"Abstractly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been kept constantly in mind, and no effort has been or will be spared to promote that end. We are under no disadvantage in any foreign market, except that we pay our workmen and workwomen better wages than are paid elsewhere—better abstractly, better relatively to the cost of the necessaries of life. I do not doubt that a very largely increased foreign trade is accessible to us without bartering for it either our home market for such products of the farm and shop as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... are altogether needless; they rest fundamentally on false dogmatic views of this propitiation, as if there were not existing in the Father's being the same love which is expressed in the Son,—as if the Father needed abstractly to be propitiated in order to entertain this love! We are not to seek Christ himself as mediator in the person of this father; nor (though Melancthon has strangely ventured to affirm it), afterwards in the fatted calf, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... however, now to content ourselves with a mere outline of our intended observations on a subject—our victory over the Emperor of China—which is pregnant with matter for long and profound reflection. Abstractly, our triumphant assault on these distant and vast dominions, affords matter for national pride and exultation, as far as concerns our naval and military renown; and the names of Parker and Gough will never be forgotten in British history. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... again, he must not be discouraged if his efforts appear to be abortive and the results ridiculous. The secret of a republic seems abstractly to be very simple, for it is merely that all good men shall act together and elect good officers. But good men cannot act together if they do not think together, and the best method of obtaining results which all desire is the very problem ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... it my view!" he said. "Abstractly, perhaps, all natures may be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the divine grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in many natures. Besides, this perversion itself may often be disease, bad habits transmitted, like drunkenness, or some ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... motive which prompted it was generous, honorable, and praiseworthy, nothing could be expected to ensue from its advocacy but accumulated disaster and greater misfortunes still. Of either case, then, abstractly considered, religion cannot ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... interested in the form of instruction employed by so eminent a scientist as Agassiz. In the first place, it is much to be desired that those who concern themselves with pedagogy should give relatively less heed to the way in which subjects, abstractly considered, ought to be taught, and should pay more attention than I fear has been paid to the way in which great and successful teachers actually have taught their pupils. As in other fields of human endeavor, so in teaching: ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... has caused as much innocent blood to flow, as the cimeter of Jenghiz Khan. The counsel for the prosecution will tell you that every fact in this melancholy case stabs the prisoner, and that facts cannot lie. Abstractly and logically considered, facts certainly do not lie; but let us see whether the inferences deduced from what we believe to be facts, do not sometimes eclipse Ananias and Sapphira! Not long ago, the public ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... meet this want must have theory; yet the theory must not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the concrete facts with which ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean translated ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... absolutely perfect. All of them necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal worse if somebody else made the choice ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... insurrection of the colonies against England, and that of the South against the Federation,—both the repressive measures of England against the colonies, and of the Federation against the South,—were in themselves founded on an indefeasible right, and abstractly defensible; and that the "casting vote," (so to speak,) in both cases, depends, not upon any wordy denial of the right, but upon a thorough estimate of all the attendant conditions, and prominently of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... truth, I don't expect to have any more." She laughed her old joyous friendly laugh, and he stretched his arm across her lap to adjust the robe more closely to her form. Her attitude towards him had completely changed, concretely as well as abstractly, for now she sat cosily and contentedly by his side, instead of perching herself a yard away, and allowing the winter winds to emphasize the coldness that had existed between them. This wonderful improvement ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... sees anything abstractly, but only in relation to other things known and observed. With more than half the world in its grip, the towering wave of green bore no more resemblance to its California prototype than a brontosaurus ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... in America undoubtedly have underestimated these immediate effects. They have been too abstractly doctrinaire, have argued too absolutely for the merits of free trade to be applied instantly regardless of the existing distribution of investments and of occupations. They have opposed one extreme system by ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... are, of course, the same which lie against any theory of universal suffrage. These are many and strong, if considered abstractly; but we assume that theory to be admitted now as the rule of our political practice, and its evils as a working system have not been found so great, taking the country at large, as nearly to outweigh, its advantages. Moreover, as we ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... to be kind and reassuring, were almost as sinister to Helen as the menace to her own life. Long had she known how cheap life was held in the West, but she had only known it abstractly, and she had never let the fact remain before her consciousness. This cheerful young man spoke calmly of spilling blood in her behalf. The thought it roused was tragic—for bloodshed was insupportable to her—and then the ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... would here observe, that we do not affirm of either Good or Evil any irresistible power of enforcing love or exciting abhorrence, having evidence to the contrary in the multitudes about us; all we affirm is, that, when contemplated abstractly, they cannot be viewed otherwise. Nor is the fact of their inefficiency in many cases difficult of solution, when it is remembered that the very condition to their true effect is the complete absence of self, that they must clearly be viewed ab extra; a hard, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... little now and then at their amount as oppressive, it is only because he takes pleasure in grumbling, and this seems to afford him a good excuse for it. He would not be deprived of it if he could: witness the discussions of the Income Tax, which every body denounces while no one justifies it abstractly; and yet it is always upheld, and I presume always will be. If the question could now be put to a direct vote, even of the tax-payers alone—"Shall or shall not a system of Common School Education for the United Kingdoms be maintained by ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... take the satisfactoriness concretely, as something felt by you now, and if, by truth, you mean truth taken abstractly and verified in the long run, you cannot make them equate, for it is notorious that the temporarily satisfactory is often false. Yet at each and every concrete moment, truth for each man is what that man 'troweth' at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... the analogue of Nothing; Matter, wholly apart from Space, is only a theoretical Something, really and actually as much a Nothing as Space itself, when abstractly considered in its equally impossible separation from Matter. But Matter, completely separated from Space, is the exact external analogue of the Something opposed to the Nothing of abstract Metaphysical Thinking. Here, then, is a lucid exposition, by virtue ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... should lead to the science of them. If things are not interesting in themselves, how can any amount of knowledge about them be? To be sure, there is such a thing as a purely or abstractly intellectual interest—the pleasure of the mere operation of the intellect upon the signs of things; but this must spring from a highly exercised intellectual condition, and is not to be expected before the pleasures of intellectual motion have been experienced through the employment of its ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... not all the writers of the New Testament, in accordance with the same method, went beyond the declarations which Jesus himself had made about his person, and endeavoured to conceive its value and absolute significance abstractly and speculatively. The religious convictions (see Sec. 3. 2): (1) That the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth, and the mission of Jesus as the perfect mediator, were from eternity based on God's plan of Salvation, as his ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... learn, and to let our boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... possibly with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher described in the Phaedo. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. One of our minor ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... sentences is what most languages, in greater or less degree and in a hundred varying ways, are in the habit of doing—throwing a bold bridge between the two basically distinct types of concept, the concrete and the abstractly relational, infecting the latter, as it were, with the color and grossness of the former. By a certain violence of metaphor the material concept is forced to do duty for (or intertwine ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... one of the great cultural divides between hackers and {marketroid}s. The singular is sometimes '1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also {KIPS} and {GIPS}. 2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of {computron}s. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other things, they designed the processor chips used in DEC's 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... a poetical work is ceteris paribus, the measure of its merit, seems undoubtedly, when we thus state it, a proposition sufficiently absurd—yet we are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned, which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, does impress us with ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... and unrelenting organization of an imperialist campaign. We were looked upon, not so much as individual men, but abstractly as colonial statesmen, to be impressed and hobbled. The Englishman is as businesslike in his politics, particularly his external politics, as in business, even if he covers his purposefulness with an air of polite indifference. Once convinced that the colonies were worth keeping, ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... labor, considered individually and abstractly, are not, literally speaking, productive. The proprietor who asks to be rewarded for the use of a tool, or the productive power of his land, takes for granted, then, that which is radically false; namely, that capital produces by ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Donna. They would be two outcasts, however much their deed might be respected abstractly, however much official expressions of gratitude were employed to gloss over the fact. He might as well take one chance more. "We have already decided," he said boldly. "I hear you are building a new ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... toward the polish of a classicist; in quality and freedom of thought he is very responsive to the mysteries of romanticism. He is introspective in his thinking and symbolical in his writing. Naturally he thinks abstractly, but is compelled to construct concrete methods of presenting his ideas. He never describes a strong emotion in detail, but delights in using suggestions and sidelights. His pure and refined manhood, his delicate fancy and deep interest in ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... as it is, may be too abstractly interpreted. Man is not a pure spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike to the very depths of nature, and who is connected by the most intimate and vital relations not only with his fellow-creatures of the same species, but with the whole system of nature in ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... along the path in two couples, Anna with Sviazhsky, and Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in the new surroundings in which she found herself. Abstractly, theoretically, she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna's conduct. As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of respectable existence, at a distance she ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... object which is presented to the eye, but not as human sense-activity, "praxis," not subjectively. It therefore came about that the active side in opposition to materialism was developed from idealism, but only abstractly; this was natural, since idealism does not recognize real tangible facts as such. Feuerbach is willing, it is true, to distinguish objects of sensation from objects existing in thought, but he conceives of human activity itself ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... A more abstractly morphological scheme of the evolution of Vertebrates is given in the Systematic Phylogeny of 1895.[441] The ontogenetic and ancestral stages are arranged in ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... needless to say that the philosophical laws which govern the outward manifestations of a moving force, as equilibrium or self-propagating activity, are for personal study, and are never to be spoken of abstractly to the child, but merely to ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the creditor is not always a benefactor? It is a very old and persistent delusion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest was considered illegal and the despised Jews were the only people who dared finance the world. Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right, yet I am fain to believe that the popular notion has some ground of truth in it too. Obviously, according to modern notions a country rich in natural resources, but poor in capital, inherited savings, must borrow money ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... formula is entirely sufficient as a summary of your conduct, even after you have learned to respect my property. And therein lies {50} its merely prudential character. In prudence thus strictly and abstractly regarded, there is no preference, no subordination of motives. Action is controlled by an exclusive and insistent desire, which limits itself only with a ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... over all persons and in all causes ecclesiastical; yet, from what is above hinted, it may be inferred, that the Revolution state has still preserved the very soul and substance of that blasphemous supremacy (though possibly they may have transferred it from the person of the king, abstractly considered, and lodged it in the hand of the king and parliament conjunctly, as the more proper subject thereof): for, in the words of Mr. John Burnet, in his testimony against the indulgence, quoted by Mr. Brown in his history of the indulgence, "To settle, enact and emit constitutions, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... and altogether relative fact. There are always people who catch our thought on the wing, and prefer it in this abbreviated form, and would be displeased with the greater development of it, necessary for other people. In other words, the thought considered abstractly and logically will be the same; but aesthetically we are dealing with two different intuition-expressions, into both of which enter different psychological elements. The same argument suffices to destroy, that is, to interpret correctly, the altogether ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Thebes is intelligible even at this later date, when we remember that the capture of so strong a city, already famous in Homer's time, must have left an indelible impression on the mind of Western Asia. It is no doubt abstractly possible that the prophecy is not intimately connected with any historical situation, and therefore might be much earlier; but to say nothing of the concreteness of the detail, such a supposition would be altogether contrary to the analogy of Hebrew prophecy. When Jehovah reveals His secret to ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... but a purely verbal one, as I apprehend it. Call your a and b distinct, they can't interact; call them one, they can. For taken abstractly and without qualification the words 'distinct' and 'independent' suggest only disconnection. If this be the only property of your a and b (and it is the only property your words imply), then of course, since you can't deduce their mutual influence from it, you can find ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... necessity of the next concession for which that principle calls. Once yield the alphabet, and we abandon the whole long theory of subjection and coverture; the past is set aside, and we have nothing but abstractions to fall back upon. Reasoning abstractly, it must be admitted that the argument has been, thus far, entirely on the women's side, inasmuch as no man has yet seriously tried to meet them with argument. It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... Neo-Platonic philosopher, born in Constantinople; appears to have held a Trinitarian view of the universe, and to have regarded the All abstractly viewed as contained in the Divine ever emerging from it and returning into it, a doctrine Implied in John i. 1, but far short of the corresponding trinity in the ripe philosophy of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... indeed! He, Edward Dunsack, had more brains than Jeremy Ammidon, that stiff old man with a face the color of a damask plum. His niece would go to all the balls at Franklin and Hamilton Halls, the injustice of her position overcome by an impressively increasing fortune. Abstractly he patted her shoulder with a hand as long and gaunt and yellow as his face. All this would come as a result of throwing the opium into the harbor. It was as good ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... accord with the old Puritan code by which they had been trained. He knew himself to be full of capabilities for evil, but it seemed as if some power greater than his held him back. It was Frederick Brent who looked on sin abstractly, but its presence in the concrete was seen through the eyes of Mrs. Hester Hodges. It could hardly be called the decree of conscience, because so instantaneous was the rejection of evil that there was really no time for reference ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... and industry of a majority of pupils. In the modern schools French, for example, is really taught; pupils do not acquire a mere smattering of the language. And, what is more important, the course of study is directly related to life, and to practical experience, instead of being set forth abstractly, as something which at the time the pupil perceives no possibility of putting into use. At one of the new schools in the south, the ignorant child of the mountains at once acquires a knowledge of measurement ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... as well as himself, a multifold millionaire. However, President Pierce did what he could for him by giving him the Portuguese mission (after first offering it to my father), and O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became interested—abstractly—in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... further—you will find them denounced as visions, tending to the breach of the philosophic peace; while, on the other hand, those who oppose them, albeit on no sort of ground but a mere pronunciation of contrary opinion, obtain all the credit due to the genuine philosopher. Abstractly, it would be generally admitted that any doctrine for which a certain amount of evidence is shewn, can only be overthrown by a superior force of evidence on the other side. But practically this is of no avail. Doubt and denial are so important to philosophy, and confer such an air ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... last twenty or thirty years a strong feeling has grown up in the public mind against the principle, and a still stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punishments. Many people who will admit that the execution of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, just enough, sincerely doubt whether such execution be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly certain that it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators. In consequence of this, executions have become rare; and it is quite clear that many scoundrels, well worthy of the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... and physical forces begin to wane at the end of eight, nine, or ten hours of constant application to the same work, and a woman's strength is not greater than a man's. The truth of the proposition, abstractly considered, has been long acknowledged ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... or, to speak with more propriety, by inexperience, brings forward the mind capable of forming such an affection, and when, in the lapse of time, perfection is found not to be within the reach of mortals, virtue, abstractly, is thought beautiful, and wisdom sublime. Admiration then gives place to friendship, properly so called, because it is cemented by esteem; and the being walks alone only dependent on heaven for that emulous panting after perfection which ever ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... "delights in representing adventure. He ardently sympathizes with chivalric action and spirit-stirring events: not the abstractly beautiful or the simply true, but the heroic, the progressive, the individual, and earnest phases of life, warm his fancy and attract his pencil. His forte is the dramatic.... If Leutze were not a painter, he would ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... philanthropists, ministers, suddenly starting up to find that they had been all along in error in thinking that slavery was an evil, and hoping that some day it would be removed, that they had been wrong in speaking of being "opposed to slavery in the abstract," it was abstractly not wrong, but right; they had been mistaken when regretting the circumstances which made emancipation ought not to be desire. This change of sentiment an doctrine was not gradual, but sudden; it went with telegraphic speed. The reason was that events were pressing ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... be divorced from social practice, or that the knowledge which sociology and the other social sciences offer concerning human society has no practical bearing upon present social conditions. On the contrary, while all science aims abstractly at the truth, all science is practical also in a deeper sense. No science would ever have been developed if it were not conceived that the knowledge which it discovers will ultimately be of benefit to man. All science exists, therefore, to benefit ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... it is not a mere philosophic treatise written in verse, like the fragments of Xenophanes. Its lessons are conveyed concretely and not abstractly; and its characters are not mere lay figures, but living poetical conceptions. Considered as a poem among classic German poems, it must rank next to, though immeasurably ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... in the present in the form of a represented end. And yet, once realized, it will explain the present as much as the present explains it, and even more; it must be viewed as an end as much as, and more than, a result. Our intellect has a right to consider the future abstractly from its habitual point of view, being itself an abstract view of the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Capital, and have reached very widely divergent conclusions as to what the term ought to mean, ignoring the clear and fairly consistent meaning the term actually possesses in the business world around them. The business world has indeed two views of Capital, but they are consistent with one another. Abstractly, money or the control of money, sometimes called credit, is Capital. Concretely, capital consists of all forms of marketable matter which embody labour. Land or nature is excluded except for improvements: human powers are excluded as not being matter; commodities in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... consideration by those who think on human affairs, and the probable form of government which may be expected to prevail in future among men, whether universal suffrage is the real evil to be dreaded; and whether equality of suffrage is not the real poison which destroys society. Abstractly considered, there is much justice in the plea so constantly advanced by the working-classes, that being members of the community, and contributing to its support or opulence by their labour, they are entitled to a certain voice in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... is, then man would not be under obligation to obey the devil's will! That's it! Well, I suppose so too; and I reckon most Christians would agree to that statement, Nay, more: I presume nobody ever taught that the mere naked will, abstractly considered, if it could be, from the character of God, was the ground of moral obligation? Nay, I think nobody ever imagined that the notion of an infinite Creator presupposes or includes the idea that he is a malevolent Being! I agree, then, with Edwards, ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... and not that of a producer. It is the work of a law-giving power, which declares what may and what may not be done in the field of business enterprise. It is also the work of a law-enforcing power, which makes sure that its decrees are something more than pious wishes or assertions of what is abstractly right. All of this is in harmony with the old conception of the state as the protector of property and the preserver of freedom. The people's interests, which the monopoly threatens, have to be guarded. The right ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... with you." Sutton had found his case. His face was hidden by the raised lid as he peered, examining his instruments. He spoke abstractly. "Magnificent." ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... in aid of devotion. I have certainly every inducement to decide in favor of the practice did I consult alone the seeming interest of art. That pictures may and do have the effect upon some rightly to raise the affections, I have no doubt, and, abstractly considered, the practice would not merely be harmless but useful; but, knowing that man is led astray by his imagination more than by any of his other faculties, I consider it so dangerous to his best interests ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... them, though still original, but they are public, and of the hue of the heavens over his house,—a certain out-of-door obviousness and transparency not to be disputed. What he does, his manners are not to be complained of, though abstractly offensive, for it is what man does, and in him the race is exhibited. When he eats, he is liver and bowels, and the whole digestive apparatus to the company, and so all admit the thing is done. He must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... never reached my ideal; and when a woman's home isn't the hub of her universe,—well, she takes to china painting, or gossip, or philanthropy; a man takes to poker or politics. I took to politics, second-hand. Personally and concretely I abhorred the whole miserable farce, but abstractly, and as a means to an end which I greatly desired, I found it interesting. I admired you infinitely more than I liked you in those days, but I wouldn't have married you under ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... they lay resting on their elbows in blissful contemplation of the heat they had escaped. "Wot do you say," said Johnson, slowly, without looking at his companion, but abstractly addressing himself to the landscape beyond,—"wot do you say to two straight games ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and sleep as twin boys, one black, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother, night. In this instance the phenomenon of dissolving unconsciousness which falls on mortals, abstractly generalized in the mind, is then concretely symbolized. It is a bold and happy stroke of artistic genius; but it in no way expresses or suggests the scientific facts of actual death. There is also a ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to be independent of the parents,' said the colonel, somewhat abstractly. 'It is the way of nature. It must be; for the old pass away, and the young step forward to fill their places. What I wish is that you should get ready to fill your place well. That is what we have come here for. We have taken the step, ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... upon the attainment of such a dominant purpose may, however trivial in itself, acquire a vital importance and be eagerly desired. To a man of mature mind there can be little interest in hitting a small ball with a stick, abstractly considered. Nor is the dropping of a bit of paper into a box with a slit in it an action in itself calculated to stir profound emotion. But if the hitting of the ball in the right way marks the critical point in winning an eagerly contested ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... men in this twentieth century are agreed that war abstractly is an evil thing,—perhaps the greatest of all indecencies,—and that while it may be one of the offenses which must come, "woe to that man (or nation) ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... position tormented him; wearied, he feared to sleep, yet continually he found himself nodding only to jerk awake with that suddenness that is like a physical blow. Each one of these awakenings took away a little more of his self-control till he was reduced to near hysteria, muttering abstractly, sometimes whimpering like a lost child; now seized with a feverish concern for his air supply. He would at one instant cut it down to a dangerous minimum, then, remembering the near disaster of his first attempt at economy, frantically turn it ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... duration and expansion, which comprehend in them all finite beings, and in their full extent belong only to the Deity. And therefore we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do so often find our thoughts at a loss, when we would consider them, either abstractly in themselves, or as any way attributed to the first incomprehensible Being. But when applied to any particular finite beings, the extension of any body is so much of that infinite space as the bulk of the ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... any concrete situation, the more numerous the conditions one ignores in one's calculations, the less adequate are one's calculations to that situation. The number of its inhabitants, and any mathematical operation made with that number, is true, but only very abstractly true of a nation. A similar though less radical abstractness appertains to natural science. Simple qualities of sound or color, and distinctions of beauty or moral worth, together with many other ingredients ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... scientific theory, for the enlightened modern scientist, is a 'policy and not a creed.' Science has become content to be only 'a conceptual shorthand,' provided that its message be humanly intelligible. It no longer claims truth because abstractly and absolutely it 'corresponds with Nature,' but because it yields a convenient means of mastering ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... we see that, in accordance with the above views of Aristotle, the true is not that which really occurs, but that which our feelings and intellect tell us ought to occur. The actually occurring, the Real, has always been confounded with the abstractly true, but they are very different things. Virtue, morality, such as revealed by Christianity, and confirmed by reason, are certainly true; but in relation to that which is, to the real, the actual, what man has ever yet succeeded in realizing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... that great numbers of persons followed the Court, by the necessity of their employments and other dependences; and as others retired, really frighted with the distemper, it was a mere desolating of some of the streets. But the fright was not yet near so great in the city, abstractly so called, and particularly because, though they were at first in a most inexpressible consternation, yet as I have observed that the distemper intermitted often at first, so they were, as it were, alarmed and unalarmed ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... with human nature and time. All that is truly human is interesting, however abstractly stated; but it requires the mordant of specific circumstance, involving some historical period, to make it stain permanently. Everything that belongs to Time, as his private property,—everything temporary, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... superstructure of glacial learning began to break their way to the light, and startled him very much as the earth must have been startled when the first patch of green sod broke into view, steaming under the hot rays of the noonday sun. Abstractly considered, the thing seemed preposterous enough for the plot of a dime novel, while in the light of her sweet presence the development of his love seemed as logical as an algebraic problem. At all events, the result was in both cases equally inexorable. It was useless to ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... schooled in war and made reckless by calamity, they have been the nerve of revolution wherever they have been scattered by the winds of misfortune."[1] And what Mr. Fisher, in this passage, puts in a concrete fashion, Lord Acton has expressed with equal emphasis, if more abstractly. "This famous measure," he writes of the final partition, "the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism, awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right into an aspiration, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... signed by Menius, read as follows: "1. Although this proposition, Good works are necessary to salvation, may be tolerated in the doctrine of the Law abstractly and ideally (in doctrina legis abstractive et de idea tolerari potest), nevertheless there are many weighty reasons why it should be avoided and shunned no less than the other: Christ is a creature. ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... pleased with the manner in which her rude companion spoke of serious things, and she improved the opportunity to embody the prayer of her heart in words. It was a fervent utterance, and Ethan seemed to join her in spirit. Both of them were grateful—not abstractly grateful, but grateful to God for his mercy in saving them from torture and death at the ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... best to follow very closely the formula here given, otherwise there is danger of stating the directions so abstractly that the subject could not comprehend them. A formula like "I want you to arrange the blocks in a gradually decreasing series according to weight" would be Greek to most children ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... voluntarily suffered emasculation. None but a eunuch could become high priest of Cybele. Among the sixteen million worshippers of Siva, whose symbol is the Lingam, impurity is far less prevalent than among the sister sects of Hindoo religions.[66-2] To the Lingayets, the member typifies abstractly the idea of life. Therefore they carve it on sepulchres, or, like the ancient nations of Asia Minor, they lay clay images of it on graves to intimate the hope of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... primitive by nature and training. He distinguished between Emmet the mayor and Emmet the lover; for he was familiar with the phenomenon of official probity combined with a lack of that quality in some personal relationship. Had Emmet's quandary been presented to him abstractly, he would have been quite tolerant in his judgement, with the understanding of a man of the world; but, in spite of resentment and chagrin, he still continued to love Felicity Wycliffe, and this fact made him scornful of the man who had trampled ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... qualities when presented to her in the concrete. True, on her theory, a Christian young woman ought to be ready in certain circumstances to throw such a lover over the gunwale as ruthlessly as the sailors pitched Jonah headlong. That is to say, a Christian young woman in the abstract ought to be abstractly willing to discard a rich lover in the abstract. But presented in this concrete and individual way the case was different. She was a little dazzled at the brightness of Phillida's worldly prospects, now that they were no longer merely rhetorical, but ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... consistency were not in it; that he went to Rome, because, taking his premises for granted, reason pointed that way. And yet the guarded way in which I have spoken has probably been noticed by my readers. I have not said that reason, abstractly speaking, was on his side, but that starting from his premises his course was reasonable—his premises being those to which most Christians hold. The difference was that he took them seriously and they became ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... vivid lips slightly upcurled, the straight delicate nose, the cheeks so smoothly rounded where the dark thick lashes swept their bloom as she looked downward at the water—all this was abstractly beautiful; very lovely, too, the full column of the neck, and the rounded arms ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then, shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... in the same valley, but—— Well, a "seat" is one thing, and a farm's another; the world is to blame again, no doubt. And with men who want nothing, for whom the word "opening" has no magic, what is to be done? Abstractly they are seen to be a necessary element in the community; but they do not make good sons or sons-in-law for ambitious men. Janie, when she had seen Bob, an unrepentant cheerful Bob, on his way, came back to find her ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... certainly when corrupted, like Manichaeism and ecclesiastical domination, let us remember that these were adapted to their times, or were called out by pressing exigencies. And further, let us bear in mind that, in giving their endorsement, they could not predict the abuse of principles abstractly good and wise, like poverty, and obedience, and chastity, and devout meditation, and solitary communion with God. In all their conduct and opinions, we see, nevertheless, a large-hearted humanity, a toleration and charity for human infirmities, and a beautiful spirit of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Tocqueville pronounced in their favor; De Witt, in his recent essay on Jefferson, comes to the same decision: both observers who have no party-feelings nor class-prejudices to mislead them. And have not the last few years given us all light enough to see that abstractly, as statesmen, the Federal leaders were right? As politicians, in the degraded American sense of the word, they were unskilful; they accelerated the downfall of their party by injudicious measures and by petty rivalries. But although their ruin might have been adjourned, it could not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... from substance, but are substances. For as love and wisdom are not abstract things, but substance (as was shown above, n. 40-43), so in like manner are all things that are called civil, moral, and spiritual. These may be thought of abstractly from substances, yet in themselves they are not abstract; as for example, affection and thought, charity and faith, will and understanding; for it is the same with these as with love and wisdom, in that they are not possible outside of subjects which are substances, but are states of subjects, ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... George abstractly in the same key. "I was thinking what a rum, unfathomable old beggar Slavin is. Fancy him springing that comical old yarn at such a ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... not fit to be handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginably stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It is held further that words that are perfectly innocent in themselves—"words, abstractly considered, [that] may be free from vulgarism"—may yet be assumed, by a friendly jury, to be likely to "arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of a modest woman." (I quote exactly! The court failed to define "modest woman.")[57] Yet ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... of metre in the preface is highly ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts during, (and, as I think, in consequence of), its combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of constitutional limitation differ from ordinary statutes in this, that these rules are made impersonally, abstractly, dispassionately, impartially, as the people's expression of what they believe to be right and necessary for the preservation of their idea of liberty and justice. The process of amendment is so guarded by the constitution itself as to require the lapse of time and opportunity ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... that He is our promised Messiah; and I have decided to accept Him as such." Did he say that? That would have been the simple truth. But such a remark plainly would have aroused a storm of criticism, and he dreaded that. Yet he felt that something should be said. So, lawyer-like, he puts the case abstractly. "Hmm—does our law judge a man without giving him a fair hearing?" That sounds fair, though it does seem rather feeble in face of their determined opposition. But near by sits a burly Pharisee, who turns sharply around and, glaring savagely at Nicodemus, says sneeringly: ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... a matter of profound gratitude that these the earliest American lawgivers were eminently worthy their high vocation. While confounding, in some degree, the separate functions of government, as abstractly defined at a later day by Montesquieu, and eventually put in concrete form in our fundamental laws, State and Federal—it is none the less true that these first legislators clearly discerned their inherent rights as a part of the English-speaking race. More important still, a perusal of the brief ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... being that of the poet, and not that of the moralist or preacher, how shall he sort and sift, culling this virtue and that, giving parts and fragments instead of the entire man? He must give all, not abstractly, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... has an independent existence, prior, complete, and authoritative. What would society be, parted from the individuals who compose it? No more than an individual who does not embody social relationships. The two are mutual conceptions, different aspects of the same thing. We may view a person abstractly, fixing attention on his single centre of consciousness; or we may view him conjunctly, attending ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... Faith rather abstractly. "Now mother—it is ready, and I'll take it up stairs if ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... J.H. Benrimo. The resemblance between the stage property and the thing represented is fairly close. The moving flags on each side of the actor suggest the actual color and progress of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its magnificence. The red sack used for a bloody head has at least the color and size of one. The dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the length of an infant of the age described and wears the general costume thereof. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... in brandy, abstractly or concretely. It was liquor, and liquor had been a curse to his home, a curse to his mother, and a curse to himself; and he was tempted to take the boxes on deck, open them, and spill the contents of the bottles into the sea. Possibly—not probably—he would have done so, ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... verifiability is in essence this: can we discover any set of beliefs which are never mistaken or any test which, when applicable, will always enable us to discriminate between true and false beliefs? Put thus broadly and abstractly, the answer must be negative. There is no way hitherto discovered of wholly eliminating the risk of error, and no infallible criterion. If we believe we have found a criterion, this belief itself may be mistaken; we should be begging the question if we tried to test the criterion by applying ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... once broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive determination to form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... conversation roamed over the universal topics of the day,—the hard times, the position of the employee in a corporation, etc. The clerk in the Baking Powder Trust was inclined to philosophical acceptance of present conditions. Abstractly there might not be much justice for the poor, but here in the new part of the country every man had his chance to be on top, to become a capitalist. There was the manager of the B. P. T. He had begun on ten dollars a week, but he had bided his time, bought stock in the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... especially and properly, a luminous variety of low CHROMA; also, abstractly, the respect in which a color may be raised by more or less admixture of white, which at once increases the luminosity ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... from time to time in the Talmud, in which one recognizes a more than ordinarily deep and earnest feeling on the part of the commentator. The interpreter expresses himself as a man instinct with the exclusive Hebrew spirit, and as such claims his title to the whole inheritance. It is a claim abstractly defensible, and the just assertion of it is the basis of all rights over others. The only question here is whether the Jew alone is invested with the privilege. There can be little doubt that the principle on which he claims enfeoffment ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the Far Oriental's ideal of life. The repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system is slowly tending as its death,—this to him appears, though from no scientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders, abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,—synonym, alas, to man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,—till even the sense of self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal of unconsciousness he ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... therefore about five hundred and seventy-five miles. These distances are all enormous; on the left were only forty-two thousand men, on the right, about thirty-four thousand; along the line, forty-two thousand. The diagram, if drawn, will display all the peculiarities of Napoleonic formation in mass, abstractly considered, but it will likewise display the fact that with the highest and most perfect army organization then known, it would have been well-nigh impossible to work the combination. Neither of the monstrous flanks could be held by the comparatively scanty forces ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the door was louder. This and the drug-induced buzzing in Brion's ear made thinking difficult. "Abstractly, I of course agree with you," he said haltingly. "But you know there is nothing I can do personally without being emotionally involved. A logical decision is valueless for ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... Moon, 377-u. Deities, prominent, of the Mysteries were Male and Female, 377-u. Deities, to explain the existence of Good and Evil the Persians assumed two, 300-m. Deity, a symbol or representative hieroglyphic was the name of, 208-u. Deity abstractly expressed is but a symbol of an object unknown, 513-m. Deity, according to Aristotle and Plato, in relation to Good, 681-m. Deity acts by general laws for general purposes, 688-l. Deity acts by universal laws and constant modes ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... even though in some of them one might apprehend a little loss of balance from the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written on the palm ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... to suppose, looking at the matter abstractly, that all students and teachers of literature would take it for granted that the practice of making a dispassionate criticism of a passion would be a dangerous practice for any vital and spontaneous nature—certainly the last kind of practice ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... last President may not be without its use, in reminding us that we, too, must die. Death, abstractly considered, is the same with the high as with the low; but practically we are not so much aroused by the contemplation of our own mortal natures, by the fall of many undistinguished, as that of one great and well-known ...
— The Life and Public Service of General Zachary Taylor: An Address • Abraham Lincoln
... turbulent passions of the characters; for even the punishment for offenses against the gods is of the nature of a personal revenge which they take. Later, of course, when the gods retreated into the background of human life, retributive justice was conceived more abstractly. Now, it must be admitted, I think, that this idea, so deeply rooted in the popular mind, has exerted a profound influence on the drama; yet it cannot be applied universally without sophistry. To be sure, in Romeo and Juliet, the young people were disobedient ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... and susceptible to training in all these respects. By virtue of the fact that we are all members of the human race, we have common characteristics; by virtue that we are individuals, we all display specific variations in specific human capacities. There is, save abstractly, no such thing as a standard human being. We may intellectually set up a norm or standard, but it will be a norm or standard from which every individual ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... transcendent form of abstract theistic religion, in which God appears as the ruler over Nature as merely dependent; and His chosen people plant the root of their nationality no longer in the earth, but in this belief. The unity of the abstractly natural and abstractly spiritual determinateness is the concrete unity of the spirit with nature, in which it recognizes nature as its necessary organ, and itself as in its nature divine. Spirit in this stage, as the internal presupposition of the two previously named, takes up into itself ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... growth of trust in unseen forces should be left to those alone. In the present stage of progress in mind healing, there should be nothing which would require anyone to dispense with reasonable nursing nor with common sense. Some things which are ideally and abstractly true, can only be fully realized in the future, and it is not well to prematurely use them before ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... do with that steamboat?" He would say that we struck the first blow. Now, admit that,—and none of your state rights men can deny it,—admit that, and all the rest follows of course. They will say it was wrong—abstractly, if you please. Talking of abstractions, it was wrong for an expedition to come over and burn the steamboat, and send her over the falls. But what was your steamboat about? What had she been doing? What was she to do the next morning? And what ought you to do? You have reparation to make for ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... "Of course. The k-factor is one of the many factors that interrelate in a society. Abstractly it is no more important than the other odd thousand we work with. But in practice it is the only ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... my view!" he said, "Abstractly, perhaps, all Nature may be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the divine grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in many natures. Besides, this perversion itself may often be disease, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the history of such cases, in their administration of justice, as might have occurred in the court of the old [Greek: polemarchos], will allow us to conclude that they are in possession of a rule coercing them to be just and brotherlike towards the unprotected stranger, abstractly and for justice's sake. Now, with us you may find many individual rogues, but never a roguish court, nor tolerated roguish public body. And of this difference between us Christians and them Turks, it will not be difficult for any one to supply the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... do not deny that instrumental music is capable of exciting delight. They are not insensible either of its power or of its charms. They throw no imputation on its innocence, when viewed abstractly by itself; but they do not see anything in it sufficiently useful, to make it an object of education, or so useful, as to counterbalance other considerations, which ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... high value for the personal life we have said all that is necessary to say. That, however, is very far from being the case. We soon realize here, as at every point in the practical application of sexual psychology, that it is not sufficient to determine the abstractly right course along biological lines. We have to harmonize our biological demands with social demands. We are ruled not only by natural instincts but by inherited traditions, that in the far past were solidly based on intelligible grounds, and that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... adopted, slavery was regarded entirely as a domestic matter, left to each of the States to manage and dispose of as each saw fit. But at that period there was no dissenting voice to the proposition, that, abstractly considered, slave-holding was wrong; yet the owner of a large number of negroes could honestly declare he was himself innocent of the first transgression, and ignorant of any practicable way to get rid of the evil,—for it was counted an evil. When the rice, cotton and sugar fields demanded ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... morning Mr Salteena stood bag in hand in the ancestle hall waiting for the viacle to convay him to the station. Bernard Clark and Ethel were seated side by side on a costly sofa gazing abstractly at the parting guest. Horace had dashed off to put on his cocked hat as he was going in the baroushe but Francis Minnit was roaming about the hall well prepared for ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... economies than the nature or genesis of religion, while the truly devout, who are not generally given to the critical analysis of their faith, accepted it as a Divine revelation needing no accounting for outside their Bible. Moreover such things as these were not then and never can be held abstractly. They were articulate in creeds and organized in churches and invested with the august sanction of authority, and mediated through old, old processes of ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... have to remember that though this control, with the limitation of offspring it involves, fails to answer all the demands which Social Hygiene to-day makes of us, it yet achieves much. It may not improve what we abstractly term the "race," but it immensely improves the individuals of which the race is made up. Thus the limitation of the family renders it possible to avoid the production of undesired children. That in itself is an immense social gain, because it tends to abolish excessive ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... our political institutions?" I answer, it has much to do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil, and much of its danger consists in the proneness of our minds to regard its direct as its only consequences. Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of population that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never matter of reasonable ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... plate of beautiful peaches, another of pears, and another of plums, and a musk-melon were placed upon the table." Nevertheless, in spite of the friendliness shown to him personally, in spite of the sympathy which, abstractly considered, the New Yorkers expressed for the sad state of Boston, Mr. Adams was made to understand that if it came to practical measures for the support of Massachusetts, many diverse currents of opinion and interest would ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... a very shallow criticism of him. He saw and states the whole rebels' position—"In Memoriam" is largely a debate between the Shelley-Swinburne point of view and the Christian. Only he states it so abstractly that to people familiar with Browning's concrete and humanised dialectic it seems cold and artificial. But it's really his sincerest and deepest thought, and he deliberately rejects the rebel position as intellectually and morally untenable: and adopts a position of aquiescent agnosticism ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... these women of the truth of that which I supposed had been settled about one hundred and twenty-one years ago. It is necessary to make women believe that suffrage is a natural right rather than a privilege; that, while abstractly it seems well for an intelligent citizen to govern an ignorant one, human nature is such that the intelligent will govern selfishly and leave the ignorant no ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... altogether. If, however, this were the source of our knowledge that two and two are four, we should proceed differently, in persuading ourselves of its truth, from the way in which we do actually proceed. In fact, a certain number of instances are needed to make us think of two abstractly, rather than of two coins or two books or two people, or two of any other specified kind. But as soon as we are able to divest our thoughts of irrelevant particularity, we become able to see the general principle that two and two are four; any one instance is ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... just in proportion as he gives himself up to the dominion of one of these loves and rejects the sway of the others he leads a consistent life. Society may assert that life is everything, and faith nothing, when it talks abstractly; but its common sense ever shows more wisdom by transferring the quality of the motive to the act, as often as it finds any clew to the knowledge of motive. Of course, society makes many blunders in these judgments, because it reads the heart of ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... taking off what you call the rubbish, Mr. Gracelius, and pruning the question down as much as you please, I cannot possibly admit that the Bible anywhere justifies piracy under any circumstances whatsoever, either abstractly or practically. I call upon you for anything in all the Bible that gives the slightest countenance to such a mode of life, or such a government, as you ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... all other peoples, will be expected to hold to. We feel it a duty to spread our moral truth abroad and our mores are necessarily right for us, and this idea of rightness of mores must imply a desire to make them prevail in the world. We may recognize, abstractly, other standards of conduct, but there is something in moral belief which, of course, cannot voluntarily be changed, and which must stand for the ultimately real in consciousness so long as it is ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... that same society. This has been often told and shown to those who after death have come among spirits. Man, to be sure, does not appear in that society as a spirit while he is living in the world, for the reason that he then thinks naturally; but when one is thinking abstractly from the body, because he is then in the spirit, he sometimes appears in his society; and when seen he is easily distinguished from the spirits there, for he goes about meditating and in silence, not looking at others, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... to understand and to admire in books; but he is not forward to recognise the heroic under the traits of any contemporary man, and least of all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher. But as the years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain to look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon their comic school-master as upon the noblest ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contend for supremacy in the worlds of action and of valuation: dominance, competition, and cooperation. All mean a meeting of human forces. They rest respectively on power, rivalry, and sympathetic interchange. Each may contribute to human welfare. On the other hand, each may be taken so abstractly as to threaten human values. I hope to point out that the greatest of these is cooperation, and that it is largely ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts
... this story of Bismarck. If it is not true, it ought to be. And if it is not true specifically, it is true abstractly. He had just returned from one of his notable diplomatic victories at the beginning of his career; great crowds had ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... single lake. Was it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching—see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... pack it, and be at the Eclair Hotel in B—— by noon on the following Friday. Those were her orders. She looked wonderingly at the two hundred dollar check which Mr. Gardiner had given her for the expense of making herself ready. She had never before seen two hundred dollars. She knew only abstractly by the way of her arithmetic that such vast sums of money existed. And now she was expected to spend this fortune in the space of three days upon herself. She folded up the slip of paper and tucked it carefully into her purse. When she presented it at one of the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... for at last the art is brought into correlation with man's other powers and becomes a living reflex of the tendencies and activities of the period. Notwithstanding the prodigious vitality of Bach's work, we feel that his musical sense operated abstractly like a law of Nature and that he was an unconscious embodiment, as it were, of the deep religious sentiment of his time and of the sturdy independence of his race. At any period and in any place Bach would have been ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... in the same Place where Chastity was, before there were any Creatures that had an Appetite to procreate their Species. This puts me in mind of the inconsiderate Zeal of some Men, who even in Metaphysicks, know not how to think abstractly, and cannot forebear mixing their own Meanness and Imbecillities, with the Idea's they ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... to determine what are reasonable rates. He tries to sustain his objection by the following argument: "The fixing of rates upon a railroad is as delicate a process as that of determining the pulse of a sick man. They cannot be determined abstractly, or in advance of the wants of business, but must be adjusted from hour to hour to conform to its fluctuations. Five thousand men find active employment in the United States in connection with the important duty of making rates. Each case ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... much to say that one season had much transformed her. She had been so ignorant of the world a year ago. She had taken for granted all that was abstractly right. Now she saw that the conventions of life were like sand-dunes and barriers in the path she was expected to walk. She had learned for one thing what money was. Wealth had been such an accepted part of her life, since she could remember, that she had attached no importance ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Brand nodded abstractly, and concentrated on the control board. Rapidly the ship rocketed down toward the surface. The disk became a whirling, gigantic plate; and then an endless plain, with cloud formations beginning to take on ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... view opens up the very fruitful conception of an Empire or Realm of Ends. As a Realm is the systematic union of rational beings by means of common laws, so the ends determined by the laws may, abstractly viewed, be taken to form a systematic whole. Rational beings, as subject to a law requiring them to treat themselves and others as ends and never merely as means, enter into a systematic union by means of common objective laws, i.e. into an (ideal) Empire or Realm ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... I understand the value of advertising. But in my own case it would be futile. I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you. My pleasure is to prescribe books for ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... you are wrong. Politically a man is not entitled to do what he chooses with his own. There are limitations. For instance, a man owns a house. Abstractly, he is entitled to burn it down if he chooses. But if his house abuts upon mine, he may not set it on fire if he chooses, because in so doing he would set fire to my house also, which is very much ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... dramatic than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the poet shows his dramatic strength; and whenever he speaks abstractly for country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits no doubt ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... impassable gulfs, unless one chooses, as Mr. Burroughs does, to ignore the lower human types and the higher animal types, and to compare human mind with bird mind. It was impossible for life to reason abstractly until speech was developed. Equipped with swords, with tools of thought, in short, the slow development of the power to reason in the abstract went on. The lowest human types do little or no reasoning in the abstract. With every word, with every increase in the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... poetical work is, ceteris paribus, the measure of its merit, seems undoubtedly, when we thus state it, a proposition sufficiently absurd—yet we are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various |
