the connection between the teaching in elementary schools and that in secondary schools. There is no reason to introduce differentiation ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... "compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will turn our flowery groves of Academe into mere factories of commercial efficiency. But fear is a treacherous guide. They are the victims of that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset. I check their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my children, and the hundreds of boys I have known. And I see more and more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments and the common stock of human nature and civilised ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... all flowers of his character, pearls strung on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he HAD a character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation. One might doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a general licence for such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one's feeling that there could be none ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... minute and in the 'Life of Lord Mayo.' Every one of the legislative measures in which he was concerned might be regarded as an illustration of one or more of these propositions. To me it seems that they represent at least a definite policy, worthy of his common sense and general vigour of mind. A generalisation from these principles came to constitute his political ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... years ago). Read any page of "Venus and Adonis" side by side with any page of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and you cannot but mark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualised image, in Marlowe the beautiful generalisation, the abstract term, the thing seen at a literary remove. Take the two openings, both of which start out ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... their relations to fishes more clearly signified by the joint title of Ichthyopsida. At the same time, proof was brought forward that the line of descent of the Sauropsida clearly diverged from that of the Mammalia, both starting from some common ancestry. And besides this great generalisation, the importance of which, both from a classificatory and from an evolutional point of view, needs no comment, there came out of the same researches numerous lesser contributions to the advancement of morphological knowledge, including among others an attempt, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley |
